The Brain Audit

by Sean D'Souza

  Salt (as per your high blood pressure...:)

  9 onions (ha, ha, ha-You’ll need these laughs when you cry)

  Indian store purchase section:

  Garam masala (Available at the store)

  1 tsp dried coriander + 1 tsp dried cumin powder

  25 Kashmiri chillies (Red dried chillies). Discard the seeds and make a paste of the chillies by soaking them in water.

  Step 1:

  1) Marinate the chicken with garam masala, salt, yoghurt, and keep in the fridge overnight.

  2) Chop the onions fine, and fry them in oil or ghee until brown. Add ginger and garlic paste and fry for some time. Add the Kashmiri chilly paste and cook for some time. Add the coriander and cumin powder and keep frying. Then add the garam masala and keep at it... tomato puree is next on the list and fry well until cooked. As a finale, add the cashew nut paste and cook until it thickens and then set aside.

  Step 2:

  Take the marinated chicken and lay the pieces in the oven tray greased with ghee or oil. Important-- Don’t use the liquid from the marinade while roasting. Set the liquid aside for later (This can also be done in a frying pan if you don’t have an oven).

  After the chicken is roasted, add the reserved liquid. Cook for some time. Finally add the cream and cook for 2 minutes. Set aside.

  Decaf: Check once more!

  Soy: Check once more!

  Latte: Check once more!

  Smoking Section:

  This is really cool and not to be missed!

  Take a couple of pieces of charcoal. Heat the charcoal on a flame until they get really hot and glowing. Take these pieces and put them in a very small open vessel or small metal container. Warm 3-4 tbsps of oil and pour it over the glowing charcoal. The charcoal will immediately start to hiss and smoke.

  Then immediately immerse the vessel in the chicken dish (this is to give flavour, so make sure it doesn’t get into the chicken itself. It needs to be on top like a boat on the ocean). Cover the main chicken dish vessel immediately to seal in the aroma.

  After a while open the vessel. Remove the charcoal and your dish is ready to serve. Garnish with fresh coriander!

  Summary: The Risk Reversal

  As a customer, you feel the spectre of risk when buying a product or service. But as soon as you become the person selling the product/service, you feel that the customer should be the one to take the risk. And that’s erroneous thinking. For customers to even try the biriyani, they need to know that all the risk lies with the seller. This makes a customer far more willing to buy your product/service.

  Logically risk reversals should hamper growth and profits. But quite the opposite is true. Companies such as Granite Rock, not only charge more in a cut-throat market, but also make very healthy profits. Plus they get free publicity, which can’t be harming their cause.

  There are two types of risk reversal. The obvious kind. And the hidden kind. You have to really get into the brain of the customer to work out the hidden risk. When you do find the hidden risk, you’re getting at the core of what causes a customer not to buy—and removing that risk.

  You can’t always take one type of hidden risk and run it across every product and service. A risk factor that works for one type of product, or one type of application, won’t necessarily work for the next. So analyse the risk for each application. Being lazy and slapping one type of risk reversal across the board, isn’t going to help you sell more products/services.

  Remember to name the risk reversal. It may seem like a trivial detail to you, but it’s not. When customers want to reference the risk reversal, they’re able to pull up a couple of words, instead of a long-winded risk reversal policy. Once they do have a branded risk reversal, they’re able to quickly expand what the risk reversal stands for.

  You may believe that risk reversing is risky. But customers will only ask for their money back if your product/service really needs to be fixed. If you’re working on a service-only project, break up the project into tiny slices, and give a risk reversal for each slice, only moving ahead when you’ve finished that slice of work.

  And finally, risk reversal doesn’t cheapen your product. In fact, it makes your product way more desirable, because now both the obvious as well as the hidden risk has been reduced dramatically.

  Bag 7: The Uniqueness

  There’s a fundamental flaw in creating uniqueness.

  And if you’ve ever had your picture taken, you’ll know what I mean.

  “Say cheese,” says the person behind the camera.

  And you say cheese. Your facial muscles are frozen. You have a dumb, goofy look. And under your breath you’re muttering, “C’mon take the picture, take the picture, c’monnnn!”

  Click! You blink. The picture’s been taken.

  And then the photographer runs across to you, all excited to show the nice digital photo. You take a look, you roll your eyes. You cringe. Because you just detest the photo.

  The big problem with uniqueness is that you’re trying to find your uniqueness. And you end up with some cheesy line. What you need to do is ‘create your uniqueness.’

  It looks artificial. It looks posed. It’s not you. It looks like all those ‘cheesy’ pictures you’ve seen before. It’s not unique.

  How can it be unique? You weren’t yourself!

  And that’s the whole problem with uniqueness. You’ve tried too hard. In your business you’ve tried your darndest to get your own uniqueness. And you’ve failed miserably. Because you froze.

  And the uniqueness you sought to find, looked like the cheesy picture in the third paragraph. When asked about your uniqueness, you mumble something like ‘service or quality’, which means nothing to most people.

  And this lack of uniqueness is a problem if you own a business.

  Imagine you own a yoga centre. And a yoga centre is a yoga centre, right? So it’s possible to twist your brain like a pretzel, and yet find it’s almost impossible to come up with a form of uniqueness.

  So naturally you’ll do what all the experts recommended.

  You’ll ask your clients. And some of them will shrug, not knowing what to answer. And some of them will give their glib answers like ‘quality’ or ‘service’ or something that may seem helpful, but doesn’t make your class sound unique. And then there’s a third set of clients who will give you different reasons why you stand out, and what makes you unique. Which means you now have a grocery list of unique points. And not surprisingly, it confuses you more than ever before.

  So you’ll do what most businesses do. You’ll choose something so safe, that ‘the uniqueness’ is invisible. Or you’ll just give up. At the end of the day, a yoga centre is a yoga centre, is a yoga centre, right?

  Wrong!

  You know it and I know it. Your yoga centre is different, and it makes no sense to stay a ‘commodity’ if you can stand out and be unique. The only reason you’ve given up, or played safe is because of the end result. The end result of this entire uniqueness exercise drives you up the wall, and gives you no satisfaction.

  So what if we change the technique? You see you could be going about creating uniqueness in the wrong manner.

  Choosing your uniqueness is often a big pain in the you-know-where. How do you choose?

  You’re trying to find your uniqueness.

  You don’t need to find your uniqueness at all. Because finding your uniqueness assumes you’ve done something amazing or fabulous in the past. But what if we dropped the past completely? What if we focused on the future instead?

  Let me explain.

  Most people trying to find their uniqueness ask the question: What’s unique about my business? Instead they should be asking: “What do I *want to do* in my business that’s different from everyone else?”

  So let’s go back to your yoga school. If you were asked: ‘What’s unique about your business?’, you’d struggle to give an answer. But if you changed the question to: What would you want to achieve for your students mo
st of all? Aha, that’s a whole new question, isn’t it?

  Your brain now sees what it wants the clients to achieve. It seeks out the purpose. It brings out the specifics that eluded you before.

  So let’s say you started out at the yoga school to ‘prevent injury in yoga’, then when asked the question: ‘What do you want to achieve for your clients/why did you set up this yoga school?’, you come up with a completely different answer.

  Your answer may be: “You can really hurt yourself in a yoga class if you’re doing the wrong thing. I want every student to have Injury-Free Yoga.”

  You don’t find your uniqueness; you invent it. Choose one of the factors you want to be the best at, and then build your business around that factor of uniqueness.

  Tum..dee..dum. Can you see it? You can, can’t you? Your uniqueness is *Injury-Free Yoga.* Plain and simple.

  What’s the one reason you set up your business?

  What do you want to do, differently from everyone else?

  What’s your dream for your customer?

  Ask Tom Monaghan, founder Dominos Pizza.

  Today you take quick pizza delivery for granted. But if you zapped your way back to the swinging, hey-groovy seventies, you’d grow old just waiting for a pizza.

  You’d call a pizza place. You’d ask, “Can you deliver?” And about seventy-nine hours later, you’d be still tapping your fingers waiting for the pizza guy to arrive.

  Tom Monaghan knew this was a problem. That customers weren’t angling for the best pizza in the world. That by the time the customer picked up the phone, they were already hungry. That the best thing to do was to create a uniqueness based not on the pizza, but on the speed of the pizza delivery.

  Tom Monaghan literally invented his uniqueness.

  He worked out how to get a pizza to his customer in 30 minutes or less. And then he came up with Dominos now historic slogan. ‘Dominos Pizza. In 30 Minutes or It’s Free!’

  Are you getting the point?

  You can’t find uniqueness. It’s easier trying to touch your tongue to your nose (Don’t try that! I know you will :)).

  The uniqueness has to be invented.

  Make it up.

  Think of your wildest wish; your wildest dream and write it down.

  And here’s a good way to invent your uniqueness: You look at your business like you were a monarch surveying his kingdom. There you are at the top of the cliff looking down on your kingdom. And you want to create a kingdom like no other.

  Your kingdom could be the safest kingdom.

  Or the richest. Or have the best healthcare. Or be the most technologically advanced. Whatever you decide (and you have to decide) choose one factor.

  One factor.

  One.

  As in not two.

  Or three.

  Yes, we know you can make three wishes.

  Yes, we do know you’re proficient enough to handle safety, and healthcare and technology and yada, yada. But let’s not forget the purpose of this exercise. Uniqueness stands for ‘one thing’.

  Choose one.

  Just like The Benjamin in New York.

  The Benjamin—a hotel in Manhattan, New York—created a factor of uniqueness all by themselves. They decided that most business travellers needed a really good night’s sleep above everything else.

  But it’s easy to argue against the thought process of The Benjamin. Because when you look at it, a good night’s sleep is only one of many things a traveller needs.

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  zzzzzzzzzzzzzzz : Is that

  really unique?

  Business travellers need superfast broadband connections; and food at ungodly hours; and great bathrooms, etc. There is a massive list that any hotel can draw up in a matter of seconds, that describes what most business travellers require when staying at the hotel.

  But The Benjamin decided to focus on the sleep aspect. That’s what uniqueness is all about. It’s not about this and that, and that, and that. It’s unique, remember? One thing. Just one thing. Yes, you’re super-brilliant at many things, but it’s time to choose one.

  Because the advantages of choosing just one thing leads to several benefits:

  1) You can make your company’s offering simple and understandable

  2) It becomes the DNA of your company. Everything revolves around that uniqueness

  3) Your customers and the media start to see you as different and hence newsworthy.

  So let’s start with the newsworthy part and wind our way up. Let’s take another look at The Benjamin. And let’s see the review they got in the New York Times. And I quote:

  The Benjamin Hotel in Midtown Manhattan helped invent the position of sleep concierge nearly seven years ago when its concierge staff noticed that more and more of their guest questions involved sleep. It is one of only a few hotels to offer the service, with the Fairmont in Washington and the SoHo Metropolitan Hotel in Toronto offering similar services.

  Steps away from the No. 6 subway train and Lexington Avenue in full havoc, The Benjamin has deployed an array of anti-insomnia weapons.

  They include guest rooms that begin on the fifth floor, high above street noise, with soundproof windows; luxury sheets; aromatherapy; massages; satin sleep masks; tips for “executive” naps; a menu of 11 special pillows, including the “Snore-No-More”; and special sleep-inducing foods, like banana bread with peanut butter.

  The hotel, at 50th Street and Lexington, has a guarantee, said the sleep concierge, Anya Orlanska, who speaks with a slight Polish accent.

  “You must sleep well or you will get your money back,” she said.

  Jennifer King, a technology consultant originally from Chicago, stayed at The Benjamin Hotel last month. She did so because Ms. Orlanska had done a deft job of finding a good hairdresser for Ms. King’s mother when Ms. Orlanska was the concierge at the New York Palace Hotel.

  Ms. King noticed the pillow menu and other offerings, but, she said, “I didn’t think it was going to be that big of a deal.”

  That’s not a food menu. It’s a pillow menu. Surprised? Don’t be. Because if you head to The Benjamin Hotel in New York, sleep comes first on the menu.

  A sufferer of back pain, Ms. King said she had never been able to sleep for more than three hours a night without getting up.

  But with a firm mattress and a special pillow — the “Swedish Memory,” with self-molding foam developed by NASA — she was able to sleep for eight hours, she said. “And this was during the United Nations General Assembly and police escorts and traffic and people all around,” Ms. King said. “I couldn’t believe it.”

  And there’s more…

  At The Benjamin, Ms. Orlanska, 37, the hotel’s senior concierge, said she advises dozens of guests a day on their sleep. She and the three other Benjamin concierges are trained in the sleep program, and spend the majority of their time dealing with sleep issues, while also doing the usual concierge duties like finding theater tickets to “Mary Poppins.”

  Three days before a guest is scheduled to arrive, the staff advises him or her of the pillow menu so that the pillow will be in the room when the guest arrives. The program is constantly expanding. A new iPod pillow plays music in the pillow itself.

  Most of the pillows shift the body, usually on the side. The “Snore-No-More” elevates the chin. The maternity pillow eases stress on the abdomen.

  Ms. Orlanska said she must often play psychiatrist to identify the causes of stress, like back-to-back meetings. A tip sheet, “Take an Executive Nap,” which advises that a 60-minute nap is better than a 30-minute nap, usually does the trick. She’ll also resort to banana bread.

  Only one guest actually collected on the hotel’s guarantee, said Eileen McGill, who was a concierge at The Benjamin for more than six years. Consolidated Edison was jackhammering one
night, said Ms. McGill, now the senior concierge at Manhattan House, a condominium complex on the Upper East Side.

  “We gave him his money back,” she said, even though he was only one out of several hundred guests who complained.

  Now this brings us to the second point.

  If you choose a uniqueness, then you can start to build your entire company around that one concept. If you were paying attention to the review, you’d have noticed that they solved a problem, bringing a solution to a very specific audience. They destroyed the high-price objections. They have testimonials that hark back to their uniqueness. And whaddya know: The risk reversal is also intrinsically linked to their uniqueness.

  See, the entire core, the entire DNA of your company, can be built around one unique factor. Not two. Or three.

  One.

  Just one.

  Volvo’s uniqueness is safety. How did they get this uniqueness? They created it. And thus created a DNA for their products worldwide.

  And to the third biggest reason why you need to drop everything and work out your uniqueness: You can make your company’s offering simple and easy to understand.

  So let’s prove that point, shall we? What is The Benjamin in New York best known for? Aha, I don’t have to prompt you, do I? You already know what to say. Because the uniqueness is drummed into your system. Just like Volvo brings up the concept of ‘safety’ in your brain, The Benjamin must make you feel very, very sleepy.

  Aha, but there’s a problem here.