by Pat Bodin
That is also the only way business Reds and Blues and Greens will be able to communicate. Like the political above, these business Colors have a core. They have values and assumptions and an ideology they hold dear. To communicate to them, you must know them. As Stephen Covey so wisely said in The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People, “Seek first to understand, then to be understood.”10 Core is the first element of the Care-About Tool.
The Core of Red
For Red, the core is efficiency. Reds want to do more with less, because in a black-and-white world that inherently makes sense. Why wouldn’t you want to do more with less time, less money, less everything? On the surface, it sounds great.
The challenge is that if efficiency does not help the value of your organization, it may be immaterial. Say you’re in a healthcare organization with revenue of $20 billion. Assuming the IT spend is roughly 8% of revenue, that’s $1.6 billion—a significant amount of money. Maybe 20% of that is IT infrastructure, so we’re down to $320 million. You’re the network communications leader, so your budget is a fraction of that $320 million. Now, I’m an outside vendor, and I tell you that I can save you 2% of your costs. You’re thrilled! Saving 2% of a budget (a too-small one, in your view) is very useful. But as you try to get approval for my proposal from higher-ups with greater responsibility— operators like chiefs of medicine, strategists like the CEO—you start to find out that 2% savings in your budget is not necessarily material to Green, nor to the organization. As a Red, your core value of efficiency could blind you from seeing your point of greatest impact to the organization.
The Core of Blue
Effectiveness is the core of Blue. Blue people want to be able to achieve their goals in the most effective way possible. You want to pitch an improvement to the Chief of Medicine. What does he care about? What’s his core? Effectiveness. He wants more bang for his buck. He doesn’t mind paying money to achieve his goal of better patient care. That’s not efficiency, by the way—efficiency is spending money to save money. Spending money to get more money is effectiveness.
So maybe you talk about labor. Help the chief of medicine automate a repetitive task and reduce labor costs, which are probably responsible for 60% of his total costs. Healthcare has many traditionally repetitive tasks that cost time and burn people out. The chief of medicine wants to keep labor around (because high turnover rates are ineffective). Help him accomplish that and you’ll be a hero.
For example, nurses have to record patient information and input it into the central system. Traditionally, the nurse would take notes on paper and then later type it into the computer. This caused delays because the nurses had to walk back and forth between patient rooms and the front desk. Today, nurses type information directly into the system using a tablet computer.
The Core of Green
What is material to Green? Productivity. When I was the CEO of a services company, I cared about three labor metrics. The first was customer satisfaction. The second was utilization. I wanted my people to be utilized 62–68% of the time. (Utilization higher than 68% was not attainable because the production personnel traveled around the globe.) That percentage was effective, so if someone’s utilization was substantially lower, I looked for a root cause. The third metric I cared about was productivity. I took each employee’s base cost to the organization, multiplied it by three, and compared it to the revenue that employee produced. If the revenue was over 300% of the total cost, I was happy. That made for a healthy income that we could invest back into the company. As a Green CEO, I loved it when my employees were productive.
Speak to the core
Do you want to communicate more effectively with people at different tiers in your organization? Speak to their core. If you are an IT leader, having provided support in the tactical area for a long time, you’ll be tempted to speak to your CEO about efficiency. He’ll probably blow you off—efficiency is not his concern. It’s core to you, but not to him. Clothe your proposal in something that would matter to him: productivity and growth.
Remember “measure what matters”? Efficiency is a measure of what matters for you. But the CEO is measured on growth. Unless you help him improve what he is measured on, you will remain irrelevant. The organization’s value proposition is the same for both of you and you are striving toward the same overarching goal, but your individual contributions are distinct and your measurements are unique.
To impact others and be relevant you must understand the core of Red, the core of Blue, and the core of Green. In short:
• Red – Efficiency
• Blue – Effectiveness
• Green – Productivity
Let’s take an example from the food industry. Blue people are focused on process and components associated with that process, like key performance indicators (KPIs). One of the by-product of the food industry is waste and food manufacturers spend a lot of time reducing waste. Waste is sometimes quite disgusting (especially if you know what the food industry is doing with some of the waste). The nicest example from the food industry may be cookie ice cream.
One large food company was producing cookies at one end of their plant and ice cream on the other end. As always, their processes produced waste. What does waste from cookies look like? Cookie crumbs!
For hundreds of years, people have been reusing food waste for food production. What to do with stale bread? Make croutons or use it in recipes such as bread pudding or ribollita. What did owners of small farms feed their pigs? They fed them leftovers, food waste. Then, in due time, the pigs become food themselves. That was traditionally what was done hundreds of years ago and it’s still happening today.
The ice cream example is similar. The Blue people who were running the production process in the cookie factory asked themselves, “How can we reduce waste?” They came up with an idea: Reuse it by putting it into ice cream. Putting cookie crumbs into ice cream reuses waste, thus making the factory more efficient at producing cookies.
Now cookie ice cream was on the market. And then something unforeseen happened: People didn’t just like it, they loved the cookie ice cream! The factories increased production and used up every last bit of cookie waste (i.e. crumbs) for cookie ice cream. But consumers still wanted to buy more, so the company had to come up with something new.
Maybe you’ve seen their new idea in your local supermarket. Now there is not only cookie ice cream with crumbs inside, but also cookie ice cream with whole cookies inside! Breaking whole cookies just for the sake of ice cream doesn’t make sense. Why not put the full cookies into the ice cream to address customer demand? That’s what the companies have done.
Efficiency means completing a process with minimum waste. Productivity means creating value. Happily, like cookie ice cream, sometimes you can have both!
Chapter 7.
CAT: Risk
What is the greatest risk for Red, for Blue, and for Green?
We all have personal risk: You can’t drive your car to work without risking an accident, however unlikely. In the same way, other forms of risk are present in business. Take financial risk, for instance; a business may have insufficient capital to fund its projects, or feel squeezed by debt service payments, or lack cash flow. Technology comes with risks, too: the risk of systems crashing, the risk of outages to essential applications. Compliance risk affects banking, healthcare, and financial services companies, among others. Regulations are heavy worldwide, with severe penalties for noncompliance. Change—inside or outside the business—is risky too. “The way things have always been” seems safe…at least until stagnancy and immobility turn you into a dinosaur.
Which Colors care about which risks?
• Red people primarily deal with the risk of change. Their job is to update networks and replace outdated systems and every time they try something new they invite the risk of disaster.
• Blue people focus on operational risk. Are the key processes working? Is the customer satisfied?
• Green people worry about fin
ancial risk every day. Their goal is productivity and profitability, so they handle the business numbers.
• Together, Blue and Green deal with compliance risk. Blue oversees the tools that must comply, while Green is held responsible for any noncompliance.
Risk matters. Business leaders decide on courses of action based on their perception of threats to the business. Thus, when you speak to Blue or Green, remember what they are worrying about and help allay their fears.
A friend of Robert Schaffner shared the following story with him:
He was at dinner with two friends, the first a sales trainer, and the second a solar panel salesman to homeowners. He asked the second friend, “How’s business?”
“Really hard. Solar panels are being shipped in from China and driving prices down. The technology is becoming mainstream and lots of other solar panel companies are starting up.”
They talked about what he could do to improve his business. The sales trainer friend asked, “What risks are associated with installing solar panels?”
“There aren’t really any risks. The vendors guarantee the solar panels for a certain number of years. If a panel breaks, you can get it replaced.”
Then they thought of this question: How easy is it to uninstall solar panels?
The answer was: It’s really easy and very fast. You drive up with a truck; you set up the ladder; you get on the roof; you start to uninstall them. Half an hour later, you have a whole load of solar panels in your truck.
The friends came up with the idea of manual protection for solar panels, where they need a special tool to uninstall them. The tool itself doesn’t cost much, but without it, other tools cannot be used to uninstall solar panels. If someone comes by and wants to steal the panels, they will need half an hour to break the solar panel lock. The required effort is much higher.
The solar panel salesman began having conversations with his customers. He would say, “Congratulations on purchasing solar panels. Installing panels on your roof is a major investment and while they will pay for themselves over time, that will take a few years. In the meantime, do you take vacations? Do you travel for business? Does your house ever sit empty for a few days?” The answer is normally, “Yes, of course.”
“Well, did you know that uninstalling panels is not that hard? But we have a solution that locks the solar panels in place and makes it harder to uninstall them. That will help prevent people from dropping by and stealing them. Of course, this is an optional item and you don’t need to purchase it. But I thought you might want to consider it.”
After introducing this offer, the friend’s business picked up quite dramatically. Not everyone purchased the manual lock, but many did. He had thought deeply about the end customer’s potential risks and invented a solution before they even knew they had a problem.
Half a year later, everyone in the industry offered a similar feature. The competitive advantage was gone, which was a disappointment — but my friend had gotten to spur an industry change. Today, most every solar panel installation requires special tools to uninstall.
The solar panel salesman gained a competitive advantage by recognizing a risk facing end customers and offering a timely solution. The lesson here does not just apply to salespeople, it applies to all of us who have to “sell” something internally. Make clear that you understand the specific risks of the person you are selling to. Speak to those risks and offer solutions. That makes your offer much more relevant.
Chapter 8.
CAT: Language
While earlier generations may not have ventured far from their hometown, travel, including international travel, is becoming more common and accessible to the average person in this modern age. Air travel is no longer just for the elite. Americans, especially, for the first time in their lives are visiting places where they are the non-dominant culture. How they navigate their experience will make the difference on how they perceive their journey. Do they learn key phrases in the language of the country? Have they researched basic customs and culture?
In the United States, it’s common for someone to casually ask a stranger that one has struck up a conversation with, “So, what do you do for a living?” as it is considered taking an interest in that person’s life and his day to day activities. In some other countries, it would be considered prying or elitist to ask a stranger that question, or even a casual acquaintance, in the same way that it would be intrusive to ask someone how much income they earned last year.
Even when people appear to speak the same language, things can get tricky. One British woman related a story to me from her early days of living in California:
When I was in my 20s during the late 1970s, my husband and I had recently moved from England to California and we invited another young couple over for dinner after church one Sunday.
“What are we having?” our new friends asked after they arrived and we were sitting in the living room together.
“Oh,” I replied, lightly, “I thought we’d have a nice joint.” The couple’s faces were absolutely aghast.
My husband immediately understood the language mishap. “She means roast beef! She means the meat!”
Language is a tricky thing. Our challenge is that we get caught in two areas. First, we get caught in the details. Imagine you are looking at a tree in a forest. Ignoring the surrounding trees (the big picture) is problematic. Tunnel vision limits your broader view of the obstacles ahead. You may be very skillful at tending your tree, which provides you with confidence in this complex world. But many outside factors are impacting your tree. What if there’s a fire burning nearby? If you don’t dig a ditch, you can care for the tree all you want, but it will soon be consumed by fire. That problem arises when you go from macro to micro too quickly. IT people often go deep into the minutiae of a subject before understanding it as a whole.
The second challenge is that we get caught in jargon. I think IT uses the most jargon of any industry apart from military and healthcare. For example, “Our pen-tester is finally finished with the bloatware—it showed quite some code smell after some brute force.” (If you didn’t understand that sentence, don’t worry. It’s not your fault. And if you did understand the sentence, promise me never to say anything like it!)
Why do we speak in jargon? Because it’s useful to speed up communication. You want to say something quickly, so you turn it into an acronym. But most people in the organization outside of the IT department do not share this lexicon. Using jargon while trying to communicate with them becomes a problem. Sometimes, jargon has become so natural and second-nature to us that we aren’t even aware that we are using it.
Take the word “virtualization,” for instance. Everyone in IT uses that word. It’s a very Red word; you won’t hear a Blue or Green person talking that way. Red uses virtual language.
My mother is in her 80s. She has been a homemaker most of her life, and her passions are growing beautiful flowers and canning delicious preserves. If I went home to my mother and said, “Hey mom, can we talk about virtualization?” that would be a very short conversation. She’d probably reply bluntly, in her no-nonsense manner, “No. I don’t know what that means, so I don’t really want to talk about it.” That’s what Blue and Green people would like to say, too.
Our jargon does not resonate outside of our protective space. Moreover, it makes us irrelevant. We need to understand that people use different words. What is virtualization? It’s the ability to take multiple computer nodes and put them on one physical node, therefore attaining better efficiency of the computer nodes. There used to be many under-utilized resources inside computers, but virtualization eliminates that. It also gives you a centralized view of your computing capacity. That’s what we mean by virtualization.
Blue people use rational language. In the application-based Blue world, collapsing multiple applications into one business project is called “rationalization”. Rationalization is similar to virtualization in the Red world, so you could use it as a s
ynonym.
Green strategists use visual language. They want visibility into their environment, so we can use the word “digitalization” or “visualization” for them. This is somewhat of a paraphrase rather than a direct translation. That said, I would definitely not use the word “virtualization” with someone who is a CEO. That would not connect with his core. I would tell him, “We want to digitize so that we can visualize our environment more effectively.” That would resonate. It would even resonate with my mom: “Mom, can you visualize a bed of flowers outside your window?” I’m sure she could.
Chapter 9.
CAT: Motivation, Care, and Challenge
In addition to the core of who they are, the risks that impact them, and the language they use, the colors have different core motivations.
Motivation
My estimation, after many years in the IT world, is that the core motivator for Red is job security. Technologists are trying constantly to protect our jobs. That might seem obvious: we have bills to pay and may have families to feed, clothe, and shelter, as well. But as you communicate to people higher up the architectural level, you will find that, though they all care about job security, it is not their principal motivator. Attempting to motivate them with your principal motivator leads to irrelevance.
Blue cares a lot about time: time to market, time to operational value, time to everything. Why does Blue care about time? Because it affects their key motivator, project success. Blues need to be successful at their projects, whereas a Red person in that same project may care about an element of it but not the entire project. Blue has more of a macro view; Red, a micro view.
