by Pamela Slim
Very quickly, a simple agreement would turn into multiple e-mails back and forth, with redlines and text edits in the contract document. Once finalized, the document would have to be printed, signed, scanned, then sent back. The original client would print that document out, sign it, scan it, and finally return a copy to all parties.
Kyle wanted to build software that contained templates of legally sound contracts that creative professionals could use to do things like set up joint-venture agreements, audio-visual recording releases, bills of sale, and promissory notes. He envisioned a website where it would be possible to send, review, and digitally sign contracts with no fuss or headache.
The problem was that he had never created a software product and had no idea where to start.
When Kyle came to me with this problem, I suggested that he attend the Business of Software, a technology conference in Boston that brought together the best, most experienced and successful software startup founders in one place.
At the conference, Kyle learned the best practices for developing products, which tools to use to do the development, and mistakes to avoid.
After the conference, he read a pile of books and blog posts about software development.
With a better idea of what he wanted to build, Kyle now needed help building it.
He attended the first Lift Off Retreat that I ran with my partner, Charlie Gilkey. Lift Off was a three-day business-design retreat where we brought together thirteen entrepreneurs from all over the country to Saguaro Lake Ranch, in Mesa, Arizona.
When Kyle shared his idea with others in the group, he found that there was a small subset of retreat participants who had the exact skill sets he needed to build the first prototype of his product.
A couple of weeks later, Kyle decided to fly a small team of retreat participants—expert researcher Crystal Williams, graphic designer Rhiannon Llewellyn, videographer Karen Yaeger, and technology consultant Willie Jackson—to a rented house in the San Juan Islands near his home in Seattle. They bunkered down for five days and brainstormed and researched ideas on the spot. Rhiannon created wireframes as they sketched out the design, Crystal completed detailed research on various ideas, and Willie communicated with outside technology experts as they discussed different tools and programs.
By the end of the weekend, this small team had a basic business model, ideas about which technology to use, and wireframes to build on.
After the San Juan Islands retreat, Kyle and Willie interviewed a variety of software developers and other Lift Off participants, one of which knew a team of great developers in Buenos Aires.
Kyle and Willie decided to hire the Argentine team of developers, who quickly built the beta version of his software ourdeal.com, which now provides a quick and easy way for clients to review, edit, and digitally sign legal contracts.
Before this experience, Kyle was used to figuring things out on his own. He felt uncomfortable asking for help at first, but soon learned that identifying a strong peer network of friends and collaborators was a great way to reduce risk, develop ideas, and grow business. The original team is still friends and refers clients back and forth to one another.
Kyle did invest some money in bringing the team together to flesh out the original project, but it was much less than he would have paid to hire someone else to do the work, or worse, to just guess his way through building the software himself and make costly mistakes.
Because he went through the entire process, it was easy to later spin off new software projects, like taxreceipts.com, which helps entrepreneurs easily navigate tax code so that they know what kind of expenses are valid business write-offs, and partnerright.com, which provides expert guidance on setting up joint ventures and partnerships.
Kyle learned that identifying and building strong collaborative partnerships with peers, experts, and mentors is a critical part of the formula for business success, especially when you are setting out to expand a specific aspect of your body of work.
Collaborating effectively is a key skill in the new world of work, no matter which work mode you choose.
Connectional intelligence—CxQ
Harvard researcher Erica Dhawan agrees that collaboration and peer networks are an essential part of the new world of work. She takes the discussion a step further and says that there is a new type of intelligence, as important as intellectual quotient (IQ) and emotional quotient (EQ), which she calls connectional intelligence.
“Connectional intelligence (CxQ) is the ability to build and realize value from networks of relationships, to harness units of knowledge and reuse them to innovate, to convene communities, [and] to marshal a variety of resources for breakthrough results. In the past decade, we’ve seen an exponential rise of CxQ as seen through millennials curating TEDx events via webcasts that reach millions; starting social businesses blending profit and purpose, like TOMS Shoes and Warby Parker; or using social sharing and crowd-funding tools, such as Kickstarter, to reach new audiences.”
Erica and her collaborator, Saj-nicole Joni, chief executive of Cambridge International Group, consult with Fortune 500 companies to develop cross-generational dialogue and empower all employees to share their natural connectional intelligence to improve innovation in organizations. Their thirty-year age difference provides perspective and depth to the work they do as a team.
Saj-nicole says, “This generation is uniquely equipped to lead to breakthrough innovation in a way that has never before been possible, because it is the first to have grown up in a world of ubiquitous connection. For millennials, engagement with all social media is not only about entertainment or news. It is embedded in daily life. Digital connection is the air they breathe. They do everything in it, from deeply sharing their lives with friends and family (who may live in different cities or countries) to shopping and paying bills, communicating at work. . . .
“The missing link is this: In our new world of an embedded digital infrastructure that connects all of our lives, the power of connectional intelligence holds exponential, and previously untapped, potential for breakthroughs in ways we can barely begin to imagine.”
Erica and Saj-nicole believe that contextual capacity—the ability to bring together different kinds of people and ideas to foster the recombination of different ideas, and to see things from a different perspective—is a key part of connectional intelligence and a key skill for both individuals and institutions to develop if they want to remain competitive.
In Erica’s research at the Harvard Kennedy School of Government and in studies for their book, Erica and Saj-nicole are creating and encouraging “sparring zones”—places where people of very different backgrounds can discuss and debate ideas, in an open and healthy way.
By mobilizing networks to share ideas, they can create great things and solve big problems.
Erica says, “Globalization of business, economic, and political instability and global hyper-connectivity is forcing us to approach innovation and problem solving differently. Connectional intelligence is becoming a key differentiator in organizations who want to remain competitive.”
I agree wholeheartedly with Erica and Saj-nicole.
For some people, this connectional intelligence comes naturally. For others, it is a skill to be learned.
The best way to learn about it is to understand avatars, ecosystems, and watering holes.
Avatars, ecosystems, and watering holes
Connecting is so much easier when you know the specific characteristics of ideal collaborators and where they spend their time. I define ideal collaborators as avatars, the broad networks where they hang out as ecosystems, and the specific locations where large numbers of avatars hang out as watering holes.
Depending on your work mode and business objective, you may be looking to connect with peers, mentors, clients, or customers.
Many people spread themselves too thin by spending
hours trying to cultivate connections on social media or by attending multiple workshops and conferences, hoping that the right peers, mentors, and clients will magically appear. When you do the work to focus and clarify your ideal collaborators, you get much better results with less effort.
Ideal connection avatar
When you can describe the specific characteristics of people you want to collaborate with, it makes it much easier to find them. It will also make it easier to screen out people who are not the right fit.
Individual collaborators can be defined with some demographic information:
Profession
Income level
Geographic area
Psychographic characteristics (personality, values, vibe, et cetera)
Age
Gender
Ethnicity
Interests
Hobbies
Institutional collaborators can be defined by things such as:
Nature of business or organization
Size of company
Type of industry (high technology, manufacturing, health and wellness, et cetera)
Geographic area
Alan Cooper originated the concept of Buyer Personas in his 1999 book, The Inmates Are Running the Asylum. In recent years, the more common term is “ideal client avatars.” I am certain that Apple has my picture hanging on the white board of their marketing department. Under “Ideal Customer Avatar,” they would have:
Anglo female
Forty-six years old
Mother of small children
Loves technology
Loves design
Loves TED, PopTech, Ignite
Entrepreneur
Heavy social media user
With this kind of specific description, there are all kinds of ways and places Apple could (and does) market to me. I am embarrassed to say it works: I have an iPhone, iPad, iMac, and MacBook Air.
Similarly to discovering your ideal client avatars, once you have clear descriptions of your ideal collaboration avatars, you are ready to define the ecosystem in which they live.
Ecosystems
No individual or company stands alone in its market. There are a whole group of other companies that market to the same people.
When I was teaching a marketing class about ecosystems and watering holes, I took to Twitter to ask who my followers thought would be in the Whole Foods Market ecosystem. I got back the following answers.
Trader Joe’s
The Fresh Market
REI
Patagonia
Rent A Goat
TOMS Shoes
Farmers’ markets
Yoga studios
Pilates studios
lululemon
Honda
Toyota (Prius)
Volkswagen
Apple
TED.com
Gaiam (organic clothes)
Laura’s Lean Beef
When I shared these findings on Twitter, I got this reply from my Canadian friend Lianne Raymond:
“I love Whole Foods mushroom blue cheese pizza (she types into her Apple computer before driving her VW to yoga in her lululemon slit crop boogie pants).”
Without having any prior awareness, Lianne realized that she was smack in the middle of a brand ecosystem.
Watering holes
When you have a sense of your ideal connections and the overall ecosystem in which they participate, you can start to look for watering holes. These are places, online and in person, where large concentrations of your ideal connections hang out.
They include:
Blogs
Forums
Conferences
Events
Stores
The South by Southwest Interactive Festival in Austin, Texas, is a watering hole for social media–active, technology-loving innovators. You can meet thousands of customers, peer collaborators, mentors, watering-hole gatekeepers, journalists, and corporate sponsors.
When I was standing in line for hours to register for the event in 2012, I struck up a conversation with a Wall Street Journal reporter from the San Francisco bureau. Later that evening, in one small hotel lobby bar, I met the vice president of a huge technology company, the owner of a 300,000-member marketing site, a viral video legend, and a famous bestselling author. Outside of a conference watering hole, it would have taken many headaches, unreturned e-mails, and conversations with gatekeepers to get this same level of access to this group of influential people.
Conferences are not the only effective watering holes. Blogs or online forums can also be excellent places to meet peers, mentors, and customers.
When I first started my coaching business, Guy Kawasaki’s blog was the watering hole that led me to so many great friends and partners, including Stanford professor and author Bob Sutton, Presentation Zen author Garr Reynolds, author and programmer Kathy Sierra, and marketing expert Seth Godin. After Guy linked to a few of the posts on my blog, I got a flood of new subscribers, and it earned him the nickname of my “link sugar daddy.” He ended up becoming a friend and wrote the foreword to my first book.
AVATARS, ECOSYSTEMS, AND WATERING HOLES
If you take the time to define your ideal connection avatars, ecosystems, and watering holes, your networks will grow exponentially faster. And as Kyle Durand discovered, you will be able to create and build new pieces of your body of work better and quicker.
To create your collaboration plan, follow these three steps:
1. Define the specific characteristics of your ideal connection avatar.
You may have more than one—try to capture the most important ones. Remember, ideal connections not only help you do your best work, but they are also fun to work with!
Demographic information: age, gender, cultural background, profession
Psychographic information: personality type, communication style, conative style
Special ingredients: skills, experience, values
2. Define the ecosystem that surrounds your ideal connection avatar.
Which products and services do they buy?
Whom are they influenced by? (authors, political leaders, cultural figures)
What do they read? (books, magazines, blogs)
3. Identify the watering holes where your ideal connections hang out.
Where will you find concentrated group of your ideal avatars within the ecosystems?
Be as specific as possible! “They hang out on blogs” will not help you get clients. Which blogs? Which live events?
Network roles: connector, maven, and salesman
Malcolm Gladwell has contributed many great ideas to the business world over the years with bestselling books like Blink and Outliers.
His book The Tipping Point changed the way I think about creating and developing networks that help develop and deploy great ideas into the world. In chapter 2, Gladwell describes three types of people:
Connectors: People with the extraordinary gift of bringing large groups together
Mavens: People with a vast amount of diverse knowledge
Salespeople: People with the skills to persuade and spread information
When you identify your primary “Tipping Point Archetype,” you know how to leverage your strength, and, most important, you identify the archetypes you need to surround yourself with in order to strengthen the quality of and to spread ideas for your body of work.
How do you recognize these types in the real world?
Connectors are fantastic at expanding your network. When you share your idea with them, they will say:
“Oh, you should talk to . . .”
“Have you heard about Bob, who wrote that book . . .”
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��Let me introduce you to . . .”
They think in terms of people, and networks of people, and like nothing more than to help you.
Mavens will dig deeply into your product and give very specific, detailed, and relevant information on how it can fit within the marketplace.
“I was researching that last month, and I noticed a slight discrepancy in . . .”
“Your work fits right in the xxx part of yyy’s essay on the zzz topic.”
“You could add videos to this to bring the lessons alive! And you could expand on the content in chapter three, section two, by listing . . .”
Salesmen will take the idea and help you package it, price it, and sell it. They’ll say:
“Here is one way that you could position it, in order to get people excited about the idea.”
“What is the big idea? What is the promise?”
“You have to have an offer. Traffic means nothing if it doesn’t lead to a sale.”
“What is your pricing structure?”
“What specific value will this have to your market? How much is that worth?”
My friend Charlie Gilkey, who identifies as a maven, thinks that we have primary, secondary, and tertiary Tipping Point Archetypes. So you could be a connector (primary), maven (secondary), and salesman (tertiary), relying on each of the strengths in differing quantities.
One fun way I like to help people figure out which is their primary network role is to ask a question like: “How would you get to the moon?” And take note of their instinctual response.
Connectors think of anyone they know who may know someone who works at NASA.
Mavens run through different scenarios and calculations to determine exactly what the task entails. Would they be flying in a rocket? Does NASA have any plans to fly to the moon, or are Mars and Jupiter more of a budget priority?
Salesmen think about what powerful story they could tell to convince Richard Branson that they are a great candidate for the next commercial airline flight to the moon.
How do you use network roles in the real world?
