Persuasion, Hollywood style

strategy+business, May 23, 2022

by Theodore Kinni


Photograph by Archive Holdings Inc.

I usually associate pitching with characters like the late inventor and pitchman Ron Popeil, who earned a spot in America’s cultural history—and a small fortune—hawking products such as the Chop-O-Matic, the Pocket Fisherman, spray-on hair, and the Showtime Rotisserie and BBQ oven on late night TV. (“Set it, and forget it!”) But that’s a reductionist view, at best. Pitching is a form of interactive selling that business leaders at all levels need to master.

“We define a pitch as a scheduled meeting for the specific intention of trying to promote an idea, business project, or script,” write Peter Desberg and Jeffrey Davis in their new book, Pitch Like Hollywood. As the title suggests, Desberg, a clinical psychologist and a professor emeritus at California State University, Dominguez Hills, and Davis, a screenwriter and professor at Loyola Marymount University School of Film and Television, look to the film industry for lessons in pitching. And rightly so. Movies and TV shows are typically sold on the strength of a pitch to studio executives that can take anywhere from an hour to several days, depending on the size of the project.

Though CEOs tend to be polished presenters, pitching a new strategy to the board or an acquisition offer to the founders of a promising startup is not the same thing as making a presentation. “The biggest difference is the interactivity. Pitching is not a one-way presentation—it’s not, ‘I’m gonna tell you, and you’re gonna sit and listen to me,’” Davis told me during a video interview with the two authors. “A pitch is less controlled. If your pitch is good, you’re involving the people you’re pitching. You are trying to get their opinions, to get to what’s important to them, and to get them to help you shape your pitch to really make it work.”

This interactivity gets to the root cause of many failed pitches—mishandling criticism. “If a catcher asks a pitcher a hostile question or points out a flaw, and the pitcher gets defensive or counterattacks, the conversation dies,” said Desberg.

For their pitch to avoid this fate, leaders should take a lesson from a story the authors relate about a creative director at an ad agency who pitched six potential campaigns to a tire company executive. When he’d finished, the exec looked at him and said, “I hate everything you’ve shown me.” Unflustered, the creative director asked, “Which one do you hate the least?” That question led to a conversation that ended in a successful campaign.

Like the creative director, good pitchers see criticism as a green light. “They’re thinking, ‘This person is trying to enter a creative collaboration with me. I’ve got to nurture the heck out of that,’” said Davis. “Show business, like all business, is more collaborative than ever. If you’re not a collaborator, you have no future in business.” Read the rest here

Unleashing the power of government transformation: The Ministry of the Future

Learned a lot lending an editorial hand here:

PwC Strategy& Ideation Center, May 2022

by Fadi Adra, Yahya Anouti, Raed Kombargi, Paolo Pigorinia, and Dima Sayess

Middle East governments have ambitious plans to transform their countries in the face of economic, social, and technological challenges. This task has been made more urgent and difficult by the COVID-19 pandemic. The difficulty is that many of the ministries and agencies responsible for envisioning and guiding transformation are hampered by their own roles, operating models, capabilities, and governance structures. If these ministries and agencies are to play a leading role in national transformation, they will have to first transform themselves.The challenges for Middle East governments are substantial. They include changes in the region’s social fabric, mounting economic competition, technological advances, rising barriers to global trade, and budgetary pressures.In this environment, there is an urgent need for purpose-driven ministries and agencies that are fully accountable for delivering high-impact services. Too often, however, government itself becomes an obstacle to the achievement of national transformation. The sheer bulk of the region’s governments, attributable mainly to public-sector employment acting as a social safety net and weak private-sector and economic integration, reduces governmental efficiency, effectiveness, and decision-making ability. The over-involvement of government in operations and service delivery prevents private-sector engagement and expansion, hinders innovation, and creates negative competition. Moreover, few governments to date have fully taken advantage of the power of technology to lower the barriers to decision making, policy formulation, and performance evaluation.

Before they can transform their countries, governments need to become fit-for-transformation in seven ways. They must become:

• DIGITALLY POWERED: Relying on advanced and emerging technologies to enable solutions and conduct operations
• ANTICIPATORY AND PROACTIVE: Utilizing horizon scanning, foresight, scenario analysis, and best practices to address emerging and potential challenges and opportunities
• CUSTOMER-CENTRIC AND HOLISTIC: Adopting a customer-focused, whole-of-life approach to service delivery
• COLLABORATIVE AND PARTICIPATORY: Taking advantage of the collective resources, capacities, and expertise of the public sector, private sector, and citizens in order to design, deliver, and assess solutions
• AGILE AND DYNAMIC: Employing lean and flexible organizational structures staffed with fluid, crossfunctional, and accountable teams
• INNOVATIVE AND RESILIENT: Ideating, prototyping, piloting, and delivering creative and future-proof solutions that make government resilient
• EVIDENCE-BASED AND RESULTS-ORIENTED: Using targets and indicators to set, monitor, and evaluate clearly defined objectives, impacts, and outcomes 

Read the rest here:

Getting and staying motivated

strategy+business, May 5, 2022

by Theodore Kinni


Photograph by ATU Images

Get It Done: Surprising Lessons from the Science of Motivation
by Ayelet Fishbach, Little, Brown Spark, 2022

In the early years of the last century, Hanoi had a rat problem. To solve it, the French colonial government placed a one-cent bounty on the rodents, which could be claimed by anyone who delivered a rat’s tail. Thousands of tails were tendered, but Hanoi’s rat population didn’t shrink. Instead, tailless rats were running through streets, and rat farms were discovered. To make money selling rats’ tails, you need lots of rats breeding more rats. The moral of the story: be careful which behaviors you reward.

Ayelet Fishbach, the Jeffrey Breakenridge Keller Professor of Behavioral Science and Marketing at the University of Chicago Booth School of Business, tells the tale of Hanoi’s rats in Get It Done. The book is a deep dive into a veritable ocean of behavioral research, including a substantial number of studies conducted by the author. This area of scholarship is so full of codicils and complications that it’s a wonder that managers can motivate themselves, let alone the people in their charge.

Consider the role that progress plays in motivation. Will you be more motivated if you focus on how far you’ve already traveled toward a goal or if you keep your attention trained on how far you have left to go? The not-so-simple answer, explains Fishbach in chapter 5, is: it depends. What’s your emotional predilection—are you a glass-half-empty or glass-half-full kind of person? Is the goal you are pursuing a conditional one with all-or-nothing benefits that are paid on completion or an accumulative one from which you derive benefits as you go? And how far along on the path are you: how close are you to reaching your goal? Your answers to those questions determine how you should use progress as a motivational force. What’s more, if you don’t ask those questions and answer them properly, the progress that you’ve made toward your goal could become a demoralizing force and an obstacle to its achievement.

Every chapter in Get It Done reiterates the multifaceted nature of self-motivation and underscores the critical nuances in the kind of advice found in sound bites on social media... read the rest here