[Advice] Listening to the Linchpins

There are all of these stories out there.

A woman works in the billing department of a major company. She is passionate about her work, but she is also knowledgeable about tax laws. She sells vitamin supplements as a side hustle, and owns a piece of rental property. Her kids help her with the work on the rental property and she is able to buy them new Nikes.

A women owned her own business for ten years because she went to business school because her father wanted her to. She was always passionate about working with people. After ten years of operating and owning a business, she put that project aside to work in a company with people.

A man works to feed vulnerable populations at scale on a daily basis. He believes in the work so much, that he is running for political office as well.

A man knows more about food safety than you and I will ever know. He has trouble convincing his family though, that they should listen to him in his knowledge and take his advice. They all get sick following an outdoor picnic at a family reunion where the food was out, starting a cascade of conflict via text messages after the fact.

All of these people are linchpins. They create value and connection with the people around them, in order to grow their worlds. They are taking risks to expand their voices and the only thing that is stopping them from going further is themselves.

Listen to the stories around you.

The stories of the linchpins.

Because the chorus of stories is growing louder and louder and expanding out further and further and touching more and more lives in ways that matter.

[Opinion] It’s Up to MBAs to Save the World

Business students—modern day, Internet savvy, native users of the information superhighway we’ve all built for the last twenty or so years—can save the corporate world.

The unfortunate thing is that somewhere along the way to cashing out in a cushy consulting position, or advancing in organizations by whose culture they are troubled, someone forgot to tell them.

This is not unusual. Partially it’s due to the echo chamber of higher education—the faculty who teach from a worldview and frame set on preserving the world they teach in—and partially it’s due to a corporate world still focused (in spite of all the evidence of disruption to the contrary) on achieving cookie-cutter, command-and-control outcomes on a quarterly basis.

There are, of course, a range of types and varieties of business students, from undergraduate business majors, dutifully studying their work at second, third, and fourth tier institutions, all the way to community and junior college students “older-than-average” who return to business programs to either run a small business better, or to provide for their families.

Finally, there are the top tier, classic business school students from elite institutions who are studying to become the next masters of the universe. These are the ones that we traditionally think of as dominating the salaries and cultures of corporations and organizations where MBAs are hired.

Except, at all levels, the work that matters is shifting away from what a human used to do well toward what a computer can do better. Accounting, spreadsheet analysis, financial reporting, supply chain management, and on and on, really matter less and less as topical areas of focus and interest in a world where information is changing hands faster than the left to right swiping motion on a smartphone screen.

The work that does matter, in organizations, to individuals, and the work that is going to reshape the global paradigm of the next fifty years, doesn’t show up on spreadsheet, and can’t be open to analysis. And it never did; but, industrialists of the past century who built the old paradigm want MBAs and anyone in a business program of any kind to continue to believe otherwise.

Philosophically, there must be a change in how we teach bright, young, ambitious, people at all levels (from community college programs to the Ivy League) in order to succeed with outcomes that will be measurable, not in terms of dollars and cents (though that will come) but in terms of people, connection, and the continuing malleability of human nature.

But what would a two-year immersive, MBA experience look like?

Here’s a rough idea of how practically, an MBA program would look, one focused on getting bright, ambitious, Internet native, students to develop and nurture the kind of work that will grow organizations in the 21^st century:

Year One:
- Semester One:
  - Ethics
  - Sustainability
  - Conflict/Dispute Resolution Skills
  - Failure, Success, and Resilience
- Semester Two:
  - People Management
  - Psychology of Supervision
  - Storytelling
  - Listening
Capstone Project: Peer Reviewed and Focused on Building a Functioning Business in the Real World
Year Two:
- Semester One:
  - Finance
  - Accounting
  - Supply Chain Management
  - Quantitative and Qualitative Analysis
- Semester Two:
  - Persuasive Writing
  - Digital/Virtual Leadership
  - Organizational Culture
  - Restorative Justice
Capstone Project: Go and Turn Your Peer-Reviewed Project from the 1^st Semester into a Business

And after all of this, there must be follow-up. But not in the traditional sense of “Did you get a job?” and “How much does it pay?” which are questions that really only interest the federal student loan originators. Instead, follow-up with these students would be focused on the only metrics that matter: failure, success, long-term growth, and connection:

Did you fail in 5 to 7 years after the program?
Did you succeed in 5 to 7 years after the program?
What “dent” if any, did you make in the universe?

And that’s it.

With such a program, the MBAs we are turning out from all institutions would be prepared to save the world from the current troubles and hypocrisies, that have caused many corporations to collapse under the inability to change for the future that is here.

Now.

[Advice] Evolving Cultural Sensibilities and ADR

As the economic, cultural, and spiritual forces that used to bind us together continue to refragment from overarching macro-cultures to indispensable micro-cultures, alternative dispute resolution practitioners must take notice.

Overarching macro-culture was driven by communal events, television, economic stability, and overarching cultural “norms” that allowed people to engage in conflicts and disputes with the same regularity they always have, but also allowed the impacts of those conflicts to be dampened.

Indispensable micro-culture is driven by technology, network connections that defy geography and notice, a dismissal of the status quo, and a strong identity component. People still have conflict in these micro-cultures (what used to be called “sub-cultures”). But the impacts of those conflicts are like wildfires that catch the masses attention for a moment, but without a “there” there, there is little sustained effort mounted to ameliorate the effects upon people in those micro-culture conflicts.

Conflict resolvers, conflict coaches, conflict engagers, mediators, arbitrators, and others have watched this evolution occur over the last fifty or so years, with greater acceleration, but the response to the evolution through providing access points to conflict resolution has not been as quick. This is mainly for three reasons:

Indispensable micro-culture is still seen as “niche” and not really enough to build a business model on by the entrepreneurial conflict resolver. This is a terrible fact, but except for some people doing some great work in resolving conflicts in specific areas with specific groups in conflicts (i.e. with parties in churches, with divorcing or separating pet owners, etc.) there is more focus by ADR professionals on how to gain credibility with the courts—still standing as the last guardians of a passing away overarching macro-culture.
There are still enough parties in conflict participating in the remaining civic life of a formerly overarching macro-culture. This is something that will pass away over time, but right now, there are enough of the “masses” left around that many professional conflict resolvers look at the problems and conflicts of that group and decide to address their issues first. Both as a way to make a “dent” in the universality of conflict, and to make money from a reliable income stream.
Refragmentation is still not understood—or accepted psychologically, emotionally, or spiritually—as an inevitable outcome of the erosion of the twin, post-World War 2 oligopolies of corporation and government. Now, this is not to say that government will disappear either now or later; but the fact is, that as conflicts and disputes between parties in indispensable micro-culture become harder and harder to understand, the overarching macro-culture responses from government entities (i.e. new laws, regulations, taxes, and fees) will be less and less effective. This is because indispensable micro-culture conflicts are driven by esoteric, identity based rules, that require conflict resolvers to engage in relationships with those cultures to resolve—and to go beyond the overarching macro-culture rubric of intercultural communication skill sets.

None of these three areas are that daunting to overcome. And once overcome, the business models to get ideas for resolution to people in conflict begin to overwhelm the entrepreneurial conflict resolver. All that is required to get there is the courage of conflict resolvers to act outside of the “box” they have been trained in.

[Advice] There Are No Shortcuts…

The quality, or trait, of getting up and doing what needs to be done, particularly when you don’t want to do it, is sometimes called “will” or “grit” or “courage.”

But these are fancy labels for something a lot deeper that people can’t really, collectively describe.

And anybody who wants to make a dent in the universe, no matter how big or small, must possess this trait in great quantities if they are to make the dent they want to make.

Unfortunately, the audience on the outside of the dent making process, overrate the effect of the trait (the “dent”), and underrate the ability to engage with the getting toward the goal (the “will” or “grit” or “courage”).

Which is why there is so much coveting of the outcomes of exercising the “will” or “grit” or “courage.”

Which results in jealousy and envy on the part of members of the audience.

Which winds up with members of the audience expending valuable energy engaging with manipulation and deceit, rather than hard work, diligence, and patience.

There are no shortcuts to making a dent in the universe, no matter how much we might like there to be.

[Strategy] How to be the Nicky Barnes of Negotiation

The savvy entrepreneur in an ever changing business environment, should take a page from the book of entrepreneurs in other spaces. Particularly, that least savvy of all spaces, drug dealing.

Now, I am not advocating for drug-dealing, illicit drug use, or engaging in illegal activity.

Far from it.

What I am advocating for is looking at the techniques, practices, tips and trick that individuals who engage in the selling and distribution of illegal drugs use to negotiate in an ever changing, unpredictable market, filled with unpredictable, ever changing, personalities and people.

The business environment for illegal drugs is highly fluid, the market for drugs is inelastic, and the demand curve for illegal drugs is only trending upward (and has been for the last thirty or so years). From these three factors alone, we can also conclude that there is a lot of competition in the market for illicit drugs, thus there are competitors in the market that might be tempted to negotiate with each other with violence rather than with words.

Which is where the power of negotiation as a method of persuasion comes in.

In a situation where drugs are being dealt, contrary to popular opinion, the first move is not to get a weapon and being shooting—that’s actually the last move. The first move is to talk.

Particularly as a person moves up higher and higher in the ranks of the entrepreneurial, drug-dealing world, talk matters more than violence (of any kind), which is why “foot soldiers” in gangs engaged in drug dealing tend to have arrest records far longer and more extensive than the arrest records of the “big fish.”

Because, much like the CEO of a modern corporation (or a start-up founder) the higher you go in an organization, the less impetus there is for immediate resolution, and the more impetus there is for the tools and techniques of persuasion.

From Nicky Barnes to Frank Lucas and even to Pablo Escobar, negotiation was used first, and then when that didn’t work, methods of persuasion became more direct—and more violent.

But what does all of this have to do with the modern entrepreneur, trying to move units of their latest, greatest mobile phone app? There are a few tips to remember:

Entrepreneurs like a good argument: With the market, with their partners, with their competition, and even with their employees. However, remember that argumentation breaks down into three areas: arguments designed to persuade, arguments, design to advocate, and arguments designed to provide proof of a point. An argument will almost always lead to some issues that negotiation will have to work through.

Entrepreneurs need to remember that negotiation is about trust, reciprocation, commitment, and consistency. Even in the world of drug dealing, (remember, inelastic, highly competitive markets) there has to be a system of trust based in reciprocation (“I do for you, you do for me”) commitment, and consistency, or else every person will be for themselves. Coalitions, agreements, and mutual understandings come about through effective negotiation.

Entrepreneurs are sometimes less interested in persuasion than they are in being “right” or “winning” the argument or the negotiation. Persuasion is about watching language, active listening, rephrasing and paraphrasing, and having an active, engaged memory. In order to engage effectively and persuasively, remember that no negotiation scenario (whether around drugs or mobile phone apps or even a peace building process) is “pure.” There are always emotions, triggers, and other elements that each party brings to the negotiation table that have to be addressed at the negotiation table. When those issues and concerns are ignored, dismissed, or otherwise not acknowledged, resentment and bitterness begin to grow in the heart of the aggrieved party.

Negotiation is a method of persuasion that every entrepreneur should value, no matter what empire (or “dent” in the universe) they are seeking to make.

[Advice] On Influencers

Influential personalities and brands online are about to become even more influential as the years go by.

And mediators, lawyers, and negotiators should take note.

Influencer advertising is tricky to navigate, whether you are trying to partner with the peacebuilding neighborhood association with a vibrant Facebook community or the pop singer Rhianna.

Influencer marketing is only going to grow larger in the coming year for the very same reasons that social media is influential now: Individuals trust other individuals more than they trust brands. In the field of mediation and peacebuilding, where trust is a huge deal, influencers and thought leaders such as Bernard Mayer and Kenneth Cloke bring their substantial influence to academic programs, academic writing, advocacy and other areas.

However, as the influence of those individuals begins to fade, a new generation of influencers is rising in the ranks of mediation and peacebuilding professionals, such as Patricia Porter, Brad Heckman, Cinnie Noble, and others who have begun to leverage social tools and the wide reach of the Internet to make a dent in the peace building universe.

For the ADR professional with limited resources to be able to connect with larger names in the peacebuilding world, there are a few things to remember when considering using influencers to advertise your content, your services, your philosophy, or your processes:

Does the influencer’s brand link well with my brand promise?

Carefully considering how an influencer’s brand (which may range from Bernard Mayer all the way to Kim Kardashian) complements the strengths and reduces the weaknesses of the peacebuilder’s brand promise is key to developing a long term relationship with the influencer. Influencers are people first and foremost, and peacebuilding professionals should be about building that relational knowledge ahead of jumping into a branded relationship.

Is the influencer’s audience an audience that I want to be addressing as a peace builder?

Depending upon who the influencer’s audience is (and audiences range in taste and structure from the 1,000 followers the neighborhood peace builder has on her Facebook page, all the way to the millions of fans and followers Jon Stewart has) the peace builder has to decide carefully if that is an audience worth talking to. The fact of the matter is, every audience that a brand influencer has is not appropriate for a peace builder to talk to, nor is every audience open to hearing a message about peace.

Does the influencer’s message help or harm my message?

Every influencer talks to their audience in their own way, using words, images, symbols, and other forms of social cuing that inexorably tie that audience to them.

Some influencers are less savvy than others, but that does not mean that they aren’t sophisticated communications professionals in their own right.

[Podcast] Earbud_U, Season Four, Episode #1 – Chris Strub

[Podcast] Earbud_U, Season Four, Episode # 1 – Chris Strub, Social Media Engager and Connector, Part 2

[powerpress]

Welcome back to the fourth season of The Earbud_U Podcast!

The nostalgia for the perceived security and safety of the Industrial-TV complex dominated world of work and human interaction, is almost deafening.

The nostalgia mostly comes in the form of complaints about the work ethic of the current generation by a generation feeling left behind, and discounted.

Our guest today, Chris Strub is back from the second season of The Earbud_U Podcast. He defines putting in the work and redefining what the new work ethic is, by building a new way of working, using tools that allow him to grow his impact, and actively demonstrate the changing nature of the work ethic conversation.

When work ethic (or nostalgia for an imagined time in the past when people worked “harder” than they do now) is discussed, it’s often framed in the context of “paying your dues.” That mythical state of working hard, being unnoticeable (except for the work that you do), making no demands upon the work structure, and showing appropriate deference to the life experience of people older than you.

In a communication world with digital tools that are reshaping everything from shopping to working globally, “paying your dues” can begin at the age of 15 doing things that

Don’t scale
Will not appear on a resume
That an employer will never know about
And will bring the person passive income that can be leveraged after ten years…at the age of 25.

You know, at the moment when the “you should be ‘paying your dues’” conversation begins to happen, directed by superiors, co-workers, and others who didn’t have the digital tools that the 15 to 34 year olds have at their disposal right now.

Work ethic still exists. We just haven’t figured out a new way to calculate its value.

Listen to the podcast and take the multiple opportunities out there to connect with Chris today:

Chris’s Twitter: http://www.twitter.com/ChrisStrub
Chris’s Snapchat: http://www.snapchat.com/add/ChrisStrub
Chris’s YouTube (Team Strub): https://www.youtube.com/user/chrisstrub
Chris’s Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/TeamStrub
Chris’s Book: https://www.amazon.com/50-States-100-Days-Book-ebook/dp/B019J7MA3Y
Team Strub: http://www.teamstrub.com/
Chris’s Linkedin profile: https://www.linkedin.com/in/chrisstrub
Chris on Blab!: https://blab.im/ChrisStrub

[Advice] Building a Subscription Model for Content

Being the last person standing is an underrated tactic in the world of online content creation.

But for the peace builder looking to create a subscription model for content, this may be the best strategy possible.

Three things are working in the peace builder’s favor:

the speed of the Internet and the ways in which content consumers access content is increasing, even as the cost of acquiring the tools is decreasing;
the rise of ad blocking is causing many organizations to either double down on advertising, or to simply eliminate it altogether as a driver for content;
the cost in time, emotional energy, and personal effort (number of “touches”) to acquire a paying customer online is about the same as it is to acquire a paying customer offline.

More content—written, audio, and particularly video—is being consumed by audiences via mobile applications, nested on mobile devices, and accessed via the cloud. This is being seen most visibly in the overlap between subscription based product services (i.e. Harry’s Razor, Dollar Shave Club, Birchbox (for men and women) Trunk Club, Casper Mattresses, etc., etc.), and the ways in which applications, URLs, and even QR Codes are being integrated into the content consumption experience around advertising those services. Peace builders must be aware of these trends to keep their content delivery systems current and updated to get in front of as many audience members in their long-tail as possible.

The rise of ad blocking as a driver for developing a subscription based business model for content development is a key point for peace builders to take in to consideration. Yes, putting content behind a paywall and encouraging people to either give an email address (or pay a fee) to access that content may knock the peace builder in a Google ranking. But if there is an abundance of previously “free” content (audio, written, or video) that can be nested behind a paywall, advertising and ad blocking become less worrisome, in spite of whatever changes Google attempts to make to its search algorithm.

The offline content acquisition experience and the online content acquisition experience are beginning to hew closer and closer together. In the past, both on and off line, there was tremendous friction between the consumer of content and the creator of content. Now, both online and increasingly offline, all of that friction is either being automated, “app”-ed, or otherwise disappearing from interactions. Content consumers in the peace builders’ long tail are still eating, sleeping, buying clothes, and purchasing content from a variety of both on and offline resources. Peace builders must be aware of this friction reduction and move to a world where the frivolous parts of the experience (i.e. signing up, giving an email, taking a payment, etc.), are becoming more friction less so that the actual engagement with the peace builder can happen.

The peace builders that understand these three trends and incorporate the reality of them into their content business model will be the last peace builders standing (and getting paid) even as others drift away.

-Peace Be With You All-

Jesan Sorrells, MA
Principal Conflict Engagement Consultant
Human Services Consulting and Training (HSCT)
Email HSCT: jsorrells@hsconsultingandtraining.com
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/HSConsultingandTraining
Twitter: https://www.twitter.com/Sorrells79
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jesansorrells/

[Advice] New Behaviors

Peace builders struggle with sales for a variety of reasons, but the most pernicious reasons are around behaviors.

There are three areas where behaviors can be changed for peace builders to close more sales:

Determine what kind of prospecting are you doing as a peace builder: active (networking) or passive (website development). The prospecting that you are doing as peace builder may come down to understanding that you have to leverage what you do like (passive prospecting) in order to mentally and emotionally address what you don’t like (active prospecting).
Determine what the one scary behavior is that you would engage in during the day. The scary behavior goes beyond just writing a blog post and hitting “publish” (although it may start there) and goes right to researching ten local companies and calling their human resources departments. Many times, the scary behavior involves collecting “no’s” as if they are going out of style.
Determine where you as a peace builder are making excuses to not engage in the act of selling. Whether you have decided to become an evangelist—or a champion—for an idea with clients, or if you have decided to use cold-calls as a way to collect informal information about the market, peace builders often make excuses to get out of doing hard work that’s scary and uncomfortable.

Many times peace builders struggle because the things that they don’t want to do (the scary things) are the very things they need to do to build the sales in their practices.

-Peace Be With You All-

[Advice] 10 Year Overnight Success V

People tell themselves stories about success and failure.

Most of those stories overlap with cultural stories that may, or may not, be factual. Cultural stories overlap with success and failure stories carry an impact. Success stories range from stories about hard work to stories about perseverance, patience, and tenacity.

What often gets missed in these stories is a discussion (or even a curiosity) about the individual and corporate moments that lead to the successes: The moments of gossamer when someone made a decision—or didn’t—and the consequences that resulted from that decision. Very rarely is decision making viewed through this lens as a series of deliberate and coincidental acts, complete with a dizzying array of textures, and moments.

The other thing that is often missed in all of these stories is the acknowledgment of the presence of a moral component in decision making. It is a sign of how far our post-modern world has come, that stories of success are tied more to the presence or absence of psychological traits, than they are tied to the presence or absence of spiritual traits.

The change really shows its colors when we either express guilt at the perceived underserved outcomes of our success—no matter how hard we know we worked for them. And it cuts particularly deep when “so many other people around me didn’t have the same success.” We compound our problem when we lack the commensurate humility in attaining our successes and are arrogant around the impact of our failures, exhibiting both a lack of a higher moral code and even more, a lack of an understanding of the limits of our own individuality and freedom.

There are no overnight successes: Parent work to ensure that their children have advantages that they did not have in their experiences. Adults work, experiment, try and fail, and neither the rewards, nor the failures, are equally meted out. People tell themselves stories about themselves (or repeat the stories they have been told by others since birth) and in repeating the narratives of success, failure, ennui, or moral uprightness, they continue to perpetuate myths that harden into legends, and become lived truths, echoing on down through the generations.

Nothing “bad” and nothing “good” happens overnight. It takes years (some would say at least 10,000 hours) to get to the epicenter of mastery of success and it takes just as long to get to the center of failure.

And the tenacious, and the patient, are rewarded, each to their own ends.

-Peace Be With You All-