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Why Talking About the Weather is Smart

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While we’re on the subject of small talk, it’s worthwhile to say a few words about the biggest small talk cliche around — talking about the weather.

Oscar Wilde said that “Conversation about the weather is the last refuge of the unimaginative.”

It turns out that Oscare Wilde was wrong. Talking about the weather is not lame. It’s actually a really good idea.

Here’s why:

  1. The weather affects everybody.
  2. Talking about the weather leads into a whole lot of other subjects. But if you never get started with a “basic” topic like the weather, you might not get a conversation going at all — and thus you’ll never get to other more substantial topics at all.

I first came across this realization in a chapter from The Big Moo: Stop Trying to Be Perfect and Start Being Remarkable, edited by Seth Godin. The book is a collection of insights from 33 different minds. I’m not sure who wrote the chapter “Talking About the Weather,” but they said it well:

Until I was thirty-five years old I thought talking about the weather was for losers. A waste of time, insulting even. No one can do anything about the weather anyway. I believed that any comment that doesn’t offer new insight or otherwise advance the cause of humanity is just so much hot air….

Then something happened. Alone for the first time in a long time, living in challenging circumstances, experiencing a cold winter in New England, I noticed the weather. It affected me deeply and directly, every single day. Slowly it dawned on me that the weather affected everyone else, too. Maybe talking about it wasn’t totally vacuous after all.

I started with the cashier at a gas station….Years of cynicism made me almost laugh as I said, “Sure got a lot of snow this year so far.” “Yep,” was her reply. Then she said, “I could barely get my car out of the lot, be careful driving!”

Talking about the weather was easy, even effortless. An entree to at least one person on the planet who apparently cared about me, at least enough to share her small challenge and want me safe on the road. Wow.

Next I tried it at work. It turned out to be even more effective with people I already knew. Talking about the weather acted as a little bridge, sometimes to further conversation and sometimes just to the mutual acknowledgment of shared experience.

Whether it was rainy or snowy or sunny or damp for everyone, each had their own relationship with the weather. They might be achy, delighted, burdened, grumpy, relieved, or simply cold or hot. Like anything of personal importance, most were grateful for the opportunity to talk about it.

Then something else happened. As talking about the weather became more natural, I found myself talking about a whole lot more. Cashiers and clients and suppliers and colleagues all over opened up about all kinds of things. I found out about people’s families, their frustrations at work, their plans and aspirations.

Plus, I found out that the weather is not the same for everyone! And it’s only one of many factors dependent on location that you’ll never know about without engaging in casual conversations.

For a businessperson, there may be no better way to make a connection, continue a thread, or open a deeper dialogue. Honoring the simply reality of another person’s experience is an instant link to the bigger world outside one’s self. It’s the seed of empathy, and it’s free…. Talking about the weather is a baby step on your way to making change.

Breaking the First Rule of Small Talk

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Keith Ferrazzi, author of Never Eat Alone, has a good post on making small talk more effective (and authentic) that makes the simple point: be yourself. But to do this, you have to ignore conventional wisdom’s first rule of small talk:

Small talk experts claim that when you first meet a person, you should avoid unpleasant, overly personal, and highly controversial issues.

Wrong! Don’t listen to these people! Nothing has contributed more to the development of boring chitchatters everywhere. The notion that everyone can be everything to everybody at all times is completely off the mark. Personally, I’d rather be interested in what someone was saying, even if I disagreed, than be catatonic any day.

There’s one guaranteed way to stand out in the professional world: Be yourself. I believe that vulnerability—yes, vulnerability—is one of the most underappreciated assets in business today. Too many people confuse secrecy with importance. Business schools teach us to keep everything close to our vest. But the world has changed. Power, today, comes from sharing information, not withholding it. More than ever, the lines demarcating the personal and the professional have blurred. We’re an open-source society, and that calls for open-source behavior. And as a rule, not many secrets are worth the energy required to keep them secret.

How Do You Assess Performance that Defies Measurement?

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Yesterday we saw that a great organization is one that delivers superior performance and makes a distinctive impact over a long period of time.

But how do you measure “superior performance” and “impact”? — especially in the social sectors, where they are hard to quantify and thus largely defy measurement?

Jim Collins answers in Good to Great and the Social Sectors:

For a business, financial returns are a perfectly legitimate measure of performance. For a social sector organization, however, performance must be assessed relative to mission, not financial returns. In the social sectors, the critical question is not “How much money do we make per dollar of invested capital?” but “How effectively do we deliver on our mission and make a distinctive impact, relative to our resources?”

Now, you may be thinking, “OK, but collegiate sports programs and police departments have one giant advantage: you can measure win records and crime rates. What if your outputs are inherently not measurable?

The basic idea is still the same: separate inputs from outputs, and hold yourself accountable for progress in outputs, even if those outputs defy measurement.

Here’s the key point:

It doesn’t really matter whether you can quantify your results. What matters is that you rigorously assemble evidence — quantitative or qualitative — to track your progress.

If the evidence is primarily qualitative, think like a trial lawyer assembling the combined body of evidence. If the evidence is primarily quantitative, then think of yourself as a laboratory scientist assembling and assessing the data.

To throw our hands up and say, “But we cannot measure performance in the social sectors the way you can in a business” is simply lack of discipline.

All indicators are flawed, whether qualitative or quantitative. Test scores are flawed, mammograms are flawed, crime data are flawed, customer service data are flawed, patient-outcome data are flawed.

What matters is not finding the perfect indicator, but settling upon a consistent and intelligent method of assessing your output results, and then tracking your trajectory with rigor.

So when there are aspects of your performance that seem to defy measurement, you aren’t stuck. You just need to think in terms of assembling evidence.

Much of that evidence may be qualitative. But that’s fine — in that case you are just thinking like a trial lawyer rather than a laboratory scientist. Therefore, lack of easily quantifiable performance outputs does not need to preclude your ability to give intelligent thought to identifying a consistent method for assessing results, and tracking them with rigor.

Intel's Multitasking Concept Brings You Three More Screens

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From Fast Company:

Sitting in the coffee shop with forty Firefox tabs open on your laptop, wishing you had one more monitor? Or three? Today at IDF, Intel introduced a multi-tasking concept PC that allows users to work on their main screen while providing three small auxiliary screens above the keyboard for organizing and accessing smaller, snackable chunks of info from their PCs.

The concept PC was developed with an eye toward future-gen laptops–on which you can organize more information while still reducing the size of your notebook. Without affecting the information or activity on the main screen, you can access information–say, a phone number in your address book or a reminder you’ve placed in your sticky notes–while keeping the desktop as clutter-free as possible.

I’d like to see this — or something like it — catch on. It is very needed, and a solution like “Spaces” for Mac doesn’t do the trick for me because you still have to switch screens.

Avoid the Gray Twilight

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From Theodore Roosevelt (quoted in Built to Last):

Far better to dare mighty things, to win glorious triumphs, even though checkered by failure, than to take rank with those poor spirits who neither enjoy much nor suffer much, because they live in the gray twilight that knows not victory, not defeat.

What is a Great Organization?

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Jim Collins gives a very helpful, succinct, and profound definition of a great organization in Good to Great and the Social Sectors:

A great organization is one that delivers superior performance and makes a distinctive impact over a long period of time.

So there are three characteristics of a great organization. They are:

  1. Superior performance
  2. Distinctive impact
  3. Lasting endurance

I think we ought to aim to build great organizations, and so it is helpful to have a good outline of what that means. It’s not enough to just say “we should seek to make our organizations great.” We need to know what that means. This is a good start.

Having this before us, though, also leads to more questions — such as “Why should you try to build something great?” and “How do you assess how your organization is doing on these qualities, especially when they are hard to measure?” I’ll address these questions in upcoming posts.

More Than Profit

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In Built to Last: Successful Habits of Visionary Companies, Jim Collins points out that the most successful companies do not exist first and foremost to maximize profits. He writes:

Contrary to business school doctrine, “maximizing shareholder wealth” or “profit maximization” has not been the dominant driving force or primary objective through the history of the visionary companies.

Visionary companies pursue a cluster of objectives, of which making money is only one — and not necessarily the primary one.

Yes, they seek profits, but they’re equally guided by a core ideology — core values and sense of purpose beyond just making money.

Yet, paradoxically, the visionary companies make more money than the more purely profit-driven companies.

The Purpose of Budgeting

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From Good to Great on the purpose of budgeting in an organization — with implications for your personal budgeting as well:

What is the purpose of budgeting? Most answer that budgeting exists to decide how much to apportion to each activity, or to manage costs, or both. From a good-to-great perspective, both of these answers are wrong.

In a good-to-great transformation, budgeting is a discipline to decide which arenas should be fully funded and which should not be funded at all.

In other words, the budget process is not about figuring out how much each activity gets, but about determining which activities best support the Hedgehog Concept and should be fully strengthened and which should be eliminated entirely.

The point is: we shouldn’t have a mentality of doing “some of everything.” This will distract from doing what is most important. You need to do the right things, and the corollary of that is to stop doing the wrong things. Budgeting is a discipline for making those determinations.

Don’t skimp on what is most important because you need to make room for all sorts of other things, spreading yourself thin. Don’t think that there is virtue in only partially funding things, as though it makes you look more frugal. Instead, fully fund the right things, and in order to make room for that don’t fund at all the wrong things.

And this requires the disciplined thought to identify what the right things are, and what the wrong things are.