TexasDesign

Pecha Kucha Night comes to the Borderland!
July 11, 2008. We are pleased to announce first Pecha Kucha Night in El Paso, Texas. We are excited about this opportunity to bring Artists, Architects, Designers and Filmmakers together from all across the borderland to share their work and carouse.
Presenters are invited to show their work in a very tight format - 20 slides, 20 seconds per slide. And then the next one is up. PKN-EP will feature 10 or so presenters in an informal environment, watched by an energetic and creative crowd. El Paso is joining a host of cities to celebrate, support and enjoy the work of local designers, architects and visual artists.

For more information go to: http://www.pechakucha-ep.com

Join us for the first TRIBEZA Experience, co-sponsored by AIGA Austin and celebratng the April Visual Arts Issue, which features the work of legendary photographer Dan Winters. Winters, who has captured telling portraits of everyone from His Holiness the Dalai Lama to Angelina Jolie, will join us for conversation and a lecture, in which he will share his thoughts on his early work and his ever-developing sensibility behind the lens.

TRIBEZA Experience with Dan Winters
Tuesday, April 15, 2008
6 - 8 PM
Bob Bullock Texas State History Museum
1800 N. Congress Avenue at
Martin Luther King, Jr. Blvd.
3rd Floor

Well, this is typically the time when you make New Year’s Resolutions, and maybe one of those is timekeeping compliance. But rather than starting with the thinking behind all this, we’ll save that for last and instead dive right into some suggestions on how to get better participation. If you’re an employee (vs. a principal) reading this, you might want to feather your own bonus bed by taking the lead here and rallying the troops. That sort of sucking up never goes unnoticed. (Though you may never again be asked to join your peers at lunch.)

Before giving you specific suggestions, though, let me note that these are presented in reverse order. That’s because none of them have any teeth unless the last one (getting fired) is a legitimate possibility. That sounds harsh, I know, but there it is. The goal isn’t to fire employees–the goal is to make money in an environment that doesn’t kill creativity. There are many steps that lead up to that harshest of options, but it is there at the end of the steps.

Here’s what we’ve found to be effective in timekeeping compliance.

Escalating War on Deadbeat Timekeepers

1. Start with an assumption that you’ll fire them if they don’t do it. It really would come to that very rarely, but you have to be willing to do it (eventually) or the previous steps don’t work. Building on that, you work backwards to come up with a plan. So just before this step…
2. Dock them a day’s pay by asking them not to come in to work one day. Just before that…Provide a written notice of discipline to put in their personnel file. Just before that…
3. Public humiliation in the town square, like a posted list in a prominent place stating who didn’t complete their time sheet the night before. Just before that…
4. Peer pressure from missed goal. E.g., “if everyone does their timesheets, every day, by 6p, we all get pizza on Friday.” So if one person screws it up, the others will be all over them. Just before that…
5. Throw the problem back to employees. “Timekeeping is very important. That much we know for sure, but what I don’t know is how to get 100% compliance, so you as employees meet and let me know what you think will work. That’ll be better than any plan I come up with and impose. I’d rather you work it out.” Just before that…
6. Apply the policy consistently, which means the principal, too. Yep, unless there’s compliance at the top, you’ll never get anywhere with it. Just before that…
7. Communicate your expectations clearly. For example, what is the policy, and why is this important? More on that later.
8. So those are the steps I’d use. Start by asking yourself if you’d be willing to take the most severe step. If you would, start at the least severe and just work the list. Whatever plan you come up with, make sure it’s consistent in application, it is collaborative as you seek solutions, and that you stage your responses, from friendly grandparent to ruthless czar. Read more

For just a few minutes, I want to get you thinking about how the mix of things you do for clients can have a significant impact on the value they place on your services. Your clients typically have this need to compartmentalize what you do for them, separating the higher and lower level activities and then drawing inferences that put you in a box. Even more than the services you do for them, how you position those services will have a significant impact on the nature of the relationship. After laying out the rationale behind this thinking, this article concludes with five very specific suggestions on wedding strategy with execution.

In many cases there’s no simple way to avoid providing both higher and lower level services to clients, but unless you combine them in a manner that carefully takes your positioning into account, you may find yourself swimming upstream all the time, wishing for a different kind of client relationship.

How It Looks from the Outside

You know what you do, and you aren’t bothered so much by the mix of activities that consume your day. You know what you are capable of and what role the more implementation-oriented activities play in your business. But what does is it look like to an outsider who is trying to absorb every little clue about your positioning? Be honest for a minute and just consider these areas:

• First, does your web site highlight implementation? What do the images capture–the thinking process or the implementation outcome? Does your presentation feature any strategic work you do for clients that might be presented to them in nothing more than text? Would the look of how you tell these stories vary all that much from how the commercial printers you work with might tell the same story?
• Second, look at your billing structure. If you have a tiered hourly rate structure (which you should not), at what level is most of your client activity billing? Is the weighted average toward the lower end of the hourly rate options?
• Third, look at the titles of all the people your clients interact with, and see how many of them are upstream or more on the implementation side.
• Fourth, if a new client has limited time and/or money, what part of the process do you reluctantly compress at their insistence? I’ll bet it’s the analysis and strategy in order to dive into the implementation quicker because they are coming to you more for short-term solutions.
• Fifth, get a cheap digital voice recorder and record just your side of the conversation by setting it on your desk during the phone call. Then listen to it and analyze the type of questions you are asking your clients. Are you guiding them or are you reactively getting the information you’ll need in order to fulfill their implementation requests?
• Sixth, look at where your clients have stepped out of the relationship they already have with you to buy related services. When they do so, are they typically buying upstream or downstream from your firm’s role? Are they spending money on services you think you should be doing for them (if you were positioned appropriately in their minds), or are you glad you don’t have to muck with the stuff they’re giving to someone else?
• Seventh, who have they assigned on the client side to manage the relationship with you? How high up the ladder are they, and do you think you should be working at a higher level within the client organization?

Here’s what this means: when clients have a choice in cuing their positioning for you based on the higher level things you do or the lower level things you do, they are inevitably drawn to the lower things. So with them both lying side by side on the table, their eyes are drawn to the lower level implementation activities and the more strategic ones don’t register like they could.Here’s a simple illustration of that. Suppose it isn’t ordinarily your role to answer the phone, but one day you hear it ringing at the front desk as you walk by, with no one there to answer it, and so you decide to answer the call before it goes to voicemail. What happens if it’s your client on the other end? If this has happened, you know that they’ll crack some joke about you being demoted, couching the surprising (and jarring) positioning message you’ve just sent with humor. They’ve thought of you at a higher level than what you’ve just done (answering the phone), and they aren’t sure how to reconcile the two extremes. Read more