These “elevator speech” people are ripping off Alfred Hitchcock!
[quote=“Fenris, post:1, topic:558313”]
B) Can I create a book called “The best Management Practice of All: Shut UP and Let Your Workers Work”? Would you buy it? [/QUOTEThe best boss I ever had called herself the ‘excuse-killer’.
She said she managed by walking around and talking to her employees, asking them about progress, and listening to their excuses about what was interfering with their work. If the excuse seemed real, or several people had the same excuse, she went off and fixed something to eliminate that excuse. Then she came around again the next day, and asked about progress now.
Pretty soon, you had no excuses/no barriers to getting the work done, and you could achieve high productivity. It worked real well.
1). Enroll in a PhD program in marketing or management
2). Graduate
3). Write a bunch of bullshit articles that you know full-well are bullshit in a frantic effort to get tenure
4). Get tenure
5). Become a corporate motivational speaker for extra cash (professorships don’t pay as well as industry, you know). Incorporate your bullshit research every chance you get.
6). Profit!
I speak from…indirect experience.
“Hi, I work for xx car company. You may not have heard of us, but we manufacture and sell automobiles in the United States and virtually the whole world. If you don’t know what an automobile is, or why you should buy one from us, let’s set up a meeting for tomorrow.”
I guess I have no practical use for an elevator speech unless I wanted to be insulting. On the other hand, unless I’m at an industry show, I can’t stand receiving them. Thank goodness my building has secure access or I’d be inundated with suppliers during the course of the entire workday, giving me their “elevator speeches.” If you really want to reach me with something new, invite me to an industry show (within the rules, of course), or advertise on WJR during the Paul W. Smith show.
The question is not whether I would, the question is whether, say, that Controller (there isn’t one like that in every company, but many companies have one) who is so intent on controlling costs that he actually manages to raise them will buy it, read it, and realize it’s about him. Because, you see, if three thousand people have to spend one more hour on paperwork every day (20 days a month, 20 man/hour per month) so he has to work three hours per month less, by Jove they better!
t-bonham, I like your ex-boss! Adding that to my list of “management tips”.
I’ve got an accidental elevator speech, and it’s not even for my company. I’ve just given the same talk over and over again that I have it all memorized and perfected:
“I’m a Couch Surfer.”
“What’s Couch Surfing?”
“Couchsurfing is an international social network where members travel the world sleeping on each other’s couches as sort of a cultural exchange experiment. We’ve got over a million and a half members across pretty much every country in the world. But we also do local meetups once a week or more where members (and their surfers) go to happy hours, parties, museums, and fetivals together.”
Then I pause and let them ask the standard questions that everyone asks and I give them the pat answers to those too. I didn’t even come up with it on purpose. It just sorta happened.
Got it. Does your CEO have a head that looks like a male bodily part by some chance?
In my scenario, the buy is asking about the company, not you. Now if you have roused his interest, and he starts asking what you do, then you sell yourself. And get his card. These days, you can’t be too careful.
Businessman who might want to hire me with a big raise: So what does your company do?
That’s not what you do, that’s an accomplishment, and I agree having short pitches about them is good also. Lots of people have accomplishments (and jobs) not so easy to quantify.
The external help desk would be even more fun.
“Your product splattered the innards of my computer all over my office!”
“I’ll get right on it, but first let me tell you how great our company is…”
Is there no concept, be it ever so simple and clear, that management can’t screw up?
Heh. My daughter is in a PhD program in psychology, but has finagled things so she will also get one from the business school, since professors in management make about twice as much as those in other fields. Plus, you get all sorts of consulting gigs, which pay more than speaking ones for less work. And, unlikely those of us in technical fields, you don’t even have to do pesky research.
I have been dragooned into working at a trade show, and I suppose my standard spiel is something similar to the ‘elevator speech’.
But since I am but an humble computer scientist such business management bumble-speak is somewhat alien to me.
On the other hand, I LOVE to talk about what I do, so maybe that is why I get dragooned to attend trade shows.
Wired did an article about Michael Arrington, who runs TechCrunch, one of the most influential tech investor blogs. They talk about elevator pitches in the article, and how people will line up and follow him around a conference to give their pitch because he has so much influence that a mention on his blog will automatically get you investors.
It’s insane how this stuff works.
If I attended your trade show and heard some standard spiel, I’d just think that you were a salesman and not a scientist (or rather, at shows I attend, an engineer). All of the best exhibitors bring actual engineers in addition to their salesman, and the best ones love to talk about what they do.
Some of my colleagues would have a different opinion, though, and claim that the best exhibitors have the prettiest women or the best snacks or schwag.
I’ve spent plenty of time on the floor in trade shows, and in demo booths also, and have half managed some booths when I was a technical product manager. You are both right. You need a very short single line to pull people. Certain visitors might need some more technical stuff. But you have to qualify the visitor. For many visitors, especially those who control spending, you need to keep it at the level of benefits, because their eyes will glaze over if you get into technical details. Others are going to see if you really understand the technology, and their the technical skill helps. But a demo is not a paper, and the job of a guy on the floor is not to expose the inner workings of a product (even if he feels very clever for being able to do so.) This goes double when you are talking to competitors. Your job is to convince the customer you are for real, and hand him or her over to the real sales guy to collect lead information and to let the sales guy assess if this is a live one or not.
When you are in a demo suite, your job is to show and explain the technology at a high level, collect feedback, and smoothly talk through the inevitable core dump. All feedback is responded to by saying either it is under development already or, that is a very interesting idea. Especially if it isn’t. What you don’t do is to respond like one of our demo guys did in his last show, when asked what if you wanted to perform a certain operation: “then you’d be brain dead.” The fact that he was right about the stupidity of the idea did not make it a smart thing to say.
Fenris -
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The underlying concept behind an Elevator speech is sound: Can you state what you do in a brief and compelling way? If not - well, from a business standpoint, that is a problem.
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However, slathering on a layer of FISH, One-Minute Manager or Elevator Speech buzzword activity will not solve the issue and usually feels false.
Frustrating. But I understand what the business leads are trying to accomplish - they just appear to be going about it the wrong way.
My $.02
Fenris, this is a parking lot issue. 25 years of corporate fad experience here. I’ve posted this before, but it’s still fun. I work in marketing by the way.
I’m going to take exception to the OP. The stoopid fad on this board seems to be complaining that management treats you like a bunch of dumb drones, but then complaining when asked to do anything beyond acting like a drone.
An “elevator speech” is neither new nor stoopid. It is basically explaining what you do or about whatever great idea you have in a short period of time (usually less than a minute). For example, if you happen to meet someone who is a potential client at a party. Or if I. as a manager who might be able to help you, happen to ask you “how is everything going?” That is your chance to wow me with an awesome idea so when I’m doing performance evaluations, I can tell everyone how smart you are.
Here’s the deal. A fucking coffee machine works and produces stuff. It doesn’t make decisions. It doesn’t care if what sort of coffee it makes or if anyone even likes the coffee it makes. It can also be replaced at any time.
Your “job” is likely a very small and insignificant piece of a much larger puzzle. We management types have to constantly figure out what that puzzle should look like. Now ideally, I like to listen to my people and get their ideas and experiences so I can help them do their job more efficiently. But, sometimes you get those “shut up and leave me alone” types who really just want to sit in isolation counting down the minutes to 5:00. They have their uses too, but they are probably not going to advance very far and they are much more replaceable if their “job” suddenly becomes unnecessary.
That would be the job of a “management consultant”. Trust me, it is not. Companies, in spite of what people think, are not stupid. When times are lean, they are less inclined to hire high priced consultants spouting nebulous buzzward-laden advice from the likes of McKinsey, Accenture and the Big-4. That is the last business you want to be working for.
Consultants don’t come up with brilliant ideas. They take ideas that other people have heard are brilliant and then tell companies which ones they should implement.
Then I am off the clock and will be given a written warning for doing unpaid work–they switched everyone below our area manager to hourly. People have been giving write-ups for doing any extra work. One person was fired for it: he kept finishing his work, which kept putting him about 7-10 minutes over his sign out time. He was chewed out for getting overtime, so he clocked out and finished–which is (at least in this state) illegal. You cannot do work off the clock if you’re hourly. He got writeups and eventually was fired (it was stupid to make us all hourly as we’re making the same amount with less work. On the other hand, we do have a less pleasant work environment since work isn’t getting done and there’s a constant feeling of bailing a sinking ship. So, management has accomplished that, at least–it’s not a good accomplishment, but hey–a serious increase in turnover is at least something tangible they’ve produced.)
So…you’re completely wrong on that count. I am not, by law and company policy, allowed to do any company related work on my own time. Period. Full stop. No exceptions. When we first went to hourly, I took home a spreadsheet just to finish up some new metrics, e-mailed it to my boss and got a huge chewing out (I understand why–he doesn’t want the company sued and I was unwittingly in the wrong)
Besides, if I’m at a party, it’s a social occasion and I’m not the sort of douchebag who will go up to another person at a party and try to make a sales pitch (in exactly the same way I wouldn’t go up to a doctor at a party and ask for a free diagnosis.) Only a gigantic asshole would latch onto a stranger at a purely social event and try to do a sales-pitch. Seriously–even the salesguys I know wouldn’t do that. At most they’d hand the other person their card and say “Hi, I’m Joe Salesguy–I’d like to talk to you about such-and-such at a time when it’s convenient for you. How 'bout that local sports team”.
Hopefully my performance would tell you how awesome I am. But if you need a short speech to help you understand what I do and why I do it well, I’m happy to provide one. Sadly that’s explicitly not what I’m being asked to do. I’m being asked to take myself, a bunch of internal only help-desk people and get them off the phones (I assume, since they can’t do it on their own time) and finding random people, presumably on the street, to give these speeches to since we’re supposed to give them to people in the company first, and then find three (or four) people outside the company to give them to as well.
Hey, with a stellar attitude like that, no wonder you have a “job” that apparently involves being nothing but a shill for whatever stoopid management idea comes down the pike who’s only function is to interfere with the people who actually do work for a living.
ETA on preview: For that matter, aren’t you the same person who said that you’d fire an otherwise excellent employee who griped about being forced to go to company mandated hugfests and team-building twaddle because you were afraid he’d poison the attitude of everyone else? HA! You are him! No wonder. :rolleyes: I wish I’d realized that before I did all this typing.
Has it ever occurred to the rocket-scientists in management that those of us who actually do work for a living (as opposed to just pushing paper and getting in the way of the actual people who produce the goods and services that they leach off of) have actual measurable standards–you can tell a good help-desk person by some hard and fast measures: their customer service skills, their call-times, their number of one-call solutions?
Taking them off the phones to accost strangers in the streets (in this case*) is slowing down their measurable results. Unlike the useless middle-management paper-pushers who don’t actually do anything measurable or productive, we resent being taken away from our jobs to do fluff that can be used to pad their completely subjective, totally unmeasurable, utterly useless performance evaluations.
*other cases include having them do idiotic “fall back into each other’s arms” type team-building exercises while the phone-calls stack up and the customers (our own employees) can’t do their jobs and get angrier and angrier.
Or Turning the annual corporate “safety in the workplace” exercise (which would be better served by giving us the damned handout, letting us read it to ourselves and signing off on the “I have read and understood this document” form–20 minutes, tops) into…no joke…a coloring book, where employees–grown men and women–are read to by a semi-literate middle-manager and made to circle “good workplace safety” in green and “bad workplace safety” in red and then giving a $25.00 gift card (ooo! $25.00! Now I can send my daughter to Wellsley!) for…not being the best worker. Not for doing good at our job…for who colored a page of their safety manual “the best”–I had an employee quit over this–“It’s fucking demeaning”–quote, unquote. And I sympathized with him, since we never get bonuses for performance.
And my personal favorite: readjusting the furniture (for the third time in 9 months) to adjust the “workflow” for presumably feng-shui purposes (they sit at cubicles or desks. There is no workflow. They’re static-they come in and sit down. Heh. I didn’t show it outwardly but I gloated and kept a copy e-mail I sent telling every management type I could that the readjusting of the floor-space in staggered zig-zag maze-like lines (it didn’t allow more desks/cubicles in the work space) wouldn’t get by the fire department. I’m just holding on to my bcc’d copy of the e-mail for when the useless deadwood who’s redecorating constantly tries something new. He probably cost the company $10,000.00 in down-time minimum, including our time, IT and Facilities’ time to move everything twice, all the work that didn’t get done from other real workers who needed helpdesk/support, etc. Strange that if one of my people who actually work for a living had cost the company $10,000 they’d have been fired. This middle-management loser just got a “lateral promotion”.
Great video, but what’s a parking lot issue? A google search just turns up a lot of discussion about where parking lots go. And I suspect that’s not what you mean. 
Parking lot issue = idea that [smarmy manager] is trying to make you think he’s very interested in but there just aren’t resources/people/time to make it a priority right now.
So we’ll just park it in the “parking lot” and get back to it later, mm’kay?
Well, there’s certainly a wide range of opinions about this.
I work in business development, and for me, the elevator speech is key. When I go to industry functions, I meet lots of people who may want to team with me, or who I might want to team with for a future proposal that requires skills different than my own. What always amazes me is how many people give HORRIBLE elevator speeches despite being in the industry a long time. In my mind, your employees should at least have some idea of what you do and not just shuffle their feet and say “I make software”, because I might be meeting them instead of my business development counterpart at a trade show. I would say you should at least say what your software does and for who in two sentences.
Since my industry is defense, every moron out there thinks he is doing himself a favor by trying to cover every possible angle saying “We do systems engineering, program management, and support for a wide range of Government clients”. That may sound specific but that really translates to “I do everything for everybody”. It especially amazes me that companies with 5 employees will follow that up with marketing materials saying they do more services than Lockheed and Northrop Grumman combined. Being with a small company myself, I can give my pitch in four sentences that sounds interesting and will generate follow up questions focusing on the most unusual aspects of the systems we work on and for whom.
While Fenris thinks there is never an occasion to talk about your work, I find it comes up all the time in casual conversation and not because I steer it that way. Even if you’re talking about people, current events, etc., you may bring up something that happened at work, or a funny guy you work with, etc. This will then bring up the question “So what do you do?”. And when I was on the dating scene, it would ALWAYS come up. Your prospective mate may want to know whether you are CEO of Megacorp, or whether you clean out the stalls at the adult book store after new porno release day.
I just realized that this is probably in the same vein as the HR Moron trying to get everyone in my company to post a 6-word Haiku ‘to inspire the company’ on the company website.
My personal favorite?
"Listen, Pal! Get Back To Work!!!"
Parking lot beatings Never should have gone out of style…