Leadership Lessons From The Chairman and CEO at J. C. Penney

Donald Seibert as chairman and chief executive officer at J. C. Penney, he gained a reputation as an effective organiser and peacemaker. And in peace, the company prospered. Here are his key points for leadership in any organisation:

1. Understandyour own objectives, your own sense of mission and goals. Clarity and simplicity of the mission and objectives is vital to understanding and communicating the message.  

2. Clearly articulate those objectives to your organisational leaders and managers, and try to get some feedback as to how well they understand them. Whenever the J. C Penney’s management team prepared to issue a statement, whether it was a press release or an internal memo, they asked themselves two questions: (1) Is this easily understood? (2) Can this be misunderstood? These questions are quite different, and often the original statement failed the second test and needed to be rewritten. How do you measure whether you as a leader are getting your ideas across? A number of techniques could be used: attitude surveys, informal visits by members of the senior management committee, discussions with people at different levels of the company. If you take time to ask questions, you find out quickly what your people understand and do not understand.

3. Exercise patience. It will take time before you have enough of your staff behind you to turn objectives into working programs. There is a need to constantly communicate the organisations mission and objectives until a tipping point of sorts is reached and people become aligned with the objectives and facilitate or enable the execution of programs.

4. Take inventory of your personal resources and those available within your organisation. Management is the process of assuring that the programs and objectives we have set are implemented. Leadership, on the other hand, is the process of motivating people. Both are strategic skills. Every manager or leader needs to know what he has to work with before any work can get done. This means taking inventory of resources, understanding the personnel’s strengths and weaknesses, reviewing all personnel — the human resources — noting where they’re placed, and eliminating structural impediments. These are basic management tools. If a manager or leader is not strong in motivating, he can enlist key people who have demonstrated over time that they have influence with others. If you can identify these people and get them committed to your objectives, they can help sell your programs and motivate others to put them into effect.

How To Connect With Your Audience

Connecting with people is critical for selling, persuading or getting the point across. And one of the ways we connect with people is to tell them stories about ourselves.

I was at a business workshop recently, and the stories that were most effective (by acclamation of the attendees) were ones where the person let down his/her guard, and revealed something personal. This is one of the reasons storytelling is more effective than reciting a list of benefits to a prospect. In addition to being interesting and easy to understand, it also helps create a personal bond with the prospect. It means that you may want, in your business storytelling, to reveal anxieties, fears and feelings.In other words, to give the prospect your confidence.

How To Make A Point Effectively

We often grapple with the question of why and how leaders should go about making a point through their messages. In otherwords get people to understand the message when they hear it, they remember it, and they change their behavior because of it.

Messages that make a point or “sticky” messages have certain disctinctives – unexpected, concrete, credible, and emotional.

For example conisder John F. Kennedy’s message of a vision of “putting a man on the moon within the decade”? People immediately understood what he meant. (The words “man,” “moon,” and “decade” are all very simple and concrete.) They also remembered it for a long while afterward. And thousands of people changed their behavior because of it.

The key to making a point is to remember that your audience often doesn’t have your expertise and therefore the need to use language that’s meaningful to them. If Kennedy had described his vision for the United States as “being the international leader in the space industry,” he would have had far less impact.

Another characteristic of making an effective point through a message is that it helps people understand what they’re supposed to do in a particular situation and what tradeoffs they have to make, so they don’t have to keep checking back with you for direction.

A really good example, I came across of a person making a point is that of Jeff Hawkins, the guy who led the original Palm Pilot team. Hawkins walked around holding a block of wood which was the exact size of the Palm Pilot he had in mind. The wood served as a constant visible and tangible reminder of his goal for the product: “elegant simplicity.” Engineers who were tempted to sneak in more and more features just because they could, would be discouraged from committing “feature creep” when they saw the block of wood.

The Palm Pilot embodied elegant simplicity: It did only four things (including managing your contacts and to-do lists), but it did them very well. And it was easy to use. Contrast that product with pretty much any remote control device currently out in the market, and you’ll see the difference.

Other great examples are the high-concept pitches made to Hollywood movie producers. A particularly sticky pitch was “Jaws on a spaceship,” for the movie Aliens.

This simple description of the movie’s concept was packed with information that helped everyone involved make the right decisions. Potential investors could see that the project was promising, since Jaws had been so successful. And the people in charge of marketing the film, creating the score, and designing the sets could all figure out how to do their jobs based on the notion of “Jaws on a spaceship.” The director still had to provide some guidance, but he didn’t have to constantly spoon feed them information.

So how do you make a point effectively? Do you have examples if so please share it.

Does Word-of-Mouth Lead to Sales

I have read the book Pyromarketing and thoroughly enjoyed the read. So it was with interest that  I came across Greg Stielstra’s Blog. In his article on “The relationship between Awareness and Sales” he mentions a study by the Barna Group which revealed that most Christian leaders are virtually unknown to most Americans.

Advertsing for many years was built on the premise that awareness of the product was the first step towards an actual sale and that once a large segment of the population knew about the product, repeated advertsing would create a brand preference. He goes onto to point out that:

Under that scenario awareness should grow at a much faster rate than sales, but that isn’t what we see with Rick Warren.  Only 17% of the population (about 51 million people) is even aware of Rick Warren, despite the fact he authored The Purpose Driven Life (PDL), the bestselling hardcover book in American history.  PDL has sold more than 28 million copies since October 2002.  Instead, we see record-setting sales accompanied by limited awareness.

He suggests that this would mean that:

1. Word-of-Mouth (WOM) is not indiscriminate: When people buy a product they love they don’t recommend it to everyone they know. So instead of creating broad awareness it only creates awareness among very specific social networks. These networks usually incorporate people who share a common interest and awareness rarely if ever spreads beyond this group.

2. Some Customers are more valuable than others: It would be a flawed assumption to believe in a 1:1 ratio between prospects and sales. With only about 5 million Americans aware of Rick Warren some 28 million copies of PDL were sold. According to a Zondervan survey conducted on those who read the book 46.5% bought additional copies to give away. Their impact can be increased by focusing a large amount of advertisng on this group of people.

3. Awareness does not lead to sales: Some of the bestselling Christian books were written by people that didn’t make the list of leaders whose awareness Barna chose to measure.

I believe that a couple of other points can be gleaned from the survey and my own findings and experiences.

4. Better the Individual Experience, better the chance of WOM: WOM is generally instigated by a very favourable or highly favourable experience on the part of the consumer. With PDL for example – I know of people talking about aspects of the book which helped with their own lives as well as in the lives of the church. WOM has thus been generated based on experiences.

5. Focus on the experience: While the book PDL was very good – life changing experiences were created in smaller groups through the release of dvd’s and study guides. These experiences enabled conversations to be created which in turn results in WOM, which resulted in more people being drawn to experience it or to create their own experiences.

5. Tangibles + Crowd Attraction leads to more sales: With the growth in popularity fo PDL and its impact – figures of church’s being involved, testimonies of peoples lives being changed, the introduction of seminars and worshops and study guides have I believe contributed to a greater impact where in those outside of the core groups as mentioned in the article by Greg are drawn in to have a look and experience for themselves. Thus leading to a bigger impact and more WOM in new social networks – eventually leading to more sales.

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How speeches can make an impact

Mark Sanborn author of “You Don’t Need a Title to Be a Leader” makes the point of drawing from personal experience and adding stories to make a point.

In his latest book he points out that the Gettysburg Address is one of the greatest speeches in American history and yet it only contains 10 sentences. In those few words Abraham Lincoln was “able to convey great truths in a powerful and unforgettable way”.

Mark adds that great leaders are not evaluated on the length at which they speak, but on the impact of their message.