This morning at breakfast, Barb Groth, founder of the ultra-good experiential design company, Big Buddha Baba, told me a story: A few years ago, a client of hers called a meeting, the purpose of which was to cut twenty thousand dollars out of a budget for a project that was nearing completion, when resources were tight. Barb got to the meeting, looked at the eight or so executives in the room and said, “Let’s end the meeting now. That’ll save, what?, ten or fifteen thousand dollars? Then cancel the next meeting. There, we saved twenty thousand dollars.”
I love this story because it shows how what stifles our ability to solve a problem is less often about the nature or scope of the problem than it is about the quality of the problem-solving process.
Too often, we invest in poor communication practices and processes, characterized by unproductive games like ‘Eight Axes, One Budget,’ that no one enjoys playing, never mind that they are not designed to solve our particular problem in the first place. I call these poor games. ‘Poor’ because they don’t have much ‘play’ in them, either in the sense that they are a happy experience, or that they are flexible. No, they’re grim and rigid, like the dead. Their ROI is poor because the probability of getting to a solution quickly is low. Because they frequently lack focus and energy, they waste time.
There are thousands of characteristics of poor games, and thousands of poor games played in business every second of every working day. ‘Reading Your PowerPoint Deck to Your Audience’ is a poor game. ‘Kissing Ass’ is almost always a poor game. The ‘Eight Axes, One Budget’ game Barb Groth walked into was a poor game. She saw it, and suggested an adjustment. That’s what gamechangers do.
All it took for her to transform the game was changing its objective–from ‘Cut $20K’ to ‘Save $20K.’ One word. A tiny shift in perspective on the problem. Suddenly, the opinionating, negotiating, status-seeking, bragging, positioning, arguing, joking, backstabbing, politicking, gossiping and justifying that plague poor games, were not getting in the way of solving the problem. The new game got played, the problem solved, in the time it takes to Rochambeau.
Barb’s gamechange freed time that could be better invested in activities with more business upside, or in personal time. Any game that lets you swap an hour of arguing about whose budget gets cut for an hour playing with your kids or helping them with their homework? That’s a rich game.
When I saw that Rich Talarico would be conducting an 8-week class entitled 
This broke today over CNN.
Over the last five or six holes the tournament’s drama became palpable. None of the young guys were holding back, no one was playing not to lose, they were all winding up, letting it rip, and playing for the win, and it was riveting. The tournament came down to a tie between two players, Bubba and the German, Kaymer, with Johnson playing the final hole of the tournament with a chance to win it. He missed his par putt to win. We were looking at a three-player, three-hole playoff for the championship.
Underneath his fright wig and his goofy screen persona, Harpo Marx was one beautiful human being. In his autobiography, Harpo Speaks, he lists his family’s rules. It’s some of the wisest advice a father ever gave his children:
Every business conversation that’s unscripted–and that’s about 99% of them–is an improvised scene. How ably we improvise usually determines the success of the scene. In sales, the audience for the scene is the customer, and the ultimate ‘applause’ is a sale. Furthermore, in sales scenes, the customer is not just the audience, her or she is also a player in the scene. This is important for salespeople to understand, because it means you are asking the customer to judge their own performance in your scene together. If they they give their performance in your scene a thumbs-up, chances are you’ve got yourself a sale.
“There’s also the nature of the contact itself to consider,” Ett went on. “Was there rubbing involved or was the contact static? Was it hand contact only, or was it of a hugging nature so that bodies were touching? This is an important distinction, because hugs are becoming increasingly problematic in the workplace. Many employers prohibit what we call ‘full frontal clutching’ while still allowing what we call ‘casual side-to-side linkage.’ We’re seeing strong anti-clutching trends across the corporate landscape.
“Also what, specifically, was ‘the back’ being patted? I’d want to know that. Was it in the region of the upper, or Cervical, vertebrae? If it was on the upper back it was probably okay, assuming of course, it didn’t last for longer than three seconds and no rubbing was involved. Middle, or Thoracic vertebrae, are a gray area, especially numbers T-One through T-Four. You find HR people very divided about this, and there are no clear guidelines, so my advice is to steer clear of the Thoracic region entirely, just to be safe. The lower, or Lumbar region, is a definite no-no. And a pat on the Sacrum will get you a visit from Security, no question.