Communication technique: never fight people if you want them to do something to you

I am reading this famous book How to Win Friends & Influence People (which is a somewhat terrible title, let's face it). I am still on the first 3-4 chapters, but what I can say is that it really makes a lot of sense, it's a very light reading and is very useful. Each chapter talks about one principle to be great in the art of influencing people and so on. The book refers itself as the bible of good human relationship and I think I kind of agree.

One of the chapters talks about the principle of never criticizing (or something like that). Which is to never fight anyone about anything, because it won't change the person opinion about it. When you fight, people fight back and justify themselves, even if you get them to understand if they are wrong, you won't get anything from them. We are all surrounded by lots of proofs:

- no dictator ever changed his mind when people were fighting his regime, instead, he fought back harder
- People never gave any single coin to a thief, but lots of people donate much more money to charity or give away money to beggers
- I couldn't change the mind of the local committee presidents on the financial situation by fighting their lack of responsibility

Fighting just doesn't work. But how not fighting will help them?

This week I came across a very interesting example of when people do not fight, how they win the fight anyway:

We all know how piracy is a problem for the entertainment industry and they keep fighting (with no success) with their lawyers, copy protections and so on. So there's this little game company that produced an independent game that was just released called Zeno Clash. Of course in a couple of days it was already available for illegal download at any torrent site. What the producers did? They did not fight, instead, they posted this kind of comment on the illegal file:

"I am one of the developers of Zeno Clash. I would appreciate you read this if you are about to download this file.

Zeno Clash is an independently funded game by a very small and sacrificed group of people. The only way in which we can continue making games like this (or a sequel) is to have good sales.

I am aware that at this moment there is still no demo of the game, but we are working on one which will be available soon.

We cannot do anything to stop piracy of the game (and honestly don't intend to do so) but if you are downloading because you wish to try before you buy, I would ask that you purchase the game (and support the independent game development scene) if you enjoy it. We plan on updating Zeno Clash with DLC and continuing support for the game long after it's release.

Thanks for taking the time to read this... hopefully it will make a difference.

Carlos Bordeu ACE Team"

The answer from the people downloading the game? You can see some here:

"Wow, okay Carlos, I'll buy it off of steam. Thanks for being straight up."

"Hi Carlos Your forthrightness is appreciated, and I can 100% guarantee you I have no intention of playing through this game without PAYING for it. I can only hope everyone else on the torrent will do the same!"

"Will buy If I like. If I dont like it I won't play through it! Most likely buying before I even download it XD"

"Wow this game is amazing, and very cheap, I've bought it and dont regret it. Guys buy this if you like it after trying it because even though the easier way might be downloading, think about the people that invested time and effort in making this great release for us and buy their game, so that they may keep on doing so... otherwise we'll never get anotehr great game like this one from these developers again. Once again, brilliant game well worth the money. (I mean come on, if you have the money to buy a computer that can run this, an internet connection that can download this, and can pay the electricity bill even after u left your PC on long enough to download this: I doubt $20 will be much to ask for will it???)"

"Hi, I bought this game after playing it for an hour(I always need a demo of some sort before I purchase), and I don't regret it at all, I look forward to your future games.

The graphics are simply magnificent."

"good to see you actually appealing to the people instead of putting drm on it. i dont play pc games any more but i do play console games and always d/l the game first if it doesnt have a demo. if i like it i'll buy it. most games that i d/l are crap so they dont get used for more than an hour."

"I was looking for a demo and couldn't find one, but after looking on steam the game is only $20 USD, which is a steal I spent more on beer last night, even if I only get a few hours of game play out of it, it's still worth the money."

"I too was looking for a demo before buying but I realized it's only 20$ on steam or direct2drive so I just bought it. It's cheap and have good reviews, so why not? Can't wait to try it."

Not fighting wins!

Balanced Scorecard planning and achieving goals

One thing that I am very satisfied with is how some local committees (like University of Oslo and NHH) are driving forward the initiative to implement Balanced Scorecard as a planning and management tool in their AIESEC committees.

A couple of weeks ago I was in the AIESEC University of Oslo planning weekend and I could see how much preparation the local executive board put into it. I am very proud with what they are doing, going step by step, from vision to implementation plan. It's quite a step to use BSC in AIESEC Norway, since our planning process was not very good, especially at local committees.

It was also very satisfying to see them being ambitious and realistic at the same time, making me really confident if there's one local commitee who can achieve its' goals, for sure its University of Oslo. If they achieve their goals, they envision to be the biggest local committee in AIESEC Norway sending norwegian students to professional exchanges abroad.

It's extremelly rewarding for me to see the change in University of Oslo mindset and I trully believe a lot of it comes from a better recruitment and selection (so the new executive board is better than the previous and the current should be worst than the next one and so on), which I have some part on it. Another reason is because people understand more the AIESEC way and understand the importance of realizing more exchanges to achieve our vision and mission.

Unfortunatelly, a good planning don't need to get University of Oslo to the results they aim necessarilly. Even if they have the best plan, they still need one crucial thing: execution.

If they manage to track the plan, review it when necessary and put their strategies into action, then I am 100% confident they will achieve.

But that's the hardest part.

Plans are only good intentions unless they immediately degenerate into hard work. - Peter Drucker

AIESEC Norway CEO's failure 1 out of ?? - New Financial Model: rejected

AIESEC is an organization that works like that: the national executive board is only there to support the local committees to grow. So, for instance, the national executive board has no reason to exist if not for the local committees. That's why local committees should support the national association - as in any membership organization: the members support the association to provide its services, not the other way around. You pay a club to become a member, your payment and the other members give you access to some services, simple as that.

On the other hand, as in any membership organization, the members rule it completly (usually by voting decisions) - thus one more reason for members to support the organization and not the other way around. In reality, in AIESEC this means that local committees decide how much we can spend in each area of our budget, judge how many people to hire and fire, vote directly for choosing the CEO, discharge the national executive board after their term, etc.

Last weeks I've been working with our VP Finance and people from the board of directors to present to our Local Committee Presidents a new financial model to AIESEC Norway. Skiping the in depth details, this would mean that a bigger share of national board financial responsibility would fall under the local committees in a form of monthly fees. As a counter-offer, local committees would get more money for their performance.

This proposed financial model had 2 sole reasons of being:

- Give more responsibility to local committees to hold the association together
- Support performance improvement by destinating a bigger share of money to local committees

The proposed model is in contrast with the current model, where local committees get very little of the money generated, because the bigger part of it is retained in the national executive board. But the twist is that today local committes have no problem/pressure if they don't perform, because they don't need to pay anything to the association. ONLY and IF they perform, the national executive board retain a bigger share of the money generated. That would be the main change of the new model.

Yesterday I had one of the first (and still biggest for now) failures as elected CEO, since the new financial model was rejected by the local committee presidents. Weeks of work just rejected and threw in the trash. This hurts. I know as CEO I should be calm and somehow work to reach an agreement. But I couldn't. I failed. I was naive to think local committee presidents would think with the national association well-being as their first choice.



I am sure it's not only my failure though.

AIESEC Norway failed on yesterday's evening legislation. Fear, lack of ambition, lack of boldness, negativism, failure to commit to own goals, failure to take responsibility to drive the national association...

...lack of leadership.

I am ashamed by AIESEC Norway, both by local committee presidents lack of responsibility and by my failure to make some sense of the chaos that the legislation became. My failure in reassuring that it would be alright, that we would support local committees to grow and perform on the next level.

It was a setback, but I will keep trying. Failure is just midway to success.

I just need sometime to get myself together, because that was a hard one. Not achieving my goals (in this case, approving the new financial model) affects me so much that sometimes I wonder if I am the right person to be a CEO in an NGO full of volunteers that I don't have any real control, but only influence. I am sure the same local committee presidents that rejected my offer are not so worried or concerned as me.

Is this worth it?

Looking through my tons of AIESEC t-shirts and other memorabilia, I can say: yes. My experience was so amazing in this organization. No one or nothing will be able to convince me otherwise. Not even when people in it act the way they did.

I, my team and the new local committee presidents, local executive boards and local volunteers, we all will change AIESEC Norway for the best. This was just the first challenge and we will win as a whole, one AIESEC Norway.

Sink's accountability

I live in an appartment with more 4 young people from 3 different nationalities. We had a constant problem in our appartment: the amount of dirty dishes lying on the sink was always overwelming. Don't get me wrong, we could get 2 or 3 days with no dish there, but imidiatly when the first unwashed dish appear there, than no one else would wash their plates just after using it, accumulating a lot of dishes. That's a good example of how much the behaviour of other people influence others.



It seemed hopeless.

But then some people in the appartment had a brilliant idea: put name tags on the unwashed dishes, to point out who did not wash the dish and still had to do it. I was the first one to be affected by the measure: I got a little surprised and got even a little annoyed by the tag, but I washed my dishes.

Since then (around one week), there's hardly some dish on the sink and, when it is, we imidiatly tag it and it vanishes in a few hours.

What can we learn with our sink's accountability system?

Accountability is easy to get: just make public the action, the status of the action, the deadline and, the most important part, the neame of the responsible to do it. It doesn't need to be so complicated, an action plan with green, yellow and red on the wall can be enough.

It's like magic, but it's just accountability.

360 competency assessment

One of the most cool tool we have in AIESEC intranet (that we call MyAIESEC.net) is the competency assessment tool, provided by Career Innovation, where you can invite people who worked with you to assess your competencies (anonimously). It's a great tool for feedback and for understanding more yours strenghs and weaknesses. I've been using this quite a bit (around 2 years now, I presume) and it made me really improve a lot my self-awareness.

But now one new feature was included: you can make your competency assessment available to some people (like managers and mentors) or completly public, so anyone can see. I went to the 2nd approach and made my last competency assessment (April/2009) here in the office completly public. The people who assessed me were my leader, 3 collegues and one subordinate. You can check it out in this link.

It's especially interesting to check the part on the gaps of perception (where you compare your assessment with the others' assessments) and super assets (where you can check written feedback on what you are outstanding or not)

As you can see, I have a long way to go in dealing with people.

22 tips on how to nail an interview

I interviewed quite a lot of people myself to join AIESEC and the things you hear are trully unbelievable. So, to not make a fool of yourself, here are the amazing 22 tips on how to nail an interview (with funny true interview videos included).

Problems with hiring great people? I have a hint where to find them

If you own a business, you are probably facing this: it's harder to hire good people. And if you are a student, you probably are having some difficulties getting a good job.

In hard times, people lay off first the dead meat or the ones closer to that and they stick as hell to the A players, those stars that can make anything happen.

So if you want to hire dead meat / cheap labor, suit yourself, the market has tons of it sending CVs to you. But if you want to hire great people (especially because you don't have so much fat to spend in so-so people as in good times), what do you do? As you can see in "Why hiring is paradoxically harder in a downturn" says, if you post a job offer, most likely you will get tons of C players CVs, which are virtually indistinguishable from the few A players around.

Then you spend lots of money with tons of tests and interviews to find some good people. But shouldn't you be saving some money in a downturn? What about making the process more efficient?

The most simple solution is go to great talent sources and convince people there to meet with you (which is not always easy if you don't have a great reputation as an employer also - which is in fact the only long term solution, be an employer of choice to A players).

Where? Companies that traditionally only hire great people, competitive universities and, of course, AIESEC.

AIESEC?

Yes, AIESEC.

What AIESEC does is basically recruit the top students in the universities we are present in (and also some we are not present in, because some students seek for it) and offer them opportunities to develop leadership and tons of soft skills, such as presentation skills, team management, time management, planning, strategic thinking and so on. AIESECers are not normal students, they don't ask questions normal students do, they don't act as normal students and they don't seek normal jobs as normal students. But you don't need to trust me, you can hear some of AIESEC partners talking about it:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dt0DxJqidwQ


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Biz6wTwRTxY


As a business, you can interact with AIESEC in a variety of ways. Two of the most common ways are:

1) the AIESEC internship program - where you get some talented AIESEC member from another country to work as an intern in your organization. With this you get 2 things in one, first an AIESECers with all the qualities an AIESECer usually have, second an international to bring diversity and cultural awareness to your business.

2) Being an institutional partner of AIESEC - by being present in conferences, branding your name, delivering workshops, having special student events, etc, you can brand yourself as an employer of choice for both national and international students.

Most business that partner with AIESEC do both, of course, they know what they get and they are really interested in it.

What about you? Is your business in need of some young great people? Why not to try AIESEC?

If you are a student, maybe you want a great job and is not getting it? What about standing out from the crowd and get some invaluable skills while on university? Join AIESEC.

More information on www.aiesec.org or, if you are in Norway as I am, www.aiesec.no