Most American business schools base their teaching on case studies, a method which goes back over one hundred years. Business cases are descriptions of actual business situations.
Information is presented about a company: products, markets, competition, financial structure, sales, management, employees, as well as other factors influencing success. The length of business cases ranges from five to fifty pages. Case studies are based on experience.
When the search term future is keyed in on Amazon.com, 134,329 search results are generated. Some titles found from the search include the following: Future Perfect: The Case for Progress in a Networked Age by Steven Johnson, Physics of the Future: How Science Will Shape Human Destiny and Our Daily Lives by the Year 2100 by Michio Kaku, The Price of Inequality: How Today’s Divided Society Endangers Our Future by Joseph E. Stiglitz, and The $100 Startup: Reinvent the Way You Make a Living, Do What You Love, and Create a New Future by Chris Guillebeau.
Interestingly, typing „frequent follow-up“ into Google leads to 179 million results. The first ten pages with ten results each all refer to healthcare:
Long-Term Follow-up of Asymptomatic Healthy Subjects. Frequent follow-up as data gathering and continued care. Colonoscopy Overuse A Result Of Frequent Follow-Up. Follow-up see eMedicineHealth. Is There a Benefit of Frequent CT Follow-up After EVAR?
The term follow-up in the medical space is about: care; staying on top of a problem; remaining proactive; constant monitoring; reacting to a changing situation.
In May 2014 John Barrows – a sales trainer for companies like Salesforce, Box, LinkedIn, Marketo, Zendesk – posted the following advice on follow-up in SalesHacker:
Question: How do you follow up effectively with a potential client without being annoying?
1. Ask for guidance on the best way to follow up with them while adding value and not being annoying. You know who does know how to effectively follow up with the client The client. Ask them.
2. Ask what their preferred form of communication is and if they will respond. This is different than asking them about the best way to follow up. This is about their preferred form of communication and getting them to commit to a level of responsiveness. I literally ask people – “what is your preferred form of communication moving forward here? Is it cell, e-mail, text?”
3. Make sure you always end each conversation with a clearly defined next step. It kills me how often I see sales reps get off the phone after a good conversation with a prospect without a clearly defined next step scheduled on the calendar. The easiest time to get a commitment on a next meeting is at the end of the meeting you just had.
4. Summarize your conversations and get written confirmation. At the end of every decent conversation, I always send an e-mail that summarizes what we talked about and asks for their confirmation.
5. Always have a reason to reach out and never just call to ‘touch base’ or ‘check in’. I am on a personal crusade to get ‘touching base’ and ‘checking in’ out of the vocabulary of sales professionals.
Add value. Don’t annoy.
The following dialogue was posted on ask(dot)metafilter(dot)com in March 2011. It gives insight into how Americans view follow-up.
Question: “What is the best way to word my persistent e-mail follow-ups with non-responsive colleagues?”
I work for an agency that employs about 180 people and the agency’s role is to regulate a technical sector. My role is to respond to the general public’s enquiries. I have to get exact legal/technical wording from other staff. I find staff will sometimes not reply to my enquiries for days and weeks. I’m near the bottom of the pile at the organization and so I have no authority to order anyone to help me.
I send my enquiries to staff over e-mail and need to continue to do so. I am not looking for suggestions about stopping into people’s offices in person or talking over the phone. The nature of the work doesn’t really allow for this option.
How frequently should I follow-up with people for their responses? How should I word my 2nd, 3rd and 4th e-mail follow-ups? What has worked for you when your work depends on the actions of a higher-up colleague, but you don’t want to be a pest?”
Responses:
“If you can’t make phone calls or drop by the office, can you IM them? If you can’t IM, what I’ve found starts getting attention is cc’ing various people if the initial person doesn’t respond.”
“I’d send a follow up daily. Perhaps at different times of the day. Maybe people get swamped first thing in the morning and might respond better in the afternoon.”
“Every follow up after the first, cc additional people that might be able to respond or get things moving (whether it’s a supervisor or not). This will almost always get SOMEONE involved. But don’t cc a bunch of people from the beginning because often people will think someone else will take care of it if it’s sent to a ton of people.”
“Phone calling just really gets people’s attention. It will be more embarrassing for the person and demonstrate your seriousness and persistence in the way one email in a giant inbox with hundreds of emails on a non-urgent (to them) matter never can.”
“I have a colleague who isn’t shy about bolding key lines in a severe email, like ‘This is my third request. This response is needed by Friday at the latest.’ You can try this, but even so, it’s easier to ignore than a voice or face communicating directly with you.”
Searing: Very hot; marked by extreme intensity, harshness, or emotional power.
The United States is an immigrant country. More accurately stated: a younger, more recent immigrant country. For the history of mankind is the history of man moving, settling, then picking up and moving again.
There were and are reasons for why people moved and continue to move to the United States. Many seek greater freedom of thought, of religion, of way of life. Economic opportunity was/is certainly a motivation for many, if not most. And there are those who wanted to break out of the inflexible structures of their native country.
The immigrant experience is searing. It is of great emotional intensity, forming who we are as individuals, families, ethnic communities, and as a nation. The stories, the emotions, the choices made are passed down from generation to generation.
Oddly, but understandably, an American of German descent will say: “I’m German,” meaning, “My ethnic heritage is German,” in a deeper sense, “My national cultural hard-wiring is American and German,” just as it is for others: American and Italian, American and Irish, and Vietnamese, and Mexican, and Polish, and so on.
A searing experience. People left behind all that they knew. Language, culture, traditions, friends and relatives. The risks were both high and not entirely known. The immigrant experience leads to a complex relationship with what was once home. For people take their culture with them. National culture changes only slowly and painfully.
Immigrants admire, respect, long for their home. But they also leave it behind, in some ways they reject it. Americans have always seen America as the New World. Not just a new settlement, a new country. But a new world, as if mankind were starting afresh, anew. It is a part of the American self-understanding to believe that you can strike out on a new path, question old ways, methods, traditions.
Realistic for Americans means that the present is a starting point to the future, a new starting point towards a new future, possibly different and better than the past. Yes, the present is the result of the past, but not locked into a pre-determined, unalterable trajectory. The past, therefore, has less relevance. There is less need to explain how the present was arrived at.
Whereas for Germans realistic means “keeping your feet on the ground,” maintaining a sober view of the situation, not deviating too much from known ways; “knowing where you come from.” For Americans realistic means developing a vision, imagining new possibilities, stretching beyond, reaching for more and greater things.
The word deadline was first used during the American Civil War to describe a line which, if a prisoner crossed it, could result in the prisoner’s death. Even though most deadlines today won’t end in murder, Americans still feel that correlation when talking about a deadline, and they tend to treat it like a life-or-death matter.
Deadline: a line drawn within or around a prison that a prisoner passes at the risk of being shot; a date or time before which something must be done; the time after which copy is not accepted for a particular issue of a publication. First known use was in 1864.
Examples: She worked on her composition right up until the deadline. We had to hurry to meet the deadline. The project was completed a week past its deadline. The deadline for submitting college applications is April 19th. They’re working under a deadline.
Deadlines and recovery from missed deadlines are so important to Americans that many job interviewers specifically ask applicants to describe a time that they missed a deadline and how they recovered from it. If you type missed deadline into Google, you’re immediately bombarded with self-help websites describing how to recover from a missed deadline.
In 2013, the Prince George’s County school system lost $1.4 million of state funds when it failed to approve school construction contracts within their two year deadline. Although the school district was very close to approving these contracts, no extension was given, and the money had to be returned.
First-mover advantage is gained by the first significant player in a market segment who gains control of resources that other participants in the market cannot match. Amazon had a first mover advantage over Barnes & Noble. Amazon maintained its advantage by partnering with Borders and extending product offerings into apparel, electronics, toys and housewares.
Rarely is a project, large or small, completed within schedule, within budget and meeting fully, much less exceeding, the specifications of the customer. The business world is seldom that simple. In the American business context quality is more likely to be sacrificed than schedule or budget. Americans expect products and services on-time, and at the price they agreed to. Quality – in the sense of completeness – can be made up for with extra effort.
When it comes to that magic triangle – schedule, budget, quality – the first two usually trump the third, in the U.S.
Trump. A card of a suit any of whose cards will win over a card that is not of this suit —called also trump card; a decisive overriding factor or final resource.
Americans recognize that problems are an inescapable part of life. Physicist Albert Einstein said that “in the middle of difficulty lies opportunity.” Americans, practical and optimistic, believe that “every cloud has a silver lining,” that there’s a “light at the end of every tunnel.” They see a half-full glass which others view as half-empty.
Instead of dwelling on the problem as such, Americans quickly begin the search for opportunities hidden in a given problem. Difficult situations often require making difficult choices. To be persuasive is to demonstrate that you have searched for and identified an opportunity.
In the United States, maintaining forward movement is critical to success. Americans purposely set high goals, hoping to “stretch” themselves. And although mistakes will be made, Americans see greater progress in learning from them than in setting modest goals. To be persuasive in the American context means to propose large steps forward and a vision of the future.
Americans say “Shoot for the moon. Even if you miss, you’ll land among the stars.” The 19th century philosopher Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote: “Once you make a decision, the universe conspires to make it happen.” Americans take action in order to make things happen.