Quick and Informal Archives - Page 2 of 3

Opt Out, Not Opt In

President George W. Bush signed the CAN-SPAM Act on December 16, 2003. The law does not ask a sender for permission before a first commercial email. Instead, each message must explain “how the recipient can opt out.” The sender must honor that request “within 10 business days.” The law “makes no exception for business-to-business email.”

In daily work, this means an American professional may email a stranger to offer a product or service. The law does not require the stranger’s permission first. The stranger can stop the emails by opting out.

Not everyone liked the law. Critics called the law the “You-Can-Spam” Act.

Emails to Professors

In 2015 the Journal of Applied Psychology published a field experiment by Katherine Milkman, Modupe Akinola and Dolly Chugh. They sent 6,548 emails from invented prospective doctoral students to professors at 259 American universities. Each email asked a stranger for a meeting “to briefly talk about your work and any possible opportunities for me to get involved in your research.” Sixty-seven percent of the emails received a response.

The real purpose of the study was to measure bias, and professors did not answer everyone equally. In business schools, 87 percent of white men received a response, compared with 62 percent of women and minority students.

A Saturday at GEICO

On a Saturday in January 1951, Warren Buffett, then a 20-year-old student, took the train to Washington to visit the headquarters of the insurer GEICO. The building was closed for the weekend. He knocked on the door until a janitor appeared. The janitor directed him to Lorimer Davidson, the assistant to the president, who was working that day.

Davidson spent the afternoon explaining the insurance business to the young stranger. Buffett later wrote: “‘Davy’ graciously spent four hours or so showering me with both kindness and instruction.”

Calling Bill Hewlett

In a 1994 interview, Steve Jobs told how he got a summer job at Hewlett-Packard. At 12 he wanted to build a frequency counter, and he needed parts. So he looked up the number of Bill Hewlett, a co-founder of the company, and called him. “I called up Bill Hewlett when I was 12 years old,” Jobs said.

Hewlett laughed and gave him the parts. He also gave him a job that summer on the assembly line where the counters were built. “I was in heaven,” Jobs said. He drew a lesson from it: “I’ve never found anybody that didn’t want to help me if I asked them for help.”

First Day on the Team

A new member of an American team hears the same phrases in the first hour.

Welcome aboard!

Great to have you on the team.

Nice to meet you.

Call me Mike. A Michael says this right after he is introduced.

Hey guys. This is the usual opening of a team email or meeting.

How’s it going?

When the project ends, the phrases change.

Let’s keep in touch.

Don’t be a stranger.

Let’s connect on LinkedIn.

The HP Way

At Hewlett-Packard, the company’s way of working became known as the HP Way. The founders insisted on “first-name informality.” Employees received goals but no fixed method for reaching them. HP’s 1977 objectives described the aim of “allowing the individual great freedom of action in attaining well-defined objectives.”

In 1995 David Packard published a book called The HP Way.

Natural, Frank and Open

In the chapter of Democracy in America titled “How Democracy Renders the Habitual Intercourse of the Americans Simple and Easy,” Alexis de Tocqueville describes Americans who meet by chance. “If they meet by accident, they neither seek nor avoid intercourse; their manner is therefore natural, frank, and open.”

In the same chapter he notes that Americans who meet abroad become friendly at once, for the simple reason that they are both American.

Topics for Small Talk

JobTIPS, an online guide to job skills, tells readers that “Small talk is a normal and expected thing that happens in almost every work environment.” Good topics include what you did over the weekend and television shows, movies or music.

Topics to avoid include politics, religion, salary, personal financial problems, personal questions about relationships and personal health issues.

Gift of gab

In his post on Forbes online – Six Reasons Small Talk Is Very Important and How To Get Better At It – Brett Nelson writes:

„Whether getting a job, working with colleagues, winning new clients, entertaining existing ones, all of it requires small talk. You better have the gift of gab.“

He then quotes from How To Get A Job On Wall Street, written by Scott Hoover, Associate Professor of Finance at Washington and Lee University: “In trying to generate business, the deal pitch is obviously critical. What is not so obvious is that simple, seemingly innocuous conversation with potential clients can be just as important. Companies want to hire people who can think on their feet.”

MerriamWebster defines gab as: to talk a lot in an informal way usually about things that are not important or serious; to talk in a rapid or thoughtless manner. First know use 1786. Synonyms: babble, blab, cackle, chatter, chat, jabber, rattle, run on, schmooze, talk, twitter.

Find Commonalities

In his book Influence: the Psychology of Persuasion, American psychology and marketing professor Robert Beno Cialdini lists likability as one of the 6 key principles of influence.

And a way to get people to like you, Cialdini argues, is to “rapidly seek out commonalities” with that person. Moreover, the connection doesn’t have to be unique or meaningful – a shared interest in sports or a similar vacation location are both sufficient to help make someone like you.

Small talk allows people to find commonalities quickly, and thus to have influence over each other right from the beginning.