2010 May | Vertabase Blog

May 25, 2010
2 comments

Make Them Feel Like the Smartest People in the World

I heard a great anecdote from Ed Brodow that sums up the importance, and power, of listening.

A women in England went on separate dates with two very famous people who had very different personalities, William Gladstone and Benjamin Disraeli.

Asked about her evening with Gladstone she said,

“he took me to the symphony and by the end of the night I felt like I was with the most sophisticated and smartest man in the world.”

And how about your evening with Disraeli? her friends asked.

“He took me to the opera. By the end of the night I felt like I was the most sophisticated and smartest woman in the world.”

Gladstone spent the evening talking about himself.

Disraeli spent his evening listening to her. Disraeli made her feel great.

May 3, 2010
8 comments

Teach Engineers to Be Remarkable

Engineers are trained to deliver high quality, repeatable processes. That is very good.

But very good is not good enough in today’s marketplace. Books with titles like “Good to Great” and “Purple Cow” are rife with the sentiment that “good is the enemy of great” and “very good is not good enough.”

What is needed in today’s economy is to be remarkable. Only remarkable stuff gets people’s attention. Only remarkable stuff can survive.

Remarkable, incidentally, doesn’t mean the next biggest invention.

As Seth Godin says, remarkable is anything worth remarking about, worth telling someone else about. It can be a cool new product. It can also be the a wonderful interaction between a client and customer or between a project manager and team member.

It takes innovation to produce remarkable stuff. You have to take risks and put yourself out there. You have to be willing to invest part of yourself into the thing that you’re doing, make it personal.

So, the challenge for engineers, and the people who work with them i.e. entrepreneurs, managers, and a State like Michigan -that has more engineers than any other state, is to create an environment, a process that pushes engineers to not just be very good, to not produce testable, repeatable processes.

The challenge is to push engineers to be remarkable and produce remarkable stuff.