What makes an expert different?

This week, a good friend of mine, Alastair (check out his blog on effective online marketing) , sent me a link to a video of Brandon Burchard.  Brandon is the founder of a series of seminars in which he helps others turn their passions into speeches, books and positive change for the world.  I like his explanation of what differentiates a true expert from non-experts.  This is relevant for anyone who communicates regularly from a position of authority – doctors, scientists, professors...

There are four things that the best experts do:

1. Choose mastery.  Choose continuous learning. Choose to read, to review, to focus intensely on a continuous process of learning and growing in the specific field in which they are experts.  Go deep rather than go broad.
2. Regularly interview other experts looking for patterns and best practice.
3. Create arguments based on four parts:
1. What we should be paying attention to
2. What things mean
3. How things work
4. What might happen
4. Simplify complex ideas with frameworks

There are four further things that can differentiate the wealthy expert from the plain expert:

1. Package their knowledge: Write, speak, record – put knowledge into a form that people are willing to purchase
2. Campaign vs Promote their knowledge – each interaction leads to a further interaction
3. Charge expert fees – charge more than you are comfortable with
4. Focus on:
1. Distinction – Keep studying the competition and keep innovating
2. Excellence – Be better
3. Service – Be helpful and responsive

I will finish with a thought from Charles Handy, the Irish business philosopher who was one of the founders of London Business School.  I read his autobiography thanks to Matt, another newly minted blogger (on creating amazing customer experience) from London. 

“The aim of education is to give someone the self belief that enables them to take charge of their own life.”  I think this is the worthy aim of any expert.

Leadership and Self Deception. A personal question...

This question is really a game. Here is how it works:

1. Relate a story of a time when you've made a mistake.
2. Retell the story while only relating the actual mistake (without justification).

The question is, "Why might it be difficult to do just Step 2?"

I read Leadership and Self-Deception and The Anatomy of Peace from the Arbinger Institute over a year ago thanks to a recommendation from a good friend.  Both books focus on one specific action that is an automatic response of our minds.

Imagine you arrive at your office early as you have some meetings and you want to be well prepared.  You made a special effort today to get in early.  You enter the office building and enter an elevator.  As the doors begin to close, you see somebody enter the main doors and take a couple of steps towards your elevator.  You have an instinct to reach out and push the "hold doors open" button...

...But, you don't push it.

In the milisecond between my instinct to do right for an other (hold the elevator), and the action of actually pushing the button a fierce debate rages in my head.

"but I came in specially early and need to get to my desk", "nobody would have held the elevator for me", "that person should have come in quicker if they really wanted to get the elevator"...

The Arbinger Institute identify the Self Deception process as

1. Instinct to do right
2. Not acting on the instinct to do right (Self betrayal)
3. Making it someone elses fault that you didn't act (Self Deception)

This is an automatic protection process of our minds.  This is not a process only existant in "bad" people, it is part of the infrastructure of our minds. 

I ask the question at the beginning because I see that for me it is painfully dificult not to justify my mistakes. Have you described your story?

Heather Burton of The Arbinger Institute, who first asked me the question gave the following example of an answer:

This past week, I attended a special Conflict Transformation training. Those of us who flew in for the event shared space in a rented condominium. We bought groceries, together and separately, to make breakfasts and a few dinners, as well as snacks. I bought a big back of lovely seedless black grapes.

On the Tuesday, I noticed someone had kindly rinsed the grapes and put them in a bowl for everyone to enjoy. I offered them around the group as we had our breakfast together, and particularly to Cossie, my colleague from Down Under. He's a dear friend I don't see often, and I wanted to share. I think he had a few. They were so sweet and delicious that I ate a lot of them myself.

On about Thursday, after our training session was over and we were back at the condo, I was rummaging in the fridge for "a little something." That's when I noticed that there was a bag of grapes still sitting in the bottom of the fridge, unopened. All of a sudden, I realized that the reason the grapes had been washed and put in a bowl on Tuesday was that they were Cossie's grapes. He had avoided embarrassing me by letting me not only share his grapes, but pretty much eat the whole bag single-handedly.

So, that's the long story. The mistake, without embellishments and details? I ate Cossie's grapes.

Now, when I related this story to our group, I added even more colour commentary. When asked to just name the mistake, it was almost physically impossible to just say, "I ate Cossie's grapes." Something in me wanted to keep saying things like, "Not realizing there were two bags, I ate Cossie's grapes" or "The grapes were so delicious that I offered them around, not realizing they were Cossie's."

Entrepreneur: Work on your business not in your business

I have been a member of Entrepreneurs' Organisation (EO) for five years.  There is a regular theme at any large international gathering (see you in EO Cape Town?) about the role of an entrepreneur.  The saying is that "you should work on your business not in your business".

The successful scale entrepreneurs are those that work on their business rather than in their business.  They are like a mechanic working on the engine rather than the carburettor within the engine.  If they become part of the engine the energy gets dedicated to just keeping the motor running rather than improving the motor.

My early professional work experience was in Accenture. I spent 9 years in total, with 4 in the role of project manager. Accenture prides itself on "hands-on" management - where managers take full responsibility and are involved in the details of the work.  A "good" Accenture manager is details oriented, knowledgeable, dedicated and highly responsive to his team, peers, bosses and clients (ie lives on his blackberry/laptop).  This is my model of how to run an organisation.  I have spent the last 6 years as an entrepreneur (applying my Accenture manager model) and have now decided that I need to change my belief system around what role I should be playing as manager/leader of my business.  I feel a need to respond to employee emails. I feel a need to be on top of sales process. I feel that I owe people my time and energy.  I want to break this cycle. I didn't stop being an employee in someone elses organisation to become an employee in my own organisation (on less salary and nobody to thank me in the bi-annual performance interview).

Cameron Herold of Back Pocket COO was asked by Fortune magazine "How do you motivate your employees?"  He said, “I don’t. I refuse to try to motivate people. What I want to do is try to take people who are already motivated and inspire them to do the stuff they know they have to do, and give them the systems and tools to create change. Then be there to support them.”

I like his philosophy. My scarce resource is energy (here is Sid Savara on self motivation) - I can use it up on others or use it up on myself and surround myself with those that bring their own. That is my plan.

Postscript...  Jacques Small (in comments) wrote a subsequent blog post inspired by the thought "work on your business not in your business"