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Friday, April 27, 2018
The Power Of “Ritual Questions”
Recently, I read an article about “Ritual Questions.” It’s a powerful concept–but I think leaders can take the concept much further.
As I work with and study great leaders, I’ve noticed they all do something similar. They ask the same questions over and over. The questions are a little different depending on the person and the context, but the underlying core question is always the same.
These leaders are obsessive in asking these questions–every person they speak with in the organization, customers, suppliers. There is a consistency in what they ask, the conversations they have over long periods of time.
As you start analyzing what’s happening with these “ritual questions,” a powerful ideas emerge:
- The questions are always centered on the top priorities of the leader and the organization.
- Asking these questions helps the person being asked to think about their role and contribution to these top priorities.
- Conversations centering on these questions help the leader learn how people think about these priorities, challenges they may be having in contributing to these priorities.
- These questions and the conversations help provide great clarity and purposefulness about what the leader and organization is trying to achieve, and the role of each person in contributing to these goals. They enable everyone to align around the key things the organization is trying to achieve.
- These questions reinforce the culture and values of the leader and organization.
- They become the anchoring point in driving change. We know how everything we do contributes to the top priorities, and, conversely, know that the organization is will be aligned around everything we are doing to support those priorities.
- The executive constantly asking these questions in meetings and in individual encounters provides consistent reinforcement of the top priorities and what’s important to the organization in achieving their goals. People knowing the executive is likely to ask them about these issues, refocus on where they are in their achievement of the priorities. This process creates a reinforcing loop, accelerating the ability of the organization to achieve the goal.
The most successful people using the power of these “ritual questions,” don’t have a laundry list—“Here are the 50 questions I ask in each conversation.” The best focus on roughly 3 key questions.
There’s magic, also, in focusing on 3. It forces the executive to think about what’s really important. Since these are questions they will be asking many different people, including customers and suppliers, over time–they can’t be trivial or crisis focused. The power of these is aligning behaviors, priorities, and execution over time.
It’s tough work, many executives don’t have the personal discipline to think about these, it’s much easier to focus on the crisis du jour–but of course if we get people aligned behind the concepts of the 3 questions, then we have fewer “crises du jour.” (Funny how that works).
What are your 3 questions?
How will you engage everyone on your team and in the organization in discussions around these questions?
How are these important to your customers, suppliers, community?
When will you start?
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Thursday, April 26, 2018
Games of the Day
There are five afternoon games on Thursday, the best the contest between the Mets and the Cardinals. Noah Syndergaard takes on Carlos Martinez. Syndergaard has been tougher in day games this season with 28 K in 15 1/3 innings, compared to 11 K in 12 innings at night. Martinez brings a 1.42 ERA into the game, thanks in part to just one home run allowed in 31 2/3 innings. He allowed 27 home runs last year.
Chris Sale takes on Marco Estrada as Boston and Toronto play the rubber game of their series. Sale, a lefty is pitching great against right-handed batters. So far he holds them to a .198 BA and a .240 OBP. Estrada keeps getting dinged, with six home runs allowed in his first 22 innings. That’s a big reason for his 5.32 ERA.
Enjoy!
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Beat the Streak Picks
Here are the top picks my programs produced for use in Beat the Streak. This post mostly explains the ideas behind the calculations. In addition, this post shows tests on the Neural Network (NN). This post discusses an NN that includes the ballpark. I updated the models, and the results of those tests are here.
For 2018, I am just going to publish the Log5 hit averages and the NN probabilities with parks factored in. I am keeping track of the results here. I added a graph that gives a visual representation of the probability and success each day.
I have been asked to expand the list to the top 25 players for an econometric project.
First, the Log5 Method picks:
0.297 — Nick Castellanos batting against Ivan Nova.
0.287 — David Peralta batting against Ben Lively.
0.283 — Ronald Torreyes batting against Kyle Gibson.
0.281 — Miguel Cabrera batting against Ivan Nova.
0.280 — Didi Gregorius batting against Kyle Gibson.
0.278 — Ender Inciarte batting against Homer Bailey.
0.273 — Manny Machado batting against Chris Archer.
0.272 — A.J. Pollock batting against Ben Lively.
0.271 — Jeimer Candelario batting against Ivan Nova.
0.270 — Corey Dickerson batting against Michael Fulmer.
0.270 — Scooter Gennett batting against Sean Newcomb.
0.270 — Yadier Molina batting against Noah Syndergaard.
0.268 — Jose Martinez batting against Noah Syndergaard.
0.268 — Chris Owings batting against Ben Lively.
0.268 — Kurt Suzuki batting against Homer Bailey.
0.267 — Freddie Freeman batting against Homer Bailey.
0.264 — Victor Martinez batting against Ivan Nova.
0.264 — Nick Markakis batting against Homer Bailey.
0.263 — Thomas Pham batting against Noah Syndergaard.
0.262 — Dansby Swanson batting against Homer Bailey.
0.262 — Trey Mancini batting against Chris Archer.
0.262 — Ozzie Albies batting against Homer Bailey.
0.262 — Starling Marte batting against Michael Fulmer.
0.261 — Paul Goldschmidt batting against Ben Lively.
0.261 — Paul DeJong batting against Noah Syndergaard.
Castellanos owns a nice career arc. He made it to the majors at seasonal age 21, a good sign that a batter will be good. His batting stats were meh for a couple of seasons, then at age 24 started developing power. This year he added a much high BA and more walks for a .388 OBP and a .500 slugging percentage. In general, most of this OBP comes from hits, which makes him a great candidate for hit streaks.
Here is how the NN with Park ranks the players:
0.283, 0.708 — Ronald Torreyes batting against Kyle Gibson.
0.297, 0.707 — Nick Castellanos batting against Ivan Nova.
0.280, 0.700 — Didi Gregorius batting against Kyle Gibson.
0.278, 0.700 — Ender Inciarte batting against Homer Bailey.
0.287, 0.695 — David Peralta batting against Ben Lively.
0.270, 0.687 — Yadier Molina batting against Noah Syndergaard.
0.281, 0.685 — Miguel Cabrera batting against Ivan Nova.
0.270, 0.684 — Scooter Gennett batting against Sean Newcomb.
0.257, 0.684 — Eduardo Nunez batting against Marco Estrada.
0.243, 0.682 — Jean Segura batting against Michael Clevinger.
0.268, 0.681 — Jose Martinez batting against Noah Syndergaard.
0.273, 0.681 — Manny Machado batting against Chris Archer.
0.253, 0.681 — Jose Ramirez batting against James Paxton.
0.267, 0.681 — Freddie Freeman batting against Homer Bailey.
0.270, 0.681 — Corey Dickerson batting against Michael Fulmer.
0.268, 0.679 — Kurt Suzuki batting against Homer Bailey.
0.259, 0.678 — J.D. Martinez batting against Marco Estrada.
0.262, 0.677 — Trey Mancini batting against Chris Archer.
0.262, 0.675 — Starling Marte batting against Michael Fulmer.
0.238, 0.674 — Dee Gordon batting against Michael Clevinger.
0.260, 0.673 — Mookie Betts batting against Marco Estrada.
0.261, 0.673 — Paul DeJong batting against Noah Syndergaard.
0.257, 0.672 — Marcell Ozuna batting against Noah Syndergaard.
0.263, 0.672 — Thomas Pham batting against Noah Syndergaard.
0.254, 0.671 — Michael Brantley batting against James Paxton.
0.235, 0.671 — Jose Abreu batting against Jakob Junis.
This might be the first time a part-time player came out at the top of the list. Torreyes, like Castellanos, has an OBP that is mostly made up of hits. He’s batting .417 with a .432 OBP at the moment, and given the light schedule today, be bubbled to the top of the list.
Note that probabilities are very low today. Castellanos is the consensus first pick. Given that the Yankees are playing a day game after a night game, Torreyes may get a start to rest someone.
Remember, your best pick will fail about 25% of the time. Good luck!
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Best Batter Today
Aaron Judge moves past Mike Trout on the Baseball Musings Batter Rankings, but the big mover is Didi Gregorius, who moves from eleventh to third after going three for three with a home run and two walks. Jose Ramirez and Tommy Pham round out the top five. Gregorius now homered in four straight games.
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We Get Sales Math Wrong! The Magic Is In The Numerator!
My apologies, I’m doing a series of rants that are something akin to David Letterman’s Stupid Pet Tricks. Instead these posts are about Stupid Sales Management/Marketing/Sales Tricks.
Sales and marketing are among the most measured functions around. But having these metrics, knowing what they mean, developing and executing plans to improve performance and knowing what to do about them are not well understood.
Too often, we leap to the stupid answer, not to the answers that really turn the dials on performance.
Here are some examples, while they may seem laughable, they are real. I’m not smart enough to make this stuff up.
- The sales manager declaring to everyone on the team, “You need to have three time coverage in your pipelines!” He does this because people always seem to use 3X as the coverage model. It doesn’t make any difference that at least 50% of the team have win rates of 20-25%!
- The manager then wonders why the team isn’t making their numbers.
- Or the marketing/sales manager who declares, “We only got 15K opens on that last 150K email campaign! We need 30K to get the volume of leads to feed sales.” And then what they do is send out twice as many emails.
- Or the outbound sales manager saying, “It takes 15 K dials to generate 150 good conversations. We need 450 good conversations, so we need to ramp our dialer to make 45K dials!
So now I get twice as many emails and three times as many phone calls to ignore.
And I know when these marketing and sales managers see the upped volumes aren’t producing results, they’ll up them more.
See, math shows relationships, for example the relationship for between a numerator and a denominator. But math often doesn’t give insight about the number that is produced.
For those of you who are mathematically challenged, the numerator is on top, the denominator is on the bottom (no, I’m not trying to get kinky). Here’s a little picture:
For example, if we win 33 out of 100 deals, the way the math works for our win rate is 33/100= 33% (OK I snuck an extra step in on you, and converted the 0.33 to a percentage. If you need a math tutorial, call me.) If our win rate is 33% and we need to close 100 deals, we need 300 in our pipeline. That’s where those coverage models come from.
Extending the same math to the phone example above, our conversation rate is 1% and the conversion rate on our email campaign is 10%.
Somehow, as we look at the volumes necessary to make our numbers, we treat those conversion rates or percentages as fundamental laws of nature (kind of like the freezing point of water is 32 degrees F, 0 C, or 273.15 K).
I suppose we never challenge those ratios, because it’s hard work! We have to really think about what drives those numbers. It’s just easier to scale rather than change the ratio.
But the magic to productivity and performance is all in the numerator. Changing the numerator for a given denominator really starts tilting all the numbers in our favor.
It’s hard work, it takes deep understanding of what drives success. For example, outbound phone calls are very important to our business. We continually refine who we are calling, how we engage, when we call….. Rather than a 1% answer rate, we have 50%. So, if like the previous example, we need to have 450 conversations, we only have to make 900 dials, not 45K! Our win rates are in the 82-90% range. So we only have to have 1.2 time pipeline coverage. (You might be curious about how we achieve those win rates, we are vicious in disqualifying opportunities, focusing only on real deals in the dead center of our sweet spot with highly motivated buyers).
Ironically, when we don’t tear apart those ratios, understanding what really drives the result–when we just scale those same ratios to achieve the numbers we need, we have to work much harder to achieve the same results(45K dials versus 900!)
It isn’t too hard to understand how to tilt the ratios and numbers in our favor. It takes a little thoughtfulness, analysis, and critical thinking. It takes really understanding what works and what doesn’t work, focusing more time on the things that work.
Unfortunately, as simple as it is, too few take this time, so they are always struggling for results.
Afterword: I’m sorry that I’m venting my frustration on you. I’m just getting tired of simplistic math and thinking from too many “experts” on volume/velocity scaling.
Another afterword or intriguing fact: Water actually doesn’t always freeze at 32 F, 0 C. Here’s a fascinating explanation: https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/at-what-temperature-does-water-freeze-1120813/ Think of it as a fun conversation starter at those networking events—“Hey, did you know water doesn’t always freeze……”
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