Lately I’m thinking a lot about influence. As a prelude to charting a course of intentional influence with the rest of my life, I’ve been thinking about what types of influence exist. What are my options, basically.

Here’s a stab at a rough taxonomy of influence:

Influence Everyone Has

Self Influence: You are the person you have the most influence on. We all have a huge opportunity to make a difference by changing ourselves.

Individual Task Influence: This is contributing as a member of a team to make an organization run, or accomplish specific tasks on your own. These contributions are often unsung, but the collective results can be world-changing.

Individual Interpersonal Influence: This is parenting, coaching, managing, mentoring one-on-one. Everyone has huge opportunity to make a difference by positively impacting the people they are involved with. (A sub-type is Professional Individual Interpersonal Influence, like the influence that a professional therapist or professional coach has.)

Influence Everyone Can Have if They Choose To

Individual Giving Influence: This is donating to a cause or project. This can range in scale from a quarter in the bucket to establishing a multi-billion-dollar charitable foundation.

Individual Creative Influence: This is bringing something into the world that didn’t exist before. An individual researcher who finds a cure, or an inventor who solves a quality-of-life problem are examples of high-impact individual creative influence.

Influence Given to Some People by Other People

Organizational Leadership Influence: This is influence in a group of people through leadership (strategy, vision, decision-making, etc). This covers groups ranging in size from a small club to a large nation. CEO’s, ministers, managers, board members and elected officials, are some examples of people with this kind of influence.

Public Thought Influence: This is speaking to a mass audience through a platform such as a book, popular media, or the Internet. It’s hard to be heard through all the noise, but voices that resonate can make big change.

Viral Thought Influence: This is individual interpersonal influence that may start small but spreads exponentially, like influencing two people who each influence two people, and so on. Some worldwide religions started this way.

Circles of Influence

Generally faithful and successful activity in the “smaller” circles of influence leads to increased opportunity for influence in the larger circles. So in a loose sense, there is a progression of influence in each person’s life.

What Am I Missing?

I’m sure this is not an exhaustive list. Can you think of major types of influence I haven’t included here? Maybe an example of someone who had a big impact on a small or large scale? Contact me and let me know.

P.S. As part of re-calibrating my avenues of influence, I’ll be writing less often on this blog, at least for a while, but no less than once a week.

Setting prices for your product or service is an inexact science. I think the guesswork that goes into setting prices also makes it tempting to leave prices unchanged for too long. But leave them too high and you lose customers. Leave them too low and you lose margin. Two questions to ask when prices might be out of date:

1. Have my costs changed? This changes your minimum profitable price.

2. Have my customers’ alternatives changed? This changes your maximum marketable price.

In a typical business, prices should probably be evaluated once or twice a year.

We are most likely to change when:

• There is a problem…
• That we care too much about to just tolerate…
• That we can’t get away from…
• And is challenging but not overwhelming.

These “optimal” conditions remind me of some of life’s most difficult and painful circumstances. Apparently optimal change comes through experiences that feel extremely sub-optimal.

If you want to change, reach out for the resources you need, then face into the difficulty as honestly as you can.

As a training exercise, I’ve been taking a look at proposals before our sales reps send them out to customers.

Before I even look at the proposal I ask the sales rep “What’s important to this customer?” It might be lead time, price, color matching, control of a specific frequency, you name it. I can’t evaluate the job we did preparing our proposal until I know what’s important to the customer who will receive it.

This implies another truth: Effective sales involves listening a lot, not talking a lot. If you listen, customers will tell you all about what’s important to them. You don’t even need to ask, they’ll start telling you from the minute you answer the phone. Once you know, you can make a relevant and genuinely helpful proposal.

I love dashboards that show the vital stats of an organization at a glance. I recommend them wholeheartedly.

There’s a danger though. Once that beautiful real-time dashboard is a click away, it can be tempting to spend too much time checking results. (I’ve been known to check real-time sales stats before, during, and after a staff meeting.) It feels good when the numbers are up, but checking progress can be a distraction from creating progress.

Create progress through clear strategy and deliberate, consistent action. Check progress often enough to know what’s working and what’s not. Know the score but focus on playing the game.

I participated in this exercise with a seminar speaker recently. It’s fun and surprisingly eye-opening.

Thinking about your business, your organization, or any unit of your life, write a list of the main things that make it what is.

Example: If you own a restaurant: We make food. We have menus. We charge for food. We have tables and chairs.

Next to each item, write a brainstorm list of what you could do if that item was reversed.

Same restaurant example:

• We don’t make food… People bring in their own food. The customers cook the food. A different guest chef makes the food each week.
• We don’t have menus… Every entree is a surprise. The chef decides what will be served based on that day’s market. The servers memorize a clever way of selecting food.
• We don’t charge for food… We charge by the hour for the table space. We charge an annual membership fee. Everything is a suggested donation.
• We don’t have tables and chairs… We use bleachers, like stadium seating. People sit in seats that can be driven around like bumper cars. [Your idea here.]

I love how this exercise brings out ideas that are normally hidden behind the obvious answers.

Last week I saw a young music star belting it out on stage in front of thousands of screaming fans. His confidence and comfort in the spotlight amazed me. It’s tempting to say “He was born different than me, that’s why he can do that and I never could.”. That might be comforting, but it’s not true.

Not long ago in New York City I visited a small music venue. I watched each singer take the stage for a set, and they were good. I was impressed but how much practice they already had, and how much more practice they would get before ever singing on a big stage. Hundreds of gigs, thousands of hours, that’s the back story.

Every mastered skill, everything that looks like a “gift” has the same back story.

Back to last week and the young star. I looked him up on Wikipedia during the performance. He started performing when he was 4 years old.

It’s not inborn, it’s practice.

I recently learned the story of a new friend who started and grew a new division in an established company. He made it a success in spite of challenging circumstances, less-than-supportive bosses, and less-than-plentiful resources. The essential ingredient in the mix wasn’t funding, a trail already blazed, or any external factor.

It was him. He was the essential ingredient.

He might not take credit, but I’m convinced his ingenuity, leadership, salesmanship, and especially perseverance made it work. With the character and ability that he had, almost any external challenge could be overcome. Without his character and ability, a small challenge would have been enough to derail the whole thing.

As I look back, this is true of me and my story. I didn’t start with any funding, a privileged family tree, or a “winning idea” handed to me. I didn’t start with anything except the character and ability that are in me. And that was enough.

This is true of you and your story too. It’s what’s in you, not any external factor, that will make the biggest difference.

I’d bet on a leader with proven character and ability any day. I’d never bet on a well-funded “sure thing” that lacked that kind of leader.

This is not about going it alone without a team or without a coach. It’s about the power of character to shape outcomes in ways that make external factors look weak.

When a customer says “We’ll place this big order, if you can rush it.”, sales usually feels pretty enthusiastic, because that means extra commission, and company growth.

When sales calls production to share the good news, production is not so enthusiastic. For production that means extra effort, and changes in plans.

My take on this classic tension: The entire company must be unified around giving customers what they want, subject to two limits.

1) Say no when saying yes to one customer will hurt another customer. Don’t say you’ll rush Tom’s order if it will make Jim’s order late.

2) Say no when saying yes will give away profit inappropriately. Don’t give a customer half price just to get the order.

Look for a way around those limits even if it takes extra effort or creative planning. When it’s possible and profitable for production to do what customer Tom wants and what customer Jim wants, no limit has been reached. Say yes.

Sales must advocate courageously for the needs of the customer, and at the same time show an attitude of respect for the perspective production brings to the table.

It’s our job to inconvenience ourselves to serve our customers well. Anyone who has a pattern of saying no to avoid extra effort doesn’t fit a culture of customer service and must change or exit.

In my companies we make plans for each year’s growth, but honestly, most of the growth comes from new ideas we didn’t foresee in our planning.

We don’t have a bank of awesome but unused ideas to copy/paste into the annual plan. When we come up with a great idea, we try it right away. That means at any given time we’re out of great ideas, but not for long.

By being curious and paying attention, by building on top of the last improvement, by listening to our customers, we always come up with another improvement idea.

If you don’t have a list of “10 things that will change the game this year”, that’s probably ok. Wade on into what you’ve lined up so far, and keep your eyes open all the time for insight, inspiration, and opportunities to improve. It’s amazing how a year of continuous improvement adds up to a big leap forward.