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Brick No154: How To Be A Yes Man
By Matt Weston, Thursday 4 August 2005 How to be a Yes Man Meet Danny Wallace. You might have caught the first of his new six part documentary comedy series, How To Start Your Own Country, on BBC2 last night. Or maybe you recognise his name from his collaboration with Dave Gorman, where Gorman traced other Dave Gormans and travelled the world to meet them. Or, less likely, it could be that you're one of the 8,000 members of Join Me, a cult about nothing that he started by accident. But none of those projects are the subject of today's column. Danny also happens to be the man who says yes to everything. He just wrote a book called Yes Man. Yes Man is about what happens when you say yes to every favour, request, suggestion and invitation - the result of a year-long experiment undertaken by Danny, and sparked by some random advice from a random man on a random bus. A bias toward yes If you want detail, Zoe Williams did a smashing interview with Danny. But, for the purpose of today, we can cut a long story short. Danny's experiment works out. His relentless yessing lands him a book deal and a new girlfriend. And, stop press, the film rights for Yes Man have been picked up by Warner Bros. (Jack Black will play the Danny part.) I've been getting a lot of email recently from readers who think they say yes too much. (Clue: they don't.) They find it very hard to say no. Like most small business owners (me included), they have a natural bias toward yes. And that means they (we) spend time doing favours, and taking on projects that aren't guaranteed to come off: work that isn't billable, or isn't immediately profitable. If you believe the pat advice meted out by most bank managers, and by most small business manuals, the solution is easy. You simply need to learn how to say no more. Say no more? If you're a soft touch, price too low, or keep hiring the wrong kind of clients, that might be helpful. But mostly that advice is about being conservative. It ignores the power of saying yes. Don't keep score, but if you're the sort of person who says yes a lot, you're the sort of person people want to say yes to. A bias toward yes can turn a little opportunity into something big (as evidenced by Danny Wallace.) Or it can turn an ordinary customer into a delighted customer. Learn how to say no, for sure. But don't let your bias toward yes turn into a bias toward no. Bric-a-Brac (1) I borrowed the wording "bias toward yes" from a Tom Peters short - "1Y/2N 2 Pizzas Plastic bulldozer I love stuff like this: 1Y/2N. I'm told that one trick employed by the service-obsessed Commerce Bank of New Jersey is that an employee can say "Yes" to a customer (within some high-tolerance limits) on her or his own. But to say "No" to any customer request, no matter how weird, requires two people (e.g., you and your boss) to turn the request down. That is, the "culture" has a designed-in "Bias toward 'Yes.'" 2 Pizzas. Amazon's Jeff Bezos declares that no employee team can have more people than can be fed by two pizzas. (This courtesy Vanity Fair/10.04.) Plastic Bulldozer. Michael Dell, we also learn from VF, keeps a plastic bulldozer on his desk to remind him not to run roughshod over new ideas." (2) "Getting To Yes", by Roger Fisher & William Ury. A brilliant manual written by the team behind the Harvard Negotiating Project. Remember to sign up: back to top |
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