On Friday at 5pm we convened a game of Executive Decision. This is a board game from the 70’s made by 3M. It is old and a bit antiquated, but I love playing it. I first purchased it at a garage sale in 1993. It’s a business oriented game, and the goal is to maxmize profits on a monthly basis. After 12 months the person with the most money wins. Here’s a a quick overview:

Each month you bid to buy raw materials on the open market. The market price of the raw materials is determined by demand and adjusted after each player bids. The number of bids there are for a material determines the adjusted price. If your bid is at or above the adjusted market price, you are able to buy your materials. If your bid is below market price then you cannot purchase anything and you have to wait for the next month. After raw materials are purchased and distributed, the 2nd half of each month begins which is the sales effort. Each player determines what “product” he wants to sell based on the raw materials he has on hand. Each player “offers” his product to the market by writing on his chit sheet how many units are for sale and at what price. Again, the price is adjusted based on the number of units offered. On the sales end if your price is at or below the market then you are able to sell your product and collect the return on your investment. If you offer your product above the market price, then you are unable to sell and must hold onto your raw materials and try again next month.

Let me first say that this game is not for everyone. In fact, although I don’t have the research yet, I believe 3M sold a total of 19 of these games. My purchase doesn’t count of course as it was acquired on the “secondary market” ie the Fishbein’s garage sale of July ‘93. With that said, it is a great game if you want something with a business slant that doesn’t involve chance. Monopoly is awesome. But one thing that you can’t get away from, is that in Monopoly luck many times trumps skill (or at least good guessing). If your rolls land you on Boardwalk and Park Place and you buy the appropriate houses and hotels, then you will beat your opponent who has the opposite luck of landing on your property. Executive Decision also teaches important lessons about business in general. Sell your products and services to the market at a price that is at or close to the maximum they are willing to pay, but not more, and you will succeed. Acquire the components you need to produce your product or services at a price that is at or close to the minimum you need to pay, and you will make a nice profit.

I am a big believer in playing games. It’s part of our culture at surespeak. It builds camaraderie, and if you’re playing with co-workers, it allows you to see how people learn, behave, interact, compete and sometimes taunt. For example, our Director of Technology spent most of the game trying to figure out a way to “rig” the market by over-bidding in order to drive the price down. Knowing that the guy in charge of our technology vision is an out-of-the box thinker is very encouraging. Likewise, a management team member didn’t talk much and spent most of the game absorbing the rules, but by the end had a firm grasp of the rules and the strategy. One of our technology consultants got it right away and seemed to enjoy the game and the verbal sparring that ensued. The best story is of our .Net developer, who we brought in from Pune, India. He was very uncertain of the rules, even confused at first. However, by the end of our game he had mastered the strategy and had made the most profit. Another example of our profits being outsourced to India!

Thanks for reading and speak surely today!

Seth Godin talks about the shortage of digital coaches today… and this is also an opportunity for “brick and mortar” speech pathologists and trainers to leverage the web with their students.

SureSpeak has assembled the tools you need to take your training online, so you can increase your student bandwidth and give feedback faster. You can create courses and lessons for your students as well as create your own custom scoring criteria to plot their progress.

Michael Landrum points out in this article:

“Many speakers mistakenly think that reading a speech from a Teleprompter will be easy, so they stint on the practice. That is a serious miscalculation. While it may be simple enough to read from a scrolling text, it is not so easy to turn that into an energetic, rapport-building speech that successfully moves your audience to action.”

and

“One of the most valuable tools in my coaching kit is my camcorder. Videotape your rehearsals to discover the energy level of your communication. Are you talking to someone, or simply droning on? Is your face animated? Is it too expressive, are you mugging? Play it back with the sound off and see. Is your voice expressive enough? Are you shouting? Cover the screen and just listen to the playback. Remember, the purpose of rehearsal is to make the speech seem easy.”

The Freestyle feature on SureSpeak makes it easy to practice ad hoc speeches and presentations at your own pace and convenience. I ran across this online teleprompter tool that you can use for practice and makes a great supplement to your SureSpeak videos so you don’t have to keep glancing down at your notes.

I often talk about how surespeak was first conceived, so I thought I would share it here and take the opportunity to give a broader history. There are several occurrences spread out over my life which helped to pollinate the idea for SureSpeak. To begin with I loved getting attention when I was a kid (as most do). I was a rascal and always liked to make people laugh and cause trouble. I was definitely the kid whose parent/teacher conference included the line “he’s always acting out”. I got my sense of humor from my father, although it wasn’t the “tell a joke” type. In fact, to this day I can’t tell a joke. It was a more subversive type rooted in sarcasm, storytelling and pranks. Sometimes the pranks lasted several days. My father was my hero and my protector. Given the choice I would rather sit with him on a park bench and do nothing than go to a carnival with the other kids. Sadly he died when I was 11. When I tell people he died in a bank robbery, I always highlight this as an example of why it is so damn important to pick a reliable getaway driver. It gets a few laughs and a few people linger in the zone of uncertainty, which of course I relish. The boring truth is he died of a common myocardial infarction (heart attack) at 2:36am on Saturday December 30, 1978 at the age of 49. Earlier the night before I had run downstairs to tell him that the coach of the Ohio State football team had just punched a player on the other team. He was slumped over his exercise bike out of breath. He went up stairs to lay down. The next time I saw him was when I was awoken by a commotion and opened my bedroom door to see him being wheeled away on a gurney. That event shaped the course of my life. Because he died when I was so young, I lionized him and everything he did and stood for; humor, storytelling, perserverence, helping people and being the life of the party. This is common for people who lose a parent at a young age; the deceased can take on an almost mythical quality. I was not given the opportunity to question authority and doubt veracity, as most do when they enter their teens, so everything he was I strived to be.

The next “seed” of SureSpeak came in High School. I began to develop a bit of a stutter. I don’t know why, but my guess is that my confidence began eroding because of the lack of stability in my family, as I was then living with an Aunt and Uncle for half the year and cousins the other half. This dichotomy is what I believe to be one of the strongest seedlings of SureSpeak. I saw myself in two opposing views, only one of which I desired to be. When I was confident I expressed myself clearly and confidently. When I was not confident the opposite occurred. This carried forward into college, where I finally took action and another big step on my path toward SureSpeak. I purchased a dictophone and would practice reading and speaking into it, then listen back and make adjustments. This is where I first realized the value of practice and review. My first job out of college added to that experience. I was selling long-distance service to businesses and doing a lot of cold calling and presentations. Part of the training was role playing. I was hooked. When I began my next job, I carried the role-playing with me. I grabbed the only guy that looked more nervous than me and we would practice our sales pitch back and forth on the phone. I became a top salesperson because of my role-playing, which elevated me to manager and then to a company-wide training position. We would practice our phone sales pitches and record them on audio tapes and play them for new trainees and at sales meetings (this was before PCs, .mp3s and iPods).

The final piece in the puzzle came after I started a company in Chicago with two partners. I was in charge of sales and training and our training was heavy on role-playing. I realized that repetition and review were critical factors in learning. People needed to practice and receive feedback in a safe environment so they could take that confidence with them to real scenarios. This differs from many training philosophies where people are thrown into the fire with the hope that they will learn from their mistakes. In my opinion nothing could be more damaging to the confidence, enthusiasm and future of a new or struggling employee. In business and in our strive for self-improvement, practice doesn’t get enough play. Probably because of the time and resources involved. Ironically, professional sports are very good at this and one of the reasons the athletes perform at such a high level. Football, baseball, basketball and hockey teams all practice as much, if not more, than they play. That is what I realized in 1998, and what was the final piece in the puzzle that became SureSpeak. Sitting around a room full of trainees that I was role-playing with, I realized the inefficiency we were subjecting ourselves to. That the value of practice was being undermined by the fact that people were not able to practice and make mistakes in private, in fact most people do not like to practice in front of other people. Additionally, there was no video record of the role-play. That’s when it hit me; use technology - computers, the internet, and webcams, to give people the ability to practice and master critical conversations and presentation skills on their own. Then allow them to review their performance, and send to a coach who can review it on his or her own time and provide valuable coaching and feedback. Asynchronous training — The idea for SureSpeak was born.

Thanks and speak surely today!

Today is a big day for SureSpeak. Online registration is now live. After 8 years, SureSpeak’s time has finally come. People laughed at me in 2000 when I told them I wanted to provide a video platform that would allow people to practice their communication skills with a webcam and an internet connection. I was told upload and download speeds were too slow and that people wouldn’t use webcams to record themselves. We kept focused, landed a few good clients and ultimately trained over 5,000 corporate users between 2001-2006. Even though we got demonstrable results, and people enjoyed seeing themselves on video, web-based video as a training and practice tool had not been accepted. Then YouTube came along and changed everything. Since that time the world has rapidly accepted online video and the conversation about web-based training with webcams has become much easier.

From 2001 until mid 2007, video recording was done in Windows .wmv format. The file was recorded locally and stored in a temp file, and then a service ran that compressed and uploaded the video to our server. It worked very well, but was a HUGE pain in the neck to initially load each new user. There were 4-5 downloads a new user had to go through in order to begin using SureSpeak; .net, a transfer service, some Logitech code we tweaked using their SDK, etc. Since we were primarily still working with business users, that meant I had to sit with each machine and enable the downloads. We knew Flash was a better option, because we did not need downloads and would not have to fiddle with Active X settings in Internet Explorer. The problem was that I was caught up in the belief that we would lose significant quality if we went to Flash, as we would be streaming direct to the server. The quality of our .wmv videos seemed much clearer. For about 2 months in early 2007 I was obsessed with finding a way to record locally in Flash then upload, essentially replicating what we were doing with .wmv without the need for a lengthy set-up process. Flash allows you to either save to your local machine or direct to a server, not both. However, I was sure we could figure it out. I posted on guru.com looking for a solution. I got a lot of responses, and spoke to people in China, Romania, Poland, India and some weirdo in Florida. In the end I realized I was making things much more complicated than I needed to. We decided to go with Flash. The quality was good enough, and has gotten much better since. The decision to record in Flash ensured that all you needed was a webcam and you were plug-and-play. No downloads and no firewall issues. Now that online registration is complete, we are ready to invite the world into the SureSpeak community. That’s where we stand today, which is a big day for SureSpeak.

Thanks for reading and speak surely today!