Dump the participation trophies - let's be candid with kids on success and failure

I coached my kids' soccer teams before they turned 10 (and needed better coaching than I could provide!). One season, my older son's team lost every game they played, most by large margins. It was a very difficult season - probably for us coaches and parents most of all.

This story came back to me when I read "Losing Is Good For You" in the New York Times (thanks Rita McGrath for pointing it out). In this opinion piece, author Ashley Merryman criticizes the trend toward recognizing kids for participation rather than accomplishment.

I have heard this argument before, mostly from highly-competitive parents who dismiss the idea of recognition for anything other than ultimate victory. Merryman's argument is more complex and useful. She asserts that participation trophies dilute the excitement of winning, the toughening power of losing, the honor of competition, and the impetus to improve, no matter what your current abilities are:

When children make mistakes, our job should not be to spin those losses into decorated victories. Instead, our job is to help kids overcome setbacks, to help them see that progress over time is more important than a particular win or loss, and to help them graciously congratulate the child who succeeded when they failed.

I'm with Merryman. Competition is a complex mixture. Winning is fun, and losing is information. Improvement from game to game is also important and valuable. These lessons are important for young people, midcareer adults, everyone.

For the last game of our lost soccer season, our team had to travel nearly and hour and a half to the opposing team's field. It was a very hot May day. Some of our parents decided not to brave the trip, so the team was short-handed. In fact, we had to play one man short on the field the entire game.

Our guys fought terribly hard, and never gave up. They lost 7-0. After the game the other team saluted our players for their grit and determination. Our guys were happy and proud, as were we coaches. It was one of the biggest wins in my coaching experience.

VC Mark Suster recalls a painful sales loss, and what he learned from it

This is the second story from Mark Suster's 2010 post "Embrace Learning: It Will Make You Stronger." Suster recalls how one of his startup companies, a collaboration software maker, lost a deal it thought was all wrapped up. I a similar experience almost 20 years ago and many of the lessons are exactly the same.

In the 2003/04 timeframe I was living in the UK and running my first company. I had been competing to win a contract at Thames Water, the largest water company in the UK. They were looking for a collaboration tool to manage all of their large water development projects. The initial contract was worth about $500,000 and the whole value of the contract would have been worth a couple of million over the years. I was working hand-in-hand with my close friend and associate Stuart Lander who was running our UK office and with one of our local sales reps.

We had initially been told that we had no chance because they had previously purchased Documentum and it would mean changing the system entirely. They had a team trained up in Documentum and we certainly had enemies from the inside. But we worked the account tirelessly for months. We helped the write out their requirements for a system. We met everybody in the organization. We had every reference client we worked with call their senior team members (we had already won a major project at Scottish Water, Anglian Water and another at a large water company in Paris, France).

There were about 8 initial contenders for the work and in the end it came down to just 3 of us. As the founder & CEO I personally went and met with as many people at Thames Water as I could. We felt this was a marquee account and one that would help us take our collaboration tool global as Thames owned assets all over the world. Winning the contract meant that we would hit our quarterly revenue figure and be in good position for our annual sales target.

And then the news came. A woman named Trish Hannon called me with the good news that we had won the project. I was to tell noone until the contract was signed. I immediately put a full team on contract management and another on drawing up an implementation plan.

DefeatI later learned one of my biggest lesson in sales. You are most vulnerable right after you have won a deal. It is when you’re competitors have nothing to lose. It’s when the people who are part of the decision making process who don’t support the decision seek ways to undermine you. That is when you potentially become complacent.

Two weeks after winning the deal and well into implementation planning we released a new version of our software. We had made the decision that we would no longer be supporting IE v 5.5 (we would support 6.0 and 7.0, which was in beta). Even Microsoft publicly said that there were security flaws with 5.5 and that people should upgrade. But Thames Water was still on version 5.5. We assumed they would take our advice and upgrade. We had discussed this with Trish.

An internal resource inside Thames Water used our upgrade and lack of 5.5 support as a way to re-open the decision. How could a company like ours be so callous as not to support their software (even one more than 4 years out of date)? Did we really have good change management procedures if we were willing to launch products without backward compatibility. And so on. They decided to re-open the competition for 3-4 more weeks. I knew THEN that we had lost. We fought hard to stay in the game.

They hired a consultant to help them with the review. They stopped allowing us to contact them directly. The momentum had shifted. Something happened and it was clear to me that this IE issues was just a smoke screen. Somebody had gotten to somebody senior in the Thames organization. It just so happened that the consultant they hired to chose a software vendor worked for a company that had owned one of our competitors. It was a tiny little collaboration company that only had a presence in the UK (and therefore couldn’t meet their international needs). And surprise, surprise the decision came back 3 weeks later than none of the preferred 3 vendors had won but rather this tiny little competitor owned by the consulting company charged with doing the review.

Outrage. Scandal. Surely inside Thames they would see it for what it was. Given that it was a public tender the chairman of our board had encouraged us to think about launching a complaint with the UK government agency in charge of such reviews. We talked with lawyers. We felt totally deflated. We decided it wasn’t worth the fight. We licked our wounds and moved on.

I am still not over that loss. I sometimes call Stuart and we recount what happened. But that loss was really important in my career. It taught me a lot of lessons. We spent enough time dissecting it to really learn.

Here are my take aways from the loss:

1. In a sales campaign you always need to call as high as you can. If you don’t, your competitors will. If you don’t know them, somebody else does. They may not overturn decision, but they sometimes do.

2. No deal is ever done until the ink is dry and the money is in your bank account. Never take your win for granted.

3. You are most vulnerable right after it has been announced that you won (I will write a separate post on this). This is the most important lesson I learned from this experience. All other lessons were sort of obvious. This one was eye-opening.

4. We in the tech world extol the virtues of lots of product releases and rapid innovation. I hear Silicon Valley firms bragging all the time about how often they release software. In the consumer world, maybe. In the corporate world this strategy is flawed. Many large clients prefer stable technology and no changes – even sometimes when there are known security flaws. When I was at Salesforce we launched a new version of our UI. We gave users the choice to upgrade or keep with the classic UI. Years later 10% of users were still on classic. Go figure.

5. In every deal where you have serious competitors there is always somebody on the inside against you. You need to find out who that is and neutralize them.

6. No matter how much your customer tells you that they love you and that they favor you it is possible they are telling other people the same thing or some variation of this. (you would have thought I would have learned this lesson in high school ;-)

7. No matter how much large clients tell you they want transparency in pricing, they always seem to fall for the same old trick. Competitors price low to get in the door and then nail them with scope control, change orders, product extension costs and other hidden items. You can try to convince them of your “pay no more once you’ve signed up” model but they fall for the other guy’s pitch every time. Low numbers are sexy. I stopped trying to win this argument and chalk it up as some sort of human condition that I can’t change (like thinking that $14.99 = $14).

8. Time is the enemy of all deals. If you have a chance to close something – don’t let it drift.

9. Losing sucks. But at least it has made me a better competitor.

Ultra-competitive mindset leads to acquisition mistakes

Deepak Malhotra (co-author of "Negotiation Genius," one of 2007's top 5 books) and colleagues have once again dived into the psychology of negotiators and dealmakers in May's Harvard Business Review ("When Winning is Everything").

They find that certain factors present in many deals can drive irrational thinking and, ultimately, overpaying for acquisitions. The factors are:

1. Rivalry - animosity toward a competitive rival for an acquisition, say, can create a "win at all costs" mentality.
2. Time Pressure - racing to meet a stated or internal deadline can lead to accepting a poor deal
3. The Spotlight - if people are watching--coworkers or the public--a dealmaker may act less rationally than if the spotlight were off.

Malhotra et al write: "Rivalry, time pressure and a bright spotlight can each fuel competitive arousal. Collectively, they can lead to decision disasters." They point to the Boston Scientific acquisition of Guidant and Viacom's purchase of Paramount as two costly examples of this type.

What to do? As in "Negotiation Genius," Malhotra urges dealmakers, first of all, to be aware that these factors exist. Mere awareness of a feeling of time pressure is a tool to prompt reflection: "Is there a reason this has to be done this week?" Almost always, the answer is no. The world won't end if the deal is delayed.

As for rivalry and the spotlight, companies can put approaches in place to manage them. Often, it means spreading the responsibility among teams of dealmakers rather than allowing individuals to shoulder the entire burden. [Microsoft might have managed 2008's Yahoo engagement better if it had not allowed it to become Steve Ballmer's deal. The jury will be out for a while, of course, on the Skype acquisition.]

Malhotra and his colleagues are probing into new and important territory in business research. By bringing behavioral economics and psychology into the forefront of dealmaking and negotiation, they are providing a valuable service to businesspeople everywhere.

Most refreshingly, their focus on the costs of dealmakers' irrationality and aggression is a welcome antidote to the lionizing of ultracompetitive CEOs and moguls elsewhere in the business press.

(Photo: a still from the infamous Steve Ballmer monkey dance)


Related posts:
"The Best Negotating Book I've Ever Read"

Megamind triumphs by learning from his mistakes

We watched "Megamind" last night and I was delightfully surprised by an exchange between Megamind, the villain-turned-hero, and Titan, the hero-turned-villain (you'll have to see the movie to make sense of that, I think):

[Titan has just thrown Megamind into a wall and is about to finish him off.]

TITAN: No matter what side you're on, you're always the loser.

MEGAMIND: There's a benefit to losing. You get to learn from your mistakes.

[MM proceeds to wriggle out of the tight spot and turn the tables on Titan, save the city, and get the girl.]

Makers of animated films seem to have this learning from mistakes thing down pat - see the quote from "Meet the Robinsons" at the margin to the right.

And here's the Megamind trailer if you're curious:

What a "broken child" reminds us about life

There's an amazing exchange from Fresh Air when Teri Gross interviews Ian Brown, author of "The Boy in the Moon: A Father's Journey to Understand His Extraordinary Son," a memoir about life with his 15-year old son Walker, who suffers from a rare and severely disabling condition called cardiofaciocutaneous (CFC) syndrome.

Brown is discussing a quote from his wife imagining what the world would be like without people like Walker, when Teri Gross interrupts:

Brown:
What sort of a world would it be without Walkers? A world where there are only sort of Masters of the Universe...would be like Sparta.

Teri Gross:
Could we just stop here? I'm not a Master of the Universe. You know, I'm not broken, physiologically broken, like your boy. But I'm hardly a Master of the Universe. I think most of us are not Masters of the Universe. We're all broken in our own special ways. So it's not like we're perfected people and we need constant reminders of imperfection. I'm not arguing for abortion here, I'm just saying...we're not a population of perfection.

Brown:
No, no, absolutely not... although, you know, the imperative to know what to do, to have the answer, to...have the solution. I think that's a very strong imperative. And Walker is...he's more than a reminder of imperfection. Gradually, I've begun to realize, he is a way of...not the only way of being, but he's an alternate way of being. Because you can't be successful with Walker. You can't "get it done." You can't "just do it," as the ad says. You have to actually just be with him

I remember precisely where I was when I heard this: on Forster St., heading over the Harvey Taylor Bridge taking my son home from school. As I listened, I was reminded of something very current and yet age-old. An obsession with "winning." What Brown is saying means this to me: Walker is important and his life is meaningful because he presents us a situation that is not winnable. It just is. The work involved with raising and caring for Walker will not end in triumph. It will persist, day by day, for as long as it lasts. That is its limitation and, in the end, its beauty.