To be clear, Cone defines Powerlines as “a compelling story about an event, person, place, product, or a part of human nature that has lasting impact. Sometimes these lines are just a few words, sometimes several sentences, and once in a great while, must one word.” This definition in itself is not very powerline-ish but it is a definition … just one that I couldn’t remember off the top of my head and had to go look up just now. He also says powerlines must “ring true” and they should not overreach.

I like books that have lots of great examples and then actions you can take immediately to start enacting the change the book is advocating. Powerlines has lots of great examples but I didn’t find the tips came early enough in the book. Either I’m not seeing them or they just aren’t there. He had tidbits here and there but he didn’t dedicate as much text to steps you can take to improve the powerlines you create.

What there is a lot of is examples. In fact, there are way too many examples. In one chapter he lists almost every single presidential campaign slogan from the beginning of the republic. He takes time to explain why it was good and some background to put the slogan in context. I found it to be way over the top, I could have done with about half as much.

I also found Cone used the same examples over and over again to stress his points. For example, Ronald Reagan’s “It’s morning again in America,” was repeated several times throughout the book. He was also fond of citing FedEx’s “When it absolutely, positively has to be there overnight.”

Both of these are great powerlines but they didn’t do much to help me create my own powerlines by using them again and again.

The author does give some great tips on creating your own powerline, albeit closer to the end of the book. They are:

• Convey a genuine truth or depict an experience—real or imaginary.
• Build them to last and should rarely, if ever, be changed.
• Convey a benefit, show how they will improve our lives, recommend an action or offer some other satisfaction.
• Are made more memorable if they can be set to music or made to rhyme.
• Should be made to move on the screen on television or online.
• Should be a prominent touch point with the consumer, i.e., large and pervasive throughout the campaign.

There’s no doubt Cone knows his stuff and I would love to have him over for dinner to discuss advertising and marketing. In the case of Powerlines, I’m not certain Cone set out to actually create a step-by-step plan to come up with great powerlines. In fact one point that has stuck with me is he says powerlines are never created by group of committee but rather by individuals who have a deep understanding of the brand.

Powerlines gets a high rating on Amazon but in terms of Powerlines being a textbook for learning to create you own powerlines, it falls short.

Related posts:

1. Reward Systems: Does Yours Measure Up? – my recap Part of my current responsibilities at work – one that...
2. The Starbucks Experience – my recap I’ve been wanting to read this particular book for a...
3. The Speed of Trust – my recap I was given The Speed of Trust: The One Thing...

Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.

One of the biggest challenges we face at the newspaper is recruiting and retaining volunteer writers. I’ve been studying reward systems from a consumer perspective (e.g. how to use programs like Air Miles to encourage customer behaviour) for a few years but haven’t thought of a specific strategy for employees.

The idea popped into my head this past summer and I sought out a book I could learn from. that’s where Steve Kerr’s Reward Systems: Does Yours Measure Up? came into play.

Steve Kerr has been the Chief Learning Officer and managing director at Goldman Sachs and before that spent time as GE’s CLO heading up their prestigious Crotonville corporate university.

The book is a quick read, smaller than your standard hardcover in height and width and only 130 odd pages. However, it’s jam packed with insight and very light on hyperbole and theorizing. Instead Kerr uses examples from his experience to illustrate the lessons.

The early part of the book deconstructs some systems that might be installed at your workplace that are faulty. The one that sticks out the most in my mind is the ranking system. Kerr says ranking systems are failures because they rank people against each other instead of against a system. It’s also a failure because if one manager trains his direct reports really well his bottom 25% might still be far superior than another manager’s top 10%.

Instead of using a ranking system for employees you should review them based on the following criteria.

For Perfomance

1. How good a job did the person do during the past performance cycle?
2. How important to the organization is the job that was done?
3. How difficult was it, given both internal and external job conditions, to do a good job?

For Setting Compensation

1. How difficult would it be to replace the person in that job?
2. Ho does that person’s compensation (and for promotion purposes, organizational level) compare to others inside and outside the organization
3. Are there other factors (e.g. historical inequities, diversity considerations) to consider?

For Promotions

1. How well does the person’s performance in his or her present job predict likely performance in the new position?

These points are all moot, of course, if you haven’t defined performance. As Kerr says in the book, you cannot evaluate performance if you don’t define performance. A mid-point theme in the book is the need to have concrete and measurable metrics that everyone knows about in order to have a successful reward system.

Worse, he says is when you don’t measure important aspects of performance you label them as unimportant.

Once you determine what’s important to measure you don’t have to measure them all the time. Kerr uses the analogy of police assignments; after a game at the stadium, lots of police are dispatched to the area to help with crowd control and traffic but a sleepy suburban neighbourhood may only have a patrol car drive through every two weeks. Measure the really important stuff all the time and the less important stuff less frequently.

Creating the metrics is a vital step in creating a reward system but Kerr warns against creating metrics that can be gamed. I’ve seen this in my own experience. A friend of mine worked for a multi-national consumer goods manufacturer and every quarter they had to meet a specific sales goal. If they were going to be short of the goal they would sell off huge amounts of inventory at a reduced price to wholesalers. This strategy got their numbers for each quarter and they got their bonus, but it also saturated the market for the next quarter.

Be careful what you’re measuring is the lesson here – but more on that later.

Types of Rewards

Prestige Rewards

Prestige rewards may cost the company money but do not put cash in the recipient’s pocket. These can include things like a new job title, access to private clubs, a larger office, invitations to posh corporate functions and so on.

Financial Rewards

These are of course cash of some sort or another, a bonus, pay increase, etc. It’s actually what I thought of when i started thinking about rewards programs. Kerr says any financial reward is like the company making an investment so the company wants to be sure that they’re getting a return on their investment. For example, if you deposit $500 into a savings account once and it returns 5% one year and then it neither gains or reduces ever again, you have made a one-time investment and received a one-time return. Now imagine the next year you deposit another $500 and then the next year another and so on never to receive a return on that investment beyond the first year. That’s what Kerr likens a pay raise to. When you give someone a pay raise, are you confident you’ll see a return on that investment year after year?

Job Content Rewards

Job Content Rewards really excite the author and for good reason. This type of reward includes the following things:

• feedback
• increased responsibility
• challenges
• recognition
• autonomy
• opportunities to participate in decision making
• to grow professionally
• to do important and interesting work

Kerr’s favourite thing about this type of reward is you can create your own supply and the amount of rewards you give are limited by your own imagination. Kerr says traditional rewards are valued because we’ve wrongly made only a few of them available – they are scarce. But job content rewards can be some of the most rewarding of all but there is no reason you can’t give a group of people feedback several times a year.

Make them public and reversable

The secrecy surrounding rewards is another thought from the old school that needs to go the way of the Dodo bird. If you give an employee a $1,000 bonus you either make 1 person happy – the recipient who’s glad they were recognized – or 0 people happy – the recipient who thought the should have received more. When giving rewards, share with everyone who is getting it and how they got it. How they got it is very important because rewards need to be attainable by everybody. If they don’t see how they can attain it then what’s the point of having the reward in the first place?

You probably will make mistakes. When you do it’s important that you haven’t done it with rewards. Sometimes these reversible rewards are called a bonus, incentive pay, variable compensation or something along those lines. Whatever you call it, you need to be sure you don’t make it a permanent fixture. This can as simple as putting “bonus pay” on the pay stub or if you mail it home, mail it in a special envelope.

Final Thoughts

The author wanrs against across the board rewards (e.g. pay increases for everyone). Firstly it’s not an equitable solution, it’s only efficient. Across the board pay increases sends the message to low performers that it’s okay to perform at their level and they’ll actually push the boundaries and drop their efforts slightly. It also sends a message to the top performers in the form of demotivation and their levels will drop closer to where the low performers are.

It’s similar to saying “We want long-term growth,” and then punishing an employee for not coming in every day on time. If you want long-term growth, reward for it, don’t send them the message that attendance is the most important metric.

Related posts:

1. Powerlines – my recap Like anyone that has a marketing or advertising component to...
2. The Speed of Trust – my recap I was given The Speed of Trust: The One Thing...
3. The Starbucks Experience – my recap I’ve been wanting to read this particular book for a...

Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.

I’ve been using it ever since and I’ve recently published my shelf to the Web. It’s not the entire listing, but it has the bulk of my library. Check it out here.

Related posts:

1. Sometimes I like to change the setting on people’s toasters when I’m in their kitchen. I don’t often visit Reddit.com, but I somehow ended up...
2. What to do when Google Docs won’t load The other day, Google Docs just wouldn’t load for me....

Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.