Interview

To have a little fun (it’s allowed), enjoy the following interview by Allison Taylor.

Allison Taylor, President of Paravox is a speaker, trainer and consultant. Paravox specializes in non-traditional marketing & sales strategies, word-of-mouth marketing, productivity & retention programs, executive skill development and Millenials (Generation Y – born since 1982).

AT: What are “Nonverbal Leadership” and “Nonverbal Magic”?

Most books on nonverbal communication focus on “reading” people.  That’s passive and misleading.   Verbal signals go one way, like reading a book; however,  nonverbal signals are simultaneously, two-way communications.  Further, these are relationship dances.  What I mean is that these are processes.  There is a sequence to sales, teaching, leading, negotiations, friending, dating, parenting, etc.  “Nonverbal Leadership” is proactively taking ownership of your own nonverbal signals in the dance.  “Nonverbal Magic” describes the seemingly effortless breakthroughs that occur when you skillfully apply Nonverbal Leadership.  When the nonverbal signals are right, life flows.

AT: Michael, what makes you an “change expert”?

MC: The quality of my answers. It is scary being called “an expert” since information doubles about every two years; however, it’s all relative, isn’t it? If my answers are better than your answers, well, I don’t mean you specifically. I mean better than 98.52% of everyone else’s answers, then relatively, that makes me an expert. (OK, I made up 98.52%. The extra precision of “.52” was a nice touch, don’t you think?).

Anyway, I’m comfortable enough to give a challenge: Ask any expert in the world about a specific people-issue at work, and then ask me. I’ll take my chances.

AT: How did you become, “The Status Guru”?

MC: “The Status Swami” was already taken.  Actually I became The Status Guru because of a moth-like, sadistic attraction to confusion and complexity. Most people drift toward cool, simplistic answers. It’s painful buzzing around hot, blinding chaos, but the goodies in life (and epiphanies) come to those who choose emotional and cognitive uncomfortableness. It was that crazy persistence that helped me “see” the world of status signals.  In truth, status is just a piece of what explains human behavior, but since it’s both powerful and imperceptible, it fascinates me.

There’s more to the story.  The company’s name, Engaging Change”, reflects that the company’s initial focus on business culture, engaging employees, and doing change management.  I still love everything that has to do with engaging and changing people and businesses.   It’s just that when I speak, people are blown away by the power of status, someone stated calling me The Status Guru, and it stuck.

Going back to your first question, about expertise, I think, what people really pay for, is wisdom. To me, that means applying expertise to a particular situation, in a way that produces a special outcome.  That’s highly valuable. Wisdom is customized expertise.

AT: What else helped you become an expert?

MC: Good genes. My father was a physicist engineer from MIT who quoted Shakespeare, while dancing me on his feet. True story.

Hard work! You know that book, “Think and Grow Rich”? It should be titled, “Think, then Work like Hell, Redo it a Half-Dozen Times, and Maybe Grow Rich (After you have Gone Bankrupt a few Times)”.

In today’s world there are two types of power: money and knowledge. I’m comfortable in the latter, working on the former. Have I mentioned my fees yet?

Getting back to your question, I think my personal genius is finding the patters in complexity. Understanding humans is challenging.

By the way, what’s your personal genius?

AT: Asking questions and keeping the interviewee on topic (smiling).

MC: (laughter) OK then…

Basically, I’ve taken an interdisciplinary approach. Sure I have degrees in economics and business, but the magic, the secret sauce if you will, comes from finding the fundamental principles of being human. Physics has basic principles, chemistry and biology too. I think learning, which is key to change, and individual and group behavior have fundamentals too.

There are many examples in nature of how complexity comes from a few fundamental principles. Evolution and DNA come to mind…plus mix in 3 billion years of environmental pressures.

We humans, when we really don’t know what we are talking about, tend to make things worse. Take psychology, for example. If you go to Wikipedia, you will see over 30 unique, often conflicting schools of thought attributed to psychology. How crazy is that? Pun intended.

If we put on our thinking caps, we can form some reasonable hypotheses…..

AT: They would be?

….

MC: I’m waiting for the audience to find and attach their thinking caps.

AT: Let’s assume they are already wearing them, how’s that?

MC: Clever!

We can postulate that:

1. All these disciplines probably work to some degree, or they wouldn’t exist.
2. They all probably don’t work in some circumstances, or else there would not be so many.
3. Likely, there are common variables across all these disciplines.
4. Also likely, there are forces outside the realm of the individual that explain most of the variation. In other words, contextual variables.

This is obvious right? Well, I’m a slow learner; it took me 20+ years to figure that out.

I’m sorry, what was the question again?

AT: I asked what else made you an expert?

MC: So my point is that finding the key variables, the fundamentals, and not being satisfied with conventional explanations or what’s politically correct, is important in developing expertise and in particular, wisdom.

If I may, can I quickly finish my story about psychology?

AT: Absolutely

MC: The most important context for the individual is the group. In the western culture, especially in the USA, individualism is supreme. It includes not only psychology, therapy, self-help but also our legal system, government policies, and our values. Yet, humans, like all primates and most mammals and many insects, are group creatures.

Returning to business, all business events and processes are group activities. Even solopreneurs have families. They network, market, buy, sell, and serve others, or they fail. Groups, even temporary and informal ones, influence every aspect of our lives. To understand individual behavior, you need to understand group behavior.  We are social beings.

Which begs the question, who is crazier, the patient of the psychiatrist?

That reminds me of a Woody Allen joke:

A man walks into a psychiatrist’s office and he says, “Can you help me, my brother thinks he’s a chicken.”

The psychiatrist says, “How long has he been this way?”

The man says, “Five years.”

The psychiatrist says, “Five years! Why did you wait so long?”

The man says, “I needed the eggs.”

In the change-agent world, the eggs are call “secondary gain”. Eggs can stop change in its tracks.

AT: Why are most of your clients in business and in particular IT or consulting?

MC: It’s what I know. After the economics degree from Rutgers and a short stint in Mutual Funds and Banking, I geeked out for 5 years on a new contraption called a PC. Who remembers 8 inch floppies? I read machine code and patched operating systems for fun, but I missed humans. I studied Expert Systems as a bridge between the two worlds, but everyone knows that didn’t work out.

After my MBA in Management, I worked for big consulting firms, mostly doing transformations. Initially, I worked on the backend, ramming change through organizations. Next, I became an expert at rescuing runaway IT projects. After that, I worked the front-end, either with process redesign, strategy, or culture change. It was rich and rewarding work. What could be better than world travel, tough business challenges, and forgetting to pack your dress shoes? Sure, little stuff happens, like getting locked out of your hotel room naked.  Anyway, as a management consultant, I learned that 80% (if not 100%) of business problems are really people problems.

Consultants and thought leaders must influence to be successful, but have no real authority or power.  I love empowering them, especially with stealth-like , nonverbal techniques.

AT: Who else do you work with?

These days I work mostly with individuals to create engaging messages, turn on presence,  and improve leadership skills.  Also, This goes back to the discussion about the quality of one’s answers. When people hear congruence between what I say and their current situation, they engage.  I receive all kinds of inquiries: conflict management, tips for woman executives, green product design, political campaigns, marketing/branding, networking skills, sales training, etc.  Sometimes I work with people on their romantic life, because success at dating is mostly nonverbal.  Anyway, high-tech folks, consultants, and thought leaders are brethren who often need help seeing the logic in illogical behavior. Cerebral types who get people? Now that could really change the world.

AT: Any books in the works?

MC: Yes.

AT: About?

MC: I’m not ready to reveal that yet.

AT: We are about out of time, what haven’t I asked that needs asking?

MC: Ask what people should do next.

AT: Seems reasonable. What do you want people to do?

MC:

• Read my Free Stuff which includes
• Ask a question
• Check out my traditional biography
• Book me for a Speaking event.
• Take advantage of my expertise: Message Makeover, Executive Presence for everyone, and Ad hoc Advice.
• And have a fabulous day!

Thanks Allison, that was fun.

AT: You are welcome, Michael.