The Exponent: Vol 2003 Number 6
“You To The Power Of Us”

“I find the great thing in this world is not so much where we stand, as in
what direction we are moving:

To reach the port, we must sail sometimes with the wind and sometimes
against it, but we must sail, and not drift, nor lie at anchor.”

- Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., US Supreme Court Justice

Welcome

It’s a new school year. More than that, it’s an opportunity to once again
choose to make things better for yourself, for your chapter, and for
Triangle or to take the easy way and just “let things ride.”

Guess which option I, your Brother, is challenging you to take up?

How can you make those things happen, you wonder?

A Chinese proverb has it that the journey of a thousand miles begins with a
single step. So, to start off, I think you should start off. Take the
first step – identify your goals! What do you want to be better for
yourself, for your chapter, and for Triangle? Maybe a goal is to fix a
problem you’ve seen. Maybe it’s something you simply think should be done.
Doesn’t matter, figure it out individually or, where appropriate, in groups.
Be a leader!

Like our friends at Microsoft say, “Where do you want to go today?”



Why would anyone join your chapter of Triangle?
Tim Eiler minn87

First answer the question “what do customers buy?" Though people,
particularly technical people, tend to want to sell the features of a
product, thinking that someone would buy “a room,” for instance, people
actually buy benefits that they want. Think about the last time you bought
a computer. Did you buy the machine because it has a fast clock or because
the fast clock would help you do your work faster, allow you to play games
with better graphics, made you feel superior to the guy down the hall with
an obsolete machine, etc? Be honest with yourself. If that doesn’t work,
ask your mom why she bought the last appliance she bought…

What’s the difference between an attribute and a benefit, you ask? Product
attributes reside in the product, while benefits reside at the customer. For
example, a car can have 4-wheel drive (a concrete attribute) and provide a
benefit to a customer of being able to go more places and in worse weather
than a 2-wheel drive car. Benefits are always abstract, and are often the
result of a cluster of product attributes, some of which may be abstract
attributes. For example, think of the benefit ‘safety’ (e.g. auto safety).
There is a cluster of concrete product attributes (e.g., air bags, brakes,
and body construction) that combine to generate the more-abstract concept of
the benefit of safety.

Customers buy abstract ideas… Given this discussion, you can see that it is
somewhat easy to think about what a customer buys by thinking along the
continuum of concrete versus abstract ideas.

Ok, so now you’re asking how that can help Triangle…

Is it better for a chapter to sell only the fact that its average GPA is
3.0+ or better for that chapter to sell the concept that the prospective can
get a high GPA (with the average GPA stat used to back that up)? Which is
likely to be perceived as a benefit to the prospective member and which as
just an attribute? If you sell the attribute (3.0+ GPA), you leave the
prospective to make the leap from “you guys have high GPA’s” to “I can get a
high GPA here, too.” Much better to sell the “You can get a high GPA here
(benefit). Let me show you the evidence.”

What are the benefits that a prospective member (his parents, a faculty
advisor, a community neighbor, etc) want to buy from Triangle? Are those in
what you actually offer? Does what you currently tell prospectives speak
about the benefits of being a Triangle or about lists of features?

Be careful when answering those questions. It is easy to think in terms of
concepts that are simply at too high a level of abstraction. Take for
example the generic words "value" and "quality". What do these mean? If you
ask people to define these concepts you will likely find several answers,
since they are so general that they are often meaningless. If you find
yourself with too-abstract benefit concepts, you can find the benefits
underlying these more general concepts by asking the simple question: “What
do you mean by that?” For example, if you say that "value" is a benefit
that customers seek from Triangle, then ask yourself (or better yet, the
customer) "What do you mean by that?" You will typically find that people
will respond by using less abstract and more meaningful words, like
"leadership training" or “job networking.” You will eventually find that
you can get an answer to the question only by using features.

If you keep asking the question, "what do you mean by that?" you will
eventually find that you can only

To help you, compare what you are telling your prospectives against these:
1. It must not be concrete, or tactical.
2. It must not be at too high a level of abstraction (think, "what do you
mean by that?")


Do You Need a Pork Chop Around Your Neck For The Dog To Play With You?
>From the "Top 15 Signs Your Fraternity Brothers Don't Like You" (copyright
2000, Chris White):

Reason 2: Helloooo? You're *paying money* to hang out with them! Do I
need to repeat that?

We’ve all probably heard a non-Greek claim that one of the flaws of Greek
organizations is that they require the members to pay for their friends.
This doesn’t make a tremendous amount of sense when you think about it.
Hopefully, you’ll be armed to refute such a claim.

True, money does exchange hands between members and the Fraternity.
Triangle isn’t the kind of business that seeks to make a profit, though.
Any money collected from members is put into simply covering operating
overhead costs – paying rent, paying utilities, saving for “rainy days” and
future growth, and sometimes having social events and the like. That hardly
constitutes “paying for friends,” at least not any more than would be the
case for someone who pays to live with others in a dorm.

Even though non-Triangles (and non-Greeks) pay money to do exactly the same
things, in fact, they get far less for what they contribute. Triangle gives
the individual a chance to improve himself in more directed, less haphazard
ways. We've come to recognize, I think, that Triangle's purpose - the very
essence of why it exists - is to help the individual member. It does that
in a couple of separate, but intertwined ways.

First, through leadership positions, group projects, and participation in
meetings and chapter decisions, being a Triangle provides opportunity for a
man to get and improve the kinds of life skills he needs to be most
successful in life. These life skills are the "ISP" (Intellectual, Social,
and Professional) personal development categories you've probably heard
about before.

The other is the development of lifelong friendships. These, of course, are
deeper, stronger friendships than you will find nearly anywhere else. This
is the kind of relationship - fun, supportive, life-long - that is typically
only found in families. There's a reason we call each other Brother, after
all. Because we belong to a larger organization that is meant to stay
around for a long time and that we chose to belong to – as opposed to just
being randomly thrown together with folks in a dorm or apartment situation –
we have the right opportunity to grow such friendships.

It's probably pretty clear how those two things are interrelated, by the
way. Friends help us, through support, critique, and opportunities for
practice, the chance to improve our "ISP" skills. Without the help of
friends, a man is far less likely to develop those key success-support
skills. On the flip side, it takes interaction between people for
friendships to develop and to gain ever-increasing strength. Acquaintances
(like the folks you’d find in most dorms) are sometimes called friends, but
real friends can be found only among those who support us long-term through
the highs and lows of life.

So, a Triangle pays money to be a member & gets help improving himself while
also getting the chance to have friends? Non-Greeks might still say that
we're buying our friends - that anyone could get the same benefits Triangle
offers even if he chose to live in a dorm, at home, or in an apartment.
What gives?

Here's a summary of the reasons their “buying friends” epithet is wrong:

1. In the business exchange, the individual member contributes money and
his own participation. Since there is no financial profit involved, the
funds given to Triangle by the member are intended only to cover the
member's share of expenses. That's why Triangle at all levels is considered
a nonprofit business. A Triangle no more pays to hang out with other
Triangles than does one roommate of a dorm room to hang out with other dorm
dwellers. Would dorm-dwellers be charged with "paying for” their friends?

2. By having a common general field of study among us, Triangles more
easily find themselves among men with whom they can identify. Fortunately,
that doesn't lead to ultra-homogeneity, though - in fact, I've found nearly
all chapters bring together wide varieties of personalities, politics, etc.

3. By having made a more conscious choice to join a group - especially a
group with a clear, common interest - the friendships developed there are
more likely to last longer than acquaintances developed in a more "random"
environment. That's even further increased by the fact that Triangle is set
up to require individual effort to operate the chapter - dorms and such
require very little of that kind of devoted input.


Do We Fall Short?
Tim Eiler minn87

We tell people – prospective members, active members, alumni, parents,
friends, family, neighbors, school faculty and staff, and more – that
Triangle has value to members (and all the others). Hopefully, that’s an
explicit statement of “The benefits a member (or whomever) gets from
Triangle are x, y, and z. He wouldn’t get those benefits in the same
package and quality anywhere else.” Sometimes, though, even though it’s
more implicit in our behaviors and public results, we still say essentially
that same thing.

Does your chapter (or Triangle in general) fall short of what we say,
explicitly or implicitly, we are?

I’m sure you’ll all recall that we are each called upon to be honest and
honorable. I’d like to hope the answer to that question is “no.” The only
qualification that should be allowed in that answer, for us to live up to
our charges, is that we, like any humans, are fallible and that we
infrequently make errors.

What’s your chapter’s answer?

What about you? You also make that same kind of statement about yourself –
that people who know you can count on you to be x, y, and z; that you’ll act
in a certain way; that you are trustworthy. Do you live up to your own
explicit and implicit personal statements of who you are?


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