Via Reuse This Bag. (H/T @ritubpant)

Eat green.

For decades, salespeople have practiced something called an "elevator pitch." The idea was that they had to sell themselves and their product or service in the time it took to ride an elevator from the ground to the top floor. Every good salesperson had an "elevator pitch" and could perform it flawlessly at a moment's notice.

Today, elevators are much faster and attention spans are much shorter, so you've got to amp up your pitch. You've got to have a 118.

The 118 Pitch is my modern term for the old elevator pitch. It's based on the fact that 118 seconds is the length of the average elevator ride in New York City. The first 8 seconds are "the hook"—the time you have to get the "lean in" factor, to snag your prospect, to catch their interest.

Those first 8 seconds are the key. In researching the idea I discovered that the length of time the average human can concentrate on something and not lose some focus is as little as 8 seconds. Eight! (It's true--I found it on the Internet!) Thirty seconds, then, was way too long for getting that lean-in factor for your pitch. You know how you hear something in a conversation and you lean in because you want to hear the rest of it? That's what you want from your prospect in those first 8 seconds of the 118.

If you accomplish that in those 8 seconds, they'll give you the next 110 seconds to drive your message home with no bull. It's not about name dropping. It's about what's in it for the recipient of your pitch.

Your 118 must:

•Grab the attention of your prospect
•Convey who you are
•Describe what your business offers
•Explain the promises you will deliver on

You need speed and immediate relevance. A compelling, attention-grabbing 118 tells who you are, the value of what you do and sells that to anyone, internally and externally. Used correctly, it helps your business grow bigger. Your 118 should also describe the thing that separates you from everyone else that sells the same thing. I don't care what businesses you are in or what other services you offer; tell me how you are different, your story and how that story connects to your prospect.

Leaders need to get away from bland pronouncements that say, "We do this" and focus on "what we do for you." You're supposed to understand not just what you're selling, but what it offers to your prospect.

The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly of 118 Pitches:

The Good: Mentions your product or service and tells how it will help your prospect. "In less than two minutes, I will tell you how the use of me, my company, or my service will grow your development department 115%."

The Bad: Mentions what you're offering, but lacks any reference to what it offers your prospect. "My name is Sam Maybe-Somebody, and my company The Hopeful-Who Knows wants to work with your company using our We Think Super Service."

The Ugly: Makes no mention of your company or service and how the prospect will benefit. "My name is Sam Nobody, and my company wants to work with your company because we think we can help you."

Eight seconds goes by in a heartbeat and you don't have time for anything that's flabby or ambivalent. Cut to the chase, make them lean in, and then don't let go.

Start your 118 with a rough draft. Then, do another draft. Then, put it down for a while and come back to it. Does it still ring true? Repeat the process. When you finally arrive at a 118 that best suits your business, you'll know it. The vibe will be there. It'll feel good rolling off your tongue. You'll wake up in the morning reciting it and go to bed at night doing the same thing.

You'll believe it.

After all, if you don't, nobody else will.

118 seconds seems like the perfect length for a video!

Editor’s Note: When the members of the class of 2010 entered business school, the economy was strong and their post-graduation ambitions could be limitless. Just a few weeks later, the economy went into a tailspin. They’ve spent the past two years recalibrating their worldview and their definition of success.

The students seem highly aware of how the world has changed (as the sampling of views in this article shows). In the spring, Harvard Business School’s graduating class asked HBS professor Clay Christensen to address them—but not on how to apply his principles and thinking to their post-HBS careers. The students wanted to know how to apply them to their personal lives. He shared with them a set of guidelines that have helped him find meaning in his own life. Though Christensen’s thinking comes from his deep religious faith, we believe that these are strategies anyone can use. And so we asked him to share them with the readers of HBR. To learn more about Christensen’s work, visit his HBR Author Page.

Before I published The Innovator’s Dilemma, I got a call from Andrew Grove, then the chairman of Intel. He had read one of my early papers about disruptive technology, and he asked if I could talk to his direct reports and explain my research and what it implied for Intel. Excited, I flew to Silicon Valley and showed up at the appointed time, only to have Grove say, “Look, stuff has happened. We have only 10 minutes for you. Tell us what your model of disruption means for Intel.” I said that I couldn’t—that I needed a full 30 minutes to explain the model, because only with it as context would any comments about Intel make sense. Ten minutes into my explanation, Grove interrupted: “Look, I’ve got your model. Just tell us what it means for Intel.”

I insisted that I needed 10 more minutes to describe how the process of disruption had worked its way through a very different industry, steel, so that he and his team could understand how disruption worked. I told the story of how Nucor and other steel minimills had begun by attacking the lowest end of the market—steel reinforcing bars, or rebar—and later moved up toward the high end, undercutting the traditional steel mills.

When I finished the minimill story, Grove said, “OK, I get it. What it means for Intel is...,” and then went on to articulate what would become the company’s strategy for going to the bottom of the market to launch the Celeron processor.

I’ve thought about that a million times since. If I had been suckered into telling Andy Grove what he should think about the microprocessor business, I’d have been killed. But instead of telling him what to think, I taught him how to think—and then he reached what I felt was the correct decision on his own.

That experience had a profound influence on me. When people ask what I think they should do, I rarely answer their question directly. Instead, I run the question aloud through one of my models. I’ll describe how the process in the model worked its way through an industry quite different from their own. And then, more often than not, they’ll say, “OK, I get it.” And they’ll answer their own question more insightfully than I could have.

My class at HBS is structured to help my students understand what good management theory is and how it is built. To that backbone I attach different models or theories that help students think about the various dimensions of a general manager’s job in stimulating innovation and growth. In each session we look at one company through the lenses of those theories—using them to explain how the company got into its situation and to examine what managerial actions will yield the needed results.

On the last day of class, I ask my students to turn those theoretical lenses on themselves, to find cogent answers to three questions: First, how can I be sure that I’ll be happy in my career? Second, how can I be sure that my relationships with my spouse and my family become an enduring source of happiness? Third, how can I be sure I’ll stay out of jail? Though the last question sounds lighthearted, it’s not. Two of the 32 people in my Rhodes scholar class spent time in jail. Jeff Skilling of Enron fame was a classmate of mine at HBS. These were good guys—but something in their lives sent them off in the wrong direction.

The Class of 2010

As the students discuss the answers to these questions, I open my own life to them as a case study of sorts, to illustrate how they can use the theories from our course to guide their life decisions.

If you like this I'd also reccomend reading: Mastering the Art of Living Well - http://blogs.hbr.org/haque/2011/12/mastering_the_art_of_living_me.html