Business Insight Zone

For the imminent 4th of July holiday, consider this my personal Declaration of Independence from the gigantic pile of bookmarks in my browser. Talkin’ ’bout sharing some interesting links with you, friends.

Probably this will extend across the long weekend. You might want to pop some popcorn or something.

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Joel Spolsky: Seven steps to remarkable customer service

Spolsky’s very first piece of advice, “Fix everything two ways,” is worth the price of admission all by itself: don’t just fix the particular instance of a problem that a customer points out to you — invest the time and energy to make sure that the problem won’t crop up for anyone else. If telecom companies took this approach . . . well, my head nearly exploded thinking about that.

By the way, in my experience of customer service — as both customer and server — his fourth point, “Take the blame,” trumps all.

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Jason Fried of 37signals: Tiny projects keep it new.

My writeup of Jason’s talk at SXSW 2008 is one of the most popular posts this blog has ever had, and it’s not hard to understand why Jason and the rest of the folks have earned a loyal following, not just for their software, but for the managment approaches they espouse on their company blog, Signal vs. Noise.

This post is a classic because it addresses a universal problem of work with a breathtakingly simple solution: People get excited at the beginning of projects, but usually bog down somewhere in the long middle. Solution: “Break problems down to their atomic level,” so that people can experience the joy of starting every week or two, instead of every few months or years.

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First Monday: Infomania: Why we can’t afford to ignore it any longer

Although this study was published a year ago, its findings have hardly grown less timely. E-mail overload and related interruptions throughout the working day aren’t just a marginally bad idea — they are actively costing companies millions of dollars per year.

The entire study is well worth reading, and I’ll probably write about it at more length later. For now, though, I’ll quote some of the article’s conclusion:

The impact described and quantified in this work clearly warrants a serious solution effort. No large organization can tolerate a phenomenon that reduces employee productivity, makes lives miserable, and potentially costs hundreds of millions of dollars each year.

Development of programs to address and solve the problem will not be simple. This is especially true given its deeply entrenched nature and numerous misperceptions of impacted knowledge workers. For example, they inevitably claim they can “multi–task” without negative impact on their performance, despite extensive data to the contrary.

A solution will require changes at the heart of expected behaviors and cultural paradigms in the organization, and possible modification of mission–critical technologies. Any program to achieve results will likely run initially for a year or more. [...]

It is our hope that this will create a completely different reality of work and life – a reality where people can create outstanding business results while enjoying a pleasant work environment and improved quality of life.

Seems like a pretty good reality to aim for, no?

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Here’s a Josh Bernoff two-fer:

1. At his own blog: The real business model for Web 2.0: corporate clients

2. Interviewed by Jackie Huba on the Church of the Customer blog.

Bernoff is an analyst with Forrester who really, really knows what he’s talking about when it comes to social media, especially in regards to the ways that it’s already being used to change the way companies do businesses. There’s no “Gee whiz!” here, just good sense.

Here’s my favorite bit from the Huba interview:

Most managers say they want to hear from customers. They don’t. They like the idea of a mass of consumers but individually, customers are quirky. Most companies keep them at arm’s length with phone systems and call centers and focus groups. Why are you stuck on the other side of that one-way glass? Dell is an example of a company that now gets it. Michael Dell talks in terms of 100 million customer touches per year. When you think of those touches as an asset, you’ve changed your thinking. For your company to attain that thinking, it helps to build a social application. It will slowly and inexorably change your attitudes to be more customer-centric, especially at is succeeds and spreads to other applications. It takes years, but it works.

It will take time for Bernoff’s view to penetrate corporate America — but I think it certainly will happen.

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Kermit Pattison interviews Ram Charan in Fast Company: How to Kill an Idea

My favorite part of this short interview with uber-consultant Charan is his support for simultaneous rather than linear innovation — i.e. an innovation process that involves the different parts of a company (marketing, product, technology, etc.) simultaneously.

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(Picture by Stefano Bertocchi.)

Category: Management