Business Insight Zone

[A shortcut to the good stuff -- the month's most-viewed posts -- for anyone who visits the archive.]

1. “Black Wednesday” strikes book publishing.
2. Seven things you may not know about me.
3. How much more fictitious value will the U.S. real estate market lose?
4. Algorithms, not tips.
5. What “Real Advice” Would You Give Your Company?

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Image by Kevin Dooley.

I forget the exact wording of the old saw that says your problems should get bigger and better over time — IF you’re really growing.

STAGNATION

Think of what a heartbreak it is to see someone struggle with the exact same problems year in and year out — always one paycheck from disaster, always “meaning to” turn over a new leaf, always facing the same petty imps that have bedeviled them for so long.

Too many people in business stop learning regularly when they finish school, such that they’re always being left behind by the latest developments in their fields. Too many companies never seem to grow out of their problems, such that they’re always having to restructure — and always failing to restructure adequately. (Why does Alcatel-Lucent come to mind?)

GROWTH

Contrast that to the development of healthy, well-adjusted children. As they grow, they can take on bigger and better problems, so that as kindergartners they are challenged by tying their shoes and solving 2+2, but as teenagers they are challenged by rebuilding the engine of an old Mustang or solving differential equations.

The best companies — Toyota, Google, General Electric — grow by remaking themselves better every day. It’s a sort of pre-emptive, positive restructuring that forestalls the need for the brutal kind of restructuring. And these companies are willing to take on ever-bigger challenges as part of their cost of doing business in this better, more fulfilling, more profitable way.

YOU?

Which category have you been in lately? If you filter out the truly unavoidable effects of this year’s economic downturn, were your 2008 problems of about the same caliber as your 2007 problems? Were they grander, more like Google’s? Or pettier, more like Alcatel’s?

Commit yourself now for the new year that starts tomorrow. Put yourself, your team, and your company into the growth category. Abandon your pettiest problems; replace them with the steady pursuit of the best opportunities. You’ll stretch yourself, but that’s a good thing.

Tying your shoes shouldn’t be a problem by now. Time for some rocket science.

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Photo by .A.A.

“Nothing is so fatiguing as the eternal nagging on of an uncompleted task.”
—William James

It’s the next-to-last day of 2008. Why not isolate a few nagging tasks that don’t need to follow you into 2009 and finish them off one by one between now and tomorrow?

Maybe you could even throw some things away off your to-do list, without doing them at all. If you’re anything like me, it’s easy to accumulate an ever-growing list that includes a lot of could-do’s and nice-to-do’s alongside the must-do’s.

Today could be the perfect day for giving your task list a haircut. Heck, give it the crew cut it deserves, and launch yourself into 2009 with a spring in your step.

2009 could mean anything – to you, to your family, to your company.

ANYTHING.

Me, I’m a big believer that much of what we get derives directly from what we do. Yes, sometimes life is unfair, but eventually the inputs mostly match up with the outputs.

What do you expect to find on the other side of the gate?
What do you expect to CREATE once you’re there?

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Photo by Hamed Masoumi.

“Action expresses priorities.”

Gandhi knew how to say a lot with just a few words.

We talk about our priorities. We swear up and down that we’re dedicated to . . . what?

• achieving higher profits
• getting better at our jobs
• building stronger teams
• wasting less time
• spending more time with the family
• working out
• dealing with interpersonal issues
• et cetera

But what do we DO?

That’s the only question that makes a difference, because all the good intentions in the world won’t convince your customer that you’re genuinely interested in their satisfaction . . . if you don’t express an interest in their satisfaction and act to enhance their satisfaction.

It’s the same if you swear that you care about your people, but then don’t act like you care about them. (One of the reasons people like working at Hoover’s so much: we actually treat each other well, instead of just paying lip service to it.)

Forget the priorities you may have written down for yourself: What priorities are you ACTING on?

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Image of Gandhi on the Salt March via Wikimedia.

A good reason to widen your horizons, in terms of both the types of people you know and the kinds of information you take in:

“People whose networks bridge the structural holes between groups have an advantage in detecting and developing rewarding opportunities. Information arbitrage is their advantage. They are able to see early, see more broadly, and translate information across groups.”

–Ronald Burt, “Structural Holes and Good Ideas” [PDF link]

All that paperwork you have to deal with?
It was created by people who were “just doing their jobs.”

You’re Creating Your Own Problems.

Some of the key problems in your business, including some that you — yes, YOU — create, arise from people “just doing their jobs.”

Think back over the past year, and consider your most frustrating encounters in doing business, or as a customer of a business. Some of them may have stemmed from incompetence or ill will, but I’ll bet more of them came from competent people who had nothing against you, but whose hands were tied:

• “Sorry, you don’t have the blue form BS-12. I can’t help you.”

The sad thing is, that lady was TOLD to tell you that. No BS-12, no can do. Period.

• “But what can I do about it?”
• “I don’t know. That’s not my job.”

Now that company (or agency, school, etc.) has an unhappy customer who can only say bad things about them. Which, when you think about it, is bad.

The Case of the Inert Roku Box

Contrast that to the experience my wife had last week — which was refreshing enough that I’ll call out the worthy company by name. My wife had ordered a Roku media player to use with our new HDTV. It was delivered overnight, all the right hardware was in the package, and the setup instructions were clear.

But for whatever reason, the player wouldn’t turn on. She unplugged everything and started over, re-read the instructions, et cetera. She called the support line, and the person who came on the line was helpful. He walked her through some of the same steps again, just to be sure. He told her the super-secret instructions for resetting the machine like a technician would. He was scratching his head, too.

Finally, they had an exchange about like this:

• He: “Well, we’ve tried all the usual things. Let me think of what else . . . “
• She: “At this point, could we just swap it for a new one? I’m afraid this one may be a dud.”
• He: “Of course — let me put that order in now. We’ll overnight the new to you, and include a return tag so you can ship the old one back to us for free.”

Boom.

Somewhere, somebody got the idea that it makes sense to please the customer, and to make it the job of that phone-support guy to please the customer. Ergo, no accusations that my wife had broken the device, no “five to ten business days for delivery,” no extra charge for replacement, nothing.

No grief masquerading as “just doing my job,” in other words. All because somebody freed up that phone-support guy to satisfy customers.

Guess how happy we are with Roku now? (The new box they sent us, by the way, is one of the best, simplest, most awesome pieces of consumer electronics I’ve ever used.)

Now, back to YOUR business.

If you’re a manager and you’re human, you’ve likely propagated or perpetuated some asinine rule that makes it harder for your customers or your colleagues to do business.

If you’re a front-line worker, you’ve probably shaken your head but gone ahead and carried out such a rule, without even pushing back very hard about it.

How can I be so sure? Because I see it everywhere I go. Because I hear it from contacts across many industries. Because it’s a constant source of complaint in my Twitter stream.

So don’t take it personally, but please DO acknowledge that you’re probably — somewhere, some which way — committing the sin of “just doing my job,” either by comission or omission. Assume the problem exists, and start looking for it; you may be sobered by how quickly you find it.

Then, take steps to make sure that no one your company serves — customer, employee, vendor, whatever — ever has reason to grind their teeth when they hear you say “just doing my job.”

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Image by Isaac Bowen, used under a CC-Share Alike license.

My friend Aaron Strout tagged me for this meme, and since I’ve put my personal blog on hiatus, I’ve been thinking about how I might apply the meme to my professional work, rather than just telling you my favorite flavor of ice cream (Rocky Road? Tough call), my favorite city to visit (Edinburgh), or that I’m an outstanding speller (true).

So I’ve tried to set out seven things that might help you better understand this blog, my career, and my outlook on business. You tell me whether I’ve succeeded at all. Read more

Keep bringing it back to the users and their needs.

No matter what, never forget that it’s not about your product or service or coolness or ineffable oomph. It’s always — always — about the users and what they get out of your product, what they do with your service, how they partake of your coolness, or how they participate in that oomph.

It was ever thus. The nature of social-media communities merely intensifies the effects.

The wisdom of Kathy Sierra

This is a conversation that’s been going on for some time. Kathy Sierra nailed it long ago, when she said that the point of the software you’re writing (or whatever else you’re doing) is to help your user “kick ass.” That’s a verbatim quote — Kathy doesn’t mince words on this stuff — and it’s a point she made over and over and over and over and over. Which is appropriate, because it’s a point most of us miss, most of the time.

Just in the past couple of days, Aaron Strout and Chris Brogan have written posts that mesh with this theme:

• Aaron Strout and Bill Fanning: Would You Join a Toothpaste Community?
• Chris Brogan: Cafe-Shaped Business

Let’s think about each of these in turn.

What Your Product MEANS to People

Aaron and Bill rightly question why consumers would want to join a social network centered on a particular brand of toothpaste, and called on their readers to present them with even tougher challenges in terms of building community around a particular product. (By all means, dive in and read the comments on the post — very interesting stuff from a bunch of smart social-media types.)

In my own comment on their post, I suggested ways that a company like Procter & Gamble or Colgate-Palmolive might build up a community, not around toothpaste per se, but around good hygiene habits for growing families (this helps you recruit concerned moms to your community) or around extending good hygiene health to the less fortunate (this helps ally your product — which is, after all, only toothpaste — with a larger, nobler cause).

The point, again, is to skip the often-fruitless effort of talking up your product’s intrinsic niftiness, and play up the ways that your product (toothpaste, ball bearings, software, whatever) can enhance the lives and address the concerns of its users.

What Your Company MEANS to People

In his post, Chris Brogan doesn’t talk about products; instead, he talks about the ways that we as consumers relate to businesses, and how we as businesspeople can relate to our customers. He centers his post on the example of Carolyn Jordan of You Are Here Books, a tiny bookshop that Chris loves.

It’s a quintessential “cafe-sized” and “cafe-shaped” business (a theme that Chris has explored before), which means that Carolyn’s efforts to make her customers feel at home translate more or less directly to feelings of warmth and loyalty and satisfaction on the part of Chris and everyone else who buys books there.

This point is particularly important because Carolyn is selling something — books — that can be had just as easily, if not more so, from Amazon or Barnes & Noble. You, too, might be in a line of work where your widget or service offering isn’t, in and of itself, all that special. Step One in your strategic plan might be to transform your product into something special, but Step Zero could be to give your users / customers / clients a reason to become raving fans of your product / company / community as it already exists.

As I pointed out in my comment on Chris’s post, one of the grand challenges for larger businesses getting into social media (including Hoover’s, I might add) is to come up with new ways to create many “cafe-shaped conversations” with smaller groups of users who, with the right kind of support from the company, can be enabled to kick far more ass — and feel great about the company while doing it.

No matter what else you do, discipline yourself to keep bringing it back to your users / customers / fans and what they need, whether that’s books or toothpaste or (more likely) a desire to connect with like-minded people and to solve their own pressing issues — not yours.

Keep bringing it back to users.

Talk to them. Get to know them. Gather feedback on their concerns, and give them feedback on their concerns.

When you’re tempted to get too fancy, or when you’re tempted to use the social media inappropriately — as one more blunderbuss for your cut-and-dried marketing messages — keep bringing it back to users. (When you’re a user, do you like being blunderbussed? That’s not why you join a community.)

Keep bringing it back to users. Make it easy for them to kick ass, whatever that entails. Once in a while, it may even mean pointing them to your competitor around the corner. That’s okay: just go ahead and help them kick ass. They will reward your service sooner or later.

The moral of this story: keep bringing it back to users.

Sometimes, it really is that simple.

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Related posts:

• Social media makes merchants of us all.
• Does your audience know where you’re going? Do you?
• Social media breaches barriers.
• Social media: the right tool for the job.

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Image by Southern Foodways Alliance.

Because sometimes people act like children.

Because some people have an emotional need to live in a world where they can do no wrong, where they can never be inferior, rather than living in the world of reality.

Because people, being flawed, sometimes don’t think through both their rational responses and their emotional responses to setbacks, then deliberately choose to act upon their superior instincts rather than their inferior ones.

Because it’s hard to be a grownup sometimes.

These are my answers to Seth Godin’s final question in his post, Two ways to deal with “no”.

Please Give Seth’s post a read and tell me if you think I’m on the right track.