Sooner or later, you'll ask for something or read something or expect something and you won't like what you get. You'll feel like I wasted your time, wasted your money or didn't meet your expectations.
Not just me, of course. Everyone. Even you. You will disappoint someone, and the organizations you depend on will disappoint you. Expectations keep rising, and promises keep being made. We keep bringing more magic into the world, but rising expectations mean that there's more disappointment as well.
That's part of the deal of being in the world.
The alternative, I'm afraid, isn't to choose a path where we make everyone happy and always exceed their expectations. Nope. The alternative is to hide, to fail to engage and to produce nothing.
A pretty easy choice.
February 2, 2012
Lightning rarely strikes. Instead, achievement is often the result of stepwise progress, of doing something increasingly difficult until you get the result you seek.
For a comedian to get on the Tonight Show in 1980 was a triumph. How to get there? A series of steps… open mike nights, sleeping in vans, gigging, polishing, working up the ladder until the booker both saw you and liked you.
Same thing goes for the CEO job, the TED talk on the main stage, the line outside the restaurant after a great review in the local paper.
Repeating easy tasks again and again gets you not very far. Attacking only steep cliffs where no progress is made isn’t particularly effective either. No, the best path is an endless series of difficult (but achievable) hills.
Just about all of the stuck projects and failed endeavors I see are the result of poor hill choices. I still remember meeting a guy 30 years ago with a new kind of controller for the Atari game system. He told me that he had raised $500,000 and was going to spend it all (every penny) on a single ad during the Cosby show. His exact words, "my product will be on fire, like a thresher through a wheat field, like a hot knife through butter!" He was praying for lightning, and of course, it didn't strike.
There are plenty of obvious reasons why we avoid picking the right interim steps, why we either settle for too little or foolishly shoot for too much. Mostly it comes down to fear and impatience.
The craft of your career comes in picking the right hills. Hills just challenging enough that you can barely make it over. A series of hills becomes a mountain, and a series of mountains is a career.
February 1, 2012
One way for a candidate to change the conversation around her candidacy: have her followers pelt the opposition with waffles at every public appearance. Eggos in particular are lightweight and their shape makes them easy to toss.
Particularly in primaries, simplicity and certainty are rewarded. The waffling candidate, the one who hesitates to give a clear yes or no answer to every question is seen as weak.
(Worth noting that the word "waffling" didn't start appearing in books much until after the 1960 elections).
Of course, this post isn't about politics at all. Customers and employees and vendors and regulators almost always prefer simplicity and certainty.
There are two ways to begin an answer to most questions we face in organizations:
"It's simple" and
"It's complicated."
Both are usually true. At 10,000 feet, most challenges are simple. But actually making something work is quite complicated.
Nuance is the sign of an intelligent observer. Nuance shows restaint and maturity and an understanding of the underlying mechanics of whatever problem we're wrestling with. After all, if the solution was simple, we would have solved it already.
On the other hand, resorting to nuance early and often can also be a sign of fear, of an unwillingness to go out on a limb and make a difference. Hence the reactions of boards hiring consultants and CEOs, or of passionate primary voters. "Don't tell me it's complicated. Just show me the guts to make something happen."
My vote: your goals and your strategy must be simple. You must have passion and certainty in order to make a difference as a leader. Your tactics, on the other hand, should be layered, multi-dimensional and reflect the patience of someone who cares about reaching a goal.
When Howard Schultz talks about coffee or Jill Greenberg talks about lighting or Cory Booker talks about education, they can impatiently demand clear and simple results. At the same time, successful leaders see the nuance they'll need in executing to get there.
The paradox is that the simplicity we often seek in search of solutions rarely leads to the patient leadership we need to get them.
The irony is not lost on me… the decision on when to be bold is a nuanced one.
January 31, 2012
This might be the simplest possible explanation of customer satisfaction.
Dissatisfaction occurs when salespeople and marketers tend to try to amplify the first part (what you're promised) while neglecting the second.
The ability to delight and surprise is at the core of every beloved brand (product, politician, teenager…). Overhype and shady promises will undercut that before it even has a chance to get started. Yes, of course you have to make promises to earn attention and trial. The mistake is when you put more effort into the promises and less into what you deliver. Promise a lot but deliver even more.
[One really important amplification: Research shows us that what people remember is far more important than what they experience. What's remembered:
–the peak of the experience (bad or good) and,
–the last part of the experience.
The easiest way to amplify customer satisfaction, then, is to underpromise, then increase the positive peak and make sure it happens near the end of the experience you provide. Easy to say, but rarely done.]
January 30, 2012
"We're hoping to succeed; we're okay with failure. We just don't want to land in between."
–David Chang
He's serious. Lots of people say this, but few are willing to put themselves at risk, which destroys the likelihood of success and dramatically increases the chance of in between.
January 29, 2012
Sure, it's easy to grab a first name from a database or glean some info from a profile.
But when you pretend to know me, you've already started our relationship with a lie. You've cheapened the tools we use to recognize each other and you've tricked me, at least a little.
Direct mail used to take advantage of this technique a lot, and since they measure everything, they knew when it worked. Online, though, we're seeing less disciplined marketers (big and small) continually mess it up. The clues are obvious to even the untrained eye–typefaces that don't match, references that don't make sense, and most of all, the weird disconnect we get when we think we're supposed to know someone and can't remember who they are. That's a lousy mood to get your prospect in, I think.
It really is a choice, one or the other.
Either you happily recommend the best option for your customer, or you give preference to your own items first.
Either you believe in what you sell, or you don't.
Either you treat your best partners better, or you treat everyone the same.
Either you shade the truth when it's painful to do otherwise, or you consistently share what's important.
Either you always keep your promises or you don't.
Either you give me the best price the first time, or you make me jump through hoops to get there.
Earning the position of the honest broker is time-consuming and expensive. Losing it takes just a moment.
January 28, 2012
One theory of technology marketing and acceptance goes like this: A technology causes a media hypestorm and rising expectations. Then it crashes to Earth as the popular press and the public discovers that it's not all the hypesters said it would be–through no fault of the technologists who brought it to the world in the first place. Then, gradually, the truth about the technology seeps out until finally it reaches its use case–and then becomes that status quo, just waiting to be disrupted as it previously disrupted what came before.
While the violent vicissitudes of this chart make for good TV movies, in reality very few innovations follow this path. That's because it ignores 'being ignored.'
90% of the time, new technology triggers are widely and aggressively ignored. While we're more eager than ever for a savior that will change everything, the number of technologies, pundits, prophets and entrepreneurs is so large that there's now a line out the door. As a result, most of the things we now take for granted (cell phones, tweeting, insulated windows, email) didn't follow this curve at all.
In fact, just about every innovation I know of has to make it through the wilderness before it gets anywhere close to a hype cycle. The wilderness is the term for the years (or decades) that a founder/entrepreneur/artist/technology must spend being ignored and unfunded before the breakthrough of overnight success occurs.
January 27, 2012
Unless someone does, things start to fray around the edges.
Often it's the CEO or the manager who sets a standard of caring about the details. Even better is a culture where everyone cares, and where each person reinforces that horizontally throughout the team.
You've probably been to the hotel that serves refrigerated tomatoes in January at their $20 breakfast, that doesn't answer the phone when you call the front desk, that has a shower curtain that is falling off the rack and a slightly snarky concierge. This is in sharp relief to that hotel down the street, the one that costs just the same, but gets the details right.
It's obviously not about access to capital (doing it right doesn't cost more). It's about caring enough to make an effort.
If we define good enough sufficiently low, we'll probably meet our standards. Caring involves raising that bar to the point where the team has to stretch.
Of course, the manager of the mediocre hotel who's reading this, the staff member of the mediocre restaurant who just got forwarded this note–they have a great excuse. Times are tough, money is tight, the team wasn't hired by me, nobody else cares, I'm only going to be doing this gig for a year, our customers are jerks… who cares?
Caring, it turns out, is a competitive advantage, and one that takes effort, not money.
Like most things that are worth doing, it's not easy at first and the one who cares isn't going to get a standing ovation from those that are merely phoning it in. I think it's this lack of early positive feedback that makes caring in service businesses so rare.
Which is precisely what makes it valuable.
January 26, 2012
Often, we're hesitant to identify a problem out of fear we can't solve it. Knowing that we have to live with something that we're unable to alter gives us a good reason to avoid verbalizing it–highlighting it just makes it worse.
While this sort of denial might be okay for individuals (emphasis on might), it's a lousy approach for organizations of any size. That's because there are almost certainly resources available that can solve a problem if you decide it's truly worth solving.
Put yourself and your people on a path to finding problems without regard for whether or not they are capable of solving them. Queue them up, prioritize them and then go find the help your organization needs to solve them.
Just because you don't know what to do about it doesn't make it less of a problem.
January 25, 2012
