The Destruction Manual

March 30, 2016 //
0

A funny thing happened the other day. A guy I know – I play soccer with him a couple times a month and would know him as an acquaintance rather than a friend – came to service our gas central heating system.

In he breezed, and asked me if I had the ‘destruction’ manual for the boiler. He probably gets to say it numerous times a week to break the ice with the customer and it made me smile as I handed over the instruction manual – to use its more common moniker.

Within 5 minutes the system had switched on of its own accord without the controller computer telling it to – not good – and ten minutes later the fuse blew on the system and shorted the circuit for the utility room.

He had indeed used the destruction manual to destroy the central heating.

It got me thinking about something I learned about early on in my managerial career, namely the self-fulfilling prophecy. It’s the notion that your attitude towards an impending situation can often govern how it turns out. If you think a meeting’s going to go badly, it probably will. If you go in with a positive mindset, you tend to get a positive outcome. Clearly there’s some cause and effect at work here.

It follows, therefore, that a positive disposition is always worth the effort, as it will help the end result favour you and also perhaps rub off on others as well.

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Categories Communication, Customers, Language

The Collective Intake of Breath

March 28, 2016 //
6

We’ve all witnessed those moments when someone does something truly remarkable.

What emerges in the immediate aftermath of one of those moments is what I call the Collective Intake of Breath.

They’re easier to spot in the world of entertainment I think. In soccer, there is a moment like the Cruyff turn, showcased in the 1974 World Cup. For a brief instant, the entire audience is captivated and taken aback by the sheer artistry. It simultaneously draws breath as if it were one giant multi-headed beast.

Two of these personal moments come to me first, though they occur – thankfully – regularly enough in a lifetime to keep us interested. One was seeing Michael Jackson in concert, in front of an estimated audience of 130,000, do his moonwalk thing – but sideways. I kid you not. It was mesmerising, and for a split second, you could hear nothing.

Another was a decade before when I was at the world table tennis championships, watching a match between an attacking Japanese player and a defensive Chinese player. The defensive player was pinned to the back of the court when another Japanese salvo flashed to his extreme left. In an instant, needing the extra distance to reach across his body to play the right-handed backhand, he turned his back on the table and ball, and flicked his outstretched wrist in a slicing motion. The ball flew off his racket, a centimetre over the net and he was back in the rally. It was probably the finest shot I’d ever seen, and I would have seen a million shots at that point. Same collective intake of breath.

So when we’re producing work, perhaps we should aim for something so remarkable that we cause in our audience a collective intake of breath? Not by offending or shocking them, but by amazing and astonishing them.

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Categories Communication, Customers, Marketing, Sales

One Chance

March 25, 2016 //
0

These days, as a provider of products and services in either a B2B or B2C scenario, you get very few chances before you blow it. If you’re in a commodity business, you get one chance. Mess up and you’re gone, even if you’ve had a good track record before your faux pas.

One strike and you’re out.

I’ve bought 3 shirts from an online discount store in the last 3 months. It’s the usual end-of-line strategy and stuff. The prices are good, and the quality of the product is decent. But the damn things take ages to arrive. Ages as in a month or more. And it’s tough to get customer service to respond, unless they’ve good news and can give you a tracking number. I haven’t got my last item yet…when I do I’m not using them again.

Years and years ago, when I lived in Scotland’s capital, I used to go to a local fast food place for fish and chips or pizza. One time I got a chicken pizza. I was ill with food poisoning that night and the whole of the next day. Never went there again. Did I tell them about my experiences? I can’t actually remember, but I voted with my feet.

I’m not the type of person who goes back looking to get a refund or compensation – life’s too short. I simply shop elsewhere. And don’t forget that we typically tell 3 times as many people about a bad experience as we do after a good one.

This is why, as a business, you must have a relentless and constant focus on quality, end-to-end. The thread can be that fine.

Along with trench warfare mentality, it’s a good mindset to imagine that you only have one chance to impress with every customer, every time.

 

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Categories Customers, Marketing, Sales, Strategy

Mea Culpa – Not

March 23, 2016 //
0

Do you know what I find pretty shocking these days? When a company doesn’t admit they were wrong, or they made a mistake, or their service failed to live up to expectations.

Now there’s a small chance a company didn’t know that its website was down for a good while, for example, but it’s a very small chance these days. When was the last time you saw a company admit they messed up, unless they were forced to because a PR issue they could have stemmed early has spiralled into a nightmare?

I recently got an email from a company whose stuff I subscribe to, because it’s very good content. The email came thru with the subject line exactly like this: [insert subversive subject line]. I kid you not. It’s wrong on so many levels, even when you try and explain it away as deliberate, but I never saw a subsequent apology.

Companies seem to want to sweep it under the corporate carpet, forget it ever happened, or else hope that no-one noticed. They hardly ever say ‘mea culpa’ unless they have to. Wouldn’t it be the most refreshing thing in the world if you went onto a website and there was a prominent statement to the effect of:

“Do you know something, our website was down for 2 hours last Thursday, and that might have been when you were browsing it. If that’s the case, we humbly apologise for your experience not being up the standards we set ourselves. We’ll try our best not to let it happen again.”

Do you think it will send their customers’ lawyers scurrying off to see if they can eek out a few bucks for a broken SLA? Do you think it’ll send their stock price plummeting and plunge the world’s markets into disarray? Probably not. A little bit of honesty, humility and integrity will in all likelihood have the opposite effect.

This is what it boils down to. It shouldn’t be a case of ‘Phew, got away with that one, let’s chalk it up to good fortune’ but rather ‘We should do better, we should come clean and we should redouble our efforts to live up to our brand promise.’

It’s OK to say ‘I’m sorry, my fault.’  In fact I encourage it, especially if you manage people.

The trouble is, it’s almost always expediency over effort.

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Categories Communication, Customers, Marketing, Sales, Strategy

The False Economy of the Super Preferred Approach

March 21, 2016 //
0

In US life insurance, people with good genes and sensible lifestyles are accorded the lowest premium and the status of ‘super preferred’. In effect they’re rewarded for not being a risky proposition for financial institutions.

Extrapolating this argument, the safer you are, the more you save during the course of your life. But then, when your life is over, and you didn’t really live it to its fullest extent because you were limiting your risks and your payments while alive, who is the winner there? Not you, at least not to this writer.

It occurs to me that there is a parallel in business. These days, immense macro forces like globalisation, commoditisation and automation are making it more and more essential for companies to do something special, and be something special, for their customers. Otherwise, they’ll just get replicated and replaced by a cheaper ‘me too’ substitute.

So is your business simply bobbing along, keeping its head down and playing it safe, while not trying anything too risky? Or is it constantly trying new, risky stuff that keeps it ahead of the pack that’s soon to become extinct?

In business, the super preferred life is not a life worth living.

And on another parting, and unrelated thought, this is post #400 :-).

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Categories General

The Face of the Non-Athlete

March 18, 2016 //
0

If you’re reading this post on the day of its publication, then I’m on holiday right now. It’s actually a sporting holiday en famille. I say this not to gloat, but because it reminds me of an observation from my sporting endeavours, and those of many millions like me.

When I work really hard at a particular sport, the kind of effort that involves sweating profusely and being out of breath at times, I also go red in the face. Very red. Almost maroon in fact. It’s pretty unsightly – and I’m aware of the irony of using pretty as an adverb there. It also takes what seems like an eternity to melt away, long after the heart rate and breathing have returned to normal.

Do you know what’s most galling though? How come you never see any athletes, in person or on the TV or web, with puce faces as a result of their exertions? Why do they have a normal-coloured face in the face of extreme work? Even the paler-skinned varieties like me?

Now I’m sure there is a scientific reason for this that the good folks at wikipedia have already committed to the web, so it’s more of a plaintive question on my part than an inquisitive one.

It’s pretty annoying though. It’s like a beacon advertising to everyone in the vicinity: look out, non-athlete alert :-(.

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Categories General

Karma

March 16, 2016 //
0

I’m not a religious person, so I don’t really hold much with divine direction.

I do believe in karma, however, the kind where spiritual credits and debits are in operation. Over the course of a life, these pretty much even out I think. If you do good, life pays you back with good. If you do bad, at the expense of others, then a big piece of bad will probably even the score.

I was reminded of this the other day when my good lady and I were at a fun-raising pub quiz night. As it turned out, our team won the quiz, and we were presented with a very bag of generous goodies each, including money. We gave half the money back as a prize for the raffle. We then promptly won 2 prizes in the raffle. Score one for the nice guys.

There was a table next to us, with a coupe of older folk and their kids. They didn’t win anything in the raffle, despite having bought quite a few tickets for quite a few prizes. We gave them one of our goodie bags and were preparing to head off.

Then, over the loud speakers our hostess explained that she had forgotten one of the really good prizes, and so there was to be one more draw, for a new smartphone. ‘Ooh,’ said Mrs D, ‘I need a new smartphone.’

You can guess the rest. Score two for the nice guys.

Karma, paying it forward, call it what you will. Be nice, it works.

 

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Categories Communication, Customers, General

It Is What It Is

March 14, 2016 //
2

One of my previous bosses – and I’ve been fortunate enough to have several excellent ones – had a phrase he often relied upon.

“It is what it is.”

This for me is all about accepting what you have, dealing with what’s in front of you, and making the best of the ingredients. You made a plan, you executed it, results followed and you’ve measured where you stand. It’s no use lamenting the what ifs, because, as the older generation still say, “if ifs and ands were pots and pans.” The second half of that phrase contains what you might term a ‘politically incorrect epithet,’ but it conveys the point well enough.

There’s something so succinct about It is what it is, that for me it’s like a snap of the fingers where you break out of the negative or wistful feelings and get in the right mindset, get your game face on. Let’s deal with what we have and let’s make the best of what we have.

Because, after all, we have what we have. We’re active and in the present tense. We can improve our future situation with this hand we’ve been dealt. In life and business we can’t really ask for a re-deal.

 

 

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Categories General, Marketing, Planning

There Are No Competitors

March 11, 2016 //
2

“There are no competitors”. I used to be fond of saying this, especially in previous industries I’d worked in which were fairly commoditised and definitely got the thin end of the Porter 5 forces wedge. These industries were also fiercely competitive.

My point was really this: There are no competitors, only potential partners or customers.” There is always a possibility of working with someone rather than against them. It’s more productive, and better for the collective, greater good. Of course, one of my reasons for saying this was to re-position my company, and de-position the opposition, by making such a statement, implying that we were different, unique even.

To an extent this is similar to the process of challenging the status quo. When you can look at things from a fresh perspective, and frame the place where you compete in a different way, then you reframe your market, you create fresh categories for yourself and you forge a unique set of dynamics where you are the lynchpin or fulcrum around which everything revolves.

When you can do this, your competitors melt away. There are no competitors; only you exist in this space, and your value enhances accordingly.

 

 

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Categories Customers, Marketing, Planning, Sales, Strategy

Challenging the Status Quo

March 9, 2016 //
0

We’re constantly hearing about entrepreneurs or leading companies that challenge the status quo and look for new ways to do things. This can often give them an important edge in the market, which inevitably takes the competition time to identify and address.

Challenging the status quo is easier said than done, however. It takes a certain mindset which needs to operate in two dimensions. The first dimension is that you have to be able to think outside the box, to use a battered cliche, to be able to eschew the standard assumptions and accepted situations. The second is that you need to be able to do it a lot, and ideally all the time.

I was reminded of this some months ago when helping to prepare some messaging around a certain market, which included defining that market and how that market was structured. A couple of the senior individuals were in the team and I was struck by how differently and more expansively they were able to view the market they operated in, and hence how they could position their company in a more different and more beneficial way.

They simply brushed away the assumptions about how the industry was structured, assumptions I had wrongly taken as the pillars for how things worked in the industry.

It’s obvious that the role of senior executives is to be looking over the parapet far more often than other staff who are more siloed, specialist, operational, or tactical. But, that said, it was refreshing to see people who took a professional approach to questioning everything and thinking deeply about what they could and couldn’t move.

As you can imagine, visionaries are far more able to see everything as movable. For them there is no status quo.

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Categories Marketing, Planning, Strategy, Technology
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