Brain Breach

What could the benefit be with being able to get over and assessing our failures quickly, and handling our success with emotional intelligence?  Failures wouldn’t be devastating, but just lessons strongly learned.  Success wouldn’t ruin us and our kids, like we see so often, but simply spice our lives a bit.

Consider your success and failure not as a state you are in, but as events that are happening to you. Certainly you have much control over these events, but not complete.

There is an important reason to taking this angle.  Your monetary success can’t bring ultimate fulfillment, and your failures shouldn’t be allowed to bring you ultimately down.  Success and failure should not be considered states that you are in or out of.  Being “in” failure implies a few things that might not be true:  You are a failure; you fail more often than others; you have lost.  Likewise, being in “success” implies some things that shouldn’t be considered true: You job is now finished; sit around; you have arrived.
Success and failure happen to you, they are not you.  React to them as you do with other things that happen to you, and fix them.

Thanks to Lawson for Sparking this idea.

Voice of the customer. Great companies listen to it, and mediocre companies try to listen to it.

The issue of truly hearing your customers isn’t as simple as just reading complaints and comments. If you don’t think it’s a tricky task, think of these issues:

• Who will analyze the problem?
• Who reports it to CEO/COO?
• How will the customer be notified problem is fixed to see if they are pleased?
• How to we effectively sift through the mounds of data to make sense of it all?
• Will the CEO see these as important money making resolutions?

A sound VOC system will take care of these issues and more. This is where it helps to thrive in ambiguity. It’s obvious that a great company needs to hear their customers. The real problem is how does that happen with piles of data and teams already swimming in tasks. Shall we make a system, outsource it, rent software (which one!), hire a consultant, train employees in house, etc.

Regardless of the attack, a great company must attack it.

Goodman, in a study of 100 companies over three years, identifies 8 problems that great companies have already fixed, and mediocre ones haven’t, when it comes to their VOC process:

1. Inefficient and costly data collection
2. Analysis in a vacuum
3. Inconsistent classification schemes
4. Old data
5. Analysis without priorities
6. Analysis that is not actionable
7. Ineffective presentation of data and findings
8. Failure to track the impact of corrective actions resulting
   from the VOC process

Another interesting observation is the need to reward the marketing department for their attention to the data:

While many companies have satisfaction related incentive systems for operations and service management personnel, they rarely exist for marketing and sales. This is a critical oversight;
TARP’s research has shown that 30% to 40% of customer problems are tied to marketing and sales.

Resources:

Stay Close to thy customers

EFM (enterprise feedback management) blog

Goodman, Depalma: Maximizing the Value of Customer Feedback

Scott Barttell (Director of World wide sales operations at Adobe) offered a tour of their headquarters. Are you kidding! Sign me up! So a couple weeks back I got to make the trip. Impressive.

Adobe one of the best technical companies of this generation, and their thoughtfulness and expertise in meeting needs/wants certainly translates over to their headquarters. Certainly the three towers are lavish where it counts. These towers host 3,000 well trained employees, and seem fit for them. Interesting the office spaces are humble. I signed a 3 page NDA twice about not giving away the Adobe secrets, or something, so, I hope I am not breaking that!

Lunch was great. There were a dozen gourmet chefs lined up waiting for our lunch time commands. It was fantastic! All the meals were $5-$9. The grass was beautifully trimmed, the seats comfy, the glass sparkling. Such thoughtfulness and good process management goes into all this, it’s amazing.

Well, I could go on, but I think you understand how impressed I was. I am inspired to care about the little things in the same way they did. It helps you recognize the big things!

This is best illustrated with a story.

ScreenBird Presenter was in its alpha stage, and had little traction in the presentation community, so I went to advertise on GoogleAdwords. What quicker way to get customers for my program? Having seen the effects good Adword campaigns, I know it was a sure bet. Sign up and registration was very straight forward, as was the actual process of setting up the campaign. There is however a learning curve to the whole program. In fact I have watched the creator of Adwords give a lecture, so I appreciated the complexity that goes into the whole program.

What do you know, it worked! For the paltry sum I put into the effort, I was able to show successful installs of ScreenBird. So now it’s time to spend a bit more cash elsewhere, and get a taste of the landscape. Thus we are lead to Yahoo!

Sign up first. Ok, simple, I have three Yahoo! id’s, so I will just use one of those. REJECTED! Hmmm, I will suffer, make yet another i.d. for some reason. With all the Google services I use, I have but one id. Now we go to setup the campaign. That wasn’t too bad, and I would say comparably nice to Google’s tools. I am on a roll now, and pause……. I get an error page during the very end of the process. Too many questions; did my new i.d. take, or do I start over again? Do I just wait for something magic to happen? Is my campaign live? I reload the page to get the same error.

Well bugs happen, but such a large one on your main revenue stream? Three days later I get an email welcoming me to the ad service.

That my friends, is righteously bad after-marketing!

The problem is the message took so long to arrive, and the processes of enrolling was just uncomfortable enough that I am reluctant. The experiential side of their after-marketing was the problem. I haven’t given them too much of a chance to try their other after-marketing techniques on me.

This is similar to buying a new product, and receiving a terribly written manual to jump start your experience. If Yahoo exercised great after marketing in this one little area, they would have my measly cash, and others that maybe shared my experience.

After-marketing happens after the buy-in or sale.  Experience can also be categorized under aftermaketing.  Aftermarketing one of those things that helps retain customers if done well. A 5% decrease on customer desertion can lead to 25%-80% revenue gains, depending on your industry.

There is such a great marketing opportunity after your customer has bought in, and it can be wasted with a bad experience and poor planning, or a great one with opportunities to pitch upgrade services.

A colleague at work suggested I read The E-Myth . After picking it up Friday, I couldn’t stop thinking about it, and finished it Saturday. It’s on my top 5 for business, so far. Here is what I learned.
The E is for entrepreneur. The E myth, which Gerber goes on to dispel, says entrepreneurs are super-human. Only these heroes have the right to start businesses. Really what goes on in the rest of the book is a intro to business development. But that would have made a terribly boring title. What’s so exciting about business development? It’s the fact that you didn’t know you needed it.

Gerber first starts with a bit of psychology. Inside of everyone involved in business, there are three personalities:

• Entreprener – This is the dreamer
• Manager – Likes order and predictability
• Technician – Likes the art of the craft, the end product.

According to Gerber, most folks start small businesses because they are a good technician. Technician meaning anything technical; baking pies, programming, styling hair etc. . They make a faulty assumption:

The Fatal Assumption is: if you understand the technical work of the business, you understand a business that does that technical work. pg 13

A clear difference from a bird’s eye view, but this misunderstanding is the most common reason small businesses fail. Each of these personalities has a vital role. For example, you inner technician should be the master of the product, documenting exactly how to reproduce it. You inner manager should implement that system, and be consistent. Your inner entrepreneur should always ask, “what would the customer want?”, and not be contented until they have it.

The enigma with a start up happens after your first couple of employees, when you hand off management by abdication, not delegation. For some reason, the widgets have scratches on the, or they come unglued all the time. In other words, your employees aren’t doing as good as you did when you wore every hat. It only gets worse as you get a larger workforce, until you get so stressed, that you throw your hands up and go back to a one man shop.

So why are the big guys big? The big guys had systems in place to control and reproduce everything worth doing right. Everything! They had a system to teach every employee that process. See, every time you are getting something done, you have to think how can this be reproduced exactly right, thousands more times. A franchise mentality! This is a major shift in thinking for a technician. Many folks start businesses because they don’t want their lame incompetent boss directing their life. The problem is technicians aren’t good at running businesses. Managers and Entrepreneurs are, so you must give them space to work.

My favorite idea found in the E-Myth is not to create a business to work at, but create a business that works. Every piece of your business should be perfectly documented, and adhered too. It should provide a structure for employees to flourish, a “game” for them to play. They can flourish and earn rewards by following the rules. It’s a rule of thumb to document the position well enough for the lowest skilled employee can become great under it. Money saver!

There are more tasty morsels that I didn’t mention, and some good insight on what your system should look like. Worth a read if you ask me.

I love good blogs, and important indicator for me is blog’s insight. Good information is important, but good insight is the ability to communicate the information in a different and compelling way. Insight is the one or two sentences you read the whole book for. One blog that has good insight is YoungEntrepreneur .

This blog reminds me of my previous post, “hire slow, fire fast”. Finding good blogs is similar to finding good employees in that you can find good blogs by reading good blogs, and you always have to fire, or remove the lowest 10%. I guess the parallels stop there.

YoungEntrepreneur is worth the reading just for their Modeling Masters section alone. In this section you get small nuggets of entrepreneurial gold from the masters of business. From Warren Buffet, “The business schools reward difficult complex behavior more than simple behavior, but simple behavior is more effective.” From John H. Johnson “Dream small dreams. If you make them too big, you get overwhelmed and you don’t do anything.”. Tasty, I know! Read the Modeling Masters section alone and see if you aren’t locked on the screen screen for 30 minutes.

I happen to be a young entrepreneur, and they really pegged me good as their target audience. In my opinion, this is a much more useful site, in my current stage, than many other highly touted ramblings.

Thanks for the blog YongEntrepreunuers, and keep the insight coming. Oh, and thanks for not posting about iPhones.

One of the first lessons Lawson Barttell, my mentor taught me was to “hire slow, and fire fast”. What does it mean? Take time on the hiring process and make sure you have the right person. Then secondly fire employees quickly if they give you good reason. The ability to fire folks quickly is a good one to have. It’s one way to save a company from corporate cancer; a non-motivated workforce.

I see two main benefits to hiring slow and firing fast. First, your team quality increases. If you continually shave off your bottom 10%, while hiring the best candidates, your team will really shine. Some of my best employees have come from word of mouth. I wouldn’t be able to say that if below average employees were sending their friends my way. They would be on the same level because folks usually have friends that are similar to themselves.

Secondly, everyone knows you expect excellence, and won’t settle for half-hearted attempts. Fire that deserving employee, and just watch the passions in the workplace grow. Down the road it will lead a higher retention rate.

While this is counter-intuitive and seemingly unproductive in some circles, I try desperately to live it. There are even personal benefits to living this selfless mantra. Think of it this way: how does one climb the social latter? By making others feel special, wanted, liked, important. Now I consider that a lucky side-effect, and not the reason to consider others better.

This mind-frame is difficult, and something I must practice whenever I remember. I find it especially difficult with people that are pompous. Imagine looking at the person checking your food out at the store: he/she probably doesn’t have a great education; I am better paid; I am dressed better and maybe better spoken, yet, they are better than me!

Sure they are better than me. How do I get in this mind-set without just lying to myself? Those are all outward appearances, and I really have no idea what they are capable of. John H. Johnson started with nothing, as did many other business greats. I consider the person in question either better than me at what they are currently doing, and therefore fulling their duty, or, consider them an dormant seedpod, who will hopefully find their inspiration and direction and become great.

Now look how I can treat this person. With the same respect I would give an admired or wealthy personality.

I want to build a team of greats, so I will treat them as such.

ps. Sorry to all the great people I have fired. You will be great for someone else ;)

The fun part about business is the raw challenge of having to face SO many important decisions. It’s not that these are simply a sea of inch-deep and mile-wide decisions, but truly miles deep and wide. It’s like drilling for oil. Look at the decisions you have to make today: you can create a new product, you can re brand your old one, you can expand or change your target audience, you can hire at a low or high wage, you can school or buy books, you can buy books from well established authors or fringe insightful ones, you can get take funding from the big guy, go find a few small guys, or bring your product to market and self fund. I faced all those this month! There is seemingly no clear path. Ambiguity!

To illustrate, consider Microsoft and the Zune. You have to ask yourself, with the billions they spend in R&D, don’t you think some important decision makers in the Microsoft team thought “hmmm, we could make mp3 players much better”, even before the iPod? I am sure of it. However, they didn’t release their mp3 until 5 years AFTER the iPod.

The sea of ambiguity takes style, and intuition to navigate. Microsoft lives in the same world that Mac does, and with way more capital, but the didn’t display the clarity of mind. Maybe all their market research is hurting them! Steve Job’s isn’t big on market research for a reason. I don’t think he is any type of strategic genius, just a great sense of what he wants.

Interestingly, Warren Buffet dealt with ambiguity by lessening it. When living in New York he told reporters he had 100 ideas a day come across his desk, when he only wanted a good one every year. That’s why he moved back to his home town of Omaha. Not a bad system.

Look at so many large companies today that started of with such clarity. Some still have it, others don’t. Ford was maligned for doubling employer wages and cutting hours. That move shortly double Ford’s income. Though, they don’t seem to display that same clarity now don’t you think?

The Success Commandment prevails: Thrive in Ambiguity. Enjoy the sea of decisions miles deep and wide, and know what you want out of it. The folks that can’t will never be seen as powerful leaders.

Grady Booch, a brainbreacher in the software architecture world, put such importance on a programmer’s ability to abstract properly. You can listen to the wonderful podcast by following the link at the end of this article. Booch describes how all complex systems are broken down to become simple through abstraction. Think of abstraction as organizing information. As wikipedia puts it:

Abstraction is the process or result of generalization by reducing the information content of a concept or an observable phenomenon, typically in order to retain only information which is relevant for a particular purpose.

Have you ever soldered a circuit board? You wouldn’t be thinking of capacitors, resistors and ferrets when you are trying to enter a certain time into the microwave, even though they are involved. If you do, it might hinder your ability to judge the right time. McConnell (book) says maintaining different levels of abstraction and allowing modules only to only communicate to other modules in their strata is called Stratification in software engineering. Perfectly termed! Think of the strata of the sky with it’s troposphere, mesosphere .etc.

Now the ability to abstract, and the importance of recognizing when to abstract is critical for programmers. If your engineer can’t create software with clean and well thought out stratification, you will soon find a mess on your hands when your skilled engineers give you a piece of the their mind. This doesn’t mean if a fellow can abstract any way he will can be a good engineer; I have seen folks that can abstract up well, or down well, and not the other way. This creates problems. If your engineer can’t abstract up in the hierarchy of information, conversations can be very awkward, and design lacking. If they can’t abstract down to the complex, they will never get anything done.

One way to test this is good long technical conversations durring the initial interview. If they can make your nontechnical colleague understand how their system works, we might have some abstraction problems.

Links
Gary Booch podcast
Gary’s Blog
Code Complete 2