Whatcha Gonna Do With That Duck?: And Other Provocations, 2006-2012 (10 page)

Which should you take?

In a surprisingly large number of cases, we take the stereo, even though we’d never buy a nice stereo at home, or we choose to “go with our heart because college is so important” and pick the expensive college. (This is, of course, a good choice to have to make, as most people can’t possibly find the money.)

Here’s one reason we mess up: money is just a number.

Comparing dreams of a great stereo (four years of driving long distances, listening to great music!) compared with the daily reminder of our cheapness makes picking the better stereo feel easier. After all, we’re not giving up anything but a number.

The college case is even more clear: $200,000 is a number that’s big, sure, but it doesn’t have much substance. It’s not a number we play with or encounter very often. The feeling about the story of a compromise involving something tied up in our self-esteem, though, that feeling is something we deal with daily.

Here’s how to undo the self-marketing.
Stop using numbers
.

You can have the stereo if you give up going to Starbucks every workday for the next year and a half. Worth it?

If you go to the free school, you can drive there in a brand-new Mini convertible, and every summer you can spend $25,000 on a top-of-the-line internship/experience, and you can create a jazz series and pay your favorite musicians to come to campus to play for you and your fifty coolest friends, and you can have Herbie Hancock give you piano lessons and you can still have enough money left over to live without debt for a year after you graduate while you look for the perfect gig.

Suddenly, you’re not comparing “this is my dream” with a number that means very little. You’re comparing one version of your dream with another version.

… then you’ve handed control of your happiness to the gatekeepers, built a system that doesn’t scale, and prevented yourself from doing the brave work that leads to a quantum leap.

The industrial system and the marketing regime adore the mindset of “a little bit more, please,” because it furthers their power. A slightly higher paycheck, a slightly more famous college, an incrementally better car—it’s easy to be seduced by this safe, stepwise progress, and if marketers and bosses can make you feel dissatisfied at every step along the way, even better for them.

Their rules, their increments, and you are always on a treadmill, unhappy today, imagining that the answer lies just over the next hill.

All the data shows us that the people on that hill are just as frustrated as the people on your hill. It demonstrates that the people at that
college are just as envious as the people at this college. The never-ending cycle (no surprise) never ends.

An alternative is to be happy wherever you are, with whatever you’ve got, but always hungry for the thrill of creating art, of being missed if you’re gone, and, most of all, of doing important work.

Accept applause, sure, please do.

But when you
expect
applause, when you do your work in order to get (and because of) applause, you have sold yourself short. That’s because your work is depending on something out of your control. You have given away part of your art. If your work is filled with the hope and longing for applause, it’s no longer your work—the dependence on approval has corrupted it, turned it into a process in which you are striving for ever more approval.

Who decides if your work is good? When you are at your best, you do. If the work doesn’t deliver on its purpose, if the pot you made leaks or the hammer you forged breaks, then you should learn to make a better one. But we don’t blame the nail for breaking the hammer, or the water for leaking from the pot. They are part of the system, just as the market embracing your product is part of marketing.

“Here, here it is, it’s finished.”

If it’s finished, the applause, the thanks, the gratitude are something else. Something extra and not part of what you created. If you play a beautiful song for two people or a thousand, it’s the same song, and the amount of thanks you receive isn’t part of that song.

I don’t think winners beat the competition because they work harder. And it’s not even clear that they win because they have more creativity. The secret, I think, is in understanding what matters.

It’s not obvious, and it changes. It changes by culture, by buyer, by product, and even by the day of the week. But those who manage to
capture the imagination, make sales, and grow are doing it by perfecting the things that matter and
ignoring the rest
.

Both parts are difficult, particularly when you are surrounded by people who insist on fretting about and working on the stuff that makes no difference at all.

Every business encounters angry people. Not disappointed or confused, but actually angry. Here are a few steps you might want to try:

• Acknowledge the anger. You don’t have to agree with it, but in order to have a chance at making it go away, you need to empathize with the person’s anger.
  You cannot sell something (even a solution) to, nor can you negotiate with, an angry person.
  
• Talk more quietly and more slowly than the person you’re talking with. Not an exaggerated mantra, but just enough that you will be de-escalating, not escalating.
  
• Ask the person what it will take to help them not be angry. Repeat what they’re asking for, in your own words.
  
• Ask them if that will not only solve their problem, but give your organization a chance to delight them.
  
• If no, then ask again what it will take. (But only once. You’ll settle for a benign grudge if you can get one.)
  

[It’s important to note that so far I haven’t asked you to give them anything or to actually agree with their point of view. Just to understand
it and recognize it. You cannot negotiate with an angry person. Doesn’t work.]

• Now, summarize. Human to human, not as a manipulator or someone following a list of steps read on a blog. “Sue, I’m really sorry you’re upset. I can imagine that having one of our room service people walk into your room at 11
  P.M.
  , uninvited, and wake you up before a big conference could cost you a lot of sleep and really ruin your visit with us. It sounds like you’re hoping for an apology from our manager and a waiver of our Internet fee as a way of showing you we really blew it. Would that help?”
  

Bingo. You’ve changed the dynamic. You’ve made it clear which side of the discussion you’re on. You haven’t set any expectations, but you’ve built a connection.

At this point, you have two options. You can describe what you CAN do, right now, in an attempt to make it up to the person. Or you can ask for time and promise to get back to the person after you’ve checked in with the higher-ups.

It’s entirely possible that the steps above won’t work. It’s entirely possible that Sue is so angry she’ll never, ever return to your hotel again. That’s okay. You did what you could … but more important, you didn’t waste a lot of time and emotion and energy trying to solve a problem that’s not solvable.

The manager of the Chase Bank in Pleasantville parks right out front. Her branch is on a quiet street with parking meters available for customers to use. Figure there are perhaps a dozen spaces convenient enough to make it worth going to the bank; if they’re full, keep on driving, because there’s always another bank coming up soon.

And yet, the manager parks right out front (in fact, I saw her move her car from two spaces away to an even closer spot today). She has four or five people working in the branch, so if they follow her lead, that’s half the spaces.

Of course, it’s a far bigger issue than parking spaces. It’s about eating lunch with your employees, handing out free samples to customers instead of to your friends, or answering the phone yourself when Customer Service gets backed up.

I’m increasingly coming to the conclusion that there are really only two attitudes that people bring to work with them. Either they park right out front, or they park down the street in order to send a signal to their staff, their customers, and themselves.

Most marketing (and most business) is usually like this:

Do
this
and get
that.

Figure out what you want, figure out what you need to do to get it, and go do it.

I was thinking about the way my Dad does business the other day. He’s been a successful executive (and then entrepreneur) for more than 50 years. I realized that I can’t remember one time when he did
this
to get
that.

When he volunteered to run the United Way or the local theater, or when he helped a local church raise money for a new building, he didn’t have an ulterior motive. When he negotiated with the UAW to create a different sort of workforce structure for his plant, it wasn’t so he could get more. It was so they could get more. Same thing when he helped dozens of people emigrate from the Soviet Union a few decades ago.

It’s been a consistent approach, and it sure seems to work. Consistent as in all the time, not just when it’s convenient. It works for a factory in Buffalo (HARD Manufacturing Co.), but it also seems to work for others—for successful marketers all over the world. Now, more than ever, it’s easier to give even when it seems like you’re not going to get. The happy irony is that this turns out to be a very effective marketing approach, even though that’s not the point.

Word of mouth comes directly from expectations.

Low expectations are a terrific shortcut, because when you exceed them, people are so amazed that they can’t help but talk about it.

But low expectations are dangerous, because if you fly too low, you’re invisible. Worse, when people expect little of you, they often don’t bother listening at all.

So most of the time, you’re challenged with this: high expectations that must be beat.

Broadway shows. Apple products. Expensive consulting services. Promise big and deliver bigger seems to be the only reliable strategy.

One of the luxuries of being in a low-cost business or in having access to capital is that you can scale quickly. You can go from one salesperson to a hundred, one store to twenty, no franchises to a thousand.

In our rush to scale, sometimes we forget something essential: if it doesn’t work when you’ve got one, it’s extremely unlikely to work when you have dozens.

If a political candidate can’t sway the audience with one speech, how will doing the speech across the district do anything but waste time?

If a direct-mail letter doesn’t work when you mail it to a hundred people, it won’t work any better when you mail it to a thousand.

All a roundabout way of saying that you get big dividends when you obsess about that tiny moment when someone decides to buy. Rejiggering or even overhauling a single example of what you do is almost always a better way to spend your time than is trying to double the number of places you do what you do.

If you didn’t want anything in return, nothing at all, what’s the most generous thing you could do for your best customer, your best friend, your most important prospect?

Give it a try.

Treating different customers differently is important.

Customers actually like it if you do it right. People in coach don’t mind the folks in first class getting more service, because they’d like to be there one day. (Or because they like the fact that the people paying too much for a fancy seat are subsidizing their flight.) People at nightclubs like watching celebrities being whisked to the front of the line, because it reinforces their belief that they’re at a special place.

The trouble kicks in not when you treat different people differently but if it’s random or unfair or unpredictable.

When Steve Jobs gave a $200 discount to the late adopters of the iPhone, the early adopters were incensed. They were being treated differently, but in the wrong way. My guess is that his $100 store credit and personal note helped a great deal, but it also cost about $20 million in profit. If Apple had thought it through, Jobs could have offered any of the following (and done it during the presentation he did of the new products):

• Free exclusive ringtones, commissioned from Bob Dylan and U2, available only to the people who already had a phone. (This is my favorite because it announces to your friends—every time the phone rings—that you got in early.)
  
• A free pass to get to the head of the line the next time a new hot product comes out.
  
• The ability to buy a specially colored iPod, or an iPod with limited-edition music, that no one else can buy.
  

The key is not to give price protection to early buyers (that’s unsustainable as a business model) but to make them feel more exclusive, not less.

As for being capricious, consider the U.S. Open. The Open doesn’t allow spectators to bring in backpacks of any size—IF the straps are padded. They don’t announce this rule, and they enforce it somewhat randomly.

If it were really a security issue, they’d have to enforce it completely. If it’s just a silly policy that someone dreamed up one day, it’s sure to annoy people. Because it’s irrational. Because it’s not enforced in a way that makes sense.

So yes, treat different customers differently. The more the better, actually. But do it consistently and in a way that your customers respect and understand.

I don’t know French. I can’t play the piano. I have no clue how to catch a bony spinefish. This is the first kind of “don’t know.” Stuff you don’t know because you haven’t been taught it yet. Books are awfully good at solving this problem; so are good teachers.

The second kind of “don’t know” is often confused with the first type, but it’s really quite different. This is the person who says that they don’t know how to cook or that they can’t balance a checkbook. This isn’t about technique or a lack of knowledge. It’s usually either fear or lack of interest. People with this type of deficit won’t find the answer in a book or (usually) in a seminar, either. You don’t learn how to cook from a cookbook.