Whatcha Gonna Do With That Duck?: And Other Provocations, 2006-2012 (14 page)

When it comes down to decisions that matter, your town, every town, is far more likely to support the one who has moved in, put down roots, and contributed than it is to rush to whatever bright, shiny object shows up for a few days before moving on.

The happy theory of business ethics is this: do the right thing and you will also maximize your long-term profit.

After all, the thinking goes, doing the right thing builds your brand, burnishes your reputation, helps you attract better staff, and gives back to the community, the very community that will in turn buy from you. Do all of that and of course you’ll make more money. Problem solved.

The unhappy theory of business ethics is this: you have a fiduciary responsibility to maximize profit. Period. To do anything other than that is to cheat your investors. And in a competitive world, you don’t have much wiggle room here.

If you would like to believe in business ethics, the unhappy theory is a huge problem.

As the world gets more complex, as it gets harder to see the long term given the huge short-term bets that are made, as business gets less transparent (“which company made that, exactly?”), and as the web of interactions makes it harder for any one person to stand up and take responsibility, the happy theory begins to fall apart. After all, if the long-term effects of a decision today can’t possibly have any impact on the profit of this project (which will end in six weeks), then it’s difficult to argue that maximizing profit and doing the right thing are aligned. The local store gets very little long-term profit for its good behavior if it goes out of business before the long term arrives.

It comes down to this:
only people can have ethics
. Ethics, as in doing the right thing for the community even though it might not benefit you or your company financially. Pointing to the numbers (or to the boss) is an easy refuge for someone who would like to duck the issue, but the fork in the road is really clear. Either you do work you are proud of, or you
work to make the maximum amount of money. (It would be nice if those goals overlapped every time, but they rarely do.)

“I just work here” is the worst sort of ethical excuse. I’d rather work with a company filled with ethical people than try to find a company that’s ethical. In fact, companies we think of as ethical got that way because ethical people made them so.

I worry that we absolve ourselves of responsibility when we talk about business ethics and corporate social responsibility. Corporations are collections of people, and we ought to insist that those people (that would be us) do the right thing. Business is too powerful for us to leave our humanity at the door of the office.
It’s not business, it’s personal
.

[I learned this lesson from my Dad. Every single day he leads by example, building a career and a company based on taking personal responsibility, not on blaming the heartless, profit-focused system.]

We’re all looking for someone to trust. People and institutions that will do what they say and say what they mean.

Banks used to use marble pillars and armed guards to make it clear that our money was safe. Doctors put diplomas on the wall and wear white smocks. Institutions and relationships don’t work without trust. It’s not an accident that a gold standard in business is being able to do business on a handshake.

Today, though, it’s easier than ever to build a facade of trust but not actually deliver. “Read the fine print,” the financial institutions, cruise ship operators, and business partners tell us after they’ve failed to honor what we thought they promised.

It’s incredibly difficult to build a civil society on the back of “read the fine print.”
Emptor fidem
works so much better than caveat emptor. When we have to spend all our time watching our backs and working with lawyers, it’s far more challenging to get anything done—and it makes building a business and a brand infinitely more difficult.

The question that needs to be asked by the marketer is, “are we doing this to create the appearance of trust, or is this actually something trustworthy, something we’re proud to do?”

Building trust is expensive. You can call it an expense or an investment, or merely cut corners and work on trustiness instead.

Trust is built when no one is looking, when you think you have the option of cutting corners and when you find a loophole. Trustiness is what happens when you use trust as a PR tool.

The difference should be obvious. Trust experienced is remarkable; trustiness, once discovered, leaves a bad taste for even your most valued customers.

The perverse irony is this: the more you work on your trustiness, the harder you fall once people discover that they were tricked.

(With a hat tip to Stephen Colbert.)

Another is to be the sort of person who is missed when you’re not.

The first involves making noise. The second involves making a difference.

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.

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 sees you and likes 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 who had 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.

Great surgeons don’t need to be respectful or to have a talented, kind, or alert front-desk staff. They’re great at the surgery part, and you’re not here for the service, you’re here to get well (if you believe that the surgery
part is what matters). In fact, gruffness might be a clue to their skill for some people.

Great opera singers don’t have to be reasonable or kind. They sing like no one else—that’s why you hired them, and why they get to (are expected to) act like divas. Get over it.

So the thinking goes.

The traditional scarcity model implied some sort of inverse relationship between service and quality. Not for service businesses like hotels, of course, but for the other stuff. If someone was truly gifted, of course they didn’t have the time or focus to also be kind or reasonable or good at understanding your needs. A diva was great partly because, we decided, she was a jerk.

I think that’s changing, possibly forever, for a bunch of reasons:

• The state of the art is now easier to find. Word spreads about behavior and service faster than ever. As a result, customers quickly become aware of what a raw deal they’re getting from this supposedly gifted individual.
  
• It’s so much easier to deliver better service (Dr. Diva, please send me an email if you’re running late!) that we’re far less forgiving.
  
• Since just about any intelligent and caring person can use technology and a bit of humility to deliver better service (see above), we start to wonder whether that diva provider actually is intelligent and caring. And if he isn’t, it doesn’t really matter if he has some sort of skill, because uncaring hands are worth avoiding.
  
• With fewer great gigs available (even in opera), it’s not so easy to act like a jerk (or be insulated and uncaring) and still get work.
  

Care.

Care more than you need to, more often than expected, more completely than the other guy.

No one reports liking Steve Jobs very much, yet he was as embraced
as any businessperson since Walt Disney. Because he cared. He cared deeply about what he was making and how it would be used. Of course, he didn’t just care in a general, amorphous, whiny way; he cared and then actually delivered.

Politicians are held in astonishingly low esteem. Congress in particular is setting record lows in approval ratings, but it’s an endemic problem. The reason? Members of Congress consistently act as if they don’t care. They don’t care about their peers, certainly, and as we see by their actions, apparently they don’t care about us. Money first.

Many salespeople face a similar problem—perhaps because for years they’ve used a shallow version of caring as a marketing technique to boost their commissions. One report by the National Association of Realtors found that more than 90% of all home owners are never again contacted by their real estate agent after the contracts for the home are signed. Why bother … there’s no money in it, just the possibility of complaints. Well, the reason is obvious—you’d come by with cookies and intros to the neighbors if you cared.

Economists tell us that the reason to care is that it increases customer retention, profitability, and brand value. For me, though, that’s beside the point (and even counter to the real goal). Caring gives you a compass, a direction to head in, and most of all, a reason to do the work you do in the first place.

Care More
.

It’s only two words, but it’s hard to think of a better mantra for the organization that is smart enough to understand the core underpinning of their business, as well as one in search of a reason for being. No need to get all tied up in subcycles of “this leads to this which leads to that so therefore I care …” Instead, there’s the opportunity to follow the direct and difficult road of someone who truly cares about what’s being made and who it is for.

But of course, you’re not.

And this is the most important component of strategic marketing: we’re not our customers.

Empathy isn’t dictated to us by a focus group or a statistical analysis. Empathy is the powerful (and rare) ability to imagine what motivates someone else to act.

When a politician or a pundit vilifies someone for her actions, he’s missed the point, because all he can do is imagine what he would do in that situation, completely avoiding an opportunity to see the world through someone else’s eyes, to try on a new worldview, to attempt to imagine the circumstances that would lead to any action other than the one he would take.

When a teacher can’t see why a student is stuck, or when an interface designer dismisses the 12% of the users who can’t find the “off” switch, we’re seeing a failure of empathy, not a flaw in the user base.

When we call a prospect stupid for not choosing us, when we resort to blunt promotional tactics to get attention we could have earned with a more graceful approach—these are the symptoms that we’ve forgotten how to be empathetic.

You don’t have to wear panty hose to be a great brand manager at L’eggs, nor do you need to be unemployed to work on a task force on getting people back to work. What is required, though, is a persistent effort to understand how other people see the world, and to care about it.

Five thousand years ago, every human was a hunter. If you were hungry, you got a rock or a stick and you went hunting.

The problem was that all of the animals were either dead or really good at hiding.

Fortunately, we discovered/invented the idea of farming. Plant seeds, fertilize ’em, water ’em, watch ’em grow, and then you harvest them.

The idea spread and it led to the birth of civilization.

Everyone got the idea … except for marketers.

Marketers still like to hunt.

What we’re discovering, though, is that the good prospects are getting really good at hiding.

Stop!

Please?!

Fact: about half the visitors to your website leave after less than five seconds.

Fact: the percentage that spend less than that on your ad or your packaging is even greater.

Two choices:

grab the quickie browsers FAST and turn them into interested prospects (somehow);

or

ignore them and realize that you get a chance to talk to only those people who are going to stay for more than five seconds anyway. The rest of the population is ignoring you; don’t let them distract you from your real mission, which is to amplify interest, not create it.