Whatcha Gonna Do With That Duck?: And Other Provocations, 2006-2012 (41 page)

The thing is, if you promise very little, you don’t get a chance to deliver because I’ll ignore you. And if you promise too much, you don’t get a chance to deliver, because I won’t believe you.

Hence the paradox. The more you promise, the less likely you are to achieve delight and the less likely you are to earn the trust to get the gig in the first place. Salespeople often want you to allow them to overpromise, because it gets them through the RFP. Marketers, if they’re smart, will push you (the CEO) to underpromise, since that’s where the word of mouth is going to come from.

I have worked with someone who is very good at the promising part. She enjoys it. And when the promises don’t work out, she’s always ready with the perfect excuse. This is a great strategy if you have a regular job and the excuses are really terrific, but if you need internal or external clients, it gets old pretty fast. It certainly doesn’t lead to the sort of word of mouth one is eager to encounter.

Surgeons have this problem all the time. They promise a complete, pain-free recovery and work hard to build up a positive expectation,
particularly for elective surgery. And the entire time you’re in bed, in pain, unable to pee, all you can do is hate on the doctor.

This is one reason why recovering from failure is such a great opportunity. If you or your organization fail and then you pull out all the stops to recover or make good, the expectation/delivery gap is huge. You don’t win because you did a good job; you win because you so dramatically exceeded expectations.

When you sit down to dream up a new business, you can imagine a world without constraints. Or you can choose to build in fundamental pieces that will make it more likely that your idea will pay off.

Here are some fundamental pieces of most new successful businesses. The goal is to build these elements into the very nature of the business itself, not just to tack them on. For example, the Scotch Tape people at 3M can’t do item #5 in the list below because of the structure of retail distribution and the way they mass-produce and can’t track who is buying what.

You can live without some of these pieces, but go in with your eyes open if you do:

1. Build in virality. Consider: Groupon.
   
2. Don’t sell a product that can be purchased cheaper at Amazon.
   
3. Subscriptions beat one-off sales.
   
4. Try to create an environment where your customers are happier when there are other customers doing business with you (see #1).
   
5. Treat different customers differently.
   
6. Generate joy; don’t just satisfy a need for a commodity.
   
7. Rely on unique individuals, not an easily copied system.
   
8. Plan on remarkable experiences, not remarkable ads.
   
9. Don’t build a fortress of secrets; bet on open.
   
10. Unless there’s a differentiating business reason, use off-the-shelf software and cheap cloud storage.
    
11. The asset of the future is the embrace of a tribe, not a cheaper widget.
    
12. Match expenses to cash flow—don’t run out of money, because it’s no longer 1999.
    
13. Create scarcity, but act with abundance. Free samples create demand for the valuable (but not unlimited) tier you offer.
    
14. Tell a story, erect a mythology, walk the walk.
    
15. Plan on obsolescence (of your products, not your customers).
    

Notes:

3. The cost of selling a subscription to your product or service is not a lot higher than the cost of selling just one instance, but you benefit by having sales you can count on at low cost. Your customers benefit because you depend on them more and they save time.

5. Everyone has different needs and expectations and resources. The Internet lets you tell people apart and give them what they need.

7. AKA as linchpins.

9. If you’re building a business based on trade secrets or lack of information among your customers, you’re trying to fill a leaky bucket. Far easier to bet on the idea that the more people know, the better you do.

10. Cheap software and the cloud are going to continue to get cheaper, and custom work that’s worth anything is going to continue to get more expensive.

12. The best people to fund your growth are your customers.

13. When the marginal cost of an interaction approaches zero, you benefit by creating plenty of interactions.

14. We can tell.

When a popular rock group comes to town, some of their fans won’t get great tickets. Not enough room in the front row. Now they’re annoyed. Two percent of them are angry enough to speak up or bad-mouth or write an angry letter.

When Disney changes a policy and offers a great new feature or
benefit to the most dedicated fans, 2% of them won’t be able to use it, because of timing or transport or resources or whatever. They’re angry and they let the brand know it.

Do the math. Every time Apple delights 10,000 people, they hear from 200 angry customers, people who don’t like the change or the opportunity or the risk it represents.

If you have fans or followers or customers, no matter what you do, you’ll annoy or disappoint 2% of them. And you’ll probably hear a lot more from the unhappy 2% than from the delighted 98%.

It seems as though there are only two ways to deal with this: stop innovating and just stagnate; or go ahead and delight the vast majority.

Sure, you can try to minimize the cost of change, and you might even get the number down to 1%. But if you try to delight everyone, all the time, you’ll just make yourself crazy. Or become boring.

The law of the Internet is simple: either you do something I can’t do myself (or get from someone else), or I pay you less than you’d like.

Why else would it be any other way?

Twenty years ago, self-publishing a record was difficult and expensive. A big label could get you shelf space at Tower easily; you couldn’t. A big label could pay for a recording session with available capital, but it was difficult for you to find the money or take the risk. A big label could reach the dozens of music reviewers, and do it with credibility. Hard for you to do that yourself.

Now?

Now when someone comes to a successful musician and says, “we’ll take 90% and you do all the work,” they’re opening the door to an uncomfortable conversation. The label has no assets, just desire. That’s great, but that’s exactly what the musician has, and giving up so much pie (and control over his destiny) hardly seems like a fair trade.

Multiply this by a thousand industries and a billion freelancers and you come to one inescapable conclusion: be better, be different, or be cheaper. And the last is no fun.

Two things are always not true:

Everyone likes this.

No one likes this.

Sorry.

If you try to please everyone, the few you don’t delight will either ruin your day or ruin your sense of what sort of product you should make.

And if you believe the critic who insists that no one is going to like what you made, you will walk away from a useful niche.

One other thing: sometimes it’s easy to confuse “the small cadre of people I want to impress because my ego demands that this ‘in’ group is important” with “everyone.” They’re not the same.

It’s unreasonable to get out of bed on a snow day, when school has been cancelled, and turn the downtime into six hours of work on an extra-credit physics lab.

It’s unreasonable to launch a technology product that jumps the development curve by nine months, bringing the next generation out much earlier than more reasonable competitors would.

It’s unreasonable for a trucking company to answer the phone on the first ring.

It’s unreasonable to start a new company without the reassurance that venture capital funding can bring.

It’s unreasonable to expect a doctor’s office to have a pleasant and helpful front-desk staff.

It’s unreasonable to walk away from a good gig in today’s economy, even if you want to do something brave and original.

It’s unreasonable for teachers to expect that we can enable disadvantaged inner-city kids to do well in high school.

It’s unreasonable to treat your colleagues and competitors with respect, given the pressure you’re under.

It’s unreasonable to expect that anyone but a great woman, someone
with both drive and advantages, could do anything important in a world where the deck is stacked against ordinary folks.

It’s unreasonable to devote years of your life to making a product that most people will never appreciate.

Fortunately, the world is filled with unreasonable people. Unfortunately, you need to compete with them.

A motto for those doing work that matters:

“We can’t please everyone—in fact, we’re not even going to try.”

Or perhaps:

“Pleasing everyone with our work is impossible. It wastes the time of our best customers and annoys our staff. Forgive us for focusing on those we’re trying to delight.”

The math here is simple. As soon as you work hard to please everyone, you have no choice but to sand off the edges, pleasing some people
less
in order to please others a bit more. And it drives you crazy at the same time.

Here’s a little-spoken truth learned via crowdsourcing:

Most people don’t believe they are capable of initiative.

Initiating a project, a blog, a Wikipedia article, a family journey. Initiating something even when you’re not putatively in charge.

At the same time, almost all people believe they are capable of editing, giving feedback, or merely criticizing.

So finding people to fix your typos is easy.

A few people are vandals, happy to anonymously attack or add graffiti or useless noise.

If your project depends on having individuals step up and say, “This is what I believe, here is my plan, here is my original thought, here is my tribe,” then you need to expect that most people will see that offer and decline to take it.

Most of the edits on Wikipedia are tiny. Most of the tweets among
the billions that go by are reactions or possibly responses, not initiatives. Q&A sites flourish because everyone knows how to ask a question, and many people feel empowered to answer it, if it’s specific enough. Little tiny steps, not intellectual leaps or risks.

I have a controversial belief about this: I don’t think the problem has much to do with the innate ability to initiate. I think it has to do with believing that it’s possible and acceptable for you to do it. We’ve had these doors wide open for only a decade or so, and most people have been brainwashed into believing that their job is to copyedit the world, not to design it.

There’s a huge shortage … a shortage of people who will say “go.”

Every morning, the line of cars waiting to get onto the Hutchinson River Parkway exceeds 40. Of course, you don’t have to patiently wait—you can drive down the center lane, passing all the civilized suckers, and then, at the last moment, cut over.

Drivers hate this, and for good reason. The road is narrow, and your aggressive act didn’t help anyone but you. You slowed down the cars in the lane behind you, and your selfish behavior merely made 40 other people wait.

This is a different act than the contribution someone makes when she sees that everyone is patiently waiting to enter a building through a single door. She walks past everyone and opens a second door. Now, with two doors open, things start moving again, and she’s certainly earned her place at the front of that second entrance.

Too often, we’re persuaded that initiative and innovation and bypassing the status quo constitute some sort of line jumping, a selfish gaming of the zero-sum game. Most of the time it’s not. In fact, what you do when you solve an interesting problem is that you open a new door. Not only is that okay, but I think it’s actually a moral act.

Don’t wait your turn if waiting your turn is leaving doors unopened.

Do you let the facts get in the way of a good story?

What do you do with people who disagree with you? Do you call them names in order to shut them down?

Are you open to multiple points of view, or do you demand compliance and uniformity? [Bonus: Are you willing to walk away from a project or customer or employee who has values that don’t match yours?]

Is it okay if someone else gets the credit?

How often are you able to change your position?

Do you have a goal that can be reached in multiple ways?

If someone else can get us there faster, are you willing to let them?

No textbook answers … It’s easy to get tripped up by these. In fact, most leaders I know, do.

One way to approach your work: “I come in on time, even a little early. I do what the boss asks, a bit faster than she expects. I stay on time and on budget, and I’m hardworking and loyal.”

The other way: “What aren’t they asking me to do that I can do, learnfrom, make an impact on, and possibly fail (yet survive)? What’s not on my agenda that I can fight to put there? Whom can I frighten, what can I learn, how can I go faster, what sort of legacy am I creating?”

You might very well be doing a good job. But that doesn’t mean you’re a linchpin, the one we’ll miss. For that, you have to stop thinking about the job and start thinking about your platform, your point of view, and your mission.

It’s entirely possible that you work somewhere that gives you no option but to merely do a job. If that’s actually true, I wonder why someone with your potential would stay.

In the post-industrial revolution, the very nature of a job is outmoded. Doing a good job is no guarantee of security, advancement, or delight.

Here’s a ubiquitous food that succeeds because it’s precisely in the center, perfectly normal, exactly the regular kind. No kid whines about how weird Kraft Singles are.