Whatcha Gonna Do With That Duck?: And Other Provocations, 2006-2012 (43 page)

B. As manufacturing skills increase (and information about them is exchanged), it means that your competition has as much ability to manufacture with quality as you do.

On the other hand, quality of design remains a fast-moving, judgment-based process in which supremacy is hard to reach and harder to maintain.

And yet organizations often focus obsessively on manufacturing quality. Easier to describe, easier to measure, easier to take on as a group. It’s essential, it’s just not as important as it used to be.

If we put a number on it, people will try to make the number go up.

Now that everyone is a marketer, many people are looking for a
louder megaphone, a chance to talk about their work, their career, their product … and social media looks like the ideal soapbox, a free opportunity to shout to the masses.

But first, we’re told to make that number go up. Increase the number of fans, friends, and followers, so your shouts will be heard. The problem, of course, is that
more noise is not better noise
.

In Corey’s words, the conventional, broken wisdom is:

• Follow a ton of people to get people to follow back.
  
• Focus on the number of followers, not on the interests of followers or your relationship with them.
  
• Pump links through the social platform (take your pick, or do them all!).
  
• Offer nothing of value, and no context.
  This is a megaphone, not a telephone
  .
  
• Think you’re winning, because you’re playing video games (highest follower count wins!).
  

This activity looks like winning (the numbers are going up!), but it’s actually a double-edged form of losing. First, you’re polluting a powerful space, turning signals into noise and bringing down the level of discourse for everyone. And second, you’re wasting your time when you could be building a tribe instead, could be earning permission, could be creating a channel where your voice is welcomed.

Leadership (even idea leadership) scares many people, because it requires you to own your words, to do work that matters. The alternative is to be a junk dealer.

Game theory pushes us in one of two directions:

Either be better at pump-and-dump than anyone else, get your numbers into the millions, outmass those that choose to use mass, and always dance at the edge of spam (in which the number of those you offend or turn off forever keeps increasing),
or

Relentlessly focus. Prune your message and your list, and build a reputation that’s worth owning and an audience that cares.

Only one of these strategies builds an asset of value.

Not a secret, often overlooked:

“Keep your promises.”

If you say you’ll show up every day at 8
A.M
., do so. Every day.

If you say your service is excellent, make it so.

If circumstances or priorities change, well then, invest to change them back. Or tell the truth, and mean it.

If traffic might be bad, plan for it.

Is there
actually
unusually heavy call volume? Really?

Want a bigger brand? Make bigger promises. And keep them.

The purpose of an elevator pitch isn’t to close the sale.

The goal isn’t even to give a short, accurate, Wikipedia-standard description of you or your project.

And the idea of using vacuous, vague words to craft a bland mission statement is dumb.

No, the purpose of an elevator pitch is to describe a situation or solution so compelling that the person you’re with wants to hear more even after the elevator ride is over.

But bravery does.

The challenge of maintaining work/life balance is a relatively new one, and it is an artifact of a world where you get paid for showing up, paid for hours spent, paid for working.

In that world, it’s clearly an advantage to have a team that spends more time than the competition does. One way to get ahead as a freelancer or a factory worker of any kind (even a consultant at Deloitte) is simply to put in more hours. After all, that makes you more productive, if we define productivity as output per dollar spent.

But people have discovered that after hour 24, there are no more hours left. Suddenly, you can’t get ahead by outworking the other guy, because both of you are already working as hard as Newtonian physics will permit.

Just in time, the economy is now rewarding art and innovation and guts. It’s rewarding brilliant ideas executed with singular direction by aligned teams on behalf of truly motivated customers. None of which is measured on the clock.

John Cage doesn’t work more hours than you. Neither does Carole Greider. Work/life balance is a silly idea, just as work/food balance or work/breathing balance is. It’s not really up to you after a certain point. Instead of sneaking around the edges, you might find that it pays to cut your hours in half but take the intellectual risks and do the emotional labor you’re capable of.

Advertisers struggle to be heard through the noise. Customer service reps, on the other hand, can whisper.

A few organizations have figured out how to turn customer service into a marketing opportunity and thus a profit center. They figure that if they’ve got your attention, if they’re talking to you at a moment when you care a great deal, they can turn that into an opportunity to delight. And being delighted is remarkable and worth talking about.

That means that if your organization has a “stall, deny, and avoid” policy when it comes to customer interaction, you will almost certainly be defeated if a competitor comes up with a scalable way to delight.

Overseas call centers and online chats handled by untrained workers with no incentives seem like clever ways to cut costs during stressful times. What they actually are, are
scalable engines of annoyance
, time-sucking processes that raise expectations and then totally dash them. Better to not even have a phone number. (You can’t call Google, but you don’t
want
to call Adobe. Which one generates more animus—the inability to call, or the unfulfilled promise of respect and thoughtful help?)

Or consider: some airlines are starting to realize that a delayed or
cancelled flight is actually a chance to earn some remarkability. In the two hours that someone is stranded, he is paying very careful attention to your brand. What are you (the airlines) doing? Notifying stranded customers by email that the flight is late, offering them free Wi-Fi, even giving them a link to a free book or movie online—none of that costs more than caring. All of those actions are important opportunities to be heard and remembered.

Investing in delight via customer service is cheap to experiment with and easy to prove. Just siphon off 1% of your calls to a trained person who actually cares and wants to help—and see what happens to customer satisfaction and word of mouth. Cancel a few TV ads and you can pay for it—soon it will pay for itself.

Bring forward a new idea or technology that disrupts business as usual and demands a response.

Change pricing dramatically.

Redefine a service as a product (or vice versa).

Organize the disorganized, connect the disconnected.

Radically alter the speed to market.

Change the infrastructure, the rules, or the flow of information.

Give away what used to be expensive and charge for something else.

Cater to the weird, bypassing the masses.

Take the lead on ethics.

(Or you could just wait for someone to tell you what they want you to do.)

If you have a list of 1,000 subscribers or 5,000 fans or 10,000 supporters, you have a choice to make.

You can create stories and options and benefits that naturally spread from this group to their friends, and your core group can multiply, with 5,000 growing to 10,000 and then 100,000.

Or you can put the group through a sales funnel, weed out the free
riders, and monetize the rest. A 5% conversion rate means you just turned 5,000 interested people into 250 paying customers.

Multiplying scales. Dividing helps you make this quarter’s numbers.

The road to the bottom is paved with good intentions or, at the very least, clever rationalizations.

National Geographic goes into a cable TV partnership and ends up broadcasting shameless (shameful? same thing) reality shows, then justifies it as a way to make money to pay for the good stuff.

Restaurants serve chicken fingers to their guests’ kids, because it’s the only thing they’ll eat.

Some comedians give up their best work in exchange for jokes that everyone will get.

Brands extend their products or dumb down their offerings or slap their names on inferior substitutes, all in the name of reaching the masses.

And that’s the problem with the shortcut. You trade in your reputation (another word for brand) in exchange for a short-term boost of awareness or profit, but then you have neither. Yes, you can have a blog that follows every rule of blogging and SEO, but no, it won’t be a blog we’ll miss if it’s gone.

Should Harley-Davidson make a scooter?

Yes, you can pander, and if you’re a public company and have promised an infinite growth curve, you may very well have to. But if you want to build a reputation that lasts, if you want to be the voice that some (not all!) in the market seek out, the opportunity to appeal to everyone is nothing but a trap, a test to see if you can resist short-term greed long enough to build something that matters.

Let’s assert that there are two kinds of jobs you need to fill.

The first kind of job is a cog job. A job where you need someone to perform a measurable task and to follow instructions. This can range from stuffing envelopes to performing blood tests. It’s a profitable task if the person is productive, and you need to find a reliable, skilled person to do what you need.

The second kind of job requires insight and creativity. This job relies on someone doing something you could never imagine in advance, producing outcomes better than you had hoped for. This might include a sales job, or someone rearranging the factory floor to increase productivity. It could also include a skilled craftsperson or even a particularly skilled receptionist.

If you’re hiring for the first kind of job, exactly why are you sitting a nervous candidate down in your office and asking her to put on some sort of demonstration of her ability to interact with strangers under pressure? Why do you care what his suit looks like or whether or not he can look you in the eye?

Years ago, in order to keep the ethnic balance at Harvard the way some trustees felt was correct, the school created interviews and essays as a not-so-subtle way to weed out the undesirables. This practice spread
to just about every college in the country, and persists to this day, even though it’s a largely discredited way to determine anything. Your company is probably doing exactly the same thing. If someone can do the cog job, what other information are you looking for? Why?

And if you’re hiring for the second kind of job, the question becomes even more interesting. Would you marry someone based on a one-hour interview in a singles bar? And how does repeating the forced awkwardness of an interview across your entire team help you choose which people are going to do the extraordinary work you’re banking on?

I’ve been to thousands of job interviews (thankfully as an interviewer mostly) and I have come to the conclusion that the entire effort is a waste of time.

At least half the interview finds the interviewer giving an unplanned and not very good overview of what the applicant should expect from this job. Unlike most of the marketing communications the organization does, this spiel is unvetted, unnatural, and unmeasured. No one has ever sat down and said, “When we say X, is it likely that the applicant understands what we mean? Are we putting our best foot forward? Does it make it more likely that the right people will want to work here, for the right reasons?” [Tell the truth: Do you test your job interview spiel the same way you test your Web results or even your direct mail?]

The other half of the interview is dedicated to figuring out whether the applicant is good at job interviews or not.

I should have learned this lesson in 1981, when my partner and I (and three of our managers) hired Susan, who was perhaps the best interviewer I have ever met. And one of the worst employees we ever hired. Too bad we didn’t have a division that sold interviews.

Let me be clear about what I’m recommending: the next time someone asks you to “sit in” on an interview, just say no. Don’t do it. Don’t waste your time or theirs.

So, what should you do instead?

Glad you asked!

First, none of this will work if you’re not offering a great job at a great company for fair pay. These techniques will not succeed if you are the employer of last resort. Assuming that’s not the case, how about this:

Every applicant gets a guided tour of your story. Maybe from a
website or lens or DVD. Maybe from one person in your organization who is really good at this. It might mean a plant tour or watching an interview with the CEO. It might involve spending an hour sitting in one of your stores or following one of your doctors around on her rounds. But it’s a measurable event, something you can evaluate after the process is over. If you’re hiring more than a few people a week, clearly it’s worth having a full-time person to do this task and do it well.

There are no
one-on-one-sit-in-my-office-and-let’s-talk
interviews. Boom, you just saved seven hours per interview. Instead, spend those seven hours actually doing the work. Put the person on a team and have a brainstorming session, or design a widget or make some espressos together. If you want to hire a copywriter, do some copywriting. Send back some edits and see how they’re received.