Creating a customer obsessive culture

I read a post from Harvard Business recently that was so head spinning I have to share. I have subscribed to the HBR Ideacasts (easy to add to your iPod via iTunes) for a while and listen to them on my commute to work. They are both insightful and quick and easy to understand. I have access to their published components through work and the electronic lead ins provide a great way to focus on the stuff that actually matters.

An example of that is a post titled Why Zappos Pays New Employees to Quit - And You Should To. The idea of giving people a $1000 bonus to quit sounds absolutely insane when you first look at the surface of it. Especially when you consider the high cost of talent acquisition, nut then when you think a little deeper it starts to make sense.

The people who would take such a bonus and leave are people who are asking themselves the question of "what have I gotten myself into". They may be thinking, "this is all well and good but is this really for me?" In most situations when you start a new job you are so focused on pleasing everyone you hardly stop to think if the fit you thought was there really is. As an employer you are also focused on trying to make sure someone fits and gets all the opportunity to succeed they may need. The perception of someone leaving is so very negative that no one wants it.

By taking this approach Zappos short circuits all of those negative items. It becomes not just ok, but encouraged to consider your fit. It becomes not anathema but perfectly acceptable to call it quits when there is not a fit.

It may not be something that every company goes out and does right away (or potentially even should ever do) but I certainly applaud the Zappos team for thinking differently and realizing how to get to their real goal of excellent customer service with fanatical employees.

Brilliant.

A time management observation

Have you ever noticed how critical decision meetings have a tendency to be scheduled at the end of the day? I have noticed this as a trend recently in several of the streams that I am working on.

My first thought was that this was due to the need to work through the day to get the information together in preparation for that meeting. Anecdotally (meaning stuff I have seen, done or messed up myself but may not be statistically significant to the world at large) this seems to be the case in 20-40% of the high criticality meetings that get scheduled. This leaves a gap of 60-80% that could happen at other times in the day.

At the end of the day you are tired. At least (anecdotally) I am since the day has been spent making decisions, digging into problems and hopefully doing real work. So my next thought was why do we push these important meetings to late in the day if we are actually going to be less well equipped to handle them?

The answer (or at least my version of it) came to me as I thought about the tasks list and task list management that I do. Each day I follow the process below.

1. Review a list of tasks. I assign each one an A, B, or C. This roughly amounts to A - MUST DO, B - Good to do, C - No chance I am getting to this, I could schedule it forward now but then that would take time from getting to the A and B stuff.
2. Assign a number to each task starting at 1 for each letter category. (Yes, I never even bother with C)

Now when I do this I can say A1 is more important and I should work on it first. Great! Only my human nature kicks in (chances are if you are reading this you have one of those as well. We tend to keep them in closets and they can get dusty but they do peak out at the worst of times) and suddenly I find myself drifting down the list to item A4 or (say it isn't so) a B1... because it's easier. My little human nature side lives for that little endorphin rush of the check mark so... hmmm... off I go.

With meetings I think we do the same thing. We schedule some simple meetings up front. Easy discussions, standing team meetings etc etc. Then we postpone some of those really important, hard meetings and conversations to later in the day.

So I am going to try to move my important meetings earlier. When I find myself setting up one of these meetings I will catch myself and ask the question "would this be better in the AM? Or now?"

Am I nuts? Is this just how business is supposed to work? Have you seen this? In a global economy with companies getting more global in audience as well as employee base these types of behaviors become not only self-pain inflicting but they don't even make sense given global time zones and the fact that the sunlight moves.

You wouldn't move without a destination for your stuff...

Consider this story. You gets a transfer to a new city. It's a great opportunity, great job, benefits and salary. The new company offers you a relocation package where they will help you with housing, selling your current home and everything. It all just falls into place, your home sells in short order and you are ready to go. You pack up all of your belongings to move out to your new city. Couches, Televisions, Cars, Toys etc. Everything is picked up by the movers put into the 18 wheeler with care and zooms off down the road. You get on a plane and head to your new city, ready to get on with your life. You land and are ready to head to your new home and realize you don't have one. You never set anything up. No new home purchased, no apartment, nothing. Oops. Your belongings have no where to go. You call your company and tell them they need to get you a house and... what do you know... they just laugh.

Ok... so this story is a little strange and something you are probably thinking "I wouldn't do that. What kind of idiot would pack everything, be ready to move and not have a destination?" Not many right...

Actually you would be surprised. While not a house and a couch we get requests all the time for a home for an application. An application that has to be delivered in just two weeks! This is when the inside voice starts to emphatically state "Failure to plan on your part does not constitute and emergency on mine." Of course that is the inside voice and not the outside voice.

What can you do about it? If something is being built, know where it is going to go. Don't just assume, know. Know what the requirements are up front, what the application will run in, on and through. It seems obvious that you would want a planned home for a product but when you get busy coding and building those types of things are easy to loose track of or to assume that "someone" is taking care of it.

Nothing gets done till nothing gets done - Woehlke's Law

What a provocative thought... nothing gets done till nothing gets done. This law is really more of a postulate or a theory then an actual scientific law as I don't believe any mathematical proof has ever been done. That said, it is one that has a lot of circumstantial and experiential evidence piled up towards it being the truth.

We have all been on projects where we know going in that the right [Resources, Timeline, Staffing, Education, ...] is not in place for the project to be successful. But we march on and because we all want to do a great job we try our hardest and keep the worst from happening for a long time, sometimes succeeding despite the obstacles and sometimes not failing until very late. What Woehlke is stating in this is that in order to get management attention and get the resources that are truly needed to be successful a problem needs to be evident.

A few quick reads on Woehlke's law -

• The Nimble PM has a nice article on Woehlkes law starting with the quote "Project managers will not get the staff they need so long as they muddle through with overtime, ulcers, and super-human effort. Only when deadlines are missed will senior management approve the staff who, had they been available at the outset, would have prevented the missed deadlines"
• Cutter had an advisor article in 2005 where Donna Fitzgerald made some great points about how to avoid getting caught in the trap and how hard it is for most of us over achievers to really understand what this law means.

What do I think this law means? If you look at a project and know that it can't be successful you need to prove it. Not with whining and bellyaching. If you go to management with a story of how "this will be really hard" you will get a reaction of "well duh, that's why we have you, our gifted team on this project". Rather you need to have "Data in fact". Set up tests to show where performance is and what would be needed to mitigate it. Set up early aggressive iterations to show a realistic rate of development. It's all about risk mitigation... if you can show where the real true risk is then you will get help. If all you have is an intuitive "this is hard" you will be patted on the head and told to go try hard.

Go get an MBA?

I recently read a fabulous post by Seth Godin on NOBS, the end of the MBA. In between bouts of laughter I thought immediately of post material and here we find ourselves.

Not that there is no value in an MBA. Certainly there is and depending upon the program, classes and approach to teaching lots of value can be garnered. But it is not the be all and end all that it is often made out to be. For many people a real world education and a desire to learn are what is needed to be successful. Through books, such as those written by Seth Godin are great sources of knowledge, the catch is that you need to make the time and spend the effort to learn from them.

Another important point is to consider what your focus is. MBAs focus on business administration and financials in most cases. If your passion and skills are around technology and development then it may not be the best suited thing for you to change that focus. Focus on what you do well, not what you think others want and you will go further and faster.

Stephen Covey often uses the term circle of influence to describe what you control and what you do not. If you focus on what you influencce you can expand that influence, knowledge and experience. When you focus on things outside of your circle of influence or beyond your control you only end up getting frustrated and end up with less time and less energy to focus on the things that can help you and expand your circle of influence.

You have a limited amount of time and a limited amount of energy and spirit... use them for something that gives you more, not less.

I have posted before about how globalization and other changes to the world business environment have driven a need to develop and use our whole minds. This in turn is also driving what I believe is a need to address school systems to adjust to these needs. I recently read an interesting article from the Wall Street Journal on how Pain Free Trade Spurs Second Thoughts. The article is an interesting piece on how Alan Blinder, economist, Princeton teacher and one time advisor to the Federal Reserve has changed his mind about the impact of globalization and offshoring to American jobs.

It is easy to jump to the protectionist approach (especially for politicians) but really this just delays an inevitability. What, in my opinion, is the more correct response is to adjust our understanding and focus on what will be staying put. High touch areas and things that instantaneous technical bandwidth won't address will always be in demand. As a recent quote from Texas State Representative Rob Eissler, on the importance of arts education states "Left brain is logic, right brain is creativity. We don't want our kids to compete internationally with half of their brains tied behind their backs." (Original post from Dan Pink's blog. Dan is the author of the fabulous book A Whole New Mind that deals with many of these topics.)

Drag Racing vs Rally Racing

Some of you that know me outside of my Uptime Blog posts know that I am a fan of Rally Racing. In part it is because I drive a Subaru so I was drawn to watch. (Yes, a blue STi with the handle on the back so that God can reach down and shake me when he thinks I am doing something dumb is mine.) But also I like Rally racing because it takes a real world car (granted, they gut the interior and up the strength a bit on the components) and drive it like fiends through corners, over dirt roads, through snow and over jumps. It is a real test of driver abilities and a lot of fun to watch or even play on a game console.

So what does this have to do with technology? It has to do with optimization and how optimized you can make a system, either people or computing. If you take the example of a Rally car they need to have horsepower yes, but that is not enough. You need to have torque, suspension flexibility, handling adjustability the ability to turn and to stop is just as important as the ability to go. In one stage you may be racing on a mostly strait asphalt road, in the next over a switch-back 180 degree turn infested gravel road through a forest. The ability to handle that change is very important to build into the car. Conversely if you look at a drag race car the need for handling, turning, even suspension decrease. What you need is horsepower and pure strait line speed (and hopefully the ability to stop, though if you look at some of these cars a parachute is what is used). How boring.

I maintain that business is much more like a Rally race than a Drag race. You never know what curve a competitor is going to throw at you next. The ability to handle those curves, stop on a dime, turn in the other direction and then go full bore ahead again is critical to business survival.

Sometimes though we seem to optimize our ability to go fast and go strait. We focus only on the immediate goal in front of us. Cut out items that are not critical to our achieving that strait ahead goal. We optimize our "people load", "trim the fat", etc. to keep everyone as utilized as possible moving towards the strait line goal. Then a change comes up... and we discover we can't turn as fast as when we started and we are surprised to find we even have a problem changing our direction simply due to momentum.

This is why things like Non-Functional Requirements are critical to a project and a companies long term success. They maintain the ability to turn and stop and give the slack necessary to allow a shift one step to the right. If we are all pushing so hard to go forward in a strait line even adjusting slightly to the side is difficult. In planning this is Risk Management. It's accepting that planning "if all things go right" is not going to really get you there.

Getting the right strategy means you have to assume your competitors are damn good, or at the very least as good as you are, and that they are moving just as fast or faster. When it comes to peering into the future, you just can't be paranoid enough.

- Jack Welch