Doug Kreitzberg

The Permanent Now

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Last week a friend of mine was diagnosed with a condition that requires a visit to the specialist. Her doctor gave her two names.  She called one and the number routed her to an individual who took down all her particulars.  When she tried to schedule an appointment, the person on the other end said “I don’t schedule appointments,” and asked her to pick one of two places where the doctor practiced. When my friend hesitated, she was routed to one of the practices, but she was never told which one.  When the practice answered the phone and my friend asked to schedule an appointment, she was asked, “Why?”  My friend hesitated. “To see the doctor.”  “Yes, but why?”  “Because….I was referred to him.”  “Yes,” (exasperated) “but why were you referred to him.”  My friend gave the practice the name of her diagnosis.  “We’ll have someone get back to you with an appointment.”  Since then…..crickets.

Over the past two days I have been trying to generate postcards from my home computer to my printer.  I have created it the postcards on my computer, looked at them via print preview, then printed.  And they don’t look the same printed as on the screen.  So I adjust what it looks like on the screen to fit what I think it will look like on the computer.  Then the print spooler stops working.  I look on line to figure out how to get the print spooler working and get that back up.  Then, the software, for some reason has to update itself.  (I try updating myself by using words like “chilax” around my 16 year old, but I just can’t make it come off.) After the software updates itself, I think I got it down and try to print.  It still doesn’t work.  Postcard creation time: 1 hour;  Postcard print time: 4 hours (and counting).

Last week, an online shoe company, Zappos, sells to Amazon for 880 million dollars.  How could a company selling a commodity like shoes in the online world command that type of offer?  Because it was known as a customer-obssessed organization.

Whether you are looking to schedule an appointment, printing a postcard or buying shoes, your expectations are that you can do it now.  Now is defined as whenever or however you would like.  Now is also defined as being able to get the information you need, or your questions answered, right away. Now is speaking with someone who at least pretends he or she is interested in who you are and what you’d like accomplished.  Now is that nanosecond that a business has to gain the attention of a customer and register a feeling — if that feeling is anything but positive, that customer will not be back.

That bar for service is set higher than ever.  We all need to think hard about the experiences our customers have with us.   We need to look at directing the appropriate amount of investment towards enhancing those experiences (and spending less in areas that are not as impactful on those experiences).  But most of all, we need to have, and live, an attitude that wants to engage the customer in a positive, fun (yes, fun) way.

Is your company Now?  Or is it Yesterday?

Find Your MacGuffin

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This weekend, I my son and his friend introduced me to the world of guerrilla drive-ins and macguffins.

The guerrilla drive-in is a movie shown in secret outdoor locations.  The one in our area shows movies like “Ghostbusters”, “Back to the Future”, etc from the seat of a 1977 BMW motorcycle sidecar, typically shown on sheets or a few pieces of plywood. The “projectionist” attempts to show the films at locations that mirror some aspect of the film.  As an example, “Ghostbusters” was shown at Fort Mifflin where there have been stories of hauntings, and “Back to the Future” was shown over an old parking garage with a view of a clock tower (which figures in the movie). At the Back to the Future showing, about a hundred people showed up, along with a Delorean collector who showed off his car.

To know where the movies are being shown, you have to find the macguffin, listen for a secret code, take your picture with the macguffin and e-mail the photo and the code to the organizer. You then get on an e-mail list describing dates, times, locations and movie titles of upcoming events.  The macguffin is nothing more than a radio transmitter (in an attractive organge box adorned with a sticker of Che Guevara wearing 3D glasses)  which is hidden in an undisclosed part of town. While there are hints if you scour the web, people typically find out where the macguffin is from friends who have been to one of the movies.  (In our case, John’s friend’s brother.)

Yesterday, we went macguffin hunting.  We found the location, sat in the car, tuned our station to 1700AM and listened for the code.  After a few minutes, we got the code, then went into the store, found the macguffin and took our pictures with it. As a bonus, we found a guy named “Zeke” and got pictures taken with him.  (I’m told that the bonus is you get a “Z” in front of your member number.)

My son and his friend fired off their e-mails with photos and code and hope to hear from the organizer soon.

Now, the movies that are shown are not hard to find, and watching them on in sixteen millimeter on a sheet isn’t the greatest technology.  But the way in which you find out about the events, the method by which they’re staged and the mock-secret way of discovering the macguffin give the shows a sense of community and a sense of fun.  The movie is not the entertainment, becoming part of, and engaging in the community is the entertainment.

Last week, I met up with a client I had known for many years. We talked a little business, then he began to chide me for not keeping in touch. I realized that he wasn’t as interested in the business aspects as the personal aspects. I had gotten too high falutin’, had become all business and had forgotten to pay attention to the friends I’ve made along the way.  I lost my macguffin.

I know business is serious stuff, dealing with serious issues.  But I also know that we sell to people.  And people have emotions and they respond to joy, fear, anger.  I also know that people want to be happy and they to find ways they can engage in activities which make them laugh.  When was the last time you made a customer laugh?  When was the last time you created a marketing campaign that got prospects excited? Listen. You sell the same thing as everyone else.  Perhaps the way to appeal to your market is to engage them in a way no one else has as of yet.  Create a macguffin, make the experience of buying insurance better than root canal, do something different that people will smile when they remember it.  Regardless, just keep in mind what Maya Angelou says: “I’ve learned that people will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel.”

Five Easy Steps to Grow Your Company

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In a recent post at techcrunch.com, Sarah Lacy mused on whether execution is more important than vision.  The vast majority of comments testified to the fact that execution (getting things done) is more important than vision (having the idea).  In fact, the business world is littered with failed companies that had great ideas and successful copies which managed to take other’s great ideas and actually get something accomplished.

At the same time, knowing what and when to execute is perhaps even more important than the execution itself.  I can do a great job getting things done, but if they aren’t the right things, then I’ve wasted my time and getting better at executing won’t matter.

When any company is challenged with growth, managers typically think that they need to overhaul their entire strategy and come up with a new vision or they just need to work harder at what they’re already doing.  In certain cases the managers might be correct, but I would argue those are the exceptions rather than the rule. Both actions are stressful, demoralizing and typically unsuccessful.  The better way is not to overthink vision or execution.  It’s to look at your business, find what’s working and do more of it.  It’s that easy and can be done if you follow these five steps:

One: Know what drives your business

If you are not growing today, you need to change what you are doing. But you can’t change what you are doing if you don’t know where you are.  That is why having clear visibility into the metrics that really drive your business is so important.  Don’t focus on the P&L — they only show lagging indicators.  Try to measure and look at the activities that generate your P&L; # of sales calls, campaign conversion rates, time to answer, etc.  Create your own business dashboard of the metrics you think are important and track them for a few months. Look to see what is really driving your business, what helps or prevents growth.

Two:  Find Out Where the Growth Is

As you begin to look at your business through your dashboard, you will begin to see where there are opportunities for growth in your business.  It might be a producer who consistently makes x number of calls, or a market segment which seems to like your products / services more than others. Don’t worry if the growth is small, think of it as finding a small speck of gold in a sifting pan.  It might be small, but it tells you where to keep looking.

Three: Expand Your Growth Target

Once you’ve identified a couple of areas in which growth already exists in your company, you need to think about how to better leverage those areas so that it becomes more of a meaningful part of the organization.  Do you expand the geography?  Do you need more producers?  Do you redevelop a training program based on the actions of one producer? Do you apply what you’re doing to other market segments?  The key is to enlarge the strike zone so that you have more opportunities to be successful.

Four: Execute on what works — but on a larger scale

So you know where the growth is and you’ve expanded your target area.  Now, it’s just a matter of executing on a larger scale.  It may require more producers, more marketing campaigns, more developers, better training programs, talent upgrades.  Develop a game plan to increase / adjust resources  which account for cashflow and/or profitability considerations (obviously, you may not be able to do everything at once; capital requirements may require your plan to be staged over time.) This is where the action takes place and this is where you might think things get hairy.  And, of course there are always pitfalls, but the best part is that you’ve done it before.  That takes the stress out and, without stress, the game slows down and things do get easy.

Five:  See What Works and Adjust

Of course, you can’t just sit back and relax while the growth curves up.  You need to continue to monitor your activity and the results to see if your actions continue to generate the growth you expected.  If you see things going in a different direction, adjust (sooner than later), and see if it works.

With a few exceptions, growth does not have to terribly difficult. It simply requires knowing your business, expanding on what already works and having the persistence it takes to do the little things that make big things happen.

Groucho Marx, CEO

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“Outside of a dog, a book is a man’s best friend.  Inside of a dog, it’s too dark to read.”  Groucho Marx.

I’ve loved the Marx Brothers since I was in seventh grade.  That was the year I switched from Catholic school to public school.  It was a year I felt I could breathe again, met great friends and the Marx Brothers’ irreverent sense of humor seemed perfect for the jibes I wanted to send St. Mary Magdalen’s way.  When my son was five or six I opened him up to “Duck Soup”, and the only time the clicker comes to rest in my hand is if I find a Marx Brothers movie or interview on TV.

The Marx Brothers were masters of poking fun at establishment figures.  The characters they played were usually grifters who found themselves lauded by members of high society or government or academia, and their comedy came not because the Brothers set themselves against the establishment, but they became the establishment in its rawest, truest sense.  And, in its rawest, truest sense, the establishment proved to be nothing more than artifice and pretense.  Strip away the medals and the black ties and these “high falutin'” people were nothing more than low time grifters, street vendors or working stiffs; in other words, they were just people.

Last week, I was talking with a client. We were talking about coming up with a new campaign that recognized their members in a unique way, that viewed them as special, that offered them benefits normally reserved for high net worth individuals.  We will look at developing strong creative and powerful messaging and that will be important. But, in the end, the creative is not the key; in fact the creative can run into the danger of just being pure artifice if we don’t recognize that the real key is having people on the phone who treat the caller as if they were a person.  People don’t want to be built up or put down.  They just want to be listened to, they want to be told up front what the deal is and they don’t want surprises.  I can tell you we will spend more time shoring up our training than creating sexy urls.

To be successful in business, you need to channel your own internal Groucho: strip away the artifice and trappings that separates you from your customer (or employees, for that matter), treat them as a person, and they will never leave you.

Of Sofas, Living Rooms and Arm Chairs

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I’m in my living room, looking at my sofa and I’m not happy. The sofa is beat — torn up and god knows what else from the animals. In addition, since I took up the last wall of the living room with another bookcase, it’s slung kitty-corner in the room, making a goal-line stand in front of one bookcase containing philosophy and history and another containing fiction and my jazz album collection.

‘This won’t work,’ I think to myself.  Then I pause and add, ‘Wait a minute, what do I need a sofa for, anyway?’

What indeed? The sofa’s main purpose is to bring people together, which is great for newlyweds and teenage groping.  I have no problem with that, but give it a few years and wring out the lovey-dovey and the sofa transforms itself into a sleeper — how many of us come home ready to spend a quite evening in front of the TV in the family room only to find a gangly 17 year old splayed across the sofa like a rorshach test, leaving you to sit in the corner on a wobbly cane chair you trash-picked five years ago? (How many of us rush home to be the first to splay themselves out on the sofa?)

And, when you have folks over, each end of the sofa is staked out first, leaving the third person to sit in the middle, arms vee’d down between their legs looking like they got seat 31E for a twenty-three hour trip home on Air Kazakhstan.

But then….not having a sofa is unAmerican.  No, actually, it’s unhuman.  Everyone has a sofa, right?  How did we get this way?  My guess is that the sofa is the product of evolution. In the beginning was the log astride the fire, then the benches that would flank each side of a dining table to be pulled out for sitting and chatting by the front room fireplace.  Next people added a back to the bench and curved arms. Then the padded seat and after that the padded back and arms and legs.  Then reclining sofas and sectionals.  Like an adaptable species, sofas learned how to survive.

But I’m thinking, Darwin be damned, the sofa is outta here! What’s wrong with a few well-placed arm chairs?  They’re comfortable, they can be moved around and grouped any which way you please, they don’t hog the room like a sofa does.  It’s perfect!

What pieces of useless furniture do you have cluttering up your mind, your view of the world? Every so often, take an inventory of your perceptions, impressions, stereotypes and categories that you use to view the world.  Take a hard look at each one and see if it adds to your sense of self and your community, or it detracts from either.  If it adds value, dust it off and put it back — if not, throw it the dumpster.  Just because you always thought one way in the past doesn’t mean you have to think that way in the future. Take a chance and lighten your load.

In the meantime, wanna buy a sofa?

Be Yourself

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Companies spend a lot of time talking about their products and how they stack up to the competition. They strategize about the need to reduce their cost or add a bell or whistle to set them apart. Now, I don’t want to discount the need to have a strong product offer. But at the end of the day,  customers won’t care as much about your products as you do.  What they care about is your ability to deliver. Do you know what you’re talking about? Do you do what you say you’ll do when we say you’ll do it? Do you care about them?

In many cases, products are not purchased because they are different from your competitors — its because you are different from your competitor.  You win when you demonstrate the right combination of expertise and credibility.  You win when you win your customers’ trust.

If you want to be successful, focus more on sharpening your skills and less on waiting for the perfect product that will “sell itself”. You succeed when people make a connection with you that they value. It’s that simple. And that hard.

Management Communication and its Disconnects

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One summer during college, I worked with my uncle’s firm building microwave towers out West.  It was one of those great jobs that pay you more in experiences than dollars that I will always remember.  During that time, my uncle noticed that I a book in my backpack.

“What are you reading?” he asked.   “‘The Archeology of Knowledge‘?  Michel Focault? Who is he?”

“He’s French,” I said. “He’s a philosopher.”

“French philosophy?” my uncle snorted.  “Good luck paying for groceries with that!”

Deep down, I couldn’t argue, but I read the French philosophers anyway, specifically the ones focused on language.  Focault, Derrida, Barthes, Saussure were tough SOBs to read, but they opened up new ways to think about words and their meanings.

One thing I learned was the difference between the signifier and the signified.  In plain terms, the signifier is the word and the signified is the object that the word represents.  For example, the word, “chair”, is a representation of something else, namely, a physical object that one may sit on.

That all seems rather obvious.  But there is one key here.  The relationship between the word and the object is a social one: people have agreed what the word, “chair”, refers to.  Without social agreement, the word becomes, in effect, meaningless.

Now, let’s assume that someone has decided that the word, ‘chair’ now refers to something else.  You come into his house and he says, “Have a seat on this nice chair,” and points you to a picture frame lying against the wall.  You hesitate and are confused.   “But it’s not a chair,” you protest.  “Yes, it is.  It is a chair.  Sit.”  If that individual has power over you, you end up having no choice.  A chair is no longer a chair.  The signifier is separated from the signified.

Now, your host asks if you would like a nice cup of tea.  You begin to sweat.  “What does he mean? Is it really what I think is a cup of tea, or is it something else?”  Stay in this funhouse long enough and you end up shaking in your picture frame/chair questioning yourself and being afraid of everything. The social contract between word and meaning has been broken and therefore the community itself begins to break down.

That’s a (hopefully) extreme example. But one of the biggest challenges organizations face is the disconnect between what managers say and what their employees experience.  And, in today’s economy of falling sales, where organizations balance the need to remain profitable, in part via layoffs, with the need to invest in growth and motivate its workforce, what is a manager to say?

The simplest answer is: the truth.  Early and often. Do not sugarcoat the situation and do not ignore the impact your actions have on your workforce.  The most important thing you can do is to remove the uncertainty of the situation.  As Stephen Gill writes, people are resilient if they know what the situation is and if there is a plan to deal with it.  Being vague or unengaged doesn’t cut it.   You need to be visible, you need to demonstrate — through actions, attitude and body language — that you are consistent with what you say.

As a manager, you can only be successful if you have the trust of your employees.  Disconnecting words from their meanings, by saying one thing and acting another or by stating that things are OK when layoffs are occurring, is a surefire way to break the social contract you have with your staff.  And, in so doing, you severely inhibit your capacity for future growth and innovation.

No picture frames for chairs.  You don’t need to be a French philosopher to get that.

From the Stadium to the Living Room — Is micro-social where it’s at?

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This past week, Google unveiled its new application, “Google Wave” which will be released later this year. (To see the presentation of Wave by Google, click below.)

Wave at once makes communication and collaboration easier and makes it more personal.  Think of it as combining the intimacy of e-mail and chat-rooms with the malleability of wikis and organization of Flickr or Facebook.

In an interesting post by Mitch Joel of  twistimage.com, the fact that the Wave is a more personal form of social media may require marketers to rethink (again) how to approach social media.  What might count is not the quantity of links, friends or followers (sorry Ashton), but the quantity of the relationships. The key for marketers (or organizations), therefore, is not to focus on broadcast social media (getting on all media, measuring numbers of unique links/friends/followers) but to focus on micro social media, smaller disparate groups bounded by strong trust.  Think Tara Hunt’s whuffie factor or soup metrics.

The question is, what metrics do you therefore us to define success?  If we’re focused on the quality of the relationship more than the quantity of the relationship, perhaps we should focus on repeat visits more than unique visitors.  If Person A has 20 friends that she speaks to, but they don’t speak back and Person B has 5 friends, but they all speak back to her on multiple occasions, which person do you want to market to?  Conversely, if you are a business, how much time and money do you want to spend expanding your universe rather than engaging the clients you currently have and let them talk about you (or invite you) to their friends.

I initially thought that the beauty of social media was that you could scale conversations from the living room to the stadium, that you can extend yourself to the world.  Regardless of what new technology is out there, I think, however, that the beauty of social media is to enable us to create rich, engaging “living room” experiences with a discrete group of trusted individuals (and, perhaps, firms) regardless of setting.

Think micro-social and the whole world might not be yours.  However, the world that is important — your world — might be.

Three O’Clock Breeze

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I’ve spent this Memorial Day opening our place up in Montana.  It’s not a tough job and I get more than a few of hours of time enjoying the lake, learning how successful the resident loons have been in building and maintaining its nest, exploring the logging roads and being continually amazed by the views of the Swann and Mission mountain ranges in the distance.

Our place sits on the edge of a lake, tucked in a corner rarely used by water skiers and abutting a marsh from which we typically see cranes, osprey, blue heron, bald eagles and loons.  In the mornings, the lake is still, reflecting the sunrise against the tamarack and ponderosa that surround its shoreline.  However, each afternoon, typically around three pm, a breeze from the southeast picks up and surface of the lake is broken by unending waves.

My family has been coming to this lake for over sixty years. During that time, the 3 o’clock breeze has been a constant.  The nesting loons, bald eagles, osprey, blue heron and cranes have been a constant.  And it’s no small stretch to imagine that all have existed for far longer than we have been around.

In our world of increasing change, we are quick to ask, “what is the next new thing?”  We want to be on the leading edge of innovation, because, we feel, that is where success lies.  Heros are made by discovering new worlds and doing new deeds, not reliving past experiences.

I am not immune to these siren calls.  I, too, want to be able to see what’s around the corner and be there before the rest of the crowd arrives.   But, determining what innovation to pursue requires an ability to fine tune out static, to down play what’s sexy and the identify that which has the capacity to endure.  And, in order to do that, you need to have an innate sense of what remains permanent.  Because, when you come right down to it, change is nothing but a reaffirmation of certain unchanging rhythms, whether they reflect natural selection, the need for man to be a social animal, or, the desire of man to push himself beyond limits.

When you become aware of these rhythms, you then can be aware of what changes occurring around you are worth your attention.  You will also be in a better position to take advantage of that change.

I hope you have used this holiday to take a pause, to reconnect with your own 3 o’clock breezes, to be aware of the permanent so you can be in a better position to welcome the change ahead.

Did Dave Eggers create the social web?

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Actually, it’s silly to talk about anyone creating the social web.  Ideas get added, mixed, discarded, mutated and something emerges.  However, the social web requires some sort of notion of what identity is, and how it is shared. In his work, A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius, Eggers writes about the freedom in sharing who you are, because there is always a separation between the who that you share and the who that you are.

“I give you all the best things I have, and while these things are things that I like, memories that I treasure, good or bad, like the pictures of my family on my walls I can show them to you without diminishing them. I can afford to give you everything…We feel that to reveal embarrassing or private things….we have given someone something, that, like a primitive person fearing that a photographer will steal his soul, we identify our secrets, our pasts and their blotches, with our identity, that revealing our habits or losses or or deeds somehow makes one less of oneself. But it’s just the opposite, more is more is more–more bleeding, more giving. These things, details, stories, whatever, are like the skin shed by snakes, who leave theirs for anyone to see…Hours, days or months later, we come across a snake’s long-shed skin and we know something of the snake, we know that it’s of this approximate girth and that approximate length, but we know very little else. Do we know where the snake is now?”

When I grew up, there was a respect for those who maintained a veil of privacy over their inner-selves — indeed it was viewed as a liberty or right.  Of course, that veil also led (and leads) to a tension between with inner- and the outer- self which can lead to bad things.

Eggers’ view is that there is not a constant, platonic inner-self to protect.  That, because the self is mutable, nothing is actually lost if it is shared with others.  In fact, it is unlikely that that shared self is actually useful to define who one really is.

It is this willingness to share that Eggers describes, this realization that sharing information does not lock in identity,  but frees it that forms the basis for how the social web evolves.  We post on Twitter, Facebook, MySpace, Linkedin, blogs, retail sites, etc.  Each post is a piece of who we are, but no one can aggregate all the pieces to truly build another version of ourself because we are always just to one side of this aggregation.  These strobe light slices of ourselves are, in essence, little fictions which have an identity of their own and which are added to by others through interaction and amplification in the virtual space.

But they are still fictions.  Or are they?  Certainly compliance officers would disagree. But I would argue that it is the wrong thing to be asking.  What is important is that each piece of what we share is a fiction in that it can never contain who we can be.  That is the freedom of identity that helps fuel the social web.  Thanks, Dave Egger, for showing that to me.