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.

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.

Fahrenheit 451

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I am not a pack rat.  In fact, at home, I have a six-month rule — if we haven’t looked at or used something for over six months, out it goes.  (To be truthful, my wife has a separate rule which requires us to fill the basement to overflowing before we consider throwing anything out, so of course we follow hers.)

Despite this, it was eye-opening when I moved my office recently and reviewed the files I had compiled over the years; 90% of what I had kept was no longer needed.  To be honest, it was both uplifting and discouraging.  It was uplifting, because I was able to “lighten my load” and maintain only those files that now had a relevant purpose.  But it was discouraging because a lot of the files that went out were signs of deadends, bright ideas which had lost their luster, forms and numbers that were no longer meaningful or useful, “urgent” items that seem trite with time.  (For full disclosure, I have not thrown out the 90% I no longer need because my assistant has a separate rule which is to box everything up and send it to storage, so of course we follow hers.)

On a related note, a couple of years ago our family cabin in Montana was literally hours away from being burned to the ground by a forest fire. My mother had only a few minutes to evacuate and the only thing she took was her dog and pictures of our family.
Finally, I was in Browning, Montana recently on the Blackfeet Indian Reservation and bought some paintings by a Native American artist who drew sketches on old ledger paper from the late 1800’s taken from general stores, real estate offices and assayers; from the dry script of Mrs. Anderson’s can of peas or sack of flour emerged the colorful and enduring spirit of a proud people.

These three incidents have made me think of what really is important.  What is enduring?  And, how do you know at any given time that what we’re doing is, after all is said and done, worthwhile?

We have to accept the fact, that not everything we do will be enduring, that there will be deadends and ideas that will flame out with time.  The important thing, for me at least, is to treat each action as if it will have enduring consequences, to put the time and energy in to those ideas and, when they don’t pan out, spend a brief moment to learn and consider what was done and why it didn’t work, then move on to the next one.  Nothing great is ever achieved without failure and we aren’t always prescient enough to know what will work until we start working at it.

Ultimately, if we let it, time does grace even the smallest note with an enduring spirit of struggle, redemption and (occasionally) success.  The files in my boxes aren’t just static pieces of paper; they’re representative of ideas and actions done by people for people  and — laid out end to end — tell a story that might be as vibrant as the Blackfeet.  And, while I have no use for them now, they are a part of what I am and what I’ve done and I respect that.

My mother’s actions, however, speak the loudest; perhaps the only thing that is enduring are the relationships we have, certainly with our family and loved ones, but also with our friends, those who work with us, our clients, our customers our business partners.  Our success as individuals or as organizations is ultimately tied to the strength of these relationships and the attention we pay to them.

The author, Ray Bradbury, wrote a book called Fahrenheit 451 which is required reading for most high school students.  It talks of a society that burned books (the title refers to the temperature at which paper burns) and how individuals internalized those books to keep them alive. In the end, each word that we write, each action and interaction we have endures (positively or negatively) to some degree within ourselves or within each other.  Perhaps success lies only in recognizing this.

Stationary Movement

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I’m a big fan of Joseph Campbell. Campbell reviewed religions and mythologies around the world to identify the common stories we tell to better understand ourselves and our place in the cosmos.  One point that Campbell made regarding Buddhism has stuck with me for many years. It’s the concept that every moment of time contains eternity, which for me means that every second contains a rich multitude of possibilities during which anything can be accomplished.

Time is not something you have, because it’s an artificial construct.  Conversely, you can’t lose time, because you didn’t have it to begin with.  What you do have (if fact, the only thing you really have) is energy.  If you remember your high school physics, there is potential energy (energy which has been stored) and kinetic energy (energy which is released).  Life is about storing and releasing energy. Success is about releasing that energy in a positive direction. When I hear people say, “I don’t have enough time,”  what they are actually saying is “I don’t have enough energy.”  The energy they expend is unfocused and dissipated, and the energy they store is compromised and low-grade, clouded by beliefs and other mental baggage.

I don’t think anyone working today would say they aren’t working hard.  But even in today’s economy, there are some who are successful and there are some who are not. Some of those who are not successful are pedaling fast on a stationary bike.  They’re sweating and puffing and grimacing and they’re not going anywhere.  The results are flat, if not falling.  Their first response to how to change things is to pedal faster.  So they huff and puff even harder and end up right where they were.  Their next response to how to change things then becomes, “let’s hire more people.”  Unfortunately, what you usually end up with then is more people pedaling fast on more stationary bikes.  A lot of work.  A lot of people. Going nowhere.  Every so often the response becomes, “Let’s Reorganize!”  Let’s move the stationary bikes around and put the people back on them.  You know the result.

As individuals, many of us are also stuck to our own mental stationary bikes.  We feel squeezed out of ourselves, that time and chores have taken over our lives.  So we focus on time management so that we can get more accomplished on our stationary bikes.

Those who are successful have a focused energy, and energy built around two simple questions: “Where do I want to go?” and “Who do I want to be along the way?”  Their kinetic energy is solely expressed in trying to address those questions.  And their potential energy is created through a continual feedback loop of reflecting, acting, listening, reflecting….

If you want to grow, you need to get off your stationary, focus your energies around passions and the interaction you have with world around you.  You don’t have time.  You have energy.  Make the most of it.

Nothing ever happens until it happens for the first time

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The above is a quote from the CFO of Goldman Sachs concerning the the current economy.  To me, this quote defines how we got to where we are. The financial models used to measure risk were 99% accurate.  Unfortunately, the 1% happened and it happened in a big way.  The 1% “Nothing” became a huge “Something”.

We all have routines.  We get up at a certain time of day, do our morning chores in roughly the same order each time, have our routines in the office and later at night at home. Routines are good: they maximize efficiency and declutter our mind to allow us to focus on more important things.  The challenge with routines is that they can also limit our perception of the possible.  What we do becomes reality, not only a reality, but The Reality.  The borders of the world become enclosed and after a while we stop thinking that there can be any other way to live.  Then, something happens.  An accident. An illness. A layoff. A newborn.  A marriage. Something is thrown into the mix which changes everything, which requires us to redefine our routines and reality.

In a sense, perhaps our main focus should not be on the routines we do, not on the 99% (because, after all, routines are supposed to enable us to think about other things), but on the 1%.  I would even argue that our greatest chance at success, or our largest threats, occur within this 1%.   To me, success means aligning passions with actions: to be able to live your life by doing what you love to do every day. Passions are risky things and they exist at the borders of our perception.  To focus on them means we need to be open to possibilities that aren’t part of our normal routine.

Take a few minutes this week thinking about the routines in your life.  Think about where you currently focus.  Then think about things that might occur which might change that routine.  Some of them might be positive; some might be negative. Think about how you can take advantage of those changes.

Turn Nothing into Something.  After all, that “Nothing” exists out there anyway; it’s just waiting for you to discover it.

The Unfear of the Known

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Perhaps the best words of advice I received in the business world was to hire people who are not like me. The point was, when you want to build a team, you don’t need — or want — a lot of people who think and act the same way; you need contrasting views and opinions and personalities if you are to get a better view of where you are going, where you should be going and what you should do about it.  Choosing diversity is not always easy; we generally like to be around people who are like us, who think like we do, like the same music, like the same sports teams, live in the same neighborhoods. It’s comfortable surrounding ourselves with people like us, but it generally is not very effective and you get locked into a group-think that, at the end of the day, is boring as well.

Perhaps the second best words of advice I received in business was that our strengths are also our weaknesses.  First we were taught, through our teachers, performance evaluations and ex-girlfriends, that we had strengths (which were good) and that we had weaknesses (which were bad).  Then, we were taught we had strengths that we should continue to focus on building and we could not do anything about our weaknesses because it cost us more to change then we typically are willing to pay. However, because we rarely focus on doing things that we are weak at doing, our weaknesses rarely get us into real trouble.  What gets us into real trouble is relying too much on our strengths even when the situation demands something different.  If you’re strong at analysis, when times are tough you’ll bury yourself into data when action might be called for; if you enjoy building relationships, you might find yourself holding onto friendships with business partners, even when that ship has sailed and your business partner really wants something else.  Behavioral economists call these strengths, “anchors”, which help keep you from drifting aimlessly, but might also keep you from reaching your destination.

These anchors describe for you, the known world, and you act based on that knowledge. Unfortunately, what you know is generally not as important as what you don’t know. In an interview with the Washington Post, Nobel prize winning  economist, Daniel Kahneman stated, “We have no way of thinking properly about what we don’t know. What we do is give weight to what we know and then we add a margin of uncertainty. You act on what you think will happen. In fact, in most situations what you don’t know is so overwhelmingly more important than what you do know that you have no business acting on what you know.”  It’s not the unknown that we should be afraid of; what we should be afraid of is in believing too much in what we do know.

If Dr. Kahneman is correct, how do you ever get out of bed and do anything? One key, I believe, is to go back to Best Words of Advice #1 and surround yourself with people who don’t think like you do.  They’ll keep you honest (and humble) and, if you do a good job of listening to each other, in most situations, you’ll end up making a better decision.

They say that a man is wise when he realizes that he doesn’t know everything. To act with that wisdom means that we continually question what we know and, more importantly, question what we don’t know. To do that, we need different views and different voices.  Make sure you surround yourself with those different views, different voices and complimentary strengths.  Diversity is not just politically correct; it is necessary.