Vy Blog

Into the weekend

So if you think your life is complete confusion
Because your neighbor's got it made
Just remember that it's a grand illusion
And deep inside we're all the same

Friday roundup

The Mid-Summer Tri is coming at me like a frigging locomotive.  I'm less in shape for this one than I was in June.  12 miles on the bike this morning convinced me of that.

To drive my lazy ass into gear, I'll do laps tonight at 10:00 and tomorrow morning at 8:00 at the Relay for Life in Sherwood.  But that's not really why I'm doing it -- the woman captaining our team lost her husband two years ago to cancer and is capably spearheading the whole effort.  Also, my father was being treated for cancer when he died in 2003 -- we're decorating a luminaria with a picture of him tonight.  Further, my uncle -- my father's only surviving family member besides his own children -- now has cancer as well.

Busy weekend approaches thanks to a visit from my wife's parents, who are great people -- Beavs game tomorrow night, visit to the coast Sunday.  Summer weather in Oregon is perfect, and I do mean perfect.

I had never tried it before, but hooking a line of string to a) a door and b) your son's tooth, having him close his eyes and then slamming the door will, in fact, remove a front tooth.  Going rate for the tooth fairy nowadays is apparently $1.

Happy Friday.

Playing Texas Hold'em with a monkey

Thanks to Jarvis, a great YouTube link to what should be an uncomfortable truth not just for journalists, but for us idiots that consume some of this "reporting."

Video here.

Eliminating the negative

Mike Arrington has famously resigned from Gillmor Gang, where he's been a regular participant.  He doesn't care for Nick Carr's condescending manner.

I don't know Nicholas G. Carr.  I very rarely listen to Gillmor Gang, and interesting as the content is, I don't much care who's on or not on any given week.

However, I do know Mike Arrington, have for several years thanks to our paths crossing more than once in the domain name industry, consider him a friend, and certainly can tell you he's a first-rate human being.  However, setting that aside, I still applaud Mike here and don't think this is "taking your ball and going home."  There is nothing wrong with getting rid of the negative in your life -- proximity to a bully included.

Experience Immersion

Interesting documentation in this Fast Company article about David McQuillen, who is helping Credit Suisse with the obvious and simple task of understanding what it's like to be a customer of the Swiss bank.

You're asking, if it's so damn obvious and simple, why doesn't everyone do it?  Great question.  You tell me because I don't know.  It is nearly always revealing.

I sometimes have a discussion with my brother, an attorney, about how much business opportunity there is in, as he puts it, doing the common uncommonly well.  How many gas station / convenience stores do you pass on interstate highways by the hour?  They're all the same, right?  What if you put up a sign 100 miles away that said, "Gas, exit 224.  And guaranteed -- the cleanest restrooms you've ever experienced, or ever will."  And your restrooms sparkle, smell nice and are a pleasure to visit.  How much more business would you get over the schmo who hands you a key chained to a hubcap and jerks his thumb over his shoulder to point you to the can out back?

A recurring theme of this blog is the value of perspective.  That's precisely what McQuillen is doing -- and look how unbelievably effective it is.  One telling line from the story is this:

"As a bank, we often think that only the financial products themselves matter--but there is so much more that goes around that."

You're thinking to yourself, oh the times I've heard my exec talk about how introducing a new line of lugnuts is going to revive this business, when in fact you know the company is stale not because of products but because of myriad other reasons.  Maybe experience immersion would be a good exercise.

There was a film back in the early 90s, I think, called The Doctor.  William Hurt played the lead role as a doctor with the good life until he's diagnosed with cancer.  He goes through the diagnostic procedure, a blunt conversation with his own less-than-sympathetic physician, hospital stays and radiation treatment.  He finds the whole process impersonal, cold and technical -- and of course it changes his perspective on the way he practices medicine.  At the closing of the film, he takes a bunch of medical students to a hospital and checks them in -- for the next day or two, they eat hospital food, deal with exasperated nurses and arrogant doctors, use bedpans, wear hospital gowns, and are awakened every two hours to get blood drawn.  Frigging great idea.

Feel like you're in a rut, or your business is?  First, take a vacation day -- don't check in with the office, don't answer e-mail, and don't make any calls.  Go do something else.  Clear some brush or something.  Then, approach your business as a customer and start doing the things your customers try to do with you.  Put away your defensiveness about how you do things -- in fact, put away any perspective you have about what it's like to run your business, and just be a customer who's trying to do something with you and cross that item off his list for the day.  If you're honest with yourself, it will be highly revealing.

Customer service and staying quiet

My friend and industry colleague Susan Crawford uses Yahoo's IM service, which apparently had an outage on Saturday (and one earlier in the week, too).  Susan writes of what happened right after -- because Yahoo wasn't saying anything about anticipated time of the outage, or what was being done, etc., the "discussion" among customers rotated into Yahoo Answers, where there was much discussion and/or sarcasm.

This is illustrative of the PR peril many companies have to live with today.  You have an outage over the weekend, your spokesperson is at the beach with his kids, but because your market can talk to itself in myriad ways, it in fact starts talking and shooting barbs at you and possibly even drawing conclusions about your competency or at least your capacity to care about customer problems.

I don't have a smart "how to" answer for all this -- anticipating things like this and having a backstop in place is a cost of doing business for any company that serves millions at all hours of every day.  The bigger you scale, the more you need to be ready to talk with anyone at any time about a problem, and let them know what you're doing to fix it. 

Just ask anyone on a US-based airline (not exactly known for being great about sharing information) -- even if the problem won't be solved for a while, or can't be solved at all, more than half the battle in assuaging customer discontent simply is showing up.  Be there to let them know you care about the problem, understand the problem and are doing something about the problem.  You don't have to reveal everything, but do take the step of authentic engagement and a little forecasting about what you're up to.

Into the weekend

Hey shout, summertime blues
Jump up & down in my blue suede shoes
Hey kid, rock and roll
Rock on

The story, only the story, nothing but the story

Last Sunday, a vintage jet crashed during the Hillsboro Airshow and destroyed a few houses on the ground.  The pilot was killed but no one was in any of the houses affected.

There's a link here to a local news story about it.  It's the local news issue I'm writing about.

I'll go ahead and begrudge local broadcast news a bit, because it looks to me like much of the time they frankly are reaching hard for relevance, if not resorting to outright stupidity.  (Live!  Late-breaking!  Investigative!)  There are four main network affiliates in Portland, and they were each on the air for a couple of hours solid, saying absolutely nothing more than, "A plane crashed, the pilot was killed, three homes are on fire, but no one was in any of them."  That's all the news there was.

That of course does not stop the search for self-relevance.  For two hours, there was no letup in either repetition of the above four or, worse, an endless stream of people who saw the plane struggle before it disappeared behind a grove of trees between the airport and the crash site -- each of whom told precisely the same story which added nothing of value.

I'm perfectly aware, of course, of the emotions that drive this kind of thing.  But have you noticed how much we can make out of something we know nothing about?  Next time you see a breaking story -- and this could be on local or network, anywhere -- pay attention to whether or not the anchor and reporters say "we don't know."  It's probably a lot. 

It really hit me between the eyes first right after the Supreme Court ruling in the 2000 election, when ABC went directly on the air to their legal analyst Jeffrey Toobin who, when asked by Peter Jennings for the result of the ruling, said, "Hold on, Peter...if you'll just give me a moment to read the ruling..."  Jennings awkwardly obliged, trying to fill the time between leaping onto the air and actually having a fact to report. 

It's happening more and more frequently, sometimes disastrously. 

Jeff Jarvis would have a lot more to add to this thought, but the fact of the matter is that today we have so many ways to get our information, local broadcast is feeling the head of competition and doesn't know how to respond.  So instead of self-critique or thoughtful exploration, you get more gimmick, overreach and we-caught-him-red-handed "journalism."

And I'm not putting all the blame on the talking heads, either.  We've lost our appetite for actual news in favor of entertaining sensation.

Unhappy?

Cheer yourself up here.

Has the Dell argument jumped the shark?

I've blogged about Dell and the Jarvis situation.  (I'm not going to link it all up -- it's Monday, I'm busy, and it will take you 0.16 seconds to Google out all the data you can stand on this pissing contest.)

Is this discussion productive, or has it jumped the shark?  You tell me.

Dell screwed up royally, in the way that big companies often do, when a) it didn't take seriously its customer service responsibilities (yes, responsibilities), b) its authentically poor performance was outed by someone with influence over opinions, and c) it addressed the situation with the agility and grace of an aircraft carrier.

Now, since then:

• Jarvis calmed down, switched to a Mac, and is a lot happier
• Dell may have learned its lesson, we don't know and won't know for a while, but it looks like they're trying
• Everyone got back to important discourse, like why Britney didn't brush her hair and spit out her gum for her interview with Matt Lauer

Whoa.  Until the wound was re-opened by Dell starting its own blog.  Jarvis reignited, as did half the rest of the blog universe, arguing about whether or not Dell's blog is authentic or spin. 

Well, how the hell can you know?  If you make a judgment now, my judgment is that you're prematurely judging.  See where they take it.  Give it time to work or not work.  They blogged for all of two days when the world was all over them like white on rice.

Now Strumpette has entered the fray.  I have no idea who s/he really is or isn't, nor do I particularly care.  Some things written there are productively thought-provoking, others I think are simply posing.  (Surely she'll have a nice, productive comment to add here.)  Strumpette's position is Dell should care only about its shareholders -- increasing their value is the primary, if not only, duty of a public company.

Obviously, no.  If that were true, guys like Al Dunlap would be running things beyod their 15 minutes, and guys like Howard Schultz would be retired to Florida.  Obviously, and correctly, it's the reverse.  You have a duty to shareholders, that is not for debate.  But saying you have a duty only to shareholders, or to the market above nearly all else, is the guileful refuge of a company unwilling to do all it should do.  It should treat customers well so they return (and enhance the value of the enterprise); it should care for and take seriously its relationship with employees, so they stay there (and enhance the value of the enterprise); it should constantly question and test itself to see if its meeting marketplace needs with authentic and productive solutions to customers' pain, so they buy from the company (and enhance the value of the enterprise).

I very seriously doubt in his true mind Michael Dell, or any other real CEO, does not care about an individual customer.  The difference today is that there's so much more capability, as Jarvis points out, to productively redress your grievances.

So, has this discussion jumped the shark?  Probably.  However comma it has been productive in pointing out how people now relate to one another, where they find their authoritative information, and what they can do when a company mistreats them.  It's been productive in seeing companies have the light bulb go on and figure out how to wade into the stream, even if they're still taking mortar all around them.  And it's been a productive look at how companies and people relate to (and learn new ways to relate to) all their publics.