Archive for April, 2005
The World is Flat
I heard Thomas Friedman interviewed on NPR last week (Fresh Air) and just read this review in Business Week - Globalization Is Great — Sort Of – of his book, The World is Flat, A Brief History of the Twenty-First Century. Definitely worth a look.
Steal, steal, steal.
When I was in graduate school, working on a Masters in Comparative Religion, my professor offered a curious piece of advise to all of the first year students, "Steal, steal, steal." He was speaking from experience. The professor, E. Thomas Lawson, wrote Rethinking Religion: Connecting Cognition and Culture, which has a striking resemblance to Dan Sperber’s Rethinking Symbolism. It was purposeful. Lawson was inspired by the connection Sperber made between symbolic thinking and cognition. Lawson "stole" it and applied it to religion, creating new way to think about religion – a cognitive approach.
So, when I read Keith Robinson’s The Difficulty with Originality, it resonated with truth. As he states, "Great designers steal." The fact is, there are not alot of truly original thoughts out there. The lesson to be learned though, is that’s ok. Some of the best ideas came from somewhere else first. What makes them great is how they are applied to new or orthogonal (my new favorite word) fields or industries.
Dan Pink comes to appliedthinking, Part Three
appliedthinking: I am most likely overextending or reading into Martin’s work, but there seems to be an underlying assumption that people are hardwired (not unlike the Marcus Buckingham’s discussion of "strengths") for certain types of thinking. I think this is one of the reasons he advocates a balance between validity and reliability (right and left brain oriented thinking), especially when it comes to leadership. But, it looks like you don’t subscribe to this approach…not regarding balance, but about a person’s ability to adapt to the shift in what’s valued. Which concepts/scientific research informed your opinion on this?
Dan Pink comes to appliedthinking, Part Two
Find Part One here.
———-
appliedthinking: I guess I didn’t really expect an epiphany…although long labor always makes for a good story. Given your description of the Conceptual Age as evolutionary step (following the Agriculture, Industrial and the Information Age), I suppose it was only a matter of time when sensors to cultural/historical change (like yourself) would herald it in. I have seen signs of other folk sensing this shift as well. Take Roger Martin. Although not describing it in historical terms, his February 2005 article in the Harvard Business Review describes (or perhaps "makes a plea for" is more accurate) a necessary shift in what leaders value – from reliability to validity (his terms). Do you think Martin goes far enough?…or is this shift more fundamental?
Dan Pink: First, let me say that I’m a huge Roger Martin fan. I think he’s easily one of
the two or three best business school deans in North America. Martin’s idea is
related to mine. They might not be siblings, but they’re probably first cousins.
What we’re both describing is a world in which the scales are tilting toward a
new set of business abilities. In the case of A WHOLE NEW MIND, this tilt is
away from linear, sequential, SAT-like abilities — and ever more toward
artistic, big picture, and empathic abilities.
Dan Pink comes to appliedthinking
You know…I really love blogging. As my son would say, “marry it” love. Why? Through what other medium can a glorified slacker from the mid-West (me), get a chance to interview a best selling author and all-around influential thinker? Yes it’s true, Dan Pink, author of Free Agent Nation, Contributing Editor to Wired, and former chief speech writer (1995-97) to Vice President Al Gore has been gracious enough to answer a few questions I have about his new book, A Whole New Mind. As Dan is a busy guy, we’ll be doing this serial fashion via email. I’ve got the first question/answer posted here…and the rest will be posted as they emerge.
———-
appliedthinking: Dan, I’ll start by stating that I’ve always been fascinated in how ideas are developed: where the inspiration comes from and how they evolve. So, naturally, I’m curious about this notion of a coming Conceptual Age. I first recall reading your writing on this topic in the February 2004 issue of Wired (“The New Face of the Silicon Age”). But that article seemed to be more of a patriotic response to the off-shoring phenomena. The concept as it is presented in A Whole New Mind is much broader than that. Where did the leap come from?
How do you keep your lead?
There is the long, complete answer: books written about how to keep your lead in business – from the classics (Competitive Strategy by Michael Porter), to the iconoclastic (almost anything from Peter Drucker), to contemporary observations on the subject (Good to Great by Jim Collins). And then there is the short, something-I-can-do-today answer: invest in customer care.
There is no better way to alienate your customers (especially those who, for whatever reason, are already upset) than to pass them off to incompetent, unempowered, untrained (I could keep going) customer service staff. Everyone knows this, right? That’s why this is one of This American Life’s most popular essays. But often belief is one step removed from action.
Case in point: Sony Electronics customer care. Here’s my semi-cathartic recounting of an experience from earlier this week:
A couple summers ago I refinished my basement and installed a home theater: Sony 51" rear projection TV, 5 disk DVD player, surround sound, all of the bells and whistles. I’ve been very happy with the equipment I purchased because a) the price was right ($500 off list for a showroom model), b) it’s performed well and c) it’s been dependable…until earlier this week when all I got was blue.
Projection TVs are typically comprised of a number of internal tubes (red, green and blue) that, when aligned, produce an image on its screen. Each of these tubes must be firing at the same time for the TV to work. If not, you could end up with only one color (say, blue) showing. Thus, what seems to have happened to my set.
So, want to rectify this situation, I decided to consult Sony with the hope of finding a local certified service provider. After a couple tries at their search tools (each of which failed), I decided to call them directly (1-800-282-2848). Enter Incompetent Guy #1. I’ll be short on this part of the story, mostly because it lasted 20 minutes…but it sort of went like this:
Me: "Hi, I’m looking for a service partner to come an look at my set."
Him: "Umm…ok. What kind of Sony product do you have?"
Me: "Projection TV model number XXX."
Him: "Let me look that up. Hmmm…ok. It seems like that is a projection TV. Is that correct?"
Me: "Yes."
Him: "Opps…I think this is the wrong part number."
Me: "???"
Him: "Oh there it is. What seems to be the problem with this TV?"
Me: "It’s only showing a blue tint on the screen."
Him: "Is it plugged in?"
Me: "??? Yes, that’s how I can see the blue tint when it is turned on"
Him: "Oh yeah, right."Jump to the end of the conversation: I have NO confidence that this guy is either giving me a right answer or knows anything about the product. But, he does connect me with a couple "local" service partners (100 miles away!). So, I decide that I’m going to be charitable an offer him some feedback, letting him know that my confidence level with him is VERY low. His response? "But I’ve been giving you all of the right answers." My retort? "The right answer isn’t always enough. As a customer I need to leave this experience with you feeling a) that you have been my advocate, b) that you cared about me, and c) that you know the company and products you are representing. I got none of these.
In what I believe was his attempt to end the conversation, he offers to connect me with his supervisor – Incompetent Guy #2. "Ok," I think, "if I was the supervisor, I would be thankful to get feedback like this about one of my employees." To make this longer story short (I talked with the supervisor for another 20 minutes), he is no better than his employee. And then it occurs to me, are these guys outsourced resources for Sony? So I ask, "Are you a Sony employee?" He hangs up.
What a sad, sad commentary about the Sony brand. Will I ever buy another one of their products again? Perhaps…but that will most likely be the result of a major head trauma. If they had simply invested in quality customer care, this wouldn’t have happened…and I’d consider buying more of their products.
The fix to all of this is really simple though: hire someone who "gets" what it means to be your customer’s advocate (here’s someone who does…write her) and then empower them to do what it takes. Period. Be less concerned that this is an operational expense and more concerned about the longevity of your brand.
THAT, is how you keep your lead.
Bloglines – what gives?
UPDATE: It’s back up, with all of my feeds intact. But I’m still disappointed. Not a single "Sorry for the inconvenience" was posted.
——-
So, I go to check out all 50 or so feeds I have subscribed to through Bloglines this morning and opps!…my account is gone. Vanished. Poof. The system doesn’t even have a record of my email address anymore. Isn’t this the greatest fear of any online service user?…that one day, the system that you trust to be there simply won’t.
Now, I’ve been in the software business and understand that this sort of thing can happen from time to time. Either an account gets deleted or the system goes down entirely. If it’s the former, I’ve already sent them an email asking for assistance…although if this is the case, I’m not sure I want to go back. If it’s the latter, why don’t they redirect the homepage to one that indicates the system is down? And again, if this is the case, I’m loosing faith.
The short response: how they rectify this issue will either rebuild my trust in them, or will permanently destroy it. There are far too many options in the world to expect anything less.
More later…
Scale, Aggregation, and Education
Why is this so reminiscent of the countless proclamations during the dot com boom?
The old days of big players in the economy collecting consumers,
audience, distribution, manufacturing efficiency, buying power, or
capital in the grip of centralized control are waning. That used to be
the way to find efficiency and size. That used to be the way to scale.But they are being foiled by our new distributed world. And they are
being replaced by a more efficient means of finding size and efficiency.Aggregation is the new scale.
BuzzMachine… by Jeff Jarvis.
I seem to have heard this all before…and been a sucker to it. That’s not to say that I don’t believe the new "distributed world" won’t change things, but as with most things, the answer lies in the middle.
I do, however feel a little different about this statement:
: Education: How much better to be able to aggregate teaching, to select my teachers instead of having to throw my lot with one bunch or another.
I’ve prognosticated similar events…which was easy to do considering that companies like LydiaLearn are geared up to enable that future. Consider the concept of Reusable Learning Objects. This will allow for three fundamental shifts in the way we think about education:
- Access to the best – Anywhere, anytime I can now access the best minds and the best educational content.
- Novel options – By thinking about education in more discrete pieces, connections between disciplines can be more easily made and distributed…perhaps even creating new disciplines. Look at how Cognitive Science came about…and then consider how its growth could have been accelerated through this distributed model.
- High personalization – What kind of learner are you? Visual, auditory, kinesthetic? Once you know this vital piece of information all of your learning experiences can be custom created for your needs.
Hmmm…maybe things can change radically. Although maybe I’m still a sucker, I do feel stirred by Jeff’s last comment:
Pity every industry that has to adjust to the decentralized future.
Money will be destroyed (on one side, but saved on the other) and the
upheaval will make the business restructuring of the ’80s look like a
garden party. But pity more the industries that are bound to atoms –
airlines, home-building, shipping, and health care, say — that will
have a hard time finding the efficiencies of aggregation, the new scale.
Starbucks obsession
Take a look at John Moore’s comments regarding Starbucks Need for Speed. I’ll add something to his last point, "People will wait for good coffee." Maybe it’s just me, but I’d rather wait and get a better product. Although speed of service can enhance the experience, after a certain point the returns diminish. More speed, especially when it comes to food, does not equal good experience. Starbucks could learn something from the Slow Food movement.
Taubman sucks, Mishkoff rocks!
Thanks to a note from Mutually Inclusive, I learned that Hank Mishkoff has become aware of his fame in the blogosphere. He’s even compiled a list of bloggers (appliedthinking is #4) that wrote about his incredible efforts against The Shops at Willow Bend and their developer Taubman. Not only was Hank’s an inspiring story, but it is also showing the incredible rate at which information can be spread through blogging. Go get em Hank!
