Shape of Things

Target is doing a remarkably effective advertising campaign based on a simple premise: Expect more, pay less.  The ads list examples of the diversity of products available at Target and how easy it is to shop in one stop.  Seems obvious, but they are the only retail store I’ve seen promoting this message really well.

My local wine retailer, Great Grapes, gets it.  They have more than doubled their selections in the $8 to $12 range, and increased the quality of wines in that price range by cutting deals with desperate distributors.  They are offering their normal case discount for 6 bottles and highlighting weekly two-for-one deals.  This isn’t window-dressing, but real value for money.

Three of my clients — Geomagic, Red Gate and Blue Ridge Numerics – do well in tough financial times because their technologies enable customers to do more for less.

Red Gate has the best “try before you buy” policy in the IT business.  Geomagic has just added a Geomagic Labs website where customers can test out new technologies under development.  Blue Ridge has a new HPC module that can generate 100x speed increases for upfront CFD simulation.

I don’t have any official “more for less” policy.  I’m just trying to make it business as usual to go beyond what is required for clients, friends and colleagues. At certain times, this is called value-added.  In today’s economy, I call it essential.

My brother-in-law, Jim Spillane, is a professional photographer.  He’s currently in Nepal, where he’s photographing people going about their day-to-day lives.

Today, he sent an email about his motives for photographing local brick workers:

“It’s the expression on their face(s).  They don’t hide their feelings.  If they’re sad, they show it; happy, you know it.  Unlike the business class I had left in Kathmandu with their masqueraded friendliness, they are not trying to sell you something.  The difference is so stark you notice it immediately.”

This got me to thinking about why I was uncomfortable when I first started in business and what still makes me itch when I see it today: People putting on a mask and playing a role.  In a world of greater transparency, I hope that business people can learn to become more humane and less deceptive – that feelings can be expressed and respected.

Call me a dreamer, but I’m seeing the best companies on the planet being founded on the premise of helping people – both employees and customers – get better.  It’s a fairly clear corporate choice: be a genuine company with a conscience, or a wolf in sheep’s clothing.

A few years back, Douglas Rushkoff wrote a book called Get Back in the Box: Innovation from the Inside Out. In an article in Fast Company, he posited that most companies would benefit from sticking to their core competencies.  Key line:

“It’s as if companies can’t fathom that the most powerful link they have with their customers is their products themselves.”

Some examples he cites:

• Volkswagen of America abandoning minimalist “people’s” cars for luxury sedans and SUVs.  I’d add Porsche to the list for its foray into SUV land.
• The dubious wisdom of Hardee’s running a commercial featuring Paris Hilton eating one of its burgers while washing a car.
• The ex-CEO of the Gap focusing not on the clothes themselves, but on a hugely expensive, untargeted ad campaign.

A recent example is Noilly Prat. The venerable vermouth maker is reportedly changing its U.S. formula in an effort to gain traction as a standalone, light alcohol drink. Here’s what one expert said about Noilly Prat’s importance to the martini:

“Noilly Prat is a necessary component of a dry martini. Without it you can make a Sidecar, a Gimlet, a White Lady, or a gin and bitters, but you cannot make a dry martini.” — W. Somerset Maugham (1958)

Now, Noilly Prat, the perfect Tonto, the Robin of alcohol, the quintessential wing man, wants to go solo.  Note to NP: Before doing anything rash, think Art Garfunkel.  Think John Oates.  Return to the box and jump back in. Quickly, before too many people notice.

Even as the excellent Usability Week kicks off in Washington, D.C. this week, I’m thinking that web usability doesn’t get much respect. It’s like the offensive lineman that opens the holes for the superstar running back.

There are good people telling us about web usability, but not enough designers are listening.  The gospel preached by the Nielsen Norman Group and Steve Krug is not mystical – it’s based on real studies with real people.

Still, web designers go on making life miserable for people visiting their sites. Why? They want the coolest site on the planet, even if the intro screen makes us wait 30 seconds. And who cares about visitors? What do they know about great design anyway?

Well, we might not know design, but we do know frustration. And how not to return to a web site where we’ve had a bad experience.  Like the site of the small record label I want to support, but which continually makes me wait more than a minute to go from one page to another or doesn’t send me access to my password when I forget it.  Or, the online magazine that makes me navigate through multiple links in order to increase its page views.  Or, the major newspaper that doesn’t make it easy for me to subscribe to a blog.

Jakob Nielsen’s recent study of 20 high-traffic sites showed improvement over past years, but still 80 percent had page download times of 19 seconds or more.  Nielsen sets eight seconds as a tolerable level for page download. So, usability isn’t anywhere near where it should be, given the fact that for most companies the web site is the face of their entire business.

While designers fiddle, web consumers burn, taking their money to companies whose websites show them a little respect.

What website practices cause you frustration?  At what point do you abandon a site? Who does usability well?

Note: Donald Norman of the Nielsen Norman Group will be speaking at the highly recommended Business of Software 2009.  Steve Krug spoke last year.

In January 1969 the Beatles went into the studio to prepare for a live concert and a new album.  Recording sessions were filmed and almost everything – from musical noodling to offhand comments to deep discussions – was captured on audio tapes.  The resulting film and record were named after the song “Let It Be.”

A blow-by-blow account in the book Get Back: The Unauthorized Chronicle of The Beatles’ Let It Be Disaster, documents the painful end of a decade-long relationship.  It also offers lessons to business managers about paying attention to the changes their organizations are going through.

By “Let it Be,” George had become a major songwriting talent, but John and Paul refused to acknowledge his remarkable ascent.  In many ways, he was still seen as the adolescent kid of the group.  George reacted according to casting: bitter, sarcastic and uncooperative.

John, who formed the band and was its leader for most of its history, had become withdrawn and uncommunicative. His new obsessions: Yoko and hard drugs.  He was barely an active participant in the sessions.

With John’s abdication as a leader and George’s recalcitrance, Paul had to take on too much responsibility.  He pulled out every trick – cajoling, pleading, joking, challenging – but to no avail.  He ended up coming off shrill and egotistical.

Ringo, well, was Ringo.

“Let it Be” was a train wreck.  But, could it have been avoided?

Maybe — if someone had filled the leadership void left by Brian Epstein’s death.

Maybe — if someone could have figured out the now-conventional approach of letting individual members of a band record solo albums to give them a creative outlet for passions not shared by the rest of the group.

Maybe — if The Beatles could have taken a step back from their commitments and tried to define a common goal and sensible timetables.

What they did instead was to ignore much of what was happening around them and try to conduct business as usual.

The events leading up to The Beatles breakup are eerily familiar to anyone who has managed a business: Employees growing on divergent paths, at different rates, or not at all.  Wasteful spending. Scattered priorities. The perceived need to do more, more, more. An organizational structure riddled with cracks.  Without continuous monitoring, discussion and adjustments, companies can find themselves in the same situation as The Beatles in January 1969.

Let it be at your own risk.

A few decades ago, I worked at a very large electronics company.  A good company, with good benefits and pay. My parents and relatives were proud. I was almost immediately distraught — stuck in a job with little chance of advancement, working for a  boss who was miserable and wanted to share his plight with others.

In those times, you didn’t leave a company like this one.  But, my mental survival almost depended on it. I got out and went to work for a little-known association, where I was given a huge amount of responsibility. I learned more than I ever had in my life.  I was happy.

One of the things that is happening as a result of the recession is that people are realizing that multinational conglomerates are not the future.  We’ve sacrificed too much to accommodate them.  The future lies in small- to medium-sized companies with a big distribution arm enabled by digital technologies.   Ping Fu of Geomagic calls this digitally enabled cottage industry.

One of the hopes we can cling to as we emerge from this recession is that the big dinosaurs will be replaced by small, agile companies that are driven by passion. Companies that make their employees their first priority, followed by their customers.  Profits will be critical, but they will not be obscene. There will be a proliferation of what Bo Burlingham calls Small Giants.

Peggy Noonan, who has gone through some pretty big changes herself, says it well in her February 20 column from the Wall Street Journal:  

I end with a hunch that is not an unhappy one. Dynamism has been leached from our system for now, but not from the human brain or heart. Just as our political regeneration will happen locally, in counties and states that learn how to control themselves and demonstrate how to govern effectively in a time of limits, so will our economic regeneration. That will begin in someone’s garage, somebody’s kitchen, as it did in the case of Messrs. Jobs and Wozniak. The comeback will be from the ground up and will start with innovation. No one trusts big anymore. In the future everything will be local. That’s where the magic will be. And no amount of pessimism will stop it once it starts.

At Convergence 2009, I heard a lot about technologies that connect different entities: physical with digital, humans with products, different functions within the product development cycle.

As Ping Fu pointed out in her keynote, technologies run in advance of social and cultural change.  The big challenge: How do you get people to cooperate and share for the benefit of the greater whole?

Rus Emerick of Schneider-Electric points out that almost every company uses individual achievement as the basis of its personnel evaluations.  As a teenager, Rus was told by his grandfather that he knew nothing until he shared knowledge.  He’s taken that philosophy to Schneider-Electric, implementing DSSP throughout the company for annual savings of millions.

Sadly, most of us aren’t like Rus.  We use knowledge like currency, keeping it to ourselves and meting it out grudgingly in small drips.

Companies need metrics to award knowledge spreading, and it can’t be competitive.  Otherwise, we get into an “I share better than you” competition.

Maybe we can take a cue from the NBA.  In an article in the NY Times magazine, Michael Lewis talks about non-traditional measures of performance used by the Houston Rockets to gauge the contributions of Shane Battier.  By conventional statistical measures, Battier is an average player.  By the Rockets’ measures, he’s an MVP candidate.

Are there measures out there to reward those who are exemplary in coming up with new ideas and spreading them throughout the organization? Send your comments here.  I have a few good books to give away for the best ideas.

Rus Emerick won’t let well enough alone. And that’s great for his organization,  Schneider-Electric.  Emerick has been an evangelist for DSSP within Schneider, and as a result the company is saving millions a year applying scanning-based technologies across its design and manufacturing processes.

Rus is rare in his zeal and vision.  But, there are plenty of people with insights in your business that can be leveraged. It’s win-win. The person becomes more engaged, and the company reaps the benefits of better information flow. 

Think of the value a support person could add if encouraged to not only help with problems, but to systematically share information on customers’ needs and frustrations.  How about if your sales people made it part of their jobs to solicit stories of successful projects involving your products or services — stories that could then be shared within your customer community?

As Rus says, it’s good to be the star of your rodeo, but there is so much more possible.  If you are a manager, give your people incentive to go beyond their jobs.  Help them redefine themselves. Don’t let yourself or your people be limited by the rodeo ring.

“We’re not for everybody” — my wife, Peggy Kelly.

“I don’t want to get another pair of Hush Puppies” — Nick Lowe

There will never be another Michael Jackson. Or another “Hey Ya.” Or another Pong. The days of the massive hits are over. Customization rules. 

It means you need to profile your customers and decide who you want to engage intensely and how, and who you need to leave behind. Your product or service can’t be for everyone.  If you’re lucky, you can develop a devoted tribe that will interact with you, spread the word about what you are doing, and give you a nice welcoming reception for new offerings.

Not being for everybody is marvelously freeing.  Once you define who your customers are — their needs, problems, working habits — and address them with respect and great products or service, the relationship can deepen beyond vendor/buyer.  You can engage in honest dialog. If you make a mistake, you’ll likely have a bit of a cushion to pad your landing.

Find your tribe, and be true to it.

Did anyone ever come up with a brilliant idea or make someone feel special while drinking a latte, talking on the phone and checking stock prices simultaneously? With apologies to all the multi-tasking geniuses out there, I doubt it.

The irony of texting and tweeting is that we often lose that precious moment — the real experience of it — while we try to document it.  There are times when the simple life is better, as David Mantey, editor of Product Design & Development, points out.  

Simple has its values in business too.  In an SD Times editorial, Simon Galbraith, joint CEO of Red Gate, asserts that as software developers pile on the features, version after version, they just might be missing the opportunity to make something truly great.