Month: September 2013

Each year I try and spend a night out underneath the stars to try and experience, in a tiny and vicarious way, what the homeless face. It’s for a charity close to my heart, Action for Children. The event is called Byte Night, and this Friday hundreds of people all over the country will join us in raising money for Action for Children.

Last year was an interesting experience. It rained. And rained. And rained. The non-swimmer in me wasn’t perturbed, but another hour or two and I may have been.

This year, sadly, I won’t be amongst the sleepers-out this Friday, wet or not. I’m unavoidably away on business, and we haven’t yet invented the transport that can get me back from the US on time.

But that doesn’t stop my colleagues from spending Friday night on the banks of the Thames. It doesn’t stop them hoping and praying that the weather is somewhat better than last year.

It doesn’t stop me donating to the cause.

I hope it doesn’t stop you. Please give. And give generously.

Here’s the link.

Thank you.

Coda: I will, in conjunction with some of my colleagues, be running some other events this year in order to augment what we raise for this. Watch this space.

 

 

Every now and then something happens and you realise the world’s getting smaller, more connected, somehow overlapping in strange and wonderful ways.

There I was last night, quietly putting my feet up after a satisfyingly hectic week. I’d gone out for a wedding anniversary dinner with my wife (our 29th), and we were enjoying one of those companionable silences that can only be enjoyed by people who’ve spent lives with each other, reading peacefully. And then I remembered something I needed to do before going to sleep. It involved my having to leave the bedroom and go online.

Which I did. And I noticed that a good friend and erstwhile colleague had sent me a FollowFriday recommendation:

He’s known me for a long time, and he knew that the Gerald Waller 1946 photograph was something that meant a lot to me. No surprise it’s been my Twitter background since Twitter had backgrounds. No surprise I’ve written about it years ago.  I’ve met many people who like that photograph, so the #ff didn’t make me jump into action.

So Stu decided to press home the point:

 

He didn’t stop there either. He went on to share a youtube link with me, one that featured the musician in question, Nicki Wells (@nickiwellsmusic)

Then Saturday came along, I went about my chores, settled down for the afternoon. And watched the video. Liked the music, carried on.

And then stopped. Thought I recognised the drummer. Rewind. Replay. And there he was.

My nephew. Jivraj Singh.

Coincidence? I guess so. But that world’s getting smaller, the connections are getting more and more wonderful.

That made me call up his mother and speak to her, and I found out more about what Jivraj is up to now. Rolling Stone had already told me he was working on five different album projects.

For some reason, I’d missed learning about the Chaiwalla Sessions with Nischay Parekh. Big miss. Big mistake. Now corrected. Now I’m hooked. To Jivraj Singh, to Nischay Parekh, to Nikki Wells. To Nitin Sawhney.

Don’t make my mistake. Go listen to them. Go listen.

Coincidences. They make the world go round.

 

 

I was born in 1957. A long time ago. And that meant I grew up in the Sixties and early Seventies, in an India that was teenage in its independence. [In fact, when I was born, Goa still belonged to Portugal, albeit only since its annexation over four hundred years earlier.]

They were times of tumult and of transformation, of triumph as well as tragedy. Change everywhere. Change at incredible speed. Change with long-lasting consequences. Women entering parliament and even becoming heads of state; racism being tackled head-on for the first time; valves being replaced by transistors; man going into space; man landing on the moon; computers beginning to be exploited commercially, the mouse and the pointer being invented, personal computing becoming a possibility, the internet beginning to take shape. Mobile phones entering the fray; e-mail rearing its ugly head. Protest movements everywhere, people fighting to be heard, people fighting for their rights. Fighting against colour prejudice, against gender inequality. Fighting for the right to choose and for the right to live. Affordable international travel, leading to greater mobility across the world. Assassinations, hijackings, the beginnings of modern terrorism. Entire countries dying, and new ones coming up, as the last vestiges of five hundred years of European colonialism came to an end. War. And peace. And some of the finest music ever produced.

By the time I was 14 years old change, and rapid transformational change at that, was a constant in my life.

I’ve spent the next 40-odd years observing change, being part of that change, changing myself. And sometimes even trying to change some of the world around me.

For some reason, quite early on, I began perceiving each wave of change, regardless of its locus and coverage, as something separate in itself. Compartmentalising the change in order to make sense of it. Seeing each change as an individual thing, with something I could identify as a start, something I could identify as an end, some people involved in making the change happen, some people involved in leading that change. Starts and ends, reasons and goals, resources and costs and times and outcomes.

Yes. I confess. I viewed much of the change around me as a set of projects, sometimes interwoven, sometimes overlapping, sometimes gloriously isolated.

All projects involve change. All change meets inertia. And there’s always some risk as a result. A lot of the time, changes begin without everyone really knowing what the desired end-state is. Which means you have the skills and knowledge for the start of the project and, in all likelihood, you have to figure things out as you go along. Discover stuff. Learn, usually from mistakes. Adjust, refine. Move on. Sense and learn and respond. Again and again. Iterating until you reach where you need to be. The persistence of Robert the Bruce. The perspiration that lubricates inspiration. If you keep on at it, learning as you go, then, in Yoda fashion, you get to there-is-no-try-only-do.

That’s what projects are. Each project is a try that becomes a do as you iterate and refine and adjust and learn. Most of the time, change takes you to a place where you’ve never been; sometimes, it takes you to a place that nobody’s ever been. So discovery and learning and iteration become critical.

As you scale from one-person projects to larger ones, some sort of governance model becomes necessary. A process for agreeing priorities, for allocating resources to the tasks, for monitoring progress and getting feedback, and for intervention in the event of problem or conflict. [I chose not to use the word “failure” in that set. I have not failed, I have found ten thousand ways that do not work…]

Most projects start with constrained resources. Anecdotally speaking, the projects I’ve enjoyed the most have been those with hard constraints. Such projects tend to attract people-who-want-to-govern-inspect-or-otherwise-give-their-opinion in droves. Droves and droves. Advice and support and help are always useful,  provided you know how to use them. There’s a serenity prayer in there somewhere.

Some people may come to praise the “project”, some to bury it. You can’t do anything about it, it’s a hazard of business. But what you can do is this: you can figure out whether the person in question could help you decide on the right thing to do, or about doing things the right way.

In my own experience, there are many many people who can tell you how to do things the right way.

But a rare few who can help you work out the right thing to do. They’re keepers.

George Gilder used to say that every economic era is characterised by its unique abundances and scarcities, and that a successful business is one that makes use of both the abundances as well as the scarcities.

So that’s what I’ve tried to do in projects. Corral together the people who can help me do things the right way, convert their energy into repeatable process, build bureaucracies around them as and when needed, just to contain the sheer numbers and make things efficient. A QWERTY keyboard approach to prevent logjam.

And then I’ve tried to spend as much time as possible identifying, nurturing, developing the people who can tell me the right thing to do. The rare and the scarce. The keepers.

Which is why, when I look at governance models in companies, sometimes I have to smile wryly.

Startups tend to be hungrily looking for people who can help them ensure the right things are done. And they call them mentors and coaches and advisors.

Established companies tend to be looking, somewhat less hungrily, for people who can help them ensure that things are done the right way. And they call them NEDs.

Abundances and scarcities. It’s important to know which is which.

 

 

Have you ever been put off shopping by an over-zealous assistant? If you have, then have you considered how you feel when that over-zealous assistant is not flesh-and-bone but instead only in digital form? Some people find the analogue version an irritant; yet others groan at the digital equivalent. And so that brings me to Customer Rule #1: Don’t hassle me while I’m just looking; not unless I ask you for help.

 

 

This does not mean that store assistants are unwanted. In fact they provide a really worthwhile function, as long as they know useful stuff about the store: where you go to find stuff; where you can try stuff, test stuff, compare stuff; how you buy; how you pay; how you take delivery; anything and everything. But only when you want it. I think of store assistants as analogue equivalents of search boxes, and often nicer to deal with. But I wouldn’t want the search engine in my face except at my behest. And this brings me to Customer Rule #2: When I ask for help, please make sure you’re in a position to help. Especially if you’re a search box. Too often I visit the search function of a site and it can’t find zip. Even though what I’m looking for is on the site.

 

 

If you’re in the business of selling stuff, then people who come and browse till the cows come home and never buy anything can be the bane of your life. And so there are a bunch of ways you can get your own back on the customer. You can leave fragile things in easy-to-knock-into places, under a big sign that says if you break it you pay for it. You can seal things so that they’re hard to inspect. You can place them “behind glass”. You can even try and get people to pay for browsing, with a “just looking” fee. These are all excellent techniques to use … if your goal is to frustrate the customer. We’ve all felt this pain in the real world: the harder you make it for me to find something, to get to something, the less likely it is that I’ll buy something. And so we have Customer Rule #3: Make sure there is a good reason for putting your products and services “behind glass”.

 

It’s not just the products and services that get put behind glass. Sometimes it’s the doors and entryways. Businesses love their customers so much that they put them through some sort of benighted IQ test before they can buy stuff. Want to enter our site? Prove you’re not a machine. [Alan Turing would have found that interesting, the idea of a human having to prove he’s human via a test]. I love the way Randall Munroe makes that point in his excellent xkcd webcomic:

 

 

Think about this: how many telephone numbers do you remember “by heart” right now? And how many did you know twenty years ago? We used to have to memorise lots of numbers at one time; now we don’t have to any more. When we want someone’s number, we look up the person’s name. Nothing complicated about it. And, most of the time, we don’t even need to see that number, we just click and away we go. That’s what we started doing when mobile devices started getting smarter.

So the next time you ask a customer to remember twelve or sixteen digits as a prerequisite for her doing business with you, think about what you’re doing. Why not ask them to recite pi to 16 digits before she is “allowed” to buy something from you, or, heaven forfend, try and pay a bill….. try and pay you some money? Which leads me to Customer Rule #4: Try not asking customers to memorise stuff about you; instead, try to remember stuff about them.

 

I can’t remember the number of times I’ve walked in to a shop, both online as well as off-, only to be put off by all the stuff I have to do before I can actually buy something. Most of the time I’ve had one reaction. A predictable reaction. I’ve just walked away and found somewhere else to go about my business. Registration should be something lightweight and simple. Time for Customer Rule #5: If you make it hard for customers to do business with you, don’t be surprised if they fail in the attempt.
People have done business with each other for centuries, even millennia. They buy from each other, they sell to each other. They do so principally because they trust each other, because they’ve bothered to invest in a relationship between each other, because they have some understanding and some respect for each other.

Over those millennia, they’ve evolved ways of doing this simply and effectively. For some reason, we seem to think we can treat people differently in digital space.

Maybe we can. Maybe for some people it doesn’t matter. For me it matters. I want people to make it simple and convenient for me to do business with them. And if they don’t, I will find people who do.

How about you? Do you agree with what I’ve said? Does it match with your experience and expectation? Let me know. Your comments will determine whether I write a follow-up post on queueing time and baskets and trolleys and payment and delivery and all that….. or not, as the case may be.

 

Ronald Coase died earlier this month. He’d had a good innings, he was 102 when he passed away. I never met him; I never saw him speak. But he influenced me greatly nevertheless, an influence that continues to this day and is the reason for this post. Thank you Ronald Coase.

Coase, together with Peter Drucker and Jerome Garcia, formed an unlikely triumvirate in my (then) teenage head. Drucker helped me understand what the purpose of business was and what management meant. Coase let me see how and why firms organised and operated. And Garcia showed me what it meant to bring the customer into the equation. Between them they set the basis of how I approached business life, a basis that itself was founded on the accidents of my birth and upbringing: born in an India just ten years into independent existence, growing up in a libertarian closely-knit loosely-Hindu journalist family and home, educated by Jesuits over the best part of fifteen years, all in a Calcutta that could at best be described as a democratically elected communist city with an imperial past and an imperious present.

You can see why I found the stuff people like Stewart Brand, Larry Brilliant, Howard Rheingold and Kevin Kelly were doing heady and exciting. Of particular interest to me was how they took the empowerment of the individual and made it both individual as well as collective, something that sat well with my roots. You can see why I found The Cluetrain Manifesto unputdownable.

Ah, Cluetrain. That brings me nicely round to why I wrote this post, the topic of the “constant customer”.

The constant customer is a theme that’s been running through my mind for some decades now. Coase’s work helped me understand why a firm formed, how firms could lower transaction costs, what those transaction costs were. Drucker, with his purpose-of-business-is-to-create-a-customer approach, made sure I realised that without the customer, the firm meant nothing. And Garcia et al came along and showed me that in days to come, there would be no such thing as customer lock-in. That they would be free to leave. That they could and would choose to stay, if the circumstances were right. Cluetrain then reminded me that it wasn’t happening, and that it would.

And it is.

Now. Finally.

When I watched Marc Benioff talking about the Customer Company, he spoke about customers being connected in whole new ways, and about companies needing to “pivot” to the customer. And it made me think even harder about the “constant customer” theme. [Disclosure: As most of you know by now, I work for salesforce.com; this is just in case you didn’t].

When customers have neither choice nor mobility, they can, to a large extent, be ignored. And so they were ignored. Focus was placed instead on optimising products, on reducing transaction costs associated with products. Companies that built experience in a particular product set could then scale up both volume as well as reach, and everyone was happy. Model T happy. Any colour you like as long as it’s black. Focus on the product, not the customer.

Being a product company made sense. Products didn’t complain or talk back. And customers had nowhere else to go anyway.

I’d been a keen follower of John Hagel and John Seely Brown for some years when I came across their “Big Shift” work, which later culminated in the publication of The Power of Pull.

In it, they spoke about a number of key shifts; here I focus on two: from stocks to flows, from experience curves to learning curves. When trying to understand what they meant, I found myself going back to the theme of the constant customer. A “stocks” world was one where you worked on optimising products, occasionally (hallelujah!) changing them, staying incremental as much as possible, looking hard at reducing unit costs. The market moved slowly, the customer couldn’t move anyway. And so in a stocks world it was natural that companies that could scale experience did so and did so successfully.

In a “flows” world, the market is no longer static, and the customer is free to move. There is no “constant customer” any more. Keeping unit costs down is important, but not as important as reducing the cost of change. Because change you must. That’s what pivoting to the customer requires. That’s what is implied in moving from the experience curve to the learning curve.

In a stocks world you can focus on the product and not care about the customer; the skills that matter are principally related to engaging with the product. You worried about what the product “wanted”, you “listened” to the product, you “related” to the product. And all your communications were product-centric.

In a flows world, the skills that matter are radically different, they’re now about engaging with the customer. Flesh-and-blood people. You now have to care about what customers want, you have to learn to listen to them, you need to understand how to relate to them. And your communications need to become customer-centric.

This movement from stocks to flows, from experience to learning, it’s not easy. For one thing you have to value different things. You have to learn how to value the cost of change, not just unit costs. For decades we’ve been building monolithic systems — people, process and technology — that had as their prime objective reducing unit costs. Standardise the hell out of everything. Tariff up the cost of change. And throw volume at it until blood emerges from stones. At a level of abstraction, that’s what the outsourcing model was, that’s why private equity likes stable-market cash cows.

If products can’t adapt at the speed demanded by customers, they will die. From a customer’s perspective, their transaction costs have gone down rapidly with the advent of the web, and, more recently, their costs of change have zoomed downwards as well. They can find what they want more easily, whenever, wherever. They can discover the price to pay, quickly, easily. And they can move away with ease. Lock-ins get scarcer every day.

So when the customer’s cost of change is low, the company needs to adapt and learn. Companies need to move from monolithic architectures to platforms and ecosystems, so that they can begin to move at the pace of the customer and the market.

When companies move at customer speed, when companies are aware of customer needs, when companies listen to customers, when companies value the relationship with a customer, the customer becomes a constant. Again.

The constant customer existed once. Because she had nowhere else to go.

The constant customer can exist again. Because she chooses to stay.

But this requires a “flows” mind, a “learning” approach, adaptive platforms and ecosystems, an ability to listen to the customer, an ability to respond.

An ability to pivot to the customer, perhaps.