Those That Get ‘It’ Don’t Need ‘It’

But that isn’t what this post is really about, that was just an attempt at a catchy tag-line. Also, this post is also not about those that don’t get ‘it’. But first, what is ‘it’?

‘It’ is the value of the knowledge and skill that you offer as a service.

Consider the following diagram:

On the left hand side of the diagram (around ‘A’) you have the people that really don’t get the value of what you are offering. They don’t get it because their experience has never told them that it might be important, or they have never seen it done successfully. Unfortunately those that really don’t get ‘it’ are often the ones that need ‘it’ the most.  Don’t let this make you think this is a valid use of your time to try and convince them directly*.

On the right hand side of the diagram (around ‘C’) you have the people that really get ‘it’.  These people only need you if you want to be another set of hands to implement their plans.  If they get ‘it’ they don’t need ‘it’.  You don’t consult for these people, you get a job with them (if that is what you want).  Your skills and talents will be leveraged daily.

You’ll notice that there is another variable plotted: The chance of success.

Imagine you are providing a consulting service to an organization that involves the organization actually changing what they are doing <GASP>.  [Note: If you are the kind of person that doesn't care that your service actually has impact as long as you get paid, you can stop reading here... oh, and sometimes I wish I were you. -ed.] The chances of the initiative having success is directly related to how much the organization (top to bottom) is likely to get ‘it’.

At point ‘A’ they will never get ‘it’ and the chance of success is zero.  At ‘C’ they already get ‘it’ and it is probably already being done well by people in-house.

So, where should you focus your energy? Where do you add the most value?

You’ll notice we haven’t talked about point ‘B’ yet… the golden pentagon of ‘it’ opportunity.  Here there is enough get ‘it’ to ensure that the services offered will have some traction, but still enough need ‘it’ so that the organization needs your help to implement the goal of the service. And there is a reasonable probability of success, which leads to the *other way to get those that don’t get ‘it’ to realize that it might be important for them to do so:

Success breeds success, and it is one of the main things that diffuses ‘it’ (by word of mouth) from the few early adopters into the mass of the early majority.  Once those that don’t get ‘it’ start to see this success, they want to get some of that action. Some time after this point you write a book, get on Oprah, a million other consultants try and copy what you do, ‘it’ gets diluted and gets piled on the heap of discredited quick-fix fads. Why? Well, many of those that don’t get ‘it’ only try ‘it’ because they are desperate and/or have run out of ideas… but they still are unlikely to get ‘it’ and the chance for success stays low. [Hey, don't complain, you got to meet Oprah. -ed.]

So the moral of the story: If you are developing ‘it’, and you want to be in business for yourself, the best return-on-investment comes from that golden pentagon of opportunity.  Ask yourself honestly, does your client (and their organization) stand a reasonable chance of getting ‘it’?

This is Gonna Be HUGE!

This started off as a comment on Kneale Mann’s blog, but then I realized that a lot of my regular readers are probably expecting me to weigh in on the iPad, and why not! Ironically, Kneale’s post is about all the free publicity that the iPad is getting.  :)

There are a lot of people griping about what the iPad doesn’t have, and its name:

iTablet was the obvious (good) choice IMHO, but it breaks the ‘two-sylabble rule’ of the Apple naming conventions, and the recent predilection for the use of the letters ‘iP’ at the start (iPod, iPhone).  Complaints about the name are missing the real story here:

All the coverage I have read misses just how much this device is going to revolutionize everything! Apple has created a huge developer community and worked them into a lather over the potential of becoming rich, famous, or rich & famous developing the next multi-million-downloaded iPhone app.  Now they provide those same developers a new platform to innovate on.

Lots of analysts seem to think that this is about Kindle vs. iPad, but that misses the point too.  The Kindle is a very well executed specialized reading device which will continue to do well in the segment of eBook readers.  The iPad provides the opportunity for innovations of much greater scope.

Expect big revolutions in:

• Medical charting and visualization
• Marketing
• Gaming
• Graphic design
• eBook technology
• GPS & mapping
• Education
• Human interface design
• How you enjoy video and music
• Point of sale enablement
• Retail displays
• …

Just as an example: imagine you go into the local car dealership, and instead of being handed the usual marketing glossies you are handed a iPad with an interior and exterior visualization of your new car with all the interior and exterior features & colours, exactly to order.  The same could be applied to making all the selections for a new home, where colour and material choices can be visualized in a 3D rendered world navigated by intuitive screen gestures and/or movement of the whole device.

The tablet itself is a nice piece of work at a compelling price point (especially compared to the capabilities offered by netbooks), but the real monster unleashed here is the rabid pool of developers who now have a completely new form-factor to innovate on. In 6-12 months, the folks at Apple will look like geniuses (again).

The BEST Mechanic in Ottawa

After my OC Transpo rant, I thought it appropriate to counter-balance that with a review of a company I LOVE to do business with.

Apple? BMW? Starbucks? Bridgehead? All good guesses… but I want to talk about Dakota Automotive.

I spend a lot of my free time researching employee and customer engagement.  One of my favourite sources for such research is Gallup; you might be familiar with some of their polls.  Their research has revealed that there is an underlying structure to “emotional attachment” to businesses and it is remarkably consistent from industry to industry.  This emotional attachment model is layered much like ‘Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs‘ and includes the following layers:

• CONFIDENCE (Do I feel safe doing business with this company? Do they deliver on their promises?)
• INTEGRITY (Will this company treat me fairly? Do they offer fair resolutions to any problems?)
• PRIDE (Will I feel good about myself if I do business with this company? Do they treat me with respect?)
• PASSION (I can’t imagine a world without this company.  The company is perfect for people like me.)

Building customer engagement based on this model translates directly into increased profitability, revenue & customer retention. Just one example of this is a customer with pride or passion in a company who will actively promote that company to friends and family (or even on their blog!).  Lots of business leaders/owners have a hard time believing that their customers actually are ‘passionate’ about doing business with them, especially since they don’t see that passion about the business even in their own employees. Paying no heed to customer engagement can lead to something worse than having customers that are unengaged, you can actually make them ‘actively disengaged’.

Before we go there, lets talk about Dakota Automotive and how Andrew (the owner and mechanic) satisfies this emotional attachment hierarchy:

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• CONFIDENCE & INTEGRITY: Andrew sticks to his quotes, even if he low-balled.  While I actually prefer that he gets paid fair value for any work he performs, this clearly shows he is more than willing to deliver on his promises and treats me fairly.  I reward him the best I can by referring business his way, although he has PLENTY of business.  When he does work on your car he is always looking out for potential future problems which he informs you of, with none of the customary ‘hard sell’ pressure you find with other shops.
• PRIDE: Do I feel good about myself when I do business with him?  Absolutely, he offers great value for the money and he clearly loves what he does.  It feels good to pay someone to perform a task that they enjoy and do so well.  From a respect point of view, his willingness to hear  what I think to be the problem pays great dividends.  He will always listen, ask questions and actively diagnose the problem with me.  This not only is a sign of respect, but helps build trust. In contrast, many mechanics give you that ‘look’ when you try and describe the problem to them that clearly says: “I am just moving my pen to give you the impression I am listening, I actually have no interest in what you are saying, I am just going to get my guy to plug your car into the computer and that will tell us what we need to know”.
• PASSION: Well, I am writing a blog about him, so that is a pretty good sign that I am one of Dakota’s ‘actively engaged’ customers.  I won’t go as far to say that ‘I can’t imagine a world without this company’, but I will mention something that is very telling: Whenever I consider getting a new car, I have this pang of guilt in my mind that a new car warranty will reduce the business I do with Dakota.  Can you imagine a company that you actually adapt your behaviour to do business with them… by choice!!  What gets me to this level of passion I find hard to understand, but it has a lot to do with contrasts. Andrew is a rare gem amongst a large pool of average or even borderline-criminal people involved in the automotive industry.  He’s the sort of guy that you give money gladly because you know there is great value, it is well-earned, he enjoys his work and is just a plain likeable guy.

Speaking of contrasts, Gallup on ‘actively disengaged’ customers:

These customers harbour substantial negative feelings towards the company. Most actively disengaged could be considered strong candidates for defection to a competitor [where one exists].  Yet many remain with the company –spreading their discontent to other customers or prospects along the way – because of either high switching costs or a sense that the competitor would be no better [or there is no competition]. Their motto is, “Better the devil I know than the devil I don’t.

From my life experience the companies that quickly come to mind here are: Microsoft, OC Transpo, American Express, HSBC, Bell Canada, just about every NA car manufacturer, and George Lucas as a writer/director since about 1983. For each of these I can think of a defining moment (or many) where I was treated with a lack of respect and/or my confidence in them was severely shaken.  I go FAR out of my way to avoid doing business with these companies.

It is on days that I deal with the likes of OC Transpo that I am so especially glad that some businesses can deliver so well on their brand promise, and make their customers feel like a valuable asset to their business.  Luckily for me, I was taking OC Transpo to go pick up my car being serviced by Dakota Automotive.

OC Transpo: Humility by Design

I take the bus about once a year, but these experiences leave me with the same feeling every time: How do self-respecting people do this every day??

It seems like a system designed to make you feel cheap, insignificant, and –in my case– an idiot.  Transit fares are expected to be hiked in this year’s budget, which seems like classical conditioning in reverse: Your service sucks, so lets pay you more for it?!

My experience was exacerbated by taking the bus on our first brutally cold day of the winter, and during ‘rush hour’.  I use quotes in this case because other much larger cities –like Toronto– win awards in public transit in places that have real rush hours. After navigating OC Transpo’s confusing website in the warmth of a Starbucks, I could not determine from their confusing route maps which go to my desired destination.  So I picked one (the 85) and, with considerable concentration, determined that it might go where I wanted to go (about 10 blocks East on the same street).

Lets talk about the maps for a moment.  The route maps they put online are the same style as those used on the poles located a the stops, which are vertical in format.  This style removes two important pieces of information for the transit noob:  no relationship between actual cardinal directions (maps usually have North on top), and little to no indication what cross-streets –or even the main road– that the route travels.  They probably are quite easy to read for someone who uses the system all the time, but hopeless for anyone who is using the system infrequently.  This would only be a problem for OC Transpo if they desired new users, which they clearly do not.

They have a web-site, and it is clear they have put a lot of effort into it, but the results are less than stellar.  I was hoping for an iPhone application, but it turns out even with 140,000+ apps now available, there isn’t an app for that.  Instead, I tried the octranspo.mobi site they created for cell phones, and gave up quickly because of its lack of user-friendliness.  I can promise OC Transpo one thing: if they were to create an iPhone app, that can present local stops based on GPS and recommend routes and timetables for your desired destination, they would increase the chances of this user taking a bus 10,000%.

So, having determined a bus # and its schedule, I watched the stop from the warmth of my Starbucks to establish the once-every-10-minutes cadence of bus arrivals was consistent before I ventured out into -20C with gale force winds.  25 minutes later I, and two other regular bus users, finally get on an 85, frozen almost solid.  I mention the other two users because it was clear that they were frustrated, but their body language expressed a resignation to this being ‘business as usual’ for the bus system.  While I was waiting for this bus, I established that the two other routes that used this stop were going to my desired destination.  After 25 minutes in the cold, I was already feeling like an idiot for not spending more time to decipher the routes to determine that I could take ANY bus that used that stop to go where I was going.

Adding to this feeling like I wasn’t someone capable of graduating high school, let alone a degree in Engineering Physics, I finally get on a bus and attempt to deposit my two tickets into the fare receptacle for change.  The bus driver indicates that this isn’t what I am supposed to do and points at the top of the confusing mast used to take fares by various means: bills, change and –somewhere– tickets.  I try to stick the tickets into the slot used for cash, which seems like the right slot, it doesn’t work, then a second slot (I think) on the top.  When that doesn’t work, the driver finally points me to the back of the bus and doesn’t even want to consider actually taking the tickets from my hand.  Free ride?  Feeling embarrassed, and a bit like a leper, I slink to a place where I hope I can stand and stay out of the way; no such place exists on a bus.

After watching one person enter the bus from the rear door (he shared both my free ride, and the appearance of a leper), and watching the driver fiddle with the fare mast that wasn’t working in the adverse weather, I resigned myself to the observation that even the drivers had given up trying to work within the system and had given up due to its futility.

I arrive at my stop, wait for the green light to turn on, and push on the yellow door handles to get it to open…  and do it again harder… and harder… the bus starts to pull away and my fellow passengers –thankfully but also embarrassingly for me– yell at the driver to indicate that someone is trying to get off, but the door isn’t responding (or don’t I know what I am doing?!).  He looks back at me with a look I can’t decipher as frustration at me, frustration with the finicky doors or frustration with his life, and urges me to try harder.  I put my –considerable– weight into it, and with other users pushing on the other door, the door finally opens.

The engineer in my ponders how the door was supposed to work: is it based on force on the door, or force applied over a period of time??  Perhaps if I didn’t push as hard, but pushed longer?  Why the hell should a bus user have to figure this out?!  Clearly the poor drivers and riders aren’t being given adequate equipment to improve the user experience!

If OC Transpo actually wants to increase the number of users –and its revenue without a fare hike that it clearly doesn’t deserve–, the executive team might actually consider riding their own buses to see what the experience is like.  They should see that there are many simple things that they could do to move the user experience from humbling to something the city could take some pride in.

Is CityTV’s Dina Pugliese Really Maria Menounos?

For anyone who can’t tell… Maria is on the left, Dina on the right.