(Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Really edgy, I know, but since we discussed a simple kitchen implement that can kill you yesterday I thought today we’d lighten up.  The article reviews why a lot of chefs prefer wooden spoons in their kitchens and it got me thinking about business at the same time.

These are the main reasons chefs like them:

• It’s strong - it can stir thick things without breaking
• It’s soft - it’s not going to scratch the finish of your cookware;
• It’s insulated
• It has a high heat tolerance
• It’s wood –  it looks nice, and also that it feels nice in the hand

I’d add it’s a natural material although obviously it’s pretty old – probably among the first materials used to make cooking tools.  Which is the business point.

There’s a tendency to throw away older tools and technologies just because they’re old (let’s include tossing some older people in that thinking too).  Often overlooked is that these older solutions might have some significant advantages over newer inventions.  Plastic spoons break or melt even though they’re easier to clean and might release chemicals into your food.  Metal spoons can scratch your pans and need a lot of insulation - leave one in a pot sometime and then pick it up – ouch.

Many businesses get caught up in the rush to the latest shiny object – social media, mobile apps – without thinking about their business goals or the ability of the new thing to do the job without causing other problems.  They toss away the perfectly good wooden spoons they’ve been using only to find that their cooking – branding, marketing – suffers.

We’ve got a lot of wooden spoons along here in the kitchen along with metal, plastic, and silicone.  We also have a dozen different types of knife and various sizes and shapes of pots and pans.  Some are pretty old and some we’ve bought in the last year.  We try to use the one that’s best suited for the task.  That’s how I approach business too – figure out the business objective and work with the tools best suited to accomplish that goal.

Make sense?

A Kitchen Knife. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

I came across this article about a bizzare kitchen occurrence and in addition to feeling a need to share it with you all I’m thinking it makes an excellent business point. Let’s see what you think.

This comes out of Kuala Lumpur and is via the Press Trust of India:

In a freak accident, a Malaysian restaurant cook slipped and accidentally stabbed herself to death with a kitchen knife, police said.

Cynthia Tan Kian Hoon, 41, was cooking breakfast when she fell forward, right into a knife she was using. The six-inch knife which she was holding in her hand, pierced into her ribs.

She died shortly thereafter, having cut a main artery.  Tragic, but instructional for the rest of us.  No, the point isn’t to wear non-slip shoes or to use duller knives.  In my mind, it has to do with something I see quite often and maybe you do as well:  people getting hurt (killed!) by the very tools they need to do their work.  Sometimes it’s accidental; more often than not it has to do with someone not understanding how to use the tool in the first place.

Take web analytics.  People regurgitate meaningless data points instead of looking for data to answer actionable business questions.  Then there’s a focus in social media on “likes” and “follows,” not on the quality of interaction or the transactional value of the social exchange.  It’s not limited to the web or to media either.

This was a tragic accident and like most accidents it might have been prevented somehow.  All of us who work with the tools of our trade should spend a few minutes thinking about how the very things that help us make a living can hurt us if they’re misused.  I think we’ll all be surprised by how much of the pain is self-inflicted.

Thoughts?

(Photo credit: Wikipedia)

What made me laugh was the projection of the number of impressions both paid and earned that the campaign would generate. It came out to such a ridiculously high number (as in reaching every person on Facebook hundreds of times each) that it called into question everything in the rest of the presentation as well as the agency’s overall competence.

As I thought about it, I became a little scared and then a lot offended.  It bothered me that an agency who has a pretty good list of clients had moved into social media and was treating it the same as broadcast media.  They should know a lot better.  It made me scared because this is the sort of irresponsible behavior we find all too often in digital.  People become digital or social media experts or SEOs overnight and sell an inferior grade of services to clients who will get lousy results.  How can they invest in this form of marketing going forward when the results weren’t there?

The point is this – whether it’s media plans or budgets or a report on manufacturing, we need to ask simple, logical questions.  Why are we using Facebook when our objective is more geared to the broader web and restrictions in Facebook’s policies will prevent us from activating properly?  Do the numbers they’re projecting make sense (and if we’re really going to reach the audience 300+ times each, maybe we’ve gone too far)?

There were a bunch of other issues in the deck and aside from the numbers my general response was “these guys just don’t get it.”  None of us should be offering off the shelf, cookie-cutter solutions to problems that get more complex every day.  The nature of media is changing – the nature of media planning need to change as well, along with the messages.  You’ve experienced it in your own media behavior – why are you thinking everyone else has remained the same?

You with me?

Getty Images via @daylife

For those of you unfamiliar with the term, obstruction (and its cousins hooking and holding) is what players do to decrease the flow of the game. An easy way to think of it is as a player preventing another player who doesn’t have the puck from skating, obstructing their ability to play. Almost a decade ago, the NHL cracked down on the practice by enforcing the existing rules against it in an effort to improve the flow of the game and allow the more skilled players to show those skills. As one might expect, teams adjusted their rosters over the years to emphasize great skating and stick-handling over the clutching and grabbing that was so prevalent .

Watching the game last night, I was struck by how little free-flowing skating was going on.  Many of the other games I’ve watched during the season have seemed the same.  The rules, or at least their enforcement, seem to have changed.  Which is the business thought.

If you’ve built your team to play the game a certain way and the rules change, how do you compete?  If you’re a media company that’s built on ad revenue for eyeballs, what do you do when the audiences you’re selling evaporate to other channels?  If you’re selling SEO, what happens when the algorithms change and everything you do is now wrong?  Even if you’re in online commerce, what do you do with inventory when tastes change?

Ultimately, I think our success and failure revolves around change management – what happens when the rule book gets modified.  We need to be thinking about that as we bring on new hires – how well have they dealt with change in the past?  We need to maintain flexibility in our planning – why spend money to a budget that’s based on old rules?

I’m sure it’s frustrating to the coaches and managers when they find a different set of rules on the ice than in the rule book.  I know it’s frustrating to find a different set of business conditions and consumer preferences.  What do you do when the rules change?

Leymah Gbowee (Photo credit: aktivioslo)

and it got me thinking about education. If you’ve read the screed more than a couple of times you’re probably aware that I’m pretty passionate about the topic. It was one of my majors in college and I had planned to be a high school teacher until I realized the kids were more mature than I was at that point so I went into business.  I know for sure that I’ve used all of the teaching skills along the way.

The speaker yesterday was Leymah Gbowee a nobel Peace Prize winner for her working in founding “Women of Liberia Mass Action for Peace” an organization that helped end years of civil war in her homeland of Liberia.  Her topic focused on how passion and the education to activate it can be the greatest weapon of all (my words, not hers) by empowering people to make changes in their own lives and others.  It was an inspiring speech and you can read it all here if you’re interested.

It was something said, however, by the chair of the college trustees that resonated even more deeply and which I want to share with you today:

Clayton Christensen, the well-known Harvard Business School professor and author of the recent book “How Will You Measure Your Life”, says that rather than telling his students and clients what to think, he teaches them how to think, and then he lets them reach correct decisions on their own. He says that “if we knew the future would be exactly the same as the past, simply doing now what has succeeded before would be fine. But if the future is different—and it almost always is—then that would be the wrong thing to do.”

As businesspeople, managers, and mentors, we need to think about that.  Rather than teaching (or learning) the “what” we need to learn how to formulate using the “how” and to act accordingly.  The value of an education isn’t in the financial rewards it can help bring about but in the ability it brings to figure out how to change the world, regardless of what field we’ve chosen.  In Gbowee’s words:

Step into the world and shine. Step into the world and exert yourself. You may encounter bosses who will expect you to act dumb to make them shine. Remember that you have to blossom, not for yourself but for the people you will be serving.

Pretty good stuff with which to start the week!

(Photo credit: tamaradulva)

As a recent article explained, “farmers’ markets are hot business nowadays. The number of markets shot up 17 percent last year, and in a recent survey from Mintel market researchers, 52 percent of people said it’s more important to buy local produce than organic, which will likely drive the growth even more.”  There are a number of them in my town and the surrounding area, almost one each day of the week.   Most of the vendors are local farmers and the produce is generally pretty good.

There is, however, a dark side to many of these markets.  Some of the produce sold isn’t local even if it appears to be that way (there are no local tomatoes here in Connecticut in May, for example, unless they’re from a hot-house which means they’re less tasty).  There is loose labeling too – local, organic, pesticide-free, no-spray – many vague promises thrown around.  Which is the broader business point today.

We’re in the season of vague promises better known as an election year but we encounter lots of misleading or purposefully vague language from brands every day.  ”Natural” or “Earth Friendly” or “Vegan” are meaningless because they’re not regulated, and companies are able to use these terms at will. It’s up to the consumer to differentiate marketing from reality and then to act by refusing to buy products that use misleading claims.

At the risk of stating the obvious, once a brand is outed as using misleading language, all sorts of bad things can and do happen, especially since the newer tools such a social media and the older tool known as a class-action lawsuit empower pissed off customers.  Frito-Lay was sued over the all-natural claims it has made for its Tostito and Sun Chips products.  Colgate had TV commercials for a Sanex bath gel banned for suggesting that it contains no man-made chemical ingredients.  The list gets longer every day.  Guess there’s no quota on stupidity.

We all know I’m big on reading the freaking label even though there aren’t any at the farmer’s market.  I ask a lot of questions instead.  But isn’t it a sad thing that we can’t really believe what we read even when labels are readily available?   What do you think?

(Photo credit: Wikipedia)

However, on the off-chance you haven’t, the gist of it is that two campers cross paths with a bear.  As the angry bear begins charging out of the woods towards them, the first camper starts putting his sneakers on. The other camper screams, “It’s no use, we’ll never be able to outrun the bear!”  The first camper yells back, “I don’t need to outrun the bear, I just need to outrun you!”

A number of folks use that as a business analogy to say that in most business categories, we need only to beat our competition to survive.  I disagree.  By  thinking about surviving or “outlasting” the competition, the focus is on the short-term (we need to run only as fast as the other guys) rather than building for the long-term.  Focusing on the other guys as the standard might just mean you’re being dragged down rather than creating enough of a gap so as to make them non-entities.  After all, what is that bear protecting and what kind of opportunity does it present?

The auto industry is a great example.  For years, the US car companies built cars that were responses to what the other guy had to offer.  The standards of production in terms of fit and finish were OK.  It was pretty much a race to stay slightly ahead of one another.  Then the Japanese auto invasion hit and suddenly there was a different standard in terms of quality and innovation.  It was much higher as measured by independent firms such as J.D. Power.  The domestic manufacturers’ share of business dropped quite a bit – imports offered better quality and more car for the money.  Because they were focused on outrunning one another rather than the foreign bear, they almost got killed.  Had they been focused on an altogether different standard – the one that asks “how can we build something that’s great” who knows what might have been.

Image via CrunchBase

Today’s meditation on this concerns Facebook, or rather an interesting bit of research that came out from the AP and CNBC concerning Facebook’s future.  They conducted the poll in anticipation of Facebook going public and my immediate reaction was AOL‘s trajectory morphing to MySpace‘s morphing to…???   The AP piece summed it up with this question:

Is Facebook A Fad?

You’re laughing?  46% of the poll respondents believe Facebook  will fade away as new companies come along, and it’s not just the old farts - younger adults are no more apt than their older counterparts to expect Facebook’s long-term success; 51 percent think it will fade.

For those of us who have been in digital since the start of the commercial era, it’s not a weird question.  Fifteen years ago, one would have asked the same of AOL and could not have imagined that it would pretty much be a blip.  The rise and fall of MySpace is much more recent but illustrative.  So quit your laughing and think about how the nature of the beast is changing.  Facebook is going from a company built to attract and service folks like you and me to a company that’s built to attract and service marketers.  That’s not necessarily a bad thing except that Facebook seem to be bad at it.

You might have read that General Motors is pulling its advertising from Facebook.  That’s a $10 million deal — not massive in terms of value — but very embarrassing for the social network because apparently it was too hard for GM to quantify their ROI.  The poll data supports that thinking - 57% of users say they never click on ads or sponsored content, while 26 percent “hardly ever” click on them.

Like AOL long ago, there are some other underlying factors that might portend bad things.

• Just 13 percent say they trust Facebook completely or a lot to keep their personal information private.
• A large majority (59 percent) say they have little or no faith in the company to protect their privacy.
• Even among the site’s most frequent users — those who use it multiple times a day —half say they would not feel safe making purchases through the site.

There’s another great analysis from Forrester here and I’m sure more will be written as Facebook’s IPO happens later this week.  So is Facebook a fad?  I’ll let you respond via the comments, but my thinking is that while “fad” might not be the right term, it’s definitely not invulnerable.  Given the underlying concerns from users and marketers, someone ought to spend an hour reviewing the history of AOL and recall that MySpace went from “the most popular site in the US” in 2006 to losing half its traffic between 2009 and 2010.  What’s your thinking?

(Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Not surprisingly, Americans are growing more frustrated with customer service and businesses are hearing about it as consumers tell an increasing number of people about both their positive and poor service experiences.  How many of the folks you follow have reported on an interaction with a company?  What I found of particular note were the things Amex cited as the big four service gripes:

• Rudeness:  An insensitive or unresponsive customer service representative – 33%
• Passing the Buck: Being shuffled around with no resolution of the issue – 26%
• The Waiting Game: Waiting too long to have an issue resolved – 10%
• Being Boomeranged: Forced to continually follow-up on an issue – 10%

They’re all sort of cousins in the “we just don’t care about you as much as we do our own bottom line” family.  The key is to align the interests of the folks providing customer service of any sort with the customers themselves.  Pay them based on positive feedback, not on incremental sales.  Nearly half the respondents said that they will use social media to praise a company for a great experience (which sort of flies in the face of the widely held assumption that only complainers go public).  Nearly an equal number will vent publicly about a negative experience.  With other research telling us how most folks now do their pre-purchase research about brands and companies using social tools, none of us can afford to have anything out there that convinces consumers to do business elsewhere.

The study shows that folks who have used social media for customer service in the last year are willing to spend substantially more with companies they believe provide great service. They are also far more vocal about service experiences, both good and bad. Why aren’t we doing everything we can to be sure about the outcome?  Given the above “Big Four,” there’s still a way to go.

(Image credit: Getty Images via @daylife)

Competitive golf is played mainly on a five-and-a-half-inch course…the space between your ears.

There was no better example of this than Kevin Na during The Players.  It’s a great business lesson too.  For the uninitiated, The Players is often referred to as the fifth major.  Whether it is or not, it’s a big deal in the golf world and it draws a top field.  Kevin Na is a young (28) golfer who turned pro out of high school and won for the first time not long ago.  He was probably best known for carding a 16 on a hole last year (which he did with great grace and a smile, by the way).  What is unusual about him is that he struggles to start his golf swing.  There’s no way to describe it so I’ll show you:

It’s painful, and what’s even weirder is that once he did manage to swing he was playing well enough to be leading the tournament into the final round.  It’s a great example of how often our worst enemies lie within us, both on the golf course and in the office.  How many of us spend time negotiating against ourselves rather than the other party in a deal and deliver worse deal terms than we might otherwise have got?  How many of us operate without a plan or without regard to data that might prove useful?  How many of us let our fears of failure undermine our abilities to function, despite the fact that there is plenty of evidence (like Na’s scorecard) that says we’re doing well?

Part of our ability as businesspeople is our mental capacity, which includes the ability to shut off our brains when we need to and just let our other skills take over.  To a certain extent, we need to get outside of our heads in order to let our brains function.  I’ve had the experience of feeling as if I’m watching myself give a presentation to a few hundred people, one for which I’ve prepared diligently.  My head got out of my brain’s way.  Hopefully Na, who seems like a good guy, can use this experience to do the same.  How about you?