Monthly Archives: October 2013

October 23, 2013 · 8:35 am

Tossing It

Somewhere along the line it became most cost-effective to throw things away than it is to fix them.

broken ipad screen

(Photo credit: 3dom)

I know people who buy new printers rather than spend the money on the ink – it’s about a wash financially and they get a new printer.   I recently replaced a small appliance (ok, a little wine storage unit) because when I found out how much it would cost to fix the fan that had broken, a new unit, complete with warranty, made more sense.

Tech may be among the worst offending industries.  I mean, if the battery goes on your iPhone or MacBook Air, you can’t replace it.  We toss the unit and get a new one.  TV‘s are so cheap that the notion of repairing one is pretty alien these days, particularly when we consider that the new item will inevitably be better technology than what’s being fixed.

There is a problem with this mindset, however.  Too many people and businesses extend it to their thinking about customers, employees, and others.   When a relationship gets broken, we weigh the costs of fixing it against the expense of replacing it.  Rather than “fix” an employee who might have underperformed, we fire them.  That results in a few things – writing off the investment we’ve made in that person thus far as well as incurring the time and expense to replace them with no guarantee of better results.  Rather than investigating each and every customer complaint about service, we try to placate the disgruntled customer with some token gestures (the hotel room isn’t clean?  Oh, have a free bottle of water!) and don’t really mind when they don’t return again – they’re a pain.  We don’t look at them as fantastic suppliers of information about our failings – we consider them to be pesky children who rouse us from our daily business sleep.

Business relationships – with staff, with customers, with the public at large – are not disposable.  In many cases they are not replaceable and all efforts must be taken to repair them.  It’s almost never more cost effective to toss them.  You agree?

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October 22, 2013 · 9:38 am

Cover Me

TunesDay! Today I want to write about the cover tune, one of the most overlooked forms of music. Way back when in the ancient days before the Beatles and Buddy Holly, musical artists rarely wrote their own music. Instead, they either discovered songs on their own or, more often, worked with A&R people and managers at their label to find music that was optimal for their voices. Arrangers would figure out the musical backing and that arrangement was often more important than the vocal. Think of the sound of Frank Sinatra singing a Quincy Jones  arrangement versus one by Nelson Riddle.  Same voice, very different sound.

Today most artists write and perform their own music rather than “standards” or songs produced by writing houses such as those found in The Brill Building.  Covering another artist‘s work is the exception, it seems.  When done right, however, it can make that interpretation something unique and your own.  For example, this:

Became this:

Which is the business point today.  I have clients who stress out from time to time about being original, and I agree that making something one’s own is really important in business.  After all, consumers expect us to be authentic and to speak in our own voices.  However, doing a brilliant cover version of someone else’s song in the business world can be a fantastic and successful strategy.  After all, Amazon wasn’t the first online commerce site nor was eBay the first online auction site.  Both interpreted the “song” they chose and did it better.  They became hits while the original artists faded away.

Rather than worrying about the “new” or the latest shiny object (or technology) out there, maybe we should focus our energies on rearranging what has proven to be appealing and covering it in a way that adds new meaning.  Maybe that’s another example of everything old (covering songs and rearranging them) being new again but if it is, I’m in.  You?

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October 18, 2013 · 9:38 am

Bad Menus

Foodie Friday!  Maybe you’ve seen one of the many shows that fall into what I’ll call the “restaurant rehab” genre.

Dinner menu from Water St./ Beaver St. locatio...

(Photo credit: Wikipedia)

You know what I mean.  A restaurant is failing, a celebrity chef comes in, makes changes and voilà, business saved.  Inevitably, the chef changes the decor, makes sure the place is clean (and some are so disgusting you wonder why the health department hasn’t shut them down), savages the owner for faulty purchasing practices (a walk-in full of rotting food is a good sign you’re buying too much for what you’re using!), and, most importantly, goes over the menu and eats the food.

I think I can safely say, without it being too much of a spoiler, that in each and every case the food sucks.  You might think that bad food is the reason these places are having problems.  I think the bad food is a symptom, not the disease.  The real problem is a bad menu and maybe that’s a phenomenon that could cause problems with your business too.  Let me explain.

Nearly every place that’s been on one of these shows has a menu that’s similar in scope to an encyclopedia.  They have way too many items.  The chef thinks that they’re providing a service by letting diners order..well…almost anything.  The reality is that they setting the business up for problems.  More dishes requires more varied ingredients (the full refrigerator of rotting food).  Cooking them requires more staff training and quality control is harder.  After all, if a cook is making a dish once a week, they’re far more likely to screw it up than if they cook it hourly every night.  Finally, it confuses your patrons.  It’s stressful wondering which choice is great and which items aren’t.

Fewer choices executed perfectly is usually the solution on the TV shows and it is in most businesses and products too.  Think about Word, the widely used word processing program.  Microsoft filled it with features and, to be sure users would see them, put lots of buttons on the menu bar.  That was confusing and very few users cared about the new features each version brought so they didn’t pay to upgrade.  I know people who are still happily using Word 2003.

This notion goes as far back as Henry Ford.  You could get any color car you wanted as long as it was black.  Think of Apple – there is limited customization possible with their phone operating system but that’s just fine for most users and the products are high-quality.

We all want to give consumers choice.  What we don’t want to do is to confuse them or to offer an inferior product.  Just as the restaurants found out, that’s a recipe for failure.  Fewer options perfectly executed is my take.  What’s yours?

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