Monthly Archives: November 2017

November 13, 2017 · 12:24 pm

Bad Coaching

Most of us seek advice of some sort. It can be as simple as reading product reviews before we make a purchase or a restaurant reservation or as complicated as hiring a business advisor or a life coach. It’s information that adds to our own opinions as we make decisions, and one of the most important life skills is figuring out what’s good information and what’s not.

I thought of this while I watched this video from the European Tour. It’s 4 minutes of that tour’s golf professionals giving advice to a series of amateurs. The advice ranges from the nutty to the idiotic and every one of the amateurs follows it to the best of their ability. It’s silly stuff, ranging from stretching your eyeballs as part of your warm-up to piling grass on the ball to swinging blindfolded to throwing the club.

Here is the thing that resonated: the amateurs hung on every word of this bogus advice because it came from credible sources, tour pros. It reminded me of several clients I’ve had who had been given demonstrably wrong information from consultants or companies that positioned themselves as experts. Unlike the golf example, this wasn’t done as a joke and it did have negative consequences for my clients.

So here are a few things to think about. First, do your due diligence. Make sure the person giving you advice is qualified to do so. Not that there aren’t smart young people, but it’s less likely that a person with two or three years of business experience will have the broad perspective of someone with twenty or thirty years.

Next, avoid generic solutions. Good advice is tailored to the recipient. Golf pros who give the same lessons to everyone are generally horrible teachers. Your business is as personal as your golf swing, and any advice you get must be tailored to you.

If your advisor talks a lot more than he or she listens, dump them. In the video, some of the amateurs question the “tip” they’ve been given but the pro keeps chattering away, ignoring the questions.

I think that’s all good advice!

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November 10, 2017 · 11:51 am

Offer Fewer Fries

This Foodie Friday, I want us to think about less being more. Specifically, it’s the balance between quality and quantity. I’m of the opinion that when it comes to food, high-quality ingredients expertly prepared are more satisfying than a large portion of bland, low-quality food.

Photo by Stephanie McCabe

For example, think about a bread basket that arrives at your table. Rich, dense bread slathered in high-quality butter is not something you’d eat much of. Compare that with a bunch of Wonder Bread and store-brand butter that you might have at home. The latter is tasteless and not satisfying and I’ll bet you eat more of it.

McDonald’s proved this point in 1990 when they stopped frying their fries in beef tallow. It was a knee-jerk reaction to people believing that trans fats were better than natural fats (turned out to be totally wrong). The fries never tasted the same and, more importantly for our discussion today, were not as filling. I’m convinced that the reason we have supersized portions is that the current fries are so unfulfilling. It’s probably why we have an obesity problem as well. I suspect there were cost-savings too, but are those savings worth ruining the reputation of your signature product?

Look at Europe. France and Italy, two fantastic food cultures, don’t serve you big portions and yet it’s hard to walk away from a meal in either place still hungry. The dishes are rich and tasty. High fat? Sure. Caloric? Yes, but you don’t eat as much. For the restaurant, this can mean lower food costs (smaller portions) which might be taken as higher margins or passed along to customers. You can’t really eat a huge portion of fries cooked in duck fat, believe me.

This is a principle which I believe any business can use. Consumers don’t want (or need) tons of low-quality products. Sure, they might be duped into thinking of them as great values (“Look at that portion!”), but over time your customers realize that they’re not really satisfied.

Example: think of Word or Excel. They are extremely complex products and yet most users take advantage of a tiny amount of that complexity. Why not offer a simpler product to the masses that cost less and save the complex version for those people who really need it (and charge them accordingly?). You can find articles dating back over a decade complaining about Word’s complexity and yet it wasn’t made simpler.

Less can be a lot more. Think about offering fewer, but much better, fries. People can be satisfied with less as long as it’s top quality at an affordable price. I’d rather be sated and healthy than hungry and sick. You?

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November 8, 2017 · 9:52 am

Keeping It Real

Back in 2015, an engineer at Twitter asked his security team to look into fake accounts. He said he was stunned to find that a significant percentage of the total accounts created on Twitter had Russian and Ukrainian IP addresses and he also found that they were, for the most part, fake. They were “bots”.

Photo by Alex Knight on Unsplash

No, today isn’t a political rant about how our Democracy might just have been hijacked by a foreign power. Rather, what happened next, as told in this piece by Bloomberg, is instructive to any of us in business because it raises a few issues that are common to us all.

The engineer was part of the security team. That team was tasked with keeping the platform secure. He took his findings to another team – the growth team – which had the responsibility for increasing the user base. That user base number is critical for every business since how the business is valued is based in part on how many users (we can’t really say people in this case, can we?) are active. Discovering that a significant percentage of the user base was fake could have a negative effect on the business’ balance sheet, and in this, we begin to see the problem.

There is a misalignment of goals. If part of security is keeping the platform free from spambots, the people responsible for deleting the spambots can’t have any goals which make deleting those bots counterproductive. In this case, the engineer was told to “stay in his lane”. In other words, pay no attention to the man behind the curtain – the reality of our user numbers – it’s not your job.

No organization should have these kinds of silos. No organization can base its public statements about growth and user engagement on numbers it knows are fake. It’s one thing for users to inflate their follower numbers by buying fake followers but it’s quite another for Twitter itself to be aware of these non-human accounts and to do nothing about them because they want to keep their user numbers up.

I don’t mean to single out Twitter. The same issue persists on Facebook and other social platforms and it’s way more insidious than research can find. There is a term – dark social – that refers to sharing activity among the network’s members that isn’t easily measured. Let’s say a fake account spreads a lie and maybe even buys an ad to do so. We can see how many impressions the ad had or how many followers the fake account has. What we can’t easily see is the network effect. I see the post and am outraged about it. I tell five friends, who tell five of their friends, etc., particularly when it’s shared off the network itself via email or text.

I am fairly certain that each of these networks could identify and stop this activity despite what you might have seen in Congress last week. Those were the lawyers testifying, not the engineers. The point for your business is to keep everyone’s goals in alignment, don’t build silos, and to be honest with yourself and with your investors. These are public companies who might just be committing fraud, but every company has the same responsibility for honesty and transparency.  You with me?

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