Category Archives: Reality checks

October 25, 2017 · 11:25 am

Business Tourists

When I worked in Manhattan a long time ago, one thing that regularly made me crazy was tourists. They weren’t hard to spot. They weren’t moving along with the general flow of pedestrian traffic. In fact, they often weren’t moving at all as they stopped to gawk at the big buildings or waited until the light turned green before crossing a street that had no traffic.

At holiday time, it was worse. Not only did they stare at the decorations but there were LOTS more of them. They had to have the photo of the Rockefeller Center tree while the rest of us had to BE SOMEWHERE.

It’s become worse with the advent of smartphones. Now, it’s not just the tourists that walk around without purpose. One is constantly bumping into people. We used to have an expression at the NHL: don’t skate with your head down. It meant one should pay attention to the surroundings to avoid nasty collisions. Smartphone users inevitably walk with their heads’ down.

I see that Honolulu, another tourist mecca, has passed a law that will fine you up to $35 if you’re caught staring at your phone when crossing the street. Get caught a second time and it’ll cost you up to $75. Nailed a third time and the fine is $99. Of course, by then you’re probably in a hospital, having been hit by a car. Still, there is a business lesson in this.

It’s way too easy to conduct business with your head down, fixated on what you’re doing while ignoring your surroundings. Heck, many places encourage it, as employees sit in front of computers wearing headphones. That’s a worry (how are people to interact?) but the big concern is ignoring the changing market or new opportunities that emerge. No, we can’t go chasing every shiny new object, but we do need to be aware that they’re out there so we can evaluate if they present a new opportunity or just a distraction. When we’re locked in – whether to a computer screen or a smartphone or to our own internal goings-on – we’re business tourists, out of sync with the pace of business and unaware of our surroundings. Head’s up!

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October 11, 2017 · 9:57 am

Truthiness Wins

If you’re not familiar with the term “truthiness,” you should be. Coined way back in 2005 by Stephen Colbert, it’s a term that refers to

"I created this cartoon illustration in c...

(Photo credit: Wikipedia)

the belief or assertion that a particular statement is true based on the intuition or perceptions of some individual or individuals, without regard to evidence, logic, intellectual examination, or facts. Truthiness can range from ignorant assertions of falsehoods to deliberate duplicity or propaganda intended to sway opinions.

It was meant to be a term of satire, generally describing a politician departing from an obvious set of facts to espouse something that seems like the truth but isn’t. A dozen years ago, that was a circumstance that was relatively unusual. Today, it’s the norm, both in business and out. If you’re reading today’s screed thinking that I have an answer, you can stop here: I don’t. There are way too many vested interests that have come to rely on truthiness as a way of doing business, and that’s a shame.

Facebook recently admitted that Russian agents used its network to distribute disinformation to roughly 10 million U.S. users in order to influence the 2016 U.S. presidential election. They and other social platforms are trying to figure out how to readily identify “fake news“, all of which fits the definition of truthiness to a tee. To paraphrase Cassius in Julius Caesar, the fault, dear reader, is not in our stars or our social platforms, but in ourselves. We believe what we want to believe thanks to confirmation bias, and the explosion of content sources has made it possible for us never to hear a point of view to the contrary.

This is bad in real life and could be fatal in business. If we only pay close attention to evidence and arguments that support our own thinking on various business issues, and to toss out or ignore contradictory evidence, the odds are good that we’ll fall for something that’s truthy rather than true.

It’s 2017 and truthiness has won, or at least it’s holding the high ground and doing an excellent job of fighting off reality. Our job as business people is to win the battle and put truthiness back into the hands of the satirist from whence it came, both in business and in real life. Are you with me?

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October 9, 2017 · 11:21 am

You Can’t Handle The Truth

There has never been a time when it’s been easier to get information. If you don’t believe me, pick up that computer you keep by your side most of the time (that would be your smartphone), push whichever button activates either Siri, Google Assistant, or whatever flavor of virtual assistant you have installed, and ask what the weather will be tomorrow. Ask who the Prime Minister of Denmark is or a few ways you can cook a turnip. We have the world at our fingertips.

That can be true with business information too. Traffic to your media properties, interactions with your content, results of your ad and social media campaigns, and feedback on how your company or brand is interacting with the world at large are all readily available for analysis and action. So is customer data, market predictions, and just about anything else you’d need to know. Pretty awesome, right?

The problem is that not everyone wants to know the truth about these things. Take the manager whose staff is leaving in droves. They “hear” it’s because of a better offer but they don’t take the time to sit down and dig into if there is an underlying problem in their operation. They couldn’t handle it if the problem was really them and their management style so they avoid the question.

Then there is the web person who is under pressure to keep growing traffic and doesn’t bother to exclude the kinds of traffic that inflate the numbers. You know: your own internal use of your website, traffic from places where you don’t do business, referrer spam or other obviously fake traffic. They know the truth but their bosses can’t handle it.

The problem with having information is that it compels you to act. We can always deny there is a problem if we don’t know about it or if we think the information we have is inaccurate. As with the law, ignorance is no excuse in my mind. I’ve been in meetings where some excellent forecasting predicts a downturn in a company’s business but several members of the management team want to expand their spending. The forecasts are subordinated to the feeling that more spending will yield more revenue despite the fact that the company’s share of the market has been steady for years and probably won’t increase in a downturn (which is basically what the managers are predicting). They couldn’t handle the truth: they need to tighten their belts and ride out the next few quarters. They’re no longer in business, by the way.

We hear an awful lot about fake news and there certainly is some out there to be ignored. Your business analytics don’t fall into that category and you ignore them at your own peril. If you can’t handle the truth, you can assume that reality will handle you one way or another. OK?

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