September 27, 2017 · 10:32 am

Decluttering

As I mentioned in this space a while back, we sold Rancho Deluxe. The process of getting it ready for sale forced us to look at every single thing in the place. We made piles. One for stuff we’d keep and, therefore, have to pack and move. One for stuff we’d donate. One for stuff that was worthless and was trash. My old college papers fell into that pile, although I’m not sure my folks would agree with the categorization since they paid for the education. The last pile was for stuff we’d sell.

It was an interesting process since it forced us to really think about each item. What struck me was how little we actually kept and how much of what was in that house was just clutter. Of course, each of us has a ton of clutter in our lives, as do our businesses. I’m pretty sure that each of us could do with a decluttering as well.

Is your business media of some sort? My guess is that revenue pressures have forced a tremendous amount of clutter into your content. The commercial and promotional load (non-program material) in TV is damn near double what it was years ago. Websites are unusable due to pop-ups, pop-unders, autoplay videos, and other crap that generate minimal revues and maximum anger. The clutter of on-screen graphics has grown to obscure important parts of news, sports, or entertainment programming. The sports business is adding more logos and signage everywhere, ala NASCAR. While I know NASCAR fans are incredibly brand-loyal, I also wonder if there is a certain amount of brand blindness that occurs, much as ad banner blindness is something researchers have found to occur on cluttered web pages. No one watches anything (maybe other than the Super Bowl) for the ads.

Look at your inbox. How much email is newsletters you don’t read or email from companies from which you bought something five years ago? How much of your social news feeds is clutter? How about unsubscribing from the former and using mute on the latter?

How many companies or people with whom you do business are jerks? How about decluttering and finding alternatives? How many things on your calendar are obligations that aren’t of interest? Maybe decluttering them from your calendar will give you the time to pursue what you really love?

I’m still working on this. My fridge is often full of random bits of food that have seen better days and there are clothes in my closet with holes and stains that I keep because of an emotional tie of some sort. Still, I tossed an awful lot of junk and am selling off even more. I’m using the money to buy things I really want (and I know I really don’t NEED much of anything). Worth a try?

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September 25, 2017 · 12:03 pm

Embracing Change

“The only constant is change” is an old saw, but it got to be so because it’s true. I mean, it was uttered by an ancient Greek philosopher (Heraclitus) and has been repeated for 1,500 years. Change is inevitable yet a lot of us are incredibly resistant to it. We carry that resistance into our business lives as well.

Most businesses are pretty good at living in today. They have a grasp on their current situation and have allocated resources to deal with their daily operations based on that situation. A lot of businesses also have a grasp on what will happen tomorrow. They plan lines of succession within departments and train their staff to move up. They allocate capital to grow strategically based on how they see tomorrow playing out. Generally, the short-term doesn’t portend radical change.

The problem occurs when you ask businesses (and people) to think about the day AFTER tomorrow – the longer term in which change occurs. In some cases, people don’t even recognize that there will be a day after tomorrow. Try to have a chat with a 23-year-old employee about retirement and the need to start saving today for something 50 years down the road if you want proof of that. A lot of managers guide their businesses based on a series of short-term plans and goals without contemplating the sustainability of their plans over long-term. They don’t embrace change because they don’t want to accept that it’s going to happen.

The music business fought change and where are they now? My beloved TV business is going through this now as they continue to deny cord-cutting is a problem and refusing to adjust to this massive change. On the non-business side, I believe that many of the challenges our country faces are due to the refusal to accept how our demographic and economic base has changed. That refusal, both in business and outside of it, sparks fear as the signs of change become more prevalent. It’s really only traumatic, however, if we try to resist rather than accepting change and planning for it.

I believe in controlling your business. That means you need to contemplate change, accept it, and revise your plans before change happens to you and not because of you. Things happening due to circumstances beyond your control should be rare if you look to the day after tomorrow, embrace the inevitable change, and having a clear picture of where you’re going, not clinging to an unreasonable and unsustainable changed past. Make sense?

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September 22, 2017 · 12:01 pm

Unintended Consequences

It’s Foodie Friday and I have unintended consequences on my mind. What spurred that were a couple of food-related things. I went to do some research about an alcoholic product and of course, I was asked to verify my age before being allowed to read the brand’s website. I assumed that was some sort of regulation imposed on beer, wine, and booze makers since it’s the sort of thing I caution clients about doing all the time: preventing the user from completing their task as seamlessly as possible. As it turns out, there is no rule requiring alcohol brands to do this. What it might do, however, is deter the very people who should have more information about alcohol – young people – from getting educated. This is an unintended consequence. If they lie about their age to gain access, you’ve also caused them to violate the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, and making them break the law is another unintended consequence.

I also read a piece on the growth of restaurant delivery services:

As mobile food delivery apps like Seamless, UberEats, Caviar, and Postmates steadily expand their delivery zones and their customer bases, many restaurants are increasingly relying on delivery orders as a significant source of revenue — and they’re having to adapt operations accordingly to keep up with demand.

The unintended consequence here is that restaurant personnel are often spending so much time servicing the take-out business that the customers seated in the dining room have a lesser experience. Putting aside the fact that there is the potential for a restaurant’s reputation to suffer when the product delivered is way inferior to the product in the dining room, a failure to properly prioritize the kitchen to service the folks who have journeyed to the dining room could set up a lose-lose situation, with neither the folks eating at home nor the people eating out being satisfied. There is also the stress caused by having to refine the operations plan to support the take-out business.

We see unintended consequences all the time. Kudzu went from being an ornamental plant to a menace. When the British governor of Delhi, India addressed a cobra infestation by putting a bounty on cobras, they got more, not fewer, snakes, as people raised them to collect the bounty. I’m sure you’ve seen examples in your business of this, whether it’s a different response to a price change than what was anticipated or a sudden wave of popularity of a brand or product based on some bit of social media madness.

Whatever it is, it’s incumbent on all of us to think about every decision in the context of what the effects of a course of action might be. Who is affected and how? How will it affect competitors and what might their possible responses be? Do this more each alternative you’re contemplating and your odds of avoiding an unintended consequence will improve. You with me?

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