March 16, 2012 · 9:07 am

Blind Tasting

Friday at last and while you might be expecting a lengthy piece on the history of corned beef for our Foodie Friday Fun approaching St. Patrick’s Day, I couldn’t really find any great business points buried in there.  Oh sure, we could have a chat about multiculturalism since corned beef is a food staple in many cultures (and strangely it came late to the Irish culture and it’s really more American Irish than it is native to the Old Sod) but that seems a bit forced.

LOS ANGELES, CA - JANUARY 24: Wine made by Dr...

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So for today’s Foodie Fun I want to think about blind tastings, specifically wine tastings.  There have been many examples of unexpected results when all the trappings of a wine are taken away (big name, fancy bottle, vintage year, even what grape).  The most famous of these if the Judgement of Paris which one could claim was the birth of the modern California wine industry and was commemorated in the movie Bottle Shock.  In 1976, California wines were rated higher than many top French wines in a blind tasting held in Paris and judged by mostly French wine experts.  Of course, these same judges believed it would be easy to spot the “inferior” California wines and had any one of them conducted the tasting and written the results on their own, they might have been laughed out of their profession.  Which is, of course, the business point.

There is an old saying that no one ever got fired for buying (pick one – IBM, AT&T, Microsoft, etc.).  It means no one gets fired for making the safe pick and choosing an industry leader. While there are other companies out there with better products or offer similar quality as the market leaders at lower prices, they come with the risk of ridicule should there be a problem.  Speaking as an independent consultant I can tell you that bigger companies, where decision-making is often a group matter, seem to feel most comfortable hiring other big companies – you all know the top consulting firms.  It’s an easy decision to justify.  Too bad – if they were to taste us blind – have a telephone conversation with the people doing their work as well as to look at our fees – the might get the same or better outcomes at better rates.  That’s not just in my field of consulting – many businesses overspend and get inferior results because they don’t do a blind taste test.

If you’ve got concerns about using companies other than the big guys in any field, raise those concerns directly with the firm that rated more highly even thought they’re not the brand name.  Build the answers – service levels, delivery dates, etc. – into the contract.  Ignoring your business palate when it’s telling you something is better – even if it’s a brand with which you’re unfamiliar – is silly.  Who knows – you just might find a $10 bottle that puts the $50 swill to shame.

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March 15, 2012 · 11:18 am

Planning For Perfect

Anyone who has ever dealt with large numbers knows that near perfection still gives a few exceptions to a standard. If you deal with 100,000 customers in a year and 99.999% of them are happy, there’s still one guy who is dissatisfied. The problem is this: we don’t think about that one guy often enough – we plan for perfect. In an extreme case, some folks won’t even acknowledge that imperfect is possible. That sort of thinking precipitates crises like the oil rig problem in the Gulf.  Workers didn’t raise safety issues out of fear.  The Italian cruise ship didn’t take the safety drills seriously.
What got me thinking about this is the discussion over the Keystone Pipeline as well as some of the reporting on the Japanese nuclear problem.  Putting aside politics (maybe an impossible request, but let’s try), it seems to me that the people involved had been (or are) planning for perfect.  Emergency plans were paid lip-service but not much more and the true impact of a problem is exacerbated by the lack of preparation.

We don’t ask what can go wrong often enough, and when we do we sometimes fall into the “but that will never happen” trap.  If something can go wrong, we should assume it will.  Servers fail.  So does power, including back-up units.  Things get lost in the mail, inclusive of private shippers with full package tracking.  We arrive on business trips without luggage.  No one plans to screw things up and yet things very often end up that way.People don’t always behave honorably even though we might always try to do so ourselves.

If we always plan for perfect, we’re not optimists.  We’re idiots.

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March 14, 2012 · 8:57 am

Learning The Language

A fascinating report came out at the end of last month from The Pew Internet and American Life folks. This one has to do with the impact of an “always on” connection on young people and whether that impact will be positive or negative. You can read the release and the report itself here and there was a good summary of the study done here.

These are really the key points:

…many of the young people growing up hyperconnected to each other and the mobile Web and counting on the internet as their external brain will be nimble, quick-acting multitaskers who will do well in key respects.

At the same time, these experts predicted that the impact of networked living on today’s young will drive them to thirst for instant gratification, settle for quick choices, and lack patience. A number of the survey respondents argued that it is vital to reform education and emphasize digital literacy. A notable number expressed concerns that trends are leading to a future in which most people are shallow consumers of information, and some mentioned George Orwell’s 1984 or expressed their fears of control by powerful interests in an age of entertaining distractions.

I don’t know about you, but I spend a lot of time each day online and have for years.  There is no question it has an effect on one’s brain.  I notice how my thinking has changed – at times I feel more distracted because there are always a few other things I’m doing concurrently but I also notice that when I read offline I read the “above the fold” portion of articles (usually the lede and a few paragraphs) and then scan the rest – the mind gets restless.

My thought today is this.  Digital literacy has become something that young people learn as they do their native language.  Anyone under 21 has grown up using digital devices and their brains are wired to operate a connected environment.  Ever seen a three year old play with an iPad?  Kids are digital before they can read.  They also don’t seem to focus as well (coincidence that there is an epidemic of ADD?) and can grow impatient quickly.

That statement about the digital language is several implications.  First, we don’t think about where our native language comes from (other than those of us who study philology).  We just speak it. People know how to use the digital tools but have no clue how they operate (unless they’re engineers).  Sometimes I think we confuse speaking a language with studying one and treat people who do the former as if they’ve done the latter.  Second, when one reads articles about companies enhancing broadband wand WiFi availability in one area while others are abandoning those efforts in poorer areas, it makes me think about immigrants who can’t speak the language of a new country.  If you’re not speaking digital, pretty soon you’ll be treated as a different class.

Have a look at the study and tell me what you think (if you can focus long enough!).

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