Tag Archives: business

December 19, 2014 · 11:11 am

Learning From Portmanteaus

Foodie Friday, and today we’ll start with a word that may be new to some of you: portmanteau. A portmanteau is a combination of the most recognizable parts of two words. We have many of them in the food world and use them to label a host of new things – utensils, dishes, even fruits. You probably use them all the time without knowing what they’re called.

Ever ordered a cheeseburger? Portmanteau – cheese and hamburger. Ever used a spork? A spoon and a fork. Cronuts, frappuccinos, Clamato, even Tex-Mex all qualify, as do pluots, tangelos, and turduckens. So stop petting your labradoodle (see what I did there?) and think about what those food creations can show us in the broader business sense.

Many of these things were evolutionary.  Adding cheese to a hamburger or putting some tines on a spoon (or was it enlarging and rounding the center of a fork?) was something I’d call part of a gradual change and more of an adaptation than an invention.  We do that a lot in business and it’s a smart way to address the ongoing needs of your current customer base.  The flip side of that is revolutionary change, something that’s entirely new and probably unexpected – the cronut falls into that category.  When we create revolutionary change we run the risk of alienating all of those who love what we’re doing but it’s probably the best way to attract a customer base that has ignored us thus far.  In my mind, great businesses do both types of change – evolutionary and revolutionary – because stasis isn’t an option and consumers are always looking for new and better.

Some food portmanteaus are just bad marketing.  The P’zone – a pizza calzone – is a freaking calzone and neither revolutionary nor evolutionary.  Tofurky (tofu and turkey)?  Really?  If you’re foregoing meat, why label a product as if it is the very thing the customer is avoiding?  That said, those things represent the notion that we constantly need to innovate.  The most successful companies often do nothing more than execute a new twist on an existing product or service better than their competitors.  It might be revolutionary, it might be evolutionary and it might be called a portmanteau.  I call it good business.  You?

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December 8, 2014 · 11:58 am

The Motivation Test

I spent some time over the weekend thinking about motives.  I’ll admit that I fall into the camp of people who tend to ascribe malevolent intent to many of the seemingly innocent things that happen to each of us each day.  I also admit that it’s misguided to do so.  As I wrote a few months back, people tend to be more stupid than they are evil.  Add oblivious to that list.  That, however, isn’t really today’s thought.

English: Human figure with thought bubbles

(Photo credit: Wikipedia)

My thinking led me to this.  What is important is that people do question why we do what we do as businesses and businesspeople.  They look at two things – actions and motives.  When our actions are tone-deaf or out of sync with someone’s desires, they let us know.  Maybe it’s by lack of purchase; maybe it’s via social media.  In those cases we can usually apologize, explain that we recognize the error of our previous course of action, acknowledge bad decision-making, and promise to do better.

Where we run into issues is when the consumer, partner, or employee looks at our motives.  Yes, they will do that in the course of receiving the aforementioned apology.  That’s where we can’t screw up.  I’ve found that people are very willing to forgive if your intentions were good even if your actions were wrong.  We get into much deeper and hotter water when our motives were as wrong as our actions.

It’s not about rationalization.  In many cases where we screw up, our actions can be rationalized but not justified. In fact, almost any action can be rationalized, but justification requires something more.  I think that something more is the underlying intentions – our motives.

I get that “the road to hell is paved with good intentions” and it’s important to act on those intentions.  When we screw up in so doing, the inevitable examination of those intentions needs to check out.   If we don’t pass that exam, we can’t possibly succeed at business.  You agree?

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November 18, 2014 · 12:23 pm

What Business Hours?

I tried to pay my health insurance premium on Saturday. Even though I have a 31 day grace period, I’m always prompt about sending it in on the due date since I don’t want a sniffle to turn into pneumonia which rapidly becomes bankruptcy.

I’ve been paying the bill online for a year. It’s a pretty easy system. Input the account number, input the invoice number, tell them if you want the money taken from a bank or a credit card and you’re good to go. This time, not so much. With the invoice in my hand I was told the system could not find my information. Oh sure – they knew the group number existed, but not the invoice. Hmm. Maybe using the telephone payment system?

Same result. The automated system couldn’t find my invoice either. No problem. Heck, it’s late morning on a Saturday – let’s call customer service and speak with a human. Um – no. Not until 8am Monday. I guess it hasn’t dawned on this company that people who are at work during the week might like to have an opportunity to speak to customer service when they have an hour to wait on hold and do their business.

So promptly at 8 Monday morning I called. I got right through to an agent who found my invoice without an issue and took my payment. As it turned out their system had a database issue over the weekend which is why it couldn’t process any payments.  Which prompted a couple of thoughts.

If you have critical systems you need to have monitors in place which alert you to failure.  Any web-based client who owns servers has some sort of alert in place to tell them if something is down.  Even more have alerts in place to tell them if something is running slowly, if a DDoS attack is happening, or if any number of other events occur that affects site performance and, therefore, their business.  In this case, the company could not take in revenue.  That’s pretty important.

Doing business when YOU want and not when your customer is ready is so last century.  I realize that implementing automated systems to facilitate that during non-business hours is what the company was doing but failing to monitor and maintain those systems is the same as not having them.  Actually, it may be even worse since it frustrates your customers.

The concept of “business hours” is dead.  Your business is open 24/7.  Maybe it’s just your mind that’s closed?

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