Tag Archives: managing

June 4, 2015 · 9:50 am

Where The Devil Lives

I received an email this morning which asked me to enter a sweepstakes. Since it involved golf I was all ears and quickly filled out the form – name, and email. This led me to a second form which read “Just answer the following four questions and your entry wil (sic) be complete.” Let’s put aside the typo for a second. That request was followed by a form with three questions, not four. After scratching my head, I answered and received a confirming email. That read, in part, “We’re announcing the winner July 31, 2015, until then we wanted to let you know how you can start…” Another typo/grammatical error.

I can hear some of you saying “stop being so picky.” Here is the problem and it’s one that affects anyone in business. These mistakes demonstrate a complete lack of attention to detail. They have me asking myself if I want to do business with this company and would I trust them with my personal information? If you’ve ever run a sweepstakes you know that everything must be scrutinized carefully – the FTC and others are NOT happy when you mess something up. Multiple people must have reviewed these materials and yet…

Ask yourself how many pitch decks you’ve seen with typos or errors in grammar. Then ask yourself how many websites you read with the same sorts of mistakes. I get apps updating every day for “bug fixes.” Sometimes they’re just fixing things that should have been caught in the testing and quality control phases of development.  You can’t QC something by releasing it, not if you expect to keep a customer base.

I don’t mean to be harsh here but the devil really is in the details. To me this stuff is like going on a job interview dressed in a t-shirt and cutoffs. It’s a horrible first impression, one that is usually disqualifying.

As businesspeople, standards are one of the few things we CAN control.  We need to make sure everyone on the team is clear about the standards and then we need to hold them to those standards, especially when we’re dealing with marketing materials or anything else destined for external viewing.

Details matter.  You can call that picky.  I call it putting your best foot forward.  Do you agree?

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June 3, 2015 · 1:01 pm

GenY And Their Managers

If you follow tech at all you’re probably aware that Mary Meeker‘s annual report on the state of digital came out a couple of weeks ago.  It’s always a great read and gives excellent thinking on where we’re all heading on the technology front.  As an aside, by now I hope we all recognize that no matter what business we’re in, what’s happening with the internet and with technology will affect us, so this is probably worth a few minutes of reading.

Buried in the report is a nugget that’s our topic today.  It has to do with what young employees ages 18-34 (often called GenY or Millenials) want out of their jobs vs. what their managers believe those Millennials want.  The differences are startling and I believe have great implications.  Let’s see what you think.

If you have a look at the chart, you’ll see that managers are pretty clueless.  They believe that most younger employees are after big bucks while the truth is that only 27% of actual Millennials report that as an important factor.  Granted, the data is a couple of years old but I doubt things have changed very much.  Where the Millennials say they want “meaningful work” and the importance they place on feeling a “sense of accomplishment,” mangers dismiss those factors as being important almost entirely. Quite the disconnect.

I suspect that this is due to a couple of things.  First, I’ve known many managers who rarely interact with people several layers “beneath” them.  Maybe a “hello” at a holiday party is as close as they get.  One could write that off to the demands of the job and the lack of time in the day.  That’s crap – you need to make an effort and the people who make the actual work happen are worth the effort.

More importantly, I suspect that for many of these disconnected managers this is how they treat their customers as well.  They don’t make an effort to understand the truth about their customers’ needs and wants, believing that they have a full understanding already.  And we wonder why businesses fail…

What your staff wants, how they value work, and how their priorities might differ from yours is something about which you shouldn’t be guessing.  Are you?

 

 

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May 6, 2015 · 10:39 am

Reading The Words, Missing The Meaning

Let’s start today thinking about a language you don’t speak. It’s very possible, assuming that it’s written using the Latin alphabet, that you could pick up a book and begin to read out loud in that strange tongue. Of course, you’d have absolutely no idea what you’re reading. You can say the words on the page but you can’t explain what they mean.

Keep that image in mind as we change the topic to data. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve sat with clients and gone through their analytics reports with them and the aforementioned image has popped into my head. I don’t mean that to be derogatory to the people who pay me, nor does it mean that I’m fluent in analytics and they’re not. It raises a business point that is something we all need to keep in the back of our minds as data becomes more integral with everything we do.

Here is a small example. Most of us see “direct” traffic in our analytics reports. In theory, those visitors typed in the site URL or clicked on a bookmark they set on a previous visit. That’s a partial truth. The reality is whenever a referrer is not passed, the traffic is treated as direct traffic by Google. Think that’s an unimportant bit of information? How about in the context of mobile traffic not passing referrers at all (and I bet mobile is a big and growing part of your site traffic)? The point is that it requires both the knowledge that the “direct” bucket isn’t an absolute as well as some further analysis to figure out the truth.

I’ve seen the same sort of issues crop up in attribution modeling (what source was responsible for the sale).  The groundwork for proper attribution hasn’t been laid and so the reports aren’t accurate.  Sure, any analyst can puke out the data in front of them but the good ones – the ones who can interpret the words and not just say them – will tell you why there is a problem and fix all the links you’re putting out there to accurately reflect what’s going on.

“Keith,” you say, “I’m not a data scientist.”  Neither am I.  What I can do – and you probably can too – is to ask questions, especially when someone tells you they are dead certain about what the data is saying.  Be sure they’re not just reading aloud in a language they don’t understand.  Get beyond reporting and into meaning.  It changes everything.  Agreed?

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