Archive for October, 2006
Assumption jumping and the senior manager
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Michael Fraizer has a conventional problem.
Windows of opportunity open and close so quickly today, you can’t just mull decisions right in front of you. You have to look around the corner and figure out where you need to go, without becoming spastic or jerking your company in too many directions. (Michael Fraizer, CEO Genworth Financial)
Michael Frazier has an unconventional solution.
Mr. Fraizer regularly fires himself. (Carol Hymowitz, WSJ)
This proves to be a good way for Fraizer to react to windows of opportunity. After all, new windows take new assumptions. You can pop the hood, reach in and see if you can identify all the operative assumptions, and adjust them (as you use them). It’s tough to do this at all. It’s really tough to do it in real time.
Or you can just start again. In which case, you give yourself a pink slip, break all ties with the person you were as the old CEO. Go for a vacation, or perhaps just drive around the block, and come back a new man (or woman).
The "start fresh" principle is well known terrain for certain purposes. Thanks to the work of Tom Peters and several others, we know how often and how much the corporation can change. Thanks to the work of Rosabeth Moss Kantner, we know how tough it is to try to transition from old to new managerial philosophy, strategy, and tactics.
But this tactic, of firing ourselves, this is new and it takes us in a new direction. Here the managerial literature is a little less forthcoming. We could think of this as a multiplicity theme, and if we think about it this way, we may draw upon a lots of ferment that has taken place in contemporary culture. We have contemplate "multiple selves" and sudden discontinuities a lot.
There is actually a movie called multiplicity. Robin Williams’ stage act is a study in managing multiplicity. Indeed, many celebrities have made a habit, if not a strategy, of moving from persona to persona. Madonna is everyone’s favorite example here. But we know see multiplicity practiced by everyone from Christina Agulera to Beck. So it is not as if managers must solve this problem all on their own. Our culture precedes them.
But there is another way to do this. It is to cultivate what we might call a capacity for frame mobility. Frame mobility is the ability to reconfigure one’s head so that new assumptions apply, and then to move between this "frames" as we contemplate our options. This is a habit that anthropologists have had to cultivate for professional purposes. They need to be able to see things first with these assumptions in place, and then with these very different ones.
We can cultivate this with training. We can learn to "assumption jump"
This is actually then moving violently from one self to a new one. The advantage is that we get to takes things with us as we go. We don’t have to "forget everything we know." We have the opportunity actually to take advantage of those hard earned revelation. And of course this is precisely what we want to do. After all, it makes just as much, perhaps more, sense for the corporation to fire us and hire someone new. (And if this is not what we mean, then we are tacitly acknowledging that in fact the new CEO is actually smuggling in some of what the old CEO knows.)
But however we accomplish it, this will have to be an exercise in managed multiplicity, and that drops the CEO who often likes to keep his or her distance from contemporary culture right into the middle of this culture. And that, for anthropological purposes, is interesting too.
References
Hymowitz, Carol. 2006. Fire Yourself — Then Come Back and Act Like a New Boss Would. Wall Street Journal. October 9, 2006.
Darn Yankees
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I am typing this as quietly as I can. For they are everywhere and they are angry.
I write this post from deep inside Yankee territory, a scant few hours after the New York Yankees loss to the Detroit Tigers.
As an outsider, I am missing something. I grew up in that baseball culture that says the World Series goes to the team with the most heart. Talent and skill are so abundant and so well distributed in professional baseball that something more is called for. Big pay checks, and the indignation of the senior manager, how can this matter? (And what do we say about the game, the series, and the winner, when it does?) I thought the game belonged to a bunch of guys who find a moment of greatness, for whom the sum of team proves, sometimes inexplicably, greater than the whole of the team. (The Tigers fit the bill perfectly.)
The local airwaves are now filled with shouts of unhappiness from George Steinbrenner, a CEO so unconvincing, he makes Donald Trump look like presidential. Joe Torre, from whom every manager might learn something about patience and grace, is now for the high jump.
Yankee fans have never tasted misery. They know joy or they know anger. They don’t mourn an unsuccessful season, they fire someone. There is no such thing as fate for a Yankee fan. There is only a third base man hitting .172. Faced with anything less than a World Series, and the Yankees go out and spend more money on salaries…almost $1 billion dollars since the World Series win in 2000.
But the weirdest thing is the Yankee conviction that baseball is well served by Yankee triumph, that what rest of us really want is a Yankee win. I have my own humble thoughts on this notion, but let me defer to an expert on the game.
Admittedly, baseball has been the crucible for many of the most moronic ideas of the last 20 years – that contraction is necessary, that Washington DC doesn’t deserve a major league baseball team, that an unbalanced schedule has no effect on the wild card race, that players who don’t play on winning teams can’t be MVPs… I’ve even had people try to tell me that steroid use has no effect on baseball performance. It’s enough to question the value of a college education. But this contention – that New York deserves a super team because it’s in the best interest of baseball – is by far the most ridiculous and mind-numbingly ignorant I’ve heard. One has to go back to the Scopes trial to hear an argument with less validity.
Ok, I have to go. I think someone heard me.
References
Kepner, Tyler. 2006. For Yankees, October Has an Early End. New York Times. October 7, 2006. here.
Wood, Trace. 2004. Is YRod Good for the Game. The Long Ghandi. April 17, 2004. here.
The power of the particular in marketing
Posted by: | CommentsThanks to my friendship with Ed Cotton, I am on the mailing list for Butler, Shine, Stern and Partners. They are the agency for Mini and Converse, among others. I got back from my travels to find a "moving notice" waiting for me.
Now, this is the sort of thing we have come to expect from the agency world. This agency, we are lead to understand, more than any agency, suffers a certain "pressure of inventiveness" that means even banal communications must take on new and interesting qualities. By these tiny floresences you shall know us, and notice that these florescences are spectacular. Advertising agencies are always advertising.
Fair enough. But as I began to read the notice, it began to work its magic on me. It lists all the things that apparently turned up as BSSP were preparing to move.
Some of these things are funny.
And some of them are strange.
Some are sly and self referencing.
But mostly, they are particular, really, really particular.
At some point, you discover you have fallen down the rabbit hole. You are now picturing the old quarters of Butler Shine in incredible, "you are there" detail. Now the act of moving goes from being a vague event overtaking a distant party, to something I feel I know up close, something I feel I have taking part in. Wow. BSSP reinvented the moving notice. Nice one.
This is a case of discovering the general in the particular, I guess. (Who was it that claimed to discover the world in a grain of sand?) What a masterful act of meaning management it is. At a time when many of the standard approaches to advertising are under challenge, it is nice to be reminded of what can be accomplished by a three or four photos and a handful of words.
Anne Saunders, the Starbucks “generosity experiment” and other marketing innovations
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Anne Saunders is VP of Global Brand Strategy at Starbucks. Yesterday, she was named a "top ten" marketing innovator by Advertising Age.
AA notes the things for which Saunders and Starbucks are so justly famous, especially the creation of a robust brand with a tiny budget and almost no conventional advertising. (This year, Starbucks will spend 1% of its sales on marketing.)
Some of Saunders’ innovations are grass roots options like serving PTA meetings or sponsoring beach cleanups. Clearly, she was also the beneficiary of the extraordinary meaning making, brand building qualities of Starbucks’ "third space" retail.
But Saunders also created innovation out of naturally occurring experiments that have occurred at Starbucks.
In the fall of 2005, a Starbucks barista in California gave a drive-through customer a free cup of coffee. (She was apologizing for having got an order wrong.) The lucky customer was struck by a moment of generosity and decided to pay for the person next in line. This luckly customer did the same for the customer behind her, and an articulated act of generosity ran for 9 transactions until someone decided to take the coffee and run.
This reminds me of Levi-Strauss’ discussion of patrons in a french restaurant. Two men, perfect strangers sitting at separate tables, treat one another to a glass of wine. Nothing changes (both men consume the same amount of wine) and everything does (perfect strangers acknowledge one another).
In the case of the French restaurant, we are looking at a "tit for tat" reciprocity: I do for you what you do for me. In the Starbucks’ case, we are looking at something more open-ended (in the anthro lingo: "generalized"). My gift does not "return" to my benefactor. It goes to someone who may or may not reciprocate it. There is an element of risk. I give to you, without any quarantee that you will give to someone else.
Reciprocity is a powerful device. It creates or helps substantiate a relationship. Generalized reciprocity of the Starbucks’ kind is still more powerful. It has a way of transforming the customer from just another schmoe into someone new.
The person who gives without any guarantee of return is a paragon of generosity, someone who feels their generosity instead of risking it. This is someone who is, in the Western and not only the Western scheme of things, a little god-like. After all this Starbucks customer just got a free coffee! If they want to, they are free to break faith. They can take the coffee and run. Those who decide to perpetuate the gift with a special kind of generosity. And this stands as a special measure of their spirit and their goodness.
Clearly, Starbucks generosity picks up on something at work in our culture, the "random acts of kindness" theme that is still operative well after the 1960s have come and gone, and even as the "new age" sensibility struggles to sustain itself in a time of post 9/11 severity. It also plays out that "pass it on" theme for which, I believe a movie was named. Finally, it plays out that idea that we don’t need to know the recipients of our generosity, and that, indeed, there was something charming about not knowing the recipient of our generosity. Apparently, we like to participate in and help build networks where the nodes are unknown to one another. Strange.
Ok, here’s what Starbucks and Saunders chose to do with their stroke of good forture, that naturally occurring moment of Starbucks generosity. According to AA, "The marketing department created a coupon that told the story and asked recipients to hand the coupon to a friend or co-worker to invite them to have free cup of coffee."
This is good but I wonder if there isn’t another opportunity. Why not give the barista the opportunity to hand out free coffee as if they were passing along someone else’s generosity? Sometimes, the recipient will take the coffee and run. But sometimes they will step up to the opportunity and pass the gift along, with all the benefits to Starbucks and themselves that this entails. "Oh," says the next customer, "some thing odd and interesting and sort of charming just happened." The hum drum of daily life is relieved a little. The growing hum drum of the Starbucks is relieved a lot.
I like the way this strategy gives the barista something to work with. As it is, many baristas appear to be engaged in a "too cool for school" demonstration played out in a drama called "how slow can I go." The generosity play allows them to give coffee to people and see what happens. Will the recipient pay for the next customer or not? We can guess that baristas will compete to see who is best at choosing recipients who will pass it on. The world on the other side of the counter suddenly got a lot more interesting and engaging for them. If this helps them speed up, or brighten up, by even 10%, Starbucks will pay for those free coffees many times over.
There are lots of cautionary notes here. It is not entirely ethical to create the impression that a free coffee comes from someone else when in fact it comes from Starbucks. But notice that what we are doing here is seeding the world with generosity. Presumably, one Starbucks’ gift will generate several others that are real acts of generosity. Surely, this small deception may be forgiven on the grounds that it creates a larger social good.
Some people will balk at taking a gift from a perfect strangers on the Miltonian grounds that there is no such thing as a free cup of coffee, and because they may have indebted themselves to a creep. This will have to be addressed, monitored and finessed.
There is also the danger that this will become predictable and the further danger that it will become a mechanical system to be worked. And corporations have a history of taking good ideas and making them banal through the repetition and mechanization. A system of this kind will have to take touch.
What I really like about this is the anthropological revelation, nothing changes (everyone gets their coffee) but Starbucks has found a way to make my purchase work to your benefit, and our purchases work to everyone’s benefit. Starbucks’ renews itself, the social world gets a little more interesting, and life takes on a new generosity, drama, and dynamism.
This is brand building for the cost of a cup of coffee!
References
Mitchell Moore, Meg. 2006. The Innovators: Anne Saunders. Advertising Age. October 4, 2006. here. (subscription required)
McCracken, Grant. 2003. Tag, we’re it! The blogs sits at the intersection of anthropology and economics. January 5, 2003. here.
The perfect black bag
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The young consultant lives or dies by the "all but only" rule. He or she wants to travel with everything needed to survive life on the road, and not one thing, one ounce or one feature more.
Further to my occasional series, "advice to a young consultant," here are some thoughts on the perfect black bag. (We are talking briefcases here. I will leave the perfect suitcase to a later post; the consultant’s world is a two bag world.)
I welcome the comments and advice of other travellers. This account does not pretend to be definitive or exhaustive.
The perfect black bag
The bag itself should be cloth, expandable, study and probably by Tumi. The bag cannot have hard sides. It is going to have to expand in some moments and collapse down in others. (Consultants should be able to do the same.) Hard sides make this impossible. The bag cannot be made of leather. This dries out and looks bad in the long term. In the short term, it will be seen as a "rookie mistake" by your fellow travellers. The Tumi brand has also become a "secret signal" for the sophisticated traveller. Don’t buy something like a Hartmann or anything showy. You want to keep a lowish profile in those moments you find yourself in the company of thieves.
Contents of the perfect black bag:
Earphones
To protect yourself from the punishments of life on the road, you must have noise cancelling earphones. They work well on the plane and reduce the fatique of air travel substantially. And they mean that you can actually hear the dialogue of the movies you are watching. (Travel outside the US turns out to be a great way of catching up with popular culture inside the US. Those trans-Atlantic and trans-Pacific trips allow you to watch 3 or 4 movies at a go. You can also wear the headphones when the airport or traffic gets noisy, and here they are life savers. Finally, headphones are good when you find yourself seated by a kucklehead or a bore. Nothing says "don’t bother me" like a headset. (I did actually sit beside someone who suffered "pressure of speech" so enormously that they kept talking to me even after I put my headphones on.)
The insider’s choice at the moment is the Bose headset, but recently, having lost my Bose to misadventure on the road, I purchased a set of Sony MDR-NC50 and I think they’re better. They cover the entire ear, which is essential, and they can operate as a headset without a battery inserted. I think this is key. Who wants a battery held against one’s skull for an 8 hour flight? The price might give you pause, but believe me $200-300 is the single best investment you will make as a traveller.
Camera
If you want to be an ethnographic consultant, you are going to want to take lots of photos. I am still looking for the right camera. I have a Nikon Coolpix 3700. The perfect camera would turn on, focus, and refresh instanteously. Lots of cameras lag in one or all of these areas. Much of your photography will be shot from the open window of a speeding taxi. Any kind of lag is intolerable. Also the camera needs to be really little so that it can accompany you in a jacket pocket. It should have some telephoto capacity. I would love to hear suggestions here.
Laptop
There is no substitute for the ThinkPad by Lenovo. It is incredibly light, incredibly dependable, and it has the best keyboard, the point of interface that matters most. The new models have dramatically better battery life and hard drive capacity. (They also have that new, special "explodo" battery made by Sony, but I understand that’s being fixed. )
Cell phone service
If you are doing lots of international travel, you will want to have a phone capable of taking a SIM card and GSM/GPRS service, and this means Cingular and T-Mobile. The former give me good service and reception in Russia and China.
Food stuffs
This is a special concern for me because I have subject to anaphylaxis. But the thing about travel and consulting is that schedules are hectic and its easy to miss a meal. Miss a couple in a row and you are light headed and miserable. My fall back are granola bars from Kellogg’s .
A book
You only have room for one so you have to chose it carefully. This is going to be your companion when things get really unpleasant, so it has to be written with perfectly clarity. Last trip I took The Elizabethan Underworld by Gamini Salgado, but it is laboriously written. This is one of the "desert island disks" question, so beloved by the English, and it makes an interesting exercise. What is the single best literary companion. You might say Shakespeare’s Sonnets, but often you will be reading while exhausted, groggy, jet lagged and distracted. I don’t know about you but if find I actually have to pay attention while reading the Sonnets. Maybe the latest volume of Patrick O’Brien’s Aubrey/Maturin series. It’s swashbuckling without being too boy’s own. Pound for pound, word for word, what is the best literate pal to have along for the ride?
iPod or Zen
I think a well appointed laptop should serve as a substitute for these devices, but there will be times when you want to protect your laptop battery or travel without encumbrance. The iPod is everyone’s favorite. Ideally, we want one capable of music and movies. I welcome recommendations here.
A sweater
I know this sounds dorky but if you take a sweater, you can get them to hang up your suit jacket and the less "suited up" you feel while flying the more pleasant it will be. Travel is a process that wears away at you. Anything you can do to "give yourself a little space" is to be recommended.
Etc.
adapter laptop for plane
business cards
charge cords for phone and laptop and iPod
extra battery for laptop
folders
paper
pens
plugs and adapters for Europe and Asia
SD card for capturing images on camera and transferring them to labtop
thumbdrive for backup
transparent envelope for itinary
transparent envelope for project reading
transparent envelope for receipts
(remember to charge everything the night before you go)
Redundant systems
It’s up to you to decide which of these systems is so essential you should take a backup. Strictly speaking, I guess, this should be your laptop. But if you are transitioning out of the Microsoft world to the Google one, more and more of your essentials end up on line. Don’t hesitate to email yourself that Powerpoint presentation, for a backup you will be able to access anywhere even in the effect of a cataclysmic lose of your perfect black bag.
Hard card
This sounds dopy, too. but it’s essential. What you have decided on "all but only" the contents of your perfect black bag, you will want to type these in a list on a piece of paper, take the piece of paper to Kinko’s, and have them cover the piece of paper with something transparent. Your bag is now a little universe of some 30 heterogeneous objects waiting to go astray. Hard cards make it easier to keep track.
Bon voyage.
References
For more on the Patrick O’Brian series, see the W.W. Norton website here.
Noticing 101
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Does noticing matter? Of course it does. Lawyers notice for a living: the displeasure of the judge, the anxiety of a witness, the significance of a precedent. Doctors do too. House is top doc because he notices first and best. Crime solving depends upon noticing the faintest clues, with or without the use of an electron microscope.
As a culture, we talk a lot about the importance of reading. Literacy is a particularly big deal in Canada (where I am at the moment). I’ve been corresponding with Michael Johnson about an organization devoted to encouraging parents to read with their child.
This is well and good. But reading is really just a way of devoting ourselves to what other people have noticed. And in a culture that is moving at break neck speed from the passive mode to the active mode, surely it is time to "get behind" noticing as much as we have reading. (When you notice, you are driven to read, but the reverse is not also true.)
I have another motive for caring about noticing. My nephew has taken up football. Now this is fine. Personally I believe football saved my life. I was raised in a home with a strict ceremonial regime, and the discovery that I could strap on pads and just run into people came as the happiest revelation of my young life. I loved football. But we all know I think that football can turn a young man to thoughtlessness and so Pam and I resolved to take Andrew shopping for shoes.
Shoes? Yes, the plan is to take Andrew to a mall, to give him 30 bucks and have him join us in the food court with a pair of shoes he has just bought. The plan is to have him describe these shoes, with perfect clarity, using not a word more than he has to, not a detail less than is necessary We are not going to look till he’s done. Then we’ll see.
Now, God kows what he is going to find for 30 bucks and if there is something inherently ludicrous about an 11 year old buying shoes, well, that’s ok. This is the first rule of noticing. It’s ok to look silly. You are going to look silly. Noticing sometimes makes us look conspicuous and if we are not prepared to pay this small price for noticing, well, too bad. The game is over before it starts.
The idea is help Andrew to see details, and to talk about them. The more he does, the better he will get at it. What’s odd is that we are a culture devoted to self improvement of every kind. That airport book store is bursting with books about how to be happier, smarter, thinner, richer, and more successful. But no one has written a book on noticing. Maybe Andrew will.
References
Smart mobs and the NFL
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Yesterday, we saw a nice moment in professional football. On the last play of the game against the Indianapolis Colts, the New York Jets starting chucking the ball around with fair abandon.
“It’s basically a play when everyone acts like they’re still a kid in the schoolyard. You keep lateraling it backward and never let someone tackle you." (Jets guard Pete Kendall)
Here’s how it went:
Chad Pennington, the quarterback, threw to Leon Washington who lateralled to Brad Smith who lateralled to Laveranues Coles who returned the ball to Pennington who threw the ball backwards across the field to Justin McCareins who fumbled backward "to" Smith who fumbled backward "to" Coles who lateralled to Nick Mangold, the Jets’ 300-pound center. Strangest thing, Mangold fumbled. His fumble was not recovered. The game ended.
It was as if the Keystone cops had been smuggled onto the field in Jets’ uniforms. And it looked at first as if this might be a moment of contagion, with the first fumble suddenly striking each successive player as an increasingly good idea, until the idea found its way to Mangold by which point it was orthodoxy. Lateralling, that is to say, that went from something frowned upon to something you had to do, with highly trained, incredibly regimented professional football players looking for all the world like a smart mob. Hope Howard Rheingold was watching.
But, no. Apparently, this moment of pure spontaneity was practiced by the Jets all week. On balance, coach was pleased.
"It was close. I guess we’ll have to practice it some more.” (Eric Mangini)
Now there’s a lovely idea. Practicing chaos. Professional football is now so overformed, so surprised by its moments of creativity, so deeply discouraging of dynamism, that this must be a good thing. The evolutionary path is clear. We must hope the NFL will eventually embrace chaos that isn’t practiced. I mean the military, on which football is so thoroughly modeled, has embraced complexity theory. How long before football follows suit?
