Category Archives: Business

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Manners Made To Order

Peter Bart, the long-serving studio executive turned prominent media industry journalist, recently wrote a column in Variety wondering where all the manners have gone:

A Zest to Text Lets The Rude Intrude

The irony of calling out the entertainment community on bad behavior is not lost. If you have spent any time at all in film, television, radio, theater, advertising, or any related endeavor, you have your own war stories to share. You have been humiliated, ignored, dissed, or berated at every level of your ladder climb from desk clerk to corner office. If you are not currently experiencing the abuse to your face, you are fully aware it is happening behind your back. This of course is in no way limited to showbiz—the rest of the business world including technology has its own flavors of belittling, it’s just a little more celebrated in Hollywood as norm. If you have never had the pleasure to do jumping jacks on this playground, just catch a few reruns this summer of the hit TV show Smash.

VarietyAlthough Bart largely ties the exponential run-up in the rude factor to gadget proliferation, the 24/7 expectation of real-time response, and the death knell of “nuanced conversation” in the creative process, I wonder how many of us are paying attention to our own slides into the primordial. The question is not are we targets of rudeness, the answer to that is as obvious as it is ubiquitous—and I don’t think it has all that much to do with texting and youth, especially if you remember the pre-politically correct workplace before Wang when an airborne stapler headed for your cranium often had to be ducked. The question I am more apt to ponder is how we let ourselves get seduced to the other side, becoming a violator when we know that’s not something we want to be.

We can still be hard-charging, we can still be Type A, but there is no mandate for acclaim that requires sloppy people skills. Presuming there is a roof over your head and ample food available to you on revolving credit, ask yourself in the long run what matters more: accomplishing a task however trivial, or building relationships that strengthen your standing? Certainly in the throes of immediacy a terse email might be released now and again, but what about the basics we were taught as children about The Golden Rule, lessons we now ostensibly pass along to subsequent generations who are as glued to their handhelds as we are?

Is it really that hard to save a viciously nasty email in your drafts folder and wait until morning before you elect to hit the send button?

Can you really feel good about telling someone you’ll call them tomorrow and then failing to do it ever?

Why are you checking your Facebook news feed during a sales pitch, regardless of which side of the desk you are on?

What good are you doing yourself continuing to say “Let’s have lunch” when you really don’t want to have lunch and have no intention of following through with any such invitation?

If you are meeting someone for lunch—business or personal—and you are going to be more than five minutes late, would it be possible for you to call or text, then apologize when you arrive? Better yet, barring a jack-knifed semi blocking all freeway lanes for ten miles in both directions, could you possibly leave a little early and be on time?

Depending on what stage you may have attained in your career, some of this comes down to the difference between what you are looking to achieve in terms of personal impact rather than measured achievement. That’s a see-saw that should shift over time to the beneficial, but there are pragmatic aspects of a well-mannered approach that might be useful to you now. Considering again Bart’s suggestion that “nuanced conversation” is a mauled victim of abrupt interpersonal dynamics, it is possible that listening less really is bad for business?

If you understand the nature of creative destruction as I often discuss in this blog, you know that we live in a world where teamwork generally matters more than individual contribution, and true leverage in time to market is almost always achieved by collaborative intelligence rather than ramrod dictum. In that sense, where an effective creative process is a function of shared give and take, the question becomes not how well we are silencing the noise, but how well are we listening.

Later this year I will be piloting a training seminar to help guide executive coaches with a practical approach to the corporate training work they do. I mention this in the spirit of disclosure and not for promotional purposes. In designing this emerging program, I have been inspired repeatedly by my partner organization, the well-regarded Coaches Training Institute (CTI). In the book written by CTI’s founders Henry Kimsey-House and Karen Kimsey-House with contributing author Phillip Sandahl, I discovered the following simple but profound reflection:

The absence of real listening is especially prevalent at work. Under pressure to get the job done, we listen for the minimum of what we need to know so we can move on to the next fire that needs fighting. The consequence: it’s no wonder people feel like mere functions in a whirling machine, not human beings. It’s no wonder that “employee engagement” is a serious issue in most organization’s today. Everybody’s talking, nobody’s listening.

The point is entirely actionable—a renewable creative process requires focused listening, much more than combative banter. No doubt the methodology of Constructive Confrontation pioneered over the years at Intel is as relevant as ever, but it remains a framework that is fully participatory. If you aren’t nurturing the dialogue all around, you are leaving money on the table.

Invoking the world view of popular ethics advocate Michael Josephson, I could easily migrate The Argument for Being Nice into a call for Significance beyond Success, but my sense is we all learn that well enough for ourselves over time. Instead let me keep it pragmatic.

If you are playing the short game and have convinced yourself the liquidity event is just over the horizon and that’s all you care about, feel free to be as rude as you want. Why not? You’re going to get what you want.

If you’re like the rest of us and have no idea where the forest trail will lead today or ten years from tomorrow, remember that kid on the reception desk probably will be running a company. History is on her side.

If it’s Friday night and you’re home from a hard week cataloging all the different ways you were kicked in the teeth the past week, ask yourself a simple question—how much forensic dental work were you responsible for doling out of late? And how much dialogue did you shut down that may have given you the answer to that very hard problem you’re still trying to solve on your own with the bomb clock tic-tic-ticking?

I’ll go out on a limb here, a little old-fashioned digerati, but what the heck—good manners are good business, and both of those will make you happier. Go easy on the texts and eradicate the gossip. Listen, there are good ideas all around you.

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Words, Words, Words… and Questions

My annual visit to the Los Angeles Times Festival of Books last month was as uplifting and thought-provoking as ever.  Any celebration of the written word and reading will always be close to my heart, and this may be the one time of year in Southern California where I am happy to see lines of cars backed up into the streets waiting for parking spots.  When tremendous crowds of readers and endless booths of authors come out in full force on a sunny L.A. weekend, it just feels good.  It also makes me wonder even more what age-old publishing is destined to become as technological change accompanies us deeper into the 21st century.

It really is hard to assess whether this is the best or worst of times for writers — perhaps in the true spirit of Dickens, it is both.  While it is heartening to see so many authors in person signing their tried-and-true bound paper volumes, there is little question that electronic publishing continues to shake the traditional publishing industry to its core.  Recent contention in pricing models has even brought the Justice Department to bear, arguing there may have been collusion among a number of companies that brought forth an agency publishing model to combat aggressive online discounting in the well-known wholesale-retail model.  Setting aside legal resolution of potential antitrust issues, the question in my mind for authors trying to make a living at their craft centers around price elasticity.  If lower electronic prices really will mean significantly more unit sales at higher royalty rates for a new wave of authors, the profession of writing can flourish.  On the other hand, if the product of writing becomes commoditized to a level where customer expectations of price points descend to micropayments — at the same time market fragmentation approaches chaos with a flood of unrestricted product — too few of these new authors will have the chance to quit their day jobs.  There are clearly two sides to this argument, and I am not sure any of us can predict how increased democratization of publishing will resolve itself economically.

Of course lower prices and more abundant offerings mean virtually unlimited choice at potentially impulse price levels for customers, which from the consumer standpoint is hard to contest as a negative.  There would seem little doubt this should be the absolute best of times for readers, given the astonishing amount of content so readily available in digital form, so much of it free, even legally so.  If the public turnout for events like the L.A. Times Festival of Books reflects continued devotion to the written word in whatever form it is delivered, there is reason to be optimistic — but again, I wonder.  Focused reading is challenging in a Twitter world that offers so many distractions and immense pressure on time.  A recent study highlighted in a Wall Street Journal column by Melinda Beck (“What Cocktail Parties Teach Us“) adds more fuel to the debate over just how good our brains are at handling distractions while attempting to encode information — in other words, can we really multitask?  This is an argument not likely to be resolved anytime soon, but it reinforces the notion that reading requires commitment, and if we allow that commitment to become a luxury, the best of times for readers is not necessarily a given.

An additional question then remains: If there is abundance of content and almost no impediments to publishing for virtually anyone with a keyboard, are we trending toward a more literate global community, or one that is so hard to comprehend it is more overwhelming than instructive?  To the extent that the availability of text continues to compound at exponential levels, the expanding online solution I keep encountering is curation.  While any magnificent library can be well served by organization and editorial review, I wonder if any attempt to curate the internet however noble can be successful.  We know the internet is a place that does not seek to be managed, yet browsing unending digital archives is anything but the pleasant experience we enjoy browsing analog book jackets in a local bookstore.  In the same way that good editing can help focus writing, good curation can help direct us to relevant work we might not otherwise discover before we exhaust ourselves digging into rabbit holes.  The key to successful curation requires the opening of doors we might not otherwise find, while not closing those we would nonetheless appreciate.  Curation is no small trick; it is an evolving art, and as billions more words find their way onto servers, leaving their discovery to search-engine optimization seems too limiting an approach to identifying relevancy.

One of the most interesting panels I attended at this year’s festival was a discussion moderated by L.A. Times Book Critic David Ulin on Narrative in the Digital Age.  This panel included editors from great new sites I was delighted to discover like Byliner, The Atavist, and Grantland.  These sites celebrate long-form writing, in many cases exploring the notion of stories that are too long for traditional magazine articles but not quite approaching the word count of standalone book manuscripts.  Each site offers an entrepreneurial approach to building new businesses where old-school approaches are collapsing, allowing new sources of income for writers who might not attract enough visibility on their own.  Whether these new businesses will succeed at scale is anybody’s guess, but the courage to explore real-world transaction models where too many web surfers have come to believe they needn’t have to pay for the time and expertise of an author’s passion is truly admirable.

So many written words, so much opportunity, so little clarity — no writer or reader will be left untouched by the digital shift.  At first blush it would seem that removal of barriers to entry in electronic publishing is tantamount to the elimination of constraints on distribution, but as long as visibility remains critical to sampling, that is not necessarily the case.  Breaking through the noise in any competitive environment will always be a challenge, and commercial media will continue to walk the line of art and enterprise.  It certainly can be argued that the written word is different from other stuff we lend or sell; it is our precious connection to the past and the breadcrumbs we are laying for the future.  If you get the chance to visit a book fair or take your kids to one, see if any of these questions catch your fancy.  Better yet, just pick up a book and read!

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Dodging The Greatest Hits Graveyard

I’ve kept a frequent presence at rock concerts ever since I was a kid. Back in the day, live rock and roll shows were reasonably affordable—even if you did have to sleep on the street to get tickets—because bands toured in support of the latest record they had produced. Live shows were a catalyst for selling singles and albums, pushed local radio play, sold t-shirts and memorabilia, and paid for the road antics of the bands who could live and party on “permanent vacation.”

The concert world today is obviously different because the ecosystem is so drastically different. There are still monster arena tours like U2, Springsteen, or the Rolling Stones 50th (gasp!) corporate sponsored anniversary. There are small gatherings of devoted fans at venues around 5000 seats for tireless road warriors like Cheap Trick or Chicago. There are nostalgia plays in casino showrooms or destination bars with one or two surviving members of one-hit wonder acts. And there are tremendous new stars like Adele who play the old game a new way and can still fill amphitheaters at top prices, sell plenty of music downloads, and inspire faith that the CD has a tiny bit of life left for the bygone tribe.

What I have noticed over the course of this music evolution is the underlying key to longevity and not moving down the food chain hasn’t much changed—the survivors tend to deliver a healthy balance of old and new material. This is no small problem, as the fans who come out to concerts are no doubt screaming for an artist to play their big hits. It’s natural. It’s satisfying. It’s a trap.

TSO2005A few weeks ago my wife and I went to see one of our favorite groups, the still somewhat niche band Trans-Siberian Orchestra, best known for their annual Christmas shows and the ever-present holiday single, Christmas in Sarajevo. TSO blends heavy metal power chords with classical music and electric violins, usually with an interspersed layer of spoken storytelling. Several years ago they started branching out from Christmas themes, recording and touring a fantasy tale called Beethoven’s Last Night. This was the first time we had seen the show performed live, and while it was familiar to us, it was not well-known to much of the devoted audience. That was pretty brave, I thought, to tour a concept album that was not necessarily top of mind with their audience, but then they did something I found even more courageous. Toward the end of the show, when they had finished playing Beethoven and the audience expected they would play some oldies, they instead played several entirely new songs that had not even been released online. No one had heard these songs except those who had seen the tour, and the applause following was as you might suspect a bit tentative. The nervous quiet during these songs was not because they were bad, it was because they were new. If you are a regular on the live music scene, you know that awkwardness—but without it, there are no new hits.

New music has to be debuted at some point, that’s why it’s called a debut. Audiences can be very tough on new songs, they pay good money to hear hits and the survival of any act is contingent on meeting the expectations of fans. Yet long-term success is equally contingent on innovating, and facing an audience with the unknown or unfamiliar is always a daunting prospect. Who would willingly trade thunderous applause for quiet, polite clapping? The greatest acts know they have no choice.

Most of the hot Top 40 bands in the 1970s and 1980s would periodically release Greatest Hits albums, mechanical collections of their charting singles, usually pushed by their record labels for bankable cash acceleration. Some of these became all time bestsellers, notably The Eagles and Elton John. The question I always used to wonder when I handed over my cash for a dozen song vinyl collection was whether this was the end of the band or the beginning of a new chapter. For too many, we know how that played out, and we know where those bands are playing today, if at all. A Greatest Hits or “Best of…” album was easy money, the equivalent of predictable thunderous applause. Pushing out new work would remain the heart of risk, and the genesis of going to the next level.

Nothing about this cycle is unique to music. Business is the same, especially technology wrapped as consumer products. You need to play to your familiar success, the current incarnation of your brand, but the moment that catalogue is fixed, you’re doing dinner theater rather than headlining at Carnegie Hall. Think RIM with the standing ovation worthy Blackberry, Kodak and Polaroid with endless scrapbooks of silver snapshots, perhaps now Best Buy longing for a different curtain call than their former contender Circuit City. They all climbed the charts, but staying there remains a different story.

Steve Jobs liked to say that he never believed in focus groups, because it was not the job of customers to tell you what they wanted—how could they know what they wanted when it hadn’t yet been invented? No civilian could concretely describe iTunes, the iPod, the iPhone, or the iPad prior to their release. You can only imagine how many pundits prior to the success of these inventions could tell you of their impending doom solely on the basis of unfamiliarity. Of course Apple never stopped marketing its core line of computers during this unbelievable expansion of reach, they were still playing hits while composing new material and seeding it to the faithful, those with whom they had established profound affinity and could ask to trust them further with the unknown.

I also don’t think it is a coincidence that Steve Jobs was a huge fan of The Beatles, who in an active career that spanned all of about eight years never stopped putting out new material, took themselves off the road to focus on composition and the creative process, then reinvented their sound with almost every album, including a few radical pivots like Sgt. Pepper. Is it counter intuitive that the actual career of The Beatles was so short despite all that new material and no Greatest Hits collection until after their break-up? Possibly, but if impact is the name of the game, it is hard to dispute that The Beatles succeeded most of all at avoiding that most dreaded of dead-ends, The Greatest Hits Graveyard. Their incomparable legacy remains vibrant because they pushed themselves so hard to be innovating all the time while crowd pleasing.

Celebrated descriptors like “Built to Last” and “Good to Great” are hard-won praise tied to nimble companies for navigating the same difficult balance for so many years of reinvention. It’s a lesson in courage and vision that is as difficult to learn as it is to replicate, but it is that very bravery that can guide any individual career from ordinary to enviable. Facing the anxious reception of the untried might not be pleasant when a clear alternative is available, but it’s the only trail that bypasses the one-hit wonders.

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The Quality Chronicles

BugThe recent “failed IPO” of BATS has to be a cautionary tale. This wasn’t just a deal that didn’t price or trade according to plan. A software bug caused it to be withdrawn. You don’t hear that one too often.

A bug killed an IPO?

There is no argument that we live in a world of staggering speed, where competitors race to meet customer needs and time to market matters. Innovation is always factored by the ticking click, who gets the jump and the competitive advantage, when a cost center becomes a profit center. Information compounds on our desktops, the team with analysis paralysis most often loses to the nimble risk takers—but all this means is that in product development, the role of Quality Assurance (QA) has never been more critical.

I have often heard the mantra from development teams: “Better, Faster, Cheaper—we can give you any two and a half.” Believe me, I understand trade-offs. All product development is tempered by tough decisions that incorporate a series of smart and well-balanced quid pro quos. You want to cut the budget, give us more time or expect fewer features. You want to tighten the schedule, give us more capital or reduce the scope of benefits. You want an industry defining product, show us the money or don’t ask for a date.

Surely these threads have become clichés, and as such, they are not without some underlying truth. There are even schools of thought that proclaim speed over accuracy is the game-winning formula, entire companies built on this premise, hugely successful in their own right. Yet when the Decision Maker, whoever that is, makes the call to greenlight a software or product release, another question comes to mind: Is the call transparent or opaque? Said another way, are the risks inherent in the release from staging to live known to the Decision Maker, or is that person flying blind?

If the release is going live with known issues, that becomes a business decision with acknowledged acceptable risk. If a showstopper issue exists but is unknown to anyone, well, I don’t think I have ever seen that case in a going concern. If the release is going live with issues known to others but not the Decision Maker, that is a dysfunctional process, possibly the beginning of the end.

Here is the way I like to think about quality in product development: Quality Assurance is a Process, not a Department.

Like so many of the great lessons I have co-opted in this blog, this first became clear to me in hard-won experience with the magnificent QA Directors with whom I have worked over the years (several of whom reviewed this post in draft prior to publication), and second in Jim McCarthy’s brilliant book Dynamics of Software Development first published in 1995 and still a must read for any of my teams—non-tech even more than tech staff. The most critical constant of which I am aware in delivering great products to market consistently is for Quality to be owned by everyone involved in innovation—from designers to developers to marketers to feedback from end-users.

Of course every great development company will have a final step in the process called Quality Control or Quality Assurance, but it is my sense that the QA formal group is there to be the standard-bearer for Quality and rally the company around it, putting a final go or no-go procedure in place before the world gets its hands on a product, but not accepting proxy status for an otherwise poor process. A QA department is not a dumping ground, not a remote server where code is parked as a step function or convenient checkpoint in a perfunctory release approval, not a cynical target of blame. QA is the proxy for the customer, not management, and as such must have a voice that is shared throughout a company. If a Decision Maker chooses not to listen to either the process or a warning from fully objective and independent QA stewards, you get what you get.

I have always been enamored with QA teams, for their passion, for what they teach me, for how much they care about excellence. When QA is wound into the culture of a company, it is often because of the mutual and shared respect an organization has for the value of Quality as an intrinsic good that will most likely yield extrinsic rewards, but carries reward for itself in the form of realized creativity and pride. It is very hard to fake a love of Quality, and this applies to much more than software. Quality is a path to premium brands cautionary tale and premium prices in a landscape where speed and disseminated knowledge can commoditize just about anything if you let it. Quality is won when it is broadly embraced as a shared value, and then championed by a high energy team that inspires its adoption at the highest levels of management and all through the ranks. If top management does not buy this, Quality is doomed.

If top management at BATS did not know about the bug in their system—a software platform for trading equities like their own on IPO day and beyond —they did not do the hard work that is expected of them and now accept the business consequences. The downside illustrated in this real world example of an incomplete process is about as clear as it can be. To ignore or be ignorant of a showstopper in one’s own product is a reflection of a process that needs to be re-engineered. When you’re working with world-class engineers, it is much easier and far more fruitful to make sure the process is engineered correctly before the products go through it. The material cost of discovering a bug early in development is a tiny fraction of what it can cost you in the hands of the public. Give your engineers a voice and they will save you every time.

Listen to your QA stewards. If you built the right team, they are your first line of offense and your last line of defense. They know of what you speak.