Normally, I just link to interesting articles in my delicious feed and let it be. But this article from the NYTimes Magazine about manual labor gets so many things right about what’s wrong with corporate culture that I wanted to point it out specifically here. Some quotes:
On sitting still (one thing I HATE about corporate life):
It is a rare person, male or female, who is naturally inclined to sit still for 17 years in school, and then indefinitely at work.
On having to do things you don’t really agree with:
It sometimes required me to reason backward, from desired conclusion to suitable premise. The organization had taken certain positions, and there were some facts it was more fond of than others. As its figurehead, I was making arguments I didn’t fully buy myself.
And what that means for middle management:
Survival depends on a crucial insight: you can’t back down from an argument that you initially made in straightforward language, with moral conviction, without seeming to lose your integrity. So managers learn the art of provisional thinking and feeling, expressed in corporate doublespeak, and cultivate a lack of commitment to their own actions.
I’m not sure I agree with the “go work in the salt mines for integrity!” argument, but surviving in an organization where you have authority but not responsibility requires an undesireable flexibility… That needs to be pointed out sometimes.
There’s a bunch of hand-wringing going on right now about the state of the newspaper, and everyone’s talking about Google News and The New York Times isn’t cash-flow positive and the WSJ is going to start charging per article and the internet is killing newspapers and craigslist has taken away a major portion of their revenue (true). Here’s what almost no one is saying: newspapers don’t really like their users. Sure, they’re not suing them like the music industry and they don’t actively screw with people like the airlines, but there’s not a lot of love there.
Media companies in general have a tricky line to walk. They get their money from advertisers based on how well they can amass eyeballs for those ads. Which means they’re catering to two different audiences with different goals at the same time and that’s hard. It means they can’t have the singular customer focus of, say, Amazon.com.
But that’s no excuse for what I heard last October. I was at a gathering of newspaper folks in Chicago, and I got to hear a wonderful presentation about how 18-24 year olds were reading the news, what they liked in websites, and what worked for them. (Use was up due to the presidential election, which allowed them to get particuarly good data.) One of the main conclusions of the study was that 18-24 year olds, like everyone, struggle with the amount of information they could get and how to fit that into the rest of their lives. The attitude I heard from the room was “welcome to adulthood. deal with it.” in pretty much those exact words.
There was no fear that the users would stop coming. There was no “you know, a lot of people have that problem. I wonder how we can help.” It was just: your problem, not mine. I was floored. If you can’t get people to read your content, how on earth are you going to deliver those folks to the advertisers? If you can’t deliver those folks to the advertisers, how are you going to make your money?
That attitude needs to be overcome, just as much as they need to find the new business model for the industry.
A lot of my last job was working on customer satisfaction goals for the organization. I used my rudimentary statistics skills to find the highest correlated factor and we set various goals around that. I learned some interesting things when we analyzed the yearly goals and whether or not they were met.
- Luck mattered just as much as skill when the goal was met.
- People under pressure will do some ethically dubious things to meet their goals. Management may or may not care.
- Goals without resources will not be met. There will be little, if any, spill-over from other work.
- Performance will improve insofar as it relates to the goal.
- People resent goals that don’t incorporate all the important work, particularly high-profile goals.
- Goals provide some comfort. If people get used to having goals and are then asked to work without them (even if they worked without them for years), it makes them more uncertain.
- Goals set with specific circumstances in mind are no longer valid when those circumstances change. Management may or may not care if those circumstances change. You need to make them care when it’s important.
On a related note: Why Setting Goals Can Backfire. I want to quote half the article, but will settle for this.
Although simple numerical goals can lead to bursts of intense effort in the short term, they can also subvert the longer-term interests of a person or a company – whether it’s a pharmaceutical firm that overlooks safety in the rush to get a drug approved, or a dieter who resumes smoking to help lose 20 pounds. In work requiring a certain amount of creativity and judgment, the greatest risk appears to lie in overly simplified goals. Reducing complex activities to a bundle of numbers can end up rewarding the wrong behavior – with engineers concentrating on less promising but more straightforward research, for example, to rack up more patents.
Goals are important, but they’re only one tool to get the work done.
One of the chapters in Programming as if People Mattered
is titled Listen To Your Users, but Ignore What They Say.
It’s good advice in things other than programming too. Which leads me to link to this article about Tropicana’s recent package redesign and its subsequent rollback, and the power of the internet:
Part of the problem seems to be that, online, all outrage appears to be equal. When Facebook went through its recent redesign, the tone, and in some cases even the language, of the “outrage” seemed creepily similar to the outrage expressed against Bernie Madoff or the bankers who wrecked the economy. It’s impossible for marketers to know whether or not to take such complaints seriously.
Tropicana rolled back the redesign because sales dropped 20%. If they’d gone up, I suspect they’d've ignored the people on the internet entirely.
The list goes all the way back to The South Sea Company in the 1700s.
In the early 1700s and 1850s, this English company secured a monopoly under a treaty with Spain to trade with South America. It grew by trading debt for equity. Its obtaining of a charter in mid-1720 buoyed share prices, a peak that encouraged people to start to sell. The South Sea Company’s directors ordered their agents to buy, which raised the price to about £750 around June. It climbed to £1,000 in early August, but the level of selling started driving the price down to as little as £100 per share at year’s end. Investors who had bought shares on credit plunged into bankruptcy and the stock reached full ruin. A subsequent Parliament investigation a year later uncovered fraud among company directors.
The “What Kate Is…” posts are on hold since I’m reducing my media use. (Although I may rework them to encourage better environmentalism.) Instead, here’s a link to everything I just read or marked to read in all of my RSS feeds.
There you have it: decorating, feminism, science fiction, business, parenting, and some clothes. That’s a pretty typical daily snapshot.
Two irritating business words I’ve accidentally used in the last few days: actionable (as opposed to passable?) and action items (what’s wrong with to-dos?). Gah.
I’ve tagged a bunch of articles because I want to post them here, too. As I read through them, there’ll be more posts that are just a bunch of links.
- On working hard. “I have a great acting coach who says that success in Hollywood is based on one thing: opportunity meets readiness. You cannot always control the opportunities, but you can control the readiness.”
- This is what I hate about living in the suburbs. Your random contact with people is much lower. “I got a little zap last month when the guys at the corner diner took Randy Johnson’s picture off their Yankee Wall (I commented on its absence while waiting on an egg and cheese on a roll, and the owner made this obscure, but clearly not G-rated, hand gesture and said, ‘Restaurant in Arizona can stick up for him now, you know’), but then! Couple days ago! Same diner, city workers in line ahead of me going back and forth about the Bernie-minor-league-contract thing, and I couldn’t help myself; I just jumped in with a ‘They what now?’ They fill me in, I made noises about how I had to put some crow on my egg and cheeses last year because I’d gotten on him to retire, but when the outfield had nothing else going on but the weather Bernie really stepped up, and then all of a sudden the corner booth is in on the act all, ‘Wait, so what’d they do to him?’”
- If you’re male, some basic fashion advice to make sure you don’t look awful.
- This article about how the superstar cities are falling behind strikes true, just because I’m starting to feel like we’re never going to be able to afford a house here. “Over the past 15 years, it has been opportunistic newcomers — Houston, Charlotte, Las Vegas, Phoenix, Dallas, Riverside — that have created the most new jobs and gained the most net domestic migration. In contrast there has been virtually negligible long-term net growth in jobs or positive domestic migration to places like New York, Los Angeles, Boston or the San Francisco Bay Area.”
- Duncan Watts has the #1 breakthrough idea in the Harvard Business Review for 2007. “In his best seller The Tipping Point, Malcolm Gladwell argues that “social epidemics” are driven in large part by the actions of a tiny minority of special individuals. The idea seems intuitively right—we think we see it happening all the time. Nevertheless, this isn’t actually how ideas spread. It’s better to focus on getting enough plain, ordinary people to sign on.”
If you’ve heard of Good to Great
, you probably know what it’s about and whether or not you should read it (if you already haven’t). Seriously, to learn more about it, you could visit the author’s website, the book’s website, or watch the PBS program. I feel like the book’s been so reported on that writing a review of what it’s about would be largely useless.
I will tell you that the attention is, by and large, worth it. It’s got tons of solid information about how to run a good business, case studies of both successful companies and unsuccessful ones, and it’s written clearly, which makes it an easy read. If you haven’t read it, I’d recommend doing so.
Good to Great
: Recommended
TheCultFigurine rightly takes Versus to task for the fake drama they created around Monday’s Pittsburgh-Washington came. The fact that a week earlier they only wanted to talk about the Pittsburgh-Washington game instead of the one they were actually broadcasting at the time (Chicago-Minnesota) just made it worse.
Look, the NHL has had its problems lately, particularly since it’s losing popularity. They’ve been trying to make Sidney Crosby the savior of the league by promoting him as the next Wayne Gretzky* for the last two years. This Washington Post article about Monday’s game has two relevant quotes:
Crosby said afterward that he didn’t believe he and Ovechkin had to rescue the league or their franchises.
and
Alex the Great and Sid the Kid have basically been entrusted with taking away the financial and marketing sins of all the adults who messed up the sport, the people who absolutely see Ovechkin and Crosby as their last hopes for an NHL rebirth.
My basic take on it is: if your marketing has to be that heavy-handed, then people are going to smell the desperation. No one likes desperation. Crosby’s quote shows he gets that.
Now if we could only get Versus to lay the hell off.
* Although it’s interesting to note they’ve stopped calling him “the next one.” Maybe that was too obvious.
(Warning: I was reviewing some of my old work notes today…)
Many analysts hate simple website metrics reports*. They require almost no thought to put together, no thought to answer the questions behind them, and they’re not actionable. I disagree. They’re pretty powerful for a couple of reasons: they let everyone know how healthy the website is, and they control exaggeration. It lets you see the same thing as bunch of empty tables at a restaurant. Or a long line to get in somewhere. How’re we doing today? You know. Everyone does. Even if you can’t act on it.
* By simple, I mean the less than five number reports that answer questions like “How many people visited our site yesterday? Is that up or down from this time last week? Last month? Last year?”
Those of you who worked at Amazon or knew someone who did may remember the Editorial vs Personalization battle. Those of you who didn’t here’s the short version: Personalization wrote some software that made decisions about which products to feature on the pages. Editorial didn’t want to give up control of those pages, so Personalization wrote more software to measure conversion from those features. They ran a/b tests. Not only did the personalization software better choose what products to feature (i.e. they had a higher conversion rate), it actually caused the editor’s picks to have a lower conversion rate. Political battles ensued. Personalization won because Amazon is a business that needs to make money, and conversion matters. Most of the editors left the company.
I used to think that this was a shame; that there had to be a way for editors to be able to work within a system that uses software to help choose the content that gets surfaced. Having worked at a media company that’s dominated by editors for a few months now, I’ve changed my mind.
Editors have so much tied up in their egos that they can’t conceive of a piece of software that could possibly do a better job than them. They think, of course people do a better job than software. It’s bad enough here that they won’t even use metrics (i.e. did people actually read this story that I posted?) to help guide their decisions about what to post. And they’ll actively fight to stop a system that could do a better job than them, rather than learn to work with it.
You know that someone has to write all that content that the software chooses to post, right? Who the hell’s going to do that if there aren’t any writers or editors? But they don’t want to give up any of their power in order to allow the company to become better. So I no longer think that this is possible. It’s going to end up an either-or situation: Either the editors are going to post content that isn’t going to convert well or the good writers and editors are going to leave a company rather than work with a software program.
And I think that’s a shame.
This article seems to confirm my belief that there’s a big market out there for someone to come along and knock most newspapers in the country out of business. Well, more likely Gannett (who owns USA Today) will start buying out more and more small newspapers and start killing off the print editions when they don’t make money anymore. Then all you have to do is create online versions that you customize with a different look and feel at extremely low cost.
