American Turnaround

My strategy+business blog post this week is on Ed Whitacre's management memoir:

AT&T from Apples to iPhones

My grandfather repaired switchboards in Manhattan for the Bell system. When he retired in the 1960s, he and my grandmother lit out for the wilds of western New Jersey, where they bought a couple of acres of apple trees and lived quite comfortably on his pension. My great-grandparents, a waiter and an embroiderer, lived on the dividends from the AT&T shares they had purchased through my grandfather’s employee stock plan. Those were the days.

My mother inherited that stock in 2000. A few months later, AT&T announced an 83 percent dividend cut. By 2005, the former blue chip had been written off. “AT&T was a stripped-down long distance company with twenty straight quarters of declining revenue,” recalls Ed Whitacre in his memoir cum management guide, American Turnaround: Reinventing AT&T and GM and the Way We Do Business in the USA(with Leslie Cauley, Business Plus, 2013). “It was bleeding customers by the thousands, with no way to bring them back…a shell of a company with no future, a crummy balance sheet, and a tarnished brand name.”...read the rest here

Story of My People

I've been neglecting my blogging responsibilities lately. Too much work, too little time. But starting last week, part of that work includes a weekly post on business books for the newly launched strategy+business blogs. I'm excited about it: I've been serving as s+b's senior editor for books since 2007, but mostly behind the scenes - managing book reviews and features, and editing a really terrific group of expert freelance reviewers. Now, I get to call out books that catch my eye but might not make it into s+b otherwise, and stick in my own two-cents (one of the great joys of life...just ask any Kinni).

Going forward, I'll keep this blog going in the usual sporadic fashion. I'll also post a teaser of my weekly book post with a link back to the s+b blog. Here's last week's:

Another Facet of Globalization

“Who can say whether there was ever a moment, an hour, a day when we reached the apex of our economic lives, and from that day forth, our dreams became chimeras, our successes privileges, our future an imaginary quantity?”

So begins the climactic chapter of Edoardo Nesi’s Story of My People (Other Press, 2012), an eloquent, emotion-laden, and, I think, essential addition to the globalization bookshelf. Just released last month in the U.S., this slim memoir won the 2011 Strega Prize—the first time a work of nonfiction has received Italy’s most prestigious literary award since it was established in 1947...read the rest here

Chandler on the detective story

Since I have a longstanding reading jones for mysteries of every kind, I really enjoyed Raymond Chandler's take on the genre, "The Simple Art of Murder," which he wrote in 1950. Chandler is, of course, one of the great masters of the detective novel - the author of classics, such as The Long Goodbye and Farewell, My Lovely.

Being a fan of hard-boiled crime novels, I got particular kick out of Chandler's criticism of Dorothy Sayers and what he saw as the flaws in the mystery "formula."

Taking issue with Sayers' assertion that mysteries could not "attain the highest level of literary achievement, he says:

I think what was really gnawing at her mind was the slow realization that her kind of detective story was an arid formula which could not even satisfy its own implications. It was second-grade literature because it was not about the things that could make first-grade literature. If it started out to be about real people (and she could write about them–her minor characters show that), they must very soon do unreal things in order to form the artificial pattern required by the plot. When they did unreal things, they ceased to be real themselves. They became puppets and cardboard lovers and papier mâché villains and detectives of exquisite and impossible gentility. The only kind of writer who could be happy with these properties was the one who did not know what reality was. Dorothy Sayers’ own stories show that she was annoyed by this triteness; the weakest element in them is the part that makes them detective stories, the strongest the part which could be removed without touching the "problem of logic and deduction." Yet she could not or would not give her characters their heads and let them make their own mystery. It took a much simpler and more direct mind than hers to do that.

He also complains about American writers who picked up the English style, skewering both with this classic back-handed compliment:

Personally I like the English style better. It is not quite so brittle, and the people as a rule, just wear clothes and drink drinks. There is more sense of background, as if Cheesecake Manor really existed all around and not just the part the camera sees; there are more long walks over the Downs and the characters don’t all try to behave as if they had just been tested by MGM. The English may not always be the best writers in the world, but they are incomparably the best dull writers.

You can read the entire essay here...
 

Vonnegut on writing well

Who says ads are a waste of time? Well, I usually do, but then I came across an International Paper Company ad from the early '80s. The company asked Kurt Vonnegut to write an ad titled "How to write with style." Here's what he wrote:

Newspaper reporters and technical writers are trained to reveal almost nothing about themselves in their writings. This makes them freaks in the world of writers, since almost all of the other ink-stained wretches in that world reveal a lot about themselves to readers. We call these revelations, accidental and intentional, elements of style.

These revelations tell us as readers what sort of person it is with whom we are spending time. Does the writer sound ignorant or informed, stupid or bright, crooked or honest, humorless or playful - ? And on and on.

Why should you examine your writing style with the idea of improving it? Do so as a mark of respect for your readers, whatever you're writing. If you scribble your thoughts any which way, your readers will surely feel that you care nothing about them. They will mark you down as an egomaniac or a chowderhead - or, worse, they will stop reading you.

The most damning revelation you can make about yourself is that you do not know what is interesting and what is not. Don't you yourself like or dislike writers mainly for what they choose to show you or make you think about? Did you ever admire an empty-headed writer for his or her mastery of the language? No.

So your own winning style must begin with ideas in your head.

1. Find a subject you care about

Find a subject you care about and which you in your heart feel others should care about. It is this genuine caring, and not your games with language, which will be the most compelling and seductive element in your style.

I am not urging you to write a novel, by the way - although I would not be sorry if you wrote one, provided you genuinely cared about something. A petition to the mayor about a pothole in front of your house or a love letter to the girl next door will do.

2. Do not ramble, though

I won't ramble on about that.

3. Keep it simple

As for your use of language: Remember that two great masters of language, William Shakespeare and James Joyce, wrote sentences which were almost childlike when their subjects were most profound. "To be or not to be?" asks Shakespeare's Hamlet. The longest word is three letters long. Joyce, when he was frisky, could put together a sentence as intricate and as glittering as a necklace for Cleopatra, but my favorite sentence in his short story "Eveline" is this one: "She was tired." At that point in the story, no other words could break the heart of a reader as those three words do.

Simplicity of language is not only reputable, but perhaps even sacred. The Bible opens with a sentence well within the writing skills of a lively fourteen-year-old: "In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth."

4. Have guts to cut

It may be that you, too, are capable of making necklaces for Cleopatra, so to speak. But your eloquence should be the servant of the ideas in your head. Your rule might be this: If a sentence, no matter how excellent, does not illuminate your subject in some new and useful way, scratch it out.

5. Sound like yourself

The writing style which is most natural for you is bound to echo the speech you heard when a child. English was Conrad's third language, and much that seems piquant in his use of English was no doubt colored by his first language, which was Polish. And lucky indeed is the writer who has grown up in Ireland, for the English spoken there is so amusing and musical. I myself grew up in Indianapolis, where common speech sounds like a band saw cutting galvanized tin, and employs a vocabulary as unornamental as a monkey wrench.

In some of the more remote hollows of Appalachia, children still grow up hearing songs and locutions of Elizabethan times. Yes, and many Americans grow up hearing a language other than English, or an English dialect a majority of Americans cannot understand.
All these varieties of speech are beautiful, just as the varieties of butterflies are beautiful. No matter what your first language, you should treasure it all your life. If it happens not to be standard English, and if it shows itself when you write standard English, the result is usually delightful, like a very pretty girl with one eye that is green and one that is blue.

I myself find that I trust my own writing most, and others seem to trust it most, too, when I sound most like a person from Indianapolis, which is what I am. What alternatives do I have? The one most vehemently recommended by teachers has no doubt been pressed on you, as well: to write like cultivated Englishmen of a century or more ago.

6. Say what you mean

I used to be exasperated by such teachers, but am no more. I understand now that all those antique essays and stories with which I was to compare my own work were not magnificent for their datedness or foreignness, but for saying precisely what their authors meant them to say. My teachers wished me to write accurately, always selecting the most effective words, and relating the words to one another unambiguously, rigidly, like parts of a machine. The teachers did not want to turn me into an Englishman after all. They hoped that I would become understandable - and therefore understood. And there went my dream of doing with words what Pablo Picasso did with paint or what any number of jazz idols did with music. If I broke all the rules of punctuation, had words mean whatever I wanted them to mean, and strung them together higgledy-piggledy, I would simply not be understood. So you, too, had better avoid Picasso-style or jazz-style writing, if you have something worth saying and wish to be understood.

Readers want our pages to look very much like pages they have seen before. Why? This is because they themselves have a tough job to do, and they need all the help they can get from us.

7. Pity the readers

They have to identify thousands of little marks on paper, and make sense of them immediately. They have to read, an art so difficult that most people don't really master it even after having studied it all through grade school and high school - twelve long years.

So this discussion must finally acknowledge that our stylistic options as writers are neither numerous nor glamorous, since our readers are bound to be such imperfect artists. Our audience requires us to be sympathetic and patient readers, ever willing to simplify and clarify - whereas we would rather soar high above the crowd, singing like nightingales.

That is the bad news. The good news is that we Americans are governed under a unique Constitution, which allows us to write whatever we please without fear of punishment. So the most meaningful aspect of our styles, which is what we choose to write about, is utterly unlimited.

8. For really detailed advice

For a discussion of literary style in a narrower sense, in a more technical sense, I recommend to your attention The Elements of Style, by William Strunk, Jr. and E.B. White (Macmillan, 1979). E.B. White is, of course, one of the most admirable literary stylists this country has so far produced.

You should realize, too, that no one would care how well or badly Mr. White expressed himself, if he did not have perfectly enchanting things to say.

How to alienate a country

Have you seen the letter that Titan International CEO Morry Taylor - who so delights in his nickname "The Grizz" that he features it in his bio on the Titan corporate website - wrote to the French minister of industry on Feb. 8? It's quite an addition to annals of corporate communiques:

Dear Mr. Montebourg: 

I have just returned to the United States from Australia where I have been for the past few weeks on business; therefore, my apologies for not answering your letter dated 31 January 2013. 

I appreciate your thinking that your Ministry is protecting industrial activities and jobs in France.  I and Titan have a 40-year history of buying closed factories and companies, losing millions of dollars and turning them around to create a good business, paying good wages. Goodyear tried for over four years to save part of the Amiens jobs that are some of the highest paid, but the French unions and French government did nothing but talk. 

I have visited the factory a couple of times. The French workforce gets paid high wages but works only three hours. They get one hour for breaks and lunch, talk for three and work for three. I told this to the French union workers to their faces. They told me that’s the French way! 

You are a politician so you don’t want to rock the boat. The Chinese are shipping tires into France - really all over Europe - and yet you do nothing. The Chinese government subsidizes all the tire companies. In five years, Michelin won’t be able to produce tires in France. France will lose its industrial business because its government is more government. 

Sir, your letter states you want Titan to start a discussion. How stupid do you think we are? Titan is the one with money and talent to produce tires. What does the crazy union have? It has the French government. The French farmer wants cheap tires. He does not care if the tires are from China or India and these governments are subsidizing them. Your government doesn’t care either: “We’re French!” 

The US government is not much better than the French. Titan had to pay millions to Washington lawyers to sue the Chinese tire companies because of their subsidizing. Titan won. The government collects the duties. We don’t get the duties, the government does. 

Titan is going to buy a Chinese tire company or an Indian one, pay less than one Euro per hour and ship all the tires France needs. You can keep the so-called workers. Titan has no interest in the Amien North factory. 

Best regards, 

Maurice M. Taylor, Jr.

Chairman and CEO

The downside of this missive for Titan is pretty obvious: It alienates the French government, which can make it difficult to do business in the country; it insults the French, who buy Titan products; and it suggests that the company has an arrogant leader who can't curb his tongue, with all the problems that implies for investors, business partners, etc.

I assume The Grizz saw some benefit to sending such an incoherent rant, but I can't imagine why he just didn't write: "Thanks so much for thinking of us for this opportunity, but it isn't something we can pursue at the moment."

s+b's Best Business Books 2012

The annual Best Business Books special section is now online at strategy+business. We've got a great team of expert essayists, who chose and reviewed a terrific stack of books...in my not-so-humble opinion. Here's my intro to the section and the best of the best lineup. Read the rest here...

New and improved! This promise gets slapped on business books as often as on household cleansers. Many books are new each year, but those with genuine insight and value are very rare indeed.

We take the time to find them. In strategy+business’s Best Business Books 2012, our team of distinguished experts — some veterans of this annual special section, namely James O’Toole, Sally Helgesen, Phil Rosenzweig, and “Z” Holly, and some newcomers, Alice Schroeder, J. Philip Lathrop, and Shaun Holliday — review 21 tomes published between the autumn of 2011 and the autumn of 2012 that fulfill their promise.

Be sure to take a close look at our Top Shelf selections — our reviewers’ picks as the best of this year’s best business books. They include a new appraisal of Dwight David Eisenhower that will prompt you to consider your own effectiveness as a leader, a realistic plan for improving healthcare that eschews political rhetoric for practical solutions, an exploration of cloud computing that gets beyond the surface technological story to look more deeply at how it will change business practices, and four more books that merit your time and attention.

Here's the Top Shelf selections (lifted off the s+b website). Congrats to the authors! 

	Biography Eisenhower in War and Peace by Jean Edward Smith (Random House, 2012)
	Strategy The New Emerging Market Multinationals: Four Strategies forDisrupting Markets and Building Brands by Amitava Chattopadhyay and Rajeev Batra, with Aysegul Ozsomer (McGraw-Hill, 2012)
	Marketing Grow: How Ideals Power Growth and Profit at the World’s Greatest Companies by Jim Stengel (Crown Business, 2011)
	Innovation Cloud Surfing: A New Way to Think about Risk, Innovation, Scale, and Success by Thomas M. Koulopoulos (Bibliomotion, 2012)
	Healthcare Healthcare Beyond Reform: Doing It Right for Half the Cost by Joe Flower (Productivity Press, 2012)
	Organizational Culture Productive Workplaces: Dignity, Meaning, and Community in the 21st Century: 25th Anniversary Edition by Marvin R. Weisbord (Jossey-Bass, 2012)
	Capitalism The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion by Jonathan Haidt (Pantheon, 2012)

            

Killer quotes #2

 

 

"A fanatic is one who can't change his mind and won't change the subject"

--attributed to Winston Churchill 

Journalistic objectivity?

I started browsing an advance copy of a new book - Tap Dancing to Work: Warren Buffett on Practically Everything, 1966-2012 - that collects all of the coverage of Warren Buffett in Fortune magazine over the past six decades. It was put together by Carol Loomis, whose first paragraph in the book's preface struck me as odd. Here it is:

Because I have long been the chief writer about Warren Buffett at Fortune, which for decades has covered him more closely than any other business publication, I have often been asked whether I'm not going to branch out and write a Buffett biography. I have always said no, sure beyond a doubt that a writer who is a good friend of the subject does not make a good biographer. And I have indeed been a close friend of Warren's for more than forty years, a shareholder in his company, Berkshire Hathaway, for almost that long, and the pro bono editor of his annual letter to shareholders for thirty-five. All of those facts can be accommodated in my Fortune articles about Buffett, simply by my informing the reader that they exist. But they are not a firm base for a wide-ranging personal and professional biography, in which there should be considerable distance between writer and subject. Its absence in this case settled the question.

I don't quite follow the logic here. Being a close friend of Buffett precludes Loomis from writing a bio about him, but not writing about him in Fortune?

The other interesting thing is how adroitly Buffett and a few other businesspeople - Jack Welch and the late Steve Jobs come to mind - handle the press by picking out a favored few, who they then treat as friends and grant insider access. I wonder how much that has contributed to their reputations and whether there's a lesson in that for CEOs?

The Dalai Lama came to town

I was lucky to get a chance to see the 14th Dalai Lama just down the street at the College of William & Mary yesterday. He gave a terrific talk -- informal, humorous, and inspiring -- on the need to practice compassion and its power to change the world and our lives. You can hear it here.

I particularly liked what he said about the importance of making thoughtful and independent decisions of our own:

"We must study reality. The mind must be calm, then it can carry investigation or research more objectively. If there’s too much anger, suspicion, the mind is already one-sided and cannot see objectively."

"Investigate, experiment, do not easily accept."

Spring training tips

In 2006, the St. Louis Cardinals hired Jason Selk as its first Director of Mental Training. The team had pitching, batting, and fielding coaches, but the players also needed to learn how to set goals, focus on their priorities, stay positive, be disciplined, and win. They went on to win their first World Series in 20 years.

Since then Selk has written a couple of books detailing his approach to high personal performance: 10-Minute Toughness: The Mental Training Program for Winning Before the Game Begins
and Executive Toughness: The Mental-Training Program to Increase Your Leadership Performance. And publicist Cathy Lewis just sent along his five timely tips for execs who want to up their games:

Watch your swing, forget the home run. If you focus on your target, such as finishing the report, making the sale, or acquiring the new client, you may never get there. Pay attention to your process instead. Identify those daily goals that have the greatest influence on your performance and, therefore, your success. If your aim is to double your client load in one year, then figure out three specific tasks, or process goals, you need to complete each day that will help you reach that ultimate target. Then be relentless and consistent about completing your three process goals every day.

Don't take your eye off the ball. Many high-performing businesspeople believe they can multitask and still maintain focus. The American Psychological Association cites a study showing that multitasking leads to as much as a 40 percent drop in productivity. Recent research from Stanford University found that multitaskers are less productive than their single-minded counterparts, and also suffer from weaker self-control. Regain control of your performance. While completing the three essential tasks you identified above, turn off your cell phone and shut down your email.

Be your own ref. If you want to be more productive, you need to establish your own limits--your "not to-do" list. This might include counterproductive tasks such as responding to company emails during family time, talking to clients after 3:30 p.m., or not saying yes right away to a new project, but giving your answer the next day, after you've slept on it. Be sure that you are scheduling your calendar rather than allowing your calendar to schedule you.

Get R&R between workouts. Nearly 4 out of 10 workers are regularly fatigued, according to a recent study in the Journal of Occupational and Environmental Medicine. Lack of sleep causes fatigue, and that's a productivity killer. In fact, the rate of lost productivity for workers with fatigue was 66 percent, compared with 26 percent for workers without fatigue. Fatigued workers lost an average of 5.6 hours per week of production time. Make rest, rejuvenation, and 7-9 hours of sleep a priority.

Listen to your body. When professional athletes try to push through the pain, they end up on the DL. In the workplace, this is known as "extreme working," and it results in lower performance. New research found that 69 percent of extreme workers--super high achievers who regularly work 60-80 hours a week--admit that their extreme working habits undermine their health. Most of these workers can't sustain this level of performance, and end up burning out, just like promising athletes who have to sit on the bench all season or retire early because of injuries.

Approaching thought leadership

One of the major benefits of working as a senior editor for Booz & Company's strategy+business is the opportunity to work with its editor-in-chief, Art Kleiner. Art is a leading business writer and editor - he's worked with business thinkers like Peter Senge, Arie de Geus,and Noel Tichy.

When I first started working with Art, he told me about his simple, but hardly simplistic, approach to analyzing thought leadership, which uses four questions, or orientations:

• What is your purpose?
• What research is the work based on, and how credible is it?
• Who is your audience?
• What is the story?

The other day, Art elaborated on this analytical framework in a webinar for Leading News, an online leadership community created by Patricia Wheeler and Marshall Goldsmith. If you're associated with creating thought leadership or aspire to become a thought leader, the audio replay is well worth your time (listen here: http://ow.ly/8U4cp). Art was also kind enough to provide a great deck on thought leadership, which accompanied the talk (see http://slidesha.re/zAuu3v).

Isaacson's Jobs

Everybody has reviewed Walter Isaacson's bio Steve Jobs and rightly so - it's a terrific book about a highly successful businessman and a highly flawed person. Unsurprisingly, one of the best reviews was Malcolm Gladwell's for The New Yorker. He pegged Jobs as tweaker rather than a inventor.

The book is full of great stories, but the one that I can't get out of my mind isn't about Jobs. It's about a guy named Ron Wayne, an engineer at Atari, to whom Jobs and Wozniak gave 10% of Apple when they formed it on April 1, 1976. Here goes...

Wayne then got cold feet. As Jobs started planning to borrow and spend more money, he recalled the failure of his own company. He didn't want to go through that again. Jobs and Wozniak had no personal assets, but Wayne (who worried about a global financial Armageddon) kept gold coins hidden in his mattress. Because they had structured Apple as a simple parnership rather than a corporation, the partners would be personally liable for the debts, and Wayne was afraid potential creditors would go after him. So he returned to the Santa Clara County office just eleven days later with a "statement of withdrawal" and an amendment to the partnership agreement. "By virtue of a re-assessment of understandings by and between all parties," it began, "Wayne shall hereinafter cease to function in the status of Partner." It noted that in payment for his 10% of the company, he received $800, and shortly afterward $1,500 more.

Had he stayed on and kept his 10% stake, at the end of 2010 it would have been worth approximately $2.6 billion.

s+b's Best Business Books 2011

The annual Best Business Books special section (read or download it here) was published by strategy+business this week. I edited the 7 essays and contributed this opening:

In 2001, when strategy+business published its first Best Business Books section, an irrationally exuberant investment bubble had recently popped and the business world was coping with a global recession. Now, as this feature enters its second decade, another irrationally exuberant investment bubble has popped and the global recession is back with greater ferocity. Apparently there is some truth to the loosely translated epigram of French novelist Jean-Baptiste Alphonse Karr: The more things change, the more they stay the same.

Although they cover a wide variety of topics and fields, just about all of the books featured in the seven essays ahead are rife with dissatisfaction. Many of their authors have tracked down root causes of the destruction of economic value and prescribed radical solutions for them. Judging by the fact that the expert essayists we recruited to cull this year’s stack of business books chose these particular titles, it’s fair to assume that they too would welcome change that alters the status quo.

Professor of business ethics James O’Toole, who has contributed an unbroken chain of insightful annual essays since 2001, leads off with books that illuminate the social role of business. Karr-like, he finds that for all the change we experience, the defining characteristics of “good” companies remain the same over time — as does the inability of leaders to sustain them.

Next, IMD professor Phil Rosenzweig brings his sharp eye for flaws in business logic to his survey of this year’s books on strategy. He chooses three books that eschew formulaic strategic approaches to focus on the fundamental questions executives must consider as they decide the direction of their company.

David K. Hurst, author and our regular Books in Brief reviewer, takes on the always-packed shelves of new books on management. His picks illuminate the struggle for the future of Western management practice and thought — and suggest the kinds of changes, and their magnitude, that may be needed to ensure that we move beyond business as usual.

Award-winning financial journalist David Warsh picks the year’s best books on economics. He discovers many worthy forward-looking books, and focuses on one in particular that describes the oncoming mash-up of national economies, providing what may prove to be a durable framework for making sense of a global economy that will soon be four times its current size.

Journalist Catharine P. Taylor brings two decades of perspective to her roundup of the year’s best books on marketing. She finds a trio of compelling books that reject conventional marketing “window dressing” for more socially responsible and engaging approaches, but adopting such approaches would clearly require some corporate reinvention.

We placed this year’s choices for best leadership books in the capable hands of Barbara Kellerman, a professor at Harvard University’s John F. Kennedy School of Government. In her first best business books essay, Kellerman bypasses leadership theory for leaders’ lives, picking two biographies of American presidents and a presidential memoir that illuminate four lessons for better understanding executive effectiveness.

Finally, strategy+business contributing editor Michael Schrage of MIT’s Sloan School of Management and London’s Imperial College returns to our pages with an essay on the best books on technology. His choices broaden our understanding of how people and technology interact and coevolve, creating innovation ecosystems in the process.

Here are the year’s best business books. I hope you find them as worthy as we do and take some of their ideas to heart. If you do, we might not be reliving this same cyclical chaos 10 years hence.

Be Our Guest - 10th Anniversary Edition

Here's a brief article from D23, the Disney Fan Club, announcing the publication of the revised and expanded edition of Be Our Guest earlier this month. The book has been amazingly successful (over 150,000 copies sold), which tells you something about Disney's expertise at delivering quality service and their ability to market their products.

Ten years ago, Ted Kinni’s book Be Our Guest: Perfecting the Art of Customer Service pulled back the curtain to give readers a look at how Walt Disney Parks and Resorts does business.

Based on DI programs and extensive interviews with their clients, Be Our Guest showcases how Disney builds its entire organization around customers, or in Disney parlance, guests. Now, 150,000 copies later, the Disney Publishing Worldwide book is back on store shelves, freshly updated in time to help celebrate DI’s 25th anniversary.

“The interesting thing about this edition is that the Company itself has grown and entered a lot of different businesses since the first edition,” Ted says. “Because of this, there’s now a whole new range of examples and enhancements to the book.” He cites growth in retail stores, the Cruise Line, travel businesses, and a more global Parks presence. “This book represents a more refined quality service approach that DI has been able to develop these last 10 years,” he says. “When you think of customer service, Disney immediately pops into your mind. It’s really amazing how long Disney has excelled in customer service and how it’s built a successful organization around it.”

I'm working on a second book for Disney Institute now. It's really a dream gig working for a client that has so much great content and such a terrific track record. More on the new book when we get closer to the publication date later next year.

Bottling customer experience

For a couple of years now, I've been editing a monthly feature on the strategy+business website named Author's Choice, in which one author introduces an excerpt from another author's book, but just got around to introducing one myself. It's from a really good new book by the co-founders of Method Products that explains how they built a successful consumer packaged goods company in one of the most competitive product niches - household cleansers. Here's the intro:

The best customer experiences tend to come from companies with major service components, like Disney and Ritz-Carlton. Their business models place them face-to-face with customers, and their fortunes rise and fall on their ability to provide compelling experiences, as Starbucks discovered a couple of years ago. But most product companies, especially those that don’t sell directly to end-users, don’t think quite as rigorously about customer experience.
Enter Method Products. Method is one of those delightfully quirky entrepreneurial stories. In the late 1990s, two 24-year-old guys — an ad man and a climate researcher — take off on a ski weekend and decide that the home cleaning products industry is ripe for a shakeup. Never mind that it’s a mature, relatively stagnant market dominated by powerful brand names like Procter & Gamble and the Clorox Company. Never mind that everybody else is starting e-businesses. Never mind that they are two 24-year-old guys on a ski weekend talking about cleaning products. By 2010, their privately held company is generating annual revenues somewhere north of US$200 million; it counts major retailers, including Target, Whole Foods, and Auchan, among its accounts; and the big dogs are tracking it.
How did Method do it? One way, as detailed in the excerpt below from the new book by Method cofounders Eric Ryan and Adam Lowry, was by zeroing in on the abysmal experience associated with so many home cleansers, such as the eye-tearing, nose-burning, skin-irritating sensations that can transform a minor decision about who is going to clean the bathroom into a domestic negotiation of epic proportions...read the excerpt here

MacArthur in The Washington Post

It was cool to see No Substitute for Victory pop up in The Washington Post's "On Leadership" blog . They published the following excerpt from getAbstract's summary of the book:

The stereotypical military general wields authority like a blunt instrument: Issue an order and it's followed. The reality of military leadership is more complex, as this intriguing study of General Douglas MacArthur shows. MacArthur took a deliberate, nuanced approach to inspiring his troops. His arsenal included motivation, knowledge, intimidation, praise and self-deprecation. Authors Theodore and Donna Kinni combine a short biography, compelling anecdotes and a keen understanding of MacArthur's career and personality to build this episodic analysis of his approach to strategy, motivation and management. They include relevant study questions after each chapter. getAbstract recommends this to managers who need to take their leadership skills to boot camp and to those who enjoy good military tales.

MacArthur’s strategic rules
Douglas MacArthur was born in 1880 into an Army family. He served in World War I, became the head of West Point and served in World War II. At 70, General MacArthur remained a force in world affairs as the leader of U.S. troops in Korea. He always employed strategic skills and concepts that still offer useful guidance to managers:

"Define and pursue victory" – In any endeavor, the definition of success can differ. If you don't have a clear definition of victory, you cannot win. In Korea, MacArthur knew that he had to outline victory clearly, although this ultimately cost him his job. President Harry Truman defined victory as a sullen stalemate. MacArthur defined it as absolute victory; his criticism caused Truman to relieve him from duty. Korea today remains divided; North Korea remains an international political problem.

"Understand the situation" – As a young officer, MacArthur gained a reputation as a leader who went into battle with his troops. He wanted to get to the front so he could evaluate events for himself. Later, when his rank made it hard for him to accompany the troops, he built an intelligence-gathering team that reported directly to him.

"Use every available means" – MacArthur knew he couldn't fight today's war with yesterday's strategies, so he got creative. When he had to move forces from Australia to the Philippines during WWII, he did not let WWI logistics hold him back. Hampered by shortages of supplies and men, he hatched a "triphibious" approach, combining ground troops with air and naval forces. Stretching scarce supplies was his trademark. Short of supplies in 1947, he created "Operation Roll-Up" to refurbish leftover WWII gear in Japanese factories. This reclamation project armed U.S. troops for the Korean War. MacArthur became known for doing "more with less."

“Manage the environment” – In Papua, New Guinea, MacArthur's men were decimated by an unexpected enemy: malaria. Most of his troops were ill. He formed a task force to tackle the epidemic and soon greatly reduced infection rates, while Japanese troops continued to suffer from rampant malaria. "Nature is neutral in war," MacArthur later wrote, although he noted elsewhere that the army that adapts to the terrain wins.

“Utilize surprise" – Unpredictability was a MacArthur hallmark. He attacked the least obvious places, only after seeming to prepare for an assault elsewhere. Trapped on Corregidor, he escaped not by submarine – the most obvious method – but by unheard-of PT boats. He sent troops into heavily Japanese-fortified Manila to free U.S. prisoners of war. He figured no one would expect him to broach an armed city…

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Orwell on writing

George Orwell - author of Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty-Four, you know the guy - took on the doublespeak that passes for political prose in a 1946 essay titled "Politics and the English Language." He offered six rules for writing clearly that all of us would do well to follow:

1. Never use a metaphor, simile, or other figure of speech which you are used to seeing in print.

2. Never use a long word where a short one will do.

3. If it is possible to cut a word out, always cut it out.

4. Never use the passive where you can use the active.

5. Never use a foreign phrase, a scientific word, or a jargon word if you can think of an everyday English equivalent.

6. Break any of these rules sooner than say anything outright barbarous.

SPC and healthcare

I think Atul Gawande, surgeon, New Yorker staff writer, MacArthur Award winner, etc., etc., is the best healthcare writer around for two reasons. First, his writing epitomizes the best New Yorker nonfiction, which I’ve been reading ever since cutting my teeth on John McPhee’s inquires into everything from Bill Bradley’s basketball chops to birch-bark canoes. Second, and more important, Gawande, unlike many writers who approach healthcare as proverbial blind men, sees the whole elephant. He looks at the woes of U.S. healthcare from a Deming-like systemic perspective that would behoove anyone concerned with healthcare reform anywhere in the world. Remember W. Edwards Deming?

Gawande’s most recent foray into the healthcare wilds, “The Hot Spotters" takes us to Camden, New Jersey, where a family physician named Jeffrey Brenner got the city’s three main hospitals to give him access to their medical billing records and analyzed the data on a desktop computer. He discovered that “just one percent of the hundred thousand people who made use of Camden’s medical facilities accounted for thirty per cent of [the city’s entire healthcare] costs.”

Brenner then set up a program to provide these “super-utilizers” of healthcare with greater attention and more education. The results: Over the long term, the hospital visits of the first 36 patients in the program were reduced by 40 percent per month and their average total monthly hospital bill dropped by 56 percent from $1.2 million to just over $500,000. Gawande points out that the net savings are lower (because of the extra attention these patients need from primary care physicians, among other things), “but they remain, almost certainly, revolutionary.” Clearly, if they could be extrapolated over Camden’s 1,000 one percenters, they could put a real dent in the city’s overall healthcare costs.

Gawande says Brenner’s program is “a strange new approach to health care: to look for the most expensive patients in the system and then direct resources and brainpower toward helping them.” This “new” approach is, of course, classic statistical process control – analyze your process outcomes, pick out the biggest variations from the mean, and address them. It’s SOP for manufacturers. If it was for healthcare systems, too, lots of low-hanging fruit would surely be revealed. But healthcare systems aren’t like manufacturing plants and their supply chains.

The major players in healthcare – doctors, hospitals, and insurers – are drowning in data, but they aren’t sharing it. The fact that Brenner got three hospitals to hand him their medical records is nothing short of amazing. And if providers and payors did start pooling and analyzing their patient data, who’s going to address the outliers that are revealed? Brenner had to scare up grants to run his program because, as Gawande writes, “that’s not how the health-insurance system is built.” That alone seems like a pretty good argument for rebuilding it.

Beauty and the beast

Tina Brown's Newsweek has an interesting new back page feature -- a guest column called My Favorite Mistake. It's probably going to turn out to be a back-handed way for famous people to stroke their own egos. But I got a kick out of the inaugural column which featured this story from movie mogul Harvey Weinstein:

One of my all-time classics happened when I took a plane to England and ran into Kate Moss and Linda Evangelista on the flight. They were both dating friends of mine and couldn’t have been happier to see me. They wanted to initiate me, as I was a two-pack-a-day smoker, into their habit of smoking in the bathroom on the plane. So, whenever one of them was there, I got away with it. But the one time I tried it myself, I got caught. I said to the attendant, “When I smoked with Kate Moss, you never busted me,” and he replied with the magic words: “You are no Kate Moss.” Could there be a truer statement? They nearly arrested me, and I had to go to court and pay a small fortune for my activities...read the rest here

Customer experience reading list

I wrote a "knowledge review" discussing my picks for the essential books on the topic of customer experience that appeared in the Fall 2010 issue of strategy+business, but I forgot to mention it here. So, belatedly, here's the article opening set in my adopted home town, a link to the rest, and the book list:

Greetings from Williamsburg, Va., an outpost on the new frontier called the experience economy. Well, maybe not so new. John D. Rockefeller Jr., the only son of Senior, who was, of course, the founder of Standard Oil and an iconic figure in the rise of the unfettered industrial economy, began buying up this sleepy Tidewater town in the 1920s. Junior’s vision: Create a living museum that would protect the heritage of the United States and transport everyone who paid the price of admission back to the revolutionary 1770s to experience colonial life, right down to the horse manure.

Colonial Williamsburg, the restored capital of England’s Virginia colony, has attracted tens of millions of visitors since then, including long-reigning Queen Elizabeth II, who visited her ancestral fiefdom first in 1957 and again, 50 years later, in 2007. It also spawned an entirely new local economy based on feeding, lodging, and entertaining all those visitors and providing housing and services for people who found jobs there, as well as for former tourists who decided, as I did, that it would be a nice place to live. The entire greater Williamsburg area is a testament to the transformative power of a compelling customer experience...read the rest here

Here are the books covered in the article:

B. Joseph Pine II and James H. Gilmore, The Experience Economy: Work Is Theatre and Every Business a Stage (Harvard Business School Press, 1999)

Bernd H. Schmitt, Experiential Marketing: How to Get Customers to Sense, Feel, Think, Act, and Relate to Your Company and Brands (Free Press, 1999)

Lewis P. Carbone, Clued In: How to Keep Customers Coming Back Again and Again (FT Press, 2004)

Leonard L. Berry and Kent D. Seltman, Management Lessons from Mayo Clinic: Inside One of the World’s Most Admired Service Organizations (McGraw-Hill, 2008)

Lior Arussy, Customer Experience Strategy: The Complete Guide from Innovation to Execution (4i, 2010)

Gosia Glinska, James H. Gilmore, and Marian Chapman Moore, “The Geek Squad Guide to World Domination: A Case for the Experience Economy,” (Darden Business Publishing, 2009), DVD

Jeanne Bliss, Chief Customer Officer: Getting Past Lip Service to Passionate Action
(Jossey-Bass, 2006)