The Performance Improvement Blog

Listen to Your Customer

I heard Patrick Doyle, CEO of Domino’s Pizza, speak at a meeting of the Washtenaw Economic Club on Thursday (February 21, 2013). I was impressed by his honesty about himself and his company and his sense of humor even in the face of threats to Domino’s survival.  In 2009, at a time of declining revenue and store closings, Domino’s changed its product entirely. Doyle became CEO in 2010 and it was up to him to launch the new product. If customers didn’t like the new product, that could have been the end of his career with Domino’s. He met the challenge and because of having the right product, a successful advertising campaign, and a comprehensive training program that reached every employee in all the stores, the company regained its position as market leader.

Domino’s had been known for its delivery service, not for its pizza. According to all of their taste tests,
the pizza was as good as their competitors. But that didn’t matter. What mattered is that consumers did not think that the taste was better than their competitors. So the leaders listened to their customers and redesigned their pizza.  And they were honest about this in their advertising. In the ads, they admitted that the pizza had not been good but that they had completely changed it and asked people to give it a try. It worked. Honesty resulted in a dramatic increase in sales and profit. This made franchisees very happy because they had taken the risk along with Doyle and the other Domino’s executives.

I’ve heard the mantra, “listen to your customer”, for many years. Now, everyone says that they listen to their customers. Help desks and customer surveys are ubiquitous. However, I don’t see much change in companies because of all this “listening”. Before I got off the phone with an AT&T customer service rep recently, he asked if he could count on me to give him a good score when I received a follow-up survey. How is that “listening to your customer”?

As a business owner myself, I’m trying to listen to my customers every day. I am continually amazed by what I can learn from them. A customer (member) of Learning to be Great™ told me that, from her perspective, the company is information curation and lead generation. I hadn’t thought about the business that way but it made complete sense to me. This perspective will change how we market the company and what services we develop to support our members and users. It’s great to have customers who care enough to tell us the truth. We just have to be sure to listen.

Meetings: Love Them or Leave Them

Why is it that after all that has been said and written about wasteful meetings, managers continue to conduct meetings that are unnecessary and wasteful?  Carson Tate writes in the New York Times:

The meeting culture that is dominating corporate America is unsustainable and unproductive.
How many meetings did you attend last week that didn’t even have an agenda? How many resulted in a new idea? And at how many meetings did you think, “Why am I even here?”

Time is a commodity. And time spent in a meeting should generate a return on investment. But how often do we think about our time that way, and set expectations for meetings to produce real returns? In my experience working with Fortune 500 companies, the answer is rarely. This is just one result of a meeting-intensive culture.

This problem is not new and neither are the solutions. The famous John Cleese video, Meetings Bloody Meetings, was first produced in 1976 and dramatizes humorously the ineffectiveness of most meetings. As I have written in previous posts, meetings are overused and under-designed. We can no longer afford to have meetings just because that’s what we do at 1:00 on Mondays, or because the planning committee has something to report, or because the COO wants to announce a new policy. These are not good reasons to bring people together, wasting their time and energy. 

Technology has been both a blessing and a curse when it comes to meetings. On the one hand, location is no longer a barrier to group conversations. Smart phones, tablet computers, and laptops are all devices that allow people to participate in meetings remotely. On the other hand, meetings can be called with little planning and often with little consideration whether this is the best use of everyone's time.

In his 2003 book, Making Meetings Work: Achieving High Quality Group Decisions, John Tropman offers
very practical advice on how to have a useful meeting. His research on this problem found that when leaders had successful meetings they almost always had these four features:

1. Their meetings were characterized by decision accomplishment. Decisions got made in these groups. Participants appreciated the sense of closure that almost always occurred.
2. There was little decision rework. The group did not have to get together to decide again something that had already been decided or, as likely, had been avoided.
3. The decisions were good. There was a feeling, buttressed by reality as time passed, that the work of the group was of high quality. These were not just decisions made to “get something done.” They were thoughtful and reasoned, and they were actions that made a difference to the bureau, company, or agency.
4. People had fun! These were meetings that participants looked forward to. There was a sense of enjoyment and involvement. Participants felt that their time was well spent. They felt the meeting they were in was the “real” meeting. It was an authentic team experience.

Meetings can be productive, meaningful, and fun. However, this requires leadership that is intentional about the design and facilitation of these gatherings. Meetings should have a plan, involve group decision-making, and create a collective sense of accomplishment. Otherwise, there is no need to meet. 

Invisible Gorilla Strikes Again

This time it’s radiologists. In a study reported by NPR, 83% of radiologists failed to see the image of a gorilla on slides that they were reviewing for signs of cancer.  The conclusion by reporter Alix Spiegel is:

… what we're thinking about — what we're focused on — filters the world around us so aggressively that it literally shapes what we see. So, [the researcher] says, we need to think carefully about the instructions we give to professional searchers like radiologists or people looking for terrorist activity, because what we tell them to look for will in part determine what they see and don't see.

This phenomenon of selective attention permeates our society. Drivers don’t see approaching bicycles and motorcycles. Police can’t always determine who’s the victim and who’s the perpetrator in a violent situation. Soldiers responding in a conflict don’t always see the innocent bystanders in their line of sight. Teachers don’t always notice when a student for whom there are low expectations suddenly does something extraordinary.

When I was a teenager, I along with others observed a socio-drama as part of a lesson in tolerance. In this theatrical event, a crime was committed. We were asked to say who committed the crime. To us it was obvious. When the action was repeated it wasn’t so obvious and we learned about how our prejudices and perceptions influence our judgment, especially in quickly evolving situations.

And I wonder about leaders of large, complex organizations.  Do they sometimes display "selective attention"? Do they look at but not see the signs of a failing business model? Do they look at but not see the signs of a recessionary economy? Do they look at but not see managers who are not doing their jobs effectively? Do they look at but not see customers who are dissatisfied and looking elsewhere. Maybe it’s denial, but it also might be an inability to see something that is unexpected. 

Curation: Making Sense of Digital Information

So much information; so little time. This is a universal dilemma of the 21^st century. We are inundated with email, tweets, blog posts, Linkedin updates and comments, Facebook news feeds and messages, rss feeds, in addition to old-tech media like newspapers, magazines, TV, and radio.  It’s more than the human brain can comprehend. But the solution is at our fingertips. It’s called curation!

The title "curator" used to be reserved for someone who cares for the content of large cultural institutions such as galleries, museums, and libraries. These people protect and organize collections of objects for the purpose of making them physically and intellectually accessible to researchers and the public. They are professionals who have the expertise and credentials to do this kind of work.

Now the activity of curation has moved into the mainstream. Technology allows consumers of information to also be curators of information.  Steven Rosenbaum, author of Curation Nation: How to Win in a World Where Consumers are Creators, writes:

…curation is about adding value from humans who add their qualitative judgment to whatever is being gathered and organized…there is both amateur and professional curation, and the emergence of amateur or pro-sumer curators isn’t in any way a threat to professionals.

We can use technology to select, organize, present, and evolve the information that we need. We can take charge of the flow by controlling quality, timing, and topics. Users can control amount as well as when and where the information is received.

I like the description of curation used by the International Arts Movement for their online publication, Curator. They write:

In keeping with IAM’s belief that artistic excellence, as a model of “what ought to be”, paves the way for lasting, enduring humanity, The Curator seeks to encourage, promote, and uncover those artifacts of culture – those things which humans create – that inspire and embody truth, goodness, and beauty. We do this through considering and grappling with the zeitgeist.

IAM has criteria for deciding which “artifacts of culture” they will collect and how they will make these materials available to the public. People who buy into their beliefs about culture and art, will appreciate the curation that this publication does for them.

It has been difficult enough to make sense of the large number of tangible art objects. Without curation, it is impossible for consumers of information to manage the amount of digital data and objects. As Rosenbaum puts it, “The world needs thoughtful filters.” He recommends that these filters do three things: 1) make choices about which data to include; 2) endorse a small set of information; and 3) provide clarity to the information provided.

Aggregators of online information, such as Scoop.it and Zite.com, serve a useful purpose, but they don’t make choices and don’t provide clarity. Curation takes the management of information a step further, adding value to the set of data by selecting what best fits the criteria of consumers and helping consumers understand the meaning and usefulness of the information.

Learning to be Great™ is an example of curation of digital objects. Jim Stilwell and I created the site to make high quality orphan, organizational improvement tools available to organizational leaders seeking to influence change. The site narrows down the set of tools to a manageable number and brings clarity to the application of these tools. All of the material, which comes from our members, is organized into an easy-to-search, three by four matrix. The matrix has three forms of tools: 1) surveys; 2) models; and 3) solutions; and four foci: 1) individuals; 2) teams; 3) whole organizations; and 4) communities. For each tool there is an explanation of how the tool should be used and under what circumstances, as well as features and benefits. Finding organizational improvement tools can be an overwhelming task for a leader. Learning to be Great™ curates the information for leaders, hopefully contributing to their success.

Specialized sites are needed to help users find the best resources within the digital morass of cyberspace. Search is time consuming and provides no quality control. Curation is needed to make sense of it all. 

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