The 80-Hour Week

This made me just **@#$%! nuts

Oh okay, I've calmed down now.
I'm reading Stephen Fry's Paperweight ((Arrow, 470pp)- it's a collection of newspaper and magazine columns he wrote early in his career. This one is particularly apt for me this week:it's called Sock Fury, (he's lost one sock and then spill coffee all over the kitchen floor and it makes him ballistic) and in it he says,

What is so infuriating is the fact that I am incensed by two such nugatory, not to say trivial, hiccoughs in the life of one who generally speaking doesn't have much to kvetch about...If I tremble with rage at a mislaid gentleman's half-hose...what have I left in the emotion-back for genocidal injustice or universal peace?

Well exactly.
Last week as I was running to get the dog to the kennel and myself on the highway for a 2 hour drive to a client event, I popped into one of our local bakeries for some bread. Since I've been away more than I've been home this month, it was going to serve as breakfast and lunch. "This is today's bread, right?" I asked. "Yes, sure, absolutely," said the over-jolly guy behind the counter.
Well it wasn't. And it cost $3.50. And I was pissed and got a headache and a stiff neck and made up all kinds of exotic tortures to demonstrate the folly of lying to customers.
So, I get to the hotel. I won't tell you the name (call it the Comfort Inn) - cheap and cheerful just like my client. I turn on the TV.
To find a 24-hour free porn channel, right after the decorating network.
Now there's something about a very sharp close up of someone's naughty bits that's off-putting if you don't expect it, even if it's something we're all familiar with. Granted, there was no bestiality, and everyone was slim and very, very clean, but still...I'm cancelling all my future reservations with this hotel chain, writing to the President of the company and telling everyone I can think of about this non-advertised special.
Well, yeah, I watched it. A bit. But I didn't inhale.

Customer Service

Last night we had a really good conversation about marketing at the Tech Entrepreneurs & Emerging Companies Group MeetUp I belong to here. (Kudos to Matthew the organizer for ensuring that only legitimate tech entrepreneurs are part of the group - it's refreshing not to be confronted by MLM and consultants looking for gigs.)

Sunir Shah, the Marketing and Community Development head for FreshBooks was there, and pointed out how important the GTA (Greater Toronto Area) is for small business and entrepreneurship - good for FreshBooks for committing to build small business, the backbone of our economy.

In a recent blog, FreshBooks talked about another subject close to my heart - customer service. Now one of the things about CS is that it's honoured more in the breach than the observance; we all know what lousy CS is...and then we are often guilty of behaving in the same awful way to our clients!

Here's the commitment to responsiveness, a key component of CS, from Mike McDerment

Since May 2004 when our service went live we have maintained a two hour call return policy. 90% of the people who call us never expect a response. Period. They figure we are an internet website with no one behind it. When someone answers the phone, people frequently say, “I can’t believe you answered the phone. I never expected to get a real person!”...

As for email responses, it’s about the same. Sometimes there is a back log of emails from the night before, and responses to these can take 3-4 hours, but most of the time you will hear back from us in one business hour.

BTW June 15 FreshBooks is hosting a free tele-seminar with John Jantsch. John is the author of The Referral Flood and the man behind the Duct Tape Marketing brand - we are the authorized DTM coaches in Toronto. Hope I get to meet you there!

TV, Bishops and Systems

Thanks to Traci in Atlanta,  a convert to turning off the TV and using the web to watch shows when we want. 

On top of wasting time,  watching stupid TV made it impossible for me to sleep well - it was like some kind of very cheap red wine that wasn't very good but there was always that little bit more in the bottle to finish up before bed - I tell everyone not to underestimate the power of turning off the TV!

Tonight I went to a dinner for a bunch of bishops - that's right, the kind with the purple shirts and big rings. My colleague Jennifer remarked that there was no difference between it and the last 3 fund-raising dinners we were at, although there was a rousing hymn at the end.

So no trouble sleeping tonight! Up very early to deliver a keynote speech at a marketing conference with  hotels and resort owners; since international travel here has nosedived in the past 6 years, I anticipate a lot of tough questions.

I am going to tell them that with a marketing system, you really can get all the business you want,but if you don't install the system and do the tough work to keep it running, you won't.  Maybe you won't see results in 5 minutes, but it's like a diet - it took more than 5 minutes to put on that 20 pounds, and it's going to take ore than 5 minutes to take it off. Faith and willpower help too!

Multi-tasking and information overload

Cool! Erik Brynjolfsson at MIT and his colleagues have done some interesting research on the increasing load of stuff that pours on our heads every day. Some  observations are no-brainers...but one is a real call to action.

Here's the thing. Twenty five years ago, when I started working, there seemed to be enough money to actually train people on how to do things based on what we had learned in the past. In other words, no-one was in danger of reinventing the wheel. Then came the recession, and since then we've all had to make it up as we go along (hey I don't mind - I earn about 30% of my living filling the gap with companies and organizations who should know better.)

Information, Technology and Information Worker Productivity: Task Level Evidence
The Juice:   Overall, these data show statistically significant relationships among technology use, social networks, completed projects, and revenues for project-based information workers.

• IT use is positively correlated with non-linear drivers of productivity
• the structure and size of workers' communication networks are highly correlated with performance
• an inverted-U shaped relationship exists between multitasking and productivity such that, beyond an optimum, more multitasking is associated with declining project completion rates and revenue generation
• asynchronous information seeking such as email and database use promotes multitasking while synchronous information seeking over the phone shows a negative correlation.

Optimize May 2004, Issue 31
4 strategies  companies use to manage information overload and overcome the bottlenecks

1. They  simply ignore some of the information, either by not gathering data at all, or when they do, by making sure to focus only on what's most important. An obvious example is spam filters. But the filtering and focusing usually don't even involve technology. Many companies have explicit, conscious strategies to prune back the number of service and product lines they manage. They constantly eliminate low-performing areas and strive to avoid spreading their managerial capacity too thin. By necessity, focus means learning what to ignore, as well as what to pay attention to. This strategy for decision making can be used at every level—individual workers, work groups, divisions, as well as the corporation as a whole.

2. Develop intelligent, machine-based filters and automated decision makers that off-load processes from humans via computers and software. One of my favorite examples is the E-kiosks popping up to speed the check-in process at airports. Other examples are automatic expense-tracking systems, online reservations, and data-mining add-ons that automate human processes, such as sales, maintenance, and demand forecasts. These technologies are promising, but they have important limits.

3. Introduce more distributed decision making. The hierarchy of traditional businesses puts most decisions at the higher levels. This causes overload at the top of the company. If you distribute decision making to a flatter organizational structure, empowering employees to make decisions, you get more brains working on a problem. In fact, there's no reason this needs to be limited by company boundaries. Customers and suppliers can also do more self-service and, in many cases, timeliness, accuracy, and overall satisfaction will go up. This is especially true when smart technologies are combined with redefined decision rights. Examples are human-resources self service, online customer support, ATMs, and Web sites that let customers configure their own products.

The 20th-century company was characterized by a separation of conceptualization and execution; a small group of people—the "brains"—developed a plan, and a large group of people—the hired "hands"—carried it out. That distinction is obsolete in the information economy.

4. Improve employees' information-processing capacity. If you distribute decision making, you'd better make sure your employees have the skills to make the right decisions. Better training, education, and hiring are needed. Of course, your competitors are trying to do the same thing—it's an arms race in that regard—so there's a growing premium on talent and retention. But in an economy where employees are being given more decision-making authority, one A player is worth 10 B players.

These approaches aren't mutually exclusive. Businesses have to be creative on all four bases.

 

Erik Brynjolfsson is professor of management at the MIT Sloan School of Management and director of the Center for eBusiness at MIT

Time Saving Tips?

I do a fair amount of work with companies who want to improve their ability to work together effectively and efficiently, some as direct clients of our company, Chrysalis Creative Marketing, and some through the university where I help out (the Schulich Executive Education Centre at York University in Toronto). This is a rich source for observations that sometimes make me scratch my head - mostly along the lines of "what were you thinking...?"  Anyway, more on that later.

Here's another. I was doodling around, looking for things to share on the subject of using time more wisely, when I ran across a post in Project Management Source called 61 Time Saving Tips: Keeping you, your co-workers, and your family on-time. What I find so interesting is the number and nature of the comments to this article, as people weigh in on the subject. Wow! Who knew there was so much passion around a disciplined approach to daily tasks? Some embrace the concept with religious zeal; others are positively vitriolic about a perceived fascist attack on their personal freedom.

Now, a large part of the work I do is with people in very high-stress, information-intensive jobs. I'm on a bit of a mission to give them proven business tools that let them be powerful, relaxed, highly productive...and go home earlier. Or, to work hard at a  job they love, work long hours if they want to, and still have energy to create a great family life.

As the comments to the Project Management Source post show, many of us cling to a 19th century romantic conception that relationships with other people have to be unstructured and intuitive. Problem is, most of us are just plain lousy at this. Our intuition is mostly wrong, and we consistently misread each other. Our commercial relationships break down and our projects go awry.

It's time to acquire the technical skills and business processes that prevent these breakdowns, to be organized not only in managing tasks, but also in managing working relationships. More on this to come.