Christopher Carfi, Author at Christopher Carfi

June 1, 2005

In Search Of Failure

“I often felt there might be more to be gained by studying business failures than business successes. In my business, we try to study where people go astray, and why things don’t work…Albert Einstein said ‘Invert, always invert, in mathematics and physics,’ and it’s a very good idea in business, too. Start out with failure, and then engineer its removal.” – Warren Buffett

Just tripped across the above-quoted sentiment and it just resonated. Am (still) reading Reichheld’s The Loyalty Effect, and have just embarked into what is, so far, the best chapter I’ve read in a business book in a long time. It’s entitled “In Search Of Failure.”

Why don’t more folks take Buffett’s approach, and examine failures (both business and personal) more aggressively? Two reasons (says Reichheld):

Fear
Incapacity

Examining failure is culturally taboo. It means that “something went wrong…and talking about it might make me look bad.”

Get over it. Things happen. (Remember Windows 2.1?) Only by examining where things went wrong, can a business figure out what not to do the next time around.

This is of critical import with respect to customers.

Did the customer defect? If you don’t have a process in place to analyze that defection (an indictment of the organization’s inability to meet the customer’s needs), how can you prevent the next defection?
Did the prospect choose a competitor over your organization? Talk to them, and find out why. That way, the next time a similar opportunity comes up, you won’t make the same mistakes again.

We’re currently working on a large win/loss analysis project for a client. And…surprise…better conversations are actually taking place with the losses than with the wins. Better insight. More candid conversations (hey, the deal’s already lost…why beat around the bush?).

This approach is applicable not only to the win/loss process, but product development as well. We’re currently working on some new things (watch this space!) and, far and away, we’re learning more from the constructive, critical feedback we’re getting from customers than from the attaboy’s.

The bottom line? Listen to the customer. Embrace the failures when they happen. Learn from them. Make things better.

May 24, 2005

Why Is This OK?

Is it surprising that customers have a hard time trusting companies, when executives pull crap like this? Here’s how one exec defines the word “hype”:

“It is how you develop an image for companies. So in other words, you give out false statements to mislead the public so they will then increase in their mind the value of your company” – Russell Simmons

Unbelievable.

The continued focus on the short-term, “transactional” view of the customer still boggles the mind.

May 20, 2005

Finding The Conversations

Johnnie Moore’s blog rocks, and it’s one of 100+ that I have read through my aggregator in the past. But I rarely read it anymore. Why? Because there’s something better.

What’s better than his blog? Finding the conversations that he’s hosting.

This is because, although his blog is here, he publishes the feed for just his comments. This is where the good stuff is happening. This is where the conversations are happening. (n.b. have shamelessley stolen this idea, and if’n you’re interested the comments feed for The Social Customer Manifesto is here).

Subscribing to just the comments is a double-edged sword. On one hand, there may be insights that are missed in the “regular” blog posts. But as long as there are a good number of readers/lurkers to a regular blog, and some small number of those folks choose to start a conversation in the comments, there is an almost built-in filtering mechanism that is put in place…the posts that generate the most comments are the “high value” ones that pop up, and are the ones that get read. (By the way, Wilco is amazing. Buy all their records. Now. And Lane‘s too, while you’re at it.)

Here’s a link to how to do this yourself in Moveable Type or Typepad (thanks, Johnnie for pointing this out). It’s pretty straightforward, but you need to be comfortable mucking with the templates. Drop me a note…or a comment…if you’re not able to get it to work.

May 13, 2005

Two Fascinating Collaborative Environments

Mind…spinning…with…possibilities.

Just tripped across two flash-based sites that have sent the idea of “collaboration” off into a new direction. The first is a collaborative scratchpad where multiple people can all interact with a drawing that is being created:

As they say, what you see above is a “simulated image” (in this case, what might have been on the napkin before this was created, with kudos to Lee).

My actual experience on the scratchpad site was less-than stellar due to the combination of a troll who chose to scribble out the drawings of others, and the manic sketchings of a wanna-be Larry Flynt. The current scratchpad area appears to be a completely unmoderated, anonymous area. Not suitable for those with an aversion to profanity, etc. You’ve been warned; here’s the link. But, despite the presence of the troglodytes on the site, the possibilities are impressive.

To interact with the scratchpad, there was no loading of anything needed. No installations. No registration. No training. No nothing…just show up, and start collaborating.

The second site, also by the same author, was a collaborative site where one can move the virtual equivalent of alphabetic refrigerator magnets around. Again, no setup was needed; by simply showing up at the site, you are immediately immersed in the environment and collaborating with the others who are there. The same caveats apply as above, here’s the refrigerator magnet link.

The thing that makes these sites revolutionary in my opinion is their ease of use and light-weight nature. The scratchpad site appears to be a 29K shockwave file, and allows up to fifty concurrent participants. Similar specs on the letter game.

What if an organization could point a website visitor at a private site like this and work with that customer or prospect on architecting a solution to their problems, collaboratively and in real time? Or what if you could integrate these capabilities into, say, a wiki-based environment, and document and take snapshots of a solution as it evolves?

There’s something significant here.

May 12, 2005

Dear SBC: So Long, Farewell, Auf Wiedersehen, Goodbye

Random geek stuff…just found a sweet little device. It sits between the phone (regular or even cordless) and the computer. It hooks up to your regular phone via the normal phone jack (RJ-11), and hooks up to the computer with a USB port.

So what?

So now I can use the same cordless phone I’ve been using for 3 years to make and recieve Skype calls. Free to other Skype folks, and a couple of pennies a minute to call out to landlines and mobiles.

Just trying it out, but it seems to work great, at least on the outbound side. Sweet.

(click on pic to enlarge)

Breakeven period on the cost? About a week.

May 10, 2005

Internal, External Business Conversations

Hugh writes a great post about why business blogs can help organizations improve customer connections. (Updated to later illustrate that the concept is relevant in intra-organizational discussions as well.) The metaphor is that there is a membrane that surrounds every organization, and that membrane impedes real information flow and, with it, learning. The nugget:

Hugh: “The more porous your membrane (“x”), the easier it is for the internal conversation to inform the external conversation, and vice versa.”

In other words, if there is alignment, or “equilibrium,” between what’s happening inside the organization and what’s happening in the customer base, both sets of stakeholders will be better off. Customers will be getting what they want, and organizations will have happy customers. And, presumably, reasonable profits.

This triggered four thoughts:

The theory above sounds a lot like this.
For this to work, it can’t just be “conversation,” it has be the RIGHT conversation.
There is a flow to this. Flow 1 is “out to in.”
There is a second flow to this. Flow 2 is “in to out.”

So, first off, this sounds a lot like thermodynamics. I had to go look up the thermo stuff to put this post together, and then it made my head hurt (again, like it did mumblysomethingsomething years ago, the first time I saw it in school), so I closed that page quickly. But, I think a way to characterize this model is through paraphrasing that law into something like this:

“Insight spontaneously disperses from being localized to becoming spread out if it is not hindered.”

Insight is good. Knowledge is good. Knowledge of real customer needs can help an organization do the right thing for the market. Knowledge of what a supplier is doing can help a customer make better decisions.

Another way of putting this…communication in this way changes the game from being zero-sum to being collaborative. Things tend toward zero-sum when information is withheld, and power and manipulation come into play. This changes that.

Moving onto the second point above, the idea of “conversation” needs some clarity. We’ve come to use the word “conversation” as shorthand for “folks who ‘get it,’ and want to work collaboratively, and want to share information, etc.” However, all conversations are not the same. More importantly, all conversations are not equal.

For this model to work, some conversational structure may need to be in place. If customers are clamoring for something (let’s say, a fad-ish feature in a product that may have long-term detrimental effects), the company can react in two ways. In the first case, the company can listen to those customers blindly, and deliver exactly what they want. In the second case, the company could try to explain some of the shortcomings of following that approach, and try to reach a middle ground where both parties agree, that results in a longer-term positive outcome for both sides.

Both cases reach equilibrium, but they are certainly not equal conversations.

Which brings us to points three and four above, the flows. There will be an increasingly strong “out-to-in” flow if a company is not meeting the current needs of its customers. If there is a flood of feedback going across that membrane from out-to-in, and nothing is being done about it, there is a sure bet that at some point in the future that organization will be in trouble. However, if that out-to-in flow is moderate and steady and is responded to with an equal in-to-out flow of information about how the company is responding, you can bet the company is marching ahead in step with where its customers are going.

The “in-to-out” flow, on the other hand, is a quite interesting one. Assuming the in-to-out flow is information-rich (and not a flood of the same-ol’-B.S.), the company is providing some insight and novel ideas to the marketplace. This is good. However, similar to the example above, if this flow gets too strong, the company may be outrunning its customers, and providing products or services that require change the market can’t yet absorb or isn’t ready for yet (see the Apple Newton for an example). In this case, the company should take a step back and perhaps slow down a notch and listen to what’s coming back in from the outside.

Food for thought.

Others commenting on this:

Lee LeFever
BlogSpotting (Heather Green)
Fredrik Wackå
Scoble

May 8, 2005

Business Podcasting As A Competitive Intelligence Tool

The fine folks over at B2BMarketingTrends were kind enough to ask me to contribute to an article on the business uses of podcasting. In particular, they were interested in an answer to the question “How can podcasting be used to enable customer-facing personnel to stay abreast of what’s going on with competitors and to provide market intelligence?” The full article is here.

The four most salient points:

Podcasting delivers the information to users automatically, typically via a combination technology called RSS (for “Really Simple Syndication”). It is a simple program that regularly checks to see if any updated information is available. The user’s device automatically downloads this competitive information when it becomes available. This is in marked contrast to a “competitive intelligent intranet” that you must check regularly and navigate for updates, or a process that requires an individual to locate, print, and organize electronic or paper documents or e-mail messages.
The flip side of this is that individual users can choose to “subscribe” to only the particular podcasts within their organization that they deem relevant. So if an individual only wishes to receive information about a particular set of competitors, he/she can easily specify those preferences. With an individual’s attention already stretched thin as a result of e-mail overload (not to mention the problem of unsolicited messages, or spam, and a seemingly endless number of voicemail messages), the ability to receive only relevant, selected podcasts can aid not only in significantly improving productivity but also assist in reducing some of the challenges that information overload causes for sales team members.
Competitive intelligence information has an exceedingly short shelf life. Since podcasting ensures updates automatically, a sales team has the assurance of having the “latest and greatest” information that may be available. They can also update their podcasting platform by checking out resources like Agora.io for further information on this as well as see how they can better connect with their audience, customers, clients, etc.
Podcasts are, by their very definition, portable. But, more importantly, they allow people to “time-shift” to better fit their own schedules. Similar to audiobooks (which, according to National Public Radio, experienced double-digit growth in 2004), you can access competitive intelligence podcasts during a morning commute, on a subway, or while engaged in other activities such as jogging. So instead of needing to carve out time in an already hectic schedule to review and study the latest competitive information, this information can now be accessed whenever it is most appropriate for the individual (and it can be paused, rewound, and replayed as many times as desired).

Link: Listen To Information About Your Competitors…On Your iPod?