Bystanders

Business leaders cannot be bystanders.

— Howard Schultz

Bought anything lately?

Corporate waste and failure seem the norm.

Appointments aren't kept. Emails go ignored. Phone calls aren't returned. Quotes are inaccurate. Packages never arrive. Products don't work. Bills are wrong. Customers are scolded. Customers are spammed.

Everything is broken.

They wouldn't be, if business leaders stopped confining themselves to the corner office, indifferent to the constant missteps their employees make.

They wouldn't be if business leaders started leading alongside their employees, and stopped being bystanders.

Far too many business leaders are bystanders today, content just to manage risk, instead of serving customers.

An incident recounted in Nightmare Scenario, the new book about the Trump Administration's mismanagement of the Covid-19 outbreak, brought the problem home to me.

You will recall how, last February, the same month Trump tweeted, “The Coronavirus is very much under control in the USA," the Atlanta-based CDC issued hundreds of test kits—kits that turned out to malfunction by producing false positives.

In hindsight, the failure came just when accurate testing was most needed.

And what did the leaders of HHS do? They convened in Washington for three weeks to debate not what, but who was to blame, and how to cover up the failure.

Only when the head of the FDA at last sent an immunologist to Atlanta to see how the kits were being assembled did those leaders learn who was to blame—and, most importantly, why.

CDC's own lab techs turned out to be the culprits. Unsupervised, they were assembling the test kits on the same tables where they were examining samples of Covid-19, contaminating the kits with the live virus. That stupid mistake guaranteed the kits would produce false positives.

How many cases of Covid-19 might have been prevented if the leaders of HHS, instead of bystanding for nearly a month, had visited the CDC lab right away?

For the sake of contrast, consider Churchill, a boots-on-the-ground leader.

Schooled as a cavalryman and war correspondent, Churchill was obsessed with fact-finding, an obsession that served him well during World War II.

In his Memoirs, Churchill's chief advisor "Pug" Ismay recounts how, at the slightest hint of a snafu, the peripatetic prime minister would rush to the scene of the action, often to his bodyguards' chagrin.

During the war, Churchill inspected air fields, air raid shelters, rifle ranges, gun encasements, tank factories, dock yards, shipyards, submarine pens, encampments, fortresses, battlefields, smashed villages, fallen bridges, and countless bombed-out buildings.

During one Nazi air raid over London, he visited fighter command’s ops room to observe the progress of the battle on a huge plotting board, whispering to Ismay, "Never in the field of human conflict has so much been owed by so many to so few."

Churchill would say that his fact-finding trips were "reconnoiters" rife with the "refreshment of adventure."

Before Churchill, Lincoln—the only sitting US president to come under enemy fire during a war—behaved in a similar way. 

Lincoln was literally a boots-on-the-ground leader.

CEOs, please take a page from Churchill and Lincoln.

Don't just be bean-counting bystanders. There's more to business than risk management. There are—duh—customers.

Get out of the corner office once in a while.

At the first sign of trouble, get your damn boots on the ground. 

Lead alongside your employees—and fix what's broken.

Beware the Highwaymen

No thief is happy to be a thief and no murderer is happy to be a murderer.

― Rajneesh

Amid the celebrations of sacrifice and innovation, it's easy to forget malfeasance.

While hard times bring out the best in some people, they bring out the worst in thieves.

I ran into thieves during the Great Recession, when I was running consumer shows. 

A half dozen exhibitors―people with whom I'd been doing business for years―wrote me bad checks for their booth rents at the close of several shows. Some simply skipped out of the shows without paying anything. 

I lost more than $18,000 to those thieves.

I'm running into thieves now. Texas-based Newtek last month billed my credit card nearly $900, claiming I owed the company for "storage." 

While the company had been my web-hosting provider for 10 years―billing my card $6 every month for the service―I shut down my website over two years ago, after which I heard no more from Newtek.

Until it suddenly billed my credit card the $900 last month.

Now the company wants me to prove I shut down the website it hosted. 

"If you 'turned off the services in February 2018,'" the CFO wrote me yesterday, "I could not find any tangible evidence to support this event. 

"I can assure you we are only collecting on balances that are due and payable. 

"I would be more than happy to credit the account if you can provide the tangible evidence."

"No thief is happy to be a thief and no murderer is happy to be a murderer," the guru Rajneesh said. 

"They have been forced. In fact they are victims; they have been compelled by the logic of situations. They have been brought up in such a way that their whole being has been poisoned.”

Time are hard―and growing harder.

Beware the highwaymen!

Three Cheers for Mom and Pop

Notice the pattern?

Most small businesses—those lucky enough to be deemed "essential"—are innovating.

Most big businesses, on the other hand, are shuttering for the pandemic; so, too, are most mid-size ones.

Employees of "mom and pop" companies are working; employees of large and mid-size companies are filing for unemployment.

We're seeing incarnate which business leaders value employees and customers over shareholders.

And we're seeing which leaders know how to pivot, and which merely talk about pivoting when it suits them.

Three cheers for mom and pop!

Smile While You're Making It

Fiction's where I go when I've OD'ed on reality.

"Fiction reveals truth that reality obscures," Emerson said.

And it's often "the best way to capture reality," Jack Grebski says in Entrepreneur. 

Grebski lists his must-see films for entrepreneurs, and the lesson each one teaches:

• Catch Me If You Can (a lesson in "the good ol’ hustle to reach success")

• Lord of War (a lesson in "ambition, tenacity, and ability to tolerate risk)

• Wall Street (a lesson in "how easy it is to get carried away with the glamorous lifestyle that accompanies wealth")

• Rogue Trader (a lesson in "how money drives all sorts of maniacal behavior")

• Twelve Angry Men (a lesson in "the psychology of group behavior")

• Office Space (a lesson in "leadership, team-building techniques, and career development")

• The Godfather (a lesson in "why understanding competition is non-negotiable")

• The Usual Suspects (a lesson in "leadership consolidation, power and influence, and long-term business strategy")

• How To Get Ahead In Advertising (a lesson in "creative problem solving")

• The Devil Wears Prada (a lesson in "how to work your way up the corporate ladder")

• Thank You For Smoking (a lesson in "how to sell just about any product")

• Glengarry Glen Ross (a lesson in "competition and manipulation")

• The Merchant of Venice (a lesson in "business partnerships, risk assessment and mercantile law")

• Dr. Strangelove (a lesson in "leadership and loyalty")

• Erin Brockovich (a lesson in "the importance of sticking to one’s scruples even in the face of obstacles")

• The Rainmaker (a lesson in "the power of determination and social responsibility")

I'm sure you can add to Grebski's list, if you think about it.

My must-watch film for entrepreneurs is Oh, Lucky Man!, a rompish retelling of Voltaire's Candide set in the UK in 1973, and a lesson in the vagaries and hypocrisies of the climb to riches.

Oh, Lucky Man! is worth the watch just to spot a 28-year-old Dame Helen Mirren.

What's your fav?

Bad-fit Buyers

Caveat venditor: Bad-fit buyers are everywhere.

"Every new customer you bring on who isn’t the right fit presents a churn risk," says Dan Tyre on Hubspot.

Churn is a risk, because it opens new doors to bad reviews.

What are the signs to watch for? The bad-fit buyer:

• Is considerably larger or smaller than your typical customer

• Operates in an industry outside your target market or time zone

• Is discourteous and responds to questions with emotions, rather than facts

• Doesn’t want to answer questions or makes contradictory statements

• Is unwilling to take direction and seems competitive

• Doesn’t have resources (money, time, staff)

• Seeks a "silver bullet"

• Goes from excited to apathetic and back again

• Is disorganized and can’t spend time with you

• Cancels meetings with short or no notice

• Doesn’t follow simple directions (like please read the one-page outline)

• Seems to be going through the motions

• Has to hear you say the same thing at least four times before he gets it

"Almost all prospects will show some of these indicators," Tyre says. "The key is to be 100% transparent, have open conversations with your prospects, and set expectations at every step of the process."

Containers of the Past

For nearly 200 years, Americans used stoneware to keep perishable food. It was, in fact, the predominant houseware of the 19th century.

The ceramic containers were heavy and expensive to ship, so stoneware potteries cropped up everywhere to serve local markets.

But after 1913, when refrigerators were introduced, the once-ubiquitous potteries sputtered and failed.

You could say, refrigerators had a chilling effect on the stoneware business.

Today's refrigerator is, of course, the smartphone, as this week's Mobile World Congress makes clear.

And, as the event makes clear, the business without a mobile strategy today is the stoneware pottery of tomorrow.

As ad agency exec Rishad Tobaccowala says, "The future doe not fit in the containers of the past."

What's your mobile strategy?

Do You Chase Butterflies?

Remember the sunny feeling you had as a child when you chased butterflies?

If you do that in business, you're begging for trouble.

In a recent blog post, event-design guru Jeff Hurt laments the fact that most workers sacrifice impact for busyness.

"I’ve seen way too many professionals addicted to cleaning out all the emails or making progress on their list of tasks instead of spending time doing the right thing," Hurt says.

"We’ve got to retrain our brains that strategic thinking first is more important than a check mark. We’ve got to rewire our brains to realize that strategy leads to more success than our busyness."

I've witnessed another, equally toxic habit that plagues many professionals, particularly senior executives, marketers and sales managers.

That habit is chasing butterflies, the mindless pursuit of fugitive opportunities; an addiction to chasing every papery grail of growth that happens to flutter by (usually far off the path of the core business or audience).

Like busyness, chasing butterflies feels good.

Focus, its opposite, doesn't—especially when there are so many lovely distractions about.

Focus isn't easy. 

Focus isn't fun.

But it's a habit you have to adopt, if you want to have impact.

Just ask Marissa Mayer.

Disruption is for Idiots

Technology journalist Michelle Bruno's most recent article, "What Disruption Really Looks Like," prompted me to phone her. 

In the course of our conversation, she asked me why tech company executives—disruption's tireless cheerleaders—so often rest on their laurels.

In my answer, I fell back on one of my favorite words, hidebound.

Tech company execs who succeed, with few exceptions, turn hidebound; and their standpatism leaves their companies exposed.

Hidebound is often applied to larger-than-life figures of military history.

Major General Ambrose Burnside, a West Point-trained insider, was one.

In December 1862, he caused 13,000 casualties in one day, when he threw his troops against Robert E. Lee's entrenched Confederates in two assaults at Fredericksburg.

Burnside wasn't an idiot. He simply assumed he could use tactics that had worked for his century's greatest soldier, Napoleon. But Napoleon's soldiers faced smoothbore muskets, not rifles.

Too bad he wasn't an idiot.

Like all West Point insiders of his day, Burnside was blind to the effect of a disruptive change in technology.

Idiot comes from the Latin word idiota, an "outsider."

Disruption takes an idiot: an outsider unschooled in the assumptions, unversed in the tactics, and unacquainted with the rules, the business models, and even the names of the players.

The insiders are all hidebound.

Disclosure: The hero of Michelle Bruno's extraordinary story is my employer.

10 Compelling Reasons to Blog

Why blog, when you could chat with a customer, scroll through Facebook, dust the blinds or straighten your desk?

Blogger Helen Nesterenko has combed eight credible websites for statistics that add up to "58 Unbeatable Reasons to Run a Blog for Business."

Here are her 10 most compelling:

• 46% of web users read more than one blog a day

• 81% trust information from blogs

• 13% have been inspired by blogs to make a purchase

• 61% have made a purchase based on a recommendation from a blog

• Companies that blog have 55% more website visitors

• Companies that blog at least 15 times a month get 5 times more traffic than companies that don’t blog

• 70% of companies that blog 2 or 3 times a week have acquired customers through their blogs

• Blogging is the most popular content marketing tactic, used by 73% of marketers

• 59% of B2B marketers believe blogs are effective in achieving their business goals

• 86% of B2B small business marketers think blogs are their most effective content marketing tactic

Code Eats Content for Breakfast

Lamenting developers' complicity in content piracy, marketing guru Mark Schaefer recently wrote, "Coding is cheap and fast and plentiful and we seem to be in a media world dominated by cleaning up unintended consequences."

Developers know they're killing creatives, the geese that lay the golden eggs. But, wantonly, they continue to pump out code that rewards content pirates.

There's no real news here, alas. Just old-fashioned avarice.

While encouraged by investors to "disrupt" moribund industries, developers continue to fleece creatives, as they have since the days of Napster.

The injustices they perpetuate make literal the economist's term creative destruction.

Market-oriented, Schaefer recommends a return to patronage, the "Renaissance monetization model," to support content creators.

Raised by parents who worshipped FDR, I recommend revival of the WPA (funded by taxing companies like Facebook.)

What's your idea?

Wheel of Fortune

My maternal grandfather, a watchmaker, survived the Great Depression by operating a carnival wheel in an amusement park in Newark, New Jersey.

Today, the wheel hangs on a wall in my home, a gaudy artifact symbolizing weird work and small wagers, and the legacy of a man whose real trade was time.

Most of my grandfather's biographical details are lost, but at least one is clear: despite the Depression, he stayed in the game.

Fortunate are the people who—as he did—show up, learn new skills, take risks, think weird.

They don't surrender to the feeling they're hostages or has-beens. They choose instead to be bootstrappers.

Right now, two generations, Millennials and Boomers, are joined at the hip by the prospect of near-poverty.

They're placing bets on the next spin of the wheel.

The bootstrappers are mastering new, adaptive skills. 

The rest are at home, consuming games and gameshows.

Which are you doing?

Battling Bullies

As a small business, you have no greater leverage than content.

My blog Copy Points, which reached a milestone today—100,000 pageviews—proves the point.

David-size businesses can effectively combat Goliaths in the Bizarro World of social media, and build a proprietary audience of followers, fans and advocates.

But how?

In a study last year, software provider Curata identified 428 bloggers it dubbed members of the “10K Club,” because they attract 10,000 or more pageviews a month. 

Two-thirds of 10K Club members represent small and mid-size businesses, with revenue below $100 million.

Curata concluded that six factors made these David-size bloggers successful:

1. They know all the effort, one day, will pay off.
2. They create content that targets a specific audience.
3. They avoid product-pitches.
4. They post at least once a week.
5. They promote their blogs on other channels.
6. They study their pageviews, to learn what kinds work best.

With 100,000 pageviews under my belt, at last I have something I can boast about to my granddaughter. 

Once she's old enough to know what a blog is.

Save $26,041 per Employee with this Simple App

A 2008 study by SIS International Research showed that an employee squanders 17.5 hours a week deciphering faulty communications in the workplace. The researchers estimated the wasted hours to cost a small company $26,041 annually.

No surprise. 

Communication, like every business activity, is prey to Murphy's law. 

Any message that can go wrong will.

But there's a simple app available that will staunch the flow of red ink.

It's called clarity, and it's friendly and easy to use:

• Turn long sentences into two or three shorter ones.

• Chop big blocks of text into separate paragraphs.

• Use connectors—words like although, but and because—to join ideas together.

• Avoid pronouns—words like it, we, they and this. Use pronouns sparingly and you won't write a sentence like: Advise customers they are guaranteed to work 24/7 when we upgrade our servers.

• Be careful with directions—words like about, before, on and over—and you won't write a sentence like: Before lunch with the client we should hash out next year's price increases.

You can get the full download on clarity from "grammarphobes" Patricia O'Conner and Stewart Kellerman's You Send Me: Getting It Right When You Write Online.

How to Calm an Angry Customer

Recently, I had my DNA analyzed and learned I'm related to Benjamin Franklin.

So I'll quote him.

“Never ruin an apology with an excuse.”

How can you make amends after disappointing a customer?

Sue Hershkowitz-Coore, author of Power Sales Writing, offers these five tips:

Plan to keep the customer's business. Before you write a word, determine your strategy for delighting the angry customer. Find an alternative solution to her problem.

Begin with a thank-you. Offering a thank-you makes the customer feel "safe and smart," according to Herskowitz-Coore. Writing, "Thank you for giving me a chance to explain the situation," helps disarm further criticism.

Validate the customer's viewpoint. Acknowledge that, from her shoes, the customer's right. "The words 'Your'e right' are magical when they're genuine."

Belay the apologies. Don't dive into the "We're so sorry" waters. An apology is robotic and doesn't soothe; a solution is sincere, and should.

Stay positive. "Explain what is possible, not what is impossible," advises Herskowitz-Coore. Find positive ways to express negatives. Tell your angry customer what you can do, not what you cannot do—and explain what's in it for them.

End Sloppy Emails

When I first entered the workforce, no one would dare send a written communication (we called it a "memo") without prior review by the boss.

Business ran according to military rules (in fact, many of the bosses were former military officers). 

Those days are long over.

"A new status symbol in today's generally more egalitarian business environment has arisen: sloppy e-mails," says consultant Keith Ferazzi.

Writing for Harvard Business Review, Ferazzi recommends these four tips for ending sloppy emails:

Empathize with readers. Too many writers lack empathy for their readers. When writing an email, "use respect, positive affirmations, and gratitude to set the right tone and proper context." Your writing will display more empathy if you "visualize that individual in his office as you send him an e-mail."

Appreciate different styles. "We all tend to prefer a certain 'language' for communications at work," Ferazzi says. Some people prefer numbers; some, pictures; and others, stories. Appreciating others' styles improves your ability to communicate and reduces the likelihood of misinterpretation.

Spell things out. "We often communicate less information than we think we are, a syndrome psychologists call signal amplification bias," Ferazzi writes. Make descriptions and instructions clear and complete.

Respond promptly. Readers care not only about content, but about the promptness of your replies to their emails, Ferazzi says. "When your reply is tardy, the other party is left wondering whether you value that relationship or not."

Club Fed

Like any red-blooded, tax-paying American, I despise April 15.

Don't get me wrong. 

I'm the first guy to acknowledge my appreciation for the handy stuff our government does. National defense. Air traffic control. Clean skies. Student lending. Veterans aid. Crime detection. Disease prevention. Scientific research. Space exploration. Roads. Bridges. Historic preservation. Wildland protection. Etc.

But these things should come free, n'est-ce pas?

Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., famously wrote, "Taxes are what we pay for civilized society."

That's true only if you believe we enjoy a civilized society. (Ever watched an episode of Jersey Shore?)

I'll venture another definition.

Taxes are your membership dues in Club Fed.

What, don't like our club?

Join some other.

Too Much Information. Not.

E-com exec Hiroshi Mikitani says you can't get too much info.

“If anything, to be successful, one must embrace all kinds of information, all the time.”

Mikitani cites a passage from the 16th-century Book of Five Rings, by samurai-author Miyamoto Musashi.

Observing a carpenter at work, Musashi sees ways for readers to sharpen their skills:

The carpenter will make it a habit of maintaining his tools sharp so they will cut well. Using these sharp tools masterfully, he can make miniature shrines, writing shelves, tables, paper lanterns, chopping boards and pot-lids. These are the specialties of the carpenter. Things are similar for the soldier. You ought to think deeply about this.

"Answers and ideas are often hidden within completely unrelated things," Mikitani says. 

To spot them, you must approach the world with curiosity.

"There is nothing in the world unrelated to your life. That fire hose of information that douses you constantly is a blessing, not a curse."

The point? 

Stay open for inspiration.

How to Succeed in Business without Really Spying

Ninjas were 16th century James Bonds who were tapped by their samurai masters for the dirty work of spying, sabotage and assassination.

Gary Shapiro, head of the Consumer Electronics Association, thinks ninjas created the die from which today's business winners are cast.

He draws out that comparison entertainingly in his new 250-page book Ninja Innovation: The Ten Killer Strategies of the World's Most Successful Businesses.

"Ninja innovation is my catch-all phrase for what it takes to succeed," Shapiro writes in the introduction. 

"You have to display the qualities of the ancient Japanese ninja, whose only purpose was to complete the job. He wasn't bound by precedent; he had to invent new ways."

In defining ninja innovation, Shapiro offers a quasi-memoir that might have been titled My Life in Consumer Electronics. 

The stories are fun and the major characters—including Bill Gates, Jeff Bezos, Mark Cuban and Mark Zuckerberg—mostly notable.

From the book we learn that business innovators, though not literally given to spying, like James Bond are particularly single-minded. They don't think twice about breaking the "rules of the game" to win.

Shapiro scatters among the lessons lengthy gripes about US immigration policy, government regulation and unions, leftovers from his first book, The Comeback.

But the fresh material—especially his inside look at lobbying and the history of the Consumer Electronics Show—makes Shapiro's new book worth reading.

In an interview, I asked him whether business success demands that you play the tough guy.

"Absolutely not," Shapiro replied. "In fact, that's a recipe for not being successful. Instead, you have to think like a ninja. You have to be clever, creative, and think outside the box. You have to set a goal and relentlessly pursue it. You have to have a plan and a strategy and you have to be focused."

The Role of Chance

Business is frightfully competitive. So we tend to believe only the fittest survive.

But success may take more luck than pluck.

Investment strategist Michael Mauboussin thinks so.

He claims we're too quick to discount the role chance plays in business.

“People attempt to extract lessons from what is mostly a random process,” Mauboussin tells readers of Inc.

“Once something has been successful, we start to believe it was the only thing that could have happened.”

By idolizing business winners, Mauboussin says, we forget there were others who followed the same strategies, but failed.

Remembering those failures helps you “keep your mind open to other possibilities,” he says.

Paleontologist Stephen Jay Gould observed the same thing in nature. Gould thought chance was a deciding factor in the evolution of life on earth.

He based his conclusions on fossilized animals discovered in Canada’s Burgess Shale.

The animals in the Burgess Shale were all exquisitely suited to their environment. But none left modern descendants.

From the fact, Gould concluded that fitness is no guarantee of survival.

Survival is really a matter of luck.

Three Tips for Better Storytelling

Struggling to tell your company's story in a way that connects with customers?

Freelance writer Nadia Goodman offers three tips in Entrepreneur:

Describe your company's value in human terms. The compulsion to close deals blocks storytelling. Marketers fall back on contract-talk to define the company's value, when the customers really want to hear how you differ from competitors. "Your real value is about what you believe in," Goodman says. "You're looking for the thing that your organization truly cares about."

Get everyone on the same page. You're in trouble if your CEO describes the company differently than a front-line worker. To get everyone on the same page, Goodman suggests, ask a sample of people at various ranks to provide five adjectives they'd use to describe the company and two statements of the company's value. "Look for themes or especially strong responses, and synthesize them into a clearly defined description," Goodman says.

Give your brand personality. "Once you know why you matter and how to describe your value, choose the type of person that could best deliver that message," Goodman says. Your company should have a "personality" that's clear and consistent. You need to decide, for example, whether it's masculine or feminine; conservative or quirky; opinionated or open-minded.