Endless Knots

And while we're on the subject of customer service...Sanita

You know those wonderful clogs, the ones you think come only from Dansko? Turns out the originator is the Danish company, Sanita ("we’ve been making cozy, comfortable clogs the Danish way since 1907"). If you're like me, you probably thought Dankso was the original. They've got a great story too and for a while the two companies had a strong partnership. Here's a bit of the history:

Since the early 1990s until August 2007, all Dansko Professional clogs and all Dansko Stapled Clogs had been manufactured by Sanita in Europe. The distribution agreement between Dansko and Sanita ended in August 2007. Shortly after that time, Sanita began distributing the same products directly in the US under their own name.

So what's the point? I had a pair of clogs that I loved -- brown, oiled leather -- that literally fell apart. I noticed this when I found chunks of the sole deposited throughout the house -- first from the heel, then from the toe. I thought this was rather unusual so I decided to contact the company to ask whether this was normal.

That's when I discovered that my Danskos were really Sanitas and...the lovely Sanita company was more than understanding and offered me a discount on a new pair of clogs, which I wasn't really seeking and which was kind of incredible since the clogs were at least seven years old. But alas when I went to use the discount, thank you very much, I found three pairs that I loved and couldn't figure out how to buy one at discount and the other two at full price. When I inquired, they said I could have all three at discount! Amazing! And generous!

One pair, the Darcy, which you can order here, continues to get compliments (the other two are regular ole' clogs, albeit in great colors--brown with red trim and steel gray) so here's a picture of it, an ad, if you will, because what they did is real customer service. And thank you to those customer service people at Sanita (Dan was one), whom I cannot write to personally because of this (such a sad face that there's no emoticon for it), which has resulted in my losing their emails. I promised I would write a post -- and I'm finally doing it.

 

 

Marissa Mayer, we need to talk: This genie is way out of the bottle

Dear Marissa,

Apparently, I'm not the only one who has a word or two to say to you. Tom Ashbrook (On Point, "Yahoos Ban on Working From Home") is holding forth with some savvy guests even as I type; Maureen Dowd has a biting op-ed in yesterday's NY Times ("Get Off Of Your Cloud"); and the bloggers have gone wild. Not to mention that I've received numerous emails including this one from a client: "Wish you could write a counter to this and have it published.  This does not help the cause..."*

I regret that I've had to make you a category here but with so much emotion swirling around the HR edict ordering all-hands on the Yahoo! deck, let's begin with some facts:

1. As a computer scientist, you might want to look at real data. There is little evidence to support the notion that people need to be face-to-face to collaborate OR innovate. Yes, there are moments to come together but not perpetually. Professor Tom Allen set the lie to this idea 35 years ago with his ground-breaking research for Digital Equipment Corporation. Simply, if people are more than 50 meters (150 feet) apart, the "probability that two people will communicate [at least once a week] as a function of distance separating them" plummets. Here's the chart:

2. "Can Absence Make a Team Grow Stronger?" With two business school professors, we researched 54 high-performing teams in 26 companies across 15 industries and the resounding conclusion from the data was "yes, indeed." Here's the quick summary from the Harvard Business Review where the study was published as "Best Practices:"

Some projects have such diverse requirements that they need a variety of specialists to work on them. But often the best-qualified specialists are scattered around the globe, perhaps at several companies. Remarkably, an extensive benchmarking study reveals, it isn't necessary to bring team members together to get their best work. In fact, they can be even more productive if they stay separated and do all their collaborating virtually.

The conclusion for Yahoo!: unless you're doing very simplistic projects, i.e. routine processing chores, stocking shelves, and the like, you're staffing your teams incorrectly. If you're looking for innovation, you need diversity, the subject of many studies before and after ours.There is no way that you have that diversity in toto within driving distance of your Silicon Valley. It's 2013, not 1950, the year the number of manufacturing workers reached its peak in the US.

3. Which leads right into this point. As per the title of this post, the genie is waaaay out of the bottle. Do you actually believe that people today work in intact teams? When you force everyone to co-locate, you're most likely not bringing in the people who actually work together. Do you have contractors? Partners in other companies? Suppliers? Vendors? Developers in India/China/Philippines/Singapore? Do your sales people spend their time in the office? (If your answer to this one is yes, perhaps we've pinpointed a big part of your problem.)

Unless Yahoo! has completely turned its back on development trends that are, say, as old as the Internet itself, team members are scattered around the globe. Yahoo! should do a study of where its team members are situated. We can place a pretty confident bet that they're not all in proximity of Yahoo! HQ.

And that's just the start of what's wrong with this 20th century edict.

4. Let's talk about culture for a moment, one of the big points of the "YAHOO! PROPRIETARY AND CONFIDENTIAL INFORMATION--DO NOT FORWARD" HR memo that All Things D's Kara Swisher had up within moments, it seems, and which has been published everywhere.

Forcing people into the office hardly builds loyalty. It's abundantly clear that Yahoo! is attempting a massive and quick turnaround of its culture. The insults about the workforce, as reflected in posts around the web, are legion. The parking lot is only half-full at 9:30 AM. Stopping right there, in some companies, this is regarded as a virtue, meaning that carpooling and the like are working, cutting down on carbon emissions. (For more on this, take a look at the pioneering climate initiative at Unilever, which has coupled aggressive carbon reduction gains with new ways of working initiatives, both increasing productivity and innovation and reducing travel miles.)

There are equally numerous reports on the new Google-esque perks at Yahoo! -- better food, dry cleaning services, nicer digs, for example. What builds culture is commitment, positive reinforcement, and challenging work. If you think people aren't coming into the office because they don't like the food, I strongly recommend that you commission a study on this.

Likewise, do you have evidence that people don't collaborate? That people truly are slacking off at home? Data in study after study indicates that people are more productive when they are able to get up, do whatever morning things they have to do at home (tend to kids/parents/animals/themselves) and then get right to work, saving needless hours on the highway. Hello? Aren't we talking about a bit of traffic on 101?

A most startling stat on this, "The hard truth about telecommuting," from the Bureau of Labor Statistics Monthly Labor Review last June by Mary Noonan and Jennifer Glass and excerpted in the Dec 26 Scientific American: telecommuters on average work 5-7 hours longer per week.

5. 24/7. After ordering people back to their cubbies, are you also prohibiting them from working at home? Consider what you're saying in the-now-much-quoted HR memo to Yahoos: "To become the absolute best place to work, communication and collaboration will be important, so we need to be working side-by-side. Some of the best decisions and insights comes from hallway and cafeteria discussions, meeting new people, and important impromptu meetings. Speed and quality are often sacrificed when we work from home. We need to be one Yahoo! and that starts with physically being together." OK, Yahoos. Turn off your phones at home; don't check your mail first thing in the morning (or last at night); and absolutely do not call from your cars. That applies to you, too, Marissa. Are you referring to your "speed and quality" when communicating from, as reported, your 14-day maternity leave?

6. I nearly can't bring myself to comment on this last point for which the young mother-CEO has been excoriated from GMT-12 to GMT+12. A few of your quotes are enraging to other parents, as you've heard. Just this one will follow you for life: "The baby's been easy. The baby's been way easier than everyone made it out to be." I had "easy" babies too but I found it best to keep that under my hat. Most babies are not and it's quite hurtful to other women to rub it in, i.e. stuff a rag in that comment forevermore. And it's irking your coworkers that you have permission to build a nursery next to your office (even if you paid for it). When are you building sidecars for all the other new moms?

Meanwhile, Marissa, please invite in, say, 40 or 400 or 4000 of the mothers, not to mention the fathers, in your company and listen to what it's like to get through a day. I'm watching a software executive who's your age with major responsibilities, as she is juggling young kids, big corporate decisions, a lot of travel, and being a good family member while her husband, although he doesn't travel as much, is also running on fumes as he works very long hours, cooks, and tells endless stories to the kids. And they can afford help.

There is something profoundly unglued, unrealistic, and uncompassionate in your new approach. Virtual Teams work -- I know. I wrote the book. Maybe you should read it.

--Jessica Lipnack, CEO, consultant, writer, mother, grandmother, and unsolicited advice-giver

 

To become the absolute best place to work, communication and collaboration will be important, so we need to be working side-by-side. That is why it is critical that we are all present in our offices. Some of the best decisions and insights come from hallway and cafeteria discussions, meeting new people, and impromptu team meetings. Speed and quality are often sacrificed when we work from home. We need to be one Yahoo!, and that starts with physically being together. - See more at: http://allthingsd.com/20130222/physically-together-heres-the-internal-yahoo-no-work-from-home-memo-which-extends-beyond-remote-workers/#sthash.BzYp4u24.dpuf

To become the absolute best place to work, communication and collaboration will be important, so we need to be working side-by-side. That is why it is critical that we are all present in our offices. Some of the best decisions and insights come from hallway and cafeteria discussions, meeting new people, and impromptu team meetings. Speed and quality are often sacrificed when we work from home. We need to be one Yahoo!, and that starts with physically being together. - See more at: http://allthingsd.com/20130222/physically-together-heres-the-internal-yahoo-no-work-from-home-memo-which-extends-beyond-remote-workers/#sthash.BzYp4u24.dpuf

To become the absolute best place to work, communication and collaboration will be important, so we need to be working side-by-side. That is why it is critical that we are all present in our offices. Some of the best decisions and insights come from hallway and cafeteria discussions, meeting new people, and impromptu team meetings. Speed and quality are often sacrificed when we work from home. We need to be one Yahoo!, and that starts with physically being together. - See more at: http://allthingsd.com/20130222/physically-together-heres-the-internal-yahoo-no-work-from-home-memo-which-extends-beyond-remote-workers/#sthash.BzYp4u24.dpu

*For the record, I posted the news as soon as it reached me last Friday.

A Nobel or "Milner" for Organizational Innovation?

"Cosmic Inflation" by Don Dixon

Best I know, no one awards a prize for breakthroughs in organizational thinking, never mind practice. I can't even remember an author receiving one of the literary crowns (authors don't receive money, remember, the largest bag of bucks being the Nobel for literature -- $1.1M-ish awarded to a mere 100 or so folks in all of the world's existence) to any book about business ideas. Wait. I'm a little uninformed and thinking way too narrowly. A serious foray into search reveals this award from Financial Times and Goldman Sachs, which appears to have been cashing out to business book authors (about $50K, not bad) since 2005.

But a quick skim of awardees indicates their works are predictably, given the grantors, about Wall Street, where of course the way the companies and people they write about are organized is not the point. What they're organized for, obviously, makes quite a good story (follow the money)... which suggests this question: Who's going to get the big advance for the book on what these companies' organizational structures might have to do with why they succeed and fail? Ah-hem.

Why is this on my mind? My personal newswire for interesting stuff around organizations, Tom Stewart, whose feed on Facebook often catches my attention, does so again. Today he posts about the new no-strings (so to speak)-attached-prize in physics -- a cool $3M, awarded to each of nine (9!) physicists working on cosmic "inflation," which arguably could also be given to someone on Wall Street. The awarder is one Yuri Milner, a physicist-turned-social-media entrepreneur (he's no dope). Need I tell you that part of his $12B fortune comes from his early investment in Facebook, where, naturally, I saw Tom's post about this prize?

Here's, in part, how Nature reports it (though they missed the string-theory twist):

“The intention was to say that science is as important as shares trading on Wall Street,” Milner told Nature. The prize money comes with no strings attached, although Milner hopes that the theorists will contribute to a new lecture series for the public. Milner also plans to create an annual $100,000 New Horizons prize for young researchers and an ad hoc version of the Fundamental Physics Prize that can be won at any time “in exceptional cases”, the website says. According to the rules of the prizes, anyone can be nominated, and future prizewinners will be selected by a committee of all previous ones.

So here's my message to the next Sloan/Insead/Said grad in management who figured out how to make something of him/herself. Start a prize for "quantum organizational breakthroughs." Even call it that and it will sound scientific so people will think it's important. There's a lot of it going around these days.

"How Robin Chase Reinvented the Transportation Industry"

About a dozen years ago, I was one of a couple of dozen women in Boston selected to present at one of Springboard's New England Venture Forum. To prepare, we were divided into small discussion groups of four or five people. A mentor who'd been successful in business was assigned to each of us. I can't remember the name of the woman assigned to me but if she happens to see this, she was terrific.

Robin Chase, founder of Zipcar, BuzzCar, and now GoLoco, was in my small group, where we each had to give our pitches in a few minutes. As you read the next sentences, remember that the year was 2000 and all of this took place just seconds before the dot-com crash. Everyone in the group had the same reaction to Robin's idea for Zipcar. How did this relate to being a dot-com? Wasn't she talking about a car rental company? Where were the eyeballs in her pitch? Why would anyone be interested? Robin took this all in without any rancor but with slight exasperation, as I recall, because we were all so tunnel-visioned. Couldn't we realize that none of this could happen without technology? That the whole thing was premised on the extraordinary ease that the online management system allowed? That there would be RFID chips in the membership cards? That if we didn't stop pumping CO2 into the atmosphere, we would, well, we all know the story of why continuing to choke the atmosphere with fossil fuel emissions might not be the smartest move? Technology technology technology coupled with a terrific need linked to addressing the greatest challenge of our time...

By the time Robin gave her presentation to the venture capitalists who showed up on the big day, her proposal was very polished and very clear. To my mind, it was the best presentation of the day, representing a breakthrough idea that was unlike any of the others (among the competitors were an online newsletter service, an online community thingie, and a loyalty program, for example). Robin had fully integrated the feedback, lead with the technology focus of what she was doing, and, I think but am not completely sure, gained investors as a result.

I've been "following" Robin ever since, even before you could click a button to do so. Today's Forbes carries an interview with her with the title of this post: "How Robin Chase Reinvented the Transportation Industry." I agree. But the editor in me would change the title to read: How Robin Chase Is Reinventing the Transportation Industry. I doubt that she's done. Here she is at TED in 2007.

 

 

A new low for Bank of America

Warning: if you have a banking problem and if, like me, you are a Bank of America business customer by virtue of a corporate round-up (my original perfectly fine BayBank was bought by BankBoston -- nee Bank of Boston -- which was bought by Fleet which was bought by ... ), don't call them. Let me make this more succinct and clear: if you, a business customer, have a problem, it will cost you $30 EVERY TIME YOU CALL THEM!

Sorry about the screaming. I know. You're thinking what I said. This can't possibly be true. "Yes, that's right. That's why we have our self-service center." Self-service center? Sorry, I've never heard of that. How long has that been around? "We've always had it." Always? Online banking hasn't *always* been around, I reasoned. But then I remembered: $30/per call+customer service ≠ logic.

I was sufficiently indignant that he waived the fee - just shortly before I said that going forward, every time Bank of America contacts me, I'll be charging them $30 and sending them hefty invoices since they're constantly sending me unsolicited material.

Not long thereafter, we were "disconnected," which is my way of assuaging my feelings, i.e. I don't want to believe he hung up on me because that would be really insulting to a customer who'd just, in desperation over being told to go to the library if I didn't have a fax machine because that's the only way my problem could be solved -- faxing forms back and forth in, am I wrong, 2012? -- I insisted on being transferred to CEO Brian Moynihan's office. That worked like a charm, obviously, resulting in this highly laudatory post for the great customer service at Bank of America.

I almost forgot: this whole saga began at the local branch with them giving me a number to call. It was the wrong number. They transferred me but before they did I asked for the right number in case I was disconnected. Need I say that they transferred me to the wrong number..where they transferred me to the $30/call number, great for them but oh-so-wrong for me.

And for the record, the last time Bank of America slapped a stupid fee on another small business account of mine, I withdrew my funds and marched down the street to Village Bank, a co-op, that can't be bought by a behemoth. No fees, no minimum balance, great service, online banking.  So there, Bank of America. As son-in-law #1 said, "I'm sure the Board of Directors called an emergency meeting."

"'Let's [not] meet'"

Eli Stein cartoon, reprinted with permission

Scott Kirsner's round-up today on how people feel about meetings - and what they do about it - is "likely" to be one of the most "liked" articles in modern Boston Globism.

Other than his having missed my brilliant posts on this topic (joking, Scott, just joking), he manages to capture many of the good ideas that relieve the agony of meeting bloat.

Some gems: take away the chairs; account for the time it takes for going from one meeting to another (i.e. advance the clock 10 minutes); keep it small; use a speaker's baton (he says pass a tennis ball; this is an old facilitation trick where only the person holding the sacred item gets to speak); HAVE A PURPOSE (duh); skip PowerPoint (I've done a couple of posts on this in particular); use graphic support (write ideas on whiteboards and take pictures of them); skip meetings for a whole day entirely (this is really popular but, alas, whenever I bring this up in workshops that cover this topic, we learn that it rarely works as people always find a way to drift back to meeting for some earthshakingly important purpose); and, what only the boss can get away with, come to the meeting rudely late (Red Sox owner John Henry's approach). As Kirsner says, "I disavow responsibility if Henry’s strategy renders you suddenly unemployed."

Next time, Scott, tackle virtual meetings... It would be interesting to get the stats on how the scale has tipped from face-to-face to conference calls of late. Many of these ideas can apply there too. Plus there's a very long piece you can do on how to confront multitasking.

Good piece. Read it; you'll nod a lot.

 

Nohria: "Global century of business"

See Denison and Bray's "Harvard Business School Dean Is Bent on Change," covering Nitin Nohria's first day with the new students. "Nohria said he intends to open Harvard Business School to wider influences, a job for which he feels particularly well suited."

In the accompanying video, he says he's just back from a whirlwind trip around the world, looking at business practices. Nohria: "If the 20th century was the American century of business, the 21st century really is becoming the global century of business." Says he saw "amazing companies and amazing management practices being developed all over the world." Short video, worth watching.

Why BP Crashed and Killed the Gulf

Harvard Business Review Blogs carries our post today on the role BP's organizational structure may have played in causing the horror show in the gulf. See "Why BP Crashed and Killed the Gulf." I wrote about this briefly here shortly after the explosion on April 20.

Nohria new dean at Harvard Business School

Harvard University President Drew Faust just announced that Nitin Nohria, an insightful academic who early on recognized the importance of networks to global business strategy, is the new dean of HBS. "He's an outstanding scholar, teacher, and mentor, with a global outlook and an instinct for collaboration across traditional boundaries," Faust said.

From the announcement* on the B-school's site:

A scholar of leadership and organizational change, Nohria has previously been the School's senior associate dean for faculty development and chair of its organizational behavior unit. Current co-chair of the HBS Leadership Initiative and a member of the HBS faculty since 1988, he will take up his new role on July 1.

Congrats, Nitin. Very happy for you, the institution, and for networks.

Hello Lipnack

I think this might be the first email I've received that begins like this:

Hello Lipnack,

Hello My name is Michael.  I am the new Regional Account Manager with [excellent company] servicing your area.  At one time, your organization was a customer of ours.  [Excellent co] has recently made changes to reflect the current business climate.

We would love to learn more about your business today, the future goals of your organization, and how we can help.

Please feel free to call me directly or reply to this email with the best time to reach to you to schedule a conversation.

Kind Regards,

Michael

If I do respond, do I say, "Hello, Michael - this is Lipnack?"