The Big Picture

Abscence (of Discomfort) Makes the Heart Grow Fonder

 

Even without the advent of all of this talk of the experience economy, association membership has always been, at heart, a service industry. But a recent USA Today article about the general manager of the Peninsula in Beverly Hills proves just how much of a service industry we are...

"Oscar time was crunch time at The Peninsula Beverly Hills." - Annual Conference time, anyone?

"The French Renaissance-style stone hotel near Rodeo Drive was sold out last weekend, packed with movie moguls and nominees in town for the ceremony." - At our annual conference, all of our CEOs (who largely decide whether or not to pay our dues) are in one spot.

"Latecomers not accustomed to hearing the word "no" begged to get in." - I swear I registered. My secretary has the information. I didn't know I needed to reserve my room so far in advance.

"Some didn't." - OK, one difference. I'll give you one difference. ;)

"It's an eye-opener, showing that while a luxury hotel may look as graceful as a swan on the surface, underneath there's a lot of frantic paddling." - We've all had those meetings where we thought everything that could go wrong did...but the reviews were all raving. The attendees didn't know what didn't happen or see the mistakes.

"The 196-room hotel, where the smallest quarters rent for $475 a night, succeeds by "customizing our service to each guest," he explains." - Customization is becoming a common refrain in the association world.

"Before arrival, first-timers are asked for preferences (room location, pillow type, newspapers, special requests); a record is kept of repeaters' likes and dislikes." - Would you prefer our newsletter on dead trees, via e-mail, RSS feeds or would you just like to check out the Web site when you were interested in information? What about legislative information: e-mail alerts, phone calls?

""To us, a loyal guest is a celebrity." - 'Nuff said.

"Like most hoteliers who serve VIPs, Kasikci is tight-lipped about who has checked in or acted badly. But like most, he's seen his share of outlandish behavior." - 'Nuff said.

"The seam of one bedside lampshade is showing. He spins the shade till it's hidden. "How many guests would notice that, I don't know. But I do. The minute a guest notices, it's too late." - Perfect meeting and educational sessions, awful food served at lunch. Reviews? So-so. Feedback forms were filled out during the awful lunch. The room is too cold. The room is too hot. The room should be moved to Hawaii. ;)

"It's the details that make a hotel great, says Kasikci." - I gauge my success at the annual meeting registration desk by whether or not I ever have to ask someone for his or her name. If I have not met someone's name that I see on the roster, I will go out of my way to search for a picture so I will know what they look like when they come in. (This is admittedly much easier after being here five years - and probably only possible because we are a state association and we hold many in-house educational offerings.)

"A hotel succeeds by building loyalty, anticipating guests' wishes and fulfilling them fast." - Sound familiar?

"It's a juggling act to "determine what the market is willing to pay" and deliver a first-class product that turns a profit." - Sound familiar?

"A hotel is like a car, Kasikci says, and "every part is important. In the eyes of the guest: Who delivers the service a guest needs right now is the most important person. The guests pay your salary." He pauses. "The day we don't meet your needs, you will leave. The day you don't do things the way we want, we will part ways." - Sound familiar? Though members often see the same staff in person, everyone in the association plays a part in a satisfied member - billing, accounting, the receptionist.

Have I missed any other comparables (or comps, as they say in the hotel industry)? ;)

Shoot the Focus Group

Exasperation with focus groups, while not universal, is growing as companies look for better ways to get inside consumers' heads, often assisted by new technology and the Internet. The dissatisfaction and the proliferation of new research approaches has been escalating so rapidly that the ad industry's main trade group has been spurred to conduct the first widespread study of testing methods since the 1950s. Despite the common assumption that you don't know if an online chatter is a teenager or a cocker spaniel, going online to get at true consumer behavior is drawing increasing interest from marketers.

Yahoo is ditching focus groups for what they call immersion groups - where the consumer actually becomes part of the planning process instead of just observed like ants in the colony. For example, Yahoo is testing a new online community for car buffs who want more member-to-member opportunities to chat.

I've never read the book, but Bonnie Goebert has an interesting book I've heard a lot about on the issue, Beyond Listening: Learning the Secret Language of Focus Groups. One interesting scenario from the book is a Nabisco focus group. The group told researchers that they always separated their Oreos before they ate them. The researchers recommended that the company develop a cookie that couldn't be taken apart. Fortunately, in this case, Nabisco didn't heed the researchers' advice - I would never be able to enjoy an Oreo cookie again. (It is the only way to eat an Oreo, after all.)

In the book, Goebert, who has three decades of experience with focus groups, explains what's wrong with how companies use the information and she draws on her own experiences with clients like the New York Times, Tropicana, Maxwell House, Colgate, Maybelline, Lipton, Federal Express and others to provide simple guidelines on how companies of just about any size can use focus groups to capture the hearts and minds of consumers.

Read the full article about focus group in Business Week.

How to Ask a Dumb Question

Geoffrey Colvin tells us in the June 27th issue of Fortune how to ask a dumb question:

Don't apologize in advance or allow as how this is probably unimportant or say any of the other things that sap the dumb question of its power. Just step up and ask it. The shorter the better. Don't be intimidated by the stunned silence that follows. Wait it out. The payoff is on its way.

And the payoff? Wisdom. It seems that few have the courage to ask the dumb questions anymore - the many dumb questions of organizational life, the ones no one will ask in a meeting for fear of sounding stupid.

Remember, Socrates was the greatest asker of dumb questions in history.

Nine Decision-Making Pitfalls - And How to Avoid Them

Fortune dedicated their June 27th issue to decision-making. It even separates bad decisions from wrong decisions (outcome vs. process). Jim Collins says in the issue that the best decisions come from a basic statement: I don't know. The best decision-makers then gather all the data and just give it an intelligent guess.

Michael Useem and Jerry Useem, in an article entitled Great Escapes, give us nine decision-making pitfalls - and nine simple devices to beat them.

1. Analysis Paralysis. The cure: The 70% solution (stolen from the Marine Corps). If you have 70% of the information, have done 70% of the analysis and feel 70% confident, then move.
2. Sunk-Cost Syndrome. The cure: Burn the boat. Seymour Cray built two things: sailboats and supercomputers. Obsolescence is a given. To drive the point home to himself, each spring he'd build a sailboat - and every fall he'd burn it. Lesson: It's always painful to destroy something we've built, but sometimes it has to be done.
3. Yes-Man Echoes. The cure: Voice questions, not opinions. If you're a higher up seeking advice, start out with a question, not an opinion.
4. Anxiety Overload. The cure: Look at the clock. Find what calms you. Low levels of anxiety are productive, high levels of anxiety are counter-productive.
5. Warring Camps. The cure: Let the battle rage. Political infighting can be destructive, but battles over substance, managed well, can be constructive.
6. A Wily Adversary. The cure: Clone your opponent. Assign a person or a group to think like your competitor. "Imitation can be a high form of heroism," it says.
7. To Be Or Not To Be? The cure: Go with the omen. Yes, a prophetic sign, a gut instinct, the little voice in your head. Go with it.
8. Inexperience. The cure: Educate your instincts. Blind instinct can not be trusted - but it can be educated. Think flight simulators and physician residencies.
9. Self-interested Thinking. The cure: What would Sara Lee do? Companies are like people - they want to live long and prosper. Since companies can't speak or decide for themselves, people do.

And Jim Collins says in this issue that the most important most executives make are not what decisions but who decisions - people decisions, in other words: "Lasting excellence in corporations seems to stem less from decisions about strategy then decisions about people."

But then again, shouldn't hiring the right people for the right job be part of a company's "strategy decisions"? I understand what he's trying to say, but I don't think the separation is always as clear-cut as that.

If you'd rather read the whole Fortune article, instead of my condensed version, here it is.

Better Business Through Improv

John Moore at Brand Autopsy is sharpening his improv skills - and his business skills, too, it seems. Recently he struck up an e-mail conversation with Patricia Ryan Madsen, author of IMPROV WISDOM, his current textbook. (While the book is geared more to encourage us to take chances and do more of the things that are important to us in our personal lives, the Improv Maxims Patricia shares are highly applicable to business.)

A transcript of their e-mail exchange can be found here. (And you have to love any book that has a subtitle of Don't Prepare, Just Show Up. Even Woody Allen says that's 95 percent of success anyways.)

Part of the beauty of adapting improv into business practices is what Seth Godin in his latest book, All Marketers Are Liars, dubbed The Curse of the Red Queen - the evolutionary paradox that what worked yesterday is unlikely to work today. (This must be a Seth original because I did a search and could not find anything besides references to the slasher movie myth of the queen that kills seven every 100 years. And I would quote you the exact passage but Red Queen or Curse was not in his index and I have no recollection where it was in the book.)

Whether we like it or not, none of us are as prepared for tomorrow as we need to be. (Mostly because we don't yet know what tomorrow will throw at us until it gets here.) But this book looks like it might be a good resource to learn how to be more open to the chaos.