When the consultants arrived, strategy was not driven by those who embraced the product and its audience, strategy became a set of theoretical suppositions evidenced by the competitive landscape.  There were only two problems: 1) the consultants were no more obsessively using competitive products than those of AOL; and 2) the competitive landscape was crumbling because it was just as inorganic in construct, itself no more than the conclusions of observation.  Using a product is not trying it once, it is using it every day and using competitive products to fully internalize how bad becomes good and good becomes great.  Data, analysis, reconnaissance, and interpretation are all essential in responding to hyper growth, but if you aren’t eating your own dogfood, all bets are off.

Yes, you must Eat Your Own Dogfood.

Some people trace this edict to the television commercials for Alpo in the 1970s and 1980s where Lorne Greene made a point of showing us that he fed the very product he endorsed to his own dogs.  No, he didn’t actually eat it himself, but the way he looked at it, you could tell he might be considering it.  His dogs were an extension of himself.  That love made it clear he would only feed them a product he trusted, and he would only endorse it publicly because he trusted it.  I am not saying he was right, I am just noting than his conviction was visceral.

In the software spectrum, the phrase “Eating Our Own Dogfood” is more commonly traced to a 1988 memo from then Microsoft Manager Paul Maritz encouraging his team to obsess over use of Microsoft’s products.  His basic tenet was that to win a category and perfect your work, you had to be the consumer.  The memo spread widely throughout Microsoft, over the gate and through the industry.  It resonated with many of us, and began being accompanied by such observations as, “If you won’t use the software when it’s free, why should anyone pay you for it?”

Soon after came the dawn of the Dot-com age in the mid 1990s, quickly followed by the implosion of Web 1.0 known as the Dot-bomb era circa 2000.  Interesting to note, a few of the companies that survived the turmoil and went onto become the great first generation brands of the Internet like Amazon and eBay made it a point to eat their own dogfood.  While third-party consultants poured into corporations to sort out their tanking business models and rationalize their value propositions, far too many of those consultants were busy writing decks and compiling spread sheets.  When you asked them what online products and services they loved, they often couldn’t respond, because they were too overwhelmed by time commitments to use the products they would evaluate, let alone love them.  For those who had already been through a product development cycle or two, the writing was on the whiteboard.

The absolute necessity of eating your own dogfood is anything but limited to software.  If you design cars for a living and are not planning to drive your own creation when it comes off the line, how can you attend to every nuance and detail that sets apart your vehicle from the vast number of choices already available for sale?  If your team designs a new line of workplace apparel intended to be marketed as more comfortable, durable, and stylish than everything else already hanging on the rack, will you not be planning to wear what you have produced proudly at least a few days each week out of pure joy?  When you have the privilege to be creative and innovative in your occupation, you are quickly humbled by the fact that an idea for a new product or service however inspired and brilliant is in fact almost worthless.  Customers seldom buy or become loyal to the ideas you pitch.  Until a concept is executed expertly and embraced by those who will champion it, it really is just a first draft — perhaps filled with promise, but nonetheless in need of refinement, iteration, and polish.  There is a long and winding road from pitch to product, and all along the way details have to be vetted first by those who most love the work, the creators.

Apple long ago coined this notion as Evangelism, and no Apple Evangelist in his or her right mind would try to get you excited about a product they weren’t already using themselves.   To be fair, Evangelism is a beginning, not an end, after which customer feedback must become part of the process, but if our goal in social marketing is to engage our community in a supportive and seamless dialogue, then we owe it to them to initiate the dialogue with honesty, commitment, and passion.  There will always be pain to share in early releases, but the more defects we extract ahead of release because we already know they are there, the more our customers can trust us to take them seriously in allowing our own needs to be met before we presume to address theirs.

Design is not cynical, its true elegance is purely self-reflective because form and function are easily evaluated in day-to-day use.  If something is good enough for your dog, it might be good enough for someone else’s dog.  Now imagine if you ensured it was good enough for you before you topped off the can.  That would be some seriously tasty dogfood.  Go on, take a byte.

It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, and comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows the great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat. 

The quote comes from a speech Roosevelt delivered at the Sorbonne in Paris on April 23, 1910, just after the completion of his presidency.  He ponders a world which is increasingly industrialized, the role of the common man in its development, and the critical nature of risk in our capitalist economy.  Roosevelt is optimistic about America’s role in the New World, the rising living standard for the middle class, and the importance of learning — academic and experiential — to the evolution of our civilization.  “The poorest way to face life is to face it with a sneer,” spoke the former President.  He was a champion of character.  He had no appetite for the voice of the cynic.

There is a lot of substance in Roosevelt’s reflection, but the essence for me comes back to the notion of the creative process, whether in business or government or science or art, what it means to put oneself in the public light with new ideas.  I write a good deal about innovation and creative destruction, how it is essential to the evolution of our norms, but not enough about the drive behind that process, the extremely hard work of dodging the ordinary and then attempting to get others onboard where they might otherwise be uncomfortable.  Getting attacked is no fun, but it comes with the territory of the new.  Creativity is not only exhausting, it’s messy.

I think this is what Roosevelt was getting at, how leaders in any field first dare themselves to expose a new idea, then attempt to explain that idea to others, then prepare themselves to share the bounty in success or accept the blame in failure, as if neither is more likely or important than the other.  The point in finding the courage to advance an untested notion is specifically that, to test it.  If the notion proves of merit than the win is broad, but if not, the win is equally broad because the test has eliminated a dead-end we all can acknowledge and use as a new reference point for further testing.

It is the courage to address the critic, the skeptic, that is so uncommon.  We know it when we see it, but we don’t see it enough.  We are hungry to hear ideas, but too often all we hear is naysaying.  It is much easier to be a critic than an innovator, in that the innovator approaches creativity with self-critique an implicit part of the process, a means, not an end.  The critic whose work begins and ends there offers opinion, even explanation, but if there is no build on the work of the innovator, then what is the value added?

We hear our political candidates bash each other for sport, so much so that we become numb to it.  They are not listening to each other and we are not listening to them so what good is being accomplished by the perpetuating standoff?  When this happens in business, companies are lost.  When it happens in science, we run in place.  When it happens in the arts, our culture becomes stagnant.  Roosevelt looked forward and advised us to fear the downside of not trying more than the downside of coming up short.

The individual who has a story to tell risks all, because the more that story is original, the more it is likely to be rejected.  Think of the powerful corporations who did not believe we would all have our own computers someday, and the few individuals who thought we would and got them to our desktops.  Think of Martin Luther King’s vision for a desegregated America, the resistance against his ideals, and the normalcy today of celebrating diversity.  Think of The Beatles dreaming in those seedy clubs in Hamburg, when much of the music establishment was convinced that guitar bands were on their way out.  Think of the first doctors and medical researchers to propose the notion of a vaccine, how frightening that seemed to so many, and the diseases we would still suffer today were it not for their willingness to persevere.

Not all ideas are good, and not all visionaries are right.  True visionaries know this, and they know that failure will always be part of the package.  As we listen to those around us attempting to tackle the more complex problems of the day, perhaps we would do well to remember that even if an idea proves wrong, the people courageous enough to explore that idea might be doing something right.  Everyone wants to win, but not everyone is brave enough to want to try.  Where we are unable to find that courage in ourselves, let’s not forget to praise it in those who are exposing themselves to critique.

Look for the spark in the brave people around us who worry less about what others say about them, and worry more about overcoming constraints on what can be possible when we appropriately embrace courage.  To be honest, they don’t much care what the crowd thinks, but the crowd has everything to gain by inviting themselves to the party.  We have more challenges facing us today than the Progressive Republican President Roosevelt could have imagined, yet even more paths to triumph through knowledge if the most inspired creative voices are heard.

A timeline of “Kodak’s Key Moments” recently appeared in the Wall Street Journal, and what is too easily forgotten is that Kodak developed the first digital camera as early as 1975, but chose not to bring it to market for fear of cannibalizing its hugely popular film business.  That’s an easy enough Monday morning quarterback call, but how many companies right now know they are on a path to their own obsolescence, have a pretty good idea what the longterm answer to their ills may be, but are ceding alternative paths to their competitors for fear of short-term pain or possibly looking stupid?  The answer: more than you think.

In a subsequent article entitled Avoiding Innovation’s Terrible Toll, the Journal further noted that in a study of more than six million firms, only a tiny fraction made it to the ripe old age of 40.  The authors of that report, Charles I. Stubbart and Michael B. Knight, reflect that “…despite their size, their vast financial and human resources, average large firms do not ‘live’ as long as ordinary Americans.”  We have just seen this of late with the beloved Borders Books, and now we are watching Barnes and Noble try to pull off a comeback around its initiatives with Nook.  Other companies like Apple, Johnson & Johnson, IBM, and General Electric have steered their ships across longer journeys.  It is possible to go the distance, but it requires an openness to change that is so uncommon in business, you almost have to shake people physically to get them to see how to save themselves.  Generally speaking, corporate people don’t like to be shaken, even if it’s good for them.

Creative destruction as most commonly defined by Joseph Schumpeter is real and unavoidable.  It is also reasonably easy to argue that despite the pain it causes in transition, it is a positive force of social evolution that drives us forward and replaces inefficient procedures with new technology, updated methodology, and even new financial opportunities for investment and return.  My dear friend Kermet Apio, a wonderfully successful standup comedian, captures the essence of Creative Destruction in a 90 second bit where he compares the joy and simplicity today of clicking on a song you might want to hear versus trying to find it on a cassette tape, which might take you so long you’d almost certainly abandon the task unfinished, or worse, try using your pinkie on the internal reels to queue up the precise starting spot.  There’s a touch of nostalgia here, and we do find ourselves laughing very hard at what was our norm not so long ago.  Click on the link above to see how Kermet tells the tale, the chuckle makes the point.

But no one is laughing at Kodak’s headquarters in Rochester, and no one should be.  Kodak had the first digital camera in 1975, and while admittedly neither they nor anyone else knew what to make of this at the time, they had a much more important mandate on their mind: Protect Film.  Kodachrome was not only iconic, it was hugely profitable.  So was motion picture film processing.  So were all their other traditional film developing technologies, not to mention the sale of retail supplies, equipment repairs, and patent licensing.  Kodak was a beloved company and a global brand that made the same wrong decision so many other short-life companies make — they worried too much about cannibalism, and not enough about what happens if they don’t cannibalize their own markets.

It doesn’t get any easier to understand than this — if you don’t cannibalize your own markets, someone will do it for you.  The choice is that simple, do it to yourself for your own good, or be the victim of outside attack.  No form of technology is forever, and any trend you’re surfing is going to break flat on the beach.  In Kermet’s bit, he talks about the Sony Walkman.  Everyone had one.  It was great.  Then came the CD, Sony had a piece of that technology, so far so good.  Then came Apple with the iPod, not the inventor of portable digital music playback, but the “perfector.”  By the time Sony responded, they were on defense instead of offense.  Too late.  The cannibal is here, it came from elsewhere and did what you feared it would.  You knew it would happen, you couldn’t stop it, but you could have been it.  That’s the choice.  Not will it come, but from where will it come.

That is the real lesson of Kodak, no one can stop the march of innovation because it is inconvenient or upsetting.  No company can duck cannibalism by refusing to acknowledge that current markets have to be sacrificed for new markets to be built.  If you’re young and just getting into business, get used to this, and get used to your bosses telling you all the reasons why they have to protect what you have today, that the hit to earnings to attack your own hugely successful lines of business with nascent replacement ventures is just too painful.  If you’ve been doing this a few decades, remember back on all those long and awful bureaucratic meetings where you wished someone would have just pounded the table and screamed, “To Hell with cannibalism, we’re doing this.”  There were meetings where that happened.  Those are the companies with the 100 year brands.

If you are at CES this week wandering the endless aisles of new stuff and you see something that could eat your lunch, ask yourself, why didn’t we think of that?  And if we did, would we have had the courage to launch it?  Let’s hope this lesson gets easier to recite so we don’t see loyal employees lose their benefits because political correctness forced a gag order or management failed to act when time was on their side.  Manage the product life cycle, but don’t be afraid to leave a little money on the table.  Get the new products out there before someone does it for you.  The real money is in longevity, which means innovation, which means playing offense against yourself.

Then there are books.

In a recent Wall Street Journal piece with the header “Books That Are Never Done Being Written,” Nicholas Carr contemplates the far-ranging impact of digital distribution on long-established but fluid notions of traditional publishing:

An e-book, I realized, is far different from an old-fashioned printed one. The words in the latter stay put. In the former, the words can keep changing, at the whim of the author or anyone else with access to the source file. The endless malleability of digital writing promises to overturn a whole lot of our assumptions about publishing.

The realization that books are no more permanent than this year’s understanding of medical treatment is hardly shocking.  The very paradigm of printing on paper and binding a work has throughout its history adopted the notion of editions and revisions.  Where would the school textbook industry be without an excuse to update a classroom volume rather than allow you to feel comfortable buying a dog-eared half price two-year old version?  If we only needed one unabridged edition of the Complete Works of William Shakespeare, think of how many academic preface summaries we would have been denied annotating discovered corrections in the core text.

Yet in the worlds of literature and even political theory, we do seem to maintain an expectation that the version we read of Charles Dickens or John Stuart Mill is largely the same as the draft the author called final.  “A Tale of Two Cities” even when presented in its initial serialization was eventually finished, as was the essay “On Liberty,” and when we buy a copy of one of these today either in paperback or download, we do believe in the authenticity of replication representing if not a fully steady state, a pretty firm slice of life.  That is helpful not only in getting us all on the same page for discussion and critique, it offers us grounding in history and social evolution, the ceaseless churn emerging from deliberately placed bricks in the wall.

I have a hard time thinking today is much different, and no matter the short attention span theater that victimizes so much of our patience, my sense is our books have never been more important — no matter the brevity of their life-cycle, no matter their imposed truncation or expansion, no matter their delivery format or storage means on wood shelf or cloud server.  Our books will change as they must, but their timeliness and meditation as collective might be the primary permanence we retain, even if it is more spiritual and metaphorical than natural or physical.  The means of delivering the book does not define the book, it is largely irrelevant, itself a timely convenience worthy of disruption.  The material of delivery is subordinated to the material of substance, it is the content that matters, not the media.  The Platonic form is the ideal, and that cannot be taken from us by technology.

However we acknowledge its consumption mechanism, the book as ideal is a bridge among scattered coordinates.  We learn to read an organized set of drawn thoughts to see what is meant by change, and those who have the gift and discipline to construct a book add to the global library of permanence by carrying the torch that challenges all that came before.  Historic observation is clear and consistent: the buildings decay, the land can be conquered and utilized anew after wars and governments are gone, but the ideas underlying arts remain for examination.  The composed book is the codification of the idea however it is presented, that does not change.

My amazing wife, who is also an amazing teacher, enters her classroom on the first day with a simple statement:

“Our books are our treasures.”

Her specialty is English as a Second Language, and whether she is teaching adults or children, this mantra is always the same.  Books are precious.  If you look around our house, you might see why this is our chorus.  Books are everywhere.  That is what we want to be surrounded by.  We also have a Kindle and an iPad.  They are filled with books as well.

Another recent story in the Wall Street Journal discussed how the price of e-books was sometimes dropping below the price of “real” books which I guess means paper books, but to me, one is no less real than the other.  The broader question remaining is whether the great majority of people should still find the time for long-form written expression in a world cluttered with half-baked tidbit social media posts like this one.  The answer has to be yes, because if we are going to allow character count to trump in-depth inquiry, we condemn our more severe concerns to being adequately addressed by less than substantial narrative.  Our pace of change is only becoming more frantic, and the hope for some form of understandable permanence all the more desirable in addressing unending anxieties.  Committed writing and reading gets us a good deal of the way there, because the acts of reading and writing might be one of the few forms of permanence we can share.

I say this as someone who just spent the better part of a year writing my first book, which is now in first draft and undergoing edit.  I haven’t talked much about the book, and won’t until we get closer to publication, but let me just say that whether anyone reads it or it sells a single copy, it will remain one of my proudest achievements.  Right now it is a long book.  It will get shorter to accommodate marketing concerns, but hopefully it will still be a substantial book.  I couldn’t have said all I needed to say in a blog post or I would have.  Believe me, I would have!

In our world of constant and increasing hyper flux, books can be thought of as a noble but flawed exercise in establishing some sense of the enduring.  Now that digital publishing allows current authors easy access to further disturbing permanence, any foothold in establishing the concrete may remain even more illusive, but the stepping-stones of thought that bridge us from there to here can certainly maintain significance if we view thought as continuum, a timeline.  In that regard, as a roadmap or even a set of breadcrumbs, books for me have never been more relevant, nor the mission of authors any less permanent.  Some books are good and some are bad, some certainly more ephemeral than others, but the connectivity of books is ongoing.  Apps or facings, that is as it should be, as long as I can read.

For starters…

A little more focus on sustainable job creation with decent paying gigs for those who want to work; a little less badgering of the unemployed who are nobly trying to spring themselves back into action.

A little more attention to world-class customer service that shows true respect for those who pay the bills; a little less maneuvering in the shadows to squeeze unwarranted improvements in margin by taking advantage of customer patience and goodwill with hidden garbage.

A little more good theater onstage; a little less awful theater everywhere else.

A little more listening to creative thinking before blurting out that it won’t work; a little less condemnation of those who are carrying the bag before questioning their character.

A little more pay down of available credit by all borrowers; a little less concern with things we don’t have and might like, but can live without no problem.

A little more conservation of the Earth’s precious and limited resources; a little less right to entitlement via purchase power.

A little more earnings from growth and investment in the enterprise; a little less cap on hiring while stockpiling cash reserves.

A little more commitment to making broad education a national priority; a little less earthquake type each time a professional athlete signs a seven-figure contract.

And then…

A little less spotlight on celebrities and their personal dramas; a little more celebration of everyday unsung heroes who quietly make our world better just doing what they do.

A little less fireworks around award shows for mediocre creative work; a little more visionary creative work worth celebrating.

A little less self-aggrandized noise and plotted invective in media placement; a little more interesting dialogue and engaging discussion in the public square.

A little less “them” where rhetoric is an intentional tactic of divisiveness; a little more “us” where national pride and humility are shared values.

A little less last-minute antics in Congress where critical deadlines loom; a little more thoughtful strategic planning around long-term solutions demanded by voters.

A little less concern around titles and press releases; a little more measurable goal achievement and personal job satisfaction.

A little less built to flip and business as usual; a little more built to last and Think Different.

A little less criticism of people who look, talk, and behave differently from our routine; a little more tolerance of diversity that opens the door to understanding — on that last one, maybe a lot more.

Okay, that’s my zapping of the spark plugs.  What’s yours?

Thank you for welcoming Corporate Intelligence Radio in its first year and all your great comments (private as well as public) in our shared exploration of how to make work matter more.  Together we can make 2012 a turning point.  Why not?

Let me share with you a personal anecdote, and then an unlikely bit of advice about what I think your current boss really wants from you on the gift list.  Then I will share an idea about how to make the holidays even more satisfying with one of my personal favorite “work things” to do this time of year.

Somewhere along the way I acquired more than a passing interest in wine, and as people with a passion for something have a tendency to do, I talk about it from time to time.  I will try not to bore you with the details, but when we lived in Northern California we ventured to Napa and Sonoma on weekend drives, and that is where I began to discover the creative process behind wine is like art, poetry, and storytelling blended metaphysically with supply chain economics, agriculture, and marketing.  With my obsession around the marriage of technology and media (show + business + bits + capital), the real world metaphor of wine was a perfect diversion for me, a subject of endless study.  The more I studied every aspect of the vineyard, the more I talked about it.

Oh, those frightened employees!  How pretentious!  How intimidating!  Now we have to spend a week’s pay on a bottle just to avoid a CLM (Career Limiting Move) every holiday season.  Nightmare on Goldstein Street!

Nope, not at all.  Never asked for a bottle, never expected a bottle, and when I would get one, if it was pricey, I would donate the value of the bottle to charity and nicely advise the giver to please lighten the wallet load in the future.

Yet whenever I did get a bottle as a gift from an employee, here is what I would do — I would write his or her name on the label and the date of the gift, then store it in a closet, which eventually evolved into a more formal wine cellar.  There it would sit in the dark (luckily, my chatter reinforced my predisposition for reds, which even if they don’t age well, usually hold up if stored decently).  Then, years later, on random occasions, I retrieve the bottle because I have a taste for it, almost always forgetting who gave it to me.  That’s when I look at the label, smile, enjoy the wine, and I do my very best to find an email address or phone number for the person who gave me that bottle and I get in touch — to thank them again, to tell them the wine was good (it always is), to see how their career is going, to see how their family is doing, just to reconnect.  It’s an excuse to recapture a great slice of life, and that brings the gift full circle.

Some of you reading this have received those calls or emails from me.  Some of you haven’t because I can’t find you, but most of you haven’t because the wine is still down in the cellar and you will — sooner or later, you won’t escape.  That’s what makes the gift unique.

So if someone gives you a bottle of wine, no matter the circumstances, try the same trick, and wait as long as you can before you reach for the stored bottle, let time pass, and then open that bottle as a way to remember that person, and an excuse to reconnect with them.  You will be surprised how much fun this is, how gratifying it is, and what a great sense of continuity it brings in tying together seemingly unrelated chapters of your life as your network of colleagues expands across the globe and lives their lives with all the ups and downs we all experience.

Okay, that was the anecdote, but it was for illustrative purposes only.  This post is not about wine shopping or storage.  Let me tell you now what your boss really wants most from you for the holidays:

A better relationship.

It’s the same thing your boss wants with you all year long.  It’s the same thing you want with your boss.  You don’t need a bottle of wine to get there.  A kind note will do.

Want to know another secret?  If you write your boss a kind note at the holidays solely for the purpose of improving your relationship, your boss is likely to save that note, just like a bottle of wine.  This is not about sucking up, office politics, or any other hallway chatter you are better off avoiding — if you don’t want to do it, you should not, it is not a job requirement.  Of course your boss may not be the shiniest object in the room, perhaps you even think he or she is a nasty freak who is out to get you.  That might be true, but in case you haven’t already figured it out, bosses knows they make mistakes all the time, they worry about it, they feel terribly about it, and most of them wish you didn’t think they were out to get you.  You might prefer to fill a turquoise Tiffany box with treasures you can leave on the boss’s desk to faking a kind note, and if that is the case, you should do neither.  A wrapped gift is only a token of expression, a means to outreach, so if there is no outreach, don’t bother, you’re wasting your money.  You can give a gift, you can not give a gift, honestly I don’t think it will get you off the S-List, nor will it lead you to unwarranted promotion.  Good bosses are smarter than that, and they know the rules.

The holidays are an opportunity for reflection on all fronts.  If you do use this time of reflection to build a relationship, to settle a difficult matter of the past, to ask a candid question about how you could be doing better, to tell your boss what you like about your job, that could be a path to bonding with lasting value – and by lasting, I mean years beyond the job you currently have.  I stay in touch with some employees for decades — not all of them, but surely the ones with whom I built a relationship.  That door is open for you now, you just have to decide if you want to walk through it and have a conversation.  Hierarchies are one directional, no question about that.  Relationships cut two ways.  Hierarchies are determined by corporations with documents on record in the HR department.  Relationships are determined by people, no files at all.

This leads to my final point: What about that former boss, the one you never did give a bottle of wine or a note?  Surprise that person!  Email them as if you opened the bottle of wine and saw his or her name on it.  Tell that old boss what you are doing, how’s the spouse, the kids, the dog, the job, the retirement, the untenable new boss with whom you wish you could have a relationship.  We used to do this with Holiday Cards, and some people still do with photos of the family sitting under a palm tree on their summer vacation in Tahiti.  No one has time to write all those notes anymore — we are a busy, wired, short attention span theater crowd that communicates more efficiently on Facebook, Twitter, and in blog comments.  So just pick one each year, and see what’s there.  You will be surprised.

Whether your long-ago boss or your current one, believe me, he or she doesn’t want you to spend your hard-earned money on them.  They do want to know how you are doing.  That is a gift that is as priceless as it is ageless.

Celebrate the day, keep peace in your heart, wish for a better world and do your best to make it so!

Zero moderates?

Two questions come to mind: 1) What criteria could we be using to define the concept of moderate that would rule out everyone in the Senate; and 2) If this is truly the case, how can this possibly be good for the nation?

If the essence of this analysis is that all Democrats are left of center and all Republicans are right of center, I suppose that would leave us with zero moderates.  Yet we all know this is not the case, the party labels of Democrat and Republican have largely become just that, where we all know Democrats we consider more conservative than some Republicans as well as some Republicans we consider more liberal than Democrats.  Clearly President Obama is receiving as much if not more criticism for the actual agenda he has pursued from vocal members within his own party for “not being liberal enough,” and the most significant criticism articulated about once leading Presidential Candidate Romney by numerous members of his own party is that he is too liberal.  Here we have a handful of labels that are useful to certain individuals on any given day for campaign positioning, high profile op-ed pieces, and extremely uncomfortable holiday table rhetoric, but beyond that, these labels aren’t doing us much good.

That doesn’t mean the divisiveness in our nation is any less real; it remains as the CBS News story implies a disease that is killing us.  The problem is that regardless of monolithic labels like moderate, liberal, and conservative — descriptors that tend to have almost no meaning in our day-to-day lives where business behavior and social interaction demand a level of civility and tolerance for anything to get done in a timely manner — our elected leaders at the national level have fully separated themselves from anything that vaguely represents the real world and isolated themselves in a war between two parties that does not reflect the desires, hopes, dreams, and aspirations of a people who really do wish to be united under visionary leadership.

The divide is on party vote, creating a climate where the mandate of political survival necessitates that whether in truth moderate, liberal, or conservative, an elected official still votes along party lines so as not to be perceived as a traitor to the party.  The party articulates a definitive point of view — whether that is no tax increase can be on the table or a tax increase of some sort must be on the table — and there you have it, intractable postures.  The result?  We still haven’t resolved the debt ceiling with intelligence, we are going to allow it to be done by mathematical computation.  If preordained formulas are going to be the measure by which critical decisions of how precious and limited resources are going to be allocated, one starts to wonder exactly what we are getting for the time and money of those being sent to our nation’s Capitol as voices of representative democracy.  We are willing to go to war with enemies overseas to advocate that democracy is the best possible ideal for self-determination of nations, yet at home we allow our own democracy to languish while our leaders fight among themselves for agendas of their own career advancement that are entirely irrelevant to the people paying their salaries and standing on the sidelines waiting to be rescued from stagnation.

Now while Congress fights (before it vacations again) over whether current extension of tax cuts and jobless benefits must be tied in a single package — another all or nothing argument that mirrors the failure of the Super Committee — millions of Americans are facing the end of year holidays in complete fear they could lose everything they have before they can get back on their feet because our government cannot do its job.  There can be no more excuses here – the needs of the nation must trump the needs of those who manage the nation, and those who will reap the lucrative benefits of post government service with lobbying jobs that continue to compromise the very fabric of fairness in practice.  Not much holiday spirit there, and no rhetoric makes things right when the bank forecloses.

I have written before that polarization is not only anathema to advancement, it is largely not tolerated in the business world.  Indeed a corporation is not a democracy, it is run by a CEO with executive authority that can be autocratic when necessary, but those of us in the working world know how seldom a successful CEO exercises that kind of power — the use of a blunt instrument is too often demoralizing to employees who thrive when they are empowered.  Is there career advancement at risk in a corporation?  You bet, every single day.  Are there winners and losers on a personal level, despite the fortunes of the company?  Yes, sometimes.  Do companies on occasion forget that competition is outside the walls of the enterprise rather than down the hall?  Oh yeah, happens all the time.  Yet to maintain one’s stature and upward mobility in working life, most of us come to realize the wisdom and benefit in building consensus viewpoints around difficult measures – and the more complicated the problem, the more upside there is to be found in working toward consensus.  Consensus is not the same as compromise, but it incorporates tactics of compromise to allow the best of ideas from different points of view to come together to form more enlightened arguments and better constructed resolutions.  The winning formula in consensus understands there is always a big picture, and in standoff bifurcation there is only momentum for standstill behavior.

Any organization frozen solid when facing a crisis is likely to fail.  Strong executives understand that this is often the difference between positive and negative earnings, and rather than worrying about getting their way on every detail because they so strongly believe it, they worry about obstructions to the organization’s success.  A leader articulates a vision, listens, is decisive, and then sees to it that anything blocking success is removed from the path, not cemented at the crossroads as a monument to unhelpful ideology.

There are any number of points of view on any number of critical issues facing our nation, but my sense is that real question before us is how we rediscover the commonalities that make us a great nation and not a divided people.  If we have no moderates in government that we have no one who represents the voice of the people, which by definition in its aggregate is moderate.  Dividing lines may help individual careers and fuel unlimited punch lines for the evening talk show hosts, but they aren’t helping you and they aren’t helping me.  If Washington can’t get over it, then we need to show them where they are wrong.  If our elected officials simply refuse to lead by example, then it is time for the rest of us to show them how.  There is a lot at risk here, way more than an election, way more than claimed vindication.  We cannot meet our challenges if we remain divided, not a chance.  We must find a consensus and a shared voice of which we can be proud.

Demand more, demand better.

Our government is teetering on the edge of being unable to govern.  It is almost impossible for the average American to believe that party divide has accelerated to such a level of dysfunction that we can no longer take for granted the day-to-day work of ensuring the well-functioning of basic social institutions.  We granted Congress the opportunity to redeem its inexcusable failure in not reaching agreement earlier this year on the debt ceiling through an extended negotiation through this week via an appointed Super Committee — and they failed again.  They literally gave up, threw up their hands and said sorry, we can’t find a way to do this, “we” cannot agree.  The “we” referenced is the “we in Congress, not the “we who elected them.”  It is not so much that they failed to make “a deal” as much as it is that they failed to prove the vitality of our democracy, that at its core our celebrated process of governing by, for, and of the people is dependable.  Government failed, and that is not OK.

Last week we learned that one former Speaker of the House does not see an issue with accepting a seven-figure payday from now bankrupt Freddie Mac for providing consulting services of an undefined value other than to say its business model was problematic.  Another former Speaker of the House does not think it necessary to respond to the question of whether being invited to participate in an IPO is a potential conflict of interest for an elected official entrusted with legislating financial policies.  Neither of those is OK.

We also recently got to hear the lavishly compensated CEOs of Fannie and Freddie tell a Congressional panel that they needed to have discretion to continue to pay taxpayer funded bonuses to prevent further brain drain in their organizations.  What talent is it that they need to protect?  They are bankrupt.  Can they be less bankrupt with better paid people to mop up the remains?  National unemployment is still above 9%, many of those people with accounting degrees and MBAs who really want to work.  Bonuses paid from tax dollars are not OK.

Police at UC Davis assaulted non-violent demonstrators with pepper spray.  We have seen the video; there was no threat to the police, the demonstrators were exercising their Constitutional right to free speech and assembly.  For that, they were attacked by armed authorities.  That is not OK.

MF Global “can’t find” over a billion dollars of client money.  Their recent bankruptcy filing reveals sloppy and incomplete accounting throughout a period of aggressive and speculative bets on European debt.  The firm’s CEO was a former Governor, Senator, and CEO of one of the most substantial financial firms in the world.  That is not OK.

Students at a university rioted because their head football coach was terminated in light of a child abuse investigation where he did not report allegations to legal authorities.  They rioted — destroyed public property — because they were angry their football team might not have the leadership to continue winning.  That is not OK.

We also were asked to believe that pizza is a vegetable and should be classified as such for children in our schools.  Even Kermit the Frog found this appalling (for those who missed it, last weekend the Muppets dropped by SNL).   As Seth and Kermit expertly teed it up: Really, the food lobby actually thinks this is acceptable marketing?  No, that is not OK.

These are just a sample of the kind of news we hear daily, as if none of it is out of the ordinary, and all of it will somehow correct itself.  We are numb to hearing of crisis and scandal, and as angry as we become, we turn the page knowing that the next story will break soon enough, and we have to keep our wits about us.  Many of us wonder if these are extraordinary times, or just another chapter in our nation over which we will triumph.

I do think we will triumph, that the bad news can’t go on forever, but I see a very definite trend that will have to become primary before we get from here to there.  What is missing is leadership — true leadership, a sense that management is not good enough, that trust is a higher virtue and brings with it a burden of selfless decision-making.  We won’t get from here to there with party politics, blame, opportunism, poorly constructed argument, well-crafted media bites, or even anger.  We will get there when we chose courageous, well-versed leaders — government, business, and social – who have chosen the path of leadership for the right reasons, where integrity in articulating a vision and administering an agenda far outweighs the perks and power of the office.  The rewards of leadership for those who have enjoyed it as intended are more intrinsic that extrinsic, much less tangible than we imagine from headlines of cynical manipulation, but until we elevate leadership that embraces a giving ethos into high level authority, we aren’t going to get from here to there.  We have to be involved in the selection process by the act of choosing to follow, and we have to demand better.  If we don’t, we’ll continue to be assaulted with more of the same — just like the pepper spray.

As I have written before, it is an honor and a privilege to lead.  If someone chooses to lead, they consistently must accept their responsibilities de facto with the interests of others put before their own gain.  When they do not, they compromise our trust and the fabric of social interaction suffers injury.  Let it happen too often and the very institutions we most cherish can lose all their meaning and authority.  This is not lofty, it is everyday behavior.  Leadership means accepting trust and being willing to be held to the standard of evaluation for that trust.  All leaders can benefit from a remedial lesson in why they have their jobs; if they fail to remind themselves, we need to help jog their memories.

This week we celebrate Thanksgiving.  We express appreciation for the blessings in our lives, for all we have that is good, for the good fortune we enjoy.  That does not mean we offer reprieve to the status quo or give a pass to those who have forgotten what they owe as a result of asking for our trust.  If someone has chosen as a life commitment to protect and to serve, he or she needs to be held accountable for that commitment.  They are responsible for the portfolio they have accepted to oversee or lead.  We are responsible to ensure that they act in the public interest where humility outweighs dissonance as most befits this gracious holiday.  Yes, really.

Each year about this time I like to take a few minutes to share some of my gratitude with colleagues. Given the industry in which we work, it is sometimes hard to separate our business interests in the holiday season from our own more personal sense of human enrichment, but let me try. True enough, the holidays can be seen through the eyes of materialism, and indeed given our dependence and expectations on retail behavior this time of year, it is too easy to allow oneself to “Get Scrooged” without seeing some of the more enlightened generosity that is all around us. Forgive me, Shelley and I attended the annual tour of Trans-Siberian Orchestra this week, so I am in a highly festive and particularly reflective frame of mind. The work we do for our customers and each other is much more than a feeding of the virtual cash register for tabulation by the National Retail Federation. The work we do has meaning because we have chosen to share this time together and infuse it with meaning. It is there if you want to see it, and it is always there for me in each of your own creative contributions and team celebrations.

Let me start with the basics, I am thankful for all of the wonderful people around me each day. As I always say, I have good days and bad days but I never have boring days. The work we do is interesting because the people we share it with are universally interesting. Each day I see your passion expand, your thinking blossom, your communication flourish, and your expectations of yourselves and each other rise to new heights. This isn’t just invigorating for me, it is sustenance. There is reason to come to work each day as long as there is purpose in the day’s activity, and sometimes that purpose is simply rooted in the ability to learn something new. I can honestly share with you that I learn something new from the imagination that surrounds us each day, and I have no sense that has likelihood of disappointing me anytime soon.

I am thankful for the good fortune of being alive at this precise moment in history. To truly appreciate and understand the power of the Internet is to have lived without it for so many years before. I used to say this about the personal computer, that to discover it as an artist’s palette was for me not a continuation of history, but a reinvention of history. Just as many of our parents were born into a world without television, the advancement in democracy of being able to see news from around the world each day was almost a miracle, as was radio before that, and widely available print before that. To be alive today at the inception of the digital age is to me a gift as well as an invitation to have a profound impact on establishing a set of norms that are as evolutionary as they are unknown. Our younger kids see texting and mobile communications and even social networking as quite ordinary, if you were here before them, my sense is you share my awe in the privilege of codifying the extraordinary.

This takes me to my third thank you for the year, appreciation for being able to have even the smallest impact on reaching out to change our world. Our technology has impact, our creativity is unbounded, and our business relationships are honest and crafted around the principle of win-win-win: a win for us is a win for our partners and a win for our customers. You may not always get to work in a culture that embraces notions of empowerment, I certainly have had my own ups and downs over the years in various places I have worked. Yet more than that, we get do fun things like embrace Make-A-Wish kids, give thousands of prize dollars away to families who need it, offer great discounts to families who might not get by without them, help people make the world slightly greener by encouraging them not to drive somewhere if they can shop at home. We also save moms time, lots of time, time that can be better spent with their families enjoying more moments than they might otherwise spend away from home on errands and chores. No, it’s not the work of Mother Theresa, but it is very positive and uplifting, especially when you read all those comments each day from people saying they “love” what we do for them. That’s a powerful word, and each morning I read it in our customer comments, I know we are doing something right.

So I wonder, are we thankful enough? Can we make Thanksgiving something more than a time to power-eat and start charging up our credit cards on the big sales days that follow?As we enjoy two days away from the office, what is it that we can reflect on that keeps us coming to the office? Thanks for our incomes – I am sure there are varying levels of satisfaction there, but to have a regular income is still unfortunately rare in world of six billion people. Thanks for the people who sit next to us, or in front of us, or in the next room over – again, I am sure there are some around us whom you like more than others, but then again, I am confident that every one of us is within talking distance of at least one or two people we really appreciate, and as I said, don’t take that as a given, it will not always be the case. Encouragement to pursue excellence – OK, I know there are cynics out there who say this is just work-speak, but I promise you it is not, we have created an environment where we expect you to do your best and create work that makes you immensely proud, you’d be missing an important moment if you didn’t embrace and enjoy that, a lot of places it really is just work-speak. And finally, memories and future foundations – the accomplishments we enjoy, the education we give and receive from each other, the stories we are creating to enjoy at a later date, all of that is worth a moment of meditation; time escapes us in precious illusion, and though you are likely to forget this project or that deadline in the years out, if you look around you and thank your colleagues from time to time for even the smallest favor, you just might be making history, as that could become a moment you will share for years to come.

Freedom is such a difficult concept to appreciate because most of us have always known it, it is in the fabric of our society. Yet again, look around, is it the norm or a gift we can cherish? As we keep the women and men who serve us in uniform at the top of our thoughts this time of year, perhaps we can also reflect on just what it means to have the lives that we do, where we can pursue career aspirations and friendships and family and creative contributions to our world all at the same time. As I type these words, it all seems like a pretty big deal to me. I wouldn’t take it for granted. To be thankful is to truly enjoy all that we have, and as I look around our company, I see that we all have so much. I am never sure that I can personally be thankful enough.

I hope you are all enjoying this special time of year, it comes with a lot of work stress and family stress and Scrooge-Stress! Yet the journey is the reward, so let’s do our best to enjoy it and share it and where it makes sense, be thankful. You’d be surprised, it really can be a magical world when you look for the magic in each of the people around you. I see it, so very clearly!

Happy Thanksgiving!

Originally published: 11/22/07

Last week one individual, 27-year-old art gallery owner Kristen Christian, kicked off a true grass-roots movement that came to be known as Bank Transfer Day.  No one told her to do it, no giant entity or association formally backed her cause, she just did it and thousands of people got on board.  Since September 29, 2011 when Bank of America announced its $5.00 debit card fee, as many as 650,000 new credit union accounts have been opened.  This past week, Bank of America changed its mind about charging that fee.  You think they aren’t listening?  Maybe not as carefully as they should be, but it is clear some message got through.  This is how it should be.

Companies must never forget why they exist — to serve customers.  When they forget that, they are on a slippery slope.  Corporations can have a tendency to be inward thinking, they can focus with intense obsession on their internal issues, efficiencies, operations, politics, succession plans, and tactics for improved profitability.  Internal company struggles can become engrossing to the exclusion of more important matters, like creativity and customer focused quality.  When companies forget about customers, the other stuff ceases to matter.  They need to be reminded of that often and with passion.  Don’t feel bad when you complain or move your business, you are helping them.  They need to hear from us.  Our voice is vital to their survival.  If they don’t believe that and embrace it as a core value, creative destruction will do its job.

As I have written before, we are customers, we cannot allow ourselves to be reduced to the notion of being treated as consumers.  Customer service in a company needs to be both reactive and proactive:

Reactive customer service is when you call them to identify an issue or concern, the person on the phone or chat or responding to your email should do everything possible to solve your problem.  Great companies love these inbound calls, because each contact point is an opportunity to bond a customer for life.  If something goes wrong and a customer service person “makes the save,” your loyalty and lifetime value to that company can increase exponentially.  Conversely, if the customer service person manhandles the “win-back” moment, not only are you likely to be gone, you are likely to take a few dozen of your friends or the company’s future prospects from them, maybe more with the power of social media.  Again, you are doing the company a favor.  If you give them a chance to be helpful and they succeed, you have invested in their brand.  If they let you down, you teach them a lesson they need to learn quickly before their brand is permanently damaged.

Proactive customer service is the job of listening to customers before an action occurs, reading the trends and common themes that flow through the data bases of feedback systems.  Did banks know of the anger of the 650,000 customers who opened credit union accounts last month?  Some did and some didn’t.  Did they act in advance?  Did yours?  Why not?  If they are taking your business for granted, they deserve to lose it.  We all have options.  Proactive customer service focuses on retention activity in advance of crisis.  After crisis, it’s a public relations campaign, the spin doctors join the fray.  That may have worked a generation ago, but not so much today.  When we go, we are gone.

The Bank Transfer Day effort was careful to acknowledge that although it shared some inspiration from the activities of Occupy Wall Street, it was not part of that movement, it was its own thing.  Here again, the idea of customer voice is the key takeaway — what is being said, what is being heard, how can this help make systems function better?  Last week in the Wall Street Journal, Jeff Greene suggested the same basic idea, that “We Should Listen to the 99%” because they “are giving us a chance to address our problems before they grow worse.”  Neither Greene nor I are suggesting that every idea being articulated by OWS is necessarily actionable, but there is most certainly upside in listening and nothing but downside in ignoring the voices of passion.  If people have something to say, business is always well advised to listen.

And how about Congress, where the public approval rating dropped to 9%, are these elected officials not in need of working much harder at hearing?  Never has the need for the public’s voice been in more demand, and yet, as so many of us keep asking, is anyone listening?  The debt ceiling follow-up deadline for the Super Committee is November 23, just weeks away.  I don’t sense a consensus plan on the horizon or an amicable resolution, seems like business as usual in Washington to me.  Maybe we aren’t making enough phone calls or sending enough emails, we are much too polite.

It takes courage to speak out, to draw attention to oneself in a public forum and ask to be heard.  Likewise it takes courage in a corporation to align with the customer and advocate for improvements in the enterprise that cause customers to embrace goods and services along the lines of brand.  How much do banks spend on advertising to drive people through their doors?  What is the lifetime value of your business to a bank, to any company for that matter?  Can the banks not offer us valuable services over the course of a lifetime that produce reasonable profits?  Of course they can, or there would be no such sector.  While corporations worry about driving the value of their share prices, is there any better way to create value than to address customer needs and build lifelong customer relationships?  These are the backbone of profits, not much else that isn’t short-term financial engineering.  When innovation is applied to addressing real customer needs, good things happen for buyers and sellers.

It is so easy to give up and think that one individual cannot make a difference, but then someone like Kristen Christian comes along, fires up a Facebook page and shows us that there is power in the fabric of our nation.  That power of responsiveness is at the core of what can make a business great.  Our economic system can serve us well if we demand that it be responsive.  Don’t be quiet.  If you have something to say, say it and share it and drive the companies who need to earn your respect to work harder for the privilege to serve you.  When businesses listen they can only get better, help them to hear you by being brave and bold and honest.  A robust feedback loop makes good business sense, and everyone can have a say in that.  This is a business proposal with unlimited potential.

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