Thoughts: The 5 “Wisest” Things I Have Heard (A work in progress)

I wanted to build a collection of things that I have heard, read or somehow otherwise learned that I hold closest. Each one is to be tied to a story and together would comprise a “story-based” introduction to these “wisest” thoughts.

The first one is quite easy.

(1) Not all customers are customers you want to keep. I first learned this at a Fred Pryor Seminar on “Exceptional Customer Service.” This was back in 1997 when I had become an IT Manager and provided service to a couple of hundred departmental clients. I thought I needed help with appearing “supportive” to clients but actually managing them to minimize the demand on my time. The seminar speaker emphasized that a positive customer support experience is far more valuable than advertising. Where advertising may generally have less than 30% effectiveness (if you’re lucky), customer retention in the high 90% range or so is quite an impressive performance. So guess which one costs more on a per customer basis? Also, there isn’t anything much better than the happiest customers singing praise of you or your product. But what about those customers who seem to live to be attention-hogs or born-complainers? Lose them – disinherit them, if you can. Tell them outright that you don’t want them using your product or services. If they’re in your department, have them look elsewhere for help. Even if they tell a colleague or a friend, how much damage could they cause? Not much because even their colleagues are already familiar with their negative behavior and don’t trust their opinions (we see this phenomenon on Yelp! today). I became more attached to this principal while in CRO at Handspring. We let go of up to 5 customers during my 22 months there because of their poor demeanor – stopped the support effort, took back the product, processed the refund, and told them to stop doing business with us. This let us focus on the good customers and kept things moving forward. While intentionally cutting off customers seems counter-intuitive at first, it is an excellent option to be robust.

Here’s an interesting related article: http://www.inc.com/magazine/20091001/youre-fired-getting-rid-of-bad-customers.html

(2) Defer the Bug. When you’re creating something, there will often be an imperfection or a bug. If you’re working to a deadline, you need to prioritize the bugs then decide which ones need to get fixed first and which ones (a) get deemed acceptable because the risk of occurrence is extremely low or the outcomes are not catastrophic, or (b) get deferred (i.e., will get carried to the bug list for the next product refresh). From my experience at Handspring, a lot of bugs get deferred and often through more than one product refresh. The lesson here for product developers is that you should do your diligence in seeking bugs but fixing them takes quite a lot of emotional intelligence, otherwise nothing would ever get released.

(3) Timing is everything. I learned this mostly through investing. There are market timing strategies and Value Line has timeliness ratings on stocks it analyzes. I have also seen where new and brilliant technologies were just too early and slow in the early adopter phase and failed to reach widespread adoption. Sometimes, a poorer technology  with better timing has succeeded. We also may have heard that timing is critical in acting and even telling jokes. It affects precision and accuracy in sports.

(4) Underpromise. Overdeliver. Seems obvious when you hear it. Not so easy when you have to do it. Competitive fear seems to drive “overpromise” resulting in a huge “underdeliver.” Happens in the movies, in technology, in finance, in business,… If you’re in control of something though, make sure you set expectations appropriately and don’t set your audience up for disappointment.

(5) Men are from Mars. Women are from Venus. This is actually just an example of a collection of statements that refer to how a group that appears to be one may actually be a mixture of two. There are left-handed, right-handed issues – interesting ones being tools favoring the majority who are right-handers, and sometimes you can find tools being made for left-handers. There’s also left-brain, right brain and how different they are; fascinating that within one side, there are sections which control different things – my favorite example is how former US Representative Gabbrielle Giffords went through music therapy and used singing to communicate via language. See http://abcnews.go.com/Health/w_MindBodyNews/gabby-giffords-finding-voice-music-therapy/story?id=14903987. Then one of my personal favorites is that girls play youth basketball for different reasons than boys (and as a corollary that coaching girls and coaching boys at basketball requires two very different plans and approaches).