Crossing the River

It has often been remarked that Outer Space (spelled always with capital letters) isn’t actually that far away from where you are sitting right now. Low Earth Orbit, where you will find the International Space Station (and where until recently you would have found Space Shuttles) is closer to my house than Los Angeles is; in fact I’m closer to much of it than I am to Chicago. What’s remarkable isn’t the distance so much as the speed – even a low orbit requires getting up to a velocity relative to the surface of the Earth that most people will never experience, which in turn requires an inconveniently large rocket and an equally inconvenient place from which to launch it. When I was a child, the concept of commercial space flight was preposterous nonsense; the stuff of bad science fiction and obviously centuries or millennia away. It took the full authority and resources of the world’s two most powerful nations just to go to space, and even if smaller countries were able to duplicate that feat, there was no way any private citizen could…

Of course, we’ve heard similar statements made about a great many other achievements, including one with which you are probably using to read this blog post (assuming that anyone is reading this blog post). Still, there remains something daunting about commercial space flights. Of course, Sir Richard Branson can launch Virgin Galactic; he’s Sir Richard Branson, after all, and Space Ship One and Space Ship Two are just sight-seeing excursion craft. Sure, Space-X managed to get a commercial cargo ship into orbit, but that’s also a company owned and run by extraordinary people, and it’s still only one company. Sure, Boeing could develop a new private space launcher, but they’re one of the largest defense contractors in the world, and they’re using serious money from NASA to fund the project. And sure, there’s Sierra Nevada Corporation, and its Space Exploration Systems division, as mentioned in a previous post. So, let me ask you, how many private companies have to go to space before we stop making these excuses?

Well, if you said five, your ship appears to have just come in – and it looks like it’s a spaceship. A Google News listing takes us to a story on the International Business News site about the Orbital Sciences Corporation’s Cygnus spacecraft, which able to dock with the International Space Station on Sunday morning. Actually, “dock” may be overstating the case; the Cygnus was launched into orbit where it managed to get close enough to the space station (and match velocities well enough) for the crew to snag it with the robot arm and bring it in. But since that’s the same way every other kind of unmanned ship docks with the station, maybe that isn’t important. And while it’s true that the Cygnus isn’t certified for human transportation yet, which makes it more of a high-speed cargo pod than an actual space ship, the company expects to work out the remaining details and start transporting people to the station by the end of its contract in 2016…

But what is truly amazing about the Cygnus is that it was made by a private company for a contract with NASA to carry about 20,000 kilos (44,093 pounds) of cargo into space on eight different flights over a four-year period – and so far it looks as though the company is actually going to complete its end of the contract. And while $90,000 per kilo – about $41,000 a pound – from the surface of the Earth to the Space Station still isn’t cheap, it’s already much lower than the prices you would have encountered just a few years ago – and still falling. If actual competition were to appear – if every company and every national government interested in transporting cargo into space were to start getting multiple bids on every contract they set up – then fantasy has become fact once again, and within our own lifetimes may actually become commonplace…

In one lifetime my grandparents watched our world go from biplanes made of wood and fabric to the Space Shuttle, our top speed go from 30 or 40 mph to 25,000, and flight itself go from a suicidal curiosity to a routine part of our world. In my lifetime I have already seen us move from vacuum tubes to nanotechnology and from magnetic tape to cloud computing. And in the past five years we have seen the number of private companies going into space rise from zero to three, with at least two more to follow in the next year or two. What will we come to regard as commonplace by the time I am old man? And, even more to the point, what impossible, fantastical, preposterous rubbish will become reality by then?

Some versus All

Every semester when I begin the first day of my class, I like to tell my students that before the term is over I’m going to learn things from them, and I will do my best to teach them at least as many things. This is actually the case for any teacher, given that it’s not possible to teach anyone anything without learning more about the subject yourself in the process, but it’s probably even more correct in the case of business teachers. As I like to point out, I probably know more about business, or at least management, than any one member of the class – I’ve had twenty years of experience and two Master’s degrees; I would hope I know a few things about my subject. But there is no way I know more about business than the entire class put together; even allowing for just a few years of work and consumer experience for each person, the 40 of them have several times more years of business experience than I’ve been alive…

This makes cases where the people who run school systems assume that they are smarter, cleverer and more knowledgeable than all of their students combined seem all the more preposterous. Collectively, your students possess an amazing amount of knowledge, and a frightening mutual ability to solve problems, work out puzzles and generally outthink you. In the case of a security protocol or a lockout code, you are essentially betting that you (or whoever wrote the code) are smarter than the collective intelligence of hundreds or thousands of bright, curious, imaginative people – and that’s just counting the smart kids. Which makes the fact that students in Los Angeles required only a matter of days to hack the iPads they were issued by the school district an event so obvious it’s hard to imagine why nobody saw it coming from the beginning…

You can read the NPR story about it here if you want to, but the facts seem clear enough. The Los Angeles Unified School District signed a $30 million deal with Apple to provide iPads to all of their students for use in a variety of digital and distance learning applications, and then equipped the devices with software to both allow the schools to track the location of each iPad and also to restrict what web sites each unit could access. Less than a week later over 200 units had been “hacked” to get around the restrictions, and unless the software patches introduced this week are better than the original programming, there is reason to believe that all of the rest of them will be before much longer. As a teacher myself, I can’t even think of a bad metaphor for how obvious these events are. A much better question, at least from a management standpoint, is what are we going to do about it?

Keeping our students off of restricted web sites isn’t really possible. If the government would allow us to jam all wireless transmissions into and out of the classroom we might be able to keep our students from updating their Facebook page while we’re actually talking to them, but the FCC won’t even consider such an action, and just asking nicely (or threatening to lower grades) does not appear to be of much use. And, as the linked story makes very clear, if we take away the official iPads our students will just turn to smart phones, tablets and other devices they already have. It’s possible that if the District were to invest enough money in encryption software they might be able to make the restriction stick, but I can’t help thinking that’s just throwing good money after bad…

In a broader context, of course, this whole situation mirrors the conflict between all managers (who want to see more work getting done) and all workers (who want to get paid as much money for as little work as possible). The District can’t compel the students to spend all of their time, or even the time they are supposed to be spending, in approved fashion, any more than a manager can. What they can do is borrow the same standard most line managers use, which is simply that if you work is completed (correctly) in the time required, then I don’t care what else you’re doing or how you are spending your remaining time. It may not be the authoritarian method of which the District seems so fond, and it certainly won’t help them to establish or maintain discipline. But it’s probably more effective in the long run than just giving all of the pads back to Apple…

Almost Obvious

This past weekend I noticed a story on the CNN Technology page about a new development that promises to save the United States millions – if not billions – in defense spending, while potentially also creating hundreds of new jobs and eliminating thousands of tons of air pollution. It’s a product prototype that has the potential to complete several different (critically needed) missions at lower cost than any existing platform, and should in theory be the kind of thing that business leaders brag about and Congress approves the moment it appears. The catch appears to be that this particular product is coming from a non-traditional source – and that no one asked for it…

You can pick up the CNN story here if you want to, but the basic idea is that Textron (the company that makes, among other things, Cessna airplanes and E-Z Go golf carts) has teamed up with a small company called AirLand Enterprises (which was founded for this purpose) to create a low-cost, relatively low-speed military aircraft specifically intended for Air National Guard and other lower-intensity combat settings. According to the joint venture’s website, the airplane, called the Scorpion, is ideally suited for “…irregular warfare, border patrol, maritime surveillance, emergency relief, counter-narcotics and air defense operations," all things traditionally done by all-up strike-fighter and fighter-bomber types like the F-15E Strike Eagle and F-16 Falcon at much higher costs – but which don’t have to be…

Company figures indicate that the Scorpion will cost about one-eighth as much to operate as an F-16 (about $3,000 per air hour compared with $24,899 for the F-16); the aircraft is also expected to be much less expensive to produce. The problem is that the U.S. Air Force did not request such a vehicle, and has so far showed no interest in the program whatsoever. It’s partly that the Air Force has committed itself to the F-35 Lightning II as an eventual F-16 replacement, which hasn’t been easy given (unconfirmed) reports that the F-35 can’t fly in bad weather, can’t hover or handle short runways, and so on. But it must also be noted that the US military has had a long history of ambivalence towards airplanes of any sort that aren’t sleek, photogenic, futuristic, and generally pointy – even when such types are not suited to the mission at hand…

To take the obvious case, much of the Air Force leadership never really warmed up to the A-10 Thunderbolt II attack craft, affectionately known as the Warthog to most of the people who have flown one. Despite the airplane’s extraordinary success in both Gulf Wars, the Air Force has been trying to phase it out almost since the lumbering, unglamorous – but supremely effective – air-to-ground platform first came on-line. The Navy had similar problems with the “drumstick-shaped” A-6 Intruder, which has now been replaced with sleek, supersonic (and pointy) F/A-18 Hornet types. Three generations of pilots have complained that it is almost impossible to fly effective close air support missions in a machine optimized for twice the speed of sound, but three generations of politicians could tell you for a certainty that such a task is still easier than trying to get funding for a new weapons system that isn’t either eye-catching or loaded with useless pork (or often both) through Congress…

The future of the Scorpion project is still up in the air as of this writing. Of course, Textron doesn’t have the prototype ready for trials yet, so perhaps things will be different once they can demonstrate the aircraft’s performance in person. But with no requests for the product – and as yet, no interest in the prototype – this is going to be a hard sell. I’m hoping that the Scorpion receives at least some support, and that the company is able to sell enough of them to at least prove the concept. In the long run, we need the capabilities that this vehicle is supposed to have, and we need the economy of operation that the design promises the end user, but the most important aspect of the whole project may turn out to be proving that entrepreneurship isn’t dead in the aircraft industry, that new airplanes don’t have to cost hundreds of billions of dollars to design or take twenty years to get ready, and that the U.S. military can still recognize a good idea they didn’t ask for, even if it isn’t pointy…

Because if any of those things is no longer true, I’m pretty sure we’ve got a bigger problem…

The Ethics of Exceptions

This week I had a number of students ask me for exceptions to existing class policy for a variety of reasons. Some of them had real-world commitments that will interfere with scheduled events (including at least one case where it's a job interview conflicting with an exam), while others had managed to screw something up and were asking for clemency - or at least an extension of deadline. This isn't my first class at MSU, and accordingly I've made provision for most of these questions in the syllabus, including instructions for how and when it is acceptable to ask for an exception to our usual rules, but that hasn't kept some of my students from ignoring instructions, blowing off deadlines, or just doing what they want to do (instead of what I told them to do) and then requesting a special exception for them alone. In other words, it's a typical week in the life of pretty much every classroom teacher, ever. But it did get me thinking about the larger ethical question as it applies to life away from the classroom...

Let's consider, for example, the case of a line manager and an employee who wants permission to do something that isn't normally permitted under company regulations. In some cases, of course, this may involve violations of Federal law, state law, local ordinances, the Generally Accepted Accounting Principles, the laws of business, the laws of physics, the laws of economics, or may simply involve complete fiduciary misconduct, in which case the line manager can just point out that such an exception will get both the manager and the employee fired, sent to Federal prison, or in extreme cases, killed (either by offended stockholders, offended customers, offended physicists, or by the aforementioned laws of physics). But sometimes you will get a request that isn't illegal or counter to company policy, but is outside the scope of normal operations. How do we evaluate such a request?

First off, we need to consider how granting such a request will impact our regular operations. Giving someone an hour off of work because a close relative needs them to donate a pint of blood for a critical operation isn't a circumstance that will happen often, nor should missing one hour out of a 40-hour (or possibly 50-hour or 60-hour) work week make a lot of difference to the productivity of the unit as a whole. And even if multiple members of the team are called upon to do this, the overall impact on work accomplished shouldn't amount to much, especially when compared to the negative effect that denying such a request would have. Making that exception for anything less critical, however, will almost certainly have consequences...

Once we have made even the most minor exception for even the most benign reason, the issue can always be raised that we did so in another case, but are not willing to do so in this case. In practice, this means that if we allow a twenty-year veteran of our department to leave work an hour early on a Friday when everything is done for the week and no rush projects are expected we will almost certainly have to deal with the department’s resident troublemaker demanding time off during the middle of the work day in the midst of a major crisis on the grounds that we made an exception for the other guy. And heaven help us if the troublemaker is able to claim that favoritism was extended to the other employee or that discrimination is being practiced against them…

No one wants to be the sort of by-the-book douche-nozzle who insists that everyone clock in and out on the dot of starting/ending time every day. But by the same token, no one wants to be having to explain why an exception was made that one time but can’t be this time, either. Ultimately, the reason companies have rules is so that everyone does get treated the same way, and the reason some managers are so dogmatic about obeying them is simply because of the consequences if they don’t. So I have to ask: is it worth the cost to morale to have set rules and consistently enforce them, even when the “kindly” thing to do would mean making exceptions? Is it worth having everyone break the rules whenever they want to (or claim unfair preferences were made whenever they can’t) in return for showing compassion when you want to? Where do you draw that line, and who gets to draw it?

It’s worth thinking about…

No Excuses

I noted with some snarky amusement a story that appeared on one of the Gawker pages the other day, about a lapse in customer relations right out of a comedy sketch. It appears there is a start-up delivery service called Postmates that bills itself as being able to deliver anything you want from within the same city (San Francisco and London so far) that they are based in within a 1-hour window, and their satisfaction rate isn’t quite as good as they would like. A week or so ago a customer who was not satisfied with the service she received sent an email complaining about the issue to this company, whereupon it was escalated up the chain of command until the CEO received it. The CEO gave his people instructions for handling the case the way he wanted, and ended with the notation to his staff to also tell the customer to f*ck off. This would have passed unnoticed, except the CEO hit “reply all” and effectively copied the customer on this message…

This isn’t a new story, really; the basic idea has been around a lot longer than email. The Snopes.com urban legends site has version of this scenario – when a company screws up, sends a letter of apology, but fails to recognize that a note saying “send this guy the usual grovel” has been left attached to the letter – that go back for decades. It does seem particularly egregious when this sort of mistake is made by a web-based service company – a company which, in fact, exists for no other purpose than to provide a specific service to customers, and operates entirely online. It also seems remarkable that a company that owes its very existence to the rise of the Internet and email technologies still has people running it who don’t really understand how “reply all” works. The concept that the CEO in our story does know how his email works but was unable to use it properly would be even more daunting…

Now, this story isn’t an atrocity. The company did, in fact, come up with some solution that satisfied the customer, to the extent that when interviewed about this episode she said she accepted the CEO’s apology. Unfortunately, it wasn’t good enough to convince her that the expletive was either a joke or a typo, and it seems unlikely she will be using the service again. Shortly thereafter, the story got loose and now millions of scruffy bloggers are mocking Postmates in cities and countries where their service doesn’t even exist. It’s a completely preventable problem, and while the short-term effects should clear up after a single Internet news cycle (e.g. they already have), the long-term effects could still be devastating in areas like capital development (who is going to invest in a company that does things like this). And yet, that’s still not the worse customer service mistake we saw in the past week…

A story that ran in the (London) Daily Mail on the same day presented the case of a supermarket chain in the UK that managed to sell a Muslim family packaged foods that did not meet their dietary restrictions – which I’ve mentioned in earlier posts really is a vicious cultural insult – and then, as an apology offered the family a bottle of alcohol, which is also forbidden by their religion. One could argue that this was just a packaging mistake – and a blunder by a low-level customer service agent who was probably operating way above his or her pay grade – except that a similar mistake could get someone killed, if the mislabeled food is an allergen, and a company that feeds 11 million people each day should be able to afford managers and supervisors who have some understanding of their local customers…

In both cases, preventing the original problem was entirely within the company’s abilities, and fixing the situation after the fact (or at least keeping it from getting any worse) would have required better training, better supervision, and at least a hint of understanding why customers are important and why we can’t afford to lose all of them, but would have required very little actual work. Not taking that time, failing to train those people, and just using the same email conversation to handle everything may have saved time, or kept a few people from duties they found tedious, but the long-term costs could sink either of these companies. The sad truth is that, ultimately, both of these scenarios are actually cases of management failure, and the only way we’re ever going to stop such things from happening is to train better managers…

Old Days

There was a notice in the Long Beach (California) Press-Telegram this past week regarding the completion and departure of the 223rd and last C-17 Globemaster III from the Boeing facility in that city. To most people, I suppose, it's probably just another example of factories closing and jobs being lost as companies leave Southern California for cheaper parts of the US, and business in general migrates to lower-cost options in other countries. And that's fair enough, really; unless you were there in the old days, it's a notice of no special interest. Boeing will still provide service, spares and support for the C-17 fleet, and if they bid successfully on future Air Force contracts they can build the airplanes somewhere else without any real effect on the company. If the company can't find anything else to use the Long Beach facility for it would be bad news for the people who work there - and for the economy in Southern California - but the ongoing survival of Boeing is probably a bigger business issue. It's just that I was there in the old days...

When I was kid growing up in Southern California there were no major Boeing plants in the area; the powerhouse companies in Los Angles County were McDonnell-Douglas, Hughes Aircraft, Northrop and TRW. The area had a long history with the aerospace industry - or, at least, as long a history as you can have with an industry that has existed for less than 60 years at that point. Douglas had been based in the Los Angeles area since before its merger with McDonnell Aircraft, and the facility in Long Beach had been building transport aircraft (including the celebrated Douglas Commercial or DC line) since before World War II. After I got home from college I applied for a job with McDonnell-Douglas and went for a series of interviews at the Long Beach facility; although I didn't get the job (a degree in English and a love of airplanes isn't really a good set of credentials for a Technical Writer) I lived for the next three years just a couple of miles away from the plant...

Now, I understand that it's a different world from the one I remember. The United States doesn't have the budget to just purchase whatever ships, tanks or airplanes we want anymore, and with the end of the Cold War and the corresponding drawdown in our armed forces we don't need as much hardware to begin with. The fact is that the scene in Long Beach has been repeated all over the US, and given the correspondingly smaller chance of being randomly vaporized one night, I don't suppose that the lowering of international tensions is a bad thing. But I do worry about the damage all of this is doing to the American aerospace industry, to communities like Long Beach, and to grand traditions like aerospace companies and innovative new aircraft coming out of Los Angeles County...

Almost a century ago the fledgling airplane comanies came to California for much the same reasons the movie studios had: the land was cheap, the weather conditions made it possible to work on projects outside for much of the year, and the final product could be sent east in a small metal film cannister - or, in the case of the airplanes, just fly away on its own. I know that in the long run it's more important for the US aerospace industry as a whole to prosper, and that as long as we have overall  economic stability and sufficient military defense it doesn't really matter if powerful and graceful flying machines are being built and then flown away from a factory in Long Beach...

But despite the fact that I live in Michigan now - or possibly because of that - I still miss the old days back in Long Beach...

Gimmicks

Over the years I’ve encountered a number of business models based on unique, innovative, or just plain weird concepts – what are often thought of as “gimmicks,” especially by people outside the field of management. This isn’t always a fair assessment, of course; the term “gimmick” carries the connotation of something used in a con game to create the illusion of value when none actually exists, and many forms of business innovation offer real value to the customer. Still, it is difficult to blame an observer from applying the term to some of the more outlandish examples. There is always going to be some temptation to dismiss businesses of this type; to claim that they are not fundamentally sound, and are simply relying on the novelty of whatever specialty item or service they offer to the customer. And in some cases this is undoubtedly true – a combination singles bar and Laundromat did very well in Texas for a number of years, while a traffic school and wine-tasting operation in California did not stay open long enough for me to decide whether or not it was a joke…

What tends to get overlooked in these discussions is that all business models appear novel when first introduced, but some will continue to generate value for the customer even when the company becomes widely familiar, and some will prove difficult to imitate even after the particulars of the business model become well known. My favorite case to date is probably The Legal Grind, a business in Southern California that combines various aspects of a neighborhood legal clinic (consultations, referrals, self-help materials, etc.) with a coffee house. To the best of my knowledge, it’s the only venue in the world where you can get a latte and a bankruptcy – or a mocha and a divorce, if that’s what you need. Legend has it that the founder (a fully-qualified attorney) got fed up with traditional legal practice and wanted to open a coffee house, but people kept coming in and asking for legal advice – and a good idea is a good idea. Whether you’d consider this a coffee house with a legal service as a gimmick, or a legal service with a coffee house as a gimmick is up to you, but the firm has been in operation for over 18 years as of this writing, and has expanded into three locations now…

Then there’s the case of a “fully automated” restaurant in Germany. This isn’t actually a new story – I saw it on ABC News when they first ran the piece – but it was reprinted online this past week and struck me as a gimmick business that may or may not have staying power. The place is called Bagger’s, and their gimmick is that there is no waitstaff working there – you place your order on a touch screen at your table and your plates are delivered down a curving track by a gravity-feed system. It’s an arrangement that would be difficult to set up in a retail space where you couldn’t put the kitchen on the second floor, and it isn’t clear from context how you would send something back if it isn’t prepared correctly, but the real question from where I’m sitting is whether such an operation has any utility. Which is to say, does this arrangement offer any value to the customer above what you would expect from a more traditional method of service?

On the one hand, there would be no delay while you attempt to get the waiter’s attention or while you wait for a food runner to turn up with your plate. And there would be no issues with the waiter spilling soup on you; if the delivery system is working properly the only one who could spill anything would be you. And, at least in theory, if you wanted a drink refill, another plate of something, or to place a dessert order you could arrange for it by using the touch screen. But on the other hand, people enjoy some amount of human contact, and part of the service a traditional restaurant offers is people who will take your order, bring you what you’ve requested, and answer your questions, no matter how absurd any of this might me. People who, in fact, serve you…

I’m not sure the technical details can be easily overcome, and I’m not sure if anyone else is going to want to assume the costs of setting up the hardware or the risks inherent in a faulty delivery system spilling something hot onto a customer. But if we ever get such an operation in Central Michigan, I know I’d at least go and give it a look…

Airline Follies International – Part Deux

In yesterday’s post I mentioned the spectacular customer service failure sustained by Air Berlin after they managed to leave an entire flight’s worth of luggage behind at the airport – and then lose all track of it. There has been some speculation about how this happened – some observers have contended that the pilot was under pressure to keep to his schedule and left before any luggage had been loaded so as to arrive on time – but there’s very little doubt that this was a screw-up of truly legendary proportions. It also seems clear that someone in the airline’s hierarchy thought that using Twitter – and specifically using a Twitter bot, or expert system, to send form-letter responses to customers, would improve their situation by making the company look “hip” and “tech-savvy” and perhaps even “efficient.” Unfortunately, it appears to have made the company look even more cluelessly tone-deaf than they already did…

You can pick up the Slate story here again if you need it, but the outcome of this folly was as predictable as it was simple – except, perhaps, to the sort of people who still believe that the Internet is some kind of magic construct that can turn back time, create products (or even wads of cash!) out of thin air, or win you the hearts of customers. Using a Twitter account, or for that matter, Face Book posts, text messages, or emails, can improve customer relations by allowing your customers to gain access to your customer service personnel more easily, and receive answers much more quickly. Responding to customer inquiries using canned responses from an automated response software package (the online equivalent of recorded messages on an answering machine) not only prevents your customers from making contact in that fashion, it actually sends the message that you can’t even be bothered to hire a live person to man the Twitter account and send any meaningful reply…

Now, for all you or I know, there might have been nothing a Twitter representative could have told the passengers beyond what the automated response system was saying. It’s even possible that the recorded messages were telling the truth, and the company was entirely dependent on the airport’s lost-and-found personnel to handle the situation. But by confronting customers who were already angry with an automated response – by effectively sending the message of “we don’t care how angry you are or how badly we may have treated you” – the company was making an already bad situation far worse. And I can’t help thinking that anyone with even a room-temperature IQ would already have known that. It does not take complex statistical analysis or sophistical opinion sampling techniques to figure out that people will get angry when you take their money, lose their property, and then blow off their attempts to get it back…

I don’t know how many companies out there are using automated responses – or the more advanced “expert systems” to respond to routine customer inquiries, let alone how many are leaving those systems operating even when the situation is anything but routine. I do know that it doesn’t take all that long to type out 140 characters, and that unless every member of your customer service staff is working at maximum capacity on every shift, you could probably find someone around the office to write real replies to non-standard questions. Of course, that would require devoting time and money to actually providing superior customer service, rather than just talking about doing so, and we’ve all seen how appealing that is to companies who are trying to hold down labor costs. But the alternatives for failing to do so are becoming increasingly severe, and at this rate even a basic failure of this type runs the risk of having scruffy bloggers on the other side of the world mock you for the fun of it…

And of making potential customers who had never heard of your company before vow to take a bus – or ride a horse – before they will fly with you…

Airline Follies International

I’ve spent a lot of time on this blog making fun of the airlines – partly because they make such an easy target, and partly because they give me so many opportunities to work with. It’s not really fair, of course; shoving 200 or more people into a narrow aluminum tube and then making them sit quietly in uncomfortable seats for a few hours isn’t easy at the best of times. When you include factors that are largely out of your control (such as the price of jet fuel, the price of gate use fees, the cost of food, the cost of unionized labor) and factors that are completely out of your control (the weather, gate delays, runway and taxiway delays, grounding of all flights because someone from a competitor has crashed their airplane into a mountain, grounding of all flights because a competitor hasn’t been doing the required maintenance, or grounding of all flights because some idiot thought it would be okay to smuggle something that might or might not have been a bomb into a random plane somewhere at the airport) it’s amazing that anyone ever has a favorable flying experience. But the reason these companies make such easy targets lies in the fact that after allowing for all of those unforeseeable factors, they still follow management practices that a six-year-old would know better than to allow – and, apparently, things get even worse outside the US…

Take for example the recent case (August 9) when Air Berlin, Germany’s second largest passenger carrier, managed to leave almost 200 items of checked luggage off of a flight from Stockholm to Berlin – every single bag that was supposed to be on the plane wasn’t. Right off the bat, this would have been a huge issue in the US, where every bag is required by law to be on the same plane as the person who checked it. But leaving aside the fact that both the FAA and the FBI would have been all over an episode like that, if an American company managed to lose that much luggage all at one go they’d most likely have realized that they were about to have a planeload of angry passengers raising cane, and done something about it – even if that was just a bunch of groveling emails and phone calls, and maybe a public apology online or in a full-page ad in a newspaper. Because Americans love some schadenfreude, and they would have wound up being mocked by thousands of commentators who aren’t obscure, scruffy bloggers. And also because in this country, telling someone you can’t find their property and can’t help them get anyone else to help either will get you sued…

Apparently things are easier in Europe, however, because in the linked Slate article there are cases of people asking the airline (via Twitter) for help and being told to call the airport lost-and-found – and, on being told that the lost-and-found isn’t responding, the airline refusing to help any further. It’s hard to tell without any connection more direct than the Slate story, but it sounds as if the airline is blaming the airport, the airport is blaming the airline, and neither one is allowing the passengers involved to have a voice number with which to demand an explanation. Unless there’s an equivalent to the FAA, or possibly the U.S. Attorney’s office, somewhere in the EU it may take a private lawsuit to break this Catch-22 cycle – and I’m not sure how that works in Europe, either…

Now, unless you’re a fairly active world traveler this may never be an issue for you. There are, after all, other European carriers you could select, and a number of the US airlines do business in Europe. It may take a bit of effort to avoid being routed onto an Air Berlin flight through the One World Alliance, given that several US carriers are part of that program, and sometimes you can’t control who will be operating the airplane on the next leg of your voyage. The real lesson here isn’t so much “airlines are idiots” (we’ve been over that) or even “European airlines are bigger idiots” (one episode isn’t really enough to go on, even one as heinous as this one), but rather that social media by themselves aren’t going to be enough to gain any competitive advantage, let alone sustain one…

(Continued…)

On Bad Customers

I don't usually comment on other blogs; I have always felt that if I'm going to start that kind of thing it will eventually reach the point where someone is blogging about the blog that someone wrote about somebody blogging about another blog - at which point things will finally have gotten out of hand. But I make the occasional exception, when I feel that someone needs a wider audience, or an author needs to take an idea even further. And in the case of Matt Walsh's recent post about bad customers, I think both apply...

If you didn't catch it - and there are around 100,000,000 blogs out there, so you might not have - Mr. Walsh suggested to a patron whom he witnessed having a meltdown in a fast-food joint that maybe the reason she "always" gets bad customer service is that she is a bad customer. That is, anybody who would spend that much time yelling, screaming and cursing in public over something as trivial as a condiment being left on a junk food sandwich costing a dollar or so is most likely a miserable human being who believes that it is perfectly acceptable to treat minimum-wage employees like crap just because there is nothing they can do about it. That being the case, there's effectively no chance that this person won't find something wrong in almost any customer service situation, because what they really want is the chance to exert dominance over someone...

Now, it is possible that this is just an overt symptom of the entitlement we've seen in almost every other aspect of modern life; as a college instructor I've certainly seen my share of students who believe they should receive credit for work they haven't done, or even that they should received top marks for assignments done incorrectly. But what concerns me the most is the cumulative effect all of this is having on business as a whole. Most people will never have a screaming tantrum in the middle of a junk food stand, because most of us have matured a bit since we were two, but every time you live through something like this it makes the more ordinary rudeness we all have to endure seem more acceptable - or, at least, less important. And believe me on this, the effect is even worse when you're the one on the receiving end of the meltdown...

I'm not saying that everyone who has ever had a miserable excuse for a customer go off on them is going to end up doing the same thing; far from it. Most of us who have worked customer service jobs go out of our way to be nice to the people stilling doing that kind of work. I am saying that the customer service standard common when my generation were children is rare today, and when it occurs at all it is generally considered "old-fashioned" and most likely occupies a major part of the company's strategy. As time goes by, fewer companies are really trying to "take care of their customers" in the traditional sense, because they know that fewer and fewer of their customers value good customer service at all, or at most see it as a weakness and will try to exploit such service in order to get free products or services from the company...

Over time, as customer service is valued less its overall quality declines, which leads to even less value being placed on the customer service function - and the cycle repeats. At the same time, the increased use of automation and the rise of self-checkout and similar services is lowering the number of people actually serving in the customer service role in the first place. If this trend continues it bodes ill for the service sector; what most people may not realize is that it bodes ill for out entire civilization as well. Historically, any society in which civility becomes commonly regarded as a weakness (and rudeness is considered a strength) has not lasted long. I agree with every one of Mr. Walsh's points; I also believe that if he's right, what we are seeing isn't just the decline of American commerce, but the beginning of the end for our entire civilization...

I'm not sure we can fix this. But I believe we'd better start trying...

Stranger than Fiction Part 7

Some years ago there was a huge flap online about high school students using a series of the gel bracelets then popular with kids of that age to signal things like whether the wearer was sexually active, was looking for a partner, was not looking for a partner, or had just finished up with their tenth (or whatever number it happened to be) partner and was looking for the next one. There was a lot of scandal, a lot of people pointing fingers at one another and screaming, and all of it seemed to completely miss the fact that high school students have been doing all of these things for generations and will almost certainly continue doing them regardless of whether or not bands of silicone-rubber gel are available to signal their intentions or keep score. It does seem a bit surreal, though, that someone has apparently created a product for young adults that does exactly what those long-vanished gel bands were alleged to do…

You can pick up the original story from the Time Magazine news feed if you want to , but the basic idea is that a company calling itself MY Single World is marking a silicone wristband that is supposed to indicate that the wearer is single – and presumably, that they are looking to do something about that condition, given that they are advertising this condition to anyone who would care to look. The inventors claim that once this product achieves wide acceptance it would make Internet dating sites obsolete, eliminate the need for singles bars or speed dating events, and finally allow single people to quickly and easily form new relationships just by identifying others who have chosen to purchase the same product…

Critics of the idea point out that unless everyone in the world knows what these wristbands mean they won’t have any significance – and that this will be difficult, given the number of silicone wristband products already on the market. A much more immediate point is that a lot of people don’t especially want to go around advertising their status as available (and possibly vulnerable); we should also note that even if you do want to attract the attention of other singles you may not want the attention of every one of them, regardless of a compatible age, gender, attractiveness or other status. Conversely, many people who lacked the nerve to approach someone they find attractive for fear of being painfully rejected will not take any comfort in the fact that the object of their desire is wearing a wristband indicating that he or she wants to meet new people. That is, just because a given person is signaling a willingness to meet new people, that still does not mean that he or she wants to meet you in particular…

Personally, I thought this was the stupidest idea I had heard involving a silicone rubber wristband since the introduction of anti-bullying wristbands in the UK (kids who wear them keep being beaten up by bullies and having their wristbands stolen, you see). It’s certainly one of the silliest concepts I’ve seen for a consumer product in a number of years now. But if experience has taught me anything, it’s that I don’t really know what the next fad is going to be, or where it is going to come from. I thought pogs, Cabbage Patch dolls and Beanie Babies were all stupid ideas when they first came out, and those all seem to have generated a fair amount of profit for somebody. The same could be said for any number of clothing, hairstyle or musical choices that have emerged over the last twenty years (all of them sold, and I wouldn’t have put money into any of them)…

So you tell me; will the MY Single Band catch on? If it does, how will the company deal with the inevitable knock-off versions? For that matter, how will the company deal with the inevitable lawsuits when somebody wearing their product is assaulted, either for rejecting the wrong person, or as a result of going home with the wrong person? I still think it’s a silly idea – but I’ve been wrong before…

Doing it Right

In yesterday’s post I posed the question: “What, apart from hiring good people without any specific experience, skills or training and finding things for them to do – in effect, hiring people with good minds and growing our own specific personnel – can we possibly do about the current failure of the recruiting and hiring system in America?” Strangely enough, it looks as though the answer might really be: What’s wrong with hiring good, talented people and then arranging the job tasks around what they do well?”

I posted the link to the PBS News site yesterday, but here it is again if you need it. In his post, the PBS commentator notes that creating a job description and then attempting to find applicants to fit it is a lot like creating a product and then looking for a market that wants to buy it – a common mistake that I’ve also criticized in this space. Even if you can produce a completely accurate description of exactly what the applicant will be doing if they are hired – and this is rarely possible except in the most menial and repetitious jobs – there is still no assurance that somebody with previous experience but without talent, high intelligence, a compatible personality or a strong work ethic will perform as well as someone who has never worked before but has all of those positive traits. In fact, the published research suggests that none of the factors commonly referenced in job descriptions or want ads is the key indicator of high performance…

If you read the organizational behavior and human resources research (not that I am suggesting for one moment that anyone ought to read the organizational behavior and human resources research) you will find that the key factors in performance are conscientiousness and generalized cognitive intelligence, commonly abbreviated as the “G-Factor” or simply as “G.” There are going to be some exceptions, of course; someone who does not speak a language will not be able to speak it until they learn how, no matter how conscientious or intelligent they happen to be, and someone without a counseling license cannot (legally) counsel you to do anything about your personal problems. But the vast majority of employers will require that any particular job be done according to their specific standards, and many companies will insist on training (or re-training) new personnel to meet those standards regardless of any previous experience. Or, to put it another way, if you are going to train people to do things your way anyway, doesn’t it make sense to start with the best people?

Managers as a rule tend to assign tasks to whichever of their subordinates is best at that task; anything else would be a sub-optimal use of their resources. As a result, the employee doing any given task may not be the one who was hired to do that task, but rather the one who is the most competent. This concept takes that practice to its logical conclusion: advocating that the company assemble a pool of intelligent, talented, hard-working people and then assign each of them to complete tasks on the basis of ability and suitability rather than arbitrary job title or classification. Naturally, this will require a high degree of flexibility and improvisation on the part of the managers involved, and willingness on the part of the human resources department to put aside simple checklists and formal rating systems and actually consider the specific applicants who are available…

Which explains why, despite the relatively simplicity of the concept, and nearly a century of Management research to back up all of these contentions, there does not appear to be any major company using this method as of Fall 2013. I’m not saying that anyone out there could implement this kind of change by fiat, or by throwing a switch in the system somewhere. What I am advocating here would be a complete revolution in the way companies are staffed and managed, every bit as radical as Scientific Management in its own time. It would require the emergence of an actual profession of mangers, chosen for their ability to match employees with tasks, and resources with requirements, rather than the accident of their birth or the details of their previous work history – and no one in the world is likely to accept that idea without massive resistance. And yet, it’s the first thing we’ve seen to date that might actually give rise to the practice of management the way it should actually be…

Doing it Wrong

For many years now I’ve been railing against human resources practices that make no bloody sense, mostly because I’m a management professional and such things offend me, but also because I’ve seen far too many cases where failure of this fundamental business function has eventually brought down an otherwise sound company. Regular readers of this space (assuming I have readers) have heard me pointing out that no position in any company is there because the owners are wonderful people and want to contribute money to someone for no particular reason – all jobs exist because doing them will either generate money for the organization (through production, sales, research or what have you) or prevent the organization from losing money (through fines, lawsuits, taxes, etc.). All of that is true enough – and this is why working managers so often have issues with the Human Resources department taking too long to get them the replacement personnel they need. But that may still only be the tip of the proverbial iceberg…

If you have ever posted a resume onto Monster, or Career Builder, or even networking sites like Linked-In, you’ve probably already had the experience of getting sent dozens of “opportunities” that have nothing to do with any career path you’ve ever considered, simply because a single keyword in your file matches something in the description. These are frequently harmless accidents made by badly-defined searches, such as when a Program Manager gets sent job listings for an HTML programmer or a Manager of a Java programming project, but increasingly we’re seeing it used fraudulently, to flood users with offers for “opportunities” with commission-only sales jobs, MLM schemes, “purchase-required” management positions, and outright scams (to the extent there is any distinction between those categories). Or worse still, as a means of targeting millions of people with outright SPAM messages about for-profit colleges and training programs no one could possibly want…

Almost as bad, in my opinion, are those occasions when you apply directly for a posted job on a company website and are unable to get the attention of a recruiter because the site is being bombarded by tens of thousands of “applicants” who are simply applying for every posting they find, regardless of whether they have any qualifications whatsoever. Given this huge volume of slush, many HR departments have no choice but to search the applications by keyword, and if their search isn’t quite wide enough (e.g. if you missed the one specific term they are basing all of their searches on when you wrote your resume) they may not be able to find you amid all of the noise…

A post from the Ask the Headhunter column on the PBS News Hour site points out that the situation is being compounded by the fact that most of the time the companies that are looking for new personnel aren’t writing good job descriptions in the first place, or using selection methods that make any bloody sense once they do get applicants in for interview. We already knew that college GPA and scores from GMAT or SAT exams don’t predict job performance, but recent studies indicate that even in-house placement tests, or the puzzle questions so beloved of new-age employers like Google, offer no indication of how well a given applicant will perform if they are actually hired. And even that fails to consider those cases where the new hire ends up doing exactly none of the tasks detailed in description of the job for which they’ve applied…

It would appear that the PBS News commentator has a point when he claims that the recruiting and hiring system in America (and possibly other Western countries) is broken. The real question seems to be what, apart from hiring good people without any specific experience, skills or training and finding things for them to do – in effect, hiring people with good minds and growing our own specific personnel – can we possibly do about this?

(To be Continued…)

The Other Guys

Whenever possible I still enjoy reading magazines in hardcopy. I’d never consider giving back my Kindle, of course; it’s still one of my favorite gadgets, and I have no intention of making any long trips without it (or its generational descendants) again, especially by air. But the other day I was reading a newsstand copy of SmithsonianAir and Space when I can across an article about a (relatively) small firm right out of a science fiction novel that is taking on giants like Boeing and Space-X in an effort to develop the first true commercial space plane…

The company is called Sierra Nevada Corporation, and its Space Exploration Systems division isn’t exactly a couple of guys in a garage somewhere – they’ve already received more than $200 million from NASA in support of their orbiter design, which they call Dream Chaser. In fact, they’ve been building components for various NASA projects for years; one of their most recent accomplishments was the very successful “sky-crane” system used to lower the Curiosity probe onto Mars. Altogether, the company claims to have flown over 4,000 different constructs on more than 400 space flights. But the Dream Chaser program is their first venture into manned spacecraft, and they’re definitely not operating on the same scale as Space-X, let alone Boeing – and both of their larger competitors are further along in the design and building cycle. And yet I was immediately drawn to the Dream Chaser story for reasons that had nothing to do with my love for spacecraft or identification with underdogs and trouble-makers…

First off, the Dream Chaser design uses a composite materials hull – much like Boeing’s 787 Dreamliner airliner, but completely unlike anything else ever flown into space by people. This makes the vehicle cheaper to build and maintain than any earlier system, as well as faster and easier to produce. Up until this point the largest fleet of reusable spacecraft ever built, the Space Shuttle program, included a maximum of five flyable units; if Sierra Nevada can gain acceptance of the design they could conceivably mass-produce it, lowering the cost still further. If someone can come up with an equally affordable launcher (and several companies have suggested ideas for that) this modest seven-passenger design could become available to a huge range of private users, effectively opening space to a number of people previously imagined only by science fiction writers…

Now, I could point out that the existence of dozens of stories and novels about commercial space exploration has not had much effect on the development of privately-owned spacecraft to date, but I can’t help thinking that such arguments are actually looking at things backward. What makes the Dream Chaser program so remarkable lies in the early years of the last century. For more than a decade after the first powered flight by the Wright Brothers, airplanes were well beyond the reach of all but the very richest private citizens; at first more curiosities ridden by daredevils and stuntmen (somewhat like the “space tourists” of recent years), or military vehicles operated in defense of their countries by men who were already considered insanely brave by nearly everyone else. It wasn’t until the appearance of standard designs, mass-produced aircraft that could be counted on to behave in more or less predictable ways that the commercial use of air travel became both acceptable and affordable – and changed the world we live in, although not always for the better…

I can’t tell you if the availability of affordable launch vehicles will lower the barriers to commercial space flight the way it did for commercial aviation. But as a business consultant and instructor I can definitely tell you that none of the fanciful civilian uses of space we’ve been talking about and writing about for the last century or so will ever be possible so long as spacecraft are assembled one-by-one, by hand, and take decades to build and months to prepare for launch. Sierra Nevada Corporation may not, in fact, be building the spacecraft equivalent of the DC-3, or the Ford Tri-Motor, or even the Curtis Flying Jenny; they may not ultimately succeed in the Dream Chaser venture at all. But those equivalents are coming, and we may all live long enough to see them…

It makes you wonder what else we might find on a random visit to the newsstand, doesn’t it?

The Ethics of Time

I've written in previous posts about people who assume that writing is the same as typing, people who assume that their momentary inspirations are more important than whatever you're spending months or years of your life working on, and people who assume that your time (personal or professional) isn't worth anything and can't understand why you would be offended at the idea of just giving them all of it that they want. I've never written a post about the ethics of behaving in this fashion because there is no other side; whether you find value in their activities or not, you have no ethically justifiable right to demand someone's time or effort for free, whether they're working on a novel, volunteering time to charity, or making mud pies in the garden. But is there a situation in which you, as the writer, artist or knowledge worker have an ethical responsibility to do anything more than tell the person accosting you (politely, if possible) to ask someone else?

Consider, for example, the case where someone has genuinely come up with an idea so wonderful that its development and expansion really will change the world for the better. It seems reasonable to assume that there are some inventions, like a cure for cancer, or a renewable energy source that would replace fossil fuels, that would improve the quality of life for so many people for so long that it would be heartless not to assist the inventor. There have been very few historical examples, since most often anybody capable of envisioning something that revolutionary is also, by definition, also capable of inventing it. By the same token, just coming up with an idea is not the same thing as creating it; I can imagine a clean, safe, renewable energy source that would power the entire world, but I could not begin to tell you how to make such a thing. And anybody who could probably doesn't need my help in coming up with the idea...

On the other side of the issue, there will inevitably be those ideas which are so absurd that if your well-meaning idea person even reveals them to anyone less understanding than you, he or she will be lucky to avoid public ridicule, threats of violence, actual violence, or (in extreme cases) criminal prosecution. Attempting to pursue or develop this idea will subject the inventor to personal disgrace, financial ruin, alienation of their friends, avoidance by their family members, divorce proceedings by their spouse, and destruction of their career if they are lucky (see the aforementioned violence and/or prosecution). In these cases it would seem heartless not to attempt to dissuade the "visionary" from pursuing the idea at all. But doing so will at the very least require you to expend hours of your time and risk losing whatever friendship you have with that person; in extreme cases you may find yourself practicing counseling, law or medicine without a license...

Clearly, there is a spectrum of ideas, ranging from things so incredible that anyone would have an ethical responsibility to help make them a reality to things so incredibly bad that anyone would have an ethical responsibility to try and help whoever came up with them get psychiatric help. But most ideas will fall somewhere into the grey area between those extremes, and the vast majority will end up being nothing more than meaningless boondoggles that will accomplish nothing of consequence while devouring your time, your money and your good name. The difficulty lies in trying to tell the difference - and figuring out what to do in the appropriate case. All of which leads me to ask the question:

Do we, as consultants, writers, businesspeople, or caring human beings have any responsibility to help another person evaluate, develop, or discard their visionary ideas? Does our answer change if the person who wants our help is a family member or a close friend? Does it change if there is a significant financial reward available to us if we're right, or a major consequence to us or those close to us if we're wrong? Or should we mind our own business, not interfere in somebody else's flashes of genius or madness (as the case may be), and offer our professional services at reasonable rates as always?

It's worth thinking about...