Everyone is a customer

If you can only focus on one thing in your business, make it customer service. Not just to the paying customers--though treating them nice is a good thing--but to the internal customers as well. Who are the "internal customers?" Everyone. Every employee, driver to Director, is a customer.



Customer service is the key performance indicator. It shows (among other things) whether your company processes are running efficiently and links each job to the paying customer. Good things to know.

Tom Peters says:

we urge participants to make the level of customer satisfaction the primary basis for incentive compensation and annual performance evaluation for virtually every person at every level in every function throughout the organization. We also urge every organizational unit in every function to develop key quality measures. Progress should be posted on charts in every work space, and a quantitative goal report should be the first item of business at every staff meeting, regardless of topic.

The video explains how and why each person in the company is a customer, and a supplier. And a worker too, dang it. Each job has three phases: receive input, do work on the input then send the output to someone else. You are a customer when you receive and a supplier when you send, and a worker in between.

Measurement = Results

At the end of a frustrating--I hate technology, or it hates me--day all I have to show for it is a short video. But heck, the best things come in small packages, or that is what De Beers wants you to think.

The video is a brief introduction to measurement, the first tiny step in a series of videos, webinars, articles, podcasts, Web 2.0 gone wild. We will go from measurement to performance management to Balanced Scorecard. Why? Because if you can't measure you can't improve.

Brain Beats Brawn ... Usually

Taking a mental break from putting together a video series on performance management -- up soon, tomorrow me hopes -- I read Brains vs. Brawn by Geoff Colvin in the Sep 15 issue of dead tree Fortune (paper still beats digital for reading on the sofa, in the loo or horizontal anywhere).

Fascinating, all about the relative worth per pound of commodities and intellectual capital products. Not so much which is worth more: one expects small, high-ticket items cost more per pound than bulky, sold-by-the-boat-load (literally) commodities. The size of the contrast is still amazing though, that in 2000 hot rolled steel sold for 19 cents a pound and an Intel Pentium III 800mz chip sold for $42,893 on the hoof. Wow.

With all the attention recently paid to commodity prices, trending very high even with a recent softening, Colvin

suspected we were missing a countertrend: the even stronger rise in value of brands, technology, copyrights, and other purely human products.

Not so. Comparing the year 2000 baseline with today's prices, he discovered that "the true commodities, steel and gold, have risen hugely, about 170% each." Yet brain-heavy, intellectual-capital products haven't faired as well, with Viagra up the most at a 150% rise (puns intended). Most don't even come close: the chip test is stark. The far-advanced Core 2 Duo Extreme Edition chip has increased a mere 18%. Huh?

The closer a product is to the dirt from which it came, the more its price has risen, while if it has been upgraded and sweated over by hundreds of Ph.D. engineers, it is lucky just to have help steady. What on earth is happening?

First, obvious to anyone aware of what's happening outside the West, is there has been a huge increase in the amount of brainpower available, that as demand for brainy products have certainly increased, this increase has been dwarfed (snd made possible actually) by the 1000s and 1000s and 1000s of Chinese, Indian and non-OECD country engineers produced yearly. Throw a stone in Shenzen, Hsin Chu or Bangalore and you're likely to hit an engineer, 50:50 one with an advanced degree.

Thus the increase of demand and the increase of brain power--and the low capital needed in areas like brand building--have led to better and better design to meet the challenge of more and more competitors. This has depressed unit costs, or prices anyway.

Not so in commodities. The demand in the past decade for from-the-dirt products has far outstripped the supply. It takes time and money to even get permission for a new mine, let alone the time needed to start up, build the refinery and other infrastructure then ship the iron, copper, coal or gold.

Colvin contends that this is still just a cycle, that big demand/low supply high prices will slowly change, an equilibrium will be reached and prices will stabilize if not fall. Calling it a "once-a-generation" opportunity to cash in from commodities, he ends with the money quoye, that

A smart businessperson can always innovate, create a new brand, build a better prodcut. The game never stands still, but neither does it lead to an inevitable conclusion. That's why I'm still betting on brainpower.

Me too. I live in one of the world's commodity powerhouses, Canada, self-described "hewers of wood and drawers of water." Life is sure good in many parts of Canada, potash from Saskatchewan, oil from Alberta (Oilberta to the rest of Canada), coal and other minerals from BC make for happy budgets. But the writing is on the wall, if we take the time to see it anyway.

Central Canada, Ontario and Quebec, are suffering: our manufacturing heartland, jobs are disappearing and ... no one quite knows. I live in Sooke Harbour, on the west coast of Vancouver Island, a rugged community built on logging and fishing. But there are few logs left, and, by all accounts, fewer fish. It's a beautiful spot, and tourism will help, but B&Bs and diners pay little wages, certainly not enough to replace a logger paycheck.

We, like the rest of Canada, have to shift, from digging in the figurative dirt to innovating in the intellectual marketplace. Like Colville, I think we have no choice but to bet on brainpower.

No substitute for flying.

Along with a "paper less office," IT improvements were supposed to eliminate (okay, reduce) the need for most business travel. Why suffer through airports, cattle-car seating, taxis and hotels to meet someone? In the new, broadband, Web 2.0 paradigm, business travel was to be passe; instead just fire up the video conferencing set up and wham, travel to the next floor rather than the next city or country to hold your meeting.

Heck, it is (supposedly) easier than that! No need to move from your desk or cubicle: just boot Skype or ooVoo or some other VOIP program and there, right there on your computer screen, was the one you wanted to meet with. So close you could almost swear you were in the same room.

Almost. Well, not almost, more like never. At least internationally--maybe New York to Cleveland VOIP offers crystal clear picture and sound, but in my experience Western city to Chinese/Indian city does not. When the connection works you get jerky, time-lapse video, and the sound, well, it's okay of you like talking to people at the bottom of a well, with echo, echo, echo.

Instead of a face-to-face conversation where you use both verbal and facial clues to make the back and forth flow smoothly, in VOIP you are constantly stepping on the other person's sentence. Or reverting back to a simpler time and archaic jargon: over.

Much as I like seeing the other person my choice is the regular telephone ... or flying. The moral is that if the meeting is critical, and getting all points aired and mutual understanding achieved, either get access (at both ends) to some professional, expensive video conference set up ... or fly.

The Daily Dick No.1

Today I introduce a new feature, The Daily Dick. An ongoing (but daily?) conversation between Dick, myself and the blog, a chance to chronicle the trouble, travels and travails (and triumphs, right Dick?) Dick lives through. Interesting times (meant not as a curse) too, weaving multiple time zones and multiple cultures into a profitable gig.

You will like Dick. I do. But then I have a thing for smart, intellectually curious, best-idea-wins, results-count-but-people-matter-too people. Don't meet enough of them.

Dick 1 finds Dick in well-known-city, India, hiring new and getting to know (month) old staff, both as individuals and examples of Indian culture. He's been away from home close to two weeks and he's tired. But still observant:

Daily Dick No.1
It can be very stressful running a start-up, and there are times when I wonder what I got myself into setting up this company. Fortunately, this doesn’t happen very often, but when it does all I have to do is look outside

and watch the workers who have been demolishing the building next door to our office to get a proper sense of perspective.

These guys are doing grueling and dangerous physical labor for less than US$2 per day without any real job security or safety net in the form of insurance. Most of them are working hundreds of miles from home, and rarely to get to see the families that they are working so hard to support.

Worse still, they don’t have any choice but to sell their physical labor because they lack the necessary education and skills for finding other work, and most of them will spend their lives grafting away on building sites.

Unlike these laborers, I was lucky enough to have the choice to create this company, and now I have made this choice I have the responsibility not only to make it successful but also to provide an environment in which the people who have chosen to join me can grow and develop themselves and their careers.

This is a huge responsibility, and it is one that I need to remain constantly aware of. Having chosen to go along this path and persuaded others to follow me on it, there’s no turning back.

Dick describes the always grueling and often gruesome reality of developing India and China, waves of menials selling physical and emotional hardship in a desire for a better life for their family. Selling it to the physical and emotional desires of the new middle class for a better life for themselves. What Dick is watching is the death of one way of life and the birth of another, the changing of a culture.

Birth can be pretty but is always messy, and death can be noble but is always disturbing.

And starting a company can be exhilarating but is always tiring. Good on'ya Dick. Welcome to the blog.

Start With The End

Building anything with software is hard, often frustrating, or is for me anyway. As it (program, website, whatever) does not exist and in the end is just zeros and ones well organized, it (the software project) can move, change, shift, endlessly.

Call it feature creep, defined by searchCIO.com as:

a tendency for product or project requirements to increase during development beyond those originally foreseen, leading to features that weren't originally planned and resulting risk to product quality or schedule. Feature creep may be driven by a client's growing "wish list" or by developers themselves as they see opportunity for improving the product.

Every time, I repeat, every time I worked with software developers, on client project teams I led or projects of my own, I suffered from, fought and, truth be told, caused feature creep. The ability to add this or tweak that is just too dang tempting to pass up.

What brings this on? The new website for this blog! What will it contain? Look like? How will video be treated? Photos? Templates? Webinars? What features will it have? Lots of unknowns for just this little project. How to decide the site design writ large then (the more important) how to control the process?

Start with strong leadership, Dick and the senior IT team he's assembled. Yet neither will be involved daily on such a small project, so the question remains: how to keep the project on the rails? Define the end before you start the job.

Received a document yesterday, a website development model, the "this is what we expect website projects to prepare before starting coding, and how we expect ."

We humans do what our managers (spouses, officials) pay attention to, what they reward us for doing and punish us for not doing. A necessary inital step though is measurement, for how else would the manager know what we've done/not done?

"What gets measured gets done," five simple words (from Tom Peters ... I think) that I have repeated ad nauseum (or at least ad headache) to clients. Yet before measuring one must know what the goal or end or objective is. Vastly simplified (yet still correct) the steps are:

Set Objective (the desired end)
Decide how/where/when/what to measure
Explain objectives and metrics to responsible person(s)
Measure
Analyze
Adjust
Repeat

This document goes a long way to achieving the software objective/specifications; it explains in detail what the site should look like, colors, fonts, layouts, and what features it should have, and the steps to follow to alter the specs. Once all parties sign off on it Dick and Acme now have a way to measure what gets done.

This is a kindergarten class in performance management, but hey, we all started in kindergarten. And heck, Robert Fulghum thinks kindergarten lessons are all one really needs to know. Maybe, but I still plan lots more on measurement (a squishy target I admit, but still one my future actions can be measured against).

Teaching is helping others surpass you

Nothing is more gratifying to a teacher than seeing students learn, to understand then use lessons taught to their benefit. True for managers teaching staff, professors teaching students and fathers teaching daughters. Yet one day the teacher must be prepared for the student becoming the master. Like what happened to me this morning.

Some background. I've talked writing and communication to my daughter since she was old enough to listen (and too small to escape). "Every day with you is a lesson," she recently told me. Somewhat chagrined, I asked her if she wanted me to stop. "No. No way," she answered, than with a little pause, "Well, maybe when my friends are around." I said I would (try).

Katya has talked about being on the school Yearbook Committee since she entered middle school (Grades 6-8), and now in Grade 8 she qualifies. Eager (something she must get from her Mom) she was first to put her name on the list, first to get the application form (this is Grade 8?) and hopes this morning to be first to submit a filled-in application form. If points were given for eagerness ...

Anyway, she showed me the form over breakfast, asking for my help. A firm believer in bullet points, I sketched some weasel sentence for her as way to introduce bullets, then went to shower. About 30 minutes later I saw the filled out form, read it and ... WOW! Here it is (click to expand):


This comes from a 12-year old? "Wonderful! Better than I could do," I told her. She demurred quite convincingly (another learned skill?) but I could tell she was pleased.

If you believe in progress the goal of teaching is helping students surpass your abilities. I must be a good teacher then.

So, if one day my writing improves, it could be my daughter ghosting for me. Now if only I could teach her to mow the lawn.