KG Charles-Harris sent me an article about WeWork-as-a-cult, which prompted yesterday’s Oldie.

This post isn’t about WeWork, but about two things that struck me.

First, the pure adoration shown to Adam Neumann and the absolute blind following of all he preaches reeks of Jim Jones only with a far larger world vision.

The second were the words uttered by Neumann’s wife Rebekah at the recent Tunbridge Wells Summer Camp.

“A big part of being a woman is to help men [like Adam] manifest their calling in life.”

Shades of Phyllis Schlafly.

And here I thought the fight, from gender equity to #metoo was so women could pursue their own, independent manifest destiny.

Silly me.

All this is even more disturbing, since the great majority of both WeWork employees and devotees are Millennials.

Image credit: Yankech gary

Poking through 11+ years of posts I find information that’s as useful now as when it was written.

Golden Oldies is a collection of the most relevant and timeless posts during that time.

I wrote this back in 2014. Obviously, I didn’t mention harassment because the post focused on what was in the news, and it wasn’t talked about all that openly, unlike now.

Sadly, nothing has changed. It’s still news and people are surprised.

Read other Golden Oldies here.

I get it. I get what’s going on in terms of women in the workplace is news.

I get it that it is important to remind people that for all the progress that’s been made some things haven’t changed.

It’s still assumed that it’s OK to ask professional women, such as lawyers and marketing execs, to do stuff that would never be asked of the men in the organization.

“…plan parties, order food, take notes in meetings and join thankless committees…bring cupcakes for a colleague’s birthday, order sandwiches for office lunches and answer phones”

By the same token, it’s news that board diversity is moving at glacial speed, primarily because boards only want people with experience and to have experience they need to serve on a board.

“Recruiting women and minorities to boards is being slowed because of boards’ unwillingness to look at candidates who have not yet served on boards,” said Ron Lumbra, co-leader of the CEO and board services practice for Russell Reynolds. “There’s a premium on experience.’’

So while I have no problem with these subjects being presented over and over in the news, there is one thing I don’t understand.

Why are so many people surprised by the information?

Is the general population so naïve that they actually believe women are no longer asked to do tasks that are closer to house work than business work?

Do they really believe that the lack of board diversity is a function of the lack of experience as opposed a desire to spend time with people like themselves who are well within their comfort zones?

The sad part is that while it’s still news, it’s certainly not a surprise.

Flickr image credit: Arya Ziai

A Friday series exploring Startups and the people who make them go. Read all If the Shoe Fits posts here.

I love sandwiches.

My wife says I grew up in a “sandwich culture.” She grew up in the American South where people sat down to eat full meals a lot. We did that too in New York City, where I grew up, but sandwiches were a key part of life.

I’d stop by the deli on my way to my job after the school day was done and pick up the sandwich that would be my “dinner” that night. I rotated through roast beef and corned beef and pastrami. Cheese. Rye bread. I’d use some of my earnings to buy sandwich fixings for the weekend when I didn’t work. The best sandwiches were the ones you ate leaning over the sink.

Sometime in the last twenty years, sandwiches changed. The bread got flimsy and there was a lot less meat. People wanted to eat healthy so they cut back on the bread and the meat, but kept the cheese. Then came “low calorie” cheese.

Ugh. Low calorie cheese tastes like drywall. I kept my rye bread and I wanted a slab of cheddar or swiss on my roast beef, but I was the exception.

The sandwich in the age of the obesity epidemic

The challenge was pretty straightforward. As cheese became a more and more important part of the sandwich, people wanted it to taste good. Cheese makers responded by making low calorie cheese in various formulations. It tasted like drywall. They tried other formulas. It still tasted like drywall. Then the people at Sargento rethought the challenge.

Sargento: a history of innovation

Sargento is a big player in the packaged cheese business. They’re also a family owned company that’s been around since the 1950s with a history of innovation. In 1969, they introduced the pegbar system that’s now standard in supermarkets. They were the first to use re-sealable packages for cheese and the first to package shredded cheese.

Changing the challenge

The company figured that whatever they came up with would have to meet two criteria. It would have to use real cheese, not low-calorie, horrid tasting “cheese.” In other words, it would have to taste the way customers wanted cheese to taste. And, each slice would have to have no more than 45 calories.

Somebody at Sargento must have thought: “We can’t make low calorie cheese that tastes good. And we can’t offer smaller slices. What if we could reduce the calories in a slice of cheese by slicing real cheese thinner?”

The new challenge

That’s a great idea, but existing equipment couldn’t do it. Sargento could slice the cheese thinner, but then the slices would stick together. Whatever they came up with would have to work with existing packaging. Meeting that challenge took a $20 million investment in new technology. Sargento made it work.

The big payoff

Ultra-Thin Slices were released in 2012 and did $60 million in sales the first year. The second year sales more than doubled to $157 million. Even better, Ultra-Thin Slices attracted a lot of people who weren’t eating packaged cheese before. In other words, much of the sales growth was from new customers. That’s a breakthrough innovation by any standard.

What you can learn from Sargento’s Ultra-Thin Slices: rethinking the challenge

The breakthrough innovation didn’t happen until someone reconceived the challenge. Before, everyone, including Sargento, had conceived the challenge as coming up with a lower calorie cheese. When Sargento changed that to “slice cheese thinner so it’s only 45 calories” solutions became obvious.

What you can learn from Sargento’s Ultra-Thin Slices: the courage of conviction

It looks obvious now, but it took real courage to commit $20 million to develop new technology to support the reconception of the challenge. It may not have been a “bet the company” moment, but it was close.

Bottom Lines

Great innovation will not happen until you think of the challenge differently.

Making a great innovation a reality will not happen without courage.

Originally published at Three Star Leadership in 2016.

Image credit: HikingArtist

Today I was driving and my car burst into flames.

I wish that a hook to get you interested, but it’s the reality of what happened.

It made me think about some things as I watched the fire department spray my car down. (The image above is not my car.) One was, am I driving a safe car? The second thought was, how can I better myself so I don’t have do face this again.

Life will always give ups and downs, but can we prevent tragedy?

I find that the current state of affairs in tech are really trying to prevent tragedy and perfect our world. Facebook wants to prevent election tampering. Tesla wants to automate cars. Uber wants to increase safety of riders. Amazon wants you to order an item and receive it same day.

They all are seeking to alleviate pain and make our lives easier.

Is that what we want? I do.

However what is the cost? I’m not sure yet but I’ll let you know.

Good news. I’m safe, my car is towed and I can write another day.

Image credit: Jason Bolonski

In spite of my dislike of social media I know there is interesting stuff lurking amidst the inane, the garbage and the hate.

Fortunately, much of what I’m missing is referenced in stuff I do read, such as CB Insights, which is where the following showed up.

And here’s a link to my approach to make passwords easy.

Image credit: CB Insights

Bezos may be a genius and Amazon may be beloved by it’s customers, but for years it has been reviled for it’s (mis)treatment of fulfillment center (AKA, warehouse) workers.

The newest weapon in it’s fight to correct the facts is a Twitter campaign.

“FC ambassadors are employees who have experience working in our fulfillment centers… The most important thing is that they’ve been here long enough to honestly share the facts based on personal experience.”

The effort was first outed by Flamboyant Shoes Guy, who also said in a comment,

What amazes me is that a entire board of people on 7 or 8-figure salaries had several meetings regarding this, discussed it thoroughly and then concluded that there was no way anyone could possibly notice.

But if you think warehouse conditions are bad now, when the economy is hot and bodies in short supply, just wait until it turns, as it will. (What goes up always comes down. It’s the nature of the beast.)

Be it Amazon, Google, Facebook, Apple, etc., you need to remember that companies, just like people, aren’t all good or all bad.

It’s just that their bad has a much larger effect.

Image credit: Twitter

Poking through 11+ years of posts I find information that’s as useful now as when it was written.

Golden Oldies is a collection of the most relevant and timeless posts during that time.

Back when this blog was published seven days a week, Sunday featured a collection of quotes along with (hopefully) pithy or erudite comments from yours truly.

Read other Golden Oldies here.

C’mon, guys. What else would today be about?

Scott Johnson said, “A bad day at work is better than a good day in hell.” If you don’t agree, ask any of the thousands of people who are there because they don’t have and can’t find a job.

And on a day dedicated to the working stiffs, management should take to heart the words of Henry George, “Poorly paid labor is inefficient labor, the world over,” before finding yet more ways to reduce their compensation.

Thomas Geoghegan explains succinctly why unions aren’t organizing the way they used to, “When people ask me, ‘Why can’t labor organize the way it did in the thirties?’ the answer is simple: everything we did then is now illegal,” as are many other actions from that era.

Everybody works hard these days, whether they sweat or not. Victor Hugo understood that when he said, “A man is not idle because he is absorbed in thought. There is a visible labor and there is an invisible labor.”

Samuel Gompers offers two insightful comments.

The first recognizes that labor knows boundaries.

“All other holidays are in a more or less degree connected with conflicts and battles of man’s prowess over man, of strife and discord for greed and power, of glories achieved by one nation over another. Labor Day . . . is devoted to no man, living or dead, to no sect, race, or nation.”

The second seems to me to apply to any thinking human, not just those designated ‘labor’.

“What does labor want? We want more schoolhouses and less jails; more books and less arsenals; more learning and less vice; more leisure and less greed; more justice and less revenge; in fact, more of the opportunities to cultivate our better natures.”

Finally, Elbert Hubbard offers some profound advice to all those who run flat out 24/7, “The man who doesn’t relax and hoot a few hoots voluntarily, now and then, is in great danger of hooting hoots and standing on his head for the edification of the pathologist and trained nurse, a little later on.”

I hope you take his words to heart, unplug and hoot a bit this weekend.

BTW, do you know the true story behind labor Day?

Image credit: Valerie Everett

A Friday series exploring Startups and the people who make them go. Read all If the Shoe Fits posts here.

Founders are a breed apart, especially young founders, with little to no business experience, let alone leadership/managerial experience.

I got a call from one I work with occasionally. After getting the information he had called for he took me to task over Monday’s post.

In short, he said that founders don’t have much time to spend on culture, let alone do the people-managing stuff I’m always writing about.

He went on to say that’s why people in young companies tend to be so similar. It’s far easier, not to mention more comfortable, to get stuff done when everyone has a similar mindset.

My response was that his mindset would do much to limit his market, so he would do well to plan on being a nitch player.

It was not appreciated.

Curating a team creates the same problem that curating freshmen roommate assignments created.

There’s no question that curation reinforces opinions, while eliminating conflicting ones, narrows people beyond from where they started and acts like fertilizer to unconscious bias and outright bigotry.

Curation, whether of roommates of team, has no positive effect, which is why colleges are going back to random freshman matching and companies are striving for more diversity. Duke eliminated curated matching.

Freshman year of college, Larry Moneta, vice president for student affairs at Duke explained, is about students “engaging with difference and opening their eyes to opportunities, and meeting entirely different people than the ones they grew up with or went to high school with.”

What this 26-year-old founder didn’t say (and may not even realize) is that some things, such as successful managing, are the result of hard-won experience, not “vision.”

There is a reason that more diverse companies have better results.

Just as there is a reason that managers who practice good customer service on their teams attract the best people, have lower turnover, and enjoy better personal career growth / stronger startup success (if founders).

Image credit: HikingArtist

In a previous life I had a title of Customer Success Manager at a tech company. As the name implies, I was tasked with ensuring the desired outcome for our clients was met on every level.

Sometimes clients just wanted to be heard and I was a therapist. Other times there were specific business criteria that had to be achieved and I felt like a CFO that was building my case to deliver to the board.

One thing was clear though. Success meant different things to every client.

My title no longer carries that tag line of CSM but the desire to exceed customer expectations continues. As I am in a client facing role (and can’t imagine it otherwise), success is still top of mind within my interactions.

However, I sometimes wonder if I am truly achieving it and what is the measure for success?

We have all been delayed at airports. You fly more than once in your life and it happens. Typically I don’t get too upset, because a lot of it is out of the hands of the crew. They don’t want the delay either.

However, there are a variety of ways the crew can deal with it. I have seen some that ignore the issue and hope it goes away. Pro tip, it doesn’t. I have also seen crews decide to make it a party by giving out extra snacks or drinks.

Same situation, different outcomes.

As the veil is lifted between brands and consumers, it become easier than ever to vocalize your displeasure.

This has had the effect of highlighting those brands that are nimble and responsive and those that double down on the trashcan fire by pouring gasoline on it.

I’m looking at you United Airlines. #notafan

But what does success really look like? There are KPI’s, surveys and referral programs. In the end, success has many forms, but for me it comes down to this.

Was I happy with the interaction? Would I talk to a friend positively about said company?

That’s it. I know it’s hard to quantify, but, in my heart, those two  questions are the key to success.

Image credit: Hiking Artist

What do the companies with the best customer service have in common?

Engaged employees.

Engaging workers isn’t dependent on salary and perks, if it was, Chick-fil-A, Trader Joes and Aldi (TJ’s parent company) wouldn’t hold the top three spaces on  the Forbes Best Customer Service List.

While there are many things that can drive engagement, good management is probably at the top of the list.

And while the executive team impacts engagement, it’s the individual’s own manager who really makes the difference.

A bad manager will taint the best corporate culture, while a really good one will offset bad culture by acting sheltering their team from the impact.

Back in 2008 I listed four points needed to engage your team, and they are just as true, if not more so, a decade later.

• The guideline is the same thread that has run through every major philosophy and religion for thousands of years—treat your people as you want to be treated, whether your boss treats you that way or not.

• Authenticity is the current buzz word, but it translates simply to be honest, open and do what you say; never fudge, let alone lie, intentionally or otherwise.

• There are absolutely no circumstances that warrant or excuse the messenger being killed. None. Because if you do, there’s no going back—ever.

• If your company doesn’t have an engaging culture then you must be an umbrella for your people, because you can create one below you, even if you can’t change it above.

Truly great customer service requires engaged employees, because they are the only ones who can provide customers with the best experience possible.

Image credit: mikeg44311