Customer service — or the lack thereof — isn’t new. It goes back centuries, one might even say eons, and no, that isn’t based on assumption.

The first documented customer complaint happened slightly more than 5,800 (not a typo) years ago

What could be the world’s first complaint about shoddy service is on a clay tablet that was first sent about 3,800 [BCE; they forgot to add 2,018 CE years to the total–ed] years ago in southern Mesopotamia from the city of Ur…

Here is an excerpt from it.

Tell Ea-nasir: Nanni sends the following message:

When you came, you said to me as follows: “I will give Gimil-Sin (when he comes) fine quality copper ingots.” You left then but you did not do what you promised me. You put ingots which were not good before my messenger (Sit-Sin) and said: “If you want to take them, take them; if you do not want to take them, go away!”

What do you take me for, that you treat somebody like me with such contempt? (…) Take cognizance that (from now on) I will not accept here any copper from you that is not of fine quality. I shall (from now on) select and take the ingots individually in my own yard, and I shall exercise against you my right of rejection because you have treated me with contempt.

What I found most interesting is that the complaint wasn’t limited to the shoddy product or the initial lies in service of making the sale.

It sounded angriest at being “treated with contempt.”

Update the product and delivery method and it could be a template for almost any 21^st Century customer unhappy with a product or service.

Decades ago rotten customer service was more a function of little-to-no training and draconian scripts, but the advent of technology raised rotten customer service to new heights — think Ma Bell and Comcast.

And it was tech companies that added contempt to the rotten customer service recipe in ever larger doses.

If contempt is yin, then arrogance is its yang.

And there is no question that tech companies excel at arrogance.

Image credit: The British Museum

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.

For centuries ‘customers’ were the people who bought a company’s products or services. A few decades ago that started to change and not just. Governments started recognizing that taxpayers were, in fact, customers, as did schools and universities, with regards to their students. Hospitals and doctors embraced, or were forced to, the idea of patients as customers.

Through most of that time customer service was mostly a function of caveat emptor. Even before the web and social media made both complaining and complimenting easy ‘ before that, gossip and message boards spread the word. The change is most easily seen in the medical world where Medicare/Medicaid and insurance companies, paying based on outcome, as opposed to fee-for-service, have forced radical change in patient care.

It was during this period that management academics and gurus put forth the idea that workers were customers and customer service was the responsibility of their direct boss—not HR.

Read other Golden Oldies here.

Customer service is a major topic these days (more on that tomorrow); as is employee retention, but do they really have anything in common?

Absolutely.

Every manager, from team leader to CEO, is also a customer service manager, because your people are your customers.

That’s right, customers.

More accurately, that makes you an ESM—employee service manager.

Why do you service your people? To

• help them achieve their full potential;
• assure high productivity;
• lower turnover; and
• create an environment that’s a talent magnet.

How do you service your people? By

• cultivating the kind of MAP (mindset, attitude, philosophy™) that truly values people and understands how important it is to manifest that;
• offering high-grade professional challenges to all your people and making sure that they have the resources and all the information necessary to achieve success;
• fostering fairness so that people know they are evaluated on their merits and favoritism plays no part; and
• always walking your talk and living up to your commitments.

What’s in it for you?

• Better reviews, promotions and raises;
• increased professional development;
• less turnover and easier staffing; and
• what goes around comes around—everything that you give your people will come back to you ten-fold!

Flickr image credit: Angela Archer

I have a guilty pleasure that has persisted for years. My wife is well aware of it and actively encourages the habit. I’m an avid watcher of The Bachelor and all of the spin offs. When I first saw it with my wife years ago I could not believe how vapid and inconsequential the show was. I truly did not care about the outcome, thought everyone participating was a fool and hated myself for wasting time watching it.

However time heals all wounds. The premise of the show is simple. One woman or one man has around 30 suitors to choose from. Over the course of the season they whittle it down to one with the hope that the relationship ends in true love.

I know, absolutely ridiculous. However if you watch more than one season you start to see some of the same people. They bring back fab favorites, others get second chances, villains and heroes are established. It’s essentially a giant soap opera and becomes hilarious to watch.

One thing I have noticed is the idea that choice can be a double edged sword. We may not all have 30 people pining for our heart, but we do have an abundance of choices.

We have career paths to choose. If you are hiring there is always another candidate; if interviewing, there is always another opportunity.

You walk into some restaurants that have everything from pizza to burritos and you can’t think, nothing quite hits the spot.

Choice can immobilize us.

Why are we left feeling empty after these abundance of choices?

I think part of it is a state of mind. If you always think there is something better down the road then you’re never satisfied with your current situation.

There is always more money, a better title, a better life.

As a former Marine I lived a life for some time where we were told to, “embrace the suck”.

We didn’t have a choice and in the absence of choice there can be peace and freedom.

I don’t have a single solution, but I know the choices will only increase.

How will you choose to live?

Image credit: Jason Taellious

Do you believe that the stuff on blogs moves virally, based on interest or merit, to mainstream media?

If so, you are very naïve.

It moves via manipulation, viz the Hidden Persuaders, by people who are paid to manipulate. (Unfortunately, this cited post won’t make it.)

Ryan Holiday is a marketer and publicist who specializes in manipulating blogs in service of his clients.
(…)
contrary to prevailing wisdom, that most original reporting in online media was done by smaller blogs, (…) by influencing small blogs today, one could alter what was in the Washington Post tomorrow.

Virality is most prevalent in stories with high emotional content, especially anger and awe.

Holiday had no problem with his work when the goal was to sell a product, but when the same tools started to be used to manipulate social and civic attitudes he stopped.

If the effects of this media manipulation were merely to drive customers to products they wouldn’t otherwise buy, Ryan would still probably be out there plying his trade. What caused him to reconsider his profession (and write Trust Me I’m Lying) was the increasing use of these manipulation techniques to spread political ideas, and, in the process, hurt individuals. In the second half of the book, he talks about how sites like Jezebel and Breitbart News use the techniques he pioneered to push product for American Apparel to maximize their own page-views by stoking outrage both among their supporters and their opponents. In his view, much of responsibility for the coarsening and polarization of politics and culture can be laid at the feet of professional manipulators like himself.

Using professional manipulators to change and/or incite public opinion is nothing new.

But the tools at their disposal are more insidious than ever.

Therefore, making caveat emptor your personal slogan makes more sense than ever.

Image credit: Scott Akerman

With 68% of employees disengaged, you would think the board’s critical eye would be turned on the executive suite.

You would think wrong.

One of the greatest causes of disengagement is the difference in compensation between the CEO/executives and the workers.

That difference is the direct result pay-for-performance, coupled with the board’s ego-driven competitiveness and desire for bragging rights.

Name the most brilliant, talented, past or present CEO you can think of, then remove them from their position.

The company may hiccup, but it won’t go down in flames.

Now remove all the line managers/team leaders OR all the workers in a specific department or with a specific talent and watch the company stagger and fall on its face.

An unintended consequence of pay-for-performance is we treat companies as if they are in the airline business, except the only person who matters is the pilot—not the grounds crew, nor the quality control tinkerers, nor the guys who wrangled the ore and fuel from the ground, forged the parts, tightened the bolts and soldered the frame.

In their rush to acquire the “best” talent, boards are likely to forget that corporations are not independent entities

It’s a group of people all moving in the same direction, united in a shared vision and their efforts to reach a common goal.

To move in the same direction people need to be engaged.

But how engaged would you be when the proceeds of your hard work show up in someone else’s paycheck?

In the 1970s, shareholders took out about 50% of a company’s profits, while the rest was reinvested in the productive capacity of the firm, including R&D to employee training and rewards. Today, the shareholder gets over 90% between dividends and share buybacks. Today, a 60% or greater weight on equity or equivalents is the norm in pay packages.

Dominantly CEO/ senior pay packages.

The funny thing is that rank and file aren’t looking for similar pay.

They are looking for fairness in relative pay.

Image credit: JustyCinMD

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.

In the six years since I wrote this individual focus on meware has skyrocketed, while focus on wetware has plunged. If this is true for you, you may want to reconsider the long-term effects, both professional and personal.

Read other Golden Oldies here.

Wally Bock writes one of the few blogs under the “leadership” banner that I like, mostly because he writes common sense, keeps it simple and (usually) sees leadership through a lens similar to my own.

In a recent post Wally writes about people.

People are emotional. Some economists write like they think it’s not so. Some philosophers think it’s bad. But it’s the way we are. Our emotions affect everything we do and every choice we make.

People are perceptive and insightful. We notice things and reach conclusions without the need for advanced programming.

People are creative. Human beings are natural idea generators. Just let us show up and watch us go.

People are both consistent and inconsistent. As a species we’re pretty predictable. Once we’re past young adulthood, our previous behavior is a good guide to our future behavior. But individually we’re a source of constant surprise.

People have knowledge. Knowledge is information plus context. On a good day, we can generate wisdom.

People have relationships. They are a source of strength and support and insight. They are also a source of biases.

People have lives. We have a life at work and a life at home and a host of other lives. They are all in play all the time.

That post reminded me of an ancient Cathy comic from the Eighties in which a computer salesman tells Cathy he knows hardware and software, but isn’t fluent in wetware.

Unfortunately, a lot of managers aren’t as fluent in wetware as they need to be to generate high levels of success for both their team and themselves.

For that matter, people in general aren’t always wetware aware, let alone fluent.

However, they seem to be both fluent and aware when it comes to meware.

The problem is that meware won’t raise productivity or drive innovation; it won’t produce responsible, well-rounded kids or create viable relationships.

When it comes to life, wetware is really all that matters, whether professionally or personally.

Flickr image credit: ThisParticularGreg

Mega rounds of funding are creating a frenzy in the startup world.

Start-ups raising $100 million or more from investors — known as a mega-round in Silicon Valley — used to be a rarity. But now, they are practically routine, producing a frenzy around tech companies with enough scale and momentum to absorb a large check.

But are they smart?

It may be great for ego and bragging rights, but does it make you richer?

Probably not.

Consider Zappos and Wayfair.

EACH ONE of Wayfair’s two co-founders made as much money as ALL of Zappos’ shareholders combined. (…)  Put another way, Wayfair co-founders made at nearly 10X as much as Hsieh.

Mega rounds hurt employees by substantially diluting their stock and forces you to grow, often at an unreasonable rate.

In these days of frenzied money, some founders, such as Gusto’s founder/CEO Joshua Reeves choose to say no to excessive funding.

Gusto, a payroll and benefits software company, raised $140 million in July, but could have done five times that, according to Joshua Reeves, its chief executive and founder.

Startups seem to have forgotten that the purpose of a company is to make money, not raise it.

Mr. Reeves, of software start-up Gusto, acknowledged that founders who obtain outsize sums of capital can get caught up in a “growth at any cost” mentality. That is why he chose not to maximize his funding round despite the intense interest. “It’s up to the founder to realize that’s a distraction,” he said. “Success is not having more money or a bigger team, but having more customers or revenue.”

Think about it.

Image credit: HikingArtist

As I’ve said before, one of the smartest moves you can make is to sign up for the CB Insights newsletter. It’s got more going for it than just the data, although that is excellent.

If you take time to read it and actually pay attention to the construction, design, organization, and the writing itself, you will be miles ahead when it comes to your own efforts.

Assuming, that is, you consider a subscriber list of more than 485,000 to indicate success.

While several people author specific editions (health, fintech, etc.) It is one of the founders, Anand Sanwal, who originally wrote all of them and it is his intelligence, skilled writing, irreverence and quirkiness that set the tone. Amazingly, the other authors have similar writing skills.

One of the greatest pleasures, to me, are the odd bits that Anand provides, such as this one, that he calls “everyone before me was dumb.”

Sometimes a new person joins your team and immediately decides the way things are done is stupid and/or inefficient. They invent their own process without taking the time to understand why existing processes are in place.

Bobby Ghoshal and Nick Stamas designed this brilliant framework that describes this situation.
They’ve dubbed it The Prior Idiots Phenomenon.
This might be good to include in employee onboarding everywhere.

Managers love to hire people whom they believe can “hit the ground running.”

However, that doesn’t mean to hit the ground running roughshod over the culture, processes, ways and means that you know nothing about, because you have a better approach.

We’ve all been there, but hopefully not done that.

Or at least won’t do it again in the future.

Image credit: CB Insights Newsletter

Bias, implicit or not, intentional or not, is at the forefront of most companies and bosses’ minds. Companies spend thousands on various kinds of anti-bias training.

But based on decades of data, not much seems to change.

Perhaps that’s because bias isn’t “fixable” or, as Lily Zheng, a diversity and inclusion consultant, says, Bias isn’t like an upset stomach that an individual can take an antacid to fix.

Zheng offers a truly commonsense approach that is far more practical and achievable than trying to make people unbiased.

The outcome of any implicit bias training shouldn’t be to cure people’s bias or make them more objective—it should be to make people bias-aware. (…) When people are bias-aware, they are able to act with less bias without fixating on being unbiased.

It all boils down to knowing yourself, which can be a lost cause for some people.

More than a decade ago I started talking about MAP (mindset, attitude, philosophy™).

MAP (mindset, attitude, philosophy)™ is the basis for everything you do—it is the why of life.

Everything you do and say is a mindset, grounded in your attitude towards others, which, in turn, is based on your personal philosophy.

Obviously, implicit bias is part of MAP.

Zheng provides a good roadmap for handling implicit bias, focusing on the need for self-honesty and a non-judgmental attitude, including that awareness doesn’t always mean change.

While the decision may not end up changing, the process of being honest and nonjudgmental about one’s own bias adds both accountability and intentionality.

I provided a simple step-by-step for changing your MAP if you so desire.

Both require honest self-awareness, but doing them is, as always, your choice.

Image credit: Ron Mader

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.

In a world of Facebook/Twitter/WhatsApp/constant notifications/etc. knowing yourself is not high on people’s priority list. Partly, because it requires introspection sans distractions and partly because it is hard work and often uncomfortable. That said, it also provides the highest ROI of any action you may take.

Read other Golden Oldies here.

Do you equate leadership to influence?

Does being labeled an “influencer” by LinkedIn or other social media make you a leader?

Not really.

True leadership is internal.

It’s a function of your MAP (mindset, attitude, philosophy™).

It starts by knowing both yourself and your MAP.

Knowing yourself refers to knowing what you’ve done.

Knowing your MAP means knowing why you did it.

Knowing both allows you to accurately evaluate where you are and where you’re going.

That knowledge is the rudder with which you can chart and achieve any course you choose.

Image credit: Jevgenijs Slihto