Category Archives: Business & Marketing

The mop goes here!

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In 1987, Jeff Salzman co-authored a little book entitled: Real World 101: How to Find a Job, Get Ahead, Do It Now, and Love It! A year or two later, Salzman spoke to a small group of our company managers and told what I think might be the best management story I ever heard.

It’s the story of a Tastee Freeze, the man who cleaned it and his boss. To insure the Tastee Freeze was cleaned properly, the manager made a list of all the necessary cleaning products and tools; drew up a little chart showing where everything in the supply closet went (color coded); and made a numbered list of the proper order for cleaning the Tastee Freeze. He couldn’t understand why the cleaning guy had trouble following his carefully thought out plan.

One day a new manager showed up at the Tastee Freeze and asked the cleaning guy what he did at the Tastee Freeze. The cleaning guy showed him the precisely organized supply closet; the list of approved mops and buckets; and the printed list of steps for cleaning the Tastee Freeze.

The new manager immediately tore up the lists and told the cleaning guy, “Look, I just want the cleanest Tastee Freeze in town. I don’t care how you do it or what supplies you use. If you run into a snag, let me know and I’ll try to help.”

I must confess that I was too often the first type of manager during the 25 years I “managed” others. All I really wanted was a clean Tastee Freeze but it was so much fun to pick out the mops and make the lists. Alas.

A word from our sponsor.

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My last couple of posts got me thinking. I put my name on a no-call list so telemarketers would stop trying to sell me stuff I didn’t ask for; I set up my new Google toolbar to block pop-up ads; I’ve never seen a commercial on anything I watch with my Tivo; same for my 100 XM Radio channels.

I understand the content-for-attention value proposition of “free” media. But the fact remains that most people will skip the commercials if they can. Is that stealing? Have I broken some unspoken agreement when skip past the commercials? I don’t think that’s the important question for advertisers (and the people that sell the advertising). How effective is a commercial (TV, radio, print, online) if it’s only being seen/heard/read because there was no easy way to avoid it?

The growing glut of SPAM and telemarketing calls has made me think about this more. These people are universally hated. And they know it. But they are willing to endure this because they’ve calculated that some tiny percent of the calls/emails DO work. We never thought about this with “old” media because it was so one-way. All radio and TV have commercials so if you want to watch Perry Mason, you’ll by-god watch the commercials. Does it really do any good for me to see/hear your commercial if I have a bad feeling about your company/product at the end of those 30/60 seconds? I supect the answer is –in some twisted way– yes. Yes, it does.

Corporate blogs

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From an article by Hiawatha Bray in the Business Section (The Boston Globe) on the Weblogs Business Strategy conference last week:

“Consider: Every business needs to know what its employees know. Companies are crammed with experts on various topics whose knowledge goes to waste — because nobody knows what they know. Now give these workers an internal corporate blog, and encourage them to use it. Let them natter away on every topic that intrigues them. Harvest and index the results. You’ve mapped your workers’ brains. The company’s hidden experts will cheerfully reveal themselves, and the firm’s institutional memory gets an upgrade.” [By way of JOHO]

Stock market prediction

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Douglas Rushkoff’s “official and not-to-be-wagered-upon stock market prediction is a 10-15% rise in the S&P by the end of February, and then freefall down to 6500 before the war starts. Then, a blip up with that sense of certainty that always accompanies a good ariel bombardment, and a blip back down when we realize that in a globally networked economy, war is bad for business, too.”

BMW Films: Hostage

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And I thought you had to watch them in a theater or TV. But I was wrong. A few weeks ago I kept seeing a movie trailer for a film called Hostage. “We gotta see this movie,” I told Barb. Then I noticed it was showing at BMWfilms.com. Oh, shit. It’s a commercial. Never mind. No…mind. Go to BMWfilms.com and watch this eight minute… (movie? film? cinema? commercial?). I don’t what you call it but I watched three of these (about 8 minutes each) and I don’t remember when I’ve seen anything more entertaining. I won’t try to review these. Or categorize them. Just watch them. If these are commercials, they’re not like any commercial I ever saw. They did make me think about owning a BMW and that’s probably what it’s all about. My, my, but these were good. Directors like John Woo and Tony Scott (Spy Game, Crimson Tide, True Romance, Top Gun)…actors like Gary Oldman and James Brown. And I’m sitting here in front of my little Thinkpad watching these stream on a DSL connection thinking, “I could watch 90 minutes of this, easy.” So. Is this the advertising of the future? I don’t know now. But I’m thinking I would have paid to watch this BMW commercial and I’m already paying to not watch lots of other commercials. The winds of change are blowing.

The Curse of Competence

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“People with more of an attitude of “whatever it takes” wind up taking on more and more of the jobs no one wants and thus have less and less time for the jobs they really want to do. I call this the “curse of competence.” … Oddly, in a time of real resource constraints, it is not good to become known as the person who can get things done no matter what. If you did it with “x”, the organization doesn’t say, “well, I’ll bet he could be spectacular with ‘2x’.” Instead it says, “He did so well with ‘x,’ we bet he can get it done with ‘3/4x’ too.”

— From blog called Middle Monkey, via Halley Suitt

Walnut bowls and T-shirt shops

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When the “outdoor advertising” boys thought Missouri might pass some restrictive laws against billboards, they got busy and started throwing up billboards all over the state, trying to get in under the wire. Turns out they had nothing to worry about. Their lobbyists came through. If Mount Rushmore was in Missouri, we’d have it plastered with billboards. If we were blessed with the Grand Canyon, we’d trash it up. I was born in Missouri and have lived here most of my life but I gotta say, we are one low-rent bunch of trailer park hillbillies. We are walnut bowls and T-shirt shops. It’s not enough that we have the worst highways in the country, we line them with monstrous billboards. I imagine travelers from more enlightened states passing through… “Honey! Wake up! You gotta see this! Nothing but billboards for as far as you can see.”