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Chapter 1
Thriving in the Now
Prepare for Yes
Katy, two years out of engineering school and a new recruit at software developer “Expedite,” has just arrived at her Silicon Valley cube for a one-week stint on the graveyard shift as a technical support specialist. She has volunteered for this assignment because she's eager to see what happens on the front lines with customers she would otherwise never meet.
Grabbing her Red Bull, she logs in to Expedite's new management system designed to satisfy customers at the speed of their need.
Katy barely settles in when her Skype rings. Onto the screen pops the clearly irate face of the chief information officer of TexTech, the huge account in Ireland that Expedite won just last week.
“Six of our production facilities are down,” bellows the CIO, “because your damned software crashed! We need this fixed, and we need it fixed now!” Katy's heart races. She knows that her actions during the next few minutes will determine whether the CIO decides to stick with the new software or dump it.
“I'll get back to you in 10 minutes,” Katy promises.
Immediately she sends an internal distress tweet to the software team in Vietnam. In less than a minute she's on Skype as the engineers in Saigon access relevant documents and data from the cloud. Their real-time conversation includes “tag” searching of blogs, video references, and critical documents. The inference engine suggests the “best-fit” materials to review. The engineers quickly spot the problem, a recently discovered bug that the application maintenance department in Paris had fixed and validated hours earlier; they immediately make the necessary change in their cloud application.
When Katy Skypes the CIO, not only has he calmed down, he's thrilled with the swift response. “I didn't think you guys could solve the problem this fast. You're amazing!”
As Katy finishes the call with the customer, she picks up her Red Bull. “Still cold,” she marvels. Her smartphone chimes with a text from her boss.
“Checking in. Everything Okay?”
“All good here,” she texts back.
In a traditionally managed organization, Katy would have needed to turn the customer problem over to management, and that would have delayed the solution by hours, if not days. Fortunately, however, Katy works for a company that does business at the speed of now.
By design, conventional management systems prevent both speed and customization at a time when employees and customers alike clamor for both. If your business doesn't provide it, your competitors will.
Customers increasingly demand a yes answer to each and every question they ask. They want what they want, and they want it now. This turns the world of management on its head. Managers simply cannot keep using a system that creaks along, getting bogged down in protocol or bureaucracy. Companies must evolve or die. Once the need for speed burst into the business environment, it changed the game. Today, competitive success demands a new approach to management, one that enables employees at all levels to solve problems and seize opportunities autonomously and instantaneously.
Our Love of Speed
An advertisement for the Pony Express printed in a California newspaper in 1860 read: “Wanted. Young, skinny, wiry fellows. Not over 18. Must be expert riders. Willing to risk death daily. Orphans preferred.”
The forerunner of Federal Express ran weekly. Instead of overnight, communications took 10 days at 10 miles per hour to get from St. Joseph, Missouri, to Sacramento, California. A half-ounce letter cost $425 in today's dollars. Riders received $100 a month in a time when unskilled laborers earned a mere $4.
Amazingly, the famed Pony Express lasted only 18 months. By 1861, the first telegraph poles began dotting the countryside. And within the decade the tracks of the first transcontinental railroad ran from sea to shining sea. What propelled these developments? A love of speed and, more specifically, a passion to get vital information more swiftly.
Over the past hundred years, farsighted entrepreneurs have invented planes, jets, the fax machine, and, in the past two decades, the internet and mobile electronic devices to support the need for speed. Now anything anyone needs to know can travel at the speed of light, circling the globe 7.4 times in 1 second or traveling to the moon and back in 2.6 seconds (see Table 1.1).
Table 1.1 History of Speed.
Since nothing moves faster than the speed of light, information will never flow any faster, although bandwidth expansion allows greater and greater quantities of information and richer and richer media (“Yes, there are plenty of apps for that!”) to come speeding down the information highway. Having achieved near-instant access to the information they want and need, both customers and employees now expect speed every second of every day.
The ability to receive information with a single click of the mouse or a tap on the screen sets expectations high for getting anything you want. If you can access the cast and storyline of the latest Academy Award–winning film on your smartphone or iPad, then why can't you get your cable provider to solve a connectivity problem in seconds? Why can't you get that new LCD 55-inch television installed this afternoon? People want all sorts of stuff, and, more and more, they want it now.
Twitter's language of hash tags and short URLs can be used as a window through which millions of people can peer to see what's going on now, whether in the world of celebrities and global corporations or in the lives of friends or colleagues. A follower can access breaking news from CNN, the musings of business icon Jack Welch, details of the latest costumes worn by Lady Gaga, the most recent developments in the NFL or NBA, and the latest news from the Ford Motor Company, not to mention updates from the president of the United States or even the author of this book. (Follow me on Twitter: @johnmbernard.)
What does all this mean to today's business leaders and managers? Quite simply, it means that you must find ways to do business at the speed of everyone's need. You must find better ways to fire up your people, thrill your customers, and race past your competitors—now. This book will explore the principles and practices that leaders and managers can use to thrive in a world where change happens so fast you can only see today in your rearview mirror.
The Power of Yes
“Hello, I'm having trouble with my HD DVR,” Harley told the DirecTV service representative, who immediately said, “Thank you for being such a long-time customer.” For over 15 years Harley had remained loyal to the satellite television provider that he had championed to all his friends and neighbors on Cape Cod, many of whom also became enthusiastic customers. Whenever he had called with a problem, a DirecTV technician had always solved the problem immediately or quickly escalated it up to someone who could. But not this time.
The technician said, “I see we've run through the troubleshooting protocols. You probably need a new unit, but you'll need to talk with technical support.”
“Can't you just authorize a new HD DVR and save me and your company a lot of time?” Harley had grown impatient with trying the same fixes over and over, all to no avail.
“No sir, this is the way we have to do it.”
A half hour later Harley had talked to three different people, told the same story to each, ran the same diagnostic tests of the system, and still had not received authorization for a replacement device, even though he was a long-time customer and paid extra each month for a total equipment protection plan.
Finally, the third technician offered to connect Harley to someone in senior management. A senior manager reviewed the case, asked the same wearisome questions, and, finally, authorized the replacement machine.
Harley then asked the woman a simple question: “Why don't you allow your front-line people to make an obvious decision and save me and yourselves a lot of hassle and money? If this happens to me again, you'll turn me into a former customer.”
“Well, sir,” responded the manager, half jokingly, “Management needs something to do.”
Subsequently, when one of his tennis buddies asked him about switching from cable to satellite TV service, Harley did not recommend the move.
While reasonable customers don't mind answering a few reasonable questions, no one likes being treated like an idiot or a crook, or being taken on an agonizing journey through the messy decision-making maze of an organization where management “needs something to do.” Customers simply don't care about a company's internal procedures and policies; they want a speedy answer to a specific question, and the answer they want to hear is yes!
A company's failure to solve the customer's problem now can mean the beginning of the end of a relationship, as it did for Harley. It can also mean the beginning of a new relationship with a competitor. As happened in the DirecTV example, a long-time loyal customer lost confidence in a firm with which he had enjoyed a 15-year relationship, not over a string of bad experiences but over company procedures and policies that had prevented it from saying yes and saying it now. It happens every day as businesses lose customers for reasons they never even see. In reverse, a surprise accommodation can turn a prospective buyer into a loyal customer.
Yes derives its power from the fact that it saves customers time; and time, like low tide, waits for no one. No one can ever buy more of it; it continually slips away, and when it's gone, it's gone forever. When a customer hears a prompt yes, she can happily move on to something else she needs to do. When she hears no, especially after waiting for over an hour to hear it, she feels as if she's been robbed of something irreplaceable.
Customers also value yes because it respects their needs and makes them feel good, whether they are dealing with an insurance provider or the Department of Motor Vehicles. Can you think of a better definition for customer service than “making the customer feel good?” That feeling lies at the heart of every customer relationship, and yet companies forget that fact all the time when they take loyalty for granted.
My wife and I felt our loyalty taken for granted recently when our long-time insurance company, a name-brand outfit (always top-rated by Consumer Reports) failed to say yes. We had always liked the service this company provided, but after an industrial van smashed into my rear bumper while I was stopped at a signal waiting for the left-turn light to turn green, I ran into a snarl of red tape.
Even though my insurer ended up not paying a dime on the claim (the company that owned the vehicle that hit me did), while dealing with the incident, my insurer discovered I had not updated them on the fact that I had recently begun using my personal vehicle for business purposes. Both my wife and I held interminable conversations with a service rep, who implied that we were purposely trying to deceive a firm that also carried our home, auto, umbrella, and life policies. We paid this company a lot of money, only to listen as its representative made us feel like crooks.
The relationship soured instantly. Why, you might wonder, didn't I express my unhappiness to upper management? The hassle had already cost me more ti...
