Spelling Bee! June 1, 2009
Posted by Chuck Musciano in Random Musings.Tags: Customer Service, Quality, Spelling
5 comments
By chance, I stumbled upon the finals of the National Spelling Bee last week. I watched a bit for fun, but was soon completely captivated. I wound up watching all ten rounds to see who would win.
I am a stickler for correct spelling. Spelling, like math, is either right or wrong. There is no “close enough” in spelling, even if the reader can figure out what you were trying to say. Poor spelling says, in effect, “I can’t figure this out; you do it.”
It was fascinating to see the competitors work through the Bee. For each word, they were able to ask questions about origin and meaning, as well as alternate pronunciations and appropriate usage. The color commentator was great, explaining how these clues helped. Word origin is especially helpful since various root and suffix patterns differ between Latin, Greek, and Germanic origins. Sure enough, one kid used the Greek origin of a word to pick out the correct “rrh” pattern in the middle of a medical term.
As all these things do, it came down to a four-time competitor and a newby, battling through the list of “Championship Words.” The newcomer, seventh-grader Tim Ruiter, missed “maecenas.” This opened the door for Kavya Shivashankar to nail “laodicean” for the win. Personally, I didn’t think this was fair. “Maecenas” has that awful blended “ae” and a soft “c,” making it almost impossible to spell if you haven’t seen it before. “Laodicean,” on the other hand, is spelled exactly as it sounds and is a somewhat more common word.
Although I think a better final round would involve soundproof chambers and everyone spelling the same words at the same time, I can’t complain about the general intent of the Bee: to reward those who care to get it right, who take the time to do the job well.
Would that we would all apply similar discipline and focus to everything we do, spelling or otherwise. Many people view spelling as a small, inconsequential thing, but it represents a far larger concern. There is no difference between a writer with poor spelling and a painter who does sloppy trim work, or a carpenter who doesn’t sand everything evenly. Either you care enough to do a job right, or you don’t.
Spelling matters. Grammar matters. Punctuation matters. Neat painting and smooth furniture matter. As does making that extra call to a customer, taking an extra moment to listen to someone’s concerns, or working a bit harder to understand a problem. Little things do matter, and all the things that seem big are really just lots of little things strung together. Get the little things right, and the big things will come much easier.
What Can You Do? May 20, 2009
Posted by Chuck Musciano in Random Musings.Tags: Leadership, Nicholas Winton, Relationships, Service
4 comments
I enjoy collecting and sharing inspirational quotes. I’ve arranged a few of my favorites on the Quotes page of this blog in the hope that others may garner similar inspiration from them. I know that there are thousands of these collections, far larger and more comprehensive than mine. Mine are, well, mine; they come from people that I admire for various reasons.
The newest addition to my collection comes from a relative unknown, Nicholas Winton:
I just saw what was going on and did what I could to help.
What did Nicholas do? In the waning days of 1939, he saw what was happening to the Jews in Czechoslovakia. He went to Prague, opened an office, and arranged to have 669 Jewish children sponsored and moved to Great Britain. An additional trainload of 250 children was to have left on September 3, 1939, but war was declared and the train was canceled. Those children were killed by the invading Germans.
Nicholas Winton turned 100 yesterday, on May 19, 2009. He is inordinately modest (he never even told his wife what he had done), and I certainly have not done his story justice. You can learn more about him here and here, and a 2002 movie tells his story as well.
It would be impossible to catalog the downstream good that Winton’s actions caused. How many subsequent good acts were undertaken by those he saved? And by their children, and in turn their children? How many people have benefited by some action of those saved by Winton, but have no idea that they could trace that act back to one man, doing what he could to help, in 1939?
Few of us, regrettably, will have the impact of Winton. But all of us can have some impact, in some way, every day. No act of good, no matter how small, is wasted. Most importantly, we can never know the true measure of any act of good. What seems small to us may be huge to someone else.
There is an apocryphal tale of a small boy walking on a beach covered with starfish washed up by the tide. As he walks, he picks up starfish and throws them back into the water. His father asks him “Why throw them back? You can’t save all the starfish. What difference does it make?” The boy picks up another starfish, throws it, and says “It made a difference to him.”
Today, in honor of Nicholas Winton, make a difference to someone. In each situation you encounter, ask yourself two simple questions:
What is going on?
What can I do to help?
Imagine a world where we all did that every day. Now stop imagining and go do it!
Idiot Or Thief? April 24, 2009
Posted by Chuck Musciano in Random Musings.Tags: Customer Service, Interfaces, Irritants
2 comments
I love shopping in a store and being accused of being both stupid and a thief. What better way to win my long-term loyalty?
It all started back in 1973. A nearby grocery store had installed a high-tech checkout system that used new-fangled “bar codes” to scan items at checkout, eliminating the hand-keying of prices into the cash register. Well, what could be better? As bacon is to all foods, lasers are to all technology. There is no device that does not get better by adding a laser in some fashion. And these checkout systems had visible lasers, flickering across the products, ready to blind or maim at a moment’s notice! Dangerous technology, bent to the will of man!
Over the years, scanners replaced cash registers, until they were pervasive in every shopping experience. But the technology was off-limits to all but a select few: the highly trained cadre of cashiers who were granted access to the mysterious machines. Only they knew how to hold the products just so, and move them at the right speed, to get a good scan each and every time. Mere mortals stood back in awe as these artists worked their magic with cans, boxes, and even plastic bags.
The desire to use the machine and scan something was overpowering. Alas, my career choice precluded being a cashier, so I tried to manage my impulses. A rare encounter with a cashier that would let you scan something was like a brief glimpse into another world. It felt so good!
Imagine my excitement when my local grocery installed self-checkout machines. I could be my own cashier, scanning all by myself! This was heady stuff, and I was quick to use those lanes whenever possible.
The fun was cut short when I found that the machine assumes that I am both an idiot and a thief. As you scan each item, the system tells you to place it in the bagging area. If it doesn’t arrive in the bagging area in quickly enough, the system repeats the command and then locks up, awaiting intervention from the system manager. After the manager unlocks the system from their console, I can then move on to the next item.
As to the idiot assumption: where do they think I am going to put the item? Throw it to the floor? Back in my basket? Juggle it? I know to put it in the bag. Why would you tell me this for each and every item I am buying? Thanks for assuming that a typical adult has no idea how the purchasing process works.
And a thief? Apparently, these machines are built with scales in the bagging area, and some poor soul has entered the weight of every conceivable item you might buy. As you scan an item, the system is carefully checking to see if what you bought is correctly placed into a bag. If that weight is not registered in the bag, the system assumes you have not bagged it and must therefore be committing some sort of fraud. Did you scan one item but bag two? Scan a cheap item but bag something far more expensive?
The reality is that the scales on these machines are not that great, so that bagging errors happen all the time. Set an item down too hard or too gently, and it is misread. Jostle the scale or try to shift things in the bag, and you upset the system. Most items weigh so little that they cannot possibly register accurately every time. Yet the assumption is that the system is right, you are wrong, and some shenanigans are going on in aisle seven.
Let me clarify something for my local grocer: my long-term retirement plan does not involve skimming extra candy bars and razor blades for potential resale on eBay. I am not out to rob you; I just want to quickly check out while experiencing the vicarious thrill of using a laser to do so. I understand that certain miscreants might uses lasers for nefarious purposes, but that usually involves sharks. I am honest, long-term customer that wants to be treated that way. For goodness sake, I scanned my frequent shopper card when I started; if there was some sort of problem, you know whre I live!
Once again, companies are usnig technology with the best of intentions but ending up alienating and irritating customers. We preach about trust and relationship with customers, but that seems to only go one way. Our systems assume there is no trust or relationship, and customers are quick to perceive that. We need to live the customer experience more often and translate our feelings into the systems we design. Then we can start building trust and earning a relationship with our customers.
Get It In Writing April 13, 2009
Posted by Chuck Musciano in Random Musings.Tags: Management Skills, Project Management, Technology, Users
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When I worked in R&D, we shared our building with another group whose job was to improve engineering productivity. They took their job quite seriously and had a mandate to investigate any aspect of the engineering groups that appeared to be in need of improved productivity. They weren’t engineers, but they did claim to understand process and project management, and they often used a new acronym, TQM, as a sign that they were on the cutting edge of this kind of stuff.
As you can imagine, the engineers were not overly enamored of this group. Fortunately, the productivity team must have decided that our R&D group was beyond help, productivity-wise, since my group was rarely the target of their attention. On the whole, our groups got along pretty well and often shared information.
At some point, a few folks from the productivity group got involved in a fairly elaborate project, working with another division in my company. They were very excited about this project, which involved some fancy new computer system to collect and analyze a lot of data. The more this woman talked, the more excited she got about the project, and the more doubtful I became of her chances of success.
After a bit, I asked her about system performance. The data volume was large and the analysis was complex. Even with the best current technology, a functional solution would be a challenge to build. Would the system be able to perform well? Would the users be happy with response time?
She didn’t miss a beat. “Of course, it will perform well! We wrote that into the requirements!”
And off she went. With the stroke of a pen, she had solved any and all performance issues this new system might have. As you might imagine, the project never finished, for a variety of reasons.
It is easy to listen to this story and laugh at the naivete of non-IT people. How could anyone design such a complicated system and them make it perform well with a simple written requirement?
The deeper lesson (you knew there would be a deeper lesson, right?) is that someone failed to educate this person as to the real complexity of her project. Non-IT people cannot understand what we do. Unfortunately, when we do it well, we make it look very easy. When it looks easy, people assume that it is easy and base their world on that assumption. This results in projects that fail to meet user expectations.
Users do not want to know the details of our technology. But they need to know when things are really hard or really expensive. If they probe, you can explain why. We owe them enough information, matched to their curiosity, so that they can appropriately plan and manage their world. If we fail to do that, we have failed them, no matter how well our technology works.
The Effective CIO 