Love All, Serve All July 23, 2008
Posted by Chuck Musciano in Leadership.Tags: Customer Service, Rock and Roll
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I recently recounted a great customer service experience with the Wall Street Journal. Hard on the heels of this unexpected event, I had another great experience this past weekend at the Hard Rock Theme Park in Myrtle Beach, South Carolina. Could this be a trend? Let’s hope so!
Unlike my single interaction with the Journal, my family’s entire day at the Hard Rock was exceptional. As we arrived at the parking lot entrance to pay our $10 parking fee, the attendant took the time to explain the re-entry rules, welcomed us to the park, and exhorted us to “Rock On!” as we pulled away. We laughed and drove on, our mood and attitude reinforced for a fun day.
Inside the park, every employee took time to ask us how we were doing. Did we need help finding something? Were we enjoying our day? Did we know that a particular show was starting in a few moments? From r
ide attendants to cashiers to janitorial staff, every single employee seemed to be taking a personal interest in our experience. Although we were a bit surprised at first, we began to appreciate what a difference this attention made throughout the day. It was wonderful!
I lived in Florida for fifteen years. I’ve been to every variation of a theme park you can imagine, more times that I can count. The service and approach by the Hard Rock staff was better than any other park I’ve attended, including the Disney properties.
Being a brand new park, the Hard Rock lacks the breadth of more established parks but makes up for its smaller scope with a wide range of different things to do. Hands down, it has the best background music of any park you’ll attend. The small touches and puns are everywhere, rewarding the discriminating rock and roll fan with something to smile about no matter where you look. My favorite part: the same music plays everywhere at t
he same time, but in the reggae area, a synchronized version of the song is played on the steel drums. I never thought I’d hear Livin’ On A Prayer on the steel drums, but thanks to the Hard Rock I can check that off my bucket list.
If you get the chance, take the time to visit the Hard Rock Theme Park. Enjoy the music, have fun on the rides, and marvel at the customer service. Then come home and see if you can get your staff to generate and sustain the same level of customer focus with your customers. Love all, serve all!
Experiments In Leadership July 22, 2008
Posted by Chuck Musciano in Leadership.Tags: Leadership, Scouting
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I recently returned from a week at Boy Scout Summer Camp, at idyllic Camp Raven Knob in the mountains of North Carolina. I was not alone: camp is best experienced in large groups. To that end, I was there with Boy Scout Troop 244 with eight other adults and 39 Boy Scouts, including my son. Overall, the camp was home to 650 Scouts, with perhaps 150 adult leaders and 100 staff members.
The boys spent the week earning merit badges, hiking, swimming, building fires, playing with sharp objects, eating camp food, getting rained on, and fooling around. The adult leaders focus on ensuring that the boys have fun, don’t get too homesick, and return home with all the eyes, fingers, and limbs they brought to camp at the start of the week.
To the casual observer, Scouting is just another extracurricular activity for boys that involves camping and various outdoor skills. Those involved in Scouting know better. Scouting is an outstanding leadership training program for young men that uses outdoor experiences as the venue for boys to try their new skills. For 100 years, Scouting has been teaching young men how to solve problems, organize teams, develop strategies, and lead people. When you throw in the opportunity to build fires, use knives, and get dirty, it becomes almost irresistible to most 12-year-old boys.
Most people never get the opportunity to experiment with leadership with no fear of failure. By the time we are placed in a leadership position, failure carries a huge cost. Scouting creates leadership opportunities where failure has no downside. Instead, boys get the opportunity to see their mistakes, learn from them, and try again. By the time they move into a real leadership role, they have the experience to be successful and avoid previous errors.
I once watched my son try to lead a patrol of eight boys in cooking breakfast. He struggled as boys wandered off, ignored his plan, and went their own way. He wound up doing much of the work himself and found the experience frustrating. Everyone did get to eat, but the process was messy, literally and figuratively. Afterward, I asked him how it went. He declared he never wanted to be in charge of cooking again! I laughed, and we talked about how to motivate a team, delegate tasks, follow up, and finish a project. Since then, my son has managed patrol meals on many occasions without a problem, and his patrol eats very well. (Menu highlights have included penne with shrimp in a tomato cream sauce, chicken fajitas, and apple pie, all prepared in various remote locales across North Carolina).
Leadership training is an essential part of any good organization. Just as Scouting provides a lab environment for future leaders, we need to create training opportunities for our people to test their leadership skills. Most importantly, we need to give them the ability to fail without fear so that they can learn from their mistakes and get better. Fear of failure is paralyzing. Let your people fail, provide structure to contain the potential damage, and give feedback so they can learn from their mistakes. Although you may not be able to send them camping for a week, they’ll still grow and mature into more effective contributors in your organization.
Customer Service! July 3, 2008
Posted by Chuck Musciano in Leadership.Tags: Customer Service, Grammar, Newspapers, Punctuation
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I had a startling customer service experience this week that is worth sharing.
I am a long-time reader of the Wall Street Journal. I think the Journal is the last great newspaper in America, with an editorial viewpoint that resonates with my own political leanings. It comes as no surprise to me that a paper run by conservatives is successful and profitable, in contrast to a certain other high-profile New York paper that positions itself slightly to the left of Karl Marx.
I have been distressed recently to see an uptick in spelling and grammar errors in the Journal. Loyal readers know my feelings on such things, and I was not happy to see the Journal slipping to a level of quality normally associated with USA Today and its ilk. I reached the end of my rope when earlier this week a Journal article referred to the owner of a Toyota dealership as “Mr. Yaris,” replacing the real name with the name of a Toyota model.
Knowing that they await my feedback on a regular basis, I dashed off an email to the editors. You can imagine the consternation in the Journal offices when word got out that I had written; I can only presume they brought the whole operation to a grinding halt while my thoughts were shared across the organization.
Well, something like that must have happened, because in less than two hours, I received a personal response from the author of the article, apologizing for the error, thanking me for my concern, and assuring me that the Journal worked very hard to keep such things from happening.
Wow! A real response to a (mildly) disgruntled customer! Imagine an organization that reads their email so quickly, routes it to the responsible party, and ensures that a response occurs so quickly! I was impressed, and wrote back to say just that. Later, I found that they even listed the error in the next day’s corrections.
Does your organization handle customer feedback that well? Are your people taking personal responsibility for their errors with their customers in such a professional manner? If not, why not?
Head In The Clouds June 19, 2008
Posted by Chuck Musciano in Technology.Tags: Computing, History
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The latest rage in the world of IT is “cloud computing.” The “cloud” is the internet, often represented as an all-connected puffy blob in countless network diagrams and PowerPoint presentations.
Cloud computing moves your applications away from your local servers and desktops and houses them on servers located in the cloud. Managed by great, benevolent entities like Google, Amazon, and Microsoft, your systems will run better and faster. As butterflies dance around your worry-free head, you’ll be able to focus on your “core competencies,” whatever they may be.
Hmmm. Centralized computing services with local display technology. Where have I heard of this before? Oh, that’s right! We used to call it “mainframe computing!” And that local display technology? A 3270 terminal! In the ’80s, we built dedicated display devices called X Terminals and used them to connect to centralized servers, where we would run our applications. In the ’90s, we deployed “thin client” devices, moving the storage to the server but shifting the computing power to the device.
Those who forget history are condemned to repeat it.
Still using any of these? Of course not. If we have learned one thing in the past 50 years of computing, it is that users demand more and more local power, control, and capability. With that power they will do new and unforeseen things that will dramatically alter how we use information. Every effort to pull that power in, to restrict what people do, has failed. Trying to pull applications off the desktop and run them remotely may be possible technologically, but it will never succeed socially.
I say this even as I continuously try to standardize and manage a far-flung IT infrastructure for my company. The difference? I accept that there will be local applications and capabilities. My standards seek to embrace and manage that local element, instead of trying to pull it back and eliminate it.
Don’t misunderstand: you can shift certain services and capabilities to the cloud with great success. My company has outsourced several business processes to external service providers. My personal data at home is backed up to an external service called Mozy, which works very well. This blog runs on WordPress.com, instead of some server I manage myself. My personal email is externally hosted as well.
The idea of moving all of my personal data to the cloud and accessing my applications there is incomprehensible. Imagine doing everything (everything!) at the speed of your current internet connection. I have several thousand photos on my laptop at home. I manage them with Adobe Photoshop Elements, which provides a fast, high-fidelity interface that lets me flip through hundreds of pictures in a few seconds. Ever tried that on the web? Go to Flickr and try to preview a few hundred pictures. That’s an enjoyable experience. Now extend that to hundreds of documents that you’ll want to edit and manage. No way. Word and Excel are slow enough running locally; they (or their equivalent) will never be better at the other end of a long wire.
The speed problems aren’t the real problem. People like to use their computers anywhere, anytime. High-speed connections are not pervasive, and your cloud computing experience is only pleasant at very high speeds. It stops entirely when the connection breaks. Cloud proponents are struggling to provide an offline equivalent of their services so you can keep working while disconnected. Here’s a thought: since they cannot predict what you might want to do while offline, you’ll probably want to keep a copy of everything you need on your local machine. You know, just in case. And you’ll probably need to keep copies of the applications as well, so you can access your data. After all, data is useless without the application. Let’s see: local storage, local data, local application, local display and keyboard… it’s like your own personal copy of the cloud, but you can use it anywhere, anytime. We’ll call it… the Personal Computer!
No Free <Lunch> June 18, 2008
Posted by Chuck Musciano in Technology.Tags: Computing
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I’ve noticed a disturbing trend in sales pitches and product literature these days. When I ask if a particular product can easily import or export data with our existing systems, vendors often reply, “Of course! We can export XML!”
XML, for those readers with actual lives, stands for eXtensible Markup Language. It is a way to express data in a way that the data can be processed and managed in fairly standard ways. Essentially, you surround your actual data with keywords, attributes, and plenty of angle brackets to make it more understandable by computers and humans.
To hear some people tell it, anything expressed in XML is instantly recognizable by any other computer anywhere on earth. In fact, if you place two systems that use XML at opposite ends of your data center, by the next day they’ll have met in the middle, network cables and power cords wrapped around each other in an XML-inspired embrace.
Please. As we like to say in the computing business, “bits is bits.” Data, no matter how it is represented, can only be understood by a system that has been explicitly programmed and tested to process that data. XML may make the data easier to process, but someone still has to write, test, and support that code. And in many cases, XML makes things more complicated.
For example, today is June 18, 2008. Here is one way to represent that date for transmission between two systems:
20080618
I’ll bet most of you have decoded this particular data representation: four-digit year, two-digit month, and two-digit day. Here is the same date in a bit more old-school format:
08170
Slightly more cryptic, but not too hard to program: the first two digits are the year and the next three are the day of the year (June 19 is the 171st day of 2008). Notice the retro, pre-2000 two-digit year? It’s like shag carpeting for programmers!
Here is the date in one potential version of XML:
<date> <day>18</day> <month type=numeric>6</month> <year>2008</year> </date>
More understandable? Maybe. Self-documenting? Sure. Easier to read, parse, and decode? No way. You’ll need an XML parser, a definition document for this version of XML (known as a DTD), and a competent developer to make sense of this particular data stream.
When all is said and done, very little in computing is inherently easy or automatic. At every level, someone is designing, building, and testing all the little pieces that make that level work. You may build on that level, but you’ll have issues of your own to deal with. Never underestimate the difficulty in making systems play well together, and never believe what the salesmen say without digging into a details first.
The Effective CIO 