The Worst Hours

Sing It, Zoidberg

This is going to be brief and perhaps a little too combative for some, but I've had this happen often enough to risk offending someone. And, well, it should never happen. So here goes.

If you are interviewing for a job position, and decide that, for whatever reason, you are going to spend your time with a candidate to deepen your knowledge about optimal practices, while never really considering them for the role...

You are, basically, stealing time and money, and you deserve all of the misery and suffering that a karmic universe will (hopefully) bestow upon you. Especially if the person you are interviewing is between gigs, and could be spending their time and energies trying to chase down a real opportunity, rather than the cruel tease you are offering.

(And yes, this happened to me recently. An hour on the phone, ninety minutes in the office, then the "interviewer" not even acknowledging follow ups. I guess I've met worse people in my life, but I can't think of any right now.)

I get why you might be tempted to do this, honestly, I do. A good hour with a consultant might help to jump start your creative efforts, answer some vexing questions in a field where you don't have experience, or keep you from making a bad mistake.

But what it really shows is a crippling lack of integrity that your own people will eventually recognize and use as fuel to move along in their own careers. After all, using these vulnerable people in this way shows your true (single-minded, machiavellian, ruthless, abusive) nature, and that nature isn't conducive to sustainable businesses.

Turnover will rise, along with theft, and a drop in morale...

And you will own all of it, and deserve it, because you are a terrible human being.

What would be better?

Honesty with the consultant. An honorarium for the time spent. A pitch for a consultant relationship. Or just end the interview before it gets abusive, and steer out of the ethical skid.

End the unpaid consultant hour!

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Feel free to comment, as well as like or share this column, connect with me on LinkedIn, or email me at davidlmountain at gmail dot com, or hit the RFP boxes at top right. RFPs are always free, and we hope to hear from you soon.

The United Debacle: Winners, Not Volunteers

Seems Like An Easy Choice

By now, if you haven't heard of the PR nightmare that hit United this last week, you are probably making a concerted effort to avoid broadcast news and social media. From the initial burst of the story, to the next stage of disastrous CEO non-apology, to the truly detestable blaming the victim background work done to the passenger by his hometown media, we've all become experts in public relations, social media and airline ticketing policies. Along with having a new corporate villain to boycott, we've been soaking in this for quite some time, and the fact that it made international coverage means it's probably got a second life overseas, too.

But I want to take it back to the actual moment of the negotiation between the crew and the passengers, and show how the failure started a long time before four crew members for another plane had to displace passengers from a full cabin. Remember, the crew originally offers one price for those willing to give up their seat, then a second price, before going to the forced removal.

Which leads to the following groups of unhappy people, and it doesn't take a genius to see how, well, everyone in the cabin winds up fairly unhappy at the close of the exercise. And that's even if it goes well.

1) Those who take offer 1, and feel bad about not holding out for offer 2. These folks will, in all likelihood, never take offer 1 again.

2) Those who take offer 2, and feel good about not taking offer 1, but also wonder if there would be offer 3. They are also never taking offer 1 again.

3) Those who took neither offer, and now have heard that the allotment has gone up. Again, no one here is taking offer 1. And many of them are going to have to have a significant cost savings or other enticement to risk flying United again. (Keep in mind that from the airline's point of view, what you really want is a near-immediate acceptance of offer 1, so you can stay as close to on time as possible.)

So instead of all that, let's imagine how this looks and feels if, at that moment of negotiation, there had been some planning, not towards creating a real-time unwelcome reverse auction, but towards the fast and easy resolution of the problem. Beyond an inhuman level of personal economics that doesn't take into account, well, how humans treat risk and reward.

Imagine the flight attendants pulling out a sweepstakes style wheel, and then playing a game of Big Seat Winner. They spin a wheel with every seat location; if your seat comes up, you get a replacement ticket and ONE THOUSAND DOLLARS. In cash, in hundreds, paid out with happy counting. The next winner gets 2 grand, 4 grand, and so on. Honestly, once you start peeling off hundred dollar bills, the amounts are manageable. Instead of some nebulous check amount later.

And yes, I know, there's some tiresome income tax and security and sweepstake issues that you have to deal with, but you have everyone's address from the flight manifest, and you are a massive corporation. You can work out a lockbox in the cockpit with hundreds and a legal team sending a tax statement later.

Now, we've taken the entire chance of feeling bad about making the wrong auction choice out of the equation. We also go to a game show style interaction that has been proven to work for the better part of a century, and create winners, where we previously had volunteers to a corporation's profit margin. We also create a viral video moment of (maybe) someone celebrating their big payday, and the fun image of the fan of hundred dollar bills. At the very least, if someone is still bent out of shape about having to leave the plane, we make it more about their ingratitude, and less about the thuggery of the security force.

You could also give this real production values, the way that some airlines do with their pre-flight instructions. You could make it a part of every flight and turn your airline into the one where, every time out, whether there are displacements or not, someone's walking out with cash. And how much would United like to be known, today, as the Win Cash Airline, as opposed to You May Get Hurt Air?

The problem, as I see it, isn't that a single passenger got beaten, as hateful as that is. The bigger issue is that an entire industry has become so oblivious to anything but a spreadsheet that no one seems to be thinking about things from the perspective of the customer. Which led to dehumanization, and, well, beatings.

You really shouldn't have to have terrible things happen to adjust your mindset. But now that the crisis has happened, it's even worse if it goes to waste.

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Feel free to comment, as well as like or share this column, connect with me on LinkedIn, or email me at davidlmountain at gmail dot com, or hit the RFP boxes at top right. RFPs are always free, and we hope to hear from you soon.

The Triumph Of The Niche

Ubiquity

Running late between clients last week, I ducked into a fast food franchise, more to use the restroom than for any desire for food, honestly. Acting on my sense of personal integrity over actual hunger, I ordered a small burger from my childhood, rather than use the facilities without being a patron, and consumed it without too much thought.

It tasted like, well, what it has always tasted like; more cheese than beef, more bread than both, with the ketchup and pickles and dried onion overpowering any of that. In a half dozen bites and a couple of minutes it was gone, and the best that I have to say about it is that it didn't seem to do any real damage later (if you catch my unseemly drift), it was cheap, and I didn't regret the choice.

Doesn't sound like much of a business model, does it?

I don't mean to deman an American colossus, honestly. I'm far from the target demographic for any quick service restaurant, I'm not influencing the choices of others, and I don't patronize either this business, or its competitors, very often. They know their business far better than I do, or ever will. But I do know this...

From what I read in my monitoring of newsletters, they aren't in the growth area of the market. That's for niche quality players with names that have only cropped up in the last decade or so. Those players also make food that translates to social media imagery much, much better than what I've just posted above. (By the way, side note about food porn? It describes much of what we refer to as classical art from past centuries; the fact that lots of people photogragh their food probably says more about how imaging is now ubiquitous, rather than anything about the person doing the photographing. But let's get back to the burger.)

The merits of the mass market burger are obvious. Economics, consistency, speed. You can order one from just about any location, anywhere, and get pretty much the same thing...

But does any of that sound like something you can put in an ad?

The same phenomenon -- tried and true business model, supplemented by a more esoterically appealing niche play -- goes beyond burgers. Consider the recent change in market conditions for such staples as the circus, the hundreds of streaming programming options fracturing the collective consciousness, and in all likelihood, your very favorite comedian, musician, writer and so on.

And, more darkly, possibly your religious or political beliefs.

Continuing the thread into still more negative tones, and you might be led to believe that we are ungovernable, not really a nation so much as a collection of strangers, that we all need everything our own way. That cities are unlike suburbs, suburbs unlike rural, with nothing to stitch us together again.

Or, more positively, that we are no longer willing to settle for comfort, that the system of capitalism and innovation is working to provide more options and improve lives and experiences, and that your story about this depends on, well, you.

Who is, of course, the ultimate in niche audiences.

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Feel free to comment, as well as like or share this column, connect with me on LinkedIn, or email me at davidlmountain at gmail dot com, or hit the RFP boxes at top right. RFPs are always free, and we hope to hear from you soon.

Math Vs Snow

Market Opportunity

My local area had a late season snow storm recently, which did what it always does to cash-strapped towns; crippled them for days until the snow more or less went away on its own, because there are too many side streets, untended sidewalks and poor drainage areas, and not enough human bandwidth and money to clear it all away. Even when the main roads are clear, the side roads aren't, which makes all traffic slower, and yeah, I miss living in California, where you get to visit the snow at altitude, like elephants at a zoo. But let's move on.

What leads this into a marketing and advertising discussion is what happened next. Residents who normally walk or ride bicycles requested transport from ride sharing apps. So did those who were unwilling or unable to free their car from the ice and drifts. Many people who drive for these services chose not to, because driving in snow is dangerous and slow. And the apps did what they always do; adjusted on price to match the change in market conditions.

Which meant spikes in price of up to 600%. Leading to a subsequent hue and outcry in print and social media and among some consumers, and the usual shrugging non-apologies from the ride sharing companies themselves.

Now, it's possible that this is all just growing pains for a market that, for all of the exploding market cap and countless PR and cultural mentions, is still relatively new to much of the country and market base. It's also likely that spikes like this will ease in the future, especially if the ride sharing companies are able to convince more people to drive for them. But what struck me in reading the coverage, and which isn't a given because we're dealing with humans, is how quickly narrative was attached to algorithms.

Some consumers talked about the greed of the companies. Others railed against those who complained as looking for some kind of government handout, or unworthy of using the service because they weren't smart or hard working enough to afford it. Still others stood up for existing cab services, with an equal or better number stating that the status quo created the competition through past abuses. You could find still more voices defending bus service, or tele-commuting, or the need for more flexibility in scheduling from schools or employers, and so on, and so on.

What few seemed to do, at least publicly, was to note that the system worked exactly as a free market intended, with a resource getting real-time pricing in a de facto auction environment. Or that now that this toothpaste is out of the tube, it's never going back in.

Ride sharing apps aren't alone in having a narrative spring into existence from data, of course. Every A/B test with a significant deviation from the median creates an opportunity for a story, and so does interactions with a client who is resistant to change, or extremely demanding about small matters.

That's because in a universe that boils down to two kinds of events (facts, and the stories that we tell about these facts)... we treat our stories as factual, and always will.

Even when it's just math.

Keeping this in mind might help you keep your sanity the next time you have a difficult client, feel tempted to overstate the findings from a test, or find yourself irritated about the speed of a cycle, or any number of outcomes, really.

But if you are standing in snow, waiting for a ride that costs six times what it might have cost a day ago?

You're likely to tell a story about it.

Probably not a very nice one, either.

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Feel free to comment, as well as like or share this column, connect with me on LinkedIn, or email me at davidlmountain at gmail dot com, or hit the RFP boxes at top right. RFPs are always free, and we hope to hear from you soon.