narrative « John Caddell's blog

Posts Tagged ‘narrative’

Mistake Bank Podcast #4 – Donald McFadden on Due Diligence in a Real-Estate Transaction

Wednesday, July 28th, 2010

Continuing our look at successful entrepreneurs and the mistakes that shaped their careers. This video was part of the Mistake Bank Ning site, and I was reminded of it as we toured the city of Wilkes-Barre, PA, last weekend. My wife was driving, and from time to time she’d point to a building and say, “My dad owned that one.”

This story was from the beginning of my father-in-law’s real-estate investment career, and to me says a lot about due diligence. I’ve heard many entrepreneur mistake stories where inadequate due-diligence was at the heart of the issue. On the other hand, diving into a deal without having everything figured out, and then making it work, eventually brought these business owners to another level of success.

So: mistake or bold move? Discuss.

Don McFadden on Due Diligence in a Real Estate Transaction – a Mistake Bank story from John Caddell on Vimeo.

Prior Mistake Bank podcasts:
Tim Berry of Palo Alto Software
Charlie Crystle of Chilisoft
John Bliss of BlissPR

Tags: due diligence, entrepreneur, lessons, mistake bank, mistake story, narrative, real estate, startups, story
Posted in mistake bank | Comments

The graph is nice, but what are you hearing?

Thursday, April 29th, 2010

I’ve been working with a client company and looking deeply into their customer calls to find patterns around why people call, how CSRs handle calls, and what issues customers are having with the company’s products and services.

I was sitting down recently with one of the directors here at the client and we were talking about handle times – how long it takes for a customer’s issue to be resolved over the phone. I talked about some of the analysis we had done on certain scenarios, and shared the statistics we had generated. He looked at them, nodded his head, and turned to me.

“What are you hearing?” he said. In other words, the graphs were fine and useful, but the proof points were in the actual customer dialogues.

Similarly, I did a small analysis on reps proposing to save customers money. In a conference call today, the senior customer service team looked at the graphs, and then the VP asked the leaders to listen to sample calls I’d identified where reps had used this phraseology.

In short: the summarized data lays out the story, but the raw customer stories make it real. Conversely, drawing conclusions from graphs and charts disconnected from the ground-level information is dangerous. [See this interesting Michael Schrage post on the dangers of innumeracy among businesspeople.]

You can’t just go completely the other way, either. That’s the “Undercover Boss” phenomenon – whatever the CEO personally experiences is automatically valid and actionable, regardless of what broader patterns are out there to be discovered. The best approach is a respectful balance of both – analytics and anecdotics. “Trust but validate,” perhaps.

Tags: analytics, customer service, narrative
Posted in Customers Are Talking | Comments

Lessons Learned from the Mistake Bank

Friday, March 26th, 2010

Mistake bank logo I haven’t written much about The Mistake Bank in a little while, and I’ve put the project on hiatus. But Cynthia Kurtz convinced me that it would be good before stepping away from the project to recount some of what I’ve learned in the three years since I started working on it.

1. Mistake stories are inherently memorable – both for those who are involved and people hearing the stories. This story came so quickly to the teller that I almost didn’t finish the question before he started talking:

Find more videos like this on The Mistake Bank

2. Mistakes can lead people into successful situations they wouldn’t have encountered if they hadn’t made the mistake. My favorite story in this light is my father-in-law’s story about buying an apartment building without, in his mind, doing enough due diligence… and then spending the next several months dealing with the fallout. Of course, he ended up profiting from that apartment building for many years. And without that decision, he may never have taken the plunge. There are several stories like that on the site. All the protagonists are successful entrepreneurs.

Find more videos like this on The Mistake Bank

3. Stories are often viewed by others as not being mistakes at all. See above.

4. As time passes from the event itself, it’s easier to recount your mistakes. It’s not uncommon to encounter stories that are 20, 30, 40 years old. Like this one (blame the cameraman – me – for the poor video quality):

Find more videos like this on The Mistake Bank

5. People who share mistake stories are courageous people. This story from Sue Pera, who owns a coffeehouse near my home, struck me as particularly candid, and in a way illuminated why she is a such a successful businessperson:

Find more videos like this on The Mistake Bank

Finally I would say a word about what a narrative collection represents. Once the site got to thirty, forty, fifty stories, it began to exhibit, for me at least, something of the richness of a Cubist painting. By collecting a number of different styles of storytelling across many subjects yet all relating to mistakes, the site became a place where you could immerse yourself and gain a perspective on human imperfection and, in a way, grace.

What’s next for the Mistake Bank? Perhaps a company will take the plunge and set one of these up for themselves, as a way to capture lessons learned, the company’s history and culture.

Maybe there’s a book in it. There was for Royal Little.

[If you'd like an invitation to the Mistake Bank, email me at john (at) caddellinsightgroup (dot) com.]

Tags: mistake bank, multimedia. learning, narrative, sensemaking, story banks, story collections
Posted in mistake bank | Comments

Scott Berkun reminds us of the value of learning from mistakes

Wednesday, March 3rd, 2010

You may remember my project The Mistake Bank. It’s on hiatus now (isn’t that what broken-up bands say?), and someday soon I’ll be putting up a post on what I learned from that project. (Thanking Cynthia Kurtz for that idea.)

In the meantime, people are still screwing up and, thankfully, learning from those experiences. Most recently there was this post from Scott Berkun: “My Biggest Mistakes.”

Scott, in addition to being a great speaker and blogger, is a first-class mistake learner. His post “How to Learn From Your Mistakes” was an early entry in the Mistake Bank. It’s gratifying to see that he still appreciates the value of reflecting on his past actions, and retains the sense of humor that allows him to do so.

Tags: complexity, learning, mistake bank, mistakes, narrative
Posted in learning, mistake bank | Comments

The tyranny of the dashboard

Wednesday, December 2nd, 2009

I frankly am beginning to feel that I’m shouting into a void here. Companies are spending more time and money equipping the CEO and team with information, while starving the thousands of ground-level employees who, frankly, can have more impact on the company’s success simply through their day-to-day actions.

One ray of hope: an article in the December Harvard Business Review (co-authored by Fred Reichheld, the creator of the Net Promoter Score – a simple metric that somehow captures the complexity of customer perception) entitled, “Closing The Customer Feedback Loop.”

As opposed to the conventional wisdom of gathering masses of data and trying to detect high-level patterns in them, Reichheld and his coauthors talk about getting more granular – gathering information at the customer transaction level, creating small rollups of the data, and sharing them where they can do the most good – with the front-line employees and first-level management who directly impact the customer experience.

I agree with their prescriptions, but it still leaves the problem of what to tell upper management. Is there anything wrong with high-level management dashboards? Well, yes. Something of the danger in this is described in today’s WSJ article on Simpson’s Paradox (”When Combined Data Reveal the Flaw of Averages“). The first example cited: while today’s overall unemployment rate is lower than the 1982 level, unemployment at each educational level is higher. (The overall rate is lower because there are more people at higher educational levels, which have lower unemployment, than there were in 1982.) The article states: “Compared with a similarly educated worker in 1983, ‘the worker today has higher unemployment at every educational level.’”

There’s always something lost in summarization. In the case of Simpson’s Paradox, the result of the loss is a flawed conclusion, or at minimum missing a greater point of the story. Overall unemployment today is lower than 1982, but people today have been hit harder than their 1982 counterparts.

Dashboards distort reality as well. Executives rely on machines crunching millions or billions of numbers to present them an easily readable story of what is happening in their businesses. Yet the farther the statistics are distanced from the on-the-ground reality, the more likely they are to lie.

What can be done? Let’s get back to “Closing the Customer Feedback Loop.” On-the-ground data gathering and interpretation by those close to it makes all the sense in the world. But in communicating with upper management, there needs to be less sharing of numbers, and more sharing of individual stories. You can’t get any more granular than that. You can read a vibrant story in a minute or two. And stories fall into patterns–something more subtle and nuanced than statistics–that help senior management understand what’s going on. And human experiences are more understandable than the simplest dashboard.

There are tools to do help you gather and use stories. Rakontu, an open-source story-sharing platform, is one. Enterprise 2.0 tools such as blogs would also work for this purpose. So what’s stopping us? Or am I still shouting into the void?

(Photo by awegedebe via stock.xchng)

Tags: blogging, customer relationships, customer service, knowledge, knowledge management, learning, narrative, social media
Posted in management | Comments

Marketing messages are simply another bee in the hive

Tuesday, November 10th, 2009

Cynthia Kurtz starts off a recent blog post with a provocative statement: “Telling a story is not always the best way to tell a story.”

She continues:

There are no green fields in the land of stories; every available spot is occupied and contested. There are no story-free environments. When a new story is launched into the world, the stories it meets do not simply watch as the newcomer descends; they rise to meet it and swarm around it in complex, unpredictable and sometimes baffling ways. If an idealistic metaphor for telling a purposeful story is pulling a lever or pushing a button on a compliant machine, a more realistic metaphor is sending a bee into a hive.

I want to talk about what this means for marketing communications, especially in today’s world of proliferating social technologies.

Marcomm people have always been tasked with creating messages that can inform the public utterances of the company – be they press releases, speeches, interviews, advertisements, etc. For simplicity’s sake, let’s call these things “stories.” Here are some examples of very brief stories that companies have told over the years:

Budweiser is the King of Beers
Chevy is the Heartbeat of America
GE brings good things to life
Wal-Mart: always the low price

Those are the most public messages, but there are others, not explicitly stated, perhaps, but nurtured and supported by the marcomm folks:

Nobody ever got fired for buying IBM.
A Mercedes tells people, “I’ve arrived.”
Cool people shop at Target.

The official messages have always encountered other bees in the hive. Protesters, in some cases unions, and the press have offered counterstories to the company story – although one could argue that the press has often swallowed the company message and regurgitated it whole. (Quick aside – for the longest time I was amazed by how news stories profiling a musical artist would appear just a couple of days before a new album hit stores.) Here are some counterstories you may be familiar with:

GE’s industrial pollutants have damaged the environment at certain places where they had plants.
Wal-Mart achieves cheap prices by purchasing goods from overseas factories that exploit their workers.
GM cars have poor fit and finish and aren’t fun to drive.

By and large, though, the hive was pretty empty. Corporate messages were transmitted, and seeped into our consciousness pretty much unaltered. This was because mass public communication was expensive and exclusive.

Now we live in a different world. The hive is buzzing with voices. Communication is cheap and easy. Blogging, Tweeting, Facebooking, Yelping, Amazon-reviewing, etc., etc. The counterstories fly fast and furious (read this one contesting an oft-reported statistic that Wal-Mart prices save American families $3,100 per year).

More than once, the other hive members have swarmed all over a corporate story and killed it. Remember the Motrin Moms fiasco, or the short-lived new Tropicana packaging?

Marketers, it’s time to stop trying to control your message. It’s time to stop believing that if you spend a lot of money buying advertisements, sponsoring sporting events or creating publicity stunts, that people will automatically believe what you say.

Instead, you’re going to have to earn your positive messages. Sell great products, service them well, provide outstanding value, thrill your customers. Listen hard to what they’re saying. The deep values they espouse in the stories they tell are your messages. Feel free to retell those stories in your forums. Look in the negative ones for clues to things you can improve, or markets you simply don’t serve well.

But, most of all, stop thinking you’re in control.

(Photo from direct dish via Flickr Creative Commons)

Tags: marketing, marketing communications, messaging, narrative, social media, stories
Posted in marketing | Comments

Farmers’ market secret ingredient – community

Thursday, October 22nd, 2009

Broad Street Market 2 I did a project last year with the Broad Street Market, a farmers’ market here in Harrisburg. (Disclosure: I am on the Market’s board of directors.) We were trying to establish some parameters for a strategic plan for the Market. My project was to interview Market customers to understand why and how they valued the Market, and what common issues might be that the strategic plan should address.

I did 60 open-ended interviews, and heard some great stories – for example, a woman in her seventies discussed coming to the Market as a young girl, shopping at a place that used to sell wonderful pears, taking the trolley that ran down 3rd Street. But some of the best stories weren’t explicitly told – they occurred during the interviews.

Perhaps half a dozen times an interview was interrupted while the person I was speaking to greeted a friend who walked by: “Hi, how you doing?” and an embrace. “Let’s get together,” or “See you Saturday.”

And when the board reviewed the stories, a theme emerged: community as an important value. We had expected customers to discuss safety and cleanliness (and they did), the types of vendors (a bit), fresh and local products (yes) or the hours of operation (a lot). But the theme of community, something we hadn’t been looking for, kept coming up. For those customers, the Market was more than just a place to shop. It was a place to meet friends, to stay connected, even to return to after they’d moved out of town.

This is an interesting observation for all brick-and-mortar retailers, restaurants, etc. Even in this technology society, people yearn to get together, to be with friends and acquaintances. (Note how tech-based getting-together solutions like Meetups, Tweetups and Foursquare have emerged.) How aware are you of the community you serve? How can you engage it, and nourish it? How can you honor the value that your customers place in it?

How B2B customers talk

Wednesday, October 21st, 2009

Some years ago, our company supplied billing services for a mid-sized telecom provider. It was old technology, and we were very interested in migrating them over to a new platform we’d just begun to offer. They were referenceable and complimentary of our work with them. The IT group, our liaison, was happy to set up a meeting with the various groups that would be involved in a decision to change platforms.

At that meeting we learned the other groups didn’t hold us in such high esteem. Not only were they not ready to migrate, they had a list of issues with our current system they wanted fixed. And while we were there, they let us in on a lot of other ideas they had about what we could do better, ideas they had clearly been storing up for years.

We (me included – I headed the group that managed customer satisfaction) had made a big error – we had mistaken good feedback from our direct customer, the IT group, for good feedback from the whole user base.

When B2B customers talk, it’s a lot different from how consumers talk. It’s not uncommon to have a B2B product used by hundreds or thousands of employees in a single company, spread across multiple departments and geographies. “How are we doing?” in this case is a much harder question to answer. Weekly status meetings and yearly customer surveys sent to a handful of people will not let you know whether the company as a whole likes and values what you do for it – or whether there are pockets of dissatisfaction that could derail your strategic initiatives with this customer.

Don’t get seduced by the viewpoints of the people you deal with every day. It’s the people in the field, who use the product, who aren’t saying anything aloud – they are the customer you need to listen to.

Tags: B2B, customer satisfaction, narrative, referenceability, surveys
Posted in Customers Are Talking | Comments

The unbalanced relationship between buyer and seller – a cautionary tale

Thursday, September 17th, 2009

My colleague had set up a meeting with a prospect. I traveled to the office and we spent time preparing – chatting about the customer, next steps, do we set up a projector? etc. Then, at the time the meeting was supposed to start, the email arrived. “I’m sorry, but I won’t be able to make the meeting,” wrote the prospect.

“Did you confirm the meeting?” I asked.

My colleague shrugged. “Sure, we agreed on this time two weeks ago.”

It’s natural to blame the prospect here. He had agreed to the meeting–didn’t he know how to manage his calendar?

But this example demonstrates something important. We needed that meeting more than the prospect did. Delay won’t affect him much – his work will go on. Delay affects our timing of revenue (assuming we win), or even the likelihood that the prospect will do anything at all (remember “Time Kills Deals”?).

As much as we talk about “value exchange” and “partnering” with our customers, the truth of the matter is that during the selling cycle they are more important to us than we are to them.

And that means, even when a prospect commits to a meeting, we need to follow up – a week ahead (”here’s an agenda for our meeting”), then a couple of days before (”really looking forward to meeting; is there anything else you want to cover?”). Because if they forget, we pay the price.

Related post:
Shop Talk Podcast #1: Gordon Adams on “Time Kills Deals” (worth the listen to experience a truly primitive podcast – they have gotten a lot better sounding, don’t you think?)

Tags: follow-up, narrative, sales, scheduling
Posted in sales | Comments

John Caddell's blog

Posts Tagged ‘narrative’

Mistake Bank Podcast #4 – Donald McFadden on Due Diligence in a Real-Estate Transaction

The graph is nice, but what are you hearing?

Lessons Learned from the Mistake Bank

Scott Berkun reminds us of the value of learning from mistakes

Farmers’ market secret ingredient – community

How B2B customers talk

The unbalanced relationship between buyer and seller – a cautionary tale

Pages

Please sign up for our quarterly newsletter!

Latest from Twitter

Recent Comments

Archives

Creative Commons license


Email Address*

Email Marketing by Listrak