Why I Love This Job

Micah Solomon: Customer-Centered Leadership

Micah Solomon is a Keynote speaker, successful entrepreneur and business leader, and bestselling business author. His latest bestselling book is High-Tech, High-Touch Customer Service. 

Click here to access a free chapter of Micah's latest book.

Customer-Centered Leadership:

Leading your business to success through a focus on culture

A consciously developed customer-centered culture is a business advantage that will serve you for years—and inoculate you against competitive inroads. Think for a minute about Southwest Airlines and the lengthy list of would-be category killers that have tried to imitate it: United Airlines’s United Shuttle, Continental Airlines’s Continental Lite, Delta’s Delta Express, and US Airways’s Metro-Jet.

What did these companies lack: Money? Name recognition? Hardly. They lacked Southwest’s relentless focus on culture, which none of its pop-up competitors was willing to slow down to emulate.  And all are now bust.

This is why someone leading a business today – preparing your organization for a bright future for itself and perhaps for the world – needs to focus not just on nuts and bolts, techniques and standards, but on culture.

 

Why focus on culture first?

•  Without a consciously created culture, your leadership won’t last beyond the moment you leave the building.  Any vacation, or even lunch break you take is an invitation for disaster:  The inevitable complaint I hear from consulting clients and at my speeches is this: “Employees act differently when there aren’t any managers around.”  But with a great company culture, employees will be motivated, regardless of management’s presence or absence.

• The number of interactions at a business between customers and staff is nearly infinite, and only a strong, clear pro-customer culture gives you a fighting chance of getting the preponderance of these interactions right.

• The current technological revolution amplifies the problems of not having the correct culture:  Employees not acting in their customers’ best interest will end up having their actions broadcast over Twitter within minutes.

• Business realities are continually changing, and only a strong culture is going to help you respond to, capitalize on, and drive forward these changes in order to serve customers and show your business in the best light.

 

How to start leading through culture.

1. Articulate your central philosophy, in just a few words if possible: a few meaningful words. That’s right: a company’s culture can begin with words, but those words need to represent a decision—something you actually stand for, a decision then expressed in the clearest, and ideally fewest, words. Find a central operating principle.  Think of the Ritz-Carlton’s “We are Ladies and Gentlemen serving Ladies and Gentlemen,” or Mayo Clinic’s  “The needs of the patient come first.”

2. Elaborate on your central philosophy with a brief list of core values -- a list short enough that every employee can understand, memorize, and internalize it, yet long enough to be meaningful. Your core values should cover how customers, employees, and vendors should be treated at all times.

3. Include the wider world: Your people want a sense of purpose, believe it or not, beyond the ability to exercise stock options at a favorable moment. More inspirational a version of the “triple bottom line,” such as Southwest’s “Performance – People – Planet” commitment and annual report card.

4. Reinforce your commitment to these values continually. You may want to go as far as to devote five minutes every morning you stress one value, or an aspect of one value, at your departmental meeting. (This is what the Ritz-Carlton does.)  If that’s too often for your business reality or sensibilities, do it weekly. But don’t save it for the annual company picnic. Annual anything is the enemy of ‘‘core.’’

5. Make it visual. The Ritz-Carlton has ‘‘credo cards’’— laminated accordion-fold cards that each employee carries during work hours. The brand’s entire core beliefs, plus shared basics of guest and employee interactions, fit on that card. (Horst Schulze, the legendary founder of the modern-day Ritz-Carlton, says people chuckled twenty years ago when he said ‘‘laminated card’’; they’re not laughing now.) Zappos highlights one of its core values on each box it ships out. And sometimes ‘‘visual’’ doesn’t mean words at all. One way that FedEx shows that safety is a core value is via the orange shoulder belts in its vans: Everyone can see—from twenty-five yards away—that the driver’s wearing a belt.

6. Make them the focus of orientation. That way, if safety is one of your core values and you stress this at orientation, on day two, when the new employee’s coworker tells him ‘‘In this restaurant, we stack the high chairs in front of the emergency exit when we need more room to do our prep work’’ [This is a real-life example, unfortunately], the new employee will experience cognitive dissonance and work on a way to align the actions of the company with the core values they’re supposed to reflect.

7. Most of all, train, support, hire, and, if necessary, use discipline to enforce what’s important to you. A core values statement is two-dimensional until you bring it to life—with the right people and energetic guidance. ‘‘Maintaining a culture is like raising a teenager,’’ says Ray Davis, President and CEO of Umpqua Bank. ‘‘You’re constantly checking in. What are you doing? Where are you going? Who are you hanging out with?’’ And, sometimes, you have to use some tough love when that teenager is acting up in ways that don’t support the culture you’re working to build.

We Were Lucky. This Time.

The devastating storm last week brought back memories for a lot of people.  Hurricane Katrina is the one I hear most often, but there are plenty more.

For me, it reminds me of one of my most difficult moments in my tenure at Keynote:  9/11. 

I had almost finished writing something about the aftermath of that event, what was similar, what was different.  Then, as though someone with much better judgement than me had smacked me over the head, I realized the monumental arrogance of what I'd just written. 

So I am starting again.

I live in Northern California.  We have our share of dangers here.  My parents, in New York State, used to call me every time they heard the least report of a tremor out here, wondering if I'd been buried in an earthquake.  And of course that has happened, and not too terribly long ago, so I guess I can understand their concern.

But these past few devastating tragedies seem to have missed us.  This past week's storm, the fires in the midwest this summer, Hurricane Katrina, 9/11.  Those are just the first that come to mind; I'm not going to name them all, for fear of missing something important.

For that incredible luck, I am simply grateful.  We have been lucky, when others were so very, very unlucky. 

To those of you were not lucky this week, I can't even begin to understand what you are going through, and I'm not going to presume to try. I'm just so sorry to hear it happened to you.  

I hear some of my bureau colleagues were in dire straits this week.  You have my sympathy, and my hopes that you recover quickly.   Best of luck, to your staff and your businesses. 

 

 

Books Not to Read On An Airplane

Actually, "book" is more accurate, for my purposes today. 

I could come up with a list of bad choices (like the woman sitting across the aisle from me last week, avidly reading one of those "50 Shades" books.  Ma'am, you realize people can read over your shoulder if they want to, right?  Including the tween child sitting right behind you.  Who was in fact reading over your shoulder.  Really, I thought about saying something to you, but I couldn't think of a way to say it without the kid hearing me.) but not today.

Today I'm thinking of a book that is too funny to read on an airplane. 

Especially if the people around you are trying to sleep. 

And you are wearing earphones so you don't realize how loud you're laughing. 

Until people give you grumpy looks.

Not a new book, but new to me.  Scott Berkun, the bestselling author of two business books, The Myths of Innovation and Making Things Happen, also wrote a book about his experiences as a professional speaker:  Confessions of a Public Speaker.    Guess which one I found so funny?

Not going to give any of the stories away.  But if you are involved in the speaking business, buy the book.  And don't forget to read all the way until the end.  

 

 

A Real Vacation. For Me, Anyway.

I recently returned from my first real vacation in five years.  Because driving across the country to take my kids to camp is not really a vacation, although to the people in my office it sounds like one; I'm not at my desk, am I?  But really, staying in a hotel with three kids is not a vacation.  As any caretaker parent knows, it's just my regular life in a different location.

So anyway, husband and I and one child actually left the country to go to a place where English is not the first language.  (Why the child, you ask? Wasn't this supposed to be a vacation?  It was a birthday gift, so that we could stop giving him too many toys and objects.  Plus, it's our job to teach our kids to feel comfortable no matter where they are, anywhere in the world.  Have to start somewhere.)

So...did we stop working?  Of course not.  Was it still a vacation?  Of course it was.  Did we feel like we shortchanged ourselves, checking in with our offices?  Nope. 

Did people back at Keynote make fun of me for working?  Of course they did.  I can live with that, though.  I came home and didn't feel overwhelmed.  I felt like I knew what had been going on in my absence, no crises arose, nothing dire escaped my attention.  Not that everything I was doing while I was gone was actually time-sensitive...but it kept the backlog down when I returned.

I did receive one appropriate email from a colleague, an article from Businessweek.com by Claire Suddath (quoting from Jeff Davidson), which appeared to be scolding me for working...except that once I read it, I realized it actually provided me with an excuse to not sign off completely.

There are two parts that hand me a ready-made excuse:

Unless you’re the business owner or CEO and you absolutely have to be reachable....  Wait, that is me.  Ok, then, Katrina, carry on. 

...the best rule is to communicate with your office for only two reasons: if you absolutely have to, or if the guilt and anxiety you’d feel over staying away detracts from your ability to have a good vacation....   Wait, that's me, too.  Well done, then, Katrina!  "Guilt and anxiety" is probably overstating by a good deal, but still, dial that down a few notches and you see why it's easier to stay in touch.

This is my business, and in part, it's my life.   I love my job, and not only do I miss it when I'm not here, I feel a sense of obligation to my colleagues to be present for them when they need me. 

So how did the vacation go?  It was excellent, thanks for asking.  We still did all the things we planned to do, and our accessibility detracted absolutely zero from the experience.

Our son knows we both love our jobs, and he has grown up in an age of 24/7 access to everything anyway.  So from his point of view, nothing was amiss.  The same technology tools we used to check in - iPad, iPhone - are the same tools he uses himself (when we let him).   And someday, I want him to find a career he loves as much as my husband and I love ours.  Something that doens't feel like "work". 

A funny, mostly irrelevant, side note:  isn't is supposed to be women who take the longest to get dressed and ready, pack, leave the house, whatever?  Not in my family.  My son and I would be out the door, downstairs having breakfast in the hotel, or out on the beach, while my husband was still packing up the chargers, wires, and devices.  But then, I'm lucky that way, because I have someone to do that for me.  Hmmm, must make note to train children to take over this chore, as they become old enough....

Ben Casnocha: The Startup of You, As Found On An Elevator

Continuing with more Keynote current favorites:  Ben Casnocha, co-author with Reid Hoffman, cofounder and chairman of LinkedIn, of The Startup of You, shares one of his recent posts with Keynote. 

It's no secret that employment demographics have changed.  In ways both good and bad, that is.  What are we supposed to do about it?

For the full post, see Ben's blog here.

The Jammed Career Escalator: Old Premises, New Realities

January 24, 2012

Centuries of immigrants risked everything to come to America with the belief that if they worked hard, they would enjoy a better life than their parents had. Since the country’s birth, each generation of Americans has generally made more money, been better educated, and enjoyed a higher standard of living than the generation that came before it. This expectation of lockstep increases in prosperity had become part of the American Dream.

For the last sixty or so years, the job market for educated workers worked like an escalator. After graduating from college, you landed an entry-level job at the bottom of the escalator at an IBM or a GE or a Goldman Sachs. There you were groomed and mentored, receiving training and professional development from your employer. As you gained experience, you were whisked up the organizational hierarchy, clearing room for the ambitious young graduates who followed to fill the same entry-level positions. So long as you played nice, you moved steadily up the escalator, and each step brought with it more power, income, and job security. Eventually, around age sixty-five, you stepped off the escalator, allowing those middle-ranked employees to fill the same senior positions you just vacated. You, meanwhile, coasted into a comfortable retirement financed by a company pension and government-funded Social Security.

People didn’t assume all of this necessarily happened automatically. But there was a sense that if you were basically competent, put forth a good effort, and weren’t unlucky, the strong winds at your back would eventually shoot you to the top. For the most part this was a justified expectation.

But now that escalator is jammed at every level. Many young people, even the most highly educated, are stuck at the bottom, underemployed, or jobless, as Ronald Brownstein noted in the Atlantic. At the same time, men and women in their sixties and seventies, with empty pensions and a government safety net that looks like Swiss cheese, are staying in or rejoining the workforce in record numbers. At best, this keeps middle-aged workers stuck in promotionless limbo; at worst, it squeezes them out in order to make room for more senior talent. Today, it’s hard for the young to get on the escalator, it’s hard for the middle-aged to ascend, and it’s hard for anyone over sixty to get off. “Rather than advancing in smooth procession, everyone is stepping on everybody else,” Brownstein says. (I’ll address why it got jammed in a future post.)

What’s replaced the career escalator? There’s no single metaphor that universally describes the 21st century career journey. For those who lack globally competitive skills (and yet who are simultaneously overqualified for low-skill labor), the current environment feels like slogging through a tar pit. For people with the relevant skills, the journey is like a vast ocean voyage: unpredictable waves, multiple routes to arrive at a destination, the need to keep investing in your vessel lest it capsize, the allies who form an armada around you to cross perilous straits. A recent Fast Company cover story called the winners of the post-escalator job market “Generation Flux,” a reference to their ability to acquire new skills, adapt to change, and reinvent themselves.

Whatever you call the current climate, the point is that the old premises of the career escalator have given way to new realities, and with new realities come new rules. The new rules are ones entrepreneurs have mastered for years and they are the inspiration behind The Start-Up of You.

Full post here.

Josh Linkner: What's Your Calling?

Josh Linker, author of Disciplined Dreaming, is just as fascinating and creative in person as he sounds on your screen.  He's become a favorite speaker over here at Keynote's offices, with his creative yet structured approach to business ideas. 

After reading this post, I think you can happily put me under the "calling" category. 

Hope you feel the same way.

What's Your Calling?

Posted on July 8, 2012 by Josh Linkner

As the waiter told us about the specials this past Saturday night, he didn’t simply drone on with emotionless facts. Instead, with the animation and passion of an opera singer, he told us about the Kobe beef “experience” and the incredible “intensity” of their dry aged steaks. This guy was doing much more than his job. Perhaps he was connecting his work to a deeper meaning.

Author Jonathan Haidt in The Happiness Hypothesis, talks about the differences between a job, a career, and a calling:

    If you see your work as a job, you do it only for the money. You look at the clock frequently while dreaming about the weekend ahead, and you probably pursue hobbies, which satisfy you more thoroughly than does your work.

    If you see your work as a career, you have larger goals of advancement, promotion, and prestige.

    If you see your work as a calling, however, you find your work intrinsically fulfilling; you are not doing it to achieve something else. You see your work as contributing to the greater good or as playing a role in some larger enterprise. You have frequent experiences of flow during the work day, and you neither look forward to “quitting time” nor feel the desire to shout, “Thank God it’s Friday!” You would continue to work, perhaps even without pay, if you suddenly became very wealthy.

Maybe my enthusiastic waiter plans to own a chain of restaurants someday and he is working his way toward that vision. Perhaps he views his role as delighting others and bringing people together with the highest quality food and service. You don’t have to be saving lives or writing the next Great American Novel to find deep meaning in your work.

I have the privilege to pursue my own calling by backing passionate entrepreneurs in an effort to rebuild the city of Detroit. I also spread ideas on creativity and innovation throughout the world. This is my calling and I do these things to contribute, not just to receive. With a background as a jazz guitarist instead of a Harvard MBA, I could have easily talked myself out of this pursuit and landed in some soulless job. But when you sprint toward your authentic calling with reckless abandon, obstacles melt away and your vision comes to life.

If you are sick-and-tired of being sick-and-tired, step back and examine what you are most passionate about. It may not happen overnight, but setting yourself on a path toward your calling will liberate you. Your income will likely increase, but that will become a byproduct rather than a focal point.

Whether you are a waiter, student, executive, or playwright, now is the time to launch yourself on a trajectory aimed squarely at your best and highest purpose. While the path less travelled may feel risky, it will surely beat the regret you’ll feel for not trying in the first place.

What’s your calling?

Robert Kriegel: Timeouts for Adults

Long-time Keynote favorite Robert Kriegel sends us advice on how to lower stress, improve creativity, and find your best ideas in unexpected places. 

Published on the Huffington Post earlier this year, here are some excerpts of Robert's full article.

Taking Timeouts to Decrease Stress and Increase Creativity

Written in collaboration with Neal Vahle, Ph.D.

The world today is moving faster than ever. Technology has changed the way we communicate and get information and entertainment, and also the way we read, learn and how, when, where and from whom we buy products. And these changes will keep coming faster and more dramatically, causing most of us to be rushing and racing just to keep up.

The result is an enormous amount of stress, tension and exhaustion, which severely decreases the quality of our health, our relationships and our work. When overstressed, we don't sleep well, are more anxious and irritable and are taking more than 40,000 tons of aspirin a year to counter the ever-increasing stress-related headaches, bad backs, neck pains and stomach problems.

Recovery

The human engine, like any other, runs on energy. The more you have at your disposal, the healthier you'll be and the better you'll feel and perform. But you can't continually run an engine in the red zone, at max output, or it will burn out.

All high-performance machines need a rest cycle. Physical trainers advise us that a recovery cycle is necessary to get maximum efficiency from a muscle. You can work one set of muscles hard one day but need to rest them the next. The same is true for your mental muscle. Without a rest your brain becomes fatigued and doesn't work as efficiently or effectively. When you're tired you don't think as clearly or creatively, and you can make more mistakes.

An essential part of any conditioning program, whether mental or physical, is a recovery cycle, which means programming in some down time. Down time is really a misnomer. Taking a mini break is actually an invaluable aid for increasing the quality of your "up time." Just a short break will help to decrease stress, increase energy and often provide new insights and perspectives.

Timeouts

To preserve your sanity, de-stress and improve the quality of whatever you are doing, you need to step back from the action. In my Peak Performance workshops I give participants three 15-minute "timeout" cards that must be used each day. Taking a short break to refuel and refresh doesn't mean that you are goofing off, that your brain has shut down. The ideas you've been thinking about, the problems you've been working on, shift to a "back burner," where they incubate, moving from the logical left brain to the creative right brain. And then, when you least expect it, lightning strikes!

When I taught at Stanford's Executive Management Program we found that people got their best ideas when they were driving, napping, exercising and taking a shower. Many leaders talked about taking timeout of each day for thinking. Some would leave the building and take a walk, others would exercise. Some talked about just having some quiet time. The CEO of Federated Stores' online division told me that when he drives to and from work he is completely out of touch, with his phone, beeper, pager turned off. "That's when I do my best thinking," he told me.

But the ethic today is never to be out of touch. We walk around with our phones strapped to our belts like gunslingers from the old west and feel just as naked without them. However, when you are never "out of touch" you are not "in touch" with your own ideas, hunches, creative insights and what Steve Jobs called the whispers in your mind. In other words, as you are racing to keep up, you're preventing yourself from developing any innovative new ideas about how to do things quicker and more efficiently.

For the full article, go to the HuffPost site here.

Two Smart Men Have a Conversation about Idea Hunting

In which two smart men, speakers both, talk about finding ideas:  thanks to Andy Boynton for sharing his most recent blog post with Keynote.  Here's further information on Andy's speaking topics. 

Andy has many blog posts and books on his own work and ideas, but I couldn't resist the double lure of a window into the mind of them both. 

Idea Hunter Confidential: Steve Denning, interviewed by Andy Boynton

August 30, 2011

Who wouldn’t want to learn from a leader who transformed idea and knowledge management at the World Bank? Who has written books for leaders on the importance of storytelling in transforming an organization’s knowledge culture? Who is one the most influential bloggers around? Any idea hunter, like me, would stand in line to learn from such a leader, and we are fortunate to have that person, Steve Denning, with us today for Idea Hunter Confidential. Steve’s insights and experience about the world of ideas and their importance to leaders and their firms are both intriguing and important. And when you finish reading his Confidential insights, check out his blog at Forbes each day as part of your idea hunting habits.

Boynton: In terms of advancing your goals and objectives in life where do you search for great ideas (websites, people, conferences, locations, journals-mags, etc.)?  And can you describe how frequently you hunt in those places?

Denning: I’m tempted to say all of the above, all of the time. Ideas can come from anywhere, sometimes from the oddest places. I might be having a conversation with someone at dinner, or watching a newscast, or reading a poem, listening to my daughter talk. Suddenly I see a connection to a problem or issue that I have been puzzling about. Bingo! The beginning of a new idea is born.

Boynton: When you find great ideas, be they from a conversation or something you scan, what do you do with them? Do you store them? How?

Denning: I try to make a note of them as soon as possible, either in a notebook or in my laptop computer. Once the idea is written down, I try sleeping on it and then looking at it the next day. Sometimes it doesn’t look so great. But sometimes an idea that didn’t seem too promising looks much bigger and better than I initially thought. Letting the idea “marinade” overnight can help evolve the idea.

Boynton: Do you put them into play and show them to people?  How do you handle interesting ideas once you find them?

Denning: It depends. When I was working in an organization (the World Bank), it was vital to start discussing the idea with others and see how to shape the idea in a way that would appeal to the audience.

When I was writing my last book, The Leader’s Guide to Radical Management, I assembled a review group of several hundred people to comment on draft chapters: it became a much better book as a result of those inputs.

Now that I am blogging at http://blogs.forbes.com/stevedenning/ on a daily basis, I don’t have time to consult with others and test out ideas in advance of publication. I simply issue the blog and then observe the traffic: the level of traffic and the ensuing comments give me an instant indication of what people are interested in and hence a guide as to what idea to pursue next.

Boynton: Can you think of a few big ideas you’ve found hunting and what they led to? How’d you find those big ideas? How’d you take them and turn them into something important to you?

Denning: Let’s take three different ideas:

• When I was working in the World Bank in 1996, I was told to “go and look into information”. So I started looking into information and after a few weeks, I realized that the “sharing knowledge” was a much more significant idea for our future than “information”. So I pursued that idea and it quickly became a whole shift in business strategy for the organization. In effect, I ignored what I was told to do and instead pursued that I thought was important. In due course, after some tussles, the management agreed. If I had done what I was told to do, none of this would have happened.

• As director of knowledge management at the World Bank, I found myself trying to persuade a change-resistant organization to adopt what was a strange new idea for a bank (“sharing knowledge”). I experimented with different ways of explaining it and stumbled on the power of leadership storytelling. This was such a weird idea at the time that even I didn’t accept it for almost 18 months.  I kept doing it because I could see that it worked. But I also kept thinking to myself: “This makes no sense! Storytelling? This is goofy!” But outsiders kept pressing me to explain how I was able to persuade a change-resistant organization like the World Bank to embrace this new strange idea, when other big firms were struggling. When I confessed that it might have something to do with storytelling, someone from Harvard Business School Press immediately invited me to write a book about it. So then I thought, “If HBSP thinks there’s something in this goofy idea, maybe I should check it out.” So I did and ended up writing a series of books on leadership storytelling and helping establish storytelling around the world as a key leadership competence.

• In 2008, I started working on a new book. My initial idea was to look into why management in big organizations often seemed to kill creative ideas and programs. Why did seemingly intelligent managers do this? What could be done about it? My plan was to study high-performance teams and see whether there was a way to create and sustain them on a systematic basis. Once I had discovered how to do that, I suddenly realized that it led on to a much larger idea: how to manage entire organizations in a way that spawned continuous innovation, deep job satisfaction and customer delight. So the book was no longer just about high-performance teams. The book came to be about a radically different way to run whole organizations. Both the publisher and I were surprised to find how big the idea had become. I hadn’t set out to reinvent management, but that’s in effect what the book came to be about. Of course, I found that I was not alone in this endeavor. A number of writers had been grappling with the same set of issues. As often happens with innovation, others like Ranjay Gulati, John Hagel, John Seely Brown and Umair Haque were all converging on the same set of core ideas, although each of us had started from different places and were using slightly different language. By staying open-minded and being willing to follow the journey wherever it led, I arrived at an idea that was much bigger and more interesting than the idea that I had begun with. And I was reassured to find that I was not alone.

Boynton: When you think about your hunt for great ideas, what do you think are the keys to successful hunting? What really works well? What doesn’t?

Denning: I like Alan Kay’s thinking at Xerox PARC that the only useful leads are what he calls “extreme data points”, i.e. odd events or readings that are so far off what you expect that you can’t explain them. They make no sense. These are the kind of data points that cautious experimenters often throw away. (“Must have been something wrong with the equipment!”) According to Alan Kay, those are the only data points worth paying serious attention to, because these are the keys to major innovation, such as all the incredible inventions that came out of Xerox PARC: the PC, the mouse, the Ethernet, the laser printer, in effect, almost all of the components of the modern office.

Thus the three ideas that I mentioned earlier were all seen as very weird when I started out.

“Knowledge sharing at the World Bank?” Why would a bank do that?

“Storytelling?” Is this serious?

“A wholly different way of running organizations?” Not possible!

To arrive at really big ideas, you also have to take seriously what Ken Fisher calls in his book, The Only Three Questions That Count:
A.  What do you believe that is actually false?
B.  What can you fathom that others find unfathomable?
C.  What the heck is my brain doing to blindside me now?

I also like to keep in mind Albert Einstein’s wonderful dictum: “If at first an idea is not absurd, there is no hope for it.”

What We Really Do Over Here

This week I figured out two important things:  why exactly I'm so bad at updating my blog (when I actually love to write), and an important clue about what my real job is.

First, the blog.  I've been mentally beating myself up for a long time, telling myself that I am just too slow at posting my speaker news and ideas.   I love writing, and I love sharing and hearing ideas, and usually it's hard for people to get me to STOP talking.  Speakers send me great news all the time, about accomplishements, new books, world news.  So what's up with how slow I am?

So how does the process of writing work in real life?  I start writing about something important to me, to our business, or to our event planner clients, and then the phone rings, or a colleague walks in my office.  And we start talking about speaker recommendations, styles, reviews of people we've seen, what a client is really looking for.  And we're off, and by the time I turn back to my computer, something else pressing is going on. A client needs a contract ASAP.  A speaker needs to clarify a topic or fee for a current client. 

And that was my clue.  If this happens over and over again, it means something about what I really do here.  About what we all do over here at Keynote.

We book speakers. For real, live, clients, who have real, live audience members in their seats.  If someone calls, or emails, wanting a speaker,  we drop anything else less important (and everything else is less important!) to attend to that need.  Marketing, accounting, staff meetings, strategic planning, writing, everything else, it's all important, but it's not as important as our clients' needs.

And that's the way it's supposed to be.

I've been telling every new employee here, ever since I started this job that I love, that there is nothing, NOTHING more important that we do here, than booking a speaker for a client that needs one.  This applies to everyone from agents to administrative staff to IT.  If an agent needs a video uploaded for a client, the IT person drops everything else and does it, now.  If a client needs speaker recommendations for a meeting planner who has a presentation tomorrow, the agent drops anything else they're doing, in order to take care of that client. 

And me?  I'm a part time agent, part time administrator.  So that goes double for me.  If one of my clients needs me, of course I should stop writing and take care of my real job.  And if one of the agents needs me to vet a contract, that's more important than the blog, too.

So I can stop feeling so bad.  I'm just doing my job. Whew, what a relief.

Am I destined to be bad at this?  I hope not.  I've just realized that I have to manage the process better, to allow me to do my real job, during the business hours that clients and colleagues need me.  Realizing the problem is halfway to having a solution.

I do know one thing:  we have our priorities in the right order over here.  Count on it.

 

Circling Back, With Enchanting Customer Service

My last post included a copy of an email I sent to one of Keynote's regular vendors, giving him some, uh, "constructive criticism".  We've had great experiences with this company before, so I was pretty sure I'd get a positive response again.

And I did.  Here is an edited version of the response:

I just landed and got your email. (....) but due to a death in one of my (team members') family I have fallen behind.  I do apologize for the delay and appreciate your business.

Will I do business with this company again?  You bet I will.  A (relatively minor) mistake was made, the company responded right away, accepted my feedback graciously, apologized, and thanked me for my business.   That's how to do it right.

They could have waited to respond, or ignored my feedback, or made excuses, or turned the criticism back on me, or skipped the apology, or a variety of other sloppy responses.  That's how to do it wrong.

Instead, they did something exactly right.

I am feeling Enchanted.