citizen Evangelist

I’ve been working with a few individuals (whom I’ll keep nameless at this time) who are posturing that they know something which I’m quite certain they don’t.

Do you know what I’m talking about?

Everything they say and do has brushed up against the truth at one point in time… but, like an exercise where you take directions on how to get there from here and then mix up the order… the whole package is just wrong.

What is IT? How can you tell when someone has IT versus when someone claims to have IT?

What makes certain people think that they know what they are talking about when they don’t? What drives certain people to misrepresent what they know? At what point is it fair to confront them? Does the context of the situation drive this?

As a customer, I’ve been finding that more and more organizations that I work with use the evil power of “we’re experts and you’re not” to wrangle control out of my hands and into theirs. I’m getting better at sniffing out this behavior earlier and earlier, but it begs the question: why would anyone do it unless it was profitable to do so?

There is so much damn information floating around these days. No wonder we are overwhelmed and overloaded and ask our friends instead of trying to go out an process/consume the required information in order to determine the real deal from the claims.

Recent tangible examples:

My bank allows a large amount of my money to be transferred out of my account without my permission and then postures that I need jump through their hurdles in order to get it back

My cellular phone company modifies my account because of a text advertisement that results in nearly a thousand dollars in extra charges and then claims that I should have better monitored my account

My business provider is upset because I’ve elected not to move forward with one of their service offerings and then claims that I should have told them that I did not want their services versus my belief that they should have asked if it did want their services.

What is that?

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Check this out: Time and time related measurements are on top of the top 25 most used Nouns in the English language.

1) time
3) year
5) day
17) week

With the changes in technology, marketplaces, and the rapid globalization that is taking place, we have the conditions for the ultimate case of arbitrage.

arbitrage
Pronunciation: ‘är-b&-”träzh
Function: noun
1: the nearly simultaneous purchase and sale of securities or foreign exchange in different markets in order to profit from price discrepancies

According to wikipedia, arbitrage becomes possible when one of three (3) conditions are met:
1) The same asset does not trade at the same price on all markets (”the law of one price“).
2) Two assets with identical cash flows do not trade at the same price.
3) An asset with a known price in the future does not today trade at its future price discounted at the risk-free interest rate (or, the asset does not have negligible costs of storage; as such, for
example, this condition holds for grain but not for securities).

Now.. I can’t imagine that I’m on to something that has never been thought about before, but it seems strange to me to think about it. My greatest asset is my time. For my time, I am offered compensation in the form of a salary. With that salary, I then buy products that allow me to better utilize my time in other ways.

If I were in Silicon Valley or New York, my time would cost an employer more than it does here in Austin, TX. When I need to hire a team to complete a project, I can look to India or Russia, or other off-shoring environments to hire labor at a price that is significantly cheaper than here in Austin. These are great examples of meeting the first condition.

Time, time, time… see what’s become of me.

When I am able to get you to donate your time to my cause, and the value you perceive makes that worthwhile, then we’ve truly done something magnificent together.

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I made a promise to myself that I wouldn’t allow myself to slack on posting. One post a day.. like an apple, is supposed to keep the guilt away and the mind healthy. So much for that. With nearly a week between the last post and now, I’m a bad bad boy.

This delay got me to thinking… why did I put it off? What are my excuses? Of course… its time, or more importantly, the lack of time. What is the value of time? What is the value of my time? your time? Their time? How does that factor into our decision making processes? Of course, it has a huge but often subconscious effect on our decision making processes.

As my socio-economic status has changed, my value of time has been dramatically altered. When I was a minimum wage earner, it was more economically beneficial for me to self-source tasks (assign to myself for completion). At some point in time after I began to earn more money and my responsibilities grew, it became more worthwhile to outsource many tasks that I previous completed.

In “The World is Flat” we’re reminded of just how much the economics of the world have changed. No longer are we restricted to approach markets within towns and states. We have the opportunity to address markets in countries and continents. This dramatic expansion of scope mixes affluence with poverty and interesting conflicts in cultural beliefs. However, the constant in every culture is time. Until our scientists find a way… we all operate with the same resource constraints of self: 525,600 minutes. How we decide to spend this currency is a matter of self definition and context.

A minute of my time. What is that worth to me? What is that worth to you? What is the fundamental value I need to see or experience in order to give you a minute of my time? That truly is a fascinating question. When applied to the world, the variation in possibilities is dizzying.

Further, when looking at this valuation framework from a group or corporate level, it makes sense why there are so many new ways for organizations to look at engaging people’s time in goal accomplishment: insourcing, outsourcing, homesourcing, offshoring, and now, crowdsourcing.

In Crowdsourcing… the talent pool is described by Jeff Howe as possessing the following five (5) attributes.

1. The crowd is dispersed
2. The crowd has a short attention span
3. The crowd is full of specialists
4. The crowd produces mostly crap
5. The crowd finds the best stuff

It is under this precept that Word of Mouth marketing actually works.

Are you able to thin slice your customer contingent enough to involve them in marketing your products or services? Do you know what they value?

If you don’t, you better better figure it out. The answer comes down to understanding their individual value of time and how your offering weighs in that process. If you’re not offering an experience that is in excess of the time required to experience it, there is no way you’ll ever successfully get them to speak positively of your service.

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According to Clayton Christensen in an article entitled Marketing Malpractice, there are 30,000 new consumer products which are launched each year.

Think about that: 30,000 NEW products… each year!

Each year, 90% of these products fail. That’s 27,000 failed products. Further, I’ve seen other sources quote that 96% of all product in all sectors fail to meet or exceed minimal revenue expectations. Holy Cow, folks! What in the hell are we doing out there??

Christensen contends that the root cause of this is a fundamental flaw in how we have learned to define customers in the abstract. The common practice taught to Marketing professionals is to segment the market by various elements such as demographic elements, geographic elements, behavioral elements, and psychographic elements. I can tell you that this is starting to change… but we still have a long way to go.

While it’s true that we’ve seen significant historical benefit in using this methodology, we’ve failed to see where its true limitations exist. Christiansen writes: “The great Harvard marketing professor Theodore Levitt used to tell his students, ‘People don’t want to buy a quarter-inch drill. They want a quarter-inch hole!’ Marketing must philosophically make the switch from defining who they are targeting to the context of the solution. Or to state it in a straight forward way: Marketing needs to understand the “JOB” the product does, not the person.

Kawasaki shows us how we can back into this process inadvertently. But, the question is, can we change our ways and actually get to the point where we understand the context the customer elects to hire us?

What is preventing this? When we are on the job… Do we just get too enamored with our features? Have we translated what our customers have said and classified that feedback into something we think we heard? Are we using organizational filtering to make sure that we hear only the important information? What are we doing?

We owe it to ourselves, our companies, and our customers to find a better way.

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In Art of the Start, Guy Kawasaki spends a bit of time discussing some of the side effects of product innovation: finding unintended customers and learning about unintended uses of a product. He even provides a nice grid to show the collective importance of this unintended event.

When we begin the process of building our businesses, we begin the process of making assumptions. We rarely have the time to fully vet those assumptions, and if we did, we would rarely do anything else.

With those assumptions in hand we begin to frame our way of thinking and our actions to conform to those assumptions. Further, our we see the world through these frames, so we find validation where it may not really exist.

What am I talking about? Well, here’s an example that might help. Let’s say that I work in a company that produces deodorant.

Let’s say that the company has placed a sales objective of growing product revenues by 15%. Now I don’t know anything about this industry, so this may seem crazy, but imagine that type of growth would require a killer new product to satisfy that number.

Let’s go on to assume that there is a new trend which indicates that an organic root which is relatively cheap to produce can be added to the recipe to make the antiperspirant properties stronger and offer an alternative to the aluminum based compounds currently used. This, some would tell you, would offer a perceived health benefit to the organics market.

Ok… enough of the set up. Let’s say that the recipe change makes the product fulfill the needs as a bug repellent which is more effective than Deet. Should the company seek to reposition the product? Or accept the unintended use? What about the new customers to the deodorant? Should they be discouraged from buying the product?

In practice, the assumptions we enter into the product innovation process rarely hold up. More challenging is the fact that often, we find that our customers are not who we expected and the way they are using the product is not what we were prepared for. Further, it typically takes us a very long time to figure this out…

Is there a better way to operate? With out a doubt… but in today’s market place, that takes time, energy, dedication, and a relentless pursuit of knowing the customer.

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