She doesn’t grow plants.
The plants grow themselves.
Her job is to create conditions for the plants to grow.
The soil, the water, the light, the weeds… these are the conditions.
But none of it happens if the plants don’t do the thing they want to do in the first place.
This is always true, anywhere a leader succeeds.
Creating the conditions is the hard part.
Frederick Lewis Donaldson created a list of seven social sins that was soon popularized by Gandhi. One hundred years later, it’s more relevant and more urgent than ever.
Wealth without work.
Pleasure without conscience.
Knowledge without character.
Commerce without morality.
Science without humanity.
Religion without sacrifice.
Politics without principle.
When we create these imbalances, we pay for them.
It’s either part of your strategy or you’re paying for your mistake.
800 numbers changed the way large brands dealt with the public. Instantly, and for free, a consumer could contact a company about a product or service and they would work to make it right.
It was more than fodder for an infinite number of New Yorker cartoons. Some brands made it a part of their marketing strategy (Zappos, for example) while others saw it as a bottomless expense and did as little as they could (Google, for one.) The successful companies in the no-support group spent the money they saved on user experience, working hard to make it so you’d never need to call them.
Both are defensible choices. Great customer service is expensive, but it’s also free. It’s free because delighting a customer who has an issue is the single cheapest way to not only keep that customer, but also have them spread the word.
Building a new car company is difficult and expensive. Rivian has adopted the strategy of being the most honest, diligent and responsible car company in history. They answer the phone in one ring, a helpful person actually helps, and they work overtime to make things right. If you meet someone with a Rivian, just ask them.
A much smaller company, Discourse, supports their software with a community approach that’s human, interactive and effective. It’s not as expensive as having a car towed away, but it supports customer loyalty and decent margins.
Delightfully, great companies like PSAudio are following their lead, using Discourse to help customers become connected and find support. It provides a layer of insulation that other companies struggle to keep up with.
On the other hand, Firstbase.io, a new company aiming to service founders of new companies, has completely lost their way. They take as long as five business days to respond to a query, their UX is terrible and they generally don’t care, or at least act like they don’t. Unlike Google, who decided to build a customer-facing product that didn’t need support, Firstbase is simply in cost-cutting mode. It’s broken and they know it.
You can’t cost cut your way to greatness.
Consumers have been trained to expect that companies will engage. Even if you’re a soloist, the availability of instant communication means that if you choose to do a lousy job on support, you’re going to be judged accordingly.
“Do as I say.” That’s industrial management in four words.
If you don’t follow the instructions to the letter, you’re insubordinate. Not subordinate.
Complete subordination might have been the goal in an industrial setting. But now, it’s dangerous, expensive and inefficent. Because people close to the work know exactly what needs to be done.
The opposite of insubordination is now enrollment.
Someone who is enrolled in the journey doesn’t have to be told exactly what to do. Instead, given the goals, the tools and the culture, they will figure it out.
Robert Caro never learned to type. He pecks out his books two fingers at a time on an electric typewriter.
There are two reasons to avoid learning a proven new technology:
You know what it can do and how it will change your life and you don’t want it.
You don’t know what it can do and you don’t want to find out.
Kevin Kelly has pointed out that many Amish communities are in the first camp. They designate a few community members as nerds who can try out a technology and report back on how it changed their families and their focus. The end result is that they often make the intentional choice to avoid something that they deem counter to their goals.
On the other hand, social media makes many of the people who use it unhappy.
It’s better to know and then to decide.
Or trying better?
Fast runners aren’t the same as slow runners, but with more effort.
And great chefs or violinists or actors… it’s not about doing what you did yesterday, but more of that.
It’s something different.
Last in the series…
Most of us were indoctrinated to believe that completing chores is the appropriate measure of productivity.
“I did all my homework.”
Doing all your homework is a measure for industrial bosses.
But what, precisely, did your homework ever do for you?
The actual measures of productivity that might be useful range quite a bit:
Pick your measurement and the impact of your chores will change.
Adam Smith and Karl Marx both wrote about the pin-making machine. Not too long ago, pins (for hats, to hold shirts in place, etc.) were incredibly expensive. They were a luxury item, and a handmade pin might cost more than buying lunch.
The pin-making machine changed this. It transformed the labor of four trained workers from 20 pins a day to 10,000.
It’s pretty clear that if you wanted to make pins productively, you’d want to own one of these devices.
Industrial productivity progress grows and then ebbs or levels out. The inclined plane. The shovel. The assembly line. The computer chip. Robots…
When it’s leveling out, some people insist it will never rise again. And yet it does.
The tools that are available to each of us are so powerful, so varied and so complex that even the free ones are ignored or misunderstood. We’re too busy doing work to get much done.
And so we end up with the convenient and sexy tools (like the smartphone you might be reading this on) and fail to do the few hours or days of training we might need to transform our productivity with desktop tools or thought-through and optimized AI and workflow improvements.
Working harder is rarely a better plan than finding better tools.
In an economy built on skill, knowledge, and attitude, the single most powerful way to improve your productivity is to learn something.
You put in the effort once and it pays off for decades.
There are more ways for an adult to learn now than at any time in our history, and all of it is self-driven. When you’re ready to level up, the door is open.
My classes on Udemy have been taken by more than 75,000 people and four of them are on sale for 25% off for the next few weeks, which rarely happens.
There’s a brand new one, a short course on how to understand the charts and graphs that explain how ideas spread. It’s $30 now. In 45 minutes or so, you’ll have a deeper understanding of the dynamics of cultural change.
The Bootstrapper’s course is the one with the highest ratings to date. A bootstrapper builds a project without outside investment, creating value for customers and growing as she goes. Like all the full-length courses here, it’s $139 this month.
The Marketing course is the most complete of all my Udemy courses. It starts with the basics and includes more than fifty lessons. Based on the bestselling book This is Marketing and the original Marketing Seminar, it will give you a chance to rethink how you bring your ideas to the people who need them.
And finally, The Freelancer’s course is here for independent creators of all kinds. More than 28,000 students so far. A freelancer isn’t a junior sort of entrepreneur. Instead, it’s a chance to do your best work for clients who need you. This course will change the way you approach your work.
If you can teach something, even to one person, I hope you will. And if you can learn something, this is the best time to start. (You can even learn to print with letterpress).
If productivity is useful work created by time or money, it’s worth thinking about what we mean by ‘useful’.
There are areas where reliability is crucial. It turns out that building an airplane that works 95% of the time is incredibly easy compared to building one that never crashes. I think we’re all pleased that the standard for airplanes is ‘never’.
On the other hand, a book that’s missing a few Oxford commas can still change lives or even win a Pulitzer.
Given enough time and enough money, we can make just about anything as reliable as an airplane. But should we?
How much extra is a perfectly round pickleball ball worth?
The wrong question is: “Is it perfect?”
The right question might be: “Does it meet the spec?”
If you’re not happy with the spec, change it. But once there’s a spec, good enough is good enough.
