Today’s Contribution

Television news was showing how police were cracking down on DC cabbies who mischarged their riders, sirens screaming, tires squealing, “...gonna make an example!...” 

I laughed. I ride DC cabs and improvement by threat was only affecting the cameramen and the officials puffing up in front of them...and maybe the poor sap they were trying to hurt. They forget that cabbie is their customer. 

Peter Corbett had introduced the DC Tech community to Travis Kalanick, ceo of Uber, an app that enforced taxi compliance by giving cabbies an opportunity to earn more in return for being able to show within five minutes, keeping clean cars, taking credit cards, and maintaining their privilege by being publicly evaluated by their riders on social media. Travis told us how in city after city he had to vanquish the rentseekers, people who had fashioned niches, guarding broken systems, so they get paid for other people’s labor.

In Cambridge you have to call for a limo 8 hours before you want it. In NYC, taxi medallions are going for over a million dollars a copy. One entrayprenoor was selling medallions with duplicate numbers. Nobody cared.

In DC cabbies need to buy stickie signs for their cabs to show they’ve greased the city.

None of that has anything to do with moving me from point A to point B.

It’s just a collection of people who are carving their living out of a long ago contribution and/or bad regulation.

Over on Lifehacker, I was reading Why I Stopped Pirating And Started Paying For Media. The bottom line is once it became safe and convenient (made sense) people started to pay. All the noise about downloading is theft was an alternative to providing an acceptable way to pay. Those guys making their contribution by abusing their customers were avoiding solving the problem, and threatening force to cover their lack of mastery.

Last day of 2012, I was mailing a letter for a friend, had to get mailed that day. Walked up to a post office truck and asked the driver if he would take the letter from me. No, he was a postal professional, he didn’t take mail, but he was happy to give me erroneous directions to a post office five blocks away. Got there and that post office had closed early.

This is not directed at government, although government is all over DC and government has done the best job of holding back change. Consequently, their fixes will be the most wrenching.

This Sunday, I went into the Five Guys in DuPont Circle. Midday, the place was empty. The “manager” was sitting at a table, back to the door, nodding out. The guy at the cash register couldn’t hear my order because he had cranked the stereo so loud. I saw several groups walk in, turn around, and walk out to go somewhere less painful.

I do some Five Guys. This trip had the best fries ever from the cook, after I yelled at the financial professional to turn down the noise. The noise was so loud, it took three tries.

One time I was in a CVS. They had locked one of the exits during business hours, and the staff of three were exasperatedly yelling at the customers to use the automated checkout kiosks, which were down. There were fifteen people trying to get out of the store, and nobody bothering to operate the cash registers.

The lady behind me said, “They’re just not retail oriented.” Good line.

Many have changed business processes to take advantage of the economies of automation. Which is true...when they work. When the users are not able to make the systems work as imagined, often there is no understanding of the underlying mission of the business. The mission has changed from satisfying the customer to enabling automated processes.

The classic example is having to start over because you filled out a form incorrectly. I’m embarrassed filling out poorly designed forms that encourage errors. And you know, I’ve never had happen on Amazon. They always get their money.

Making an example of the “bad customer,” using force or coercion, is usually bad tactics for two reasons. First, paybacks are hell, and second, they highlight flawed operations.

Rentseeking, taking compensation to allow others’ efforts, is always ugly and with internet disintermediation there are fewer ways to hide it. What if the rule of thumb was to supply value commensurate with the value you take? “Well, we also have all these other things nobody in their right mind would pay for...” Rentseeking.

As for what to do about it, I think we might realize that this is a time of rapid change, and old problems may have new and different solutions. When you find yourself providing a solution that doesn’t help the guy with the problem, you probably need to try something else. 

Focus on figuring out Today’s Contribution every day. 

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The Autonomous Economy

I walk into an airport, feed a credit card into the kiosk, which spits out a boarding pass. At the same time, my seat is blocked, my meal, beer, and pillow are released, TSA knows I am coming, the gate knows I am coming, the flight crew knows I am coming, the incoming gate at my hub knows I am coming, and I am boarded on my next flight.

I didn’t realize that until one time I was transferring in Philadelphia and the video board was down.

A human attendant looked at his clipboard, and told me to go to the wrong gate all the way across the airport. I got there and found out my exit gate was actually just two away from my entry gate.

When I got back to my gate, the airline was holding the plane. They knew I was in the airport somewhere.

Now before all this computerization, a small part of that data was communicated by harried humans with clipboards. They are mostly gone now. That’s why when the plane system burps, there is no hope of getting a fix by standing in line.

Switching a business from the carbon-based units with clipboards to the silicon-based units with screens takes time. Humans are better at improvising, and can communicate with other humans.

Computers are vastly cheaper, and when the system is complete, can communicate better with computers.

From an operating cost model, reducing your business to computer driven data makes sense no matter how difficult it is. The first in an industry to successfully implement an automated system gets an enormous advantage. The problem is when your system inadvertently maximizes customer prevention.

Banks and airlines know that a mal-system interlude can tank your customer sat. If the Internet never forgets, how long do angry customers hold a grudge?

When I read about the disappearing middle class, I remember all the people with clipboards outwitting their business systems to get me home. By the same token, anyone who hides a known system burp has to be taken out of the loop, as that burp often represents hundreds or thousands of instances that went unreported.

Open Source Leadership teaches us that more eyeballs get the problem fixed easier and faster. It used to be that we were trying to get a little more time before reporting to try to come up with a solution. Today that is exactly the wrong way to play.

Where do you see the autonomous economy changing your life, for better or worse?

Will I Ever Work Again?

When I talk with people in transition this is the question they are asking: will I ever work again?

We are in a unique but interesting economic time. There's the recession, of course. Even more important, however, is the confluence of advances in applying technology, coming of age of automation, and the New Normal of how we now do work – all hitting after two decades of rightsizing in the private sector and a shift to a global marketplace. Things are simply not the same now!

In the '70s and '80s, while with a couple of major consulting firms, I observed a practice I called 'Retire in Place' – in deference to their past contribution, former rainmakers who relied on 50,000 hours of experience rather than keeping current with new rules, practices, and technology were shunted off to a special project instead of continuing to consult. Often, the project was writing a history of the organization, and when it was completed, or abandoned, they would disappear from from the firm.

As individuals in transition today provide more detail about their past work, many had roles as 'hoppers', 'conveyor-belts', and 'shippers'. The hoppers collected information, data, lists, counts, and other elements and packaged it together for someone else to use. The conveyor-belts would move collections of responses, reports, archives, and other elements from one location to another, perhaps with a manifest of what's included. The shippers packaged the various inputs into reports of summaries, statistics, ratios, charts, and comparisons of current and historical data, then deliver these reports to the specified recipients.

The roles of hoppers, conveyor-belts, and shippers have been automated with computers, software, and systems – the need in the labor market for individuals to do these functions continues to diminish rapidly.

Organizations are continuing to reorganize, consolidate, and merge in the private sector and are beginning an era of making similar changes in the public sector as well. When entities shift duties and eliminate positions, responsibilities change and people try to adapt. Funny thing about change is at some point it becomes increasingly less effective leading the individual to want to return to a non-existent status quo. This forces them to redefine the norm quietly to a new set of operating parameters – the Nuvo Quo. The results may be a forward-thinking approach or it may become a close model of the old ways.

The conflict which has evolved is between a class of experienced workers – 'while I've been working, the world has changed'- slow to adapt and the rapid advancement of automation – whether robotics on the assembly line or electronic data collection and analysis in the office.

Employees who seek out projects or training which expands their knowledge, experience, and exposure to new technology, software, systems, and processes of value to their organization are better positioned to advance, or relocate, as the responsibilities change. The Doer's Theorem suggests a major change in the individual's skill-set every three years.

The alternative may be to chase after a role which is disappearing and, even when found elsewhere, requires additional skills and experience to work at a significantly faster pace.

What have you observed?

Join us February 22^nd for Sales Lab’s Rainmaker 12 - WhatHave I Done for You Lately? at the Capital Technology Management Hub on Wednesday, February 22^nd. The featured CTMH speaker will be Sean Crowley on the topic of The Open Source Web Content Management Platform, Drupal, and its Momentum. Get details here.