“The theory arrays these tools along two dimensions—the extent to which members of the organization agree on what they want from their participation in the enterprise, and the extent to which they agree on what actions will produce the desired results. When there is little agreement on both axes, you have to use “power tools”—coercion, threats, punishment, and so on—to secure cooperation. Many companies start in this quadrant, which is why the founding executive team must play such an assertive role in defining what must be done and how. If employees’ ways of working together to address those tasks succeed over and over, consensus begins to form. MIT’s Edgar Schein has described this process as the mechanism by which a culture is built. Ultimately, people don’t even think about whether their way of doing things yields success. They embrace priorities and follow procedures by instinct and assumption rather than by explicit decision—which means that they’ve created a culture. Culture, in compelling but unspoken ways, dictates the proven, acceptable methods by which members of the group address recurrent problems. And culture defines the priority given to different types of problems. It can be a powerful management tool.” (Christensen, C. (2010). How Will You Measure Your Life?. Harvard Business Review, 88(7/8), 46-51.)

In the language of my current company, this balance between what people want from their participation, and the actions that will produce the desired results,  is called “shared vision”.  It has become part of the fabric of our corporate culture – and perhaps the most challenging concept to internalize for anyone new to the organization,  whether it is a single employee, or the whole team coming onboard after an acquisition.

Christensen also applies this concept to the family life, and this is where it gets even more interesting, as you get to the point where command and control stops working, and “because I said so” is no longer an valid argument (nor that it ever really was) – and by then you better have developed the shared vision with your child, this common understanding of what is right and what is wrong, and how to make good choices and avoid bad ones.

Below is the session description, and the text of the presentation is available here.

Wednesday 8:30 AM – 9:30 AM
Location: Grand B

In designing technical  support processes, it is critically important to understand the difference between issues and incidents. There is a subtle but clear difference,  but the teams often mix the two together, causing churn and wasted resources.

An incident is a problem report from an end-user; it generally describes the specific symptoms being experienced that may be unique to a particular environment or setup. Incidents are all about the customer; they are managed at the Tier 1 support level and tracked in a CRM system.

An issue is the underlying problem that caused the incident; it may impact more than one customer. Issues are all about the product, and are managed at Tier 2 level.  All issues should be captured in a Knowledge Base; they are worked on in a CRM or a bug-tracking system.

Issues are resolved by Tier 2 or Tier 3; associated incidents are closed by Tier 1 – with  a loop back to the customer!

The churn occurs when incidents are handled one after another without consideration of what the underlying issue may be. This is why it is so important to use KB with every customer interaction, so that every incident can be traced to its root cause through an issue.

My Kindle 2 has run out of power and had a splash screen with this bone-chilling message:

Critical Battery

Your battery is empty.

To continue using your Kindle, connect it to a power source.

It may take a few minutes of charging before your Kindle starts.

It was bone-chilling because I was at the airport and did not have the charger handy, so I was facing four hours on the place with just the  Hemispheres magazine…  the horror…So I connected the Kindle to my laptop with the USB cable but still the  same message.   Ughh. But when I got home (after the utter misery of having to read a random paperback hastily bought at a newsstand) and connected with the proper Amazon charger – it still won’t charge!

None of the tips on the Web helped, but I did call Kindle Support and here is what worked (in this exact sequence):

1. Slide the power button and hold it for 30 sec.

2. Release and wait for 20 sec until the screen begins to flash.

3. As soon as it does, plug in the power and keep it connected for 2 hours.

Worked as a charm!

What was disapponting in this whole experience was that the Amazon support agent immediately know what the problem was and had the exact step by step instructions for this process, but it was nowhere to be found on the Amazon FAQ list. Why force the customers to talk to a live agent for an issue that is apparently well known to Amazon???

Theodore Levitt in his classic 1960 HBR article Marketing Myopia has several great examples:

•    The railways almost failed because they thought they were in the railroad business but in fact they were in the transportation business, and their competitors were cars and buses, not other railways.

•    Hollywood film companies were almost destroyed by television, because they thought they in the movie business, when they actually were in the entertainment business:     ” ‘Movies’  implied a specific, limited product. This produced a fatuous contentment that from the beginning led producers to view TV as a threat. Hollywood scorned and rejected TV when it should have welcomed it as an opportunity—an opportunity to expand the entertainment business” (Levitt, Theodore. 1960.  Marketing Myopia,  Harvard Business Review 38, 45-57).

My boss was thinking about our business unit as a whole, but it made me think how to define the business my team was in. We provide support to the customers of our product, so are we in the business of fixing customer problems? No, this is too narrow a definition. Are we in the business of improving customer satisfaction and increasing loyalty? This is better, but still not quite it – something is missing, the unique value that we are adding.

I think we are in the business of helping our customers achieve full benefit of using our product, so they can be more productive and successful. The key difference here is that this last statement looks outside, at the benefit we add for the customers, not just for our company. And if we make our customers more productive and successful, they will, in turn, be more satisfied and loyal, and then they will keep coming back to buy more of our products.