What Does A Manager Do?

Though this applies to all of us, it rings especially true for those who find themselves in positions of leadership.

Your responsibility at work is to help people achieve more than they know they are capable of.

- Simon Sinek

Notice there's no mention of the importance of delegation and accountability. It's not that those things are without value, it's just they aren't the point. The point is always to do everything in your power to help the people who below, above, and beside you become the very best that they can be.

That's the kind of person I aim to be and that's are the kind of person I want to work for and with.

Via Swiss Miss.

Best Buy's Slow Ride To Bankrupty

@tsand points to this recent Forbes post, "Why Best Buy is Going out of Business…Gradually". There's a lot to digest in the article, but it's a cautionary tale of what happens when a company disconnects with its customers.

One of my favorite parts is the author's dissection of the Best Buy's recent press release concerning their inability to fill online orders at Christmas.

An article in the Minneapolis Star Tribune, the company’s hometown newspaper, reported a few days before Christmas that the company had only just informed some customers that online orders, some placed the day after Thanksgiving, couldn’t be filled and were being cancelled.  The out of stock items included the most popular items, including TVs and iPads, “as well as other tablets, cameras, laptops, PS3 games and the Nintendo Wii.”

The company issued a statement that read:  “Due to overwhelming demand of hot product offerings on BestBuy.com during the November and December time period, we have encountered a situation that has affected redemption of some of our customers’ online orders.”

Let’s parse that sentence for a moment.  The company “encountered a situation”—that is, it was a passive victim of an external problem it couldn’t control, in this case, customers daring to order products it acknowledges were “hot” buys.  This happened, inconveniently for Best Buy, during “the November and December period,” that is, the only months that matter to a retailer. For obvious reasons, the statement ties itself in knots trying to avoid mentioning that the “situation” occurred during the holidays.

The situation that Best Buy “encountered” has “affected redemption” of some orders.  Best Buy doesn’t fill online orders, it seems.  Rather, customers “redeem” them.  So it’s the customers, not Best Buy, who have the problem.  And those customers haven’t been left hanging; they’ve only been “affected” in efforts to “redeem” their orders.  It’s not as if the company did anything wrong, or, indeed, anything at all.

It’s all so passive.  It’s also a transparent and truly feeble pack of lies.  Here’s what the honest and appropriate release would have said:  “Due to poor inventory management and sales forecasting of the most popular products during our key sales season, we can’t fill orders we promised to fill weeks ago in time for Christmas.”

There’s a little more to the Best Buy’s press release:  “We are very sorry for the inconvenience this has caused, and we have notified the affected customers.”

Again, note the use of the passive voice—”this” refers to the “situation” that Best Buy “encountered.”   The “situation,” not Best Buy’s poor operations, “has caused” inconvenience to customers.  It’s not something Best Buy did wrong.  It’s like they’re reporting the weather; something utterly out of their control about which the company is a mere observer.  They’ve “notified the affected customers” despite, it seems, no sense of obligation to do so, let alone to find a solution to a problem entirely of the company’s own creation.  How sorry are they, do you think?

Again, here’s my rewrite:  “Three days before Christmas, too late for the customers to make alternative arrangements, we are just now letting our would-be customers know.  We have no excuse for such amateur behavior.”

According to the article, the company refused to answer any questions beyond the release. Here are a few: How many customers were affected? What specific products were involved? How has the company failed so badly to perform to even the lowest standards imaginable for a retailer at Christmas? Did the company expect anyone would be fooled by the ridiculously obtuse statement of non-apology?

Who Owns Your Twitter Followers?

Who owns your Twitter followers: you or your employer? Strong cases can be made for either viewpoint depending on the circumstances. That's why it's probably best, if you're an employer, that you cover this in your company social media policy. (You do have a social media policy, right?)

If you're considering a job that will include the use of social media and the organization in question does not have an established social media policy, it's probably a good idea to negotiate your retention of your own social media accounts beyond the duration of your employment. Otherwise, insist that new social media accounts be created for utilization on behalf of the organization.

Get ready. We're going to see a lot more of this sort of thing in the coming years.

[This post also appears on the bfg blog.]

It's Not a Lie; It's a Marketing Technique.

Here we have yet another example of the kind of thing that makes me ashamed to work in marketing. The card in the photo above looks to be a hand-written note from a gentleman named David. It isn't.

This is a mass produced direct mail piece for a service that aims to do for marketers exactly what it did to me: dupe the recipient into opening the piece thinking it to be a personal note from someone they know. Notice in the photo below how even the envelope, with "Everyday Greetings" on the back, is designed to further the ruse that this is a greeting card.

The question is: is it successful?

It obviously works since I opened it and I'm blogging about it. But note that I don't consider the fact that something works synonymous with success. Sure, I opened and read the piece, but left me with such a bad taste in my mouth that will go out of my way not to work with this vendor. No one likes to be duped, myself included.

Those that would argue that this piece is successful regardless of the resulting negative sentiment it produced in me are likely the same people that buy into the idea that the only bad press is no press. What a load of crap! Who in their right mind wants to be well known for being an asshat?

A lie is still a lie, even if you call it marketing.