The employee utopia that is Valve

This blog mostly is about customer service and companies and systems that deliver it. Or try and fail. Preferably, hilariously. Luckily I live in the right country for the latter. Good times! Today allow me to wax on a company I have now become a huge fan of.

Valve. This full blown love affair initially started the moment I decided to play ‘Half Life’ in 2002 and now, last night, when I wrapped their latest ton-of-fun game, Portal 2, I realized just what an amazing track record this outfit has. But now that I have finished reading the ‘Valve Employee Handbook’, I am in sheer awe of the people who run the place (clue : it’s everybody there !). If you are a manager, employee, team leader or just a guy looking to read about a utopian place, read the ‘manual’ and prepare to weep when you then go to YOUR workplace tomorrow.

Random Thoughts on a few Companies

 

BlackBerry is dying and in less than 2 years will be dead as an independent company and will be bought off by one of the technology goliaths (Google, Microsoft, HP) and I hope someone then writes a good book on the rise and fall of this once mighty RIM empire that  hubris destroyed.

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The game at a Govt service provider (Air India, USA DMV, Municipal Services) is to start with low standards and try for lower. Bet on them. The odds are they will ‘win’.

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The trouble with Indian customer service providers, esp. call center reps, domestic or international oriented is they equate great customer service with obeisance. ‘Adding a million “please” and “Saaar” and “Thaankk you Thaankk you” will not hold a candle to being able to listen and give straight answers or solutions to the query.

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Hierarchy trumps quality and strength of argument at all mediocre companies. Esp that don’t know they are.

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The TATA Motors advertisement and marketing team probably were taken to a BMW factory and fooled into thinking it was a TATA factory. Nothing else explains the gap between their bluster in the ads and the reality of the turd models they shit out year on year.

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Offsites are such a waste of time and money.

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A white collar firm in India that introduces a ‘Dogs allowed to work !!’ +’NO dress code here’ + ‘No limit on leaves taken’ will NEVER go bankrupt. There are many layers of smart phycology in those 3 rules.

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People who really know, understand and smartly use twitter are really ahead of the majority in the quality of information they are getting exposed to.

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Samsung India makes great products and it’s ‘reaction’ time probably competes with the humming bird. You email them and they will call you back in less than an hour. And if an engineer is needed to attend to your Samsung appliance, he will take less time than the ambulances and cops in India to turn up at your place. Alas, Samsung’s noble intentions towards their customer base is let down by poor selection of authorised service centers and reps who are experts at ripping the customer off and sullying the good brand.

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The new iPad is amazing and the display helps your jaw meet the floor in record time. But what it does best is not that display thing Apple boasts abt. I think the device very subtly elevates, without you even realizing it, to becoming sublime and invisible. Only the Amazon Kindle has managed this trick earlier. This ‘flow’ state happens when your engagement with the information on the device becomes so pleasurable and intuitive and intense, the device literally just disappears into the background.

Idea : Stories instead of Hold Music

The Former Mozilla CEO John Lilly said in an interview “A lot of people say the number one job of the CEO is to keep money in the bank, or the number one job is to be strategic and the number one job is recruiting. That may be a true, but when I was at Mozilla the activity I did mostly was to tell the story–tell the story simply, understandably over and over and over again. ”

Collecting and narrating good stories about a firm’s product, service and customers is a powerful tool and a very good habit with high ROI. Because it FORCES you to have a cogent narrative. Like what are you really about ? what’s the DNA of this firm ? What’s guiding us ? Alas, most firms don’t do it, considering it a ‘new age’ idea at best. But then, if your firm does, that’s a really sharp arrow in your quiver. Let’s pretend you did sit with your team and collected some great stories. What to do with it ? Use it in all comms. esp with employees ?

Here is a crazy idea ? –  Whenever someone calls your helpline and the wait time is X mins, what if instead of torturing the sap on the line with elevator music and the insincere ‘your call is very important to us’, you played a recent customer story on the IVR lasting those X mins. (So a 60 sec wait time, narrates a 50 sec story, 3 mins wait time narrates a 170 secs story.. I know. Crazy.  No doubt the tough part is collecting great sincere stories and narrating them in a manner that engages.

But if you did you’ll leave the competition in the dust.

20 signs you are working at a mediocre firm

1. The PowerPoint presentations are always 10+ slides and each slide is crammed with more words than a Bombay local at peak hours.
2. ….which the presenter reads, line by line, slowly.
3. No meetings ever start and end on time and there is no pre published agenda
4. There are no clear goals so people obsess and focus on behaviors.
5. In the rulebook the DON’T List is longer than the DO list.
6. The dress code is more than 20 words long. (btw Google’s dress code: You must wear clothes).
7. Firing a staff takes longer than hiring a staff

8. There is a bias towards NON-ACTION and more meetings ‘to discuss’
9. Everything is done either on Excel or PowerPoint. No one has heard about Dropbox/Basecamp/Slack.
10. There is a deep, dark, rich culture of CC’ing and BCC’ing
11. Stock solution to an client escalation/complaint is  “Standardization!” or More QC’ing.
12. Candor is considered unseemly.
13. The Q&A session after a presentation is even more tepid and boring than the presentation.
14. Meetings that should ideally be emails are the norm.
15. People prefer emailing versus picking up the phone or (godforbid) walking across to their colleagues.
16. Everything needs an approval email from the boss.
17. People use ‘Sir’ when speaking to or about a senior colleague.
18. There are emails that start with “Dear All“.
19. People are expected to bond at ‘Off sites’.
20. No one tweets at/about your workplace.

Spending Strategy at Commoditized Firms

When you sell a commodity-like product, price competition is usually fierce. Think airline seats, insurance, hotel rooms. So it pays to be the low cost operator. Marketing in this environment is inherently an evidence of optimism by the senior team. When you are marketing for these type of commodity products, you are fighting the evidence and the instincts of the majority consumer. Why not use that available pool of money for something smarter ? There MUST be superior ways to get more bang for the buck. Why not use all the money to set up more customer service lines, monitor the conversations about the brand online, or (omg!) participate and control it.

I think a low cost operator reputed for great customer service, in the long marathon, will beat a low cost operator with memorable ads. Any money diverted from customer service to marketing should be scrutinised more sharply by the CFO and CEO versus expenses related to T&E and Headcount (traditionally the ones that was closely monitored)

The Chief Marketing Officer of a commodity-like product should be only moved into that role after he has done a 3 year stint in Customer Service. That’ll really dampen her urge to promise the moon to customers when she knows the team in the kitchen can’t deliver that and Customer Service will face the flak.

India Files : A case for ‘Conscription’

India.

Sometimes I think, like the Matrix, this country is a stimulation training program that is designed by a cruel programmer to train the inserted student in selfishness, venality and becoming someone with nil-empathy.

Nothing else better explains the horrific phenomena that is this country and the 1.3 billion in it.

Moral gangrene meets spiritual bankruptcy.

OK. That was the rant. Done.

Here is the idea.

Have you heard about the term ‘Conscription’ ?

Conscription is the compulsory enlistment of people in some sort of national service, most often military service.

Finland and Israel do it.

What if India had conscription but NOT for military service but something far more noble, needed and nicer : Teaching.

What if the govt amended the constitution and made all jobs open to ONLY those people who proved they spent 2 years teaching.

Think about the net positive benefit to both the teacher and the millions of illiterate students.

Why not ? What is the downside versus the obvious upsides? I don’t see many but open to thoughts.

“I slept and dreamt that life was joy.

I awoke and saw that life was service.

I acted and behold, service was joy”

— said that bearded Nobel winning poet dude from Bengal

Hire slow. Fire fast. Prosper.

Sometimes seemingly random data points helps the keen observer understand the observed entity better than all the glossy brochures, the slick ‘About us‘ section in the website or the unasked 53 slides presentation from the over keen, laughably under-informed HR team on induction day.

Take hiring and firing at a firm as an example.

In most firms we see, hiring is a quick and easy exercise. You make a case for the role, interview some people and hire the bloke your gut votes for.

Firing is its polar opposite. It’s a long, painful, extended process with HR acting as the spiritual embodiment of a Calcutta Municipal Department.

HIRING should be long, detailed and thorough and firing should be easier. Not easy, EASIER, when the employee is in the bottom percentile. The DECISION to fire should be long, detailed and thorough but the act and the process should be the length of a typical hindi movie (= 4 hours?)

The ratio between days on average taken to hire an employee and days taken to fire an employee probably gives an observer a needed data point to understand if he is dealing with a dynamic workplace or a stodgy firm. Firms where the hiring cycle is MUCH longer versus time taken to terminate is a place where the word ‘Talent management’ is taken seriously both by HR and critically by Operations. A company where the opposite is the reality (= most firms today) is likely to be a place where HR is a cushy job for ‘failed govt school teacher’ types who strayed into the lucrative private industry forest and decided to squat there in an easy part of the woods.

Opinion : Hire Easy. manage Tough. Hire slow. Manage Easy

On Hiring : Hire for Interesting, not ‘Normal’

When an organization is screening a potential candidate for a customer service manager role, what is the hiring team looking for ?

Interviewing is a hit and miss game and after 200 of them recently, I have sort of given up on them as a dependable tool in filtering people. Too many false positives. And the cues I took to fall into the false positive pond are treated as ‘reliable signaling markers’ by most hiring teams.

– prior experience in that role in another company in the same industry

– a graduate degree or mba ?

– basic ‘comm’ skills (whatever that means)

– ‘experience’ handling people

I think next time here are three qualifiers I am going to impose on the potential hire who is going to manage a group of CSRs ?

– have you travelled to more than 4 countries outside of India in the last decade ?

– have you read more than 3 books in the last 6 months ?

– have you eaten 6 dishes not native to this country in the last 2 years ?

Risk aversion in hiring is one of the most potent ‘vices’ a company unconsciously practices and something that never shows up on the ‘risks to business’ section of the K10. I can bet the majority of the Fortune 500 companies that were listed in 1962 in US and who no longer exist today REALLY went for the norm most of the time.

I think if we want creativity, fresh thinking and a non-standard out of the box approach that is going to define the next decade of customer service here, it will be wise to hire the smart and the interesting versus the ‘industry norm’.

The Norm has a very short lifespan and winner actively shun it or redefine it. Remember the Apple Motto ‘Think Different’. Applies here.

Corporate Anatomy Lesson for newbies.

Here is my incisive summary of the corporate life from my years in it.

Target audience : nOObs/newbies joining the queue at the bottom of the corporate ladder.

First they hire you for what you can do well with your HANDS. So learn the proprietary platforms of the client/company, teach your fingers to FLY over the keyboard when you are getting the excel document ready for your boss before his crucial presentation.

Then, after you have proven yourself with your hands,  they will want you to be able to use your MOUTH to utter sensible stuff that gets the important people around the meeting room nodding. Make sure your English, both written and spoken, is immaculate and you are set. And learn to speak well and slowly.

The years have gone by fast and now you have evolved and are at the bottom of the BIG league. Yes, the pay grade now is really delicious up there. We are talking within firing range of ESOPs!

Now the Pantheon want you to be very good at using your EARS. You are now the ‘Senior Person‘ for a lot of people under you and around you. And the clients see you as THE GUY in the firm to go to for the key stuff/escalations/ideas. Listening here needs to be almost an art form you should have mastered. You stop winning when you stop listening here. Everyone around you should perceive you as a listener. Ask questions, observe carefully, and meet as many people as you can. Instead of spouting off about how great you are, which only serves to show people that you are insecure, try listening to people, which makes them feel important, and consequently they will like you more.

After some time, finally, you are at THE TABLE. Where it is all decided.

Dividends. Strategy. Key hiring decisions. New markets to penetrate. The world of Golf club memberships and  G6 on the runway.

Now they finally they want that stuff between your ears, your HEAD, in the game.  Deploy!

Remember, the sequence rarely varies so upgrade your body parts is the order mentioned and you will do JUST FINE in the corporate world here.

Mess up the order and get ready to wonder repeatedly just why you never made it all the way inspite of having the full anatomy.

And yes, there is ONE more body part you should take along on all the 4 phase. Heart. Always have that in the game.

Thoughts on Freemium

Free.

Cautionary tales abound about no mid-day meal of that nature exits both at mid-day or at other time in it, in relation to both the gastronomical experience or outside of it.

But lately I have been thinking there must be some obligation from customers of FREE even if the seller does not explicitly make it clear.

Let’s look at an easy example : Gmail

This service from Google is used by countless individuals. I have been on gmail for years. And I am quite the happy customer. I suspect the majority are. And Google provides it free of charge. And always will.

Now what has Google gained for itself from Gmail ? Ads. Or more precisely, a huge audience that it can sell targeted ads to. The right side on the inbox page is the prime real estate that helps pay for the rest of the inbox you are using.

So your ‘payment’ to google is adding to the user count that Google can pitch to ad buyers.

But this model is not universal.  Enter ad-free services like Wikipedia (or it could be dropbox/instapaper/firefox/some free nifty app or file)

They deliberately decided to keep their offering totally ad-free and maintain content integrity from the start.

Nobel. And I bet if you are reading this you are a Wikipedia user too.

Here I reason you have a DUTY as a customer to Wikipedia. And they can be two core ones :

Donate to it.
Promote it.

or maybe BOTH!

Only one will cost you and both will ensure the service continues to be both free and available.

‘Tragedy of the Commons’ is an economics concept we are not thought enough of in college and it is a corrosive acid that eats into any enterprise where freeloaders don’t think long enough and aren’t grateful enough and deplete common resources.

When possible help that free service you enjoy. If only so you can continue doing so.