Howard Stern’s lesson in customer loyalty

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Howard Stern has lost most of his audience. I’m not a big fan of his. I like public discussion of sex that is more interesting and productive than Howard offers. But I’m not above learning from him, and how can you not learn a lesson or two from a guy who has lost almost 11 million of his12 million listeners in just a few months?

Stern bet that his audience was so loyal that they would pay $13 a month to listen to him on satellite. Inside Radio reports today that most of Stern’s listeners are just plain too lazy to make the switch. (Though 13% don’t want to pay the extra fee.) The findings of this survey are consistent with the conventional wisdom that 80% of lost customers were not actually unhappy with what they were getting.

Each of us takes little gambles with our customer base all the time. Yesterday, for example, I told someone that I was changing our project specifications a little bit. I moved away from her vision and closer to my own. I made a bet that she likes working with me enough to put up with my change.

In this vein, an editor once told me, when I turned in a column late two weeks in a row, “People who write as well as you can be late. You just need to keep writing well.” That worked for a while, but then I really pushed his limits and he fired me. In this sense, I have empathy for Howard that he overestimated loyalty. Today I make more conservative estimates, and I bet Howard would do the same, if he could.

Once we all admit that we are all marketers, then we’re more humble about loyalty. Then we’re more careful to really get to know your clients and what matters to them — be they radio listeners, editors, consumer purchasers, or the guy in the cubicle next to you.

Howard Stern overestimated how dependent his listeners were on him, but perhaps he underestimated how beholden individual radio stations were to him. The trick, as a marketer, is to find out whose business is most dependent on you, and who you are most dependent on. Then you know where you have room to wiggle.

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Even on steroids, you have to be nice

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Barry Bonds, the recently crowned home run king (and the less recently crowned king of steroids) was incredibly rude to the press for most of his career, and he is suffering for that now because the crowds are booing and the press is writing only parenthetically about his record-breaking performance.

You know the lesson here: You have to treat everyone you meet with respect because you don’t know who you are going to need later. The problem is that people use the lesson at work — they treat their boss and their underlings well. But they don't treat people they don’t work with well.

This is such a ubiquitous problem that half of American workers have been psychologically abused at their workplace, according the Handbook on Workplace Violence, a government publication. But the abuse is coming from people outside the workspace, such as clients, customers or, as in Barry’s case, third-party people you just have to deal with in order to get your work done.

Big-time journalist Patricia Sellers, in a lecture at Yale University, said, “The best thing, the smartest thing I’ve done is to be nice to assistants and secretaries. I believe you should be nice to everybody. As you rise, you will see the world gets so small.”

She describes, in fact, what happens to a guy like Bonds. When you are on top of the world, you stand on the part of the mountain that is very small. The number of people you really talk to at the top is small. It’s more intense than at the bottom, where there’s room for tons of people.

Extremely talented people can get to the top while being a jerk, but that doesn’t mean they’ll be celebrated. After all, the baseball writers are also the Hall of Fame voters.

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Expand your opportunities by finding a specialty

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I spent two hours this week writing an article about autism. My son was diagnosed with autism and I could write five hundred pages about dealing with the diagnosis. But then I reminded myself about specializing. About focus. Specialists get a lot of good things in this world, and people who dabble in everything get nothing.

Dabbling is fine, to a point. I mean, you have to dabble to figure out what you want to be a specialist in. But let’s be real. I write a career column. I have a book about careers coming out. I speak at universities about careers. I am not an autism writer.

So I trashed the autism article. Because it’s not going to help my career in a focused way. Sure, it might help in a haphazard way, the way playing basketball at the park helps your career because you never know what will come of anything. But the only way to reach focused career goals is to have focused efforts.

I stick to writing about careers because specialization is the ticket to freedom from boring and inflexible work. Let’s say you want to have every other Wednesday off to go to a yoga class. If you are a specialist who would be hard to replace, your boss will be more likely to say yes than if five hundred entry-level people can do what you do.

The more you need, the more this rule applies. Moving in and out of the workforce is easier once you’ve established that you’re great at a specific thing. And entrepreneurship is easier as specialist, too, because one of best ways to gauge aptitude is if that person has a strong knowledge base and network in the field of the proposed business.

You don’t have to specialize right away, but you should see your work path as a quest for specialization. View random corporate jobs as possible apprenticeships. You don't need to know what you’ll specialize in, but you need to be open to it when it comes. Specialization often creeps up on you, like a friend who you never expected to turn out to be a friend.

When I first started writing columns, I had no idea that I would write about careers. I was hired to “write about what it’s like to be a female executive.” I tried lots of different types of columns. I wrote about software development (my specialty at the time). I wrote about consumer products (definitely not my specialty). Those columns flopped, and so did most of my columns that were not, in some way, about careers. I learned by trial and error that I was a career writer.

It is always scary to specialize because there are so many jobs that become out of your focus. But there is good research to show that you will have an easier time staying employed if you specialize.

Specialization is also scary because we think we need to address all aspects of our personality with our work. But no work can do that. Autism, for example, is important to me right now, but it doesn’t need to be important in my work. In fact, work is sometimes a nice break from that aspect of my life.

My son was diagnosed with Asperger’s Syndrome, which is a type of autism that occurs when someone has a very high IQ but a large deficit in social skills. His teachers taught him a way to leverage his specialty — memorizing — to learn rules for socializing that other people know intuitively.

I learned many lessons from watching him do that. One is that once you have a specialty, you can leverage it to add things that are not necessarily your specialty, but you still want to have them in your life. In that way, a specialized path is one of the most diverse and rewarding paths you can choose.

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Star performance doesn’t trump interpersonal problems

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Movie mogul Mark Gill, the guy who produced blockbusters on a shoestring like “March of the Penguins” ($77 million at the box office) and “Good Night, and Good Luck” (six Oscar nominations) has been fired. Well, officially resigned, but really he was pushed out because he can’t get along with his boss.

The New York Times reports that, “Mr. Gill’s personal style continually clashed with that of Jeff Robinov, Warner’s president of production and Mr. Gill’s boss.”

About a year ago, Gill knew there was a problem and said, “I definitely had to make some adjustments to fit into this culture.” But he obviously did not make the necessary changes. No surprise. The more you feel like a star, the more you feel like you don’t need to change.

But don’t kid yourself that doing great work for your company means you don’t have to adjust your attitude and behavior to fit in. Even a guy who produces the most popular documentaries of the year has to get along with his boss in order to keep his job.

This is not revolutionary management. In fact there’s a Harvard Business Review case study (that you have to pay for) called “What a Star – What a Jerk” that discusses the need to fire people who perform well but don’t mesh with the organization.

But, like most case studies about interpersonal skills, you don’t need to read twenty pages to know the truth: If you don’t like someone, nothing else about them matters.

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Training vital to developing self-awareness, office smarts

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The new workplace currency is training. Title is not important if you’re not staying long term. Salary increases of 3 or 4 percent are ceremonial. So use the clout you earn to get training; it will make a difference in a way salary and title cannot because training can fundamentally change how you operate and what you have to offer.

This column shows you how.

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Don’t be the hardest worker in your job or in your job hunt

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If you work the most hours you look the most desperate. You shouldn’t look lazy, but don’t be the hardest worker. After all, why do you need to work so much harder than the next person? Are you not as smart? Not as organized? Not as confident in your ability to navigate a non-work world? In many cases all three are true for those who work the hardest.

The fact that the hardest worker is not necessarily the most successful rears its head before work even starts: A study conducted by Alan Krueger, professor of economics at Princeton University, shows that when it comes to workplace success, it doesn’t matter if you get in to an Ivy League school, it matters if you apply. In this case what matters is ambition and self-image, not getting the best grades or having the best test scores.

Nonstop work offers diminishing returns after graduation as well. Marita Barth is a student at MIT in biological engineering. She is at the top of her field yet she makes time to play ice hockey and volunteer at local charities. When she talks about taking breaks from her lab, Barth says, I could not maintain focus and energy if I worked nonstop. I would completely lose perspective.”

Don’t tell yourself that you work nonstop because you love your work: If you really loved your work, you’d take a break so you don’t mess it up. People who work longer than the typical eight hours a day start to lose their effectiveness quickly. “If you work all the time, you lose your edge,” warns Diane Fassel, CEO of workplace survey firm Newmeasures and author of Working Ourselves to Death. “Often these people are perfectionists, controlling and not good team players. The hardest workers are “not the best producers in terms of efficiency and creativity.”

Ironically, moments that elevate your level of success at work often require time away from work. For example, a grand idea that impacts your company's bottom line probably won’t come to you when your brain is entrenched in workplace minutia. Anyone can work the hardest, but only special people can sit on a rock and come up with a brilliant idea. In fact, even daily troubleshooting requires some mental space. Barth has found that, “It takes a lot of thought to see what’s going wrong and make another plan. And at some point, if I spend too much time in the lab without a break, I’m not efficient.”

If you can’t stop working, you might be in for some bad news: Workaholism. Kevin Kulic, professor of psychology at Mercy College, says, “With any of those -holics, you are one if it causes you or other people a problem.”

But some people purposely create imbalance. “For many people, workaholism is about perfectionism or avoidance,” says Kulic. The hardest workers have actually lost the self-confidence to stop working. They are either terrified of making a mistake or a misstep, or they are terrified of the world that lies beyond their work — for example crumbling personal relationships.

Kulic cites the Yerkes-Dodson law that says too much or too little stimulation is bad. We need a happy medium in order to perform best. And Fassel cites worker surveys that support this law — the happiest workers have a workload that falls in between very heavy and very light.

This rule for working less applies to a job hunt, too. Many of you will be happy to hear that, “The amount of time you work beyond five hours a day has no impact on your ability to land a job” — good news brought to you by David Perry, managing partner of the recruiting firm Perry Martel International and co-author of Guerilla Marketing for Job Hunters.

Perry told me that a job hunt is like training for the 50-yard dash. “Everything is aimed at getting the interview. And you need to be mentally prepared.” Just as an athlete does not over train for the race, a job hunter will also experience defeating fatigue if there’s too much energy spent on the hunt.

Perry is adamant that the best jobs do not go to the smartest person or hardest worker but to the person who best reads his or her situation. So forget being the hardest worker because you need to be “bright eyed and bushy tailed.” Get out from behind that computer each day, he says and “enjoy the rest of your life.”

 

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First post

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Here is my first post to my blog. About two years too late.

I know this because two years ago, my readers started telling me that I should blog. I ignored them, mostly, because it seemed like too much work to write every day. After all, I write two columns a week and I invariably do an interview from the gym or from my son’s preschool. I couldn’t imagine doing more work. But now I can’t imagine not having a blog.

One of the readers who made me think the hardest about blogging was Dennis Yang. In fact, he set up a trial blog for me. Which I never used but also never stopped thinking about.

And this reminds me of dozens of readers who told me I should write a book, two or three years before I did. (And my mom. She told me a lot, too.)

So now I have learned my lesson. If I had taken the advice of my readers, I’d have been ahead of myself in many ways. Hopefully, the blog will make it so I hear from more readers on more topics.

As for listening to my mom more, I’m not sure about that.

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Advice for new managers: Be nice

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The best advice anyone will give you as a manager is to be kind and caring and make the world a better place. This does not mean that you should be a pushover or a flower child. You still need to get your work done, be a star performer, etc. But serious kindness gets you serious results.

It’s not always easy to be kind. Here are some ways it’s hard: You need to tell people with no talent for what they are doing that they are in the wrong field. Then you need to fire them and tell them this will help them find what they are good at. And you have to tell people who have lots of talent but unbearable personalities that their co-workers don’t like them and they need to be more likeable to get anywhere in life. This is difficult news to pass on, and managers who don’t care ignore the problem or shuffle the person off to a new, unsuspecting manager. A kind boss helps a person find a new path, and sometimes that means termination.

At McKinsey there is a strict “up or out” policy. The consulting company promotes its top performers and counsels the others to leave. The important word here is counsels. McKinsey helps people to see why their current job is not a good one for them. As a manager, you are a counselor, helping people to see their highest potential be it with you or at another type of position at another type of company.

As a manager you are in a position to make peoples’ lives better. You can give them more interesting work, better coaching, more flexibility, all the things that you have always wanted in a job, you can give to other people. You should do that.

Just don’t go overboard. The first time I got a management position I tried to overhaul all of corporate America from my new-manager cubicle. I surreptitiously implemented affirmative action, and though I hate to admit this, I hired people who were not totally qualified. I gave people with scattered track records the chances of their lifetimes, and when they failed I compensated for them. I mentored people at all hours of the day and my work suffered. I snuffed out sexual harassment at a speed that only someone looking too hard for it could manage. Finally, I got a reputation for caring more about making peoples’ lives better than making my boss’s life better. It was a deserved reputation, and I was fired.

It hurts me even now to say it was a deserved firing. But it taught me a good lesson: The company comes first. And my job was to please my boss. Which is everyone’s job. You get an opportunity to manage people because you are going to make things better for the company. The company wants happy workers, but not at the expense of effective workers.

So here’s another piece of advice for new managers: Success is about balance. A good manager balances the needs of her company and the needs of her employees, and after that, a good manager uses her power over peoples’ lives to make the world a better place.

The cynics of the world will say, “That’s not realistic. I never got that.” But don’t ask yourself if you ever got that. Ask yourself if you ever gave it. It is possible to go through your life doing good deeds and just trusting that they’ll come back to you, in some way. Management is the power to make a difference. Do that, without wondering what you’ll get in return.

That said, you could do more great things if you managed really well and got more power. Don’t forget that.

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Bad situations breed creativity

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The time I am the most creative is when I feel the most trapped and desperate. These are the times when I see no model for solving my problem, and I have to come up with an all-new solution that will, invariably surprise even me.

I have found that bad situations get creative juices flowing. And I have come to have an appreciation for the bad times; they give us unique opportunities to find our best ideas. Here are some situations to keep an eye out for — they are invitations to creativity:

Bad situation #1: Nagging dissatisfaction. I'm not advocating depression; believe me, I've been there, and it's mostly about hiding in bed not about being a creative genius. But an inherent part of creativity is never being satisfied with what is there, always striving for something better. After all, if everything is going great, why think of a way to change it? People who are creative never think everything is great. So you don't have to be depressed to be creative, but you can't be jubilant.

Bad situation #2: Low budgets. No one ever came up with a grand idea when they had more than enough money. You would be stupid to think of new ideas when you have enough money to pay for what is already tried and true: Best practices, most outstanding performer, top-tier firms, these are all great places to spend a big budget. Why take a risk when you don't have to? The good news about a small budget is that you can't pay for the paths that have already lead to success. So you have to come up with a new path.

Bad situation #3: Feeling lost. The least creative people I know are those who knew exactly what they wanted to do after college, and did it, and never turned back. No existential crisis. No begging parents for dinner money. Just pure focus. The reason feeling lost is good is that it's the time you figure out what you're passionate about. Passion sweeps you off your feet when you're meandering. You can't get swept off your feet when you're moving fast, when you have a plan, when you're already going somewhere. You need a foggy focus to find passion. Most people who are creative will tell you that they didn't pick their form; it picked them. The form your creativity will take will show itself during a time you are lost.

Bad situation #4: Being wrong. Creativity requires knowing what you like. You can't depend on other people to guide you or else you are not being creative but rather responding to market research. Being certain of what you like means that you're going to be wrong a lot. Not wrong about what you like, but wrong about what will work. The market researchers will tell you. But much worse than being wrong is never being wrong, because then you are a research drone, a fact-gatherer, not a creative person. So strive for being wrong sometimes, as a way to gauge your level of creativity.

Bad situation #5: Nonproductivity. Thank goodness for times when you cannot seem to follow the rules, cannot meet deadlines. The people who do good work all the time don't leave room for ideas — for genius sprung from passion and blank stares. Sit at your desk and do nothing. Ditch work and go to a cafe. Empty time is the when creativity flows.

Take a second look at the disappointing situations of your life. You might find your creative genius has been suffocated by overwhelming focus on good times.

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Don’t use workplace jargon

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Don’t use jargon. I know you’ve heard this rule before, but maybe no one has ever told you the real reason for the rule. Your choice of jargon reveals your weakness.

A lot of jargon is specific to an industry and if you use it outside the industry no one will understand you. This jargon will undermine you because you are so likely to alienate someone by using words or phrases they don’t know.

There’s also jargon that goes across most industries. The phrases you hear whether you’re an accountant in consumer products or a programmer in health care. Most people understand this jargon, but using it makes you look bad because most cross-industry jargon is a euphemism for being desperate or incompetent or calling someone else desperate or incompetent. Here are some examples:

Let's think out of the box: Really means, “Can you creatively anemic people please come up with something?” People who really do think out of the box do it whether they are told to or not. That’s how they think. If you feel like you need to tell someone to think out of the box, then it's probably hopeless. The person who says, “Let's think out of the box” is usually desperate for a new idea and surrounded by people who are not known for generating ideas. So the phrase is actually an announcement that says, “I'm in trouble.”

I need someone who can hit the ground running: Really means, “I am screwed.” Because no one can hit the ground running. You need to at least assess what race you’re in and who else is running. Everyone has a race strategy when they are in the blocks. You need a little time to get one. In the case of a new hire this means taking some time to assess company politics. If your employer needs you to hit the ground running then you’ve already missed your window to achieve success.

Do you have the bandwidth? Note that bandwidth is not time. It is something else. If you ask someone “Do you have time?” you mean, “Am I a priority?” If you ask someone “Do you have bandwidth” you mean, “You seem like your brain is fried. Can you pull yourself together to do this for me?”

Let’s hit a home run: “I’m desperate to look good. Even though the odds of a home run are slim, I’m banking on one because it’s the only thing that’ll save me.” Something for all your sports fans to remember: If you have a bunch of solid hitters you don’t need a bunch of home runs.

You and I are not on the same page: “Get on my page. Your page is misguided.” No one ever says, “We’re not on the same page, so let me work really hard to understand your point of view. If you want to understand someone else, you say, “Can you tell me more about how you’re thinking.”

I’m calling to touch base: “I want something from you but I can’t say it up front.” Or “I am worried that you are lost and I’m sniffing around for signs to confirm my hunch.” Or “I’m calling because you micromanage me.”

Let’s run the numbers and see how they look: “I know they look bad on first blush. But the true use of Excel is to keep changing the formulas until you find a format that makes the numbers look good.”

My plate is full: “Help I’m drowning,” or “I would kill myself before I’d work on your project.”

Let’s close the loop: “Let me make sure I’m not going to get into trouble for this one.”

Let’s touch base next week: “I don’t want to talk to you now,” or “You are on a short leash and you need to report back to me.”

Keep this on your radar: “This will come back to bite you or me.”

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