P&G, in moving into services, can learn lessons from Disney

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I read with interest the recent HBR Editors' Blog posting speculating on the difficulties Procter & Gamble might run into in its effort to create a chain of car wash franchises, called Mr. Clean Performance Car Wash.

When I read the post, written by marketing professors Neeli Bendapudi, Randle D. Raggio and Tassu Shervani, we were in the midst of a vacation in Orlando, Florida, at the various Disney parks. So, the connection between what P&G is trying to do now and what Walt Disney kicked off some fifty years ago came to me instantly.

The upshot of the HBR post is that product and services businesses are dramatically different, in particular the need for a service business to deliver an experience over and over again, consistently and of high quality, despite the innate variability of people, locations and customers.

With this in mind I monitored my Disney experience for the rest of the week for lessons that could help P&G.

1. Brand gets people to try your service; blocking and tackling gets them to return. The Disney properties flaunt the characters, movies and TV shows at every turn. Yet after an hour at the park, you notice that trash cans are always close by, so that if you have an empty cup or candy wrapper, you don't end up holding it for more than a few seconds before finding a place to discard it. As a result, the park is exceptionally clean for a place holding tens of thousands of guests.


2. No detail is too small. Kids are royalty at Disney (a significant differentiator compared to most places where they are seen as messy, noisy attention-seekers--which, of course, they are). The bag checkers, waitresses, salespeople--in short, every "cast member" we encountered--took special care of our kids.


3. Consistency reduces stress. Each of the four Disney parks we visited had a similar parking scheme, shuttle bus protocal, and entry design. Which meant there was very little standing around head-scratching and wondering which gate to go through or which bus to board.


4. Customer recognition builds loyalty. Everywhere in the parks I saw guests wearing buttons saying "My First Time!" or "It's My Birthday Today!" These simple gestures to recognize guests made their experiences special, built warm memories, and encouraged them to return.

I'm rooting for P&G in their Mr. Clean car wash project. The above lessons are like much good advice--easy to understand, hard to implement. Whether P&G can execute, and the marketplace and the economy cooperate, only time will tell.

Are judgment and experience irreconcilable?

I've just got around to reading "Judgment Trumps Experience," the Wall Street Journal article serving as a teaser for the forthcoming book "Judgment: How Winning Leaders Make Great Calls" by Warren Bennis and Noel Tichy. (Thanks to HBS Working Knowledge for the pointer.) In the article, Bennis and Tichy write,

After a five-year study of leadership covering virtually all sectors of American life, we came to the inescapable conclusion that judgment regularly trumps experience. Our central finding is that judgment is the core, the nucleus of exemplary leadership.

At the same time, I read this article in our local business newspaper about the longtime Harrisburg electronics entrepreneur Izzy Schwab.

Bear with me; these fit together.

Here is one quote from each piece:

Bennis/Tichy: "Our central finding is that judgment is the core, the nucleus of exemplary leadership. With good judgment, little else matters. Without it, nothing else matters."

Schwab: “What I bring to the party today is all the experience of 50 years of mistakes. If it didn’t work five times in the past, it won’t work today. Keep it simple.”

Of course, both judgment and experience are needed for the best decisionmaking. Bennis and Tichy say as much: "We are not discounting the importance of experience. Seminal and appropriate experiences must be drawn on and understood before judgments can be informed."

Yet, how do we reconcile these viewpoints? Are Bennis and Tichy right, or Izzy Schwab? Thinking about learning from mistakes can help. We can't learn much from things that go well. We can learn a lot from failures. Note that Schwab focuses on the things he has done wrong when he talks about his experiences--not his many accomplishments (here's an overview of his company, D&H Distributing).

Bennis and Tichy bring up the Cuban Missile Crisis as an example of Kennedy's brilliant judgment. Yet it was only eigtheen months before that another Kennedy decision, the authorization of the Bay of Pigs invasion, ended in utter failure.

The same person made both decisions. So thinking of "judgment" as distinct from experience rings false to me. Without being able to reflect on the Bay of Pigs tragedy, it's entirely likely Kennedy would have handled the missile crisis with far less restraint.

Judgment may trump experience, but to me one type of judgment may be best of all: the judgment to know when your experience can help you, and when it cannot.

(Photo by vivre via stock.xchng)

learning, experience, judgment, mistakes

We're all Doubting Thomases

Last week I sat on an airplane waiting for it to take off, and as I looked out my window I noticed a couple of maintenance techs staring at a small puddle of fluid beneath the wing. Over the course of time more people came out to look at the puddle and I noticed one guy leaning down and drawing his fingertip through the puddle, then rubbing his fingers together, to check and see what the liquid was.

A few minutes later a couple of more guys came out they talked with the other people for a little bit and then each of them separately tested the fluid with a finger again. I imagine that the first guy told them what he had found with his finger tests and nonetheless they had to bend down and try it themselves.

This told me a lot about how people operate. Despite what anyone tells us usually we have to experience things for ourselves in order to trust what the answer is. Similarly, showing my son George how to tie his shoes isn't very effective. He has to try and fail for a while in order to truly learn it--even if he doesn't much like the process.

[Postscript: the liquid on the ground was hydraulic fluid, and we had to change to different flights to get where we were going.]

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