Greenwashing is a marketing worst practice

Following on to the posts from last week on using marketing in bad faith (here and here), today I read Joel Makower's excellent post on "Greenwashing" (a great turn of phrase)--the incomplete or untrue attribution of environmentally-friendly characteristics to products.

Joel assesses a report from TerraChoice Environmental Marketing, which analyzed marketing claims on behalf of green products. They identify six worst practices, such as "the sin of the hidden trade-off," which "suggest a product is 'green' based on a single environmental attribute (the recycled content of paper, for example) or an unreasonably narrow set of attributes without attention to other important, or perhaps more important, environmental issues." This neat trick was the most prevalent "sin," found in 57% of the claims studied.

Such misbehavior will only serve to heighten the public's cynicism toward all green claims, with the possible result that green content gets devalued, and therefore companies stop taking pains to create it.

environment, worst practice, marketing

Larry David as archetype: "the inappropriate guy"

This week's New Yorker Talk of the Town features an item by Jacob Ward about a novel approach to teaching schizophrenics how to overcome their own social difficulties.

Don't do what Larry David does.

Larry is the creator and main character of "Curb Your Enthusiasm," a comedy on HBO. In the show his ability to act inappropriately in social settings is nearly matched by his well-practiced skill at apologizing.

David Roberts, the psychologist who developed this approach as a summer intern while in graduate school, noticed that many otherwise-unresponsive schizophrenic patients enjoyed comedic television that focused on awkwardness with others ("Monk," as another example). Writes Ward in the New Yorker:

Roberts considers Larry David to be the perfect proxy for a schizophrenic person. “On his way into his dentist’s office, he holds the door open for a woman, and, as a result, she’s seen first,” he said. “He stews, he fumes, he explodes. He’s breaking the social rules that folks with schizophrenia often break.” He went on, “Or the one where Ted Danson and Mary Steenburgen invite Larry and his wife to a concert: the night arrives, they don’t call, Larry assumes they don’t like him, then it turns out he got the date wrong. It’s a classic example of a major social cognitive error—jumping to conclusions—that schizophrenic patients are prone to.” As the patients watched David flub situation after situation, they laughed, and they willingly discussed with Roberts how they might behave in the same circumstances.

So in this case, Larry is an archetype, a figure who acts like the patients sometimes act, but isn't them. The distance created allows them to analyze and learn from Larry's mistakes (and see humor in them) without the pain of confronting their own failings directly.

In this way, self-deprecating comedy is an act of selflessness, of generosity. A description that would, I imagine, appall Larry David himself.

Thanks to the WSJ Informed Reader for the pointer.

worst practice, archetypes, learning, mistakes

Worst Practices In Product Management

I had a call with Verizon Wireless yesterday afternoon that went something like this:

Me:

"I got a Blackberry recently and I was trying to use it as a wireless modem for my laptop and I'm having trouble."

Tech Support:

"Let's try some things."

...time passes. We try lots of things. Problem persists...

Tech Support:

"I checked and I found out that you need to activate a feature to enable you to use the Blackberry as a modem. The feature costs $15 per month."

Me:

"What? I am already paying for data access, by the megabyte. Modem support costs $15 more?"

Tech Support:

"Yes, I'm sorry. Would you like to speak to Customer Service?"

...on hold for a while...

Customer Service:

"Yes, sir, that feature is $15 per month."

me:

"How come that wasn't clear when I signed up for the Blackberry service? Plus, I'm already paying you $150 a month."

Customer Service:

"I'm sorry, that's the only way we sell it... think of it this way: It's only $0.50 per day."

me:

"But I only need it occasionally. I can't justify paying $15 per month for occasional use."

Customer Service:

"This might solve your problem. You can activate it when you need it, then deactivate it when you're done. You'd only pay for the days you use in that case."

me:

"I have to call once to activate, then again to turn it off? Every time I want to use it? Why don't you have a daily access?"

Customer Service:

"That's the only way you can do it."

me:

"I might try that, but it's unfortunate that you don't have a plan that helps the occasional user, like me. And I don't like having to pay $15 or even $0.50 per day for something that should have been included with the data feature I already bought."

Customer Service:

"I'm sorry. Can I help you with anything else today?"

* * *

So: no resolution. Tech Support and Customer Service were fine, creative, even approaching that state of bending the rules to satisfy a customer. (Installing rigid processes that force this kind of behavior is a worst practice depicted nicely in a recent post by Dave Snowden.)

It's Product Management I have the problem with. First of all, an additional fee for my laptop to use megabytes I'm already paying for is bad. (It's done so that people who pay $60 per month to use the Verizon PCMCIA card in their laptop won't feel that they're getting ripped off--even though they already do.)

Second of all, not having an occasional-use plan and forcing me, the customer, to do work to synthesize this plan (call to activate, call to deactivate, every time I need the service) is also bad.

Finally, I am a $150 per month wireless customer. (VZW's ARPU is around $50.) I'm a Verizon VIP. Yet there's no accomodation built into the product for my kind of customer.

It's just poor packaging all around. And it needs to be fixed. This is one of the reasons mobile phone customers hate their suppliers.

Aaargh.

product management mobile wireless customer service customer service packaging pricing technical support Verizon Wireless

Lessons learned captured in stories at Lawrence Livermore

Lessons learned practice involves examining projects for things that went wrong or could have gone better. The old name, postmortems, has been retired, I guess, because it was too graphic or too negative. Too bad. The best lessons-learned stories are from scrutinizing worst practice.

Every company tries to do lessons learned, but many fail because the exercise can easily degrade into a critique of the project team's performance rather than a search for better ways of working. The project team's defenses go up, and you get nowhere.

By contrast, read this from the web site of the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, one of the pre-eminent US government research labs. (UPDATE 24 March 08 - these links are no longer operable.)

Probably the very first “Lessons Learned” experience for Lab employees was the failure of Ruth, our first nuclear test. Rattled and discouraged from their efforts falling flat, scientists sat in a room after the test and waited for Professor Lawrence’s entrance and, most certainly, his scathing judgment of their failed efforts. When Lawrence finally burst into the room, his first words were, “Well, what did we learn from that?”

As you can imagine from the above, it takes a powerful learning culture and leadership to truly take advantage of the lessons-learned approach. And, as if to validate that thought, Lawrence Livermore has published some important lessons-learned stories on its web site. The stories stand out for their clarity, their openness and their unfailing humor. Here's the headline from one story: "During Project Pluto, scientists tested a flying nuclear reactor and ended up with a flying 600-pound nozzle."

The lessons-learned stories (six out of a hundred total in a priceless gallery of corporate narrative) are a treasure trove not only of "worst practices" but of evidence that exposing and confronting those practices is the most direct path to excellence. (UPDATE 24 March 08--sadly, links no longer operable. They were at http://www.llnl.gov/stories/about.html)

(Photo: the JASPER gas gun. Courtesy of Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory)

storytelling narrative learning worst practice lessons learned

NASA learns to avoid its worst practices in safety

The New York Times today includes an article on how the NASA culture has changed since the Columbia disaster of 2003. By dissecting how the agency has approached the tile-damage problem with the Endeavor shuttle, reporter Kenneth Chang shows how thoroughly studying and understanding what went wrong with Columbia has led to better practices and, more profoundly, an improved "safety culture." An excerpt:

For both the Columbia and the Endeavour, the falling foam did not initially worry mission managers. The day after the Endeavour’s liftoff, John Shannon, chairman of the mission management team, said that three small pieces of foam might have hit, but “nothing significant.”

What changed in the last four years is how NASA managers handle an event they do not consider serious. Michael D. Griffin, the NASA administrator, said he and managers listened to all of the data before making decisions.

In order to get at that data, mission engineers took many steps to examine the damage, including having the shuttle perform a back flip to get a good photograph of the damaged area. Maybe most importantly, the NASA culture had begun to change since Columbia, with one shift being that "senior managers began to make sure that dissenting voices could be heard." Writes Chang in the Times article:

John Allmen, program manager for shuttle support at the NASA Ames Research Center, said the pre-Columbia culture of NASA was sometimes intimidating for an engineer to bring up a concern. “The general culture was that, ‘What are you talking about? Prove to me it will fail,’ ” he said.

Arrogance and confidence in one's own abilities must take a back seat to humility and openness to the opinions of others, especially when people's lives are on the line. It's probably not unexpected that NASA, the product of the "Right Stuff" test pilot and Mercury program culture, would be late to the game when it comes to carefully examining its own mistakes and addressing the root causes. But at least they appear to have made that change now.

UPDATE 21 August 2007: The shuttle lands safely.
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Further reading in worst practice

Following on the post from yesterday, if "Good to Great" and other such books aren't useful in teaching management lessons, which are?

I'd point people to "Conspiracy of Fools" by Kurt Eichenwald as a great example of documentation of worst practice in business. Despite the financial Rube Goldbergiana that's a crucial part of Enron's misbehavior, Eichenwald does a great job of describing a dysfunctional culture and the many poor decisions that resulted, thanks to greed, arrogance, hubris and lack of perspective.

The Enron documentary, "The Smartest Guys in the Room" is another way to experience the flood of mistakes made by Lay, Skilling and Company.

learning mistakes best practice worst practice failure

Worst practice learning theory means our favorite business bestsellers are all wrong

I love Dave Snowden's posts on worst practice. Here's a quote from a recent work in progress:

The extension of this pseudo-objectivity into the consultancy profession is endemic in the practice of knowledge management. The issue is well summarised in a delightful metaphor from Christensen & Raynor (2003) as follows:

Imagine going to your Doctor because you’re not feeling well. Before you’ve had a chance to describe your symptoms, the doctor writes out a prescription and says “take two of these three times and day, and call me in a week.”

“But – I haven’t told you what’s wrong,” you say. “How do I know this will help me?”

“Why wouldn’t it” says the doctor. “It worked for last two patients”

No competent doctors would ever practice medicine like this, nor would any sane patient accept it if they did. Yet professors and consultants routinely prescribe such generic advice, and managers routinely accept such therapy, in the naïve belief that if a particular course of action helped other companies to succeed, it ought to help theirs, too.

The metaphor represents a fundamental challenge to a case based, prescriptive approach using the benefits of hindsight (or retrospective coherence to use the appropriate CAS term). In particular it challenges one of the most common assumptions in knowledge management, namely that one of its purposes is to discover and disseminate best practice. One of the arguments in this paper is that avoidance of failure has had higher evolutionary value than imitation of success, and in consequence the human race is more inclined to learn from and distribute worst practice.

Reading the above made me wonder what this means for some of my favorite business books--and yours too: "In Search of Excellence," "Built to Last" and "Good to Great" combine a bit of statistical analysis to find companies that share certain qualities of goodness, then extract from those companies lessons we can all use to improve our own businesses. They're highly readable and their propositions tempting.

It is an utter waste of time trying to apply these lessons? I think the answer's yes.

Like the doctor prescribing whatever worked for the prior patient, there are so many factors at work in making a company successful (even for an extended period of time) that trying to create generalizations between two or more successful companies seems a fool's errand.

Some of these factors: condition of the market, competition, regulatory environment, governmental assistance/impediments, executive leadership, state of international trade, acts of God, technology lifecycle, partnerships/alliances, trendiness/hipness, inertia, effects of corruption, luck.

Shall I go on?

Hoping that duplicating five or so common traits of IBM, Nucor, etc.--assuming you can even achieve it--will help you be as successful is like playing a certain lottery number today because it won yesterday. (Even the companies themselves cannot reliably sustain their own success. Think of these companies profiled in "In Search of Excellence": Atari, Xerox, Wang, DEC. A fuller discussion is in the Criticism section of this Wikipedia entry on "ISoE.")

There's another doctor/patient story that, I think, demonstrates the power and simplicity of failure avoidance. Here it is:

Patient: (lifting his arm) Every time do this I get a pain in my side.
Doctor: Well, stop doing that.

(Photo from q83 via stock.xchng)

learning mistakes best practice worst practice failure

Yet more mistakes

In 1984, my first job out of college, I worked for GTE Labs & at some point early in my tenure I screwed something up. It's funny, I can't even remember what I did to screw up--but I do remember the aftermath. I had a meeting with my boss's boss in his office.

I thought I would get chewed out but instead he congratulated me. For messing up. Nothing good can happen unless we try things, and not everything works out, he said. Then he handed me a book. He had a bunch of copies on his bottom shelf. "Read this. You can't have great successes without your share of mistakes."

"How to Lose $100,000,000 and Other Valuable Advice" was the title. Sadly, it's out of print. (Google, when are you going to scan this one?) The author, Royal Little, was the founder of Textron, one of the largest conglomerates built during the mid-1900's. Chapter headings include "How to Lose Money on Personal Investments" and "Some of My Other Mistakes." Here is a passage from the introduction:

The personal histories of most businessmen are ego trips and of no real value to the business community.... On the other hand, when I am invited to speak to students or business groups I never talk about things that went well. The audience enjoys it much more when I tell about my mistakes.... I finally decided that by writing about my mistakes I might contribute something to our free enterprise system. Perhaps I can persuade others, both in school and business, to avoid the errors I have made. No businessman in the past has ever written such a book--possibly because no one else has compiled such an impressive record of mistakes.

In this thinking he joins advocates of teaching via worst practice such as Stephen Epstein and Dave Snowden. Little also shows that mistakes are best shared with a sense of humor (and humility).

Success stories and best practices make us feel good. But they're the political correctness of the business world. My old writing teacher said, "Good writing is mostly taught in the negative." And the same, I'm learning after twenty years, is true in business.

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Pentagon uses stories to provide ethical guidance

A Pentagon ethics official has found the perfect way to teach government employees about their thicket of ethical regulations. Tell stories.

That's right. Stephen Epstein, Director of the Pentagon's Standards of Conduct Office, has spent the past five years compiling a document called "The Encyclopedia of Ethical Failure." It contains more than a hundred stories of bureaucratic misbehavior, including one in which a Marine lent his government credit card to a friend who made $13,000 of purchases with it.

Mr. Epstein and his Encyclopedia were the subjects of a front page article in today's Wall Street Journal (link - $$). According to the article,

Mr. Epstein says he was inspired to create the Encyclopedia by a Navy magazine that used humor to discuss aviation mishaps. He recalls an account of a fighter pilot who took off, only to realize that his plane's wings were still folded. "These were stories that got your attention and had a strong message, a parable," he says.

The Encyclopedia's users are equally sold on the concept that stories can educate better than rules:

Patrick Carney, assistant general counsel for ethics at the Federal Communications Commission, draws on the Encyclopedia for training and encourages his staff to read the document online because the "bite-size examples are more entertaining than reading the statutes" themselves, he says. In quarterly internal FCC "Ethicsgram" newsletters, Mr. Carney includes items from the Encyclopedia. "Everyone around town is looking for ways to get the word out on ethics, and Steve's material is often used," he says.

Mr. Epstein provides a good example to others trying to convey increasingly complex ethical principles to their employees. Rulesbooks are either far too detailed or too sketchy to provide guidance . Narrative expert Dave Snowden argues that documenting worst practice is more useful and effective than trying to instill "best practice" in any complex area.

Stephen Epstein would agree.

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