Wednesday, March 16, 2011

Learning from Your Mistakes - by the Numbers

There are good lessons in mistakes and “natural experiments” in events and across the media business. The lessons pose both emotional and conceptual challenges. That’s why running the numbers right is highly instructive.

Mistakes in the moment in any live media generate tension – you run low on food, cues are missed, wiring is wrong, the award that was supposed to be at the front of the room was left in the back – whatever. Somebody miscalculated, didn’t practice, didn’t plan or didn’t execute the plan.

When you are in the hot seat, fixing the immediate problem, it’s hard not to get a little curt, and it’s easy to blame others. This complicates the after-action analysis. Specific detail and quantification makes it less personal.

Bigger mistakes usually manifest more slowly. Marketing deadlines get pushed back for what seem like good reasons. Key indicators are ignored, or erroneously interpreted; your product drifts off the intended focus or markets change and leave your media product positioned for yesterday. Numerical discipline helps you recognize slow but persistent change.

“Natural experiments” are often hidden in benign variation. Business is better in some regions then others. A marketing effort does a little better or worse than average. An audience responds more positively in one instance than another. Numbers reveal opportunity.

While the race is on, the best response may be counter intuitive. If you are spinning out of control, sometimes you have to “gas it” to recover. In any case you may not have time to think much. Training is necessary for times of deep crisis.

However, trusting the numbers during a crisis or when planning your next move is often the best way to guide yourself out and learn from the mistake or natural experiment.

Often mistakes involve not trusting the numbers out of fear or wishful thinking. The most common scenario is judgmental adjustments – a little padding here and there for safety or a gratuitous allowance for a shortfall. These judgments are often repeated and compounded, killing margins and driving actions off track.

Natural experiments are situations where inputs are varied unintentionally. They can go unnoticed if you always look at overall numbers and not the details. And variation is often misunderstood. Causation and correlation are easy to confuse. Human nature and human interest get involved, e.g. successful salespeople see themselves, not their assigned accounts as their source of success.

You can’t assume accuracy in your numbers. People code and count things differently. Performance numbers get “gamed.” Conversions and aggregations introduce error. Things get mislabeled. Time periods don’t match. It pays to test any numbers you use until you are sure what they mean and how reliable they are.

But, especially where things go wrong, or results vary, your best source of new tactics and strategies to prevent failure, replicate success, grow or maintain your business and make it more rewarding and less stressful is in creative, quantified analysis of the facts.

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posted by Roger Wilson at 2:51 PM 0 Comments

Tuesday, December 7, 2010

Zip Ideas: Three Lessons from the CEO of Zipcar

Scott Griffith, CEO of Zipcar, recently offered key lessons learned in the his seven years in the driver's seat of the company.  Zipcar is trying to “redefine the way people think about transportation.”  Giffith’s "Zip Ideas" could apply to media companies in a time when the way people think about information is rapidly changing.

Giffith has led Zipcar from a three-year-old, struggling start-up to an a 150 million dollar company, still without profits, but a market leader on the verge of an IPO.  For an audience of fellow University of Chicago grads, including your humble blogger, he boiled his lessons down to three ideas:

  1. Branding: Keep it Simple
What he means is keep the idea of what your brand provides clear and easy to understand; e.g.  Zipcar is a car sharing service that provides a less expensive, more convenient alternative to ownership for urbanites, businesses and university communities.

  1. Sell the steak, not the sizzle
A quick look at the Zipcar website is helpful in understanding this point.  The online pitch includes two pairs of bare legs sticking out of a station wagon (“if your boss asks, you were on a sales call”), two twenty-something “dudes” with expressions more evocative of a roller coaster ride than a car ride (“as a matter of fact I do own the road, just not the car”), etc. so he’s hardly opposed to using sizzle to make a sale.  But what he is saying is that management attention and resources should be focused on the execution of the experience. 

  1. Innovate Yourself
“If alarm bells are going off all around you,” Griffith said, “you may be the cause of the alarm.”  This rings true to your humble blogger. I’ve observed that the common denominator in repeated problems I see, might be the observer.  Griffith credited his awakening on this point to his personal fight with cancer and his brother’s supportive but challenging intervention: “I know you’ll get through this Scott, but you need to think about what kind of person you want to be on the other side.”  Griffith advocated both personal and professional self-innovation.

When you are working to turn good information into good business (which is the key part of our simple statement of what we do) these three lessons are worth keeping in mind; retain a simple view of what you do, how you do it and for whom; keep a firm grip on basic operations that create the value you sell; and constantly improve not just your organization and its products but your own character and capacity.

Next time you see a Zipcar, take a moment to recall these “Zip Ideas.”

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posted by Roger Wilson at 5:35 PM 1 Comments