If Sheryl Sandberg can do it…
Americans are once again able to leave work at a normal hour, thanks to the fact that Sheryl Sandberg does.
Google “Sheryl Sandberg” and “5:30″ to see what I mean.
I always laughed at the people who stayed excessively late at work or in general worked longer hours. Not because they did it, but because of the motivation behind it. People weren’t staying late to get work done; they were staying late to look good. “Staying late” became its own form of corporate fashion, with its advocates desperately hoping their wasted hours would appear as passion and diligence and ultimately lead to a raise, promotion, or both.
What an ugly fashion concept.
Creating Support
Customer support is a tricky thing. This is mostly due to a misunderstanding between the client and vendor on what exactly “support” means.
Being in the SaaS industry, where you live or die by how you treat your customers, I’ve seen a lot of different definitions of support. Some vendors offer the literal bare minimum of support, while others support customers to the point of servitude. As a man of mediums, neither approach is a good one. Too little, your customers become jaded and lose confidence in the solution; too much and your customers treat you like an internal department. So where’s the happy medium?
I contend it lies in empowerment. Empowerment as I mean it refers to fully educating your users on what they can and cannot do, and creating clear boundaries as to what is an acceptable support request and what is not. In some of my experience, I’ve seen recruiters send in support requests that were really making the support rep do the recruiter’s job. Conversely, I’ve seen 3 support reps hard at work whilst the other 10 checked their Fantasy Football team stats.
1. Developing a good system. Despite the fact that 95% of developers couldn’t care less about the end user or their problems, the onus of designing a system where users have broad functionality is on them. In some places I’ve worked, developers are usually huddled away from the rest of society and left to build things in silos. Development and Support must work together to identify gaps in system functionality and user ability, and build appropriate tools to bridge those gaps.
2. Training. Users must be educated about the product and how it functions. Support reps can’t complain about uneducated customers when the system training materials are poor – or non-existent! This is also the greatest chance after the sale to re-affirm your company’s position as the expert.
3. Embracing the product. Clients must be firm in their commitment to learning and must be realistic about the solution. I see too often clients that hope that the technology solution will solve the myriad of problems they face, only to be significantly let down when it doesn’t. Technology is here to assist and help processes become more efficient, but only when making the proper investment in time and learning the technology.
These three points form your choice of three-pointed or circular geometric figures. Call it what you will: good customer support starts with designing a good system, continues by creating clear directions on system use, and is sustained by customer enthusiasm. If you asked me what a support rep does, I’d reply with this: keep the customer engaged and as enthused as they were the first week they purchased the company’s product.
Social Media and YOU! …and HR?
This debate is still raging?
Look, let me break this down very simply for you…
Don’t use social media to screen job applicants.
“but it haz publics access!” you HR folks will cry. It doesn’t matter. All you need is that one pissed off applicant to call your bluff and suddenly you need to prove that you didn’t discriminate based on the myriad of information applicants provide on social networks.
Like religion.
Like race (easily seen in those drunk pictures you’ll claim reflect job ability).
Like sexuality.
Good luck convincing a judge you were somehow stricken blind as that information scrolled across your screen.
Mmm, wagyu.
I really have the best boyfriend ever. As a Christmas gift he made us reservations at Aldea, the 1 Michelin Star restaurant headed by Chef George Mendes. Located in the Flatiron District, I have to say this is a very beautiful restaurant. Inspired by the elements, we were seated in an area that definitely evoked the feeling of water, a sort of calm reverie reinforced by the natural earthiness of the decor. The overall atmosphere was hip, relaxing, and its own special kind of charming.
And so we splurged. Chef’s 5-course tasting with wine pairings for two, please!
What followed was truly delightful. We were given a small citrus-y granita to start; a nice pop of lemon to cleanse the pallet. Then came a trio of appetizers and sips of sherry; poached mussel, oyster on the half shell, a delicately small fried bacalo cake kissed on top with garlic aioli. Tuna loin and belly marched forward soon after, the former topped with crispy roots and the latter with white sturgeon caviar, both with a yuzu vinaigrette that married well with the champagne. A sardine paired with apple puree was next, which was the most disappointing dish of the evening due to the presence of bones in the fish – it was otherwise good, very soft and tender. Homemade gnocchi in a brown butter sauce and topped with shredded cheese and black truffles – talk about the pinnacle of tender creaminess. That brown butter sauce could’ve been bagged for me and inserted via IV, and the red paired with it complemented the nuttiness of the sauce beautifully.
Then the wagyu beef, perfectly medium rare. I forget what else was on the plate, but it all disappeared quite quickly. The beef literally melted in your mouth, and it had the perfect sear like a delicate little peppery coat for the tender vittles. This was paired with another red wine that complemented the robust flavor of the wagyu. Then came a ginger gelée, which was good although gelées are not really my thing. And then our final course: ginger cake with cannelles of ice cream and a berry sauce, paired with a port. A lovely and refreshing end to an equally wonderful meal. The service was wonderful and we were well taken care of; we plan to go back as soon as we’re able!
Social media is not for whining
One thing is clear to me: many people have no filter. What ever they think, they say and what ever they say, they believe to be true. Thanks for giving these nutjobs a platform, Twitter!
Call it what you will, but we need watch ourselves. This isn’t so much common sense as it is Psych 101. Any social psychologist will tell you about FAE, or the Fundamental Attribution Error. Simply: we assume people do something because of something in the person’s mind. Electronic communication does not give us the proper context (body language, voice tone, etc) that physical communication does; we’re left with an extremely limited context in which to examine what someone has posted.
Remember that article just after Christmas, which detailed people who went to Twitter to bemoan the gifts they received or didn’t? I doubt you’ll walk away from it thinking those poor people were misunderstood. Thanks to the lack of context, these people are now bonafide selfish dickbags, even though I’m sure they’re not all bad in person. But, we don’t use social media solely to communicate with those closest to us. We both directly and indirectly communicate with hundreds of people a day – and if you’re wondering what I mean by indirect communication, I mean things like leaving a comment on a blog: though not in real time, you are essentially communicating to the author and future visitors your thoughts and feelings.
Like in real life, you have a choice about what you share and how you share it. Share wisely and positively, my friends.
Entrepreneurs and Education
Over the past year or so, I’ve read a lot of articles that float around the idea that it’s a good idea to skip college. This idea is mostly advocated by Gen Y’ers who dropped out of college and made something of themselves. The following is a quotation from this article:
“When these incredible tools of knowledge and learning are available to the whole world, formal education becomes less and less important. We should expect to see the emergence of a new kind of entrepreneur who has acquired most of their knowledge through self- exploration.” – Sean Parker
Sean Parker was the founder of Napster… so forgive me if I take any advice from him with a grain of salt. To his credit he does made a good point that knowledge acquisition in this age is a relatively easy process compared to even 30 years ago. Remember those library classes in school and the Dewey Decimal system? Now we just type in a keyword and gloss over the results list – click and consume, if you will.
The Problem with Entrepreneurs
I know several entrepreneurs and most of them are, frankly, borderline narcissists. While this tenacity, love of personal vision, and drive to succeed are all positive qualities, they quickly become negative when they are untempered. In other words, entrepreneurs are their own worst enemy because of the very same qualities that make them entrepreneurs.
Entrepreneurs are mostly and solely focused on money and material worth. It’s evident in the Forbes article that these four people tie money very tightly into success, which really isn’t a huge surprise. Life, though, is more about making money, more about how much you’ve acquired. College can teach you this. So can life experience, but it will likely take a lot longer.
What I Got From College
In a word, perspective.
Sean’s assertion about “self-exploration” is all well and good if you are personally the sort of person open to a variety of thoughts and experiences. However, humans have a wonderful way of self-validating even the most insidious of thoughts. When you strike out on your own, you’re going to seek like experiences. You’re going to try and find people who likely agree with you more often than not. In short, you will create experiences and opportunities for yourself that have the least negative affect on your personal vision.
College forces you into experiencing alternate perspectives, starting Day 1 Freshman Year with the new roommate you’ve likely never talked to or met before. And then there are the classes, the campus, and a host of other things that by their very nature expose you to diversity. You are forced to confront the reality that the way you think of things isn’t the only way, and you are forced to adjust your thinking.
Obviously, life offers these lessons as well but they don’t always come in the most timely of fashions. College, in short, is a shortcut in some aspects to life lessons. It can be an expensive one, but I’ve found it to be worth it. I was a Psychology major, and ultimately went on to graduate school to earn my M.A. in Industrial/Organizational Psychology. I’m now working primarily in the HR tech field doing product support, which many would argue that has nothing to do with my degree.
I deal with people everyday. Psychology. I work with technology. Largely self-taught there, I will concede. I partner with my boss to plan business process. There’s the I/O. I communicate, a lot, through writing. Partially natural ability, partially the patient effort over years with direction from some great writers and teachers. I need to analyze, compile, and report on data. Psychology. This brief self-analysis shows that the best knowledge comes from a variety of experiences, and in doing something we draw from many wells of knowledge within us.
I would argue that if you don’t have that experience and knowledge variety, you’re lacking somewhere.
The ROI
Since entrepreneurs are material focused, it’s hard for them to understand abstract value. They see college as taking out a large investment in something that ultimately doesn’t make you money back. Unfortunately, there is no ROI on college or at least not one that can be adequately measured. There are plenty of studies that show college graduates make more money, have better quality of life, but these are general statistics that simply say that attaining a college degree can lead to positive life outcomes; so can entrepreneurship.
The true value of college lies in the diversity of the experiences offered, the opportunities to learn and interact – sometimes with people who hold opposite beliefs. You can’t escape this, as most colleges have required classes that all students must go through. That’s not the same with life experience. You can very easily pick and choose which experiences you have; the diversity is left up to you. And my contention is that many entrepreneurs do not seek out diverse opportunities, but rather opportunities that lead them only to succeed at the day’s current vision.
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