Posts from — June 2008

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Recently my family and I, along with a couple of our friends, visited the 6th Ave district of Tacoma, WA and tried out an Argentinian restaurant called Asado. Since we just moved to the city we were trying to find some new restaurants and this one looked like a good place to start. I ordered the Sea Bass for my main course and a half a dozen oysters for an appetizer. The main courses came out from the kitchen and I noticed that I had never gotten my oysters. So, I asked the waiter and he admitted that he had completely forgotten. Now at this point the night could have gone two ways:

Option A: The waiter could have said, “I’m very sorry, I completely forgot,” and left it at that. He could have just gone on with the meal and I would receive the check and walk away feeling that while I had a great meal, it was just a bit off. Even with this option, the experience would have been a positive one overall and I probably would come back.

The waiter could have said, “I’m very sorry, I completely forgot…would you like to have them with your meal or would you like a complimentary dessert instead.” I would choose the dessert and at the end of the meal our whole party would enjoy a great chocolate souffle cake with vanilla ice cream and chocolate sauce. I would then pay and leave the restaurant having had a great meal and knowing that Asado had great service and valued my experience as their customer. Asado would have just made me their new fan and spokesperson.

The waiter at Asado was wise and chose Option B. To be honest, I really didn’t care that he had forgotten my appetizer, I was too busy enjoying my Sea Bass, but the fact that he didn’t just stop at sorry and instead took the extra step of correcting the situation made a huge impact on me and won a new customer for the restaurant.

What happened at Asado happens everyday and raises an important question, “How do you react when you fail?”  If you are in a service-related organization whether it be a restaurant, retail store or professional service, this is such an important principle to understand. And it’s deceivingly simple.

If you mess up and fall short of the customer’s expectations, sorry isn’t enough. Even if it is sincere and the mistake was honest, people only feel valued if they believe an organization is working hard to make up for their mistakes.  Don’t just say “sorry,” DO SOMETHING ABOUT IT!

By choosing Option B, a company is making an incredibly lucrative investment. For the price that it cost to make a dessert (approx $2 if I had to guess), they got an enthusiastic customer that will not only come back himself and purchase many more meals (approx $50-$70 for 2 people), but will tell friends to go as well. For a $2 investment they received a return of at least $50 and likely much more over time. What organization wouldn’t want a return of 2,300% (feel free to check my math, I did this early in the morning).

This principle doesn’t only operate in the business-customer relationship, it has consequences inside the organization itself.  As a young employee there is no doubt that you will make mistakes. In fact, as I have been exploring lately, it may be beneficial to fail in certain situations. But, when you fail and have to explain yourself to your boss, remember that sorry isn’t enough. Have a plan to fix the problem and already be in the process of implementing it.

It’s not hard to do the right thing, but it starts at the top of the organization and works its way down. And if the employee interacting directly with the customer doesn’t understand this philosophy, doesn’t feel empowered to implement it, or worse doesn’t care enough to do anything when mistakes are made, the organization suffers more than just a slight mess up, they lose the very people they are trying to serve.

I know this has nothing to do with my blog, but it is definitely one of the coolest things I’ve seen a while.  Here’s a description of the film from glumbert.com:

“A short film from 1976 where a camera is mounted on the front of a Ferrari driving at up to 140mph through Paris. The film was made by Claude Lelouch, who was arrested when he showed the film to the public. This file is large, and will take some time to load.”

For the Google generation, it starts really getting good around 4 min.  Here’s the wikipedia entry for the film.  Enjoy!

I once had a teacher in 9th grade have us write down some principles for successful living. “Test Fast, Fail Fast” I scribbled down on the back of an assignment. “Wasn’t the point of life not to fail,” I thought to myself. Like a good student though, I folded the list up and stuck it in my wallet. I still have the list in my wallet today. Over the years I have come back to the list and have begun to realize the genius in my teacher’s words, specifically his insight on failure.

You see, what my teacher was getting at was a lifestyle of trying new things without fear of failure. A constant iteration of testing, failing, learning, testing, failing, learning; and all of this very quickly. Simply put, much more is learned from trying and failing then could ever be discovered solely by planning beforehand. And if you walk out this process quickly, you arrive at a success much faster and armed with more wisdom and insight than you ever could by standing on the sidelines analyzing the “fail-free” route.

The American entrepreneurial community has caught on to this idea more than anyone, viewing failure as a badge of honor rather than a scarlet letter. I have been told that some venture capitalists refuse to fund a business proposal put forth by someone who hasn’t previously failed in at least one or two other start-up efforts. Why? The experience of failure brings with it so many side-benefits that the person who has failed is actually better equipped than someone who has never tried before.

Two other people have recently peaked my interest in failure: Brad Feld and J.K. Rowling. Feld is one of the entrepreneurs I made reference to above that has been taking a deeper look at failure on his blog, Feld Thoughts. Check out his posts on failure here.

J.K. Rowling recently gave the graduation address to the class of 2008 at Harvard. She talked about the fringe benefits of failure as well as the importance of imagination. Watch the video of her brilliant speech here. Here is one of my favorite excerpts:

You might never fail on the scale I did, but some failure in life is inevitable. It is impossible to live without failing at something, unless you live so cautiously that you might as well not have lived at all - in which case, you fail by default.

Over the next few months I plan on making a study of failure and sharing what I discover with all of you. I want to know how we benefit from failure and why we fear it so much as well as how to overcome that fear.

Please send me any links on failure you think might be of interest to me. And comment below with your thoughts and stories of failure and whether or not you think they were valuable.

Trying to get back into the swing of things after over a week without a computer or internet (gasp) I came across a recent post over at Ben Casnocha’s blog that I felt was worth repeating…thanks Ben!

For those of you who have never heard of Nassim Taleb he is best known for his study of randomness, the highly impropable (The Black Swan), markets, and the reason we humans struggle so hard to explain everything. He now gets paid around $60,000 per speaking engagement and most recently wrote The Black Swan…see my review here.

Taleb’s top life tips

1 Scepticism is effortful and costly. It is better to be sceptical about matters of large consequences, and be imperfect, foolish and human in the small and the aesthetic.

2 Go to parties. You can’t even start to know what you may find on the envelope of serendipity. If you suffer from agoraphobia, send colleagues.

3 It’s not a good idea to take a forecast from someone wearing a tie. If possible, tease people who take themselves and their knowledge too seriously.

4 Wear your best for your execution and stand dignified. Your last recourse against randomness is how you act — if you can’t control outcomes, you can control the elegance of your behaviour. You will always have the last word.

5 Don’t disturb complicated systems that have been around for a very long time. We don’t understand their logic. Don’t pollute the planet. Leave it the way we found it, regardless of scientific ‘evidence’.

6 Learn to fail with pride — and do so fast and cleanly. Maximise trial and error — by mastering the error part.

7 Avoid losers. If you hear someone use the words ‘impossible’, ‘never’, ‘too difficult’ too often, drop him or her from your social network. Never take ‘no’ for an answer (conversely, take most ‘yeses’ as ‘most probably’).

8 Don’t read newspapers for the news (just for the gossip and, of course, profiles of authors). The best filter to know if the news matters is if you hear it in cafes, restaurants… or (again) parties.

9 Hard work will get you a professorship or a BMW. You need both work and luck for a Booker, a Nobel or a private jet.

10 Answer e-mails from junior people before more senior ones. Junior people have further to go and tend to remember who slighted them.

“On the road again
Goin’ places that I’ve never been
Seein’ things that I may never see again,
And I can’t wait to get on the road again” - Willie Nelson

My family and I are currently on a week-long road trip with our final destination being our new home in Washington. So, instead of blogging, I have been spending time with my family and friends as we work our way from state to state. As soon as we are moved in to our new home the posting frequency will return to normal. Until then check out my blogroll and reader favorites on the bottom left for some great reading.

Or check out my twitter updates as we make our way across the country. My username is cjschaefer.