I am routinely defeated by the two pieces of luggage I own. So much so that I desperately want to meet a luggage designer and have him (I think) explain why my luggage is conceived that way. It’s now verging on an obsession. I’ve been known to ask at cocktail parties whether anybody knows a luggage designer I could talk to. I’ve become a bit of a stalker.
It all started with the two pieces of luggage I own. The first one is a large computer bag with wheels. This thing was clearly designed by fly-fishermen because it has so many pockets they must be built for wooly buggers, tippet and fly-tying material. The business cards pocket buries them so deep it takes sticking most of my head inside the bag to extract one. When I prove unable to provide a business card to my adoring fans upon completion of a triumphant speech, I have to move to a lame “wait a minute, I will write my e-mail address on a piece of paper”. But the pen compartment inside the outer pocket of the bag has no bottom, so pens routinely get lost inside the bag, producing more archeological digging on my part. Finding paper in the file section of the bag is equally challenging because the file section of the bag is divided into four vertical areas, with no room for marking, and no way of knowing inside the darkness of the bag what each section contains, so the only way to get at anything is to dig the whole deck out of the bag and sort it out. Sometimes, I can’t even find the laptop in my laptop bag.
My other piece of luggage is a suitcase that requires memorizing a complex algorithm, just to get it open. I’m waiting for the blue tooth version. The suitcase has a zipper used to expand the size of the thing. Of course, this is always the first one I unzip, since my zippers visual memory has vastly eroded with age. When I manage to get inside the bag – I bat about 50% — I’m confronted with the next challenge: configuration. The suitcase has several pockets that can be zipped or unzipped. I suspect they were originally designed for trout and striped bass. The suit compartment involves a three-part folding contraption, plus a mesh that can be zipped along the foldable device – the original design must have been for tarpon or marlin, before being adapted for business suits. It takes a couple of hours to configure the suitcase – half of that is watching the video – and about the same time to pack – not including laundry time. As for fly-fishing, hiring a luggage coach is the best way to go.
My luggage self-esteem has been so damaged over the years that I’d like to benchmark my luggage IQ vs. the IQ of other luggage users. Call me competitive, but I’d like to know whether I’m at the stupid end of the luggage intelligence curve, or whether only designers and a handful of luggage power users are at the top, with most of us totally confused by their over-design. I’d like to know what data designers looked at when they conceived my two pieces of luggage. Did they co-create it with people like me in front of them, or did they look at focus group data gathered by some market research company, then concocted these massively over-designed pieces because it was more fun for them? I’d like to know what the technical and cost constraints involved in designing luggage are. I’d also like to find out why the overwhelming majority of upscale men’s luggage is black. Are there other people like me out there who would like to avoid the confusion created at airport luggage carrousels by the fact that most men’s suit cases are black, leading to the lifting of an average ten bags before finding your own? Is there something in cow hide pigmentation that prevents me from having a pink suitcase with giraffes? I’d also love to see these guys show me the color trend books they look at, share where their inspiration comes from, and sketch things out in real time in front of me. I’m sure this would trigger my own imagination on what would work for me and others in the market.
So let me warn you fairly, all of you luggage designers out there. I will be calling. My intent is to march onto Tumi, Travelpro and Victorinox Swiss Army headquarters, start a luggage tea party, and demand immediate simplification of luggage and the removal of useless pockets. I trust you designers are good people – you may even do some traveling of your own and might even use some company bags in the process – but you’re desperately out of touch with your market. The time has come for transparency of design.
The days of recycled fly-fishing bags masquerading as travel luggage are numbered.
As a child of the Cold War, I have a special place in my heart for Berlin. For the first 35 years of my life, the only images of Berlin I carried were the decadent pictures of Marlene Dietrich’s Blue Angel, the ominous display of the 1936 Olympics, black-and-white television pictures of the wall, and drab East German buildings under Communism. Since my parents were both high school teachers of German, there were lots of discussions of Germany at home, but the stories always pertained to the Federal Republic of Germany in the West, never to the German Democratic Republic in the East.
One day, we received a letter from a young East German boy who wanted to have a pen pal in the West. I am not sure how his letter got to us, perhaps through the high school where my parents taught, but my parents got the relationship going. About two years into the process, they decided to send the boy a small present – a simple scarf bought at our local department store – only to find out that the East German authorities required a “disinfection certificate.” My father was so incensed that, probably in the only act of duplicity in his entire life, he created a fake French disinfection certificate and sent it with the scarf. Our pen relationship stopped abruptly – probably because our pen pal got tired of writing – but we speculated that maybe the Stasi, the East German secret police, had figured out the certificate was fake and confiscated the scarf, which further reinforced the dark mystery of East Germany in my child’s mind.
Since the fall of the Wall, I have been invited to go to Berlin on several occasions, and each trip has slowly helped erase the gloomy images of the city. A couple of weeks ago, I was there for a European co-creation workshop on agriculture at the invitation of a large chemical company. The city was appropriately cold, snowy and dark. I stayed at a modest hotel across from elevated train tracks from the city transit system in the so-called Downtown area (“Mitte”). This new city center is the former no-man’s-land between the two Germanys, a kind of compromise between the old West Berlin city center built around the posh Kurfürstendamm and the old East German city center at the Alexanderplatz. When the taxi passed the old Checkpoint Charlie at dusk, it still felt like a John Le Carré book.
But Berlin is now full of life, with students and artists giving the city a unique cachet. The city is a tribute to the resilience of the human spirit, unbowed by its Nazi and Communist history. I keep promising myself I will one day find the time to visit the DDR Museum, which describes what living in East Germany was about (to exorcise my fears, if nothing else). The Holocaust Memorial, which lies only one block from the Brandenburg Gate – which saw many of the recent commemorative events of German reunification – is powerful testimony to the willingness of the new Germany to come to grips with its dark history. Against all reason, I have promised myself I will one day search to find out what happened to my pen pal after my father compromised him with an inappropriately disinfected scarf (although reason suggests he’s probably peacefully retired from a middle management career in a local government office). The workshop I was involved in was at the Kalkscheune, a giant loft for hip parties and punky Berliners. There was a delightfully incongruous quality to having conservative agricultural people meet there and deal with the clumsy staircase, the squeaky wooden floors, the oddly situated statues in the meeting rooms and the pictures of Amy Winehouse on the wall.
And when it comes to co-creation, it is hard not to think of the generosity of 63 million West Germans who took it upon themselves to reunite with their 16 million East German brethren, giving them in one fell swoop access to the rich resources of a powerful Western European democracy and taking on the cost of reunification without much hesitation. At a time when democracy in the US is struggling with creating any kind of consensus, one might do worse than look at how Chancellor Helmut Kohl led his country into this giant act of German solidarity, single-handedly wiping out the wounds of several decades and bringing a fragmented country together.
Ich auch bin ein Berliner.
It dawned on me this morning that they’re all gone. Someone must have come for them in the middle of the night, but they’re no longer there. The nice old-fashioned executive assistant who gave you hell when you asked to see her boss, then became downright maternal if you groveled a bit. Gone. The middle manager who complained about being overworked, yet came in at 9 am and left at 5:30 pm on the dot to catch his train, but somehow found the time to organize the March Madness pool and keep the books for the department. Also gone. And then there was the kid. She wasn’t quite sure why she worked there, but it paid the rent and they all thought she’d one day get excited about some business thing and go somewhere. Also gone.
American businesses have stopped growing because all the people have gone. The modern-day American enterprise is like Garrison Keillor’s Lake Wobegon: everybody in it is above average. We’ve become so good at weeding out middle- and low-performers that only the best have survived. As a result, US businesses are highly productive. But there’s no backfill for these high-performers. They’re so darn busy they can’t take on anything remotely growth-oriented. They have a job to do. And although they’re financially rewarded, most of them are miserable, crumbling under the demand for their time on task forces for development projects.
We’re killing the high-performers. The executive assistant used to protect the calendar. The middle manager could deal with some requests for information from his boss or other departments. And the young kid could every now and then get excited enough to do a worthy piece of development work that helped the cause. None of it was earth-shattering, but it did help our high-performer. No more. Now, our high-performer puts that work in his or her suitcase every night. And you want her to be on an innovation task force? Go participate with some customers in a co-creation effort?
The scarce resource for innovation work used to be money for external help. Now, it’s the people inside. “The only thing we’d consider is a project that would help us rationalize our initiatives and give some time back to our people,” I’m often told. When the launching of a growth project is conditioned by a bureaucratic allocation of time exercise, you know you have a problem. Sadly, this is the reality of many US businesses.
Yet this seems to be a uniquely American phenomenon. Businesses in emerging countries are full of people experimenting with new models at the margin of the existing enterprise, even in traditional industries. Even European companies, perhaps because the social and regulatory environment doesn’t allow them to push out low performers so readily, have kept more resources to explore new ways of doing business. Average performers are not the right people to do creative innovation work, but they are the support mechanism for the high-performers who do.
There are also social consequences to this ruthless pruning of the American corporate tree. In its never-ending quest for productivity, American business has externalized the cost of caring for the less gifted or less motivated part of the population. There’s no longer room in business for the young college graduate who’s not yet figured out what to do with her life, the middle manager who’ll never be a star but could do a decent job at a middle-income level, or the end-of-career expert who could never figure out how to sell or manage. Let the system deal with their unemployment, their healthcare needs and the sociological consequences of their demise.
We used to have a basic solidarity. High-performers with a good education and high intellectual aptitude used to create jobs for others. Not everybody was geared for the fast track. It was OK to be a career middle manager, a factory worker or a secretary. The implicit contract was that the fast-tracker would manage a department of middle managers and have a secretary. Plants were meant to absorb people with good manual dexterity and good work ethics, but not necessarily the greatest conceptual abilities. Today, the fast-tracker is asked to weed out the middle managers and do his own clerical work through technology. As for manufacturing jobs, they’ve largely migrated to lower-cost countries. Who’s to fulfill the social role that used to be played by business?
Of course, businesses are not charitable institutions. They do need the best talent to compete, which fosters a Darwinian logic, at least to some extent. But embracing diversity is also creating jobs for those who don’t have the ability to create them for themselves. We cannot only be a nation of solo entrepreneurs. Some people need the help of others. It is easy to understand that for handicapped people, or members of ethnic or religious minorities. Why not extend that to people of average gifts or motivation?
In America, our businesses have become too efficient to innovate. We’re dying completely healed.
I’m going through a mind-splitting experience. In the day time, I write a book – The Alchemy of Co-Creation, with my friend and colleague Venkat Ramaswamy, for Simon & Schuster Free Press. At night, I write this blog. Every time I switch from one to the other, I have to remind myself whether I’m Dr. Jekyll or Mr. Hyde.
For book writing purposes, I offer my best incarnation of the thoughtful middle child who plays inside a gang of my co-author, the publisher’s editor, our literary agent/coach and our in-house editor. We plot our crimes long in advance and in systematic fashion, carefully balancing conceptual integrity and consumer appeal. We endlessly rewrite the plan in minute details, complete with fact-checks and footnotes. Some of the crimes we describe will be three years in the making by the time they take place and our book describing them gets published in October 2010. I sometimes wonder whether our forensics will still be fresh at the time.
Of course, we’re going for the crime of the century, something between the Hound of the Baskervilles by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and The Murder of Roger Ackroyd by Agatha Christie. Our marketing people are already hard at work with the press. I’m thinking Robert Downey Jr. to play me, and Denzel Washington to play my co-author. I’ll need a new look for the book tour – maybe a pork pie hat or a pompadour – and I must remember to trade my RAV4 for a Ducati. It’s fun to think about it, but it may or may not happen – particularly the pompadour – and it’s far away.
From the author’s point of view, though, crimes of the blog are a lot more fun because they’re more intimate and produce instant gratification. I can skewer quickly, and immediately find out the impact of what I’ve done. Before corpses harden, I can go on Google Analytics and see how many people read my stuff and where they live. I’m dying to know the two Sofia, Bulgaria, readers who jump on my latest entry every time. If Google tells me that my partner-in-crime from Montclair, New Jersey, has not read my blog within 48 hours, I can call him and question his commitment. I’ve learned that many people don’t like to publicly associate themselves on the blog with my crimes – perhaps they don’t share my exhibitionist tendencies – but they encourage my murderous instincts through private e-mails.
I’ve learned the two secrets of blog-writing: stick with murder, and build lists. My readership goes way up when I injure or kill. Taking on British Airways has brought me minor celebrity status, particularly in the UK. By contrast, my story about Joseph Campbell’s dancing monks has produced an enthusiasm limited to my mother and sister (my wife’s on the fence). The list of “Co-Creation from A to Z” has rocked the chart because I took on the entire advertising and Customer Relationship Management (CRM) industries, and everybody hates these guys. My list of “Ten Excuses Not to Do Co-Creation” has also been picked up by several corporate types who like it when you give them a reason to slack off.
Who said crime doesn’t pay?
Being in the co-creation business, I’m often confronted with product design issues. This draws me into the world of software tools used to support the work of engineers designing those products. This industry was originally known as Computer-Aided Design (CAD), was later renamed CAD/CAM (Computer-Aided Manufacturing), and is now called Product Lifecycle Management (PLM), to reflect the fact that products increasingly need to be designed not only for manufacturing and testing but also for maintenance, servicing and disposal.
PLM is a left-brained world, to put it mildly. It is a steely blue industry where 3D charts twirl on computer screens, engineers exchange schematic designs and blinking tables of data, and tensile strength and mean-time-between failure drive the choice of material. No room for soft emotional types here. PLM software development has largely been driven by the automotive and aerospace industries, neither of which represents a benchmark for customer sensitivity, as most travelers can attest daily. Installing these software packages requires massive systems integration efforts, which are delivered by IT consulting firms and supervised by corporate IT staffs, themselves hardly populated by marketing hippies searching for new consumer experiences.
In the midst of this free-for-all of engineering features, the CEO of the French company Dassault Systemes, a person by the name of Bernard Charlès, is attempting to take his company to a different place. (In the interest of transparency, let me mention that I met Charlès once about three years ago, but do not otherwise have any relationship with him or Dassault Systemes. I just happen to like what he stands for.) Simply put, Charlès wants his software to enable the co-creation of the customer experience by bringing together user communities and engineers. He wants design to be done in real time, with users leading the charge. It is a poet’s vision in a math-based world, a rhomboid among the squares of the industry. The idea is to let customers visualize their experience through the software and allow engineers to engage in a direct dialogue with them, based on the simulated experience offered.
Picture a Boeing engineer working with a flight crew from Singapore Airlines and a group of frequent fliers to design the layout of the recently launched Boeing 787 Dreamliner plane’s interior. Imagine the pilot able to participate in the design of his cockpit and seat, and the flight attendant allowed to see her quarters move in size and place, with the drawers rearranged in real time. Become the passenger able to recline his seat, turn on his lights, and watch his neighbors. The software is no longer solely a generator of blueprint schematics and design data, but a dream machine able to engage the customer’s senses and trigger experiential conversations between customers and designers. Dassault Systemes is where IBM meets Nintendo.
Charlès’ view is that every individual is a potential product designer. (In this, there is some parallelism with Muhammad Yunus’ view that everybody is a micro-entrepreneur waiting to happen, as I blogged earlier.) Part of the Dassault Systemes strategy is therefore to democratize PLM tools – for example, Dassault owns SolidWorks, the US-based leader in low-cost PLM software. The company has also set up an online design community called 3dvia, where individuals can download 3D objects for free. It has also created a joint venture with the Publicis advertising group to offer a service called 3dswym – which stands for “see what you mean” – to help designers of packaged good products visualize the customer journey associated with the product. Charlès’ dream is to put these tools in the mind of any creator anywhere in the world.
Of course, the transformational challenge posed by this vision is enormous, and like most visionaries, Charlès may be underestimating the task at hand. His journey is comparable to Steve Jobs attempting to build a business based on a new experience for computer, entertainment, and communication consumers, in spite of massive distribution and consumer education challenges. Charlès’ competitors are largely of the left-brained variety and have formidable distribution power with CIOs. Interestingly, Dassault Systemes just bought the PLM business of IBM, its long-time partner, presumably to create a new concept of distribution more focused on customer co-creation, in a move reminiscent of Apple starting its own stores. The re-training that will have to occur in the engineering and IT professions to move to some form of customer experience sensitivity is of mammoth proportion. Customers, long accustomed to the dominance of engineering thinking over their needs, will also have to unlearn their acceptance of design mediocrity and find a new voice.
A good place for Charlès’ vision of co-created design with customers may be the US automotive industry. Detroit’s fatal flaw has long been its inability to transform from the inside. Empowering customers to participate in the design of future cars with Detroit engineers may produce the mobilization of car lovers and engineers alike, and revitalize a moribund industry. Co-creation as the future of the automotive industry in the US would certainly be a better vision than the current death by a thousand cuts.
I’m no good at giving presents. I can’t help it. It’s not in my genes. But I do see what people who’re good at it do. They make mental notes of any frustration or hint on the part of the future recipient. They probe subtly. They drop hints themselves. As for me, I don’t have a clue. I’m so inept, you might as well drop me in the middle of the shopping center on December 24, ask me to go into the first ten stores I encounter, and buy at random. Which is pretty much what I do every year.
My problem with presents is that they don’t involve co-creation. Here is the process I’d like to follow. I’d want a facilitated discussion with the people I’m supposed to buy presents for, and ask them to share with me what their life is like and where their passions lie. I’d also have a bunch of store representatives there – someone from Nordstrom who knows my wife’s sizes, one of those blond hulks from REI who can tell my daughter what kind of tent she needs to withstand bear assaults, and a geek from the Apple Store to discuss with my son what’s new in three-dimensional chess software. Somehow, they’d work it out among themselves. I’d be good at moderating that dialogue. I‘d gladly underwrite the flow of goods resulting from this highly efficient co-creation platform.
Absent that, I’m pretty much lost at sea. My wife tells me I’m supposed to pick up what people want from living with them, even without a facilitated discussion. She coaches me subtly, like when she says: “I understand Dan Brown has a new novel out, available at the Burlington Barnes & Noble for $12.00 in the best-seller section to the right of the cash registers.” When she decrypts the original message for me on Christmas morning, after discovering I’ve inadvertently offered her the same waffle-maker from Crate & Barrel as last year, I have to protest that her co-creation signals are too weak to be perceived by structured guys like me. “You have to tell me to light up my Christmas receptors,” I tell her. “How am I to know otherwise?”
Not only does she think I’m bad at picking up demand signals, she thinks my supply signals are even worse. “Don’t you ever see anything in a store or on the Web and think: this would make a nice present for such-and-such person?” I smile embarrassedly, because, no, I never match anything I see with a person who’d like to receive that merchandise (except for the waffle-maker which made me think of how lovely it would be for her to make me some waffles on a cold winter day, but somehow she didn’t think that was such a good idea).
Miraculously, the Christmas present co-creation platform I had dreamed of has arrived in the form of the Amazon.com Wish List. The smart guys at Amazon have figured out that a wish list should extend beyond the boundaries of the Amazon store itself, so they let you earmark anything you see on the Web, place it inside your Amazon Wish List, and they’ll get it for you through the regular Amazon buying process. My daughter introduced me to it. “It’ll be helpful in your work,” she said,” but feel free to buy something on my wish list to get a real experience of the thing.” And so I bought her the Stone (Granite) Mortar and Pestle, 7 inches, 2+ cup capacity from Import Food Thai Supermarket for $32.95. You may wonder what’s so co-creative about that. Well, I had a choice of items. For example, I decided not to buy her the Contemporary Stainless Special-Value 16-Inch Roaster with Nonstick Roasting Rack from Calphalon because at $124.97, I thought it was a bit expensive for a test (even at $115.99 used). Also I’ll be darned if I ever buy her the V955 Vector High Performance Radar Detector (Black/Silver) by Beltronics that’s also on the list, which reminds me I want to have a conversation with her about her driving habits.
As for my wife, she was impressed I’d even know what a pestle is. “I travel a lot,” I explained, smiling enigmatically.
It’s been a rough week. My wife had heart surgery at Brigham & Women’s hospital in Boston on Monday to correct for a longstanding problem. My 17 year-old son had a resurgence of a potentially threatening kidney problem he had in 2001 that warrants careful monitoring of his situation at Children’s Hospital of Boston. And so I have moved from being a highly supported global traveler to living the ordinary life of a caretaker meandering through the processes of two large healthcare providers. I have found this to be good for my soul, but bad for my blood pressure.
Of course, both institutions are world-class and their doctors top-notch. So what am I complaining about? Well, my grief is that I’d like to participate in the process, maybe even add value to it. You see, I happen to know my wife and my kid pretty well, including their medical history. More importantly, I love them and want to advocate for them. This seems to make me into the meddler, the guy with stethoscope envy, who’d like to be a doctor, but only plays one on TV.
The healthcare industry is focused on setting up electronic medical records (EMR in the jargon). As for me, I’d just like to have access to the darn records, whether they’re electronic or drawn as Mickey Mouse cartoons on the back of a filthy envelope. The first thing I want to do is shepherd them through and make sure they land where they’re supposed to. I’ll carry them to downtown Boston on a donkey if that’s what it takes. And by the way, I also have a computer and have been properly trained on how to attach documents and pictures to emails. All I’m missing is a couple of doctors’ e-mail addresses.
For example, some of my kid’s lab results generated in Concord on Monday needed to be at Children’s Hospital on Wednesday for an important diagnosis with a nephrology specialist there. I called several times to make sure the records would be there and was assured they were. Sure enough, the nephrologist didn’t have them when I visited with my kid, so we ended up wasting the specialist’s time at Children’s and will have to redo some of the stuff. Because I care, I would’ve been willing to spend a lot more time than any expediter in the system, so put me in charge please! It’ll be cheaper for my cost-conscious healthcare providers and I’ll stop bugging the attending nurse over it. As for me, I’ll quit chewing my nails.
And now for the scary part. If you give me transparent access to the records of those I care about, I’ll want to participate in the co-creation of the diagnosis and the treatment. My wife had a slightly elevated temperature after the operation. Because I know her temperature is quite low naturally, the elevation was more significant than for an average patient and I tried to get the nurse to pay attention to this. Because the absolute magnitude of that temperature was deemed too low for intervention in “The Great Book of Medicine,” it was suggested that I take a deep breath instead.
As I’ve also learned, getting patients to walk after a heart operation is a key component of getting well. Since nurses work in shifts at the hospital, nobody had a longitudinal record of her physical activity. At some point, her nurse had too many patients and the neighboring nurse not enough, so they literally ended up pulling names out of a hat to see who would be redistributed. My wife’s name was drawn. I’m not sure whether the new nurse was better or worse than the old one, but it provided an apt metaphor for the lack of continuity and personal identification with the patient’s experience.
To create this continuity, my daughter and I decided to write on the white board in the hospital room what my wife had accomplished and how much she still needed to do. This initiative was deemed “very cute” by a couple of amused doctors and nurses. As for me, I think I’m helping her get well, maybe not quite as much as the brilliant surgeon who held the scalpel or the world-class cardiologist who dispenses the medicine that keeps her heart pumping day after day, but we’re there nonetheless.
I have to leave you now. My wife’s coming out of the hospital today and I have to go get her. I’ll have to go to weekly tests with my kid for the foreseeable future, but he’s in good hands. The doctors, the nurses, my daughter and I, we’re a heck of a medical team.
I flew from London back to Boston last night in the business class section of British Airways (BA). We battled all night, but in the dawn’s early light, I realized the brilliance of the company’s war strategy. For those of you at military colleges, here’s what I learned about myself in the process.
My first battle involved a brief and unsuccessful raid in enemy territory, in the business-class checking area of Terminal 5 at Heathrow, to be specific. I promptly assessed that the enemy’s business-class troops are well concealed at the end of the giant terminal –no maps or signs will lead you there – but some friendly Pashtun natives pointed me in the right direction. As I started scouting for enemy positions, I noticed a wall of automated machine guns – er, automated machines – with prominent flags floating over them, erected as the first line of defense for the BA foot ground troops neatly organized behind a second line of tellers. With my special operations training, I managed to infiltrate this first line of automated positions and tried to engage the real warriors behind their desk directly. I naively thought having a business-class ticket would grant me safe passage to those people. I was immediately reminded that in the BA code of war, one has to defeat the automation army before being allowed to engage with real people, business-class ticket notwithstanding. To straighten me out, a female guard laconically pointed to the sign above her – which stipulated “bag drop only” – followed with a second pointing toward the automatic checking machines, and punctuated with a sardonic “see you in a while.”
Having been soundly defeated, I engaged in battle #2 with the Check-In Machine. Beating the machine requires deciphering a secret code involving a number, a card, or a passport. I scratched my head wondering what number I could provide. I tried the locator number, the e-ticket number, and the travel agent’s number. When the machine started producing a hissing noise, I began to fear it was booby-trapped. With panic rising, I tried to scan my electronic passport, but the machine declared it unreadable and started shaking. I then reached for my BA frequent flier card, but I unfortunately have about 15 of those airline cards, plus another 10 for hotels and 3 or 4 for car rental, and the machine is so smartly designed that it offers no usable flat surface to lay out documents, forcing you to juggle them in the air while it keeps electronically firing at you.
Sensing I was about to die shamefully in the throes of this second battle, I decided to change strategy. I started swearing in a variety of languages, including some I do not even speak – albondigas is not really a Spanish profanity, is it? I seemed to initiate a chorus of similar global profanities from fellow travelers at neighboring check-in machines. Sensing an insurgency was in the works, a very nice BA customer service employee broke ranks and tried to pacify the pesky hordes. His first priority was my neighbor, a bearded man who’d expressed his displeasure in Urdu. French profanities got me the runner-up position. The old BA gentleman knew the secret code for each of us, and got us past the machines. As I triumphantly started heading back toward the human shadows behind the tellers, he even whispered that “If you’re persistent, the people at the counter will generally end up helping you.” I hope they do not behead him when they find out he’s collaborating with the enemy.
Battle #3 is the Flying Backward one. This may be a little personal, but I simply cannot fly seated backwards. I have an inner ear disorder that makes me sick when I do, and BA is the only airline I know that makes half of its business customers travel facing back. When the French retired their last Caravelle in the early ’70s, I thought I was finally safe, but the smart cabin designers at BA revived this quaint tradition some 10 or 15 years ago. I avoid flying BA for this specific reason, but every now and then, scheduling convenience or cost forces me back to BA. Of course, the seat allocation system senses my weakness and only allocates backward-flying seats to me.
When I was offered such a seat last night, I explained to the BA front-line gunner that I turn into Linda Blair of The Exorcist when forced to fly backwards. I rotated my head back as far as I could to prove the point and asked her to imagine the unsuitability of green slime for the business-class cabin at 30,000 feet. She first pointed out that most warriors tolerate the backward flight in their chopper quite comfortably, but then proceeded to treat me with the deference my new suicide bomber status warranted. I was instructed to go to the airline lounge and throw myself at the mercy of the commanding officer there. Should my request not be granted, I could also attempt to exchange seats with another warrior in the plane itself. If that failed, it was suggested I could walk to a passenger in economy and offer to swap seats with him/her. “Of course, this is an expensive way to do it,” the exquisitely polite lady told me, “but this way, you won’t get sick.” Already soothed by such compassionate behavior, I was reassured when some general back at headquarters apparently switched my seat, allowing me to fly feet forward all the way to Boston.
Once in the plane, it was time to wage battle #4, the one involving the Drawer. Most airlines have a pouch or a pocket where you can put your travel documents, your mobile phone and perhaps a couple of magazines. BA business has a very big drawer … on the floor. If you’re young and athletic, you can squat or bend from a standing position. If you’re Michael Jordan and have a long torso and arms, you can probably stretch and reach the drawer from your seat. When all else fails, you get on your arms and knees and crawl on the floor like the Marines. As I got down to the ground, I got an encouraging look from a flight attendant who looked like an older version of the Ice Queen in the film Chronicles of Narnia. I also caught her disappointed look when I made it back up. I had won battle #4.
Battle #5 involved withstanding the Floor Sweep. BA wants nothing on the floor around you as the plane takes off. People have clearly been smashed to death by flying pillows, suffocated by twirling blankets, or knocked unconscious by errant sneakers, so regulations require that these dangerous weapons be placed in sealed compartments before take-off. To my knowledge, BA is the only airline with this requirement, which surely dates back to medieval battles involving Scottish or Welsh fighters who used blankets, pillows and sneakers as torture instruments. A very elegant flight attendant ripped my shoes from my feet before departure because I had imprudently taken them half-off after two days of teaching on my feet with a group of executives at a large European bank. I was told that shoes had to be either on or off, and if they were off, they had to be up in the compartment above my head. I let myself be separated from my shoes. I also tried to cling on to my blanket, but was told my grip was too loose to be safe. I surrendered my second weapon and decided to wait for more auspicious conditions for a counter-offensive.
The sixth and final battle involved the Return of the Coat. Shortly before landing, the flight attendants returned all coats to the passengers, except mine. I tried not to grow anxious, until it became clear that my coat and jacket had become a hostage. I pushed the flight attendant button to alert them to this fact, but only drew an annoyed circular look from the Ice Queen to check who’d had the audacity. After landing, as I was seated toward the back of the business cabin, I could not signal to the flight attendants that I was still looking for my outerwear because of all the other warriors standing ahead of me in the line. Because the jetway was malfunctioning, I spent close to 30 minutes standing in the aisle, trying to attract the attention of flight attendants who were too busy talking to each other to pay attention to me.
When I finally made it to the door after the line started moving, I was told the search process would now be initiated, provided I could provide a detailed visual description of the coat and jacket. The topic was prosecuted with the zeal of members of the Moscow Politburo being told an enemy of the regime is missing in Siberia. I was invited to shiver quietly in short sleeves in the door and wait for further information. My mind alternated between designing a proper epitaph and analytical puzzlement over how many ways there can be of losing a coat and jacket in a plane. When the last economy passenger walked by me, I was given the coat back in what appeared to be a large BA ceremony where apologies were plentiful and exquisitely articulated in Elizabethan English, but explanations sparse.
This morning, as I was doing my after-action-review, I had an epiphany. I realized that what I had perceived as bad service is actually an in-depth training program to teach me how to become a better customer. I still have occasional bouts of indiscipline where I crave some form of comfort or service, even some appetite for some form of service co-creation with my airline. But I am close to seeing the light. A new discipline has set in. I look forward to engaging with the next enemy BA throws at me, and getting further field training. Send me back to London. I’m close to battle-ready.
People often make fun of me when I associate the name of a particular person with a specific idea in a workshop setting. If I say something like “remember John’s suggestion that…,” I often see embarrassed smiles on people’s faces that tell me “we don’t do this kind of thing around here.” They probably attribute some weird cult-of-personality tendency to me, or at worst assume I am a sycophant seeking some favor from John.
I’m particularly grieved by this perception, because nothing is more fun to me than watching people connect around interesting ideas, and giving them credit for participating in such a creative network feels like the most natural thing. In fact, I must confess I tag people in my brain with their ideas, in such a way that I can rapidly call a large number of people by name simply by remembering what they contributed in the early stages of a workshop (“Oh yeah, the person who said this very intelligent thing”). It’s not a party trick: I derive great personal energy from watching smart minds connecting around a novel idea.
When that happens, it’s as if the whole room lights up. The wavering bulb of the initial idea becomes a city of light, powered by the human grid that did not exist a minute earlier. I feel it in my flesh and bones, and immediately get a “what a privilege to be here at this moment” feeling.
As I often find myself in the role of facilitator at innovation meetings, I’ve learned that being a chronicler of such meetings is an essential component of co-creation. Moments of innovation, like historical moments, warrant recording who was there and who said what. Identifying innovation protagonists and describing their exploits feel as important to me as knowing that Hannibal is the guy who crossed the Alps with the elephants, or Rommel is the WWII German general who figured out fighting in a desert is like fighting on the sea. Giving people credit for their role in those moments is also a way of keeping them engaged. We can all use a bit of recognition to keep us marching on the innovation road when all conspires to get us sidetracked with operational stuff.
Of course, I used to think ideas were paramount, and the process through which human brains connect around them anecdotal. This Cartesian illusion that good ideas will emerge independently of the people who initiated them is still quite prevalent in many organizations. The way the President of the United States just invited ideas from experts to address the job creation issue in the US testifies to the same belief that a few powerful ideas will come along that make a difference. He clearly views the role of government as identifying those ideas through an analytical process, then funding them. If he called me for advice, I’d suggest he’d be better served launching a grassroots, country-wide process of co-creation on the issue, and watch a thousand accidental heroes emerge from it. His role would be to give names to those people, not exert analytical brilliance on what ideas to pursue.
Now that I think of it, I hope he doesn’t call. He’d probably think my suggestion does not even rise to the level of being a bad idea.
Many times, the best ideas come not from inside headquarters, but from the field. A stellar example of co-created innovation comes from Subway, the ubiquitous sandwich chain, which rang up big numbers – sales of $3.81 billion in the 12 months ending in August – from a couple of round numbers: $5 for a foot-long sub. This successful offering originated not within the food labs of corporate HQ, but instead in a single franchise located within a Miami hospital. The franchisee, Stu Frankel, was seeking a way to boost weekend sales in late 2004. He hit on a simple concept: $5, “not $3.99, not $4.99,” as he later told BusinessWeek, for a sizeable sandwich.
In so doing, Frankel bucked the conventional wisdom of retailers everywhere that a penny somehow seems less to customers than a nice round number. In fact, many people seem sick of pennies, if efforts to retire the nation’s most modest coin are an indicator. Frankel’s combination of good value for a single bill was an immediate hit in his store, boosting Saturday sales by 17–22 percent and Sunday sales by over 30 percent.
The concept soon spread to other Subway outlets in Florida. To its great credit, executives at Subway headquarters in far-off Milford, CT, recognized a hit. The $5 foot-long sub rolled out nationally in March 2008, accompanied by a national ad campaign with a nice jingle.
Other restaurateurs such as Taco Bell and Schlotzsky’s have since launched their own versions of the $5 deal, but Subway has continued to let innovation bubble up. The company invited customers to submit their own versions of the ad jingle to the Subway website. Hundreds of videos have been viewed hundreds of thousands of times, collectively; website visitors rate their favorites and pan the not-so-good attempts. The $5 foot-long has entered the vocabulary of popular culture, thanks to Subway’s willingness to co-create first internally, with franchisees, and then externally, with customers.