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|In: Industry Commentary|Last Updated:

Correspondent Geoff Hazel provided the following:

Subject: Vehicle_sales_advertising

You have had a series of web ads promoting some focus groups and reorganizations at Ford. “We’re really gonna get it right, now” is the theme I’m getting from these, an attempt to recapture interest. Listen, you’re wasting your money on these ads. Don’t say you’re GONNA do it, just DO IT. After all, if you DO IT, and do it right, people should notice. If you don’t do it and people expect it, you’re REALLY failed.

Seriously, don’t spend one more dime on that ad campaign.

Ford’s reply:

Dear Geoff,

Thank you for contacting the Ford Motor Company Customer Relationship Center regarding your feedback about an advertisement.

With surprising frequency, a suggestion offered by someone not connected with our company is the same as, or very similar to, an idea developed by the people we employ for that purpose.

Ford’s sales, advertising, marketing and business personnel are constantly working on ideas and programs to market our products effectively and to hold and increase our good will. Many of these ideas are not used immediately, but are put aside for possible use in the future.

In an effort to avoid any misunderstanding concerning the source of material used by us, we have found it best to adopt the policy of only considering or reviewing suggestions related to marketing, advertising, product names, business practices, sales promotions, or vehicle designs from persons employed or retained by us.

If you have any other inquiries, please feel free to contact us and we will be happy to address them for you.

Sincerely,

Mike

Customer Relationship Center

Ford Motor Company

If Ford thinks this is excellent Customer Relationship Management, just what exactly does it consider excellent engineering to be?

No wonder it’s at death’s door.

This little exemplar of how to do things wrong provides a number of possible lessons for those of us who till the fields of information technology, among them:

Beware the danger of success. Somebody at Ford had a great idea: Build relationships with customers by providing interactive channels for conversations. The concept is sound — interaction results in less emotional distance, and eventually a sense of affinity. This can influence car-buying decisions.

The world is filled with sound concepts. It’s almost as filled with bungled implementations of sound concepts. Here, Ford created the input channel but didn’t realize that it’s hard for customers to build relationships with auto-responders, and especially with inept auto-responders that reply to inquiries with mismatched boilerplate.

Even if the auto-responder is named “Mike.”

Here’s a question to ask everyone who proposes a great idea: “What happens if this works?” Ideas are easy. Proof-of-concept pilots are almost as easy. But unless you’re prepared to deal with the implications of the idea panning out, turn your attention to something else.

Don’t ignore good ideas, just because they come from the “wrong” source. Most people, most of the time, divide the world into we and they. We are the source of everything that’s good and right with the world. We can trust each other. We aren’t like them. They are the reason things go wrong. They are unenlightened, uninformed, and untrustworthy. We are best off ignoring them.

And so, Ford ignored a perfectly valid point — that it’s time to stop making empty promises. Remember when at Ford, quality was job #1? That was before innovation was going to be the star that guided Ford’s compass, which preceded the campaign Mr. Hazel objected to.

As characterized, it recalls the time Microsoft used elimination of its own blue screen of death as the selling point for a new version of Windows. Why call attention to your history of repeated failure?

But I digress. Whoever at Ford decides what to pay attention to decided to ignore a perfectly valid point because it came from the wrong source — a customer, which is to say someone who isn’t considered we.

When presenting an idea, remember that you aren’t “we.” You’re “they.” Even more important, every brilliant suggestion you have for someone else presupposes they haven’t already thought of it.

Perhaps they didn’t. But when you make your suggestion, take into account the possibility that, having spent much more time and energy on the subject than you have, they might have arrived there first.

Or, they might have rejected the idea for reasons that haven’t yet occurred to you.

My daughter Kimberly once gave me some unsolicited advice. “Dad,” she said, “don’t give unsolicited advice. It doesn’t work.” I took her advice.

Just to prove her wrong.

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|In: Industry Commentary|Last Updated:

Frederick Jackson Turner wrote about the Frontier and how it shaped, and continues to shape America’s national character.

The Frontier requires independence and self-reliance. Need water? Dig a well. Need a barn? Build a barn. Someone steal your horse? Do something about it. It’s the American way, or at least it’s the American way among those who identify with the Frontier.

Urban citizens have a different perspective. They get each others’ company up close and personal. The population is dense. The infrastructure required to support such a dense population is complex.

An example among many: I’ve read New York City generates enough garbage every day to fill the Empire State Building. Somehow, it has to disappear as fast as people create it. If you live in New York City you can’t just dump your garbage wherever you like. Good thing, too.

Ever since I read Jared Diamond’s Guns, Germs and Steel (W.W. Norton, 2005) I’ve been fascinated by the impact of biogeography on human culture. So should you, and not only because of its likely impact on why some human habitats are red and others blue.

Culture is the learned behavior people exhibit in response to their environment. Want to change the culture? Change their environment. It’s the only choice you have, unless you think preaching will have an impact.

When the topic is business culture, most of each employee’s environment is co-worker behavior. It’s a fact that results in infinite recursion, and a sense of hopelessness when you want to change the culture.

It isn’t, however hopeless. As a leader you can control your own behavior. You can strongly influence the behavior of managers who report to you. That changes each employee’s environment. You can change the communications environment too. As precedent, electronic mail completely transformed business cultures throughout the world.

That’s the bio part of biogeography. As with the contrast between the Frontier and the Metropolis, the physical environment in which employees work can have a huge cultural impact too.

You can house each employee in an office, as Microsoft famously does. Many admire this practice, as it provides each employee with an environment conducive to concentrated effort. If what you need is a business culture that values independent, concentrated effort, separate offices are just the ticket.

You might need something else. A number of years ago I was part of a very large program of strategic business change — the sort of complex program that required the coordinated efforts of multiple project teams over an extended period of time. The Account Manager wisely decided that each project team should work in a “pod” — a largish area with table space around the perimeter, and a conference table in the middle.

The pod environment, while unsettling at first, resulted in superior teamwork and informal collaboration — the natural consequence of being able to swivel one’s chair to ask a colleague for a moment’s attention whenever a moment’s attention was needed.

Then there’s the much maligned cubicle farm. The cubicle is the minivan of office environments, a compromise between the privacy of an office and the interactivity of a pod. Like all compromise designs it’s easy to ridicule, ridicule being quite different from presenting useful alternatives.

What cultural traits do cube farms encourage? That isn’t an answerable question, because cube farm is about as descriptive as town. (“What’s it like, living in a town, Statler?” “Oh, I don’t know, Waldorf. Better than dying in one.”)

In a cubicle environment you can vary: The total space, partition height, storage, number, size and style of conference rooms, color, and lighting.

For starters.

There is no right design. Just choices based on how you want employees to act and interact. Want more collaboration? Build in a lot of small conference areas. Like consensus decision-making? Make sure you have enough full-size conference rooms. Otherwise, employees will forego consensus because finding a place to arrive at one requires too much effort.

Want employees to keep their heads down to get their work done? Small spaces and high partitions might be a better choice. They provide neither room for guests nor easy prairie-dogging. Prefer informality and interaction? Encourage this with wider openings, lower walls, enough space for visitors and chairs so they can sit.

To decide how to lay out office space, start the same way you design every other aspect of corporate culture. First, decide how you want employees to respond in common situations.

Then, figure out how to encourage them to do so.

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