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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: Business Ethics|Last Updated:

I first discovered the business significance of AND logic while participating in the redesign of my then-employer’s capital approval process. Among our findings: A $25,000 proposal required at least five approvals — the immediate manager, followed by the department head, division head, CFO and CEO. All had to agree — AND logic at its finest.

The average $2.5 million proposal, in contrast, required only three — the division head, CFO and CEO. The practical consequence? My employer had 67% more opportunities to reject simple, low-risk, high-return investments than large, risky endeavors.

All in the name of control.

Organizations grow and thrive on YES decisions. YES is how they increase revenue, decrease costs, increase speed and agility, improve quality and add excellence.

YES decisions also create risk, because every one proposes a change of some kind. Change isn’t safe. It always includes the possibility that no matter how good it looked in the PowerPoint, and how carefully everyone involved with it planned, designed, engineered and built, it might not work out.

The typical mechanism organizations use to mitigate risk is the veto. It’s requiring some number of individuals to independently decide whether the risk is worthwhile, and if any one of them doesn’t think so then the proposed change never sees the light of day.

In practice, it comes down to getting signatures. And in practice, this usually means that the process designed to mitigate risk instead becomes the process through which the organization plays favorites. You know how it works: If the proposer is, or works for, someone who is in the inner circle or is one of their proteges, then signatures become rubber stamps.

If, instead, the proposer is unknown or works for an unknown then it receives scrutiny usually reserved for the scene of a murder on CSI. And if the proposer works for someone who has annoyed anyone whose signature is required, rejection is automatic.

What’s the solution? That depends on how you define the problem.

If your company’s goal is to make its investment decisions as fairly as possible, then its governance process should look a lot like how radio stations make hiring decisions for their announcers: Applicants speak behind a screen, so that if you have a “face for radio” it won’t bias the interviewer. Similarly, a fair governance process operates on paper, and all proposals are anonymous so that nobody has a chance to play favorites.

Fairness is, however, an overrated virtue. Among its defects are its speed, which can be glacial, and its expense. In business, you’re more likely to set a different goal — to invest in the most promising proposals. Fairness might be a means to this end, but often it isn’t.

If you don’t accept this, imagine you’re evaluating two competing proposals. One comes from an associate with whom you’ve worked for more than ten years — someone you know well, like, and trust. The other comes from an outside vendor — a company that’s unknown to you.

If you ran a fair process you’d perform the exact same due diligence on both proposals. But you’ve already performed ten years of due diligence on your trusted associate, so your first step is deciding whether considering the unknown company’s proposal is worth any time and effort at all.

That, rather than the apostrophe, is the crux of the biscuit: The only difference between trust and favoritism is whether you’re among the trusted few or the anonymous many.

Here’s a nit to pick: In business, trying to invest in the most promising proposals … the best ideas … is pointless, for two reasons: Uncertainty and multidimensionality.

Uncertainty is an issue because the business justification included in every proposal is, at best, an estimate with a sizable error bar. “Best” implies a level of precision that isn’t available to you.

Multidimensionality means that every proposal has more than one justification — more than one reason for pursuing it. These different reasons have different levels of importance for different decision-makers, so “best” depends on which chair you’re sitting in.

When it comes to corporate governance, it’s best to set the bar a bit lower. Just trying to make sure every funded and scheduled proposal is worth pursuing is tough enough.

To achieve even that requires an executive team that operates as a team — whose members like and trust each other and who have a common purpose — rather than a roomful of rivals.

As CIO, you can’t make this happen. That’s the CEO’s job.

If your company doesn’t have one of these you’ll have to work toward the next best thing: Making sure as many of the decision-makers as possible like and trust you.

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