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March 13 - March 20, 2023
Saying no is essential. It provides clarity and unclutters your mind to focus on your goals. This approach also benefits customers. They need an answer or a resolution, and they will quickly learn whether you can help them or they need to look elsewhere.
“Transparency produces trust. Who can trust a company or person who doesn’t disclose information, who keeps everything close to the vest, who doesn’t share anything?
“Default to transparency.”
There are two kinds of transparency — internal and external.
However, nothing is more important than transparency between a company and its customers. Secrecy encourages customers to create their own explanations for your decisions and policies — explanations that rarely give you the benefit of the doubt.
Caring and a sense of purpose evoke better performance than pressure and fear. The idea that only obsessive egomaniacs can produce breakthroughs is nonsense.
Sustainable happiness is about achieving what you want in your whole life, which includes what you do for work.
With studies estimating the cost of losing an employee as high as 200 percent of their salary,4 that is a big deal.
The difference in a TRM organization is that those challenging times have a purpose behind them. Without purpose, the weight of challenging work can slowly wear out some employees.
Purpose keeps morale strong when times are tough or rapid growth and scale put your capacity to the test.
However, for a hint at how this one may play out, look at Google. They have nearly 70,000 employees, and they still hold weekly all-hands meetings that are broadcast live, where nothing is off limits and anyone can ask the founders a question.
“Your CPE is a reflection not just of your team’s skills but their values, passions, and character. You are what you build.”
Plan for what is likely and do not worry about everything that might happen along the way.
We call good problems to have “success disasters,” and we are delighted when they occur. When you have a responsive team and are confident in your skills, then mistakes and failures are golden opportunities to discover flaws in your process, build trust with your customers, and learn what they want and need with ever-increasing precision. Success disasters are not judgments — they are incentives to continue pursuing greater achievements.
most people judge an experience based on its peak — the point of greatest intensity — and its conclusion.
when you try to focus on a second strategic product initiative before you have traction with your first, you increase the risk of failure for both.
Excellence drops your second opportunity in your lap. But if you do not achieve excellence with a primary product first because you divide your focus, you will not get a second opportunity.
If you have strategic goals, it is easy to create a series of high-level actions that will allow you to achieve them. We call those strategic initiatives. Strategic initiatives link directly to your goals, guide what you work on, and shape where and how you choose to invest your time. If it is not strategic, do not work on it.
Strategy must adapt as needed to bring you closer to your goal.
Basically, prioritization stems from the product strategy and the company’s strategic focus. For example, if the company is in major growth mode, things that help drive customer acquisition may be prioritized first. If the primary goal is driving revenue via penetration of the existing customer base, then initiatives to help accomplish that goal may be prioritized above others.”2
The plan always dictates what has priority now, with everyone understanding that as the conditions change, the priority may change.
Everyone in your company who interacts with a customer leaves a unique fingerprint. Collectively, those interactions create the customer journey and, ultimately, how your customers perceive you — your brand. Each interaction is an opportunity to drive home the message that your CPE is like no other.
Action always speaks louder than marketing.
It is not uncommon to find leaders who view human contact as a cost center rather than the reason they are in business. They practice “contact avoidance,” deferring human interaction whenever possible through automated phone systems, online knowledge bases, peer-to-peer support forums, and the like. These measures send customers a clear message: You are not important to us.
Ship often. Ship lousy stuff, but ship. Ship constantly. Skip meetings. Often. Skip them with impunity. Ship.
Shipping fast is consistent with having a clear plan and typically reduces risk. There is less that can go wrong and it is easier to isolate and fix problems if they do occur. We use publicized weekly product launches as one more way to create delight and elicit useful customer engagement.
Interrupting work to fix problems is a lesser evil than creating technical debt.
you create a more insidious debt when you let bugs proliferate.
Technical debt accrues in unresponsive companies because they do not commit to fixing bugs.
technical debt becomes a burden for customers and employees, because humans cannot keep track of everything that does not work. They learn to work around it — or worse, become blind to it. Software engineering at the highest levels requires incredible intellect and concentration, and if bugs are not squashed immediately, they linger, multiply, and grow.
Every interaction a customer has with a bug diminishes their experience and your lovability.
The company does not do anything. People do.
You are in business to create customer value and the only way to continue to provide more of it is to get compensated for what you do.
Hierarchies create abstraction and kill authenticity.
Give your customers the kind of experience you wish other businesses would give you and pass along some unexpected joy.
Lovability is a virtuous cycle. Sometimes it’s company first and then product and other times it’s reversed. That became obvious as I started thinking about writing this book. One does not necessarily need to come before the other, but they both need to be present for love from customers and employees to last.
Research from The University of Pennsylvania shows that employee-owned companies — even ones in which employees are minority owners — outperform their competitors.
Fit is an important component of internal lovability,
Your team is your core tribe. Lovability begins with a tribe of people who are personally invested in delivering a lovable CPE and care about responding to inquiries, solving problems, getting to know customers, and growing relationships. It takes root when a company operates with integrity and follows a vision that is meaningful to everyone. It grows when leaders share the company’s goals with employees while giving them the freedom to achieve their own goals, too. It thrives when owners and executives set clear expectations, express gratitude, and recognize people for their achievements.
Every interaction with employees either reinforces or contradicts your stated values and impacts whether people trust you to do what you say you will do. The stronger that trust, the more likely people are to invest themselves in your business and give everything they have to make it a success.
In a successful company, every employee is a leader,
Work is part of life, not separate from it. We spend 40 to 80 hours a week on the job. We should aspire to have our work be as satisfying and fulfilling as all the other parts of our lives. Lovable companies focus on sustainable happiness at work and away from it.
The employee puts in 70 percent of the effort and the employer gives 30 percent back. That is a recipe for cynicism, resentment, and turnover.
Unconditional support must start with company leaders. When employees see the company acting on the 100 + 100 = 100 principle, they will reciprocate.
According to a 2016 FlexJobs survey, 81 percent of respondents also say they would be more loyal to their employers if they had flexible work options.
Executives might fret about motivation and control, but there is a solution: Hire intrinsically motivated people, give them clear goals, and offer them the tools to be successful.
Consider that people are not just trying to be great for you. They are also working at being great for their family, friends, and communities. Help them achieve that goal and their gratitude and commitment will help your business thrive.
There is also strong evidence that remote work reduces employee stress, improves health, and increases productivity — not to mention reducing vehicle emissions because people are not commuting to an office.
