MoviePass and the Unclothing of the Masters of the Universe

October 5, 2022 //
0

Have we really learned nothing over the past 20 years?

Last week, the SEC filed a lawsuit against former executives of the now defunct MoviePass. It alleges what has become an all too familiar tale. That MoviePass was not only a business that could never work, but that its owners knew it could never work, lied to customers, investors, and the markets, and to cap things off siphoned money away to executives through fraudulent invoices for services never delivered.

MoviePass was a service whereby movie patrons would pay $9.99 per month and see as many movies as they liked –  MoviePass would reimburse the movie theater for the price of the ticket. From the start there were those that said that this could never work. But the modern gods of data, analytics, and consumer research said otherwise – or so we were told. It turns out this was not the case. There was no research, no analytical software, and what boils down to no business plan – alleges the SEC. 

I for one am getting pretty sick of this.

Some new highflying new business comes along and promises to change the world and by implication telling us that we are doing it all wrong. And it leaves those who do not buy into the hype scratching their heads wondering what they are missing. What is rarely discussed is the reliance on venture capital. On creating market share above all else – stability and long-term viability be damned. The magicians point to Google, Uber, Amazon, Airbnb, Facebook, YouTube, PayPal, et al. But for every one of these there are hundreds or thousands of companies that don’t, that can’t, work. And some of these flameout spectacularly: Theranos, WeWork, Enron, pets.com, remember these?

I can’t help thinking about the Michael Lewis book, and its surprisingly faithful movie adaptation; “The Big Short.” The Big Short is about the housing crisis and the subsequent crash and world recession. More precisely, the book is about those who saw that the subprime housing market was fundamentally flawed if not actually fraudulent and spend most of the book trying to figure out what they are missing. As it turns out there are missing anything other than the willingness of others to delude themselves. 

Business should be about delivering goods and services to the community. The contract being that if a business delivers a fair product, at a fair price, a business should be rewarded by being profitable, paying its employees fairly, and if the owners want, being able to sell that business as a going concern in the future.

Where things have gone wrong is the idea of using a business to create a narrative. A narrative of the potential of the future. One day we will be profitable. One day we will be sustainable because our competitors will be out of business. We’ve ran the numbers and by some magic it will all work out down the road – look at all our customers. South Park highlighted this nonsense best with a group of gnomes who collect underpants. Their three-step plan being step one: collect underpants and step three: being profit, but never actually figuring out what step two, the most important step, actually is.

Once those at the top realize that their emperor has no clothes the lies start, and then in some cases, the fraud. Even if it does not lead to lies and fraud, the implications for society can be dire when we up end markets on a promise rather than a sound financial plan. Rental arbitrage for example, where properties are rented and then put up for short term rentals using services such as Airbnb, have made renting impossibly expensive in many cities for people who just want somewhere to live.

Now I like to think I’m not an idiot. I understand that some industries need scale to be able to work. That a startup might well have significant burn rate (the rate at which it spends investors cash). Visionary ideas are often not recognized. Disruption can be painful – and there are businesses that do need to be disrupted. There are businesses that leave money on the table that become opportunities for others. Finally, I also get that startup culture has changed our world, for the better, in a lot of ways.

But in turn, that does not mean that we should blindly accept the narrative of a businesses that sounds too good to be true is actually just ahead of their time when actually the much simpler explanation of them actually being too good to be true is more accurate. What does is say about our business landscape when a company, or an existing industry which is profitable is put out of existence by a company that can never be profitable except in the minds of those willing to finance the risk up until the point they can sell the risk to someone else and make boat loads of cash?

Take Uber. The poster child for the disruption of an industry that needed disrupting. A radical change to how people get around cities. However, they still have not made a profit in any meaningful way. Just how big does a company like Uber need to be in order to be profitable? Lots of people have gotten rich, lots of other companies have gone out of business as a result, lots of ethical lapses, lots of legally questionable tactics, and an internal culture so toxic it got its own TV show – the excellent Super Pumped on Showtime.

Uber makes our lives easier but customers underpaying for something always makes customers happier. And that’s the problem. I would argue, that in the long run stability is what matters for society. The jury is still out as to whether Uber drivers are happier than Taxi drivers. Uber is certainly more convenient for drivers, they tend to be more productive, and the barriers to entry have been removed (although there is a significant argument that Lyft deserves more of the credit here). The recent lawsuits about employee classification would seem to suggest that all in not well in the space. But what happens when Uber is “too big to fail?” Does it become the very industry is sought to disrupt?

In the end, while traditional business can be seen as stale and boring, without the glamor and potential riches of startup culture, they have the advantage of adding to society and generally being profitable. The masters of the universe of startup culture, and venture capitalism, at times seem to be the peddlers of nothing but vision. While there is lots of talk about changing the world, this is often at the expense of internal culture and the norms of doing business. Breaking things is not always the best way to get what you want done. Not all startups / venture capital funded enterprises are toxic cesspits and not more traditional business are sweetness and light.

What is becoming obvious, however, is that just disruption and having a good vison are not enough to achieve results in the real world and there by bring benefit to society as a whole.

Tags , , , , , , , , , , ,
Categories Business, Management, Marketing, Movies

Book Review: Social Media and Marketing for Veterinary Professionals by Caitlin DeWilde, DVM

September 17, 2022 //
1

Writing an accessible and thorough book about a complex and everchanging subject, such as social media, is a daunting prospect – particularly when your audience is a niche one such as veterinary medicine. Dr. Caitlin DeWilde; however, has done just that.

With the look and feel of a textbook, but the format a “Dummies” or “Idiots how to” book, Social Media and Marketing for Veterinary Professionals is a how to guide to all the major Social Media platforms and to all the tasks needing to be understood for someone who is not a marketing professional or even someone that interested in social media or reviews.

With chapters dedicated to each of the major platforms making up the first half of the book this can at times feel redundant; however, the thoroughness will be welcomed by those feeling out of their depth in a brand-new field and the dedication to not making assumptions is more than admirable. The second half of the book is a much more interesting read for the existing user, touching on issues such as retargeting (when online ads seem to follow you around the internet), review bombing, return on investment (ROI), and general advertising strategies both online and in print ads.

Filled with footnotes, the book is impeccably researched as would expect from someone with Dr. DeWilde’s reputation as “The Social DVM.” The index is a little thin, but it at least has one and it covers most of the things that one is likely to need to find in a hurry. What is a surprising addition is the over 80 QR Codes that link directly to an online resource for forms and other digital content. It is a little disappointing that the QR codes only take the user to a menu structure that the reader then must navigate through to get the required content. But this is a minor quibble and is a great use of a technology that is often used and abused. The fact that these online resources exist at all, and are included in the price of this volume, more than makes up for any navigation quibbles.

While I waded through all 200 odd and large format pages in three or four sittings, this is actually a book to tackle one chapter at a time, or to dip into as required. Growing your knowledge with your own experimentation and reading. While there is some building on what has come before, the chapters generally stand on their own and therefore can be used as a reference book if so desired.

Whether it be new managers suddenly saddled with a topic they know nothing about, staff members who have only ever used social media for their own personal networks, or those looking to build their own personal brands online there is now a guide for you with no translations from other industries required. To the vast majority of its readers, the subject of this book will always be a side interest to their main passion – whether it be veterinary management or veterinary medicine. We don’t often get resources geared towards niche areas within other niche areas. It is great to see this one.

Dr. DeWilde has literally written the book on using social media as a veterinary professional.

And it’s a good one.

Tags , , , , , , , , , ,
Categories Books, Business, Content Marketing, Management, Marketing, reviews, Social Media, Veterinary

Book Review: On Purpose Leadership by Dominick Quartuccio

September 3, 2022 //
0

I loved Dominick Quartuccio’s other book, Design your Future which I reviewed here. When I was sent the second edition of On Purpose Leadership I had high hopes, and in general those hopes were met – sort of.

The problem, and I’m prepared to be wrong here, is that while Design Your Future felt like a new and fresh bundle of ideas, On Purpose Leadership feels like a second bite of the same apple. That it was written before Design Your Future is an irony not lost on me.  The idea of bringing focus into your leadership world is not by any means unwelcome. As is being those lessons to your team. The issue is that it is not a different enough book for the reader to feel that they actually have read a different book.

The tools in On Purpose Leadership are great in themselves. The “drifting” and dissatisfaction of leaders, even those who have achieved significant success, is a well understood phenomenon. Most of us call this burnout. Anything that helps those in management circles is very welcome. Identifying the problems with burnout or drift is helpful as are identifying the solutions. The idea of putting oneself first, that others want to be led, and creating an environment for success are all excellent principles for addressing the problem.

This is a short and small book, with some interesting case studies, but for me the greater insights are to be gleaned from Mr. Quartuccio’s other book or reading both books in tandem.

Tags , ,
Categories Books, Business, Leadership, Management, personal development

Book and TV Review: Five Days at Memorial by Sheri Fink

August 27, 2022 //
3

The TV show on Apple TV + “Five Days at Memorial” based on the book of the same name (which in turn is based on a Pulitzer Prize winning article) is about three quarters through as I finished the book and I write this. Therefore, my criticism and praise of the show should be seen in this context. I’ll try to keep this review free of major spoilers for the TV show, but it is difficult to discuss the issues of this true story without covering some of the events involved.

“Five Days at Memorial” tells the story of what happened to the doctors and patients at Memorial Hospital during Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans when they lost power, were flooded, were abandoned by authorities, and evacuation was difficult to impossible. It is a challenging story that involves issues of disaster preparedness, corporate ownership of hospitals, death, euthanasia, quality of life, triage, race relations, rationing of care, and the potential criminal culpability of doctors for decisions made during emergency situations.

The TV show seems to be told from a particular point of view which in a story like this means taking a particular side. It paints a bleak picture of hospital ownership, which according to the book, are certainly due for criticism; however, the lack of care and forethought shown is disingenuous. It does set a similar tone, but like many “docudramas” it combines characters, invents new ones, and seems to invent situations to fit story arcs and running times. The acrimonious relationship between the staff at Memorial and the staff of the Life Care Hospice hospital, that inhabited the same building, seems to be a fiction made for TV.  It also wholesale moves one situation from a different hospital, Memorial was not the only hospital with major issues during Katrina, to Memorial for dramatic effect.

While I’m painting a picture of the show as being an unreliable narrator that is not to say that it is not entertaining and emotionally engaging. It also shows the importance of disaster preparedness and the dedication of medical professionals. Being in the veterinary profession, the plight of pets and the role they play in the movement of people during emergencies, is of particular interest. While the book does an excellent job of recognizing the issues that looking after pets in an emergency raise, the TV show pays only lip service to this, except for one brutally accurate scene in episode six.

As of episode six, the show is of limited use as a teaching tool about disaster response and medical ethics although it is a show worth watching. It does do an excellent job of showing how rumors start and get out of control but provides no solution for controlling them – unlike the book which forays into comparing how other hospitals, during Katrina, dealt with the same issues as Memorial differently or made the same mistakes.

As a teaching tool for disaster response issues, the book is remarkable. It acts as the crucible for ideas that was never able to be had in public and really needed to be. These are issues that affect us to this day. The book, written in 2013, makes this clear with hindsight as it discusses the withdrawal of ventilators from patients during a potential Influenza pandemic. While Katrina changed many things about disaster response and emergency preparedness, this book shows how much still has to change nine years after its publication and 17 years after Hurricane Katrina.

The book swings wildly between differing points of view on the more contentious issues which buffets the reader much as the characters in the book must have felt. The research is impeccable and paints an impressively detailed picture of both Memorial during Katrina and  that of public opinion, law enforcement, politicians, and the medical community in the aftermath.

It also explores in depth not only moral quandaries faced by doctors and emergency personnel, but also the ethical and legal issues that also arise. It does an extraordinary job of showing how people in decision making positions get trapped by a lack of situational awareness and become prisoners of decisions made with different information at different times.

What Five Days at Memorial shows, both in written form and to a lesser extent its TV cousin, is that heroes can be flawed and that villains can do good. What really needs to be our focus is values. Do emergencies change our values or do our values inform how we respond to emergencies? We need to discuss that, particularly considering COVID 19, and if the TV show helps that happen then it will have done a great service to our society.

However, it will be the book that informs that discussion and that we should use as a foundation. This is what great books do. They focus our minds and give us evidence to think. There are no easy answers in Five days at Memorial and a lot of questions. But what Ms. Fink (more accurately addressed as Dr. Fink since she herself is an M.D.) has done is set us a table for us to dine over and have those discussions. These issues will not go away, and as the book makes clear in the epilogue, we are doomed to make the same mistakes, with the same justifications, or go down potentially dangerous roads, if we do not have frank discussions about how we as a society actually feel about ethical and moral quandaries that often arise in the most trying and difficult of times.

Tags , , , , , , , ,
Categories Books, Business, COVID19, disaster preparedness, Leadership, Management, Movies, Politics, Race

Book Review: The Art of Gathering by Priya Parker

August 6, 2022 //
0

Meetings, events, networking and sometimes lectures or talks, get a bad wrap these days. The fear of imposing or worse having a bad event that people can’t wait to get out of is a real dilemma for anyone who gathers people together.

In Ms. Parker’s excellent book, The Art of Gathering: How We Meet and Why it Matters, she lays out why meetings and gatherings of people fail and how make a real difference in your own events whether they be for business or in your personal life.

One of the first items that Ms. Parker addresses is that we rarely define and share what the purpose of a meeting is, and to make matter worse when we do, we often confuse category with purpose. For example, what is the purpose of birthday party, wedding, dinner party, or baby shower? If thoughts immediately turn to celebrate getting one year older, getting married, food with friends, or a celebration of pregnancy; Ms. Parker points out that these are the categories of the event not the purpose. To think about why we have a birthday party on a particular year allows us to create something with more meaning at a moment in time.

In addition, The Art of Gathering shows that people meet in particular forms as a type of ritual. We continue with the ritual form because it can show belonging to a group or hierarchy – or just because change is hard. However, the purpose of the meeting may no longer fit the ritual, or the purpose may have drifted over time. Baby showers, for example, were originally held with the purpose of helping to prepare new parents to become a family. While in the past, looking after children was the sole responsibility of women, and so a woman only baby shower made sense; today most parents share parenting duties. Does is therefore still make sense to make a baby shower a female only affair? Likewise does a newsroom need to hold a single mid-morning meeting to decide on what will be printed on tomorrow’s front page, when articles can be published online as soon as they are written and will have a potentially higher readership? In a time before the internet, the front page of a newspaper could often be the make or break or a reporter’s career or a newspaper’s business – those days have gone, but the rituals often continue.  

Gatherings with purpose take a stand. This will not be liked by everyone; however, rarely are gatherings where everyone is happy enthralling. The more focused and narrow the purpose, the more passion it is likely to provoke. When we stop thinking about “what” and start thinking about “why” we start to find the beliefs and values that create purpose. Working backward from an outcome can also help figure out whether a meeting should even happen in the first place.

The Art of Gathering covers purpose, preparation, invitations, content, the host’s role, starting and endings, and why all of these matter. We can’t complaint about lackluster meetings if we are not prepared to think about the why and how we are meeting. And since we so rarely think about these things Ms. Parker’s book is breath of fresh air and an invaluable management tool.

Categories Uncategorized

Book Review: The Revenge of Analog by David Sax

June 3, 2022 //
0

I have a pitch for the reissue or follow up to “The Revenge of Analog” for Mr. Sax. He should call it “The Revenge of the Revenge of Analog.” If two years of a global pandemic have taught us nothing us, and I believe it has taught us a great deal, it is that the primary thesis of Mr. Sax’s excellent 2016 book is even more right than I think even he believed possible.

Real things matter.

Digital has transformed our world and for most people this is a good thing. Digital makes life easier and more productive. It allows easy access to information like never before and it allows for an ease of communication that is straight out of science fiction. The author’s point is not that digital is necessarily a bad thing, but that to live in a solely digital only world is a cold and sterile existence that can be lacking in creativity and positive unintended, consequences.

Using examples such as books, vinyl records, music production, movies, education, paper notebooks, the design process, and games, “The Revenge of Analog” makes the case that with digital it is all to easy to fit ideas to fit processes and so by extension limit those ideas.  There is also a drive, often by those who are older and want to be seen as innovative and “with it,” to focus on the technology and then try to apply it to problems rather than start with the problem and see what solutions might work- technological or otherwise. Indeed, one of the more intriguing facts in the book is that it is often those who have grown up with digital that are the ones that see the most value in analog records, books, and notebooks for example. There is value in inconveniences if the experience is more authentic.

 The wider point is that technology and digital media are just tools. Badly implemented tools, or tools that are adopted without first understanding the problem, are destined to fail. However, what is less well understood is that when tools are easy to use and do solve multiple issues, they can also reduce the value of an experience in the mind of the participant. To embrace analog items in our digital world is not a repudiation of that world – it is an acknowledgment of its shortcomings and a possible solution to them. Digital processes in the creative world can lead to homogeneity – there is nothing more creatively open than a blank piece of paper.

One of the realizations from the pandemic that almost everyone can agree on, was that meetings over zoom, for example, are not a good replacement for meetings in person. That while some people liked working from home, others found it isolating and lacking in comradery. The pandemic almost universally proved that remote education is fraught with difficulties for both students and teachers. A class being together with a teacher has value that far exceeds the delivery of knowledge.

If there was any doubt after reading Mr. Sax’s excellent book, the pandemic removed it all.

So Mr. Sax, The Revenge of the Revenge of Analog?

Just after finishing the first draft of this review, I saw that David Sax has a new book coming out – “The Future is Analog.” So much for “The Revenge of the Revenge of Analog.”

Tags , , , , , , ,
Categories Books, COVID19, I.T., Leadership, Social Media

Book Review: Measure What Matters by John Doerr

May 7, 2022 //
0

Ever have books that hang around in your book pile for way longer than would seem rational?

The book’s premise was obviously interesting enough to find its way into the pile in the first place, but repeatably fails to be interesting enough to make it the next step and actually be read. I don’t know how long Measure What Matters has been in my possession, but it has been a while.

Of course, as is often the case when finally getting around to reading a long overdue book, one thinks the book is great. I suspect my reticence is to do with the books subject matter: goal setting. I have a complicated relationship with goal setting, or more precisely with goal setting as it is usually described to people in the business world. I’ve often found that systems of formulaic goal setting overly burdensome and lacking in coherent structure. However, how can one not be intrigued by a book that describes Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) as soulless numbers!

Measure What Matters touts a system of Objectives and Key Results (OKRs) which are used in multiple different formats by companies such as Google, The Gates Foundation, and Bono’s One Charity. What soon becomes clear, however, is that what Mr. Doer is proposing is a culture shift in how companies measure performance and direction. It also has the acceptance that with OKRs there will be failure. In fact, if there is not failure, team members are probably not setting ambitious enough goals. What also resonates is the duality of goals for leaders of teams, but with the teams themselves setting their own goals on how the team can get there. A mix of top down and bottom-up objectives.

The culture shift in Measure What Matters is pervasive, extending into employee reviews and relationships between teams, supervisors, and leaders. The book is also honest about implementation and change management – steps often overlooked in this kind of book. Filled with examples for what works and does not, Measure What Matters is almost a spiritual partner to that most revered of business books (well by me anyway) Traction by Gino Wickman. (I have never reviewed Traction for my site due to being just too intimidated by it.)

A great example of “honest” OKRs rather than the “soulless” KPIs is the example given of an objective of reducing office cleaning costs by 25%. At its most basic, the simple measure of whether the costs went down by 25% could mean that the goal was achieved. However, Mr. Doerr not only suggests ways of measuring the quality of cleaning, but also suggests that to be a true OKR the person responsible for this OKR should have their office in the area being cleaned – thereby being directly affected by the key results of the objective.

This is not a book of cold and soulless analytics. This is a book that reminds us that there is more to business objectives than math. That the way to achieve greatness is to have greatness as the objective. To be motivated by failure as much as by possibility.

For once, I am excited about a book about goal setting and goal setting in general. Having a road map helps, but understanding that emotion and intuition also have their place helps more. Measure what matters is a bible text for the modern manager.

Tags , , , , , ,
Categories Books, Business, Leadership, Management, personal development, Staff Meeting Resources

Book Review: Happy at Any Cost by Kristen Grind & Katherine Sayre

April 16, 2022 //
0
cover "Happy at any cost"

“The Revolutionary Vision and Fatal Quest of Zappos CEO Tony Hsiesh,” is the subtitle.

This book, however, is a tragedy.

Happy at Any Cost is the story of on undoubted visionary leader; their quest for not just their own happiness, but also for the happiness of others. This in turn leads to a lot of good, a lot of success, but ultimately exploitation, substance abuse, and the death of a beloved figure in the world of business and Las Vegas.

Unlike Aimee Groth’s 2017 book “The Kingdom of Happiness” which I reviewed here, and is an inside look at the Las Vegas “Downtown Project” and by extension Zappos, this is the telling of the story of Tony’s last two years as he struggled with mental illness and substance abuse issues put in the wider context of the rest of his life. This is also a cautionary tale for entrepreneurs and for those who can be swept up in vision without dealing with, or caring to deal with, the nuts-and-bolts details that make visions work.

Employing an interesting dual timeline structure, Ms. Grind and Ms. Sayre present an exhaustively researched, and deeply unnerving, tale of Tony Hsieh’s rise and fall. His rise as a tech entrepreneur at Link Exchange, then becoming CEO of what turned into Zappos, his evangelism for company culture with his book Delivering Happiness, and becoming a leading Las Vegas civic figure with the Downtown Project. His fall with the problems with the Downtown Project, issues with Zappos’s adoption of a new company structure called Holocracy, his move to Park City, Utah, his “retirement” from Zappos, and his struggles with alcohol, drugs, and mental illness. It also tells the story of Tony’s last days up to and including his death after a house fire in Connecticut.

Happy at Any Cost very much frames Tony’s life story as a coping mechanism for mental health issues and has the worthy goal of pointing out that if there was not the social stigma long associated with mental health issues perhaps it would have been easier for those around him to help. It is interesting to note, that a reading of Tony’s book Delivering Happiness, particularly in retrospect, leaves the reader with the feeling that the focus on fun and party atmosphere that permeates the book could easily be a coping mechanism for other issues. Where it perhaps most accurately hits the mark is in its exploration that having happiness as a goal in itself as ultimately self-defeating and that happiness should be a by-product of whatever drives you.

I find Tony a fascinating figure to discuss. Someone with gargantuan visions which he often left others to implement. Sometimes that worked and other times it failed. By definition, someone’s legacy is based on what marks they leave behind. Tony was someone who talked about culture and put culture at the front of their business model when nobody, literally nobody, was talking about company culture. For all its flaws, Tony helped rejuvenate Downtown Las Vegas and make it a vibrant hub of new business. However, Tony unbelievably left no will making the unraveling of his estate a legal nightmare for his family and associates. Given his investments in Las Vegas real estate, and businesses, this is likely to be a story with many subsequent chapters and potential consequences.

“A failure of leadership due to a lack of management” was my conclusion to the story told in “The Kingdom of Happiness.” It is hard not to look at “Happy at Any Cost” and come to the same conclusion.

Tony was someone who was in serious trouble near the end of his life. Many of those around him tried to help, some undoubtedly exacerbated the situation, and some just bought into that this was the vision. This book, in some ways, is a celebration of what Tony was able to achieve, which makes the ultimate tragedy even more real and poignant.

It is a haunting tale of what happens someone creates their own world where they no longer hear the world “no.”  

Tags , , , , , , , , ,
Categories Books, Business, Leadership, Management

The Karen Effect – The Fall of Reviews

April 9, 2022 //
2

Does anyone care about reviews anymore?

Well – yes we should, however, even amongst those of us who care about reviews, we quite possibly care a bit less.

Why?

As the always insightful Mike Blumenthal says in this article about the fall in user and review growth on Yelp and this article on the fall in reviews on Google Local, things are not looking great for the review space. It cannot all be blamed on COVID-19. The trends of reduced new user numbers and a significant slowing in the rate of new reviews was well in place before the pandemic.

So, what is going on?

I believe what we are seeing is what I have dubbed “The Karen Effect.” The origins of the term “Karen,” meaning in rough terms a middle-aged white woman demanding to speak to the manager, being overly officious / unreasonable, or just being downright racist, is not exactly known. However, the term Karen exploded in usage during 2020 at the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic and the summer of the Black Lives Matter protests after the killing of George Floyd. Karen today could mean anyone, of any gender, losing their temper over or generally overreacting to a perceived wrong.  

This rise in petty unreasonableness and overly bad behavior, towards those working in service industries or retail, during the pandemic has in turn given rise to another phenomenon: the sharing of this behavior online. I wrote about my fears about clients trying to leverage live streams and social platforms in an aggressive manner in this 2016 post. While this weaponizing of the documenting of interactions with a business has been successfully attempted, it has also backfired.

The first time I became aware of the potential for this tide to turn was after seeing this 2014 viral video:

This is an all too familiar scene that could have happened yesterday rather than eight years ago. A customer, believing they have been wronged, exacting their revenge on social media and in doing so exposes their own failings and unreasonableness. It also highlights the extremes to which employees will go to try and address customer complaints and keep their cool while doing so.

This is the Karren Effect.

What does this have to do with reviews?

Videos of front-line employees being polite, following their business’s policies, and trying to help a customer are not great social capital. In fact, they are boring. Watching a customer “lose their sh*t” over a perceived wrong is great social capital and in turn adds a measure of retribution for someone being punished for bad behavior. This, of course, is not always the case. Some businesses screw up, act badly, and can be badly represented by employees. But since the rise of the Karen, and the flooding of social media showing just how bad things can be, would you trust a stranger’s opinions about a business? Particularly a negative opinion? The embrace of video on social media, and everyone having a high definition video camera in their pocket, or more likely in their hand, has meant that good content can be generated from bad behavior – although generally not for the person behaving badly.

Likewise, influencer marketing and the dubious reputation that it has in many circles has also not helped the review space. While many social media influencers go to great lengths to inform their followers as to when posts are a paid promotion and thereby stay on the right side of the law, others do not and also try to leverage their “influence” into free products and services.

Influencers who try to abuse their Influence has also fallen foul of “The Karen Effect.” Most social media users have little tolerance for influencers those who abuse their power – a power given to the influencer by those same social media users – and businesses despise them. This leads us back to reviews. If influencers, who by definition are known to their audience, are not be trusted with their opinions due to undisclosed commercial relationships, how can review platform users trust complete strangers – regardless of whether the review is good or bad?

The Karen Effect is the loss of trust in the opinions of strangers.

One can hope that the Karen Effect leads to a resurgence of the Better Business Bureau (BBB) or gives rise to another organization of a similar ilk. I have always bemoaned that most of the complaints about Yelp and Google Local were effectively dealt with by the BBB and that it was businesses, by not supporting them, that led to their diminished standing today and the rise of Yelp and Google Local.

It seems that people are looking for someone to trust online. They are finding other users online lacking. It will be interesting to see what fills the void.

Tags , , , , , , , , , ,
Categories Business, COVID19, Customer Service, reviews, Social Media

The Missing I.T. Skill

April 2, 2022 //
0

For all the time that I have been managing veterinary hospitals I have also had oversight responsibility for the computers and technological systems (I.T.) employed at those hospitals. Coming from a technical background in the entertainment lighting world, this just seemed to be a natural extension of my existing skill sets – the things that make me good (hopefully) at what I do.

One of the things that I have always been passionate about is data security. I’ve written articles and had them published on the subject. I made sure my hospitals had proper backup procedures, good anti-virus protection, updates ran regularly, and great firewalls.  I’d always felt that there is always an element of carelessness, or lack of understanding of the risks, when hearing about those that have fallen foul of hardware failures or ransomware. Nothing in my years of experience did anything to dissuade me from this impression.

Until one of my hospitals was hacked.

The story starts first thing on a Sunday morning when I get a call from the office manager on site saying that they are unable to get their practice management software up and running. I try logging in remotely and get nowhere so I make the five-minute drive to take a look. What meets me on the screen of the server is a message that runs my blood cold and leads to feeling of despair sinking into my stomach.

“Your System has been hacked. All of your data has been encrypted. To release your, data payment must be made via Bitcoin….”

We have backups, we have a replication server, we’ll be fine.

We were not.

The ransomware attack had been possible due to one the connections that we used to allow doctors to write up their medical records from home. In addition, there had been an old user with administrator rights that had somehow been overlooked and led to the hacker being able to access the server. The height of irony was that we were in the process of moving over to a more secure system to allow remote access when this attack took place. If we had been a couple of weeks further along this attack would not have been possible as it unfolded.

Our server was encrypted, our replication server was encrypted, our daily incremental backup drive was encrypted, our weekly full backup drive was encrypted, and several workstations were also encrypted. We had no internet, no practice management software, and so no access to medical records, schedule, email, or files.

Paying was not an option on general principles.

Our last hope was offsite cloud backup.

This backup had been fully protected and within 24 hours we were able to have remote access to this so we could access schedule and records.

We tried for three days to download the massive database onto a drive to allow us to restore the server. After three days of failure, in part cause by file size, an inopportune Windows automatic update, and network / computer stability issues, our cloud backup vendor arranged for a physical drive to be sent to us. Once the drive arrived (at 8PM at night several days later) the instructions were unclear as to how to access what had been sent to us and the cloud backup provider did not have anyone on staff late at night who knew how the drive had been prepared. We finally restored functionality to most of the hospital on the seventh day after the attack.

Lessons learned

Our I.T. vendor had, for the most part, been great. They understood the position we were in and I, in turn, protected them from the owners and staff who were rightly upset and frustrated. I had several moments of frustration myself , particularly when it came to getting a physical drive from the cloud backup vendor which turned into a comedy of errors. But both sides were able to work on the problem and maintain a professional atmosphere. We’ve had a long relationship with our I.T. support vendor and they have been very good to us in turn. They understood our need to go with other suppliers for things such as phone systems and servers but were still being prepared to help support those items and the overall health of our networks. Without that long term relationship, and atmosphere of mutual trust, things could have been very difficult indeed.

We used our barely functioning network to try and download a huge amount of data. We should have done this offsite, at one of our other locations. We should have also immediately requested a physical drive to be sent to us. I offered multiple times to get on plane and courier the drive personally, however, this was turned down but did add to the pressure on the cloud backup company to get their act together.

Try to be calm. After all was said the done the total loss of business for the week that we were unable to either take care of that week or squeeze into the following week was estimated at 4% – well within the normal variation from week to week. Not even close to the amount to bother our insurance company with. Clients will understand. Deal with what you can, improvise, and communicate as much as possible with everyone.

The major lesson that I learned, however, was one of humility. Anything can he hacked. All it takes is time and a willingness to spend that time. There was, in the heat of the moment, a number of times when the blame game reared its head. I made the decision to not allow that from anyone, feeling that if there was any blame it was the wrong time to even talk about it. What I ultimately realized that what is important was not in preventing a hack, but our resilience if the face of that attack. It is not a matter of if, but when. We lost no data – I consider that a great victory. We lost little to no business – I also consider that a victory. We also came out the other side of the ransomware attack with a much stronger awareness and agreement on the importance of cyber security.

Humility is not an excuse, or a reason to not try everything possible to prevent issues. But it helps with the realization that all systems are vulnerable. That the very things that make I.T. systems so great and useful, are also the things that can lead to vulnerabilities.

Humility is directly related to resilience. When bad things happen what is important is that we can recover from them as quickly and easily as possible- not to pretend that there are no bad things or that we are immune to them.

Tags , , , , , , , , , , , , ,
Categories I.T., Management
« Older Entries
Newer Entries »
%d bloggers like this: