#Things Swimming in My Head
Over Labor Day Weekend, Twitter user @VXDS flew off his handle (so sorry) and made history. British Airways had lost his bag amd had been negligent in responding. Without the following to start a viral outcry over poor customer service, @XVDS did what any rational person would: he bought a promoted tweet and lamabasted the company for customer services.
The incident brings to mind a famous study in behavioral economics. In an experiment published in the Journal of Psychology, researchers gave people the chance to penalize teammates in a game for ruining the chance for the team to make money. Invariably, they did. The research flies in the face of classical economic assumption about Homo Economicus, ie the purely self-interested man. People are willing to spend their own capital in order to enforce social norms.
One prerequisite for a healthy city neighborhood, writes Jane Jacobs, is the presence of public spaces and commerce where people can congregate on different schedules, and for multiple uses (ie a well-designed park or bustling sidewalk). In contrast, Wall Street is "miserable...its eating places and clothing shops are pitifully inadequate for the demands on them." 50 years later, Amazon's same-day delivery and Seamless' delivery for corporate accounts seemed to have solved those problems.
But is Wall Street a better neighborhood for it? Jacobs' lament of Wall Street is as apt now as then. Software is getting good at solving easy problems. One can only hope this makes the harder problems easier, too.
It is the beginning of the Internet Era, and today's business models for high-growth startups are built by rapidly accumulating users. Necessarily, today's entrepreneurs aren't technologists, they are marketers and designers. While it's important to scale a business with technology, the key to scaling in the first place is brand. What matters in the early stages of a company isn't the technology, it's the brand and the users that brand attracts.
A classic paradox posed by Plutarch: A ship is replaced piece by piece on a voyage such that no piece of wood that started the journey returns home. Is it still the same ship? In organizations with high turnover rates, constant churn leaves behind legacy processes that are maintained by existing employees, sometimes without purpose and often without thought.
We often make the mistake of assuming that a company's culture is defined simply by its workplace and its happy hours. That's the equivalent of judging a firm's technology by its homepage. In fact, the culture stack is defined by several key areas spanning the lifetime of an employee: hiring practice, employee onboarding, monetary compensation, career growth, business process, marketing & PR, and finally social engagement.