Were one to judge America by what they read from scanning the headlines of the magazines in the supermarket’s checkout lane, the only items of note are that Jennifer Aniston may or may not be pregnant, and that another one of the Kardashian’s was getting married—no word as to whether or not she is pregnant.  The headlines provided no indication that we are at war or that the economy has been outpaced by my daughter’s lemonade stand.

Anyway.  I have been reading Solzhenitsyn’s The Gulag Archipelago, which should be on every reading list for Genocide 101.  In the book Solzhenitsyn describes numerous offenses which could get a Russian sentenced to Stalin’s gulags.  Some estimates suggest more than sixteen million people were purged under Stalin’s regime—enough people whereby those in power had to continuously invent new offenses.

In one such description Solzhenitsyn recounts a conference for Stalin’s supporters.  Every public gathering was attended by several members of the NKVD, the bad guys.  At the conclusion of the conference its chairman called for a verbal salute to Stalin which resulted in all of those attending applauding.  The vigorous applause continued for eleven minutes because everyone was afraid to be the first to stop applauding.

To stop applauding was to show initiative, was to be an individual.  Exhausted, the chairman finally stopped clapping; immediately, so did everyone else.  The chairman, a loyal communist, was arrested.  During his interrogation the interrogator told him “Don’t ever be the first to stop applauding.”  Darwin’s natural selection; and how to grind people down with stupidity.

Nonetheless, we return to Beaver Cleaverville.

Do you ever sit in a meeting thinking it would be easier to design a revolving sliding door than to agree with or understand whatever is going on in the meeting around you?  You scan the room eying the flock of sheep each of who think of themselves as lions.  Once again, the Pickle Factory’s leader had confused motion with movement.  You scribble yourself a note using your favorite crayon—the cerulean blue, ‘I have seen our future and it needs work.’

“Well, here we are,” says the meeting’s Tartuffe-like moderator outfitted in her J C Penney imitation Vera Wang pantsuit.  For years her mind had run just fast enough to enable her thoughts to always be in the same place.

“Yeah, here is where we are,” you mumble into your cupped hand. “We have been here before and we will be here again and again.”  The person across from you seems to be humming “It’s a long way to Tipperary.”

These meetings make about as much sense to you as the game played by the Afghan Pashtun tribesmen—buzkashi—sort of like polo except instead of using a ball they use a headless goat.  (Here’s hoping no Californian makes a movie of the game and uploads it to the internet.  You had to see that coming.)  Corporate executives rampage through offices each day dragging the headless carcass of their business strategy to meeting after meeting hoping to score, and the more meetings you attend the more you feel like the goat. “Maaaa”.

“What are we supposed to accomplish today?” You ask.

“Your guess is as good as mine,” replies the moderator, her mind making its way back from its visit to the land of ultima Thule.

“No, your guess is better than mine,” you say.  “It is your meeting.”  ‘Lock the gate,’ you are thinking, ‘before the village loses its idiot.’  Everything is running behind and the team wants to make up for lost time.  Your job is to try to convince them that you cannot make up for lost time; the best you can hope for is not to lose any more.

You have always known that companies which do not tolerate dissent have a tendency to ignore dissenting information but they remember the dissenters—the first person to stop clapping. In a company lacking second sight and new ideas, the old ideas are often divided evenly among the goats.  The death spiral of silence continues—employees avoid the threat of being voted off the island refrain from making any statement that may show them having an original thought.  Showing initiative can result in your being sent to the company’s gulag.

Have you noticed that the more a firm’s competitive edge erodes, the busier the firm appears to be?  Once you have fallen through the looking glass the only way out may be for you to walk back the cat, that is travel backwards to see how it is you and the others became trapped in this house of mirrors.  The problem with that strategy is that to undertake it requires you to show initiative.

The firm’s gulag is filled with people like you.  At least when you get to the gulag there will be enough players for a rigorous game of buzkashi.

A lot of companies need to go to the doctor.  Whether the firm suffers from malaise, ADHD, or depression is not really important.  Companies do not get ill, companies do not suffer.  Their employees do, get ill that is; companies merely serve as incubators of the malaise and facilitate it.

We have all seen it.  Remember Sally?  Her office was the down the hall, third door on the left.  Crayon drawings from her granddaughter hung from her credenza.  An imitation Tiffany desk lamp with a cracked shade was to the left of her monitor, and a half-dead philodendron in a clay pot grew through the slats of the Venetian blind.

Sally was always the first one in the office.  She was the person who cleaned the coffee pot and made the first pot of the day.  She filled her ceramic mug, the same one she had used for twelve years, and using her pinkie finger like a swizzle stick stirred in two packets of artificial sweetener.

Each year Sally organized the Christmas party—at a time when companies were still allowed to call them Christmas parties—she was the person who let everyone know when it was somebody’s birthday, and she was the person who sent the flowers from the company if someone was ill or had a baby.  To many employees, Sally was the human face of the company.

Sally was let go, was downsized, was laid off, was fired.  There are numerous words for what happened, and all of them are uncomfortable.  Some guy named Bob now sits in Sally’s office.  It will never be Bob’s office.  It is as though Sally never even existed; the firm marches on without her.  Her perfume no longer drifts down the hall.  Bob let her philodendron die.  The drawings are long gone along with the imitation Tiffany lamp with the cracked shade.

If you are the first one in the office you stand in the snack room trying to figure out who is going to clean the coffee pot.  Rather than cleaning it yourself, you have learned to make do with a cup of some sort of chamomile tea that smells of lavender.  You no longer know whose birthday it is or who just had a baby.

The entire workplace changed and everybody simply went along with it.  First Sally, then Mr. Withers who worked in tax.  Two people in sales left on the same day.  It feels like there should have been a wake for them or like the survivors should be wearing black arm bands.  Everyone looks like they are either going to a funeral or are just retuning from one.  You cannot remember the last time anyone went to lunch together.  You have seen the malaise and the malaise is in you and him and her.

Companies spend millions of dollars trying to figure out how to boost earnings per share, how to improve productivity, or customer satisfaction.  They hire firms like BCG and Bain thinking maybe the answers are buried in the two hundred thousand dollar white paper they never read or in the multi-million dollar supply chain project or the hundred million dollar ERP system.  The end result—mistakes are made faster because they have been automated.  During the process of automation, more people along with their half-dead philodendrons were voted off the island.

It is as though those people never existed.  The only difference between those who never existed and those they left behind is that those left behind yet to learn that they never existed either.  In many companies the employees are no more real than laptops, and perhaps less valued.  Inventory of assets: 35 accountants, 72 programmers, one hundred and seven laptops, and six half-dead philodendrons.

One need not hire BCG or Bain to recognize the problem.  Look at the condition of the coffee pot sitting on the warm burner.  Look at the months of undelivered reports that are stacked outside of Sally’s office.  Look at the faces of those in the meeting with you or those who reluctantly came to the holiday party because they thought their boss was making a mental note of who did not attend.

Companies do not need a data warehouse or a business intelligence initiative to improve their performance.  People perform; data is nothing more than a collection of numbers.  People are what make data relevant. People are what make customers like a company or leave it.

Too many companies treat their employees as disposable and replaceable assets; like philodendrons.  Customers will never see, nor will they interact with your data warehouse.  They will assess the company based on their interactions with the employees; the receptionist, the person on the phone—the one paid the least, the one coached to smile while they talk, the one coached to get the customer off the phone as quickly as possible so they can get the next person in the queue off the phone as fast as possible.

These people did not break the company; the company broke the people.  The company created and sustained an environment of malaise and only the company can fix it.  The malaise will not improve by implementing casual Tuesdays, or by placing an employee suggestion box in the cafeteria.

Employees are a lot like customers—they are smart and they want to feel valued.  Wanna bet that there is a high correlation between customer satisfaction and employee retention?  If companies want to instill an attitude in their employees such that employees would be willing to die for the company, the first thing the company needs to do is to stop killing them.

Things that fly in the face of public opinion often leave a big welt.  Sometimes we forget that anarchism is a form of leadership led by an anarch—noblesse oblique.

There is a smartphone app that allows you to erase random people from your photos.  I have a team of programmers working on an upgrade for it that will enable me to erase random people from my life.  Imagine a farfetchual situation; sitting in a meeting and with the swipe of a finger being able to do away with the person sitting across from you—the Ron Burgundy character with the seventies hair and moustache.

Anyway.  Have you noticed that too many people view fixing business problems as rocket surgery?  These are the same people who confuse motion with movement.  These are the same people who come to work each day and work on what was happening yesterday.  Who is working on what needs to be happening tomorrow?

If your own employees view going to work and company functions with less enthusiasm than they would have going to an all-day, outdoor Celine Dion concert in the dead of winter, is it any wonder that customers are running away in droves?

Businesses begin to die the day they open their front door—ask GM.  What then is the secret sauce to remaining viable?

As different as businesses are from one another, the common factor among all businesses is one thing—customers.  Hospitals, professional services firms, manufacturers, software companies all have the same mission statement, one they do not publish—We do stuff for money.  Guess who has the money—customers.  Businesses only remain in business by being able to one thing; getting those with the money to give their money to them.

Without OPM—Other People’s Money—there is no business.  We do stuff for money.  If that is true, should not every activity, every plan, every process, and every investment somehow contribute, somehow add value to the transaction of transferring OPM from them to you?  Are activities that do not add value to that transaction wasteful, redundant, or unnecessary?

With the exception of altruistic activities, every business decision, every strategy, every acquisition, and every hire should be evaluated in terms of whether or not they increase the firm’s ability to increase the amount OPM captured.

If this idea sounds too simple, that is because it is.  There is nothing complex about focusing on the customer.  But you would never know that from scanning the internet job boards.  Companies are looking to hire for a cornucopia of customer related positions; CRM, CEM, customer for life, customer first.

What do these companies need?  Business intelligence, a data warehouse, a chief marketing officer?  Hardly.  Marketing keeps trying to figure out ‘how do we get customers to pay attention to us?’  What they should be asking is “what do we have to do to pay attention to them?”

Most company executives would not know a customer if they sat next to one on the bus or in their Mercedes.  They may know about the customer; income, age, social stratification, number of children, but they do not know why they are a customer or why they were a customer.

Customers leave all the time.  They leave to find a company that either treats them better, or one with which they do not have to interact.  Welcome to the land of customer initiated virtual RFPs.  Instead of companies deciding to whom they sell their stuff or their services, customers decide from whom they are going to buy.

CRM is dead and companies killed it.  Customers know when someone is trying to manage them and they do not like it.  Now customers are managing the sellers using tools like Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube, and they do not need multimillion dollar systems to do it.