• Four courier trips by two different courier companies delivering parts between my house and the Dell Parts Depot
• Four trips by me to a company called Solectron, located North ofToronto, to which Dell subcontracts technical service work
• Six lengthy conversations with Dell India, which handles the diagnosis of technical problems for non-corporate customers
• Thirty bewildering e-mail messages trying to get answers online, only to be told to RTFM, and then that Canadian non-corporate customers cannot get service by e-mail, and must instead phone Dell India
• One infuriating conversation with Dell ‘Customer Care’, a total oxymoron, with a guy who spoke English with no accent but I have no idea where he was located (he refused to say)

The final diagnosis was that a defective $5 AC adapter shorted out not one, but two motherboards. Total cost to Dell for parts, delivery and labour: about $2,000, and even that is less than the value of my time spent trying to get the problem fixed. My computer was out of service for a week. IF I had been simply instructed to take the PC into Solectron and wait for them to check it out, I would have been in and out in 30 minutes and the cost would have been minimal.

Since I’m copying Dell on this (that is if I can actually find an address of someone in authority to send it to) rather than tell you all the things that they did wrong (and that, acting on their instruction, I did wrong), I’ll describe instead how Dell could dramatically improve their customer service processes.

But before I do, I want to be clear about something: The people working at the grassroots level at Dell and its outsourcers are all hard-working, polite people doing their best to do their job. All the fuck-ups (and they were legion) were directly caused by Dell management policies, and can only be rectified by Dell management.

OK. Here’s what Dell needs to do to change the ‘customer experience’ from ghastly, interminable nightmare to quick-and-bearable:

1. Provide single-point-of-contact for each service issue. Solectron was wonderful — far more knowledgeable than those disembodied voices at the end of the telephone. The first time I phoned, or e-mailed, with a problem, Solectron should have handled the issue. Yeah, I know Dell doesn’t trust their outsourcer not to pad the bill, especially on warrantee work. That’s one of the problems with outsourcing.
2. When you tell the customer to take/send in their computer, tell them to send it all in. I was told by Dell India to take everything out and just send in the shell. This is the lawyers talking, and more distrust of the outsourcer. This is just plain bad policy.
3. If you’re going to use people in India to do diagnostics, for pete’s sake trust them. More than half of the very long time that these telephone conversations took was dead air — while the tech service people apologetically put me repeatedly on hold to get ‘permission’ to send me a $5 part, or to check with their boss that it was OK for me to take/send in my computer for warrantee service. It’s outrageous that customers have to wait on line while employees are treated like children and second-guessed by their superiors.
4. Educate your people about the individual policies of your outsourcers. Solectron Canada has an in-by-10, out-by-5 same-day repair policy. The people at Dell didn’t know about it, and that cost me an extra day.
5. Give your outsourcers a full supply of repair parts, and let them sell parts retail as well. When the outsourcers have to requisition parts from Dell and then wait for them to come in, that unnecessarily delays customer service. If Dell had the decency to provide loaners to customers who are without their machines more than 24 hours, this might not be so bad. But they don’t, so delays just add insult to injury.
6. Just get rid of ‘Customer Care’, and provide a proper complaint department instead. The so-called Customer Care department has absolutely no authority to do anything for customers. Their sole job is to explain and apologize for Dell’s idiotic policies, including the five above. They are instructed never to give out their full names, and never to give out names, addresses or contact information of anyone higher up in Dell. In other words, these lackeys are paid to run interference, stonewall and prevent aggrieved customers, and customers who have ideas for improvement, from any contact with the people in Dell who could resolve or act on them. Staggering arrogance, disgraceful and classic corporatist contempt for customers. Every customer has the right to complain, in writing, about bad service or bad products. And in the process to copy the regulatory authorities so that if the complaints are frequent, the conduct of the company will be investigated.

Dell just reported record earnings last week. Michael Dell and his fellow executives each raked in over $3 million last year, excluding the huge value of their stock options. Meanwhile, according to Consumer Reports, about one laptop in four has a serious problem in its short shelflife — that’s about 100,000,000 units with at least one important defect. One in twelve has problems in the first month of ownership, and one in eight has a problem that makes the computer completely inoperable — that’s 25,000,000 people per year temporarily unable to do their job while the tech support people fiddle with defects in their employers’ products. Customer satisfaction ranks just around 50%, the second lowest ratings of any consumer products the magazine tracks. There is a large increase in complaints about offshored tech support in the past year.

The big seven produce about 200,000,000 new computers each year, which on average end up in landfill sites in four to five years (the fastest growing and one of the most toxic components of our garbage problem). The vast majority are made from shoddy materials in third world countries like China, Malaysia and Singapore, by workers who get paid a few dollars a day, using components that wreak environmental havoc from slipshod and reckless mining and refining techniques. Why bother making a quality product when it will be garbage so soon anyway? And if you work with Microsoft et al, you can guarantee that even if it isn’t technically obsolete by the time it falls apart, it will be unable to power the next bloated versions of the software by then anyway. I would have added a point 7 above — “build a high quality product” — but even I’m not that naive. My new AC adapter works fine, but still fits loosely in the slot at the back of the machine, and usually falls out when I lift up the machine to put it on my lap. If they built cars this sloppily we’d all be dead.

This is what happens when a company gets big, and is rewarded for ‘maximizing profit for shareholders’ instead of producing a quality product and providing quality service. It’s what happens when a company’s management becomes removed, and then isolated, from its customers. It’s what happens when an oligopoly of seven companies corners the market and offers essentially identical, mediocre, overpriced products. It’s what we get when we fail to hold corporations accountable and responsible for what they do. It’s what we get when we accept the corporatist propaganda that the unregulated ‘market’ will always produce the best possible solution and value for customers, and that government regulation is inherently bad.

We should know better. We should expect better. We deserve better.

By this analogy, the corporate model of the 1990s was the body-builder — investing heavily in food, and exercising to build muscle and strength and speed and resilience. The catchwords of the day were innovation, knowledge, human and intellectual capital. There was even talk of a ‘war for talent’, an acknowledgement that bright, creative people were so valuable that companies would fight over them. Investments with long-term value are called assets, and the corporation of the 1990s generated wealth and growth by investing in assets.

By contrast, the corporate model of this decade is the dieter — staying healthy by eating as little as possible, spot-exercising and using diuretics to reduce every visible ounce of fat, forgoing muscle and strength and speed and resilience for the appearance of health. The catchwords today are cost-management, outsourcing, offshoring, and risk management. Focus is on short-term, quarter-over-quarter bottom-line change, and the corporation of today generates wealth by eliminating costs.

Both mechanisms, carried to an extreme, are unhealthy. The body-builder can cheat and create artificial ‘assets’ with steroids. Enron did exactly that, puffing up its balance sheet with non-existent assets. The dieter’s extreme is called anorexia, and it’s an insidious and self-perpetuating disease. You lose weight, and for awhile everyone tells you you look better. So you lose more, and eventually you get obsessed with your weight, and then you reach a wall where you can’t lose any more, and it starts to affect your mind so you can’t function properly anymore. Then it gets worse.

I believe what we’re seeing in the corporate world today is corporate anorexia. I described last week the horrendous 9-step race-to-the-bottom that has driven corporations to abandon quality, sacrifice domestic workers, and gouge and sue customers in the never-ending, desperate attempt to keep in the good books of insatiably demanding shareholders. You can see the unhappiness in the faces of today’s executives, and the weakness and vulnerability of the depleted corporations that they lead in their financial statements and forecasts. Meanwhile, fawning consultants, instead of warning about the shortage of innovation, investment and long-term strategy, are making excuses for it. It’s insane, it’s unsustainable, it’s bad for consumers, workers and the economy, and it’s irresponsible. You can no more cut your way to corporate greatness than you can starve yourself to health.

The cure for corporate anorexia is as difficult as the cure for the human illness. And as with the human illness, it’s going to take a ’support group’, people beside corporate managers who will be patient and understanding as the patient at first may get sicker before they get better. That means shareholders will have to abandon their absurdly unrealistic expectations of perpetual double-digit profit growth, and recognize that the real value of the stocks they hold is probably only a quarter to a third what they’re currently valued at — a bitter pill to swallow for which greedy brokerage firms also share responsibility. It also means shareholders must learn to think, and assess their investments, over the longer term. Innovation takes time to generate a return, especially when many corporations are essentially starting from zero — much of today’s R&D expenditures are spent on incremental and copycat products that produce safe but paltry revenue improvement. Innovation also entails risk, and that means spending money on ideas that fail in order to learn and to generate the blockbuster successes that draw on those failures, which in turn means some short-term adverse earnings trends (which are currently brutally punished in the marketplace). It also means deferring profits to build back the infrastructure and ‘muscle’ that can once again start generating new revenue from new products, new channels, quantum-leap process improvements, new technologies and other true innovations.

While investors will need to be patient, the professions that advise and monitor corporations and their management — consultants, investment analysts, accountants, and government agencies — need to take the lead and lay out a roadmap back to sustainable corporate health, and explain it and ’sell it’ to managers and investors.

• Consultants need to stop apologizing for their clients’ anorexic investment in innovation, dig out the work they did a decade ago on the innovation process and its business case, and start showing executives what needs to be done and how to do it.
• Investment analysts need to develop much longer-term horizons for forecasting and evaluating public companies. The myopic focus on quarterly earnings, and the absurd demand for steady, uninterrupted profit growth short-changes companies that make long-term investments and think ahead, and needs to be replaced with longer-term perspectives on companies’ ability to generate sustainable profits and earnings growth. Some people have advocated eliminating quarterly earnings reports entirely, which would be a good start. But analysts need to develop models that will generate reliable longer-term forecasts, based on an in-depth appreciation of a company’s ability to invest intelligently and realize a superior, measured return on its investments, to create future wealth, managing risk and uncertainty as assets and not merely minimizing them as liabilities.
• Accountants need to develop new methods of assessing corporations’ longer-term health and viability, not just focus on increasingly convoluted and meaningless measures of last year’s ‘paper profit’. These measures are needed to inform investors, but more importantly they’re needed to guide management. We all need to get serious about the value of intellectual, human, customer and social capital.
• Government needs to use tax law to encourage longer-term investments in research and innovation and to encourage corporations to take calculated risks and strive for quantum improvements in products, processes and technologies. Government also needs to work in partnership with corporations to make joint investments in innovations that can produce Future Wealth both for the company and for the society as a whole. Corporations in turn need to be encouraged to ‘get out more’ and think about ways they can make the world better, and governments can and must offer incentives to do so, in return for a stake in the value of the wealth created (not just a give-away to corporations). Unfortunately, in countries like the US with near-bankrupt governments, this assistance will have to take the form of manpower and intellectual investment rather than financial incentives.

Recovering from a debilitating disease is a slow and difficult process, especially when the patient is still in denial. But before Western corporations infect the entire economy with anorexia — as the current wave of myopic downsizing, outsourcing and offshoring threatens to do — we need to recognize the illness for what it is, and start working together to nurse the patient back to health.

(The Innovation Incubator pictured above is a service of my consultancy, Meeting of Minds)

One of the ways anthropologists study and understand tribes is by listening to and gathering stories. Analogously, Snowden says, it’s important that KM people get out and spend time on the front lines really understanding what the organization’s real stories are — not the ones that appear in the mission statement or the company newsletter, which say what management wishes the company culture was, but the peer-to-peer stories that truly define the organizational culture, drive what people really believe and do and how they act, and make the company, for better and for worse, what it truly is. To gather those stories, you must be as honest as an anthropologist, not try to do it surreptitiously, because people only tell the real stories to people who have gained and earned their trust. Snowden has developed very sophisticated and rigorous processes for doing so, which he details in his ‘masterclass’ called Using Narrative in Organisational Change,, which you can now buy on CD-ROM.

In Thomas King’s book The Truth About Stories, King argues that if you want to change a culture, you need to change its story, because that’s all a culture is. I don’t know that Snowden would disagree, but he would argue, I think, that changing an organization’s real stories is not so easy. That’s why mission statements don’t work — they’re wishful thinking, myths that management would like to believe everyone buys and is motivated by, but really aren’t. If you’re in management, he says, you don’t change the stories, he says, you understand them, then you act on them, and then you make them your own, retelling them in your own way so that you show the people in the front lines of the organization that you understand the real culture of the organization (and the real problems of front-line workers). In so doing you harness the astonishing power of ‘true’ stories.

Snowden is acutely aware of the overt class distinctions in Britain that make trust, and hence collecting stories, hard to achieve. While some of us in Europe and North America might argue that our class distinctions are not as formidable barriers as they are in the UK, I think this would be a mistake. Americans, I have observed, make a great effort to pretend that class distinctions don’t exist or are permeable, by allowing everyone to use first names, for example, when in fact the hierarchies are at least as strict as they are in the UK. The only real difference is that the determinants and clues of status are subtler — a bit more tied to wealth and the circles you move in and a bit less pre-determined by heredity. But trust is still deepest peer-to-peer and extremely hard to earn and sustain between management (or their henchman consultants and head-office lackeys) and front-line people. That is perhaps why management is in a constant quandary over decentralizing — it clearly improves productivity, innovativeness, morale and work effectiveness, but it allows people that management doesn’t really trust more control and autonomy, and perhaps even allows them to develop — heaven forbid — their own organizational culture. The reality, as Snowden argues, is that management is never in charge of organizational culture, that people behave the way they do partly because they’ve learned it’s the most effective way to do their unique job and partly in their own self-interest, and not because it’s in the procedure manual or the role description or aligned with the mission statement or the strategic plan.

Once you have collected the true stories in an unbiased manner (Snowden carefully explains how to remove bias, so you don’t get ‘fed’ just what you want to hear or put your own personal ’spin’ on the story), the next step is to act on them. Stories tell management important information about what works, and, more importantly, what doesn’t work, in the organization. A lot of stories are about how people have solved problems that management hasn’t addressed, or which management has in fact created. These are often very comical or very heroic stories that not only have important messages for management, but illustrate exemplary behaviour that management may not realize it’s not rewarding, or actually inhibiting. It is critical, Snowden says, to make sure you understand the stories, and to collect and organize and ponder a lot of stories, before charging in and making changes that misconstrue the organizational culture, impede rather than help, and destroy forever the trust that the story-gatherer built up to capture this critical information.

And finally, once management has acted carefully and conscientiously on the learnings from the stories, they can actually make these stories their own, not by retelling them in the same words and context as they heard them (that would be disingenuous, a form of intellectual property theft), and not by appropriating them and making models and heroes of their protagonists (that could make the poor protagonists look like head office plants), but by conveying the same messages and lessons with stories from their own personal work context. Crafting such stories is a complex, rigorous and skillful process, and explaining this process takes up much of Snowden’s ‘masterclass’ time. There are different types of stories, like fables, myths and viruses, each with a different purpose and different construction (the course provides templates of each). Even more important is the testing of stories by telling and having others retell them until they are perfected. The impact of an executive telling employees a real story about the organization, credibly and powerfully, can be profound, even transformational. Just imagine — instead of the boss telling his/her people what to do, and evaluating them on his/her perception of their ‘performance’ in doing so, picture the boss explaining that he/she understood exactly why his/her people were doing what they were doing, and offering constructive ideas on how management could make the employee’s job easier and more effective. Management supporting the staff instead of the other way around. Hey, I know it’s a 90s idea and is out of fashion again these days, but stories, properly collected and interpreted by trained KM practitioners, can make it possible.

I hope Dave won’t object to my sharing one of his stories to illustrate this — it’s hard to write about stories without at least one example. He describes a group of public service utility workers who are subjected to a consultant’s efficiency review, which leads to them being given fewer work breaks and being given networked PCs to allow them to save time travelling into the office for paperwork between jobs. What the consultant didn’t realize (and what the careful collection of stories finally revealed) was that these workers shared vital information about how to do their jobs properly during these work breaks and office visits, and this information either couldn’t (because it’s highly contextual and needs conversation to convey effectively) or wouldn’t (because of the lack of trust of how stuff posted publicly might be used by management) be captured in databases or messages on their new PCs. So the workers found a surreptitious place for unofficial work breaks and a surreptitious place for ‘offline’ documentation of information they wanted to share with peers, ‘working around’ the consultant’s well-meaning but wrong-headed and dysfunctional change proposals. [Dave makes this into a long and wonderful story with a brilliant punch line, a resolution in which management finally learns from this mistake and turns it to astonishing advantage, and since I'm not telling a story here, I won't spoil it -- get the CD-ROM to hear the story completely and properly.] But the point is that the organizational culture is what it is, and usually for a good reason, and it’s vital to understand that culture by collecting the stories that reveal it, before you try to change processes or behaviour, or the change effort will inevitably fail, as almost every organizational change effort does.

I got out of the KM business last December, and since then I’ve toyed with the idea of becoming a new-age KM or PKM consultant, but then decided I’d had enough of this well-intentioned but endlessly-struggling discipline. But I recognize that there’s still important KM work that could and should be done. While I agree that PKM needs better tools much more than it needs process improvement consulting, I still think there is much promise in Personal Productivity Improvement as an offshoot of KM. And now Dave has convinced me that the exercise of capturing and interpreting and acting on an organization’s real stories would be worthwhile, especially for large organizations. But I think calling it Cultural Anthropology or Story-Gathering is a non-starter — try to sell CEOs something with that woolly a name these days and you’ll starve. What could we call it that would be accurate and still compelling to CEOs who don’t, yet, get what it’s all about?