Dan Appleman: Kibitzing and Commentary

Two Epic Failures – Sears Black-Friday and Motorola Cyber-Monday

Dec 2, 2013 | General, Technology

In the past 48 hours I’ve witnessed two absolutely epic failures on the part of two different ecommerce sites. Both seemed like technology failures – except that they were not. They were failures in management.
The first was when a friend of mine ordered two new appliances from Sears.com, a refrigerator and a dishwasher. The initial order on the web site went fine, with next day delivery promised and scheduled. The first sign of trouble was when my friend got a call from the installers asking them to confirm that she is in Illinois for the dishwasher delivery. She is, in fact, in California, and it’s hard to imagine how this error occurred. As a result, she cancelled the dishwasher order.
She was at home when the delivery people for the refrigerator arrived. Unfortunately, as they drove up to the house they managed to hit a pole and take down some phone lines. Their reaction – to drive away, refusing to deliver the refrigerator and promising to reschedule for the next day. The next day, they didn’t arrive.
Upon calling Sears customer service, even the customer service agent was shocked by the notes on the account record, but still couldn’t promise timely delivery.
The end result – two cancelled orders. The business went to Home Depot. Worse, my friend, for whom Sears has always been the very first stop for appliance purchases, has sworn not only to never shop at Sears again, but is literally making friends promise to never shop at Sears again.
 
The second epic failure is great cyber-Monday Moto X fiasco. By all accounts, the Moto X phone is a great phone, just overpriced. So when Motorola announced a Cyber-Monday sale pricing it comparably to the Nexus 5, they got quite a bit of traffic. They must have lacked faith in their own phone because the site was clearly not able to handle the traffic – it effectively went down immediately at the time the promotion was expected to begin.
It stayed down for hours (and is still down as I write this), only briefly becoming available for developer edition phones that quickly sold out. During this time, Motorola’s only communication were two tweets and Facebook posts tell people what they already knew – that the site was down, with no additional information as to when it will be back up.
So what was appearing on the twitter feed? Numerous posts by frustrated potential customers, many who had spent hours waiting online to purchase a phone. Posts of those who decided give up and get a different phone. Several sponsored posts by LG for their LG2 phone. And to add insult to injury, posts by Motorola about tickets to a Wired party, that nobody seemed to care about, and many found offensive.
 
You may think these were both failures in technology, but they were not. They are failures in management.
Sears had numerous opportunities to make things right for my friend. They could have apologized and expedited delivery. They could have thrown in free delivery. They could have assigned someone to solve the problem and do whatever they could to ensure customer satisfaction. They did not, and lost a customer for life. Clearly their customer service people were not empowered or motivated to provide good customer service, and that comes from the top.
Motorola had a golden opportunity to build excitement for the Moto X. They could have solved the web site problem in minutes by simply promising to honor the pricing on all orders until midnight. That would have immediately reduced the load on their site, as the load would naturally distribute itself through the day. They could have communicated what they are doing and how they were planning to handle the situation. Instead, they focused on fixing their technology instead of helping and communicating with their customers.
Websites get overloaded. Technology has glitches – we all know that. The measure of a company is how they deal with these failures and deal with their customers. This is the true failure of both Sears and Motorola in these stories, and they are entirely failures in management and culture, not failures in technology.

Specialization is for Insects

Apr 25, 2011 | General, Technology

Recently, for a variety of reasons, I’ve been asked about my background. It’s a question that can take some time to answer. To answer why, allow me to share one of my favorite quotes by Robert A. Heinlein:

Specialization is for Insects
A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, conn a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations, analyze a new problem, pitch manure, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently, die gallantly. Specialization is for insects.

I can only do about half of these myself, but I’ve always agreed with the sentiment. Back in college my advisors all explained why it is important in one’s career to specialize. But I’ve always chosen breadth over depth. My ideal has never been the specialist, but rather, the synergist – someone who can combine multiple skills and talents to come up with creative and unique solutions to problems.
Some would argue that when one tries to do many things, it becomes impossible to do any of them well. This is not true. What is true, is that if you do not specialize, it becomes impossible to be the very best at something. I know this, because for a time in my career I did specialize in a specific area of technology and became one of the best at it anywhere. Now, I can safely say that I am not the best at anything. But it does not mean I don’t do a lot of things very well.
What might Heinlein add to his list if he were writing for today’s technical society?

A human being should also be able start and run a company, speak in front of a group (any size), write a book, film and edit a video, plan an event, write and place an ad, teach a class, read or write a financial statement, manage investments, work with spreadsheets, write production quality code (on several platforms and in multiple languages), handle a TV or radio interview, mentor a kid, build a computer, wire a network, play an instrument, configure a firewall, architect a complex software system.

Ok, that might not be his list, but it is at least part of mine. It turns out that if you spend time doing a lot of different things over enough years, you can actually become surprisingly good at them. You can even find connections – ways different knowledge sets overlap – that a specialist might never see.
So if you are still early in your career, I encourage you to create your own list. Don’t limit yourself to the confines of what you are taught in school or at work, or what you think you are supposed to be learning. And please don’t limit yourself just to technology – there’s a lot more going on out there.
And if you’re visiting this site to gain some insight into my background, suffice to say – it’s a long story. I like to think that were it possible for me to meet Heinlein today, he would, after some conversation, judge me to be a human being. Coming from him, I would consider it the highest of compliments.