I meant to throw together several links in last night’s post, but I got too sleepy. Among the links I left out was Jim McGee’s musings about institutional cluelessness:
Hypothesis one is that modern training in marketing succeeds in conditioning marketing types that markets consist of statistical abstractions that have no connection to the living, breathing human beings they interact with on a daily basis.Hypothesis two is that training in strategy ignores any notion of dynamic change or any notion that people outside the organization might behave in ways inconsistent with the assumptions in the strategic plan.
So far as I can tell, these hypotheses apply not only to marketing, but to other social scientific studies as well; the interests of aggregation trump the interests of particularity or adaptation. As a result, serious and intelligent people develop scientific generalizations about human behavior that human behavior itself tends to falsify when people behave in ways that reveal their difference from the aggregate, their responsiveness to contextual signals too fine to incorporate into a data set. One reason I appreciate blogs derives from their marked proclivity to favor the particular over the aggregate, their tendency to open onto adaptive behavior rather than to enforce expected conformity.
This is not to say that no bloggers are conformists or stick-in-the-muds; far from it! But although bloggers reflect the aggregate, homeostatic behavior that justifies quantitative research, the practice of blogging provides opportunities for particular differences to get a hearing, to make productive connections, to move in unanticipated directions.
Next link: This sure looks interesting, and seems to address issues close to what I already work on. Now, if I can just get travel funding. . . .
And Dan Gillmor shows why it isn’t just cloudy-eyed day-dreamers who believe that the internet may provide an collective endeavor that rewards cooperation more than exploitation — and that keeps me hopeful.
Posted by AKMA at September 28, 2003 04:40 PM | TrackBackThe conference you link to is slowly shaping up. If you want any additional information, feel free to contact me or Michael Delashmutt, if you have not already.
Posted by: Brad at September 28, 2003 05:12 PMThat would be a good hypothesis except for the fact that most marketing and business jobs are filled by people whose college majors were not business or marketing and don't have an MBA. This doesn't make the criticisms of the training programs invalid, but it does limit the harm from them.
I have another theory about institutional cluelessness. I noticed when I worked that I was much more sensitized to the reactions of my co-workers than that of my clients. Let's face it, co-workers are forever, clients come and go. Transfer this idea into a hospital, or a police station, or a retail store like my local Target: the workers there are going to be much more motivated to please their boss than to please me, and much more aware of what pleases their boss than what pleases me, a transient person who they may never see again.
Managers, for their part, are interested in "getting the numbers" -- retail sales, clearing hospital beds, etc, and these may or may not coincide with what the customer wants. You're on to something with the "faceless number" idea, but most customers are even less than a number. Nothing about you will get recorded unless you buy something, die, or get arrested; your mere visit, and whether you were satisfied with it, isn't recorded in anyone's statistics and isn't going to count towards anybody's bonus, profitability, or "target numbers."
This leads to a couple of ways to get better customer service: focus the employee's attention around the transaction you want to have with their organization, or, make sure you talk to more than one person, so that your interaction with the company bears on the employee's relationship to another employee -- either a peer or a supervisor.
Nice info on bloggercon!
Posted by: Fernando at October 8, 2003 12:47 PM