The Integrative Stream

Business Networking

It’s a few months old, but I just came across a neat post from Businesspundit: How To Network: For Introverts.

I like Rob’s insights, particularly since we share a similar background. Some people reach out automatically. I think the magic trick, for them, is that they’re utterly unafraid that somebody will say no. I’d say it’s equally important to respect the other guy’s (or girl’s) judgment - if they don’t have time for lunch, they’ll tell you. Invitations are not impositions, or at least they shouldn’t be.

Here’s another thought - connections exist to be used, and there’s nothing wrong with using them on someone else’s behalf.

Control What Can Be Controlled

Case study of the day: sometimes it all works out. Airlines, hotels and travel web sites are not always known for stellar customer service, but sometimes a company just gets it right.

For example, hotels in London. I’ve had a checkered history with my London hotel reservations. I used PriceLine once for a two day stay, and ended up with a nice rate at a nice hotel in Kensington. The hotel seemed to have regretted giving me that rate, since they decided I was only there for one night and, while I was at dinner, cleaned out my room and rented it to somebody else. I discovered this at about 2:00 in the morning. If I hadn’t printed the receipt I might not have gotten into the one remaining room.

My cousin is getting married in London in May, so my entire extended family is converging on the city. My mother took on the task of coordinating hotel reservations, and booked a nice hotel through LondonTown, a London tourism web site that has a better selection of hotels available than Expedia and its ilk. However, through a (family) miscommunication, my reservation ended up a day short. I noticed this today, and emailed the hotel, who told me I had to go through the web site.

Here’s where it got interesting. I looked back at the confirmation email, and it had the name of a real person, rather than “reservations” or some other generic name. So I sent her a note, attaching the original confirmation and asking if they could extend it a day. They are in London, I am in Washington. Regardless, within five minutes my cell phone rang, showing a +44 country code in caller ID, and a very polite fellow named Paul, who had all of the information about my reservation available, was on the line from the web site. He gave me my options (including realizing that, due to rate changes, I could now add breakfast to my reservation for about two dollars), and even called the hotel back to see if they could extend my reservation at the original rate. It ended up being a few dollars more expensive, but I got the impression he’d tried to save me as much as possible, and since the original reservation was in January a rise of a few dollars is acceptable. Within a few minutes everything was resolved.

I found the whole interaction fascinating. They called me from England! That’s service, particularly compared with my prior experience of getting kicked out of my hotel room. I may not end up liking the hotel, but I like the booking process, and I’ll use them next time I need a London hotel room. As a bonus for LondonTown, I’m writing it up here.

There are a couple of generalizable thoughts here:

Control what you can. Booking web sites don’t have any control over the hotel. I haven’t used PriceLine since the Kensington Incident, and not because of anything they did - the hotel miskeyed the fax. This has happened to me before, with an Expedia booking, but since it was detected at checkin and the hotel made good on it, I wasn’t put to any trouble and it didn’t stop me from using Expedia in the future. In that case, the Holiday Inn saved Expedia’s reputation. In the PriceLine case, I never did get my razor back.

Even if they can’t control the hotel, the web sites can control the reservation experience, and that’s what LondonTown did well. They were proactive; I’ve never, in my life, gotten a call from an Internet based company to resolve an issue. The closest was a call to confirm my credit card number. I’ve been told to call (and to wait on hold), but I have never been called until now.

Personalize the experience. LondonTown gave me a name to connect with. It wasn’t the person who actually called me back, but if made me feel like I was interacting with a person who could help me, rather than a faceless call center. Given how quickly the callback occurred, I wouldn’t be in the least surprised if everything that goes to that address is automatically parsed out, and there isnt’ anybody with that name at the company at all. It doesn’t matter; mission accomplished anyway.

Use technology to change the offering. I’m old enough (barely) that I remember when calling internationally was a pretty big deal. That’s not true anymore, and it’s just as inexpensive for the call center in the UK to call me in the US as it is to call a fellow Briton, give or take a few pence. Most of it is probably routed over the Internet. The low costs mean that the authority to pick up and call someone in the US can sit at the lowest level of the organization. And getting that call, for an American trying to book a room in London, is a real time saver.

Think about the whole package. If I hadn’t needed to rebook, I wouldn’t have any particular memory of this company. I didn’t even make the original reservation myself. The “high touch” rebooking was a chance to make a sale (after all, I was adding an additional night, and London hotels aren’t cheap), but it was also a chance to cement future sales. I’ll use them again. This kind of thing is even pretty easy to measure - just look at the repeat customer rates among people who have interacted with the call center and those who haven’t. If they’re not collecting these metrics, they should be.

TaskSwitchXP

Download of the Day: TaskSwitchXP (Windows)

Via LifeHacker.

This is a great utility; I installed it about fifteen minutes ago and already don’t know what I did without it. One of the great things about Mac OS X (and, apparently, Windows Vista) is toolset that allows you to easily deal with multiple windows. This tiny little utility gets you most of the way there without shelling out for the Windows upgrade (and the new computer that goes with it). When you hit Alt-Tab on keyboard rather than the unhelpful array of Windows icons you get little thumbnails and full window titles. If you have a lot of windows open, you can use the mouse to quickly select from the list. It seems to do some other things too, which I haven’t played with yet.

Drop out, Start Up, or Live Your Life

Just spotted a great post analyzing an important question for young entrepreneurs: Should you quit school because you’re brilliant?

The post resonated with me because it was a decision that I had to face when I was (not so much) younger. I joined the team for my first startup, Invantage, when I was still in high school, just as the “Internet Economy” was starting to heat up. The temptation to take a year off, or just start working full time, was pretty strong, but I never seriously considered it–and I still appreciate that our CEO never pushed me to, although it certainly would have been in his best interest if I had. So I balanced work with school, and sometimes both came out behind, but I managed to have a pretty great college experience and the company worked ok in the end.

Which isn’t to say that I don’t occasionally wish that I’d been able to floor it, entrepreneurially, back in ‘99. But I don’t think my failure to do so (or, rather, my success in sticking with formal education) closed any doors. That may be the other crucial insight: there are rarely any unique moments in history. The bubble was a chance for a small number of people, with the right skills and in the right places at the right times, to make a lot of money. But it wasn’t a unique opportunity.

Update, 1:10 EST: When this post showed up in my feed-reader I noticed how pompous the first line sounds. “Because you’re brilliant” is the title of the original post. I didn’t face the decision because I was brilliant, but because the opportunity was there. Hopefully whatever intrinsic capabilities I may possess had something to do with that, of course.

The 18 Mistakes That Kill Startups

I’m a little behind on some web sites, so I just saw Paul Graham’s The 18 Mistakes That Kill Startups, even though he posted it back in October. Oh well.

I’m going to quote number six, because I’ve seen this happen so many times that it’s worth emphasizing - and it’s not something that most other discussions of startup companies manage to pay attention to.

6. Hiring Bad Programmers

I forgot to include this in the early versions of the list, because nearly all the founders I know are programmers. This is not a serious problem for them. They might accidentally hire someone bad, but it’s not going to kill the company. In a pinch they can do whatever’s required themselves.

But when I think about what killed most of the startups in the e-commerce business back in the 90s, it was bad programmers. A lot of those companies were started by business guys who thought the way startups worked was that you had some clever idea and then hired programmers to implement it. That’s actually much harder than it sounds—almost impossibly hard in fact—because business guys can’t tell which are the good programmers. They don’t even get a shot at the best ones, because no one really good wants a job implementing the vision of a business guy.

In practice what happens is that the business guys choose people they think are good programmers (it says here on his resume that he’s a Microsoft Certified Developer) but who aren’t. Then they’re mystified to find that their startup lumbers along like a World War II bomber while their competitors scream past like jet fighters. This kind of startup is in the same position as a big company, but without the advantages.

So how do you pick good programmers if you’re not a programmer? I don’t think there’s an answer. I was about to say you’d have to find a good programmer to help you hire people. But if you can’t recognize good programmers, how would you even do that?