> I then asked the lady washing my hair about whether they consciously ask for feedback from clients, and mentioned how surprised and amazed I was that they had actually listened, discussed it and made a decision about how to improve the experience.
This is so the exception.
My experience has been that unless I'm speaking to a founder or very senior manager all suggestions and ideas for improvements disappear down a black hole.
The employee will nod and say things like "oh, that's a good idea", but will almost never pass it along to a decision maker.
If you are the decision maker in a small company, you have to create the culture for employees to speak up.
In a big company, the culture is impossible to change. A decision maker in a big company has to "spy" on the employee/customer interactions (record customer service calls for example) to find out what customers are suggesting.
"My experience has been that unless I'm speaking to a founder or very senior manager all suggestions and ideas for improvements disappear down a black hole."
Exactly my experience. There is no feedback loop. My assumptions are as follows:
1) There is no reinforcement for an employee to pass along a suggestion to upper management.
2) The idea you have has already been vetted or is not practical for cost or other reasons for the organization. So if they have tried passing along info they've found the same information passed along that they can't act upon so the feedback loop no longer exists.
3) The person who you give the suggestion to is lame and it never gets passed along because they suck (which is why they are in that front facing position and not higher up).
4) The higher ups have never worked at the lower level jobs. They haven't interacted with customers to even know what goes on or what behavior should be encouraged. Or if they have it was so long ago they simply don't think about it now to the extent that they should.
Most of the time my experience is #3 I'd have to say. I get my hair cut at the same place and passed along the fact that the confirmation emails are in to small a font. I've know the person that cuts my hair for many years. She respects me. But for some reason it's not in her personality to get into minutia like that. Otoh when I mentioned to her that the front desk acted a certain way that could directly change her income she was right on it.
I don't think I've ever read anything purporting to offer insight that was quite as banal as this.
"This was amazing to me, to realise that there are different ways things are done, and that the overlap of different methods and cultures can be so powerful."
seriously? I shudder to think that there might be grown adults who didn't already know this.
I think you're being unnecessarily harsh. Sure, that quote is not the best or most subtle summary of his own point, but in my opinion the basic insight and the clear, memorable illustration still make this a worthwhile read for plenty of people, even if not for you.
I've noticed on HN lately we're getting this wave of self-promotional self-submited blog posts whose pattern is effectively, "I'm 20 years old, the CEO/cofounder of SomeTwitterBootstrapWidgetOnRailsInHerokuIBangedOutOverAWeekend.com and let me share with you the wisdom of my vast accumulated life's experience and insight, from my struggles in an elite private US high school to my challenges overcoming too-frequent iPhone 4S use, to my ephiphany involving Mac OS X graphic design. And I'll name drop a few times. And you should follow me here, here and here."
But yeah, I tend to think that some of these "amazing insights" are chosen tongue-in-cheek, just to have an excuse to blog something and submit to HN. It's getting tiresome. I also sense a recent wave of Redditors that have signed up, based on many comments with Reddit-style comment patterns. Which I actually like on Reddit, but hoping to not see here.
This is entirely why I haven't been submitting my own content.
So, right, I sometimes discourse in HN comments on these sorts of topics. We're facing a crisis where authenticity is vanishing from the everyday life; and the traditional protector of authenticity -- religion -- is sapped away by technology, entertainment, and poor design choices. I may someday request to do a TED talk called "TED is the Problem" about this, but I can't as yet fit both an engaging discussion of the problem and what we can do about it into six minutes.
The point is, I'm 27, and I'm too young, and I'm not special. I'm working on it, practicing writing on how to be heartfelt and authentic in the world -- and the sort of crankiness at the Mistakes of Society which was once the domain of prophets and is now the domain of bloggers. But really I am only just learning to stand within it on my own. I don't even have any formal academic qualifications of any kind yet (though my Master's thesis in Physics will be presented next month). I don't have any successful projects on GitHub. I'm just little-old-me. So I refuse to submit because banality still fills my insights. The rush to be famous also, frankly, terrifies me. (Since I'm not special, I feel a great freedom to be Real.)
I guess I'm working my way around to a question which I want to ask the community. It looks something like this: "What do we do when simply talking about authentic living is an inauthentic form of life?" What do you do when the very act of saying, "here is how to Really Live" looks like a shameless attempt to gain a cult of followers because you're afraid that you're not Really Living?
Heck, I've reread this very comment a couple of times, and darned if it doesn't look like I'm committing the same error that I'm complaining about. But I really want to know. Does authenticity eat itself? Is there any room left for us to teach others to be authentic? Or is that a relic of the bygone age of gurus and rabbis, a victim of the Hollywoodification of Western culture?
What's with the downranks? Can someone provide an explanation? The guy provided a rather useless comment that comes across as insulting to most people trying to develop a start-up. Any 20 year old using rails and Heroku to try and create something new is automatically bereft of useful life experience? There's plenty of 60 years olds that despite decades of experience have more insipid, pessimistic, and unoriginal thoughts than intelligent middle school students.
I get tired of the constant pessimism on the internet. Sure, in real life there may be "pity" awards and "everyone is a winner" attitudes, but it is far more extreme in the opposite direction online. Every article I read nowadays is "you're not special", "the chance of you succeeding at anything is somewhat better than buying a lottery ticket", etc. Can anyone name ONE positive effect of these sorts of articles? They don't make me think, "Oh gee, this author's a genius!" They instead make me think some middle-aged programmer is upset he never created some grand vision he always had and wants to bring everyone else down along with him. So yeah, SomeTwitterBootstrapWidgetOnRailsInHerokuIBangedOutOverAWeekend.com may be popular, but IAmAnOldFartThatHasNothingBetterToDoThanWriteDemeaningAndPessimisticArticlesAllDay.com is just as popular.
By the way, I don't use rails, Heroku, Macs, Twitter, and iPhones, nor did I attend an elite private US high school in case you were thinking I am upset because I might fit his description.
""I'm 20 years old, the CEO/cofounder of SomeTwitterBootstrapWidgetOnRailsInHerokuIBangedOutOverAWeekend.com" ... "let me share with you the wisdom of my vast accumulated life's experience and insight, from my struggles in an elite private US high school"
Your comment really made me laugh and I thought how I wish my wife knew about HN so I could share it with her.
"these "amazing insights" are chosen tongue-in-cheek, just to have an excuse to blog something"
Maybe some are. But I think the social proof exists where someone sees that items like this are well received on HN and they go to lemm-mimick the same behavior to feel special.
really - its a good idea to be interested in someone ELSE's life?! you dont say! I've grown to expect much better content on the homepage of Hacker News - how is intimately describing the details of how a barber chair works and looks - of any consquence - especially when the moral of the story is - "try and have real conversations some times, and be interested in others"? Sure we are hackers - but not all of us are plainly socially retarded!
The interesting thing I took from it was that a real world, non-tech small business -- in some senses the polar opposite of a VC-backed startup -- still benefits from the same principles; listen to your customers, act on their feedback, etc. And every field has their new techniques and fads, not just tech; if barbers had forums, there would probably be debates between the hipster "wash sitting up" fans and the greybeard "wash lying down" advocates.
It might be an obvious point, but sometimes it's worth remembering that there's a lot of commonalities between businesses in very different industries. So talking to strangers isn't just a nice thing to do, but can actually give you some practical value.
I think this stems from the fact that a lot of people in the tech world, come from a pure tech background, and never bothered to educate themselves much with what a regular business functions like- to realize that - well - at the end of the day a business is a business - and the internet is mainly a medium - the basics will be same no matter where you are based. I'm a tech guy - but I made a conscious effort to read things occasionally that are not about tech businesses - it makes a world of a difference - in fact there are some businessy books I'd recommend to anyone - even if they arent ever interested in starting a business of their own - because they're also great life lessons hidden in those books :)
Sure, because the most socially calibrated response to this article was to use it as an opportunity to remind us all that you're one of the few of us who isn't socially retarded. Good job chief!
Interest in others, especially customers and clients, is extremely valuable.
#semi-off-topic rant:
Why are we still taking advice from Dale Carnegie in 2012?
Our salesman culture is at its end. Value cannot be created by convincing others of its existence.
True hackers cringe at any Carnegie quote, IMHO.
This reminds me of a question someone once asked Miss Manners:
Dear Miss Manners:
Don't you think that nowadays, in modern life,
the old-fashioned custom of the condolence call
is out of date?
Gentle Reader:
Why is that? Is it because people don't die
anymore, or is it because the bereaved no longer
need the comfort of their friends? Miss Manners
is always interested in hearing about how life has
been improved by modern thinking or technology.
Technology changes when and where and how we interact, but it doesn't fundamentally change why we interact and what the interactions mean.
Why are we still taking advice from Dale Carnegie in 2012?
because the way people work hasn't changed much since he wrote the book in 1936, and it's points still stand. I believe "how to win friends and influence people" is actually one of the books that Ycombinator recommends to it's companies.
Paul Graham recommends it on Why Smart People Have Bad Ideas[1]"
If you want to learn what people want, read Dale Carnegie's How to Win Friends and Influence People. [1] When a friend recommended this book, I couldn't believe he was serious. But he insisted it was good, so I read it, and he was right. It deals with the most difficult problem in human experience: how to see things from other people's point of view, instead of thinking only of yourself.
I was put off by title for a long time, before I was finally convinced that it was worth reading. How to win friends & influence people is one of the most influential books I've ever read. I try and go back and re-read it about once a year. It's just a good handbook on how to improve the quality of life for yourself and people around you.
If you're thinking of it as a way to sell people things, you're missing the good parts. Sure, I recognize that a generation or three of salesmen have misapplied random bits of the book, but that doesn't mean that the advice in it is worthless.
I agree but I myself cringed at the "true hacker" bit - it's not just "true hackers" (w/e that means) who cringe at Carnegie quotes so much as mature human beings in general.
Carnegie thought he was talking about sales, but he was really talking about tools for social engineering, which is a skill that hackers have been interested in for decades.
This is so the exception.
My experience has been that unless I'm speaking to a founder or very senior manager all suggestions and ideas for improvements disappear down a black hole.
The employee will nod and say things like "oh, that's a good idea", but will almost never pass it along to a decision maker.
If you are the decision maker in a small company, you have to create the culture for employees to speak up.
In a big company, the culture is impossible to change. A decision maker in a big company has to "spy" on the employee/customer interactions (record customer service calls for example) to find out what customers are suggesting.