Jeffrey RosterHow many of us have dreamed of coming up with a solution for the pesky “Reply All” problem. Don’t know what that is? Lucky you. Here’s the scenario: Someone gets an email and because they think their answer is: A. either so witty or B. executing a CYA flanking maneuver they hit “Reply All” with their answer. Thus forcing everyone in the company to deal with their response whether they need to or not. This is a bad situation only made worse by having to perform an archaeological dig through layers of responses dating back to the Mesozoic Period to see if in any way possible your are involved. Ultimately this is a monumental time sink for all.
I’ve often asked my friends at Microsoft if there can’t be something built into Outlook that only allows a person to do this so many times before an alarm goes off. Yes I know there are times when it’s important to do this. I spent the afternoon of 9/11stuck in a hotel room in Boston going through the many hundreds of emails bouncing around Gartner. It was quite an experience to read the thoughts of analysts on 4 continents from many different religions or no religion coming to grips with that tragedy. Serious business indeed. I’ve also spend a morning reading the very funny responses to an analyst that thought it would be a kick to send an “all company” email asking for responses to the question, “you know you’ve traveled to much when?” By the time I booted up on the west coast I had a hundred or so responses and new ones were coming in about once a minute. Yes many were hysterically funny but it was not a productivity boom that day. Fortunately being in the publishing business we were able to turn that little miscue into a booklet. My favorite answer being:
Your room key won’t work in the door. The person inside comes to the door in a bathrobe, thinking it is room service. Suddenly, you realize that the room number is the one from the LAST hotel.
I actually lived that one personally. I just thought I was getting old. Glad to know other analysts have had similar experiences.
So what did a clever retailer do to solve this problem you might ask? Take a gander at the below link
And lest you assume that the folks at Zappos don’t have fun with everyone that enters into their domain, think again. Take a peek at the link to see how they treat a poor hapless analyst that stumbled into a tour of their facility. I’ve been on a lot of store and facility tours ranging from the utterly fascinating to boring beyond belief. But I’ve never seen anything like my site visit at Zappos. As we moved from department to department we were cheered. To be quite honest it was startling at first. Then the light bulb goes off and you begin to understand the culture.
So why do I find this so fascinating? There’s clearly a passion about the business with these folks that you don’t see all that often anymore. The reason they can do this kind of thing and most of us in our organizations can’t is because they recruit people that have a similar passion. That kind of over the top behavior is what’s expected. You know it going in and you respond to it when it happens. We as consumers are drawn to that kind of energy. They prove the point you can be high performance but have high fun. It would be my wish that more retail executives would look for opportunities to instill fun and enthusiasm back into their businesses in 2009. Perhaps a return to the roots of retail is what’s called for to fix the ills now affecting our industry.
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