May 2015

Episode #46 - Free-Rider Friday

May 29th was “Free-Rider Friday.” Most of our shows are “topic” driven, where we dive deep into one subject. Free-Rider Fridays are designed to be “event” driven—whatever issues are in the news that we (or you) find worthy of commentary.

In economics, free riding means reaping the benefits from the actions of others and consequently refusing to bear the full costs of those actions. This means Ed and Ron will free ride off of the news, and each other, with no advanced knowledge of the events either will bring up.

We also had a special guest: John Chisholm, senior fellow at VeraSage Institute, and recovering lawyer.

John Chisholm’s Biography

My life changed when he met the late—and great—Paul O’Byrne in Sydney in 2005.

Until then, I had always struggled with the concept of billing clients in 6 minute increments even though, as managing partner and CEO of large law firms in Australia, this was for all intents and purposes a pretty successful business model which I embraced.

When I left mainstream law firms in 2004 and set up my consultancy practice I was determined not to price my services by time (perhaps I was just too lazy/too old to record time in my own consulting practice?) but really had no idea how I would price myself. That is until I met Paul.

The rest as they say is history. Initially through Paul and then Ron Baker and the whole VeraSage family I have become an advocate, zealot and many of my colleagues would say a terrorist for the destruction of time based billing in professional firms in Australasia.

Viva la revolution!

John’s Background

John Chisholm was previously a partner and managing partner at Maddocks, chief executive of Middletons and executive chairman Melbourne PKF Chartered Accountants.

John established his own consultancy, John Chisholm Consulting, in 2005 to share his expertise and experience with professional service firms in Australia, New Zealand and worldwide who look to maximize their business performance. He now speaks, trains, facilitates, coaches and consults.

As a practicing lawyer, managing partner and chief executive John was well placed to experience first hand both the benefits but also the drawbacks of the profession pricing their services solely by reference to time. He now works with many professional service firms (and their clients) around Australasia assisting them with both a mindset change, and the practical implementation and application of, moving towards value based pricing.

John has studied and works with professional firms in UK, US and Australia who no longer bill their clients in 6-minute increments of time. He has written numerous articles on value pricing and has presented and spoken to over a 1000 lawyers and accountants in the past three years on this topic. He is regularly invited as a keynote or guest speaker at legal industry events including for the Law Council of Australia, Australian Legal Practice Management Association, Law Institute of Victoria, Law Society of Queensland, CPA Australia and Leo Cussen Institute.

Free-Rider Friday Topics Discussed

An article on the Results Only Working Environment from Personnel Today, May 22, 2015, by Vicki Arnstein, and how the idea is starting to take root in the UK.

Daimler showed off its autonomous lorry, in the first state to license it on public roads: Nevada. Daimler believes that self-driving commercial vehicles will come to market before driverless cars. Here’s a CBS news story and a video from Daimler.

Schumpeter’s Creative Destruction Applies to Taxi Medallions. Excellent article on how taxi medallions are losing their value due to the competition from Uber, etc.

Episode #45 - Interview with Brad Smit

Brad Smith, CXO, Sage

Brad Smith, CXO, Sage

Ed and Ron interviewed Brad Smith, Global EVP of Customer Experience at Sage.

Brad is responsible for developing all aspects of the Sage customer experience, from product design to the invoice experience and all points in between. As Ed said by way of introduction, "What Joe Pine theorizes, Brad Smith materializes."

He has nearly 20 years of leadership in web consumer, enterprise software, and communication service provider industries. Brad is on the board of the Consortium for Service Innovation and loves talking about customer experience. "My job is to deliver what other people promise." 

We had a wide-ranging discussion on customer service, customer experience, airline loyalty programs, the Sage RV Tour, Sage City, and the experiment at Zappos with Holacracy.

You can read three of Brad’s articles on customer experience.

You won’t want to miss this interview. Brad is a fount of wisdom when it comes to instilling customer loyalty, value, and service into your organization.

Additional resources:

Ed's Blog post on his visit to Zappos.

Episode #44 - Public Choice Theory

Winston Churchill said,

Democracy is the worst form of government, except all those other forms that have been tried from time to time.

Public Choice Theory describes the extension of analysis to the political alternatives to markets. Many commentators talk about "market failure," but far fewer ever mention government failure. Public choice theory sheds light on how government employees face incentives as much as employees in the private markets, and how these incentives can create bad policies, costly regulations, and other negative consequences.

Identify a problem to be “solved” by government. But there are no solutions, only tradeoffs.

Nobel laureate James Buchanan and Gordon Tullock, founders Public Choice Economics, insisted:

Any formula for government intervention that ignores political realities is unscientific.

Gordon Tullock wrote that public choice was “politics without romance.”

Economists are often blamed for having a religious faith in markets, but no one has pointed out more market failures than economists.

We underestimate how well markets work and over-estimate how well democracy works.

Four Insights from Public Choice Economics

1. Special-interest-group effect (concentrated benefits, diffused costs)

  • Sugar program cost each American $9.24 yet it raised each sugar grower’s annual income by an average of $617,000 in 2012

2. Rational ignorance—your vote won’t determine election

  • Put more time into developing your job skills, or a major purchase then into an election. You’ll only get small amount of benefits, or pay small amount of costs

3. Rent-seeking—lobbyists wasteful to society, redistribution transfers slices of the pie, does nothing to increase pie

4. Bundling effect—Example: shopping supermarket

  • Imagine having to pick between two shopping carts pre-filled with food. You could look, put not move items from one cart to the other

  • Outside observers cannot know that you chose that Cart A despite its offering of diapers and dog food rather than because of them

  • We can say nothing about the majority’s preferences for any individual policy

  • So politicians don’t know why they won (or why opponents lost)

The Myth of the Rational Voter by Bryan Caplan

Why are voters predictably irrational?

H.L. Mencken: “Democracy is a pathetic belief in the collective wisdom of individual ignorance.”

Voters are asked to do brain surgery and they can’t pass basic anatomy.

Democracy is a relatively inferior way of making decisions: marriage, career, state to live, home to buy, etc.

Most voters are worse than ignorant, they are irrational, according to Caplan. He claims democracy fails because it does what voters want—a built-in externality.

Wisdom of the crowds doesn’t work with voting because of systematic errors

Most voters have four biases:

  1. Antimarket bias––tendency to underestimate the benefits of the market mechanism

  1. Antiforeign bias––a tendency to underestimate the economic benefits of interaction with foreigners

  • Incessant worry about the “trade deficit”

  • Ideological purity is free! Severe biases can’t exist in betting or prediction markets, but can in voters

  1. Make-work bias––a tendency to underestimate the economic benefits of conserving labor

  • China excavating land with shovels; Milton friedman asks, why not tractors? Need jobs. Oh, then use spoons

  • We wouldn’t think this way in our household, where we love labor saving devices

  • You don’t worry how to spend the hours you save buying a washing machine

  • Saving labor is progress and responsible for our ever-increasing standard of living!

  • Illusion that employment, not production, is the measure of prosperity

  1. Pessimistic bias––a tendency to overestimate the severity of economic problems and underestimate the recent past, present, and future performance of the economy.

  • Pessimism sells: Club of Rome, peak oil, Malthus, etc.

  • As you do better, your children have to do even better, optimism declines

Analogy between voting and shopping flawed. You don’t “buy” policies with votes.

Democracy let’s people with severe biases continue to participate at no extra cost.

If people are rational consumers and irrational voters, it’s a good idea to rely more on markets and less on politics.

Other Books and Resources

An unhealthy Alliance video

Episode #43 - Interview with Dan Ariely

Dan-Ariely.jpg

Ed and I were honored to have the opportunity to speak with Dan Ariely, James B. Duke Professor of Psychology & Behavioral Economics at Duke University, and New York Times best-selling author of four books. Dan has had a major influence on the thinking of both of us in economic matters, especially in the areas of pricing, decision making, and choice architecture.

We asked Dan

  • Burning Man, which he tries to attend every year. He explains it's a "gift economy," not a barter economy.

  • Whether or not he was comfortable with the term "behavioral economics," given that Austrian economist Ludwig von Mises argued that animals behave, but humans act (with a purpose or objective in mind), and they also learn. Dan uses the term "Judgment and Decision Making (JDM) in his first book, Predictably Irrational.

  • David Friedman says economists assume rationality because it's useful and can predict human behavior about 50% of the time. Dan disputes the 50% figure, and explains why we need to explain failure points and mistakes in human decision making.

  • The "placebo effect" (Latin for “I shall please"). The term originally explained 14th century sham mourners. People get a larger placebo effect when the price of a pill was communicated to be higher than average.

  • Do the questions on the hospital in-take forms influence a patient's ability to get well quicker?

  • The Economist subscription example Dan uses in his book and TED talk, with two and three choices, respectively. Is the "decoy" (or "dominated") option manipulative?

  • Does Dan believe in the Subjective Theory of Value? He does say that value will never be perfectly objective, but we can do better at measuring it than we do now.

  • The backwards bicycle video. Dan hadn't seen it, but discusses the power of habits and how hard they are to change.

  • In The Upside of Irrationality, Dan writes about the concept of "Hedonic adaption": we humans adapt far more quickly than we think.

  • He also wrote in that book that "the market for single people is the most egregious market failure in Western society." How has Internet dating has influenced this failure? Dan explains since it's based on searchable and quantifiable aspects of people (height, income, etc.) it may not be very predictable of compatibility, like trying to understand how a cookie will taste by reading the ingredients. Humans are not algorithms.

  • Now that you've studied all of this irrationality, are you more rational? He focuses on habits, traps, and tries to establish rules (e.g., no eating bread).

  • In The Honest Truth About Dishonesty Dan explains "the fudge factor": people's ability to cheat, up to a point where they can still feel good about their own sense of integrity. He discussed how signing your tax return first would reduce cheating, and gave empirical evidence of how this worked with odometer mileage declarations for auto insurance (people declared 15% more miles when signing the form first).

  • His latest book, due out May 19th, Irrationally Yours, based on his popular Wall Street Journal advice column, and a new movie on dishonesty coming out May 22.

We highly recommend all of Dan's books, blog, advice column and research.

Dan's Books

Episode #42 - Best Business Books - May 2015

Thousands of business books are published each year. Some are worthless, others have merit, fewer still have lasting value, but a handful possess the ability to transform your business (and possibly, your life).

Yet with today’s busy and demanding schedules, do you feel you don’t devote enough time to reading and absorbing new ideas? Then this show is for you. Ed and Ron will explore the best business books ever written, selecting their favorite all-time business books.

Ed and Ron discussed four of their all-time favorite business books. Stay tuned for further shows in this series where we will share more of our favorites.

Minding the Store, Stanley Marcus, 1974

Ron believes Stanley Marcus is the true grandfather of the customer service revolution. This is the single best book ever written on customer service, and the autobiography of a remarkable man who had a remarkable life.

“There is never a good sale for Neiman Marcus unless it’s a good buy for the customer.” Herbert Marcus, 1926, to Stanley Marcus on his first day working at the store.

Neiman Marcus (NM) was established (September 8, 1907) as a result of the bad judgment of its founders, Herbert Marcus, his younger sister, Carrie Marcus Neiman, and her husband, Al Neiman.

They established a sales promotion business in Atlanta, GA, and received two offers to sell out, one for $25,000 and the other for an exclusive franchise for the state of Missouri or Kansas for a relatively new product called Coca-Cola.

Stanley Marcus’s innovations:

  • First weekly fashion shows/bridal fashion shows

  • His and Her Xmas Gifts

  • Christmas Catalog

  • Fortnight (themes) to overcome October bus lag!

  • Personalized gift wrapping

Stanley took over store in 1950, after death of his father.

Women’s Wear Daily hung “the melancholy Plato of retailing” label on him.

People liked what they didn’t find at NM. Stanley wrote:

It’s up to management to decide, not whether the article will sell, but whether it should be sold.

Another excellent book on Marcus is Stanley Marcus: The Relentless Reign of a Merchant Prince, by Thomas E. Alexander.

Stanley wrote four books during his lifetime but this one of the only ones I've seen written about him by an insider, Thomas E. Alexander, who met Stanley in 1965 and served nearly 20 years as his Executive Vice President of Marketing.

This was an incredibly demanding job, since Marcus was the consummate marketer, and many previous men failed at in this role.

Alexander gives you an insider's view of the famous Neiman Marcus Fortnights, a Dallas institution until they were discontinued in 1986.

Many of the pictures come from the Stanley Marcus Collection at South Methodist University, DeGolyer Library.

You'll read about the first out-of-state store in Bal Harbour, Florida, opened in January 1971, and also the controversy of the San Francisco store opening at Union Square. Herb Caen was an incredible critic of Neiman Marcus opening there, and the irony was that Stanely Marcus was farther to the left than Caen ever dreamed of being.

One very amusing anecdote about Marcus are the two things that exceeded his expectations, which were very high. One was Sophia Loren, and the other was the Bohemian Grove in San Francisco.

Another is the story of Marcus's falling out with the world famous architect, Frank Lloyd Wright. Upon hiring another architect and Wright seeing his drawings, sends Marcus a letter and under his signature writes, "Looks to me like you dropped big money to pick up small change."

In the final chapter, "Saying Goodbye," Alexander tells of Marcus, age 95, reflecting: "Without change, there is no challenge, and without challenge there is only the status quo but no progress." Wise words.

Other books by Stanley Marcus

The Halo Effect…and the Eight Other Business Delusions That Deceive Managers, Phil Rosenzweig

Ed’s Summary:

  • Tom Peters gets destroyed.

  • Jim Collins gets destroyed.

Halo Effect: the tendency to look at a company’s overall performance and make attributions about its culture, leadership, value, and more.

Business books: scientific rigor or storytelling?

Do business questions lend to scientific investigations? Rosenzweig says, in many instances, yes. He believes there’s no need to veer between extremes: humanities and science.

We have no satisfactory theory of effective leadership that is independent of performance

Does strong financial performance creates employee satisfaction, or vice versa?

We yearn to find out how we can avoid the seemingly inevitable fate of decline and death.

Nothing recedes like success.

The book really debunks the work of Jim Collins, especially his book Good to Great.

Physics envy: we can predict the movement of planets, so why not the performance of companies?

Collins book offered a picture of business somewhere between Norman Rockwell and Mister Rogers

Profit Beyond Measure: Extraordinary Results through Attention to Work and People, H. Thomas Johnson and Anders Broms, 2000

In 1987, as mentioned before, H. Thomas Johnson and Robert S. Kaplan published Relevance Lost: The Rise and Fall of Management Accounting, which was named in 1997 one of the 14 most influential management books to appear in the first 75 years of Harvard Business Review’s history.

The book is credited with launching the activity-based costing revolution. Yet, these two thinkers have gone down very different paths since then: Kaplan going on to pioneering work in the field of performance measurement, creating the Balanced Scorecard, and Johnson moving on to what he calls “management by means.”

In fact, they are now feuding with each other, and have not spoken in years.

Johnson’s book Profit Beyond Measure is a seminal work, although not yet fully developed. And while I have severe misgivings about some of his environmental rants in the book, when he profiles Toyota and Scania—the latter now owned by Volvo—as two manufacturers that do not have a standard cost accounting system, he is on firm ground.

It is hard to argue with results, and Toyota is one of the most respected companies in the world, and has produced one of the highest-quality products at the lowest cost in the industry for years, dating back to 1926 when it started as a weaving machinery manufacturer.

As Glenn Uminger, a financial controller at Toyota Motor Manufacturing-Kentucky (TMM-K)—which Johnson studies in depth in his book—since 1988, says, “TMM-K has never had a standard cost system to track operating costs, and we probably never will.”

So how do they do it? How can a manufacturing company run without a standard cost accounting system? Toyota understands price drives costs, not the other way around. Here is how Johnson explains it in his book, Profit Beyond Measure:

None of these comments is meant to imply that Toyota does not have accounting and production planning information systems. Of course it does. Toyota has a comprehensive array of information systems, accounting and otherwise, with which to plan, in advance of operations, and to report results of operations after the fact. But information from such systems is not allowed to influence operational decisions.

Toyota management discharges its responsibility for costs not by taking arbitrary steps to manipulate operations, but largely in the vehicle planning stage. During the design stage, long before the first penny has been committed to making a vehicle, Toyota has always placed enormous importance on setting and achieving cost targets. To do so, over the years Toyota has developed a famous technique for target costing. Simply stated, target cost is the maximum cost the company can afford to incur to produce and sell a vehicle and still earn a required profit at the price customers are expected to pay.

Johnson goes on to explain his theory that Toyota operates under “management by means” rather than “management by results.” It is an interesting viewpoint because it views the organization as a living system, based on interdependent relationships, and those are nearly impossible to quantify.

He notes Dr. Edward Deming’s observation that over 97 percent of the events that affect a company’s results are not measurable, while less than 3 percent of what influences final results can be measured:

Because cost and profit are not objects, but are properties that emerge from relationships, quantitative measures can only describe them, they cannot explain them. Quantitative measures, unlike art, music, or the stories and myths that humans fashion with words, cannot convey understanding of the multidimensional patterns that shape the relationships from which results, such as cost and profit, emerge in a living system.

If Andrew Carnegie said, “Watch the costs and the profits will take care of themselves,” Johnson is saying, “Nurture the means. The results will take care of themselves.” Kaplan would say, “Measure the result and the means will take care of themselves,” and I say, “Watch your value, and the profits will take care of themselves.”

Turning to One Another: Simple Conversations to Restore Hope to the Future, Margaret Wheatly, 2009

Ed shared the ten questions from this book:

  • Do I feel a vocation to be fully human?

  • What is my faith in the future?

  • What do I believe about others?

  • What am I willing to notice about my world?

  • When have I experienced good listening?

  • Am I willing to reclaim time to think?

  • What is the relationship I want with the earth?

  • What is my unique contribution to the whole?

  • When have I experienced working for the common good?

  • When do I experience the sacred?