My CEO Life

I am busy preparing for our twice a year full staff get together.  For each of the last 6 years, i have flown in all staff from around the country to participate in 3 days of bonding, learning, sharing and well the occasional bit of drinking.

The first day is for the leadership team and the management team to get sync’d.  We talk about how the business has performed over the last 6 months, what our targets are for the next 6 months and what the key issues are in the business.

The second day we break into different streams - tech, sales, etc.  Each stream has lots of education and training and bonding.

The last day is for everyone.  We get together look at the business, give away prizes, have external speakers, share highs and lows, and set targets and aspirations for the next 6 months or a year.

It is alot of work, late nights, way too much drinking and bonding, but at the end of the day well worth it.  People from around the country get to know each other and form great relationships.  However, a word for the feint hearted - not cheap $200k each time!

Have you ever wanted to leap across a table and throttle someone?  Well i had that experience yesterday - the desire, not the action.

I was called to a meeting for the launch of a new internal project.  Now i was aware of the project as it is closely tied to a recent acquisition we had made.  However, what i was not prepared for was the statement of the obvious.

Prior to the meeting, documents were distributed - volumes of them.  Now i don’t know about you, but i don’t have time to read every thing that comes across my desk so i tend to ignore long email or send a polite response back asking for a summary.

So at this kick off meeting, i was expecting to be taken through the scope of the project and to have them seek my sign off so that they could get on with it.  No, they decided to waste my time and that of other senior managers on telling us how they are going to run the project.  What a waste of my and other senior management’s time.

The bottom line is that i trust them to run a project (otherwise i would not have appointed them) and what i am interested is in knowing what you are going to do, when it will be delivered, how you are going to keep me in the loop and finally HOW MUCH it will cost!

So we had a clash of cultures - the project management / external company justifying their existence versus the high speed, rapid progress, small company that believes in see forgiveness don’t beg permission.

The way we addressed it is to call the meeting to a premature halt, explain that we all know about project management and then gave them 30 min to prepare a more focused, problem solving meeting that will actually be valuable to the business.

I cant see the point in politely sitting there and then walking out and saying - what was that all about.  Carpe diem - sieze the day!

Ok - how many of you out there have an ipod and use iTunes?  If you are like me, you would be a heavy user of both, especially for podcasts, and you would be absolutely pissed at this point in time.  Why?  For the simple reason that Apple got it wrong and released a new version of iTunes (version 7) and it didn’t work.  In fact, it wouldn’t even open on my machine and it got to the point where i had to delete it, re-install version 6, install version 7 and it didn’t work again and so on …

Eventually they got it right with release 7.0.1 but by then alot of brand damage had been done.  More to the point, they are shooting them selves in the foot especially when Microsoft is launching the Zune and you can pre-order it today.  Perhaps i will give it a try.

But the above rant is not my real point.  The real point is that when you create a walled garden, the expectations for customer service go through the roof.

So what is a walled garden.  Well, quite simply, it is a proprietary system or process that means you are reliant on one provider (or a small group of providers).  AOL is the classic example of a walled garden as is Apple.

Therefore, if i am to sign up with you for a proprietary system, you have to get it right and you have to make sure that the customer service is second to none.  The reason is simple, i just cant plug and play third party software or hardware to get around the problem. I am reliant on one provider.  For iTunes, the problem gets harder as they have their own DRM system (DRM = Digital Rights Management) and therefore i cant even transfer my songs to another player.

All in all this is what they call a great suff up … if only they had taken the time to test is properly.

Now … how much is the new Microsoft Zune again?