Apple has charged the credit card for my wife’s new Mac, so I thought I’d see what’s going on. Here’s the message from Apple’s Order Status page at 6 am EST Sunday morning:
We’re sorry, but our Order Status services are extremely busy right now. Please try again later.
All I can figure is that jubilant Packers fans are still up ordering new Macs.
Congratulations to Amazon, again: For the 8th straight year, they’ve led the Holiday E-retail Customer Satisfaction Survey conducted by Forsee. Amid all the usual blather about the range of products they sell and how well their website works, the fundamental point got overlooked. Amazon’s competitors have had eight years (let that sink in for a second) to expand their range of products and fix any problems with their web sites, and still Amazon rules. And eight years for a scrappy new competitor to emerge. Continue reading
Some significant revisions to the second half of the paper, pointing out that what we often call “decisions” are actually actions, and like any actions, we need to develop Fingerspitzengefühl for them.
Download from the Articles page.
The first non-Apple device I’ve bought in more than 5 years.
With the Kindle Fire HD (7″), though, I’m going to diversify my ecosystem. Partly this is because I’m getting tired of reading about Apple filing yet one more lawsuit in an effort to limit consumer choice or trying yet again to fix prices. And partly it’s because for what I need, the Fire looks like a better device.
We already have 2 iPhones and an iPad, but I also have a lot of existing Kindle content (from a gift of an original Kindle years ago) and an Amazon Prime account. The Fire’s form factor seems ideal: If I need more computing power, I can carry my MacBook (yes, I’ll be replacing our two Macs next year with two more Macs). Otherwise the Kindle should be more portable than a laptop but better for Web surfing and movie watching than the iPhones.
I’ll let you know.
A couple of weeks ago, I mentioned a piece by Hiroshi Mikitani on why customers buy. The simple answer: Because it’s fun. Another way to say this is that because it engages them emotionally, and a good way to do that is by exploiting the cheng / chi pattern.
Today, Shauna Mei tackles the same theme in a post on Quartz (an Atlantic magazine site):
Luxury retailers have made a science out of engaging customers’ emotions, particularly vanity, in their brick-and-mortars, but have been slow to capture the effect online. Mei notes:
Websites for luxury brands function mostly as digital catalogs, imparting very little context and even less of the emotion that is traditionally a major part of a luxury brand’s appeal. … The approach thus far has been misguided. The answer may actually lie in using the Internet as more than just another platform to display merchandise. In order to be successful, we must think of e-commerce as an outlet for strategic brand creativity, with the ultimate goal of engaging customers emotionally.
Not easy, certainly, but as Mei shows, possible. If you make achieving cheng / chi your Schwerpunkt, then you can initiate your observe-orient-hypothesis-test loops to create ways to do it.
Of course not. There are still reasons to buy from overseas suppliers but as Boeing and now GE are learning, there are many reasons for bringing manufacturing back together with sales and R&D. This does not mean they they have to be co-located, by the way.
In case you haven’t read it, Charles Fishman lays out the argument, using GE as an example, in the December issue of The Atlantic. One caveat: To get maximum benefit, your company needs to be deep into lean.
Indeed, for many companies, it would make more sense to outsource the design function and keep manufacturing in-house (and in-country), sort of a reverse Apple. Speaking of which, is Apple’s domestic assembly of part of its Mac production a sign that they recognize the benefits of insourcing or a PR stunt?
Amazing why so few businesses understand it.
Check out his post on LinkedIn: Why Do People Buy?
He went through a classic deep understanding exercise — and again it’s astounding how few people, even those in sales and marketing have done this — and came up with:
I came to this conclusion: People buy for a variety of reasons – some reasons are unique to a single individual. But a common reason – an answer to the question “why” that stretches across global markets, across demographics, across product categories, is this: people buy things is because it is fun.
You can now explain Apple: Insanely great is fun. Showing off insanely great to your friends is fun. Hope they don’t forget that — by the way, it includes the shopping experience, not just the product.
As Boyd insisted, actions flow from orientation, so if your orientation isn’t a good model of unfolding reality (i.e., better than your competitions’ and for that matter, your customers’), don’t bother with the rest of your business strategy.
Or as Mikitani summarized it:
See things the way they really are. Ask “why” over and over again.
Chris Matyszczyk has a nice piece over on Cnet: What would Apple have to do to ruin your relationship?
One answer is: Be seen as violating what you consider as the moral bond between you & Apple, and Matyszczyk lists several possibilities:
That’s a quote from a recent LinkedIn piece, “The Two Types of Speed” by Hiroshi Mikitani, CEO of Rakuten, Inc.
You could say that Hiroshi has summarized Boyd’s Conceptual Spiral in one sentence (talk about a big squeeze!) Another quote from the blog should be familiar to anyone who’s dabbled in Lean: “Fast means you must eliminate waste.” In fact, he insists that you must have a continually functioning process for eliminating waste because waste always comes back (another formulation of the Second Law, by the way).
He’s also making the point that an organization generally doesn’t act more quickly — reduce the time between order and delivery, for example, or between concept and first production — by doing what it’s doing now, just doing it faster. In fact, that would probably create even more waste.
Check out Hiroshi’s piece. What do you think about Hiroshi’s definition of “agility”?
[Rakuten is the largest e-commerce site in Japan and one of the largest in the world. It owns Buy.com and just invested $50 million in Pintrest.]
Boyd didn’t like to leave anything to chance. While he recognized that uncertainty is the atmosphere of conflict, it affects all sides, like the weather. Unlike the weather, however, you don’t have to take what nature gives you; you can pump up uncertainty in the other side. Boyd’s suggestion for doing this was to conduct experiments on your opponents, learn from these experiments more rapidly than they do, and then use your updated orientation to better shape and adapt to the situation. By doing this, you can throw more novelty at them than they can handle, while at the same time handling theirs with aplomb. Continue reading
Slightly East of New 
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