"...keeping you great" Ten Minutes with the Growth Guy
HEADLINES: (Blocking and Tackling)
Google's "Buganizer" system is a model for tracking and resolving customer issues -- Google is such a well run company, period! Take five minutes and scan this June 3 NY Times article.
Single point of accountability; Big white board; Daily reporting; Weekly meetings; Pattern Recognition -- plus three person teams -- it's all so basic -- key points from Google article under DETAILS below.
Just ask and get pre-paid -- Brad Mullahy, CEO of Raleigh, NC-based Synaptis, a leading supplier of web-based training, shared his cash story with our Rockefeller Habits workshop audience Tuesday in Atlanta. Shortly after purchasing the firm, and needing cash to fuel a turnaround, he approached AOL and asked if they would be willing to pre-pay their contract if he provided a 3% discount. The AOL manager was happy to save the 3% and since the contract was already in the budget, it wasn't a problem prepaying. Just ask!!!
Hand out recruiting cards -- Peter Hanan, Principal with Rain Maker Consulting, noted that a high growth software firm in Ireland created recruitment cards for all their employees to hand out to anyone they thought would be a great fit for their company. Getting everyone involved relieves pressure off the HR/recruiting personnel in the company.
500 feet of pipe vs. 1500 feet of pipe -- Bob Lobos, founder of Baton Rouge-based Wolf Creek Business Growth Institute, shared how one of his clients, that is a leader in cleaning sewer pipe (someone has to do it!), recently started the daily huddle among their six senior executives, complete with metrics. Within days, the benefits of the daily huddle surfaced when the team learned that one team had cleaned 1500 feet of pipe the previous day while another team only cleaned 500 feet. The exec team immediately went out into the field to find out what was happening and corrected the situation. Noted the CEO "this kind of discrepancy would have normally been buried within monthly production numbers and likely never discovered."
Australia October 9 -- 11 -- I'll be heading back down under for three one-day Rockefeller Habits workshops -- Brisbane Oct 9; Melbourne Oct 10; Sydney Oct 11. Go to www.goforgrowth.com.au for workshop and registration information.
DETAILS:
- Blocking and Tackling -- As mentioned above, Google's process for gathering customer input and acting on it to improve their product is elegant in its simplicity -- and doesn't require a bunch of elaborate technology.
- Single Point of Accountability -- Amit Singhal, 39 year-old native of India, is the Google Fellow (i.e. one of the elite engineers) who is the designated "master of the ranking algorithms" that serve as the heart and soul of Google's search engine capability.
- Big White Board -- next to Singhal's desk, complaints from users about searches that went awry, are scrawled on the board along with graphs and various mathematical algorithms
- All Google Employees Contribute -- 100 search problems per day get submitted by Google's 10,000 employees using their "Buganizer" system -- which are routed to Singhal, someone chosen for his passion for "treasuring and cherishing every single broken query."
- Pattern Recognition -- Singhal keeps juggling the complaints on his white board, prioritizing them if they keep coming back. This provides a clean visual without a lot of fancy technology that lets Singhal see patterns quickly.
- Small Ad Hoc Team -- one of the recurring items was "freshness" (the article describes what this means) so Singhal assembled a team of three engineers to figure out how to solve -- and Google likes teams of three so they can move fast.
- Weekly Gathering -- Udi Manber, who oversees Google's entire search-quality group, hosts a weekly meeting that then reviews all major projects where Singhal presented the freshness issue and was able to take advantage of the collective intelligence of a broader group of top search engineers
- Give it a Name -- and like all Google initiatives, the freshness challenge was given a name: QDF for "query deserves freshness."
- 1,000 Little Tunings -- the key to Google maintaining their lead is this daily, weekly, feedback and focus process.