I Write Letters to CEOs
johnwdefeo.com
johnwdefeo.com
Mainly I complained how terrible the store experience was. Whereas Apple stores feel like an avant-garde museum Gamestops feel like the inside of a Chuck E. Cheese circa 1987 -- games everywhere, no real organization, no marketing of individual titles or genres, it's just grabbag nonsense of plastic container after plastic container.
Days after I sent the letter, his secretary called me and scheduled a phone call for the next day.
Paul could not have been nicer. He said he appreciated the criticism and offered to have his district manager tour a location with me so I could share in greater depth my concerns.
I declined (too busy) but was obviously taken aback with his generosity and patience.
Sadly, he passed away in March of this year from brain cancer at the very young age of 53.
He had no real incentive to respond to an angry letter from a random customer, but he went way out of his way to at least listen to me (even if the stores haven't improved much).
R.I.P. Paul.
i didn't know paul before he died (on my birthday even), but because of your comment, i researched his story
i work in sales, so rejection and silence are very frequent. it is rare for anyone to connect through writing or through voice, and quite often i feel like nobody desires to brainstorm and have fun thinking about ideas in a low pressure environment
i wish you well in life and i hope that we can both live every day to the fullest-- because not all of us have the luxury of time
Thanks for writing Jim :)
I never get this: you start a conversation and then when the other party engages you disengage. The CEO's response was about as good as you could wish for and would give an opportunity to influence the view of the company at the level where it matters. That's what you intend when you write to the CEO, you do that because they are the people that can make stuff happen, including putting you in touch with the right person further down the org, not because you want to chat with the CEO. They're just a very visible access point and writing them a letter is a way of saying 'this really matters to me'.
If you are too busy to follow up on such a response then maybe you could save everybody time by not writing the letter in the first place.
Also: Paul may simply not have been the right person to be there because he's too far removed from the floor to make a meaningful contribution. Delegation to the right person in the org is the hallmark of a good manager.
The company should be grateful for whatever "help" (or pointers to improvement) they can get - even if it's just a letter - way more preferable than a rant on the phone or slating on social media.
I mean it's a bit as if you complained in a restaurant that the food was bad and they proposed that you visited the kitchen and told them what you'd do differently. I don't want to do that, actually I'm probably not even qualified to do that and if I was I probably wouldn't do it for free.
It's very kind and considerate for the CEO to take time to schedule something like that but I don't find it weird at all that he declined the offer.
The District Manager left a voicemail for me asking when he could schedule a tour with me. He was 100% polite, but it sounded like he was gritting his teeth.
Maybe I was reading too much into it, but I interpreted it as, "My boss's boss is forcing me to give an idiot like you, someone probably with no experience in retail economics, a tour while I patiently pretend to listen to how you tell me to do my job better than me, a person with decades of experience in selling video games."
If the situation were reversed I wouldn't want some rando customer coming into my job and telling me everything he thinks I'm doing wrong.
Plus, I got the feeling (again, just my perception) that it would just be "here's what's wrong with this store" instead of "here's what's wrong with all of your stores."
Maybe it was all in my head and they would have taken me seriously, I don't know. But that was the impression I got.
And I was legitimately busy. Writing a letter takes 10 minutes, a tour and presentation of my ideas would obviously take a lot longer.
They are just incredibly effective sociopaths.
I'm not even sure if I'm joking.
Whether the district manager liked it or not, they absolutely would have had to report the results of your visit back to the CEO. And they would have had to be honest about it, since they knew the CEO could just call you back to check the accuracy.
I don't blame you for not wanting to get in the middle of that, but I bet the CEO felt like it was a missed opportunity.
"Definitely! How's the day after tomorrow sound?"
seen: 4 days ago
That's a promising punch line.
Most retail CEOs don't reserve much time for popping into stores and talking to customers, and store and district managers tend to dislike it--feels like micromanaging.
But at the same time, store managers and district managers are often not eager to feed a list of their stores' shortcomings up the chain of command. IMO it's a rare retail manager who is willing to stand up and say, "my store is bad and here is what I need to make it good." Most focus on putting the best possible face on things, internally. It's so hard to make good numbers in retail and there is so much pressure to do so... relationships between the management layers can often feel more adversarial than collaborative.
As malls disappear it would be nice if the multi-restaurant open and shared dining experience was preserved.
That's actually interesting, because I could easily explain away the opposite result: CEOs who waste their time responding to personal letters aren't focused on improving company performance. For example, there's some potential negative correlation between time spent playing golf and company performance [1].
Granted, even if this were statistically significant you can think of explanations why it makes sense: "These CEOs have thought so deeply about their business that responding to these letters is trivial", or "Being forced to answer these questions is beneficial for the CEOs business acumen".
Of course the most likely explanation is that the correlation is just spurious and the two things are unrelated.
Still, would be an interesting study!
1: http://www.businessinsider.com/ceo-golf-rounds-indicate-poor...
Maybe those underperforming companies will bounce back and you'll find a (much delayed) response in the author's mailbox a few months down the line!
Likewise, many companies have a comments toll free number. Almost nobody will call them (who has a comment about their toothpaste), but it turns out the type of person who does call those numbers is likely the type of person who tells all their friends which is the best toothpaste, and so it is important that whoever answers that phone is an expert on what makes their toothpaste great. (honest answers are important - this type of person already knows their stuff so lies will hurt)
Also, CEOs often know they have trouble connecting with their real customers. If a real customer writes, that is real information that they cannot easily get in any other way. A good CEO will pay attention because what one person writes 100 others think but don't say at all.
All of the above are things that make a CEO who doesn't respond under perform.
The author is certain that the CEOs responded personally. He says, "[CEO] wrote me a two-page letter that addressed my ideas point by point", "[CEO] sent me a handwritten letter", and "[CEO] forwarded my ideas to his marketing leaders".
I try my best not to write anymore, I have interns that can do this. I need to be putting my resources to my expertise, coding.
The golfing ones are a bit more extroverted and charismatic than the non-golfers; they "look like CEOs". They are more likely than the non-golfing ones to have attended a top-tier MBA program. Their average height is significantly greater than the non-golfers. And so on; you see where I'm going.
Certainly there are plenty of introverted, socially challenged golfers out there. But within any population whether CEOs or lawyers or cops or musicians or whatever else, the subset of people who golf is going to be, on average, more extroverted than the subset of people who don't.
I think this somewhat ties in to Taleb's argument that you should trust surgeons who don't look like surgeons, since their achievement of professional success despite their tendency to create a negative first impression is a robust heuristic of professional competence[0].
The population of non-golfers, averaged out as a population, were held to subtly higher standards that required better performance out of them. This means that non-golfers, as a population, tend to be more challenged at work over the course of their careers, and that it was less likely that individuals could "fail up" -- the Peter Principle extends further for extroverts.
Anyway that's my theory.
0: https://medium.com/incerto/surgeons-should-notlook-like-surg...
Would be a fun topic for research!
That's why vague claims (like in the google debacle) that women are biologically less suited to coding than men might not be relevant to your organisation even if we were to believe it true in general.
A similar effect may explain some of this: https://hbr.org/2017/09/the-comprehensive-case-for-investing...
In order to become a successful CEO (or team lead or spouse...), you do need to be able to muster the emotional backbone to have tough conversations with people. One thing that can hold you back from this is the internal worry about being an asshole. Unless you are able to say to yourself, "I hear a voice on my shoulder telling me I'm a terrible person. But this topic needs to be discussed and I need to do advocacy here. This is uncomfortable and I don't like it but I'm going to do it anyway", you will under-communicate and issue won't get resolved.
However:
1) It is possible to err. That difficult conversation? Might in fact just be you being an asshole. We are not lucky enough to live in a world with a 100% surefire way to avoid this. So, good communication involves being willing to risk some probability of being an asshole.
2) People without that "maybe you're being an asshole" voice are not going to have this problem.
In my experience, most people will accept feedback if you do it in a respectful manner.
You can tell someone they are underperforming without insulting them. Respect your employees.
Even when you tell people to read the manual, you can do so in a way that doesn’t feel insulting. There’s a world of a difference between “RTFM!” and “I believe the documentation addresses this problem on page X.”
It's the people who are either oblivious to the need to carefully communicate who are the difficult ones, along with those who intentionally ignore societal norms in an effort to prove their "alpha" status.
I think I've finally realized how to articulate what my frustration with statements of the form "If you're worried about X, you're fine" is. The person presenting the worry has a prior of [I am worried about this]. They then go seeking a solution that will let them alleviate the worry by taking concrete steps to address it. When they run into the advice "If you're worried, you're fine", they have two problems:
1) If being worried is the only reason why they are at least acceptable, then to continue to be acceptable, they need to continue to be worried.
2) They haven't actually gotten a concrete action to take or thought exercise to go through. That means if the commenter is wrong and they actually do have a habit to work on, the only thing they might be doing differently is telling their intuition (system 1 for the Khanemann fans) "Hey, you know that alarm? turn it off." Their intuition probably doesn't listen very well and probably keeps them worried, but it is also no longer acting as a useful signal whatsoever of the problem.
----
The approach I would take is to come up with a list of actually-answerable questions to ask myself, to have faith in my intuitions on those questions unless I get concrete evidence that they are wrong, and then to work to make peace with the remaining discomfort. For example, when driving a car:
- Buy a wide-angle rear-view mirror so you have better spatial awareness.
- When opening any car door from the insite, habitually practice doing the Dutch reach.
- When you are aware of a cyclist, know the reference points on the car that you should keep them at so you are a safe passing distance.
- Don't do anything else besides perhaps converse with another human in the car while I'm driving.
- Practice scanning my environment while driving and other generally-safe driving habits.
- Having practiced your duty of care -- Accept the reality that at some point I might end up crushing another person's ribcage and snuffing out the life of someone's father/brother/aunt/teacher -- a fellow human.
Try re-reading a peer performance review you've written after the fact. It can be eye-opening.
You can replay an event in a supportive feedback group instead of in your head.
(I've never been to a Toastmasters' meeting, but have heard their sales pitch.)
Bingo. God I wish more software developers realized this. Being open with criticism is important. But for most people who are not a very certain type of programmer, we don't want to hear the criticism given with words like:
"What were you thinking? Are you stupid? Of course you don't do x."
and
"I've found through experience that it's important to do X, because if you don't, then Y happens."
The fact that I run into so many people on software developer teams that communicate in the former manner has led me to leave traditional software development in favor of data analysis where I don't have to work on a team of 5-6 people, of whom 2-3 are complete assholes.
Plus, if you want to know why there are so few women in programming, this alone is a huge factor. Yes, there are a very few women who can give and take criticism in the abrasive fashion I outlined above, but most women prefer to give and take criticism in the polite, productive manner of my second example. Once again, the criticism is the same in both examples, all that's different is the tone.
Too many people in the software development industry have taken Linus Torvald's communication style as something to emulate.
What _does_ a typical surgeon look like, then? I didn't know they had a look.
To be fair, you can't always be working. Sometimes you need to wind down, and golfing or responding to your customers does sound like something a CEO would do while winding down.
No. Most companies fail simply because they don't sell enough stuff. There's an old joke that "revenue solves all problems" in business. Simply put--companies fail when they don't build a big enough customer base.
CEOs who read and react to customer feedback are focused on the most important thing to their business: their customers. I would definitely not characterize that as a "waste of time." I'd argue it is some of the most valuable uses of time that a CEO can spend.
There's a local automotive specialty repair chain in Michigan. My family has always done business with them. When they opened their first store which was in Detroit my grandfather took a picture of all the cars lined up. They were giving away two gallons of free gas which was apparently a pretty big deal in the nineteen twenties. My dad met the CEO at some business function and sent him a copy of the photo and they put copies in every one of their dozens of stores.
I've always had excellent service at our local branch. A good friend of mine asked for a recommendation so I sent him there. He received horrible service and a botched repair job which they refused to fix. I was embarrassed so I wrote the CEO. I mentioned my father so it would be clear to him who was writing. I didn't want anything for myself, I just wanted him to do right by my friend.
I never received a reply and moved my personal business to a competitor. I've also probably told two dozen people the story. The store changed managers and the new guy is driving business away. My letter should have tipped them off to problems but they ignored it.
Most CEOs are actually dying to know what their customers think of them. The hardest part of being a CEO at a major company is getting honest feedback without someone blowing smoke up your ass, so most good CEOs will make time to read direct feedback. Customers rarely have a political agenda the way a CEOs direct reports might.
That’s why I think these companies perform better. A responsive CEO is more interested in hearing the unfiltered voice of the customer. That’s a mindset that carries through to all parts of the business.
Many years ago I met the CEO of a tech company at a networking event for recent college grads that they hosted. Like a job fair but with a twist. Having read Brian D. Krueger's excellent "College Grad Job Hunter" [1], I had business cards prepared. This was long before Moo.com so they were printed out on my Deskjet on Avery pre-perforated card stock. I went with my ill-fitting suit and mismatched shoes/belt, and I was talking to someone from a small tech company and I got a tap on the shoulder, "Our CEO would like to get a picture with you." Having miniscule networking mojo and knowledge, I actually followed the PR person without excusing myself. We took the photo, and I asked if I could give him my business card. He said yes, and he gave me his.
The next day, I wrote him a letter. I honestly wrote how I liked that this networking event was not the usual deal but more like a classy cocktail event and a great opportunity to meet other companies in a less-networky, relaxed atmosphere. I thanked him and the company for hosting it.
I ended up later getting hired by his company (I was invited to apply, someone called me) and worked there for many years, as I learned the art and trade of software development, starting from nothing and someone who managed to bluff their way through the interviews.
[1] https://www.amazon.com/College-Grad-Job-Hunter-Entry-level/d... (highly recommend this, written from the perspective of the hiring manager)
As a tangent, on the topic of social niceties and navigating a party situation: If you ever need to get out of the awkward "I've been talking with this one person and I really want to exit the conversation", you never want to say "It was nice meeting you.". What you want to say is this: "I'd like to go meet those people over there. Come with me." This is genius (and I learned this from a social genius) because it gives the person a choice. If they don't want to go with you, you are golden. If they go with you, you've developed your own little temporary group of 2.
But when it came time to make it happen, the way to get the person on board as quickly as possible is to say "the CEO over there wants to take a picture with you."
Haha, just kidding. It's actually the opposite. The reason CEOs respond is because they get much fewer emails from customers than you'd imagine. They get their typical solicitations, internal meeting emails, external business discussions, but the customer emails can be interesting and more insightful than any internal letter could be. If you put time into it and write your letter which doesn't require a huge time investment to response (i.e. avoid dozens of specific questions and allow the discussions to be open-ended), you might get a response. If any human is contacted by another of our species, it's intrinsic to want to respond. Being a CEO doesn't remove that desire. Yes, you might be bothering them a bit if they sacrifice family time, but that's their own problem/choice!
Furthermore the GDPR does not apply to small-scale, ad-hoc, personal situations. Contacting a CEO as a customer is fine. Your personal phone's address book is fine. So is keeping a list of attendees of your birthday party. But wearing a camera on your body all day and recording everything and running face recognition on the video, even if you do it for personal reasons, is not ok.
With the original article, it's obvious that he's written a lot of CEOs. How many is too many? What if it were a couple of thousand?
> It may be the most appropriate basis when: > you cannot, or do not want to, give the individual full upfront control (ie consent) or bother them with disruptive consent requests when they are unlikely to object to the processing.
I also emailed Paul Graham 3 years ago thanking him for one his blogs that ironically led me to not pursuing the startup path and he responded to it.
First hit on Google was https://www.ceoemail.com. And the email address matched the one of our Outlook server.
So it's apparently very searchable.
Soon after he received my letter, I got a call from the CEO's secretary to let me know he read my letter and that he forgives me and that there's nothing I need to do. Since I didn't expect the call, I was taken aback and moved to tears while I was talking to her. I expected some wrath and punishment for what I'd done. Instead, I experienced forgiveness.
Now if I could only quantify how much software, movies and music I've bootlegged while I was a student, I would probably write those CEOs a letter too, but I can't even remember it properly so I can quantify it. It wasn't a lot, and I mostly bootlegged because I thought it was "cool" to be visible on IRC #warez and what not... never really used or resold the software, just mostly did it cause I got to hang with the cool crowd.
Given I'm a software engineer for nearly 20 years now, I don't bootleg anything anymore... music, videos, apps.. and if I do, it's only because there's no trial for some of the apps. If I end up using the app, I pay for it or if I can't afford it, usually an employer will pay for it if I/we need it.
If you think that would make sense at all, you don't understand how big companies work. The big company is in the later phases of a snowball effect. It's a huge thing that rolls by itself and can't really be redirected, stopped or sped up by anyone. A CEO knows that. He's mostly concerned about internal politics and external representation. He's not really doing anything like develop new products. Companies like Apple that move from one big product line to another are very, very rare.
So, what you get is a PR letter that can contain some insights into their current strategy. But nothing of real value. It's unlikely that such a response contains anything one could learn.
I've seen it a hundred times: decisions (or at least discussions) driven by accidental meetings on planes or trains. Something overheard at the pool or in a bar.
It's because these guys know at some level that they're in a closed chamber, away from the reality that underlies their corporate activity and if they think they've suddenly been given an authentic glimpse of something, unmediated by their lieutenants then they find that extremely novel and exciting.
They're just human beings. Often they're very interested in people in general.
I actually think it's the opposite: really successful people get there because they are more vulnerable. At least in my experience, whenever I met someone like this, they always seem way more responsive and open than the usual joe.
The fact that CEOs have politics and PR to worry about is implied. The purpose of the article is that the majority of the CEOs took the time to respond to a small list of ideas from one of their (likely menial) shareholders. The author is highlighting that this there is a correlation between the type of person willing to do this, and a successful CEO. They are making time for the people below them, given the high level aspect of their day to day. They care about the core of their business and the small people that make the whole.
Its obvious that you would be one of the CEOs who didn't respond, and you will be missing out on that 8.97% ;)
This is one of the unspoken truths of business. It's the same whether you're a CEO or a manager.
The best people know this, but never EVER say it. The rest think they have to do more than they actually should; the most obvious manifestation of this is micro-managing.
He responded that I buy one of his two books.
This is especially notable because they weren't signed by him - just by random other SFDC employees. It was a nice gesture, I guess.
At least what I take from it, good CEO would answer you with "thank you" or whatever, as Benioff is know to be more of a Ellison / Jobs type of asshole CEO, rather than let's say polite Elon Musk, so hajrice made fun that instead, Benioff asked him to buy his book in order to just squeeze few extra bucks from someone that admires him :)
Xavdidtheshadow was pointing how creepy it is to get forced to receive someones book with their signature that actually is being signed by someone else.
Both their responses made me laugh, thanks guys :)
Uh... where do you get this impression? My impression is that Musk easily fits in the same bucket as Ellison / Jobs / Bezos
With Jobs and Ellison there are endless examples of them behaving as assholes toward normal people. What are the examples with Musk? He overwhelmingly seems to treat most people extremely well by comparison. The worst I've seen about him is that he pressurizes the work environment, that he's hard charging, although it certainly doesn't appear to be anything like Apple or Oracle under Jobs / Ellison. I don't believe you can build Tesla & SpaceX without anything less than the approach Musk has used.
No.
As he notes, the sample size is ridiculously small. It's simply too likely that he got lucky with 1 or 2 companies in his "respond" group.
e.g., if he wrote these letters in the the early 90s and Buffet responded, he's immediately skewed his returns up because Buffet outperformed the market SO much in the 90s. That's likely luck, not replicable skill.
Otherwise, interesting article and the 1/3 response rate is surprisingly high.
A few weeks later we met with him in Helsinki over a pizza and discussed cybersecurity, arcade games, politics, pinball and miscellaneous topics. It was fun.
Sometimes contacting high profile individuals is all about making the step of reaching out.
Don’t just dash off an e-mail message.
> From the time that I mailed my letters, the compound annual return of the respondent group is 8.97% greater than the non-respondent companies.
If anything, I would have expected the opposite. "Successful companies are more busy, and have less time to write letters to strangers. Failing companies love to spend all their time justifying themselves." Glad to see that hypothesis disproven.
If the above correlation does hold across larger sample sizes, I wonder if hedge funds will start using it to identify profitable trades. Send anonymous letters to the executives of public companies, and weight your investments in favor of those who reply. At some point, the executives will wise up and start replying to everyone. But you could make a nice pile of money before that happens.
You want a sysadmin that’s playing video games all day, because everything is in great shape. Not a constantly stressed , jaded, angry admin. I know nothing of being a CEO, but if the CEO is bored, the company is probably in great shape.
Is it possible that someone is ghostwriting for them?
I fear Frank's decrees were not carried over after he left office (2014).
Even if you want to know about interesting things in the noise, you use dedicated people to filter out.
If you could keep the substantive comments and drop the unsubstantive ones, that would help.
I wrote to the CEO of a company with a market cap of ~6bn (For comparison, WD40 is 1.95bn) about opening an office in a town where I wanted to move (Also his home town), basically so I could work there. And I got a reply within a few hours. It wasn't a crazy big reply but it was still personal.
I think what really hit it in my case was the fact the town in question was his home town, so it was personal to him. We don't know what was in the letters that were sent to these other companies, but they may have hit a chord because they were pet projects of the CEO's, or because they had already invested capital into it and failed and it was already a mark on their resume etc. CEO's are pretty passionate people.
[1]https://www.pcgamer.com/gabe-newell-is-worth-55-billion-acco...
[2]https://www.reddit.com/r/pcmasterrace/comments/2keaco/i_sent...
These days I have more than a few beefs with Steam, but that sort of reaction sticks, and generates a lot of goodwill.
Still impressive, but I had to click to find out how a videogame guy could possibly be worth fifty-five-thousand-million dollars. :-/
These systems also allow for tagging of people too. Crazy people, various group affiliation (union, conservative, pro-x, anti-y), VIP status, etc. They also queue up personalized responses to specific issues to be timed with events, press hits, etc.
Many high level people really enjoy hearing from real people.
I complained about store and lack of empathy at stores. Next day I received call from store manager. Who offered me a 100$ gift voucher if i return to the store :)
I spent a year working over 4,500 hours and recorded every task down to the hour and still never felt productive. I got a lot done and wrote thousands of lines of code, but it's of no use to anyone now.
"I graduated from college with six figures in debt and no savings or investments. My first job out of college paid $400 per week. I ate dollar-menu fast food every day until I got sick and landed in the hospital. I paid $650 a month to live in a dank basement, ridden with bed bugs, and I slept on a mattress strewn on the floor. I hated my life."
it is always really refreshing to receive a response from anyone that is semi human. i'm in sales, and 99% of my outreach attempts end in silence or rejection
to form a personal connection with someone who is running a multi billion dollar business that could very well go bankrupt if mismanaged, well, its interesting to share ideas with them