"All I do is work here"
sethgodin.typepad.com
sethgodin.typepad.com
My perspective on the entire rant/essay/insight/whatever is that it is summarized by its last line. If you want to take credit for your organization when times are good, you cannot hide behind your powerlessness when times are bad.
When I worked for K- G---- way back in the day, we built a hit product. I milked that success for years. Imagine if I had stayed on board and things had gone poorly after a few years. Could I later say, "I only work at KG, I don't make decisions, the problems were elsewhere?"
My take on Seth's point is that I can't wear KG's success like a mantle while weaseling out of association with its failures with talk of "I only worked there, other people make the bad decisions."
It's ok to just punch a clock and do a job. But if you're going to try to associate yourself with your organization during good times, you have to live with the lumps during bad times.
JM2C, you may have read something else in this.
The real question would be how to make one's employees care about the company. It's not trivial to set up a system where every employee can affect every other's employee's actions - you don't want to encourage blame shifting and mobbing, after all.
Even so, I would expect a conscientious employee to at least make the effort instead. At a bare minimum, instead of saying "That's not my job." they should say, "I am sorry, I cannot help you with that, BUT the person who can is...."
It's a nice example to try to live up to.
"You have the responsibility and authority to handle the customers problem"
I am sure they had been told that in training, but there it was as a daily reminder. Everyone starts a new job with enthusiasm, but I am sure the "I just work here" crowd have been smacked down more than once when they went out on a limb to do what they thought was the right thing.
To answer the question I see posted in other replies to this interesting submission (what brand is this?), I think Seth Godin is saying that people who work for companies who feel that they, or their co-workers, can't work ethically have to SPEAK UP to as many layers of management as possible, to let management know that there is a problem, and that customers, suppliers, the press, and other stakeholders are noticing.
"It's a big company problem..."
No! It's YOUR problem if you are starting a company, building a brand, or serving customers. It's not necessary a big company issue - it's a "mentality". I've worked for a Fortune 500 where employees were too proud of the culture to ever "pass the buck" and a startup where employees had a "big company" mentality and thought it was okay to leave features broken for customers for months (to the ultimate peril of the company). If you're a founder coming out of a big company beware of this potential blind spot.
Good company culture, good brand, happy employees - those things aren't accidental or simply the result of a lot of money and freedom, you have to cultivate it - and brand destruction or toxic culture starts with the little things, like saying, "I just work here".
In my opinion, employees who contribute nothing more than "punching the clock" should be the best at towing the company line, because let's face it - if you just punch the clock your are easily replaced, especially in today's job market.
I also see a problem with the individual. She is failing the basics of the sales process. She calls up a person, someone obviously influential, as she knows who he is, and asks him for something- time at the least. In return, she's not willing to offer him anything? Even the phone number of the person in the department that handles that stuff- someone in marketing that would probably like a chance to speak to Seth Godin, even if it's a chance to get some feedback from him?
If so, why should they care -- they have good jobs, go home at night to their friends or families, and leave work at work. They're supposed to care about the company, brand, and 'big picture'....why, exactly?
Because if they take an indifferent attitude it shows through to the customers, who will take their business elsewhere, which will cause the company to fail, which will cause the workers to end up jobless.
If a random employee starts taking up issues caused by other people in the company, and there is no culture of communication or escalation procedure then one likely outcome is that they are going to waste their time and not get their job done. That doesn't mean an employee shouldn't be proactive or whatever, but just that in a large organization the solution can not come from the bottom up.
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"Oh, I'm so sorry Mr. Godin, I'll see if I can get Frank to fix that". After which, of course, nothing is done anyway, but at least Mr. Godin feels like they care.
Merely acknowledging the problem, taking some responsiblity even by association changes the tone of the interaction. Especially considering they're asking him for a favor.
That said, I wasn't thinking so much of the situation he posed as the message he came away with. You don't get to be Apple by having a bunch of people in your organization taking shots at other parts of the organization. Of course the question now is do you still get to be Apple with the way they run the App Store.
Oh I just work here, he sounds like a 10 year old kid having a rant about his friend.
Let me refute him. I used to work in a call centre. Some people there were pretty irresponsible, like not taking someone off the list when asked. I just did my job and got paid, so if someone wanted to be taken off the list and not be called I was glad to do it. So, I am me, I am not my company, I am an individual, and I take responsibility for my own actions, not the companies action, unless I am the CEO.
Now, what can be done about these marketers?
This partly holds for any company: if a colleague of mine delivers bad work, people will throw nasty glances at me when they hear I work at the same company. Now you can go all "they shouldn't do that" on me, but that's just sticking your head deeper in the sand and refusing to acknowledge this reality, in which you live with people that think and judge that way. Therefore, I will criticise any colleague whose work isn't up to par.
And that would have been a mistake, because this isn't really a rant. Its formal structure is that of a complaint, but in fact it is a short essay, in complaint form, about the nature of branding and company culture.
Why doesn't this count as a rant? There's no hard and fast rule. But one sign is that the company is unnamed and unidentifiable. There is a very good chance that it is fictional, or that it is a composite archetype that doesn't correspond to any specific company. None of which would change the meaning of the essay in the least.
BTW, I think that it's a bad sign how quickly these shallow dismissive comments rise to the top here. If you prefer arguments to be presented in a a logical form fine, but the information remains the same. It's not patentable, but it's worth thinking about if you feel like thinking about that sort of thing. Here's the translation:
A brand is presented as a brand. A way of of thinking about a collection of things (people, products, procedures, history) as a single thing. It is the psychological equivalent to a legal entity. A kind of Anthropomorphism. You can say: "Apple (the brand) did X" when obviously the reality is that a bunch of people or policies 'do'. This is a useful metaphor for letting customers interact with you. When you leverage a brand, you are working this metaphor to your advantage. But you can't say we (the brand) have excellent customer service & still say they (individuals making it up) are responsible for that bad product.
When we hear a "wise person" say something, we assume it has meaning, no matter how meaningless it may seem. This is why Zen koans are meditated upon, while incoherent babblings of toddlers are not. This says nothing about the objective value of the koan or the babbling, but rather the subjective value it holds to the listener. The "wisdom" metadata, the color of the text if you will, makes it valuable in that it forces our brain to create an insight for itself that could be rationalized to fit the content of the rant. It becomes a sounding board, a way of finding inner knowledge you weren't consciously aware of. This is valuable, at least to me.
I rarely learn something deep or insightful from his posts, except perhaps the power of a consistent message. But you can't deny that, at least when it comes to promoting the brand Seth Godin, he's pretty good.
For the record: before I started reading Hacker News, I didn't know who Seth Godin was. I've never read any of his books and I haven't read any of his blogs besides the ones linked here, nor do I intend to. I'm not really interested in marketing and I share the general adverseness programmers feel versus 'marketing types'.
All of that doesn't mean that the guy doesn't make sensible points. It certainly doesn't mean we should deride him for stating 'obvious' things in a ranting manner, where we would loudly applaud the exact same behaviour in a software engineer. Hell, we do that half the time when Linus goes batshit again.
However you look at it, the responsibility is with the board and top management. Not the people who "just work there" and are neither paid nor trusted with the kind of responsibility that Seth Godin is talking about.
But more than that, when you are doing something on behalf of and in the name of a company then you are that company's representative, its "face" to those you are dealing with. As such, you can expect to receive both credit and blame for everything attached to that company and you are responsible for doing everything within your authority to fix problems. That limit may be nothing more than putting the person you are dealing with in the correct department, but if that is it you should pass along the contact information (in both directions!) respectfully and courteously, not dismissively with "I just work here."
As a manager, I would be unhappy to ever hear one of my employees say that no matter what their job. If it was a customer facing employee, then (depending on the nuances of the circumstances) it could easily call for a formal reprimand for damaging the companies reputation and being dismissive to customers.
I think he meant people working for companies who actually have a bad name. If you know the company you work for engages in some shady practises, you shouldn't dismiss that with "I just work here", but consider finding another workplace instead.
In this case it sounds like this company was asking Godin for a favor - sure you could call it a rant, but it's also pretty fair given that it's not like he went to them, they went to him (which would make the attitude especially galling).
When you start saying stuff like 'it's not my department' when you're asking for a favor from someone else, it's also saying that you have little to no pride about the company that you work for and I think that's his point. If you care so little, life's short. Why wouldn't you find somewhere better to work (or better yet, start your own business that you can be proud of)?
If person A calls me to do X, from the point of view of the company all that matters is that X is done. If A comes back with a complaint from me about Y, from the point of view of the company A is wasting her time.
He says "if you are not proud, go somewhere else" but that's wrong. She may need the salary and be satisfied with her conditions. Who says she has to be proud? He's the one with the problem. Seth, if you are not happy then do business with a different company.
Me? I suspect that the brand is Real. I never get unsubscribed from their "game" spam despite having submitted about 20 unsubscribe requests.
Later, after I got someone who wasn't based in India (or somewhere like that), I learned that they couldn't do what I wanted because they had eliminated the positions that would have enabled it. If the humandroids in the first customer service had demonstrated any creativity or flexibility to find out why, I wouldn't be as angry at Acer as I am. As it is, they've demonstrated that as a company they care nothing about customer service.
This is where I'll sound like a Sethapologist: Some say anybody could have written this and that anybody could have ranted and been voted down here, but since it's Seth then the we pay attention. But has anybody really 'ranted' with the kind of consistency and proven results like he has? That's why people listen, and tho it's easy to dismiss what he says as 'just common sense', there will always be those who look to him and his words as inspiration and would have a seed of good management planted in them by it. In that case, he's already done his job and achieved the goal of his post. Something few of us can say we've done.
It's been more than a decade since I was in my 20's working a job because I needed the money yet still trying to hang on my ideals for dear life. Sometimes that's what it takes, someone to remind you that it still matters.
I'll take a punt and say nearly everyone here (or at least those involved in a startup) is a marketer in some capacity.
You've contradicted, not refuted, him. And you're wrong.
In each and every external interaction you are the brand. If you're speaking directly to me you might as well be CEO because I couldn't care less if you're the tea lady - your job to delight me. When you fail I'll blame the brand. I might even post a rant about it.
However I could see the damage this caused so I deleted from the db whenever I could see that further calling the said individual would result in "rage".