AlastairThomson.com

You know the old “customers are the lifeblood of our business” thing? Well, that’s often said, but rarely acted upon.

Thanks to the world’s determination to make everything about clicks and online tracking “for efficiency” we seem to have spawned more inconvenient and costly solutions than the simpler solutions we had before.

Sure, in the process, some tech overlord or other has become insanely rich – and good luck to them!

But we’ve also made the simple complicated. We’ve made the personal impersonal. And we’ve increased cost and inflexibility across the board.

In many organisations, we’ve done the exact opposite of the golden rule of making a sale: “Don’t make it hard for customers to buy.”

Nobody’s service stands out anymore. It’s all pretty awful across the board. People seem to have stopped even trying to get you to buy from them again by making any aspect of the experience memorable.

Even if you don’t care for any other reason, that’s terrible economics.

Creating “free money” for your business

There’s a really simple way to create “free money” for your business.

Just convince your customers to keep buying from your business beyond the first transaction they have with you.

If customers buy from you just once, effectively all your customer acquisition costs get amortised over that single sale.

So if it costs £100 to find a new customer, but you only sell to them one time, your customer acquisition cost is £100.

If you sell something for £200, which has a 50% gross margin, then you’ve broken even on the first sale. Which is pretty good, to be fair. Lots of businesses would give their eye teeth for that.

If they come to buy from you again then, while the acquisition cost is the same, the impact is spread across two sales.

So, effectively, acquiring that customer now costs only £50 per sale. Or, in other words, your first sale has gone from breakeven to a profit of £50 (£200 sales value, less £100 cost of sales, less a £50 half-share of the acquisition cost).

Get them to repeat purchase four times after the initial sale and your £100 acquisition cost drops to just £20 per sale and you’re making £80 profit on each one.

Everything beyond that first sale is increasingly profitable…and, ultimately, insanely profitable if your acquisition costs drop far enough.

This is hardly a startling economic insight…people have known exactly how this sort of economics works for generations.

A surprise

At least, people know about this intellectually.

It’s taught on all manner of business programmes at universities and colleges, including elite MBA programmes from Ivy League institutions.

Hundreds of millions of people around the world, probably, are aware of the maths.

So it always comes as a big surprise to me that, notwithstanding the widespread awareness of this phenomenon, so few businesses actually try to do anything about it.

This came particularly into mind when I was trying to book my car in for a service recently. My car is from one of the major international brands with a nationwide dealer network.

So I fired up Google to get the phone number to call to book my car in for a service, only to discover that when I clicked on the Google results for the dealer’s name, there wasn’t a phone number. I had to go through an online process – there was no alternative.

I say “I had to go through an online process”…it actually took a few minutes to work out anything about what I was supposed to do as there were no obvious links to the service department from the home page which was all filled with new car sales information.

But eventually I found a link in tiny text at the bottom of the webpage which said “Book A Service”. So I clicked on that.

It was after that I found it was impossible to book a service any other way than online.

So I persevered.

This form required information which I’m not sure most people would carry around in their heads, but after 10 or 15 minutes I finally got the form completed to find out – as the website promised me – how much my service would cost.

Except I didn’t…

Except I didn’t find out what a service would cost. After clicking “submit” I got a message saying that they couldn’t tell me what a service would cost and that someone would call me in the next 24-48 hours to confirm the price.

And, in the meantime, without telling me, they booked me a random service slot that was impossible for me to attend. I wasn’t aware of this until I got the confirmation email. To say I was mildly irritated by this point would be an understatement.

However I decided to wait for the person to call me from the dealer.

I say “from the dealer”. It was someone from a soulless call centre who had as much interest in me and my problems as I have in whether or not Kim Kardashian has bought a new handbag this week.

Anyway, I did learn one interesting thing. Apparently the “standard price” for the service I needed was £404.

Now, I don’t know about you, but if a car dealer has a standard price for that service, why it takes someone to make an outbound call at a time that may or may not be convenient for me, rather than just displaying it on the website when I entered my details, is beyond me.

However my soulless friend did at least shift the appointment to a time I was able to make, and did so relatively easily.

Easily enough, one imagines, that if a calendar link had been put into either or both of the online form or the confirmation email, I might have been able to sort out the time for an appointment which was convenient to me all by myself, rather than having one randomly allocated which I later had to get someone paid by the dealer to rearrange.

So what’s really going on here?

There is no question that the fancy website will have cost the dealer and/or the manufacturer a pretty penny or two. They also have the cost of maintaining a call centre somewhere, with all the people and technology costs that involves.

And they have somehow managed to put all that together in a way that’s considerably less efficient than having me just call the dealer, get a price, and book into their service calendar.

Last time I booked my car in for a service it was a 2-3 minute phone call involving very little technology.

The cost to the dealer for handling that entire end-to-end process was under £1, as it was just a couple of minutes of salary cost.

And it only took me a couple of minutes to get everything sorted out, start to finish. I was perfectly happy with that deal.

This time round, it look at least half an hour of my own time, an enormous amount of frustration on my part as there was no “obvious” solution to anything, a shedload of technology and people in a call centre somewhere, the cost of developing a fancy website, and a process spread out across 24 hours which could have been handled in 2 minutes.

That’s a hell of a lot of cost to end up with a worse result than they had before.

But there’s more…

However that’s not the half of it.

The dealer has vastly higher costs to service me as a customer, which doesn’t seem all that smart to me.

And, at the same time, they’ve developed a solution which makes me even less likely to buy from them in the future than I was before.

They’ve contrived the exact opposite of what most businesses are trying to achieve – instead of reducing their costs and increasing the likelihood that I’ll buy from them again, they’ve increased their costs and have made it less likely I’ll buy from them again.

Instead of being able to amortise their acquisition costs over 10, 20 or 50 visits, they might only be able to amortise them over one or two visits.

And that’s all the more surprising because car dealerships are not exactly high-margin businesses. Thanks to the power of the manufacturers, dealers are usually screwed down pretty firmly by the brands the represent.

So a high-cost solution which reduces the likelihood of repurchase is very little short of economically insane.

Don’t laugh…

But don’t laugh.

Whilst this is truly one of the most cackhanded approaches to doing something simple I’ve ever encountered, exactly this sort of thing goes in in businesses up and down the country every day of the week.

Maybe even yours.

You’ll be glad to know there’s a simple solution which never fails to build your bottom line.

Go on your own website and try to do something simple. Or get a friend to call your business with you listening on the speakerphone.

Take a careful note of what happens.

Odds are you’ll find plenty of ways your business makes it harder than it needs to be for your customers to buy from you.

Whatever those things are, engineer them out of your business processes immediately, unless there is some legal reason you can’t.

You’ll find plenty of people in your business who will give you perfectly reasonable sounding reasons why it’s impossible to make those changes, but don’t listen to them. They’re likely to be far too close to the action and unable to see the effect they’re having on your customers.

They are focusing on the process. You need to focus on the people. After all, all your customers are people, so you need to think like a person, not like a robot.

There’s always an upside

People sometimes tell me that they can’t do something that’s otherwise sensible “because of the cost”. But that’s mostly hokum.

A car dealer can’t spend £1 on the phone to make a service booking in the name of “efficiency”, yet can miraculously spend £millions a year on their tech stack and contact centre staff.

Given a choice, I’d much prefer to spend £1 than £millions to do the same thing. (Or, actually, a worse thing.)

All the more so because the £1 solution is a low-friction opportunity to impress a customer and demonstrate that we care about their business.

And the £million solution demonstrates that nobody cares about their customers – they’re just an inconvenience that gets in the way of the smooth running of their car dealership.

Very occasionally better solutions are a little more expensive, but they have such a significant impact on future sales that you’d be crazy not to do it anyway.

They might add a couple of percent to your costs, but if someone buys from you just one more time than they would have done, you’re vastly better off spending that tiny bit extra.

Of course you need to keep an eye on your cost base. I’m not suggesting anything other than that. You certainly don’t want to spend frivolously.

But you’ve got to think about both sides of the ledger.

Yes, you might not want to spend 5% more. But if spending 5% more doubles your income because a customer buys twice instead of once, you’re still 95% ahead.

And, in this day and age, you won’t often see opportunities like that in your business.

That’s why I never cease to be amazed by the number of businesses who neglect their customers, increase their costs, and introduce soulless processes and IT systems in the name of “boosting the bottom line”.

It’s usually does the exact opposite.

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Just for those who have a deep and abiding interest in accounting, when I refer to amortising the acquisition costs at the start of this article, I’m not suggesting you do that in your accounts because that’ll get you into trouble.

However, that’s the commercial reality of what’s going on. And if your business only makes decisions on a “legally filed accounts basis” instead of on a commercial basis, you probably need to work with a much better accountant.

The world is awash with data. There is no shortage of people who’ll sell you eye-wateringly expensive software which allows you to track every little bit of it, build real-time dashboards from it, and download multiple gigabytes of it to be analysed in spreadsheets of mind-numbing complexity.

Find me someone running a system like that and I’ll bet you now they are spending a lot more money to run their business than they needed to.

“Wait…wait!”, I hear you cry, “isn’t more data the Holy Grail, without which you can’t run your business properly in the 21^st century?”

Well, not exactly.

Knowing how much data you need to make a decision is a critical factor before you splurge £1m+ on goodness knows what sort of software to track how many times a day someone in your business responds to a Teams notification in 5 seconds or less, or some equally irrelevant statistic.

That’s important for a number of reasons, not least because collecting and reporting on data becomes exponentially more expensive the more of it you want to collect and analyse.

And if that data is pretty much irrelevant anyway, that data addiction becomes an expensive indulgence.

Do you even need data at all?

At the risk of sounding like my grandfather, sometimes you don’t need data at all. You just need to exercise a bit of common sense. Mostly, that’s free.

For example, I’m perfectly prepared to believe that there are a small number of people unjustly convicted of crimes they didn’t commit currently housed in our nation’s jails.

However, if I was ever to visit a jail, I still wouldn’t leave my wallet and car keys unattended on a table in the main cell block.

The fact that, with 20/20 hindsight, I might learn that 0.73% of them were subsequently given full pardons would make absolutely no difference to my decision not to leave my wallet and keys lying around unattended.

To give a surprisingly common business example of this, and without creating any new data, who would you rather have greeting potential customers who visit your business – someone who appears to have had a previous career as a warder in Prisoner Cell Block H, or someone pleasant and welcoming who offers to take your coat and make you a coffee?

Well, in about 50% of the places I visit, the answer seems to be “prison warder”.

But the correct answer is “B” – the pleasant and welcoming person.

Ironically, both of those solutions cost pretty much the same. But one gives visitors a positive view of your business right from the off.

The other has given you a mountain to climb to secure their business because, in the first 30 seconds they’ve been on your premises, because you’ve demonstrated you probably don’t care all that much about your customers.

And, all things being equal, that’s unlikely to land you their business.

You don’t need to spend 6 figures a year on an NPS programme to make the decision to put someone friendly, welcoming and customer-orientated on your reception desk. It’s just common sense.

Low tech data can beat high tech data

When people hear the word “data” they often reach for tech solutions. Which is exactly what tech vendors want you to do, of course.

But that’s not always necessary.

Japanese car manufacturers pioneered the use of Kanban systems in their factories which require no data at all.

The principle behind this is to give you a visual cue to do something without needing expensive data-tracking systems.

So a vat of paint could be marked with a re-order level, for example. When the paint drops below the line drawn on the outside of the tank, the operator raises a new purchase order with the supplier for another pre-determined quantity of paint to be delivered.

The re-order level is set to make sure the paint will never run out, so the production line will never be forced to stop due to a lack of paint for the cars.

But a low tech solution – “is the paint level above or below the line drawn on the outside of the tank?” – is all that’s needed. Having sophisticated data tracking systems to advise senior management how much paint they have in each vat on a minute-by-minute basis is an expensive, and unnecessary, luxury.

Some data required

There are situations where you can’t work on common sense alone or visual guides alone. But equally you don’t need every single bit of potentially available data to make a decision.

Some years ago I was the Finance Director in a business where the CEO had promised the board some spectacular sales from a newly-launched product.

For context, by the time I joined this business after serving several months’ notice in my previous job, it was Month 10 of their financial year. On my arrival, I discovered they had achieved, from memory, something like 10% of their Year 1 sales target for this new product line.

The sales cycle was 3-6 months long, meaning that nothing else they did in the balance of that financial year would contribute towards meeting their Year 1 target.

And their pipeline of prospects – the people who were already part-way through the sales process and had neither signed up as customers nor turned us down flat – was about one-third of the Year 1 target.

Employing some data analysis which required just a pen, a calculator, and a Post-It Note, I worked out the best case scenario, including the 10% already sold, was landing about 40% of the Year 1 target if every single business currently in their sales pipeline agreed to buy.

That’s an unlikely assumption at the best of times. I felt the final number was likely to be closer to 20-25% of the Year 1 total.

But however you looked at it, barring a miracle, the final result would be somewhere between the 10% we’d already sold and the 40% maximum we could sell if everyone in the sales pipeline said “yes”.

Whatever the actual number, it would be significantly short of 100% of that Year 1 target. Precisely how far short was hardly the point given the very best case scenario was a shortfall of 60%. A 58% shortfall would be just as disastrous as a 62% one.

Surprisingly, to me at least, the board supported the CEO’s view that it was impossible to tell how Year 1 would turn out until the full year had been finished. Apparently, what was missing from my analysis was “a positive mindset” not £3m in sales… 😉

(Final result, if you’re interested: slightly over 25% of the Year 1 target.)

It’s not rocket science

Business isn’t rocket science. You don’t need a bazillion data points like NASA needs to send people to the moon or operate the Mars Rover from Earth.

Most of the data in most businesses isn’t even looked at, much less factored into management decisions. But the cost of collecting it is huge.

Particularly the last bit of the process to take you from “an answer good enough to make a decision” to “knowing everything there is to know on this subject”.

Thinking back to the paint vat in the car factory from before, the cost of drawing a line on the outside of a vat of paint is pretty much zero. You could easily spend millions on some automatic weighing/fluid mechanics system which provided a minute-by-minute data feed to someone in a control room so they can press the “re-order” button when the paint falls to whatever the predetermined level might be.

But here your ultimate decision is no better than the machine operator looking at a line on the side of a vat of paint.

However it is several thousand times more expensive.

Making the same decision at thousands of times the cost is incredibly hard to justify, yet that mindset is underpinning a lot of business decision-making at the moment.

More data does not always lead to better decisions. In fact, beyond a threshold level, I’d argue it rarely does.

However, more data is always vastly more expensive.

Before you press the “more data” button, just make sure that decision isn’t something you could reach already, after a quiet 5 minutes with a pen, a calculator, and a Post-It Note.

You might be surprised by how often that’s all you need.

In life, as in business, often the “little things” have an outsized impact. Yet they’re often the least recognised, the least appreciated, and the least rewarded.

Sadly, there’s often not much glory in the little things. You’re very unlikely to appear live on Bloomberg or CNBC talking about the little things your company does. Those opportunities are reserved for the big takeovers, the closing of a huge factory, or announcing your stock exchange listing.

But probably there is more value inside your business based on so-called little things than in a lot of the big things your business does. And the best news of all is that those little things generally cost nothing, but deliver an exponential RoI.

So, because nobody has this stuff on a spreadsheet or a KPI dashboard, all these high-RoI activities are undervalued. More likely than not, sooner or later, one of the more AI-powered members of the board will stop doing it altogether.

You know this sort of person. They’re fond of saying things like “what doesn’t get measured, doesn’t get managed”. But they take it too far and believe this means if you can’t measure something, you shouldn’t be doing it at all.

I take a different tack.

If something costs you little or nothing, but might…even just at the margins…improve your customers’ or employees’ lives a little and make them feel better about their day, then why not do it anyway?

If it costs nothing and there’s an upside, it’ll be the biggest RoI project you’ll do in the next 10 years. And if there isn’t an upside, it didn’t cost you anything in the first place, so you’re not out of pocket.

Some people find this concept hard – not you, obviously, dear reader. But you’ll know people who can’t compute this information. So here are three little examples of what I’m talking about to help you get them started.

1 – Look ’em in the eye

Paul Craven told a great story about a very neat way to get a big bump in customer ratings on an episode of Christian Hunt‘s excellent Human Risk podcast.

The owner of a casino in the US implemented a rule staff had to greet guests using an approach they called “eye, hi, bye”.

What it boiled down to was this.

If a guest walked in and passed within 10 feet a member of staff, they were supposed to look the guest in the eye, say a warm “hi”, and welcome them to the establishment. And if a guest walked within 10 feel of a staff member on the way out, the staff member would also look them in the eye, say and equally warm “goodbye”, and thank them for visiting.

Now, we’ve all had terrible customer service experiences where we get ignored by all the customer service staff, haven’t we?

All things being equal, would I choose to stay somewhere that acknowledged me as a human rather than somewhere which made me feel like an inconvenience to the smooth running of their lives?

I don’t think I’m alone in saying I’d prefer option one. In fact, this casino bumped up its customer service satisfaction by 40% by implementing this approach. Nothing else was changed inside the business at the same time, so they could be sure of its impact.

Remember, the cost of doing this is zero – you’re already paying your staff anyway.

And it costs nothing to train your staff to follow this approach either. Everyone is capable of understanding those simple instructions and carrying them out.

So for a “little thing”, this has an exponential RoI. I’d be staggered if implementing a CRM system improved your customer satisfaction by 40%, but even if it did, that would cost you millions, whereas looking someone in the eye and saying “hi” costs nothing.

No question – the RoI on this “little thing” is vastly higher than any other investment you could make in your customer service.

2 – “Welcome back, madam!”

Another hospitality example – and I’m afraid the source is a little vague as I heard this story many years ago – however I seem to remember it was something Ritz-Carlton did.

Here’s how it worked.

When a guest drove up to the front of the hotel, the doorman would help the guest unload their luggage from their car or their taxi and ask, in conversation, “is this the first time you’ve stayed with us?”.

As the doorman walked the guest towards the reception desk, he would have a pre-arranged signal with the receptionist to let them know whether or not this was a returning guest. Something imperceptible that a guest wouldn’t see the doorman walking behind them with their luggage do.

Naturally, the first words out of the receptionist’s mouth when the guest arrived at check-in were “welcome back, madam”.

This is a simple system, requires no multi-million dollar CRM system, and helps make guests feel welcomed and appreciated.

Again, this costs nothing, requires next-to-no training, and if it makes even a few guests feel more likely to use your hotel next time they’re in town, then the RoI is exponential against a base cost of zero.

3 – …One more time

Music provides so many great examples of this. Artists and producers drop little things into a record that most people wouldn’t notice on a conscious level, but which somehow help the song hit the mark even better than it would do otherwise.

My favourite example is on Britney Spears’ breakthrough hit “…Baby One More Time”.

Very few people notice this because you need to be listening through pretty high-quality headphones to spot it, and have very good hearing as it’s all-but-hidden, but there’s a triangle on that track (or at least a triangle-like sound, it might come from a keyboard as it’s a very “flat” sound without the natural reverberation of a triangle).

It plays just a single occasional note, and it’s buried deep in the mix, so it’s hard to spot. But once you spot it, you can’t help but notice it. (It’s easiest to spot around 0:04 and 0:24 if you want to try to find it. Once you get the sound in your head, you’ll see it popping up in other places too.)

The sole purpose of that triangle is to add a little extra “sparkle” to the song at the right places. It’s not even designed to be heard consciously. But it works with your subconscious to help you feel a “lift” every now and again as you listen to the song.

“…Baby One More Time” was written by one of the biggest-selling songwriters of the last 30 years or so, Max Martin, who also produced it along with Rami and Denniz Pop, Max Martin’s mentor and the founder of the legendary Cheiron Studios in Stockholm.

Frankly, any one of those music industry geniuses could have decided to drop that triangle sound into the song. They’re an astonishingly talented group of people.

And while many, many other factors contributed to the success of “…Baby One More Time”, it went to Number One in 20 countries and is one of the best-selling singles of all time, with over 10 million copies sold.

Would it have been such a big hit without that triangle playing with your subconscious? Well, I don’t know. But for a cost of pretty much zero, if that triangle helped to sell gazillions of records, even in the margins, what’s the harm?

Now, odds are you aren’t in the casino business, the hotel business, or the record industry. So what does all this mean to you?

It’s this.

Your business will be better if you think about the little things as well as the big things.

The big things often get all the glory, but they don’t necessarily make as much difference as the little things.

I’m sure Apple employ some of the most talented IT people in the world, but I’ve heard easily 100x more people talk about the quality of Apple’s packaging and their experience of opening it, than I’ve heard talk about the brilliance of Apple’s coding or the technology behind their microchips.

And if you can get 100x the number of people talking positively about their experience of dealing with your business than you have now – especially when it costs nothing to add that “little thing” to what you would have done anyway – then take the plunge.

You have nothing to lose and potentially a huge RoI to gain!

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This article first appeared on LinkedIn.

Of course, it’s important to track progress and monitor performance, but the way this is done in many organisations can be counter-productive.

There’s too much focus on short-term “instant metrics” and too little focus on the connections between different metrics or whether those metrics serve any purpose at all.

It’s like “instant food”, such as Pot Noodles You’re hungry. You get a quick dose of energy…instant feedback from your gut telling you to feel better

Once in a blue moon, eating a Pot Noodle is unlikely to do any harm. But eat Pot Noodles for dinner every day and pretty soon you’ll be fat, bloated, and out of control.

Just like the management and administration overheads in organisations who have hooked themselves on the dopamine hit of “instant metrics”.

The overhead involved in tracking and reporting all these stats, and the management infrastructure required to spend all day in meetings talking about this tsunami of instant metrics is enormous. And the upside is often somewhere on the spectrum between small and non-existent.

But, whatever those metrics might be tracking, the root cause of their ineffectiveness is often the same. For pointing that out, we have British economist Charles Goodhart to thank.

Goodhart’s Law

Although it’s not quite how he originally expressed the idea, in the way it’s usually written today, Goodhart’s Law states: “When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure.”

There are several potential reasons for that, but first and foremost is that an organisation is likely to distort what it does to ensure the delivery of their key targets, even if the end result disadvantages the organisation. But nobody cares because “all the targets have been met”.

In my professional life, whenever I’ve seen a business in real trouble, it’s rare than they have anything other than a stellar monthly KPI report or balanced scorecard.

There might be a couple of amber-rated measures on there to give a superficial level of reassurance to the casual observer, indicating there has been some rigour in the assessment process, and that people are being held to account for their performance.

But the list is mostly rated green, or “on target”. And red ratings are incredibly rare.

Results not tasks

At heart, those measures have often been selected because they are largely within the control of the organisation, even though they mean very little in terms of bottom line performance.

For example, a marketing team might have a lead generation target. That’s a task. An internal activity that, subject to making the budget available and employing reasonably competent people, can be delivered relatively reliably.

However your business earns nothing from a lead. You don’t get paid until someone makes it into a sale.

The “generating a lead” bit is a task. The “making a sale” bit is a result.

In general, organisations build revenues, profits and cash flows by concentrating on results, not on tasks.

Sure, you might want to track tasks to get some idea of the future trajectory of the business, perhaps to manage your productive capacity effectively, or decide whether or not you want to approve a member of staff’s holiday request.

There is an undoubted benefit to tracking metrics like this. To use Goodhart’s language, that makes tasks a measure, not a target.

The only targets should be the results, because it’s easy to game tasks, but it’s much harder to game results.

If my target is to get more leads, I can go and buy some terrible leads very cheaply, turn my monthly KPI sheet green and apply for the next promotion that comes along.

If my target is to get more sales, I either get them or I don’t. Unless I’m thinking of committing fraud (spoiler alert: I wouldn’t) the only way I get to book a sale is if a potential client signs a contract and we deliver whatever it was we promised them. That’s much harder to fake.

Harder…but it’s not impossible

It’s a lot harder to fake a sale than a lead, but it’s not impossible.

Given the choice between those two metrics, I know which one I’d be choosing. It’s the sale every time for me. The end of the process, not the start of it. The result, not the task.

But even there lies a potential problem.

What about if I’m selling to people who aren’t going to pay us? Or who are going to complain and demand credits to an unreasonable level? Or who are going to sue us for some problem that was caused by their misuse of our product, rather than a failure of the product itself?

Using results (eg sales) to assess performance is vastly better than using tasks (leads). But what we really want to measure is cash left in the bank at the end of our guarantee period, so we know that the customer has paid in full and we have no continuing liability for the product we supplied.

For most organisations, this is impractical. The elapse of time between making a sale and the end of any guarantee period is too long, they believe, so all the internal performance metrics are based on tasks, not results.

Measuring tasks

I get the attraction of measuring tasks.

It’s like chugging back an espresso every half-hour or so. The caffeine hits keep coming. People get addicted to them and lose track of the organisation’s real objective – delivering results.

In fairness, it’s also much easier to measure tasks. Someone clicking a link to download a lead magnet is childishly simple to measure. Just about every piece of marketing software can spit out an hourly/daily/weekly report showing exactly how many people have clicked the link, and who they were.

No judgement is required. The lead is in your CRM or it isn’t. It’s a yes/no answer.

But there isn’t enough nuance.

Who downloaded that lead magnet? A genuine sales prospect…a “tyre-kicker” who will take up a lot of time and trouble, but ultimately not buy anything…someone doing research for a college project…a competitor trying to clone your sales process…?

The list goes on and on, but the point is this – at the task level you have no idea whether someone clicking a link is good (potential customer), bad (competitor trying to rip off your sales process), or neutral (student doing a project).

This is why, the eventual failure of failing organisations is always a huge surprise to the people running them, because they’ve been fooling themselves for quite some time that the “all green” RAG rating means they’ve been doing a great job.

Usually, by carefully choosing the tasks to measure to make sure they have a high degree of control over their delivery, meeting targets isn’t all that difficult in those organisations.

The bit they often miss is that they are focusing on the wrong targets.

Measuring results

Measuring results is harder than measuring tasks. They tend to be more multi-dimensional because anything worth achieving is almost certain to have lots of moving parts.

That multi-dimensionality mitigates against simplicity in reporting because very few things are necessarily good or bad. Lots of the individual components are in the “it depends” category of decision-making, where judgement is required and a spreadsheet or an AI bot won’t be able to give you a definitive answer.

Imagine you’re approached by a new customer who wants to buy from you, but at 10% below your normal prices. Should you take that work?

Well, it depends…

If it was for a large order, I might be prepared to give some sort of volume discount because I’ll get some economies of scale in the factory.

But equally, the factory might be quite busy at the moment and a large order at way below our normal prices might not leave enough capacity for better-paying customers.

On the other hand, if it was the holiday season and the factory was pretty quiet, I’d probably take the work so that we were at least making a contribution towards our overhead costs.

And let’s not forget this might be our first contact with a hugely prestigious client who had just been let down by their normal supplier. Might we want to pull out all the stops for them this time round to get our foot in the door with a perfect new customer?

For all those reasons and more, results are not nearly as easy to fit into a neat KPI dashboard as tasks are.

So they are rarely tracked. Rarely mentioned. Rarely the subject of discussion at a board meeting.

Whereas tasks tend to get picked over in minute detail if, heaven forbid, one of those KPI metrics starts flirting with amber territory on the dashboard.

Check for “Goodharts” in your organisation

In our data-driven world, it’s tempting to think all data is good data. But that’s not the case at all.

Data measures which can be fiddled – as a lot of task measures can be, pretty easily – are of very limited use to an organisation. They are interesting as far as they go, that’s all.

The fact that task measures are easy to track and report is not a good reason to stuff your KPI dashboard with any more of them than you already have.

As Peter Drucker said, “There is nothing quite so useless as doing efficiently that which should not be done at all.”

So take a look at your KPI reports, your balanced scorecards, and whatever goes to your board on a monthly basis for performance tracking.

The likelihood is that those reports mostly track tasks, and barely mention results. And if they do, it’s also likely that Goodhart’s Law applies – the metrics you track might have morphed into targets. Tasks which are carried out irrespective of their impact on your bottom line.

It’s not hard finding examples of Goodhart’s Law inside most organisations. So, if that’s what you find, it might be time for a rethink.

After all, tasks don’t pay an organisation’s bills. Only results do that.

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Just in case it’s bugging you, the title of this piece is a poor attempt at humour, based on the lyrics of Feargal Sharkey’s 1985 UK Number One record, “A Good Heart”.

The original lyric was “And a good heart these days is hard to find”.

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This article first appeared on LinkedIn.

Sounds a little crazy, perhaps, but did you know you can lose most of the time and still win?

There is a secret though. And it goes against how most organisations like to operate.

Here it is.

You need to stop trying to be perfect.

Most organisations can’t cope with an idea not working out. So the amount of time and effort…and therefore cost…that goes into every idea to make sure it’s thoroughly researched and road-tested before it gets released into the world, means most organisations can only afford to try out a small number of new ideas each year.

In turn, that means pretty much every idea has to be a home run so that overall there’s some positive RoI on the massive up-front expense.

Although, just by the law of averages, some of these ideas are so terrible they wipe out many times more than the value generated by the few projects which succeed, and that plunges the whole business into negative RoI territory.

Beyond a threshold, more research doesn’t mean an idea is more likely to work. It just increases the amount of the write-off for those projects which aren’t home runs.

The risk/reward ratio

That’s why so much of what’s called innovation today is just a rehash of something that’s already been done. While home runs are less likely, the costs are lower and, of course, you’ve probably also nudged the odds of success in your favour a little.

So overall you probably add something to the bottom line.

As a result, bland, re-hashed, me-too ideas take on a life of their own.

If you don’t believe me, take a look at the confectionary section in your local supermarket.

Not so long ago, there was only Cadbury’s Dairy Milk, and the only choice was whether you bought a big bar or a little bar. (I’m kidding – given the choice, who buys the little bar?)

Now, a stroll along the same aisle gives you about a dozen different products with various foodstuffs mixed in with Dairy Milk chocolate. And the products which used to come only in bars, now all come in bags of various sizes with individual bite-sizes pieces of all the most popular lines of confectionery.

From two or three base products, Cadbury’s have built several dozen variants of “things mixed into Dairy Milk”.

I’m sure Cadbury’s tried one or two ideas that didn’t work. But let’s face it, the chances of someone who enjoys Dairy Milk not enjoying Dairy Milk with some popping candy mixed into it probably isn’t very high.

Even if a few plain Dairy Milk die-hards don’t like the idea, there are probably enough fans of popping candy to make up the numbers. They might be tempted to try Dairy Milk for the first time after noticing some of their favourite sweet treats had been mixed into a bar of Dairy Milk.

I get how the economics of this works, even if it leads to some very bland choices of new products to green-light.

(Fast and Furious 27, anybody?)

A lesson from a legend

There is another way to think about how to implement new ideas in your organisation. But we need to go back in time 100 years or so first.

During the late 1800s and early 1900s a legendary Wall Street investor called Bernard Baruch made his fortune by doing things differently from the way most modern-day corporations make decisions.

He would typically make a small bet on a stock he thought would do well, but cut his losses quickly if the markets didn’t move the way he expected.

However, if the market moved the way he was expecting, he would invest more and more as the price went up, and his initial hunch was proved correct. (I say “hunch” – Baruch was famous for his detailed research too.)

So he invested more in proven winners, and cut the losses on trades which meandered or went completely the wrong way.

His experiences led him to opine, in the gendered language of the time: “…even being right three or four times out of ten should yield a person a fortune if he has the sense to cut his losses quickly on the ventures where he has been wrong.”

And here’s the maths to prove it

This can be a hard concept to get your head around because it’s a different way to think about the world.

So, without turning this into a maths lesson, here’s a simple example of how the principle works.

Imagine you make 10 £1,000 investments. You cut your losses rigorously, so only lose 5% on three investments, break even on another four, and the price goes up 10x on the remaining three.

In total, you would lose £150 on the first three investments, come out even on the next four, and make a combined £27,000 on the last three.

Overall, your return is £26,850 from that initial £10k investment pot. (The £27k less the £150 in losses, being 5% of each of the three investments where you lost money.)

Now, Bernard Baruch was a stock market investor where this sort of strategy is admittedly easier to make work. But the principles translate to your business too.

If, because of the costs that go into setting up a new project (doing all the research, the endless “strategy sessions”, the planning, the spreadsheets, and goodness knows what else), you can only launch 3 projects a year, there’s a 70% chance, using the figures above, that you’ll break even or lose money.

There is, of course, also a chance, albeit a tiny one, that you stumble across the three 10x return projects. But don’t bank on hitting home runs like that terribly often.

Even if all the effort, research, spreadsheets, and whatever else gives you slightly better odds – maybe you get 4-in-10 winners, and cut out one of the breakeven or loss-making options in the process – you are still more likely than not (60:40) to have a breakeven or loss-making project on your hands.

Until you launch to the public it’s all up for grabs anyway.

To adapt the old military saying, “no plan ever survives contact with the customer”.

Try this instead

So don’t seek perfection. Try out low-risk, low-cost ideas quickly and cheaply.

Try as many as you can.

But be ruthless about cutting out the ones that don’t work. Quickly.

And where you have an idea that gets traction, invest more and more into that project as it increasingly proves itself a reliable way to get the results you want.

The way to make this work is not to start off trying to launch the full, finished product.

Rather, think about the sequence of events which would need to be true for you to have a success on your hands.

Let’s say that to sell your product, you would first need to get people to register on your website.

Your first job should be trying to see if you can get people to register on your website for your new idea. It shouldn’t be building out a full retail version of the product before you try selling it.

Once you get the website registrations, by all means move on to whatever the next step in your process is – outbound calls, sales visits, email marketing sequences or whatever else you choose. Then try to prove that works too.

Get that right, and you need to spend very little money developing your new product until you’re pretty sure you have a winner on your hands. That keeps down the upfront costs and dramatically increases the likelihood of this new idea being successful.

You might even get some useful feedback from customers during this stage before you even have a finished product to sell. Feedback you probably wouldn’t have had if you had built the product first and then tried to sell it.

Don’t forget to cut the losers

However, if you can’t get people to register on your website for your new product that’s a fair indication that people don’t want to buy it.

Either the product is misjudged. Or the marketing is. Or both.

But if your selling process depends on people signing up on your website, and not enough people do that during your testing phase, then you definitely need to think again.

So can this project and work on something else instead.

It might have cost a few £100s to get a sign-up form on your website, but most organisations can cope with writing that off.

Wait until you’ve invested £100k to build the all-singing, all-dancing version before you try to sell it, and that’s a lot to write off if it doesn’t work.

The metaphor of stock-market investing is an imperfect one, but it gives an insight into a philosophy that isn’t as common in most organisations as it might be.

We should be celebrating low-cost, low-risk failure, because it means we canned a project that probably wasn’t going to work anyway at the point where we’d burned through just a few £100s, rather than after we’d spent £100k.

If you’re serious about building your bottom line, I know which strategy is more likely to deliver positive bottom line results over time.

Remember the Thomas Edison quote about all the times he tried to invent the electric lightbulb before finding a workable solution: “I have not failed 10,000 times – I have successfully found 10,000 ways that will not work.”

Provided those projects were approached in a low-cost, low-risk way, we should be celebrating those 10,000 failures, not firing people because they couldn’t beat the 70:30 odds against them, and hit a home run.

Otherwise you’re just putting all your money on a single spin of the roulette wheel and that’s not likely to be a winning strategy in the long run.

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This article first appeared on LinkedIn.

It’s might not sound like the most earth-shattering advice to suggest that constant innovation is one of the ways your business can stay ahead of the competition. But stick with me…

Do things other people don’t do and some customers will prefer your way. They’ll spend their money with you instead of anyone else, and your business will grow.

It’s a great defensive strategy as well. Build a reputation for regular, value-adding innovations and customers are more likely to stick around because they know whatever they are buying today will be even better in a few months’ time.

But innovation is often misunderstood.

Sometimes it’s seen as a dry, academic endeavour, full of systems, processes and extra hurdles for your customers and your people. (“We’ve improved the company expense claim system by adding three extra fields so we can build a reporting dashboard in Microsoft Excel. Hurrah – we’re being so innovative!”)

Other times, the bar for innovation is set far too high. It’s either sending people to the Moon or it isn’t worth anybody’s time. (“If we can’t work out a way to assemble cars without using a single bolt, there’s no point trying anything new in the bolt-manufacturing industry!”)

And there are also businesses where innovation is derided because they think everything worth doing has already been done. (“We don’t want to be accused of copying anyone else, so we’ll just keep doing what we’ve always done.”)

Innovation isn’t what people think it is

Every time you do something other people aren’t doing, you’re being innovative.

Get just a little closer to serving your customers’ needs than most of your industry, you’re moving ahead of the pack.

And, in our often greyed-out, me-too world, you don’t even need to do very much to stand out from the pack.

I used to work in the printing industry, running a business which produced food packaging.

Our innovation was in setting up our business to produce only short-run, fast-turnaround jobs at a time when 99% of the industry spent all their time working out ways to amortise their set-up costs over as long a print run as possible to get the price to the customer down as low as possible.

We were often twice the “market rate”. But, with us, you could have your packaging within 24/48 hours. For customers who needed an extra-fast service, we were much closer to satisfying their needs than almost all of our competitors, so picked up a lot of new business as a result.

We used the same industry-standard machinery as everyone else. The difference was in how we used it.

It was a more expensive way to run a printing business, of course, which is why we charged a higher unit price. But for our customers, given a choice between waiting a month for their packaging at the normal price, or buying from us and getting the packaging they needed in 24/48 hours, sometimes we were the best decision overall.

I’m not underestimating the effort that went into making this work, but if you were familiar with the printing industry, you could wander around our factory, see a couple of Komoris, a Roland or two and some Bobst cut and crease machinery Exactly like you’d see in any other firm in our sector.

We didn’t reinvent the art and science of lithographic printing. We just did what we did in a way that most of the industry didn’t, and added £millions to our revenue line in the process.

It’s often the tiny changes

When it comes to innovation, I’ve often found that the real game-changers aren’t huge mega-projects, which risks millions and takes years to come to fruition.

They’re often just the result of a switch in mindset. A different philosophy. An insight most of your industry missed. Distinctive positioning in a grey, same ol’, same ol’ world.

You don’t need to reinvent the wheel. You just need to spot an opportunity and make the switch.

My favourite example of this is the song “Always On My Mind”.

Depending on their age, a Brit is most likely to think of either Elvis Presley’s version of that song or The Pet Shop Boys’.

If you’re from the US, or have exceptionally good taste, you might think of Willie Nelson’s version too.

But for now, let’s keep it down to the first two options.

Apart from one tiny musical flourish (Wikipedia tells me that’s called a harmonic variation, but I’m not musical enough to vouch for that), the Pet Shop Boys’ version of “Always On My Mind” is identical to Elvis Presley’s.

Yes, the Pet Shop Boys used electronic instruments and Elvis used proper musicians, but it’s exactly the same tune, that tiny musical flourish apart.

In the UK, Elvis just squeezed into the Top 10 with his version in early 1973, topping out with a single week at Number 9 in the charts.

In December 1987, The Pet Shop Boys started a 4 week run at Number One in the charts, famously keeping The Pogues’ classic “Fairytale Of New York” off the Christmas Number One spot.

I wouldn’t particularly describe The Pet Shop Boys’ use of electronic instruments as an innovation. People playing the same tune on different instruments has been around for as long as musical instruments have existed.

So the only real innovation was dropping in that extra handful of notes.

Given that everything else was identical, it could be argued that this tiny innovation made the difference which took “Always On My Mind” from a so-so chart performance (by the standards of a legendary artist like Elvis Presley) to a blockbuster Number One single.

Now, don’t take this too literally. Sometimes when I talk about this example, people tell me that by 1987 Elvis had been forgotten and the Pet Shop Boys were riding high in popular culture, so it was easy for them to have a Number One single. Or they bring up other reasons why the results were so different.

But that misses the point. One tiny change meant a huge difference to the results.

It wasn’t a straight copy. The Pet Shop Boys did something different and made their version of “Always On My Mind” distinctively theirs.

Here’s the irony

But this story gets better. Here’s the irony.

I don’t think even Neil Tennant, lead vocalist of The Pet Shop Boys, would claim he’s a better singer than Elvis Presley. There’s no comparison between the quality of their singing voices.

Neil Tennant sings a lot better than I do, so I’m not being snide here. But he’s no Elvis.

So The Pet Shop Boys took a song, made a tiny innovation, added vocals which, by any measure, were objectively worse than the ones Elvis had laid down originally, and they still had four weeks at Number One vs a solitary week at Number 9.

Which also illustrates that you don’t need to make everything better to innovate.

Sometimes you might deliberately choose to make some elements worse. And that’s OK too if your customers don’t much care about those bits, as long as the elements you add in deliver even more value than whatever value you take away.

You might agree or disagree with their choice, but the record buyers of 1987 knew a good song when they heard one, and made that choice.

Now even more irony

The extra irony neither Elvis Presley nor The Pet Shop Boys produced objectively the best vocal performance of “Always On My Mind”.

Willie Nelson won a Grammy for vocal performance on his 1982 recording of the song.

He also innovated in his own way, helping this song’s journey from so-so chart performer to multiple Grammy Award winner.

From the full-on vocals and sweeping orchestration of Elvis Presley, Willie Nelson pared the song right back. It was little more than him standing in front of a microphone, strumming a guitar.

Elvis Presley’s voice was, of course, technically impressive.

But Willie Nelson’s version conveys the emotions better. His version hits me much harder in the gut than the other two versions, much as I enjoy them both for their respective qualities.

So what’s the point?

So what’s the point of all this rambling, you might ask.

It’s this.

Innovation can be about tiny changes. It doesn’t need to be “changing the universe as we know it” stuff.

In many organisations, change is a scary thing. Innovation is something people try to avoid. They perceive a degree of safety and certainty in the current model which, whilst a seductively comforting lie to believe, just isn’t true.

Your organisation is at much greater risk from not innovating at all than it is from trying a few innovations for size to see where they get you, because your competitors are more likely to sweep past the longer you stay in the same spot.

Often “innovation” is seen as “a big thing”. Something that will take years and cost millions. But that’s not true.

You can take something thousands of people in your industry have already done, make a tiny change to the way they do it, and have a smash hit on your hands.

You don’t need to believe me. Just ask The Pet Shop Boys.

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In this era of tech-endowed AI-faux creativity, let me also play tribute to the original writers of “Always On My Mind” – Wayne Carson, Johnny Christopher, and Mark James – without whom I literally could not have written this article.

Between them, they wrote a song that stood the test of time.

Getting on for 60 years after its first recording, “Always On My Mind” is still a song that just about everyone in the world knows. It achieved Gold and Platinum Record status around the world, and Grammy Awards by the bucketload.

How many of us can claim that one of our innovations has reached a comparable level of results…?

This article originally appeared on LinkedIn.

I know Default Settings sounds like the name of a character Trevor Howard might have played in a black-and-white film from the 1940s, but it’s got nothing to do with the golden age of British cinema.

Let me explain.

A default setting is where you set out a course of action which will be the right answer >99% of the time, but leaves open the possibility that very occasionally that won’t be the right answer and builds in an “override switch” in case it’s needed.

In most organisations, people use bureaucracy to deal with issues like this, even when that’s not the best way forward.

They try to consider every eventuality, and write 80-page procedure manuals spelling out in excruciating detail every circumstance they can think of, which leads to a detailed set of rules about what to do in each of the gazillion options they’ve managed to think of.

Bureaucracy creates problems, not solutions

This traditional bureaucratic approach brings many downsides.

The first and most obvious is that nobody knows enough about everything to consider every eventuality, so sooner or later something will come up that the 80-page procedure manual hasn’t catered for.

That usually leads to hours of meetings, lots of internal machinations, and possibly an opinion from the lawyers, before someone decides that the organisation can’t possibly admit to not having considered every possible eventuality, and launches a pointless fight about some irrelevance rather than admit their error.

Secondly, can you imagine how much training and time goes into making sure everyone in your organisation needs to be able to recite that 80-page manual off by heart? (And if that’s not at least an aspiration for your organisation, why are you bothering to write it in the first place?)

And then there’s the enormous cost of having highly-paid people spend days on end holding workshops about all the things they need to put into their 80-page manual, role-playing all the scenarios in which they might need to add some more conditions to the already-confusing smorgasbord of options in the other 79 pages, together with designing and operating the checking and enforcement mechanisms required to ensure compliance and report on what’s happened.

While some element of process and review is important in any organisation, bureaucracy is a self-sustaining, empire-building part of many organisations.

Beyond a threshold level, it rarely adds much value. It nearly always adds a considerable amount of cost. And it helps cheese off your customers and your people more effectively than just about anything else you could do.

No customer or employee likes to hear “I’m sorry, we can’t. It’s company policy.”

Yet those 80-page procedure manuals are set up to make sure that’s the answer, at least some of the time, even when everyone knows it makes very little sense in that situation.

We don’t need to be hippies

I’m not a starry-eyed hippy. Nor am I advocating anarchy or free love. Well, not anarchy, at least.

But I’ve got news for you. You can get the same results that 80-page procedure manuals claim to deliver at a tiny fraction of the cost, without cheesing off your customers and your people in the process.

That’s where default settings come in. Here’s how they work.

You set a desirable outcome, then make sure as few things as possible – especially bureaucracy – get in the way of delivering that desirable outcome for as many of your customers and your people as possible.

I heard a fantastic example of how to do this effectively several years ago, which I’ve since applied in “real world” settings – keep reading if you’re interested in the benefits of this approach.

The example I heard originally was from the CEO (at the time) of Ritz-Carlton Hotels.

His company had a policy (or a default setting, in other words) that their staff always said “yes” to guest requests, up to a monetary limit of, from memory, something like $2000.

Anything a guest asked for which would cost less than that threshold, the staff member – no matter how lowly – was empowered to do. Not just were they allowed to do it, they were expected to do it on the spot.

For items above $2000 they had to ask a manager for approval. Below that amount, they only had to ask a manager’s approval if they wanted to turn down the customer’s request.

The default setting was that the staff member would always say “yes”.

Sometimes when I tell people about this approach they go pale at the amount of cash even someone like a chambermaid is authorised to spend, but that’s part of the genius of this approach too.

The reality is that nobody…or almost nobody…made $2000 requests.

They might want someone to pick up the bag they forgot at the airport or find an express dry-cleaner after spilling their drink on an expensive dress.

As I remember the CEO’s talk, most customers never asked for anything. For those who asked for something, the average cost was under $100.

The occasional more expensive requests they received were regarded more as helpful PR collateral for Ritz-Carlton’s very public service-orientation than anything else.

But ask yourself:

How many hugely expensive internal meetings to develop 80-page procedure manuals did this approach render unnecessary?

How much time do you need to train your people before they understand “for anything up to $2000, the answer is always yes”?

How much do you think the policing and oversight of this policy costs relative to the usual bureaucratic approach?

In every case, I think you’ll agree, the “default setting” approach is vastly better, vastly cheaper, and vastly more likely to lead to excellent customer service.

Of course, it’s not quite that simple

Before you get all hot under the collar about this, of course, it’s not quite that simple.

Just because the Ritz-Carlton can afford a $2000 limit, it doesn’t mean that’s where you should set the limit too.

And Ritz-Carlton do put a lot of effort into hiring really good people and training them well.

If you employ ne’er-do-wells off the street, pay them minimum wage, and manage them in ways that even prison inmates might think was a little harsh, don’t expect this approach to be as effective for you.

But you can most certainly adopt the principles, as I did when I ran a factory for a large publicly-quoted company a few years back.

Naturally, we needed the factory to run at maximum efficiency for as much of each 24 hour period as possible. But our utilisation wasn’t as good as it might have been.

Digging into the reasons, I found that was often because the people running the machines were waiting for parts or repairs after something had broken.

However their manager was in a meeting, or was off-site for the day to visit a supplier, and the requisition form said the department manager needed to sign it off before procurement would process the purchase order to get their machine fixed.

Digging into a bit more detail, it turned out there were basically two sorts of parts/repairs events.

Nearly all of them were for something trivial. A bolt, a washer, or a belt needed replacing. The value of this sort of repair was mostly under £50.

Occasionally, perhaps once every few years, something like a drive shaft would blow and that would cost several £1000s to fix.

However, £1000+ repairs were, thankfully, incredibly rare.

So I adapted the “default setting” to give the machine-operators authority to spend anything up to £250 direct with our approved suppliers without needing to get their manager or procurement involved.

The old policy had been set up by the previous management “because we can’t trust our machine operators to spend £1000s on a new drive shaft correctly”.

I’m not sure that was true, by the way. I found our machine operators knowledgeable, customer-orientated, and eager to please. But that’s a separate issue.

That was, however, their rationale.

This might not be a surprise

If you’ve been following along so far, this might not be a surprise, but that switch from “don’t do anything without your manager’s approval” to “get your machine fixed as fast as you can, up to a spend of £250” did wonders for our utilisation.

Did anyone buy a part for their machine and sell it on to someone else, or take it home for their own use from time to time? Well, not that I ever noticed. And even if they did, the increase in utilisation added vastly more to our bottom line than the occasional “mis-applied” purchase cost us.

But the reality is that, by treating the machine operators like the skilled, trustworthy professionals they were, and by not getting in the way of fixing the problem as fast as possible, the business generated vastly higher profits than it did previously.

And, after all, even if a part broke on their machine which needed a £10 bolt to get it fixed, neither their manager nor the procurement team was ever going to say, “No, you can’t have a new bolt. We’d rather the machine stood idle.”

So all the previous policy had done was introduce delay and cost, without leading to better outcomes.

With a default setting of “get your machine fixed as fast as you can, up to a spend of £250” we eliminated pointless bureaucracy, reduced administration costs (after a while we only needed one person in procurement instead of two), and increased our chances of making on-time deliveries to our customers.

So next time someone in your organisation says you need a new procedure for X or you need to update the rulebook for Y, ask yourself – do you really need a new procedure, or might this be the time to try a default setting instead?

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PS: if you’re wondering about the Trevor Howard reference, he was a big movie star once upon a time, most famously (to me) in the beautiful film Brief Encounter from the mid-1940s. It is one of my all-time favourites.

I won’t spoil the story, but how two actors (Trevor Howard and Celia Johnson) can, more or less single-handed, hold an audience’s attention for an hour-and-a-half with no props and no action to speak of is a masterclass in writing (thanks to Noel Coward) and acting.

This post originally appeared on LinkedIn.