Right Attitudes

Ideas for Impact

Persuasion

Food Delivery Apps are Eating Up Your Money

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Food delivery apps have been the salvation for restaurants—and laid-off workers—during the COVID-19 pandemic. However, the promotions and fees charged by the likes of Uber Eats and GrubHub are bleeding restaurants dry. According to the Washington Post, one restaurant with $1,043 in food sales was left with just $377 after GrubHub’s charges for delivery, commission, processing, and promotions.

The food delivery startups’ #eatlocal and #keeprestaurantsopen promotions are exploiting customers’ generosity. Customers aren’t really helping out local restaurants as much as they may think. WIRED notes,

Uber Eats has waived delivery fees to consumers on most phone orders but still charges a 25% commission on orders from restaurants it partners with.

On a normal Wednesday night, [one Miami restaurateur] would expect roughly $5,000 in revenue. This Wednesday, the total was $665. Of that, $523 came through delivery apps, primarily Uber Eats. Those commissions totaled $131, leaving him just $534 to cover rent, plus the cost of food and staff. His typical daily overhead is about $3,000. With reduced staff, it’s now $1,200—more than twice as much as his revenue Wednesday. “It’s not sustainable,” he says.

Uber Eats isn’t the only company accused of trying to capitalize on the crisis. GrubHub’s “Supper for Support” initiative, meant to encourage buying from local restaurants, drew widespread criticism. The deal offers a $10 discount on certain orders between 5 pm and 9 pm, but restaurants that opt in cover the discount, and GrubHub still charges its commission on the full price.

Customers ought to know about these apps’ deceptive business practices and be able to make meaningful choices about patronizing local businesses.

In 2018, food delivery raked an estimated $161BB in sales worldwide, and the potential market size has attracted a great deal of startup funding. En bloc, the food delivery business has struggled to sustain itself profitably. The restaurants are particularly agitated, not least because food is a low-margin business, and the fiercely competitive meal-delivery firms just can’t recompense restaurants and riders as much as needed.

Idea for Impact: If you want to support your local businesses, patronize them directly. Call your order in. Pick up the order yourself or get your food delivered by the restaurant itself. Cut out the intermediary.

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Putting the WOW in Customer Service // Book Summary of Tony Hsieh’s Delivering Happiness

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To keep your customers in the present day, you can’t be content just to please them. If you want your business to thrive, you have to produce enthusiastic aficionados—customers who’re so keyed up about how you treat them that they want to tell stories about you. These customers and their cult-like loyalty become a key element of your sales force.

'Delivering Happiness' by Tony Hsieh (ISBN 0446576220) American entrepreneur Tony Hsieh built the online retail store Zappos on the fundamental idea that great service is not a happenstance. It starts when leaders decide what kind of experience they want their customers to have—and articulate that approach in a clear mission and vision. As in the case of luxury hotel chain Ritz-Carlton, leaders keep the mission alive by empowering their employees to go the extra mile for the customer. Above all, when it comes from the heart, great customer service keeps customers coming back over and over.

In Delivering Happiness: A Path to Profits, Passion, and Purpose (2010,) Hsieh discusses the importance of cultivating happiness as a launch pad to better results for your business.

How Zappos Profits from The Happiness Business

How Zappos Profits from The Happiness Business

Hsieh did not create Zappos. He was one of the startup’s initial investors but got sucked in to help the original founder after six years. Zappos operated in survival mode for a while. As it began to outlive its financial struggles, Hsieh and his leadership team went about building an intentional corporate culture dedicated to employee empowerment and the promise of delivering happiness through a valued workforce and devoted customers.

Over the years, the number one driver of our growth at Zappos has been repeat customers and word of mouth. Our philosophy has been to take most of the money we would have spent on paid advertising and invest it into customer service and the customer experience instead, letting our customers do the marketing for us through word of mouth.

Hsieh tells his entrepreneurial life experiences, often presenting biographical stories to make his line of reasoning. Many great entrepreneurs got started early, and Hsieh is no exception. He started with worm-farming (age 7,) button-making (elementary school,) magic tricks involving dental dams (high school,) burger joint (college,) and web-consulting (post-college) before having considerable financial success with the internet advertising firm LinkExchange (sold in 1998 to Microsoft for $265 million.)

In 2009, Hsieh sold Zappos to Amazon for $847 million under pressure from Sequoia Capital, a major financier of Zappos. As a point of reference, Hsieh later recalled,

Some board members had always viewed our company culture as a pet project—“Tony’s social experiments,” they called it. I disagreed. I believe that getting the culture right is the most important thing a company can do. But the board took the conventional view–namely, that a business should focus on profitability first and then use the profits to do nice things for its employees. The board’s attitude was that my “social experiments” might make for good PR but that they didn’t move the overall business forward. The board wanted me, or whoever was CEO, to spend less time on worrying about employee happiness and more time selling shoes.

How Zappos Fostered a Culture and a Business Model Based on the Notion of Happiness

Delivering Happiness - Tony Hsieh of Zappos Zappos’s corporate culture is guided by ten core values, which aspire to empower employees, create a sense of community in the workplace (employees are encouraged to “create fun and a little weirdness” in the office and build personal connections with colleagues,) and serve a higher purpose beyond bottom-line metrics.

  • Zappos’s core values include: deliver WOW through service (#1,) be humble (#10,) do more with less (#8,) be passionate and determined (#9,) and create fun and a little weirdness (#3.)
  • Zappos wants only those employees who really want to work for the company. All new employees attend a four-week training program that immerses them in the company’s strategy, culture, and customer-obsession. Zappos offers $2,000 to walk out at the end of the first week, and the offer stands until the end of the fourth week. Only a small number of new employees take the offer.
  • Zappos challenges all employees to make at least one improvement every week. Allowing employees to improve the tasks they’re doing and enhancing the processes that they’re responsible for executing allows them to make their jobs more meaningful.
  • Instead of measuring call center efficiency by the time each call center operator spends on the phone with a customer, Zappos developed its own scorecards. Zappos quantifies such things as the personal and emotional connections operators make with customers using measures such as measuring the number of thank you cards.

Zappos is Obsessed with Impressing Customers

By focusing on company culture, everything else—such as building a brand with sustained revenue growth, fast turnaround times at warehouses, and passionate employees—fell into place.

Happiness is really just about four things: perceived control, perceived progress, connectedness (number and depth of your relationships,) and vision/meaning (being part of something bigger than yourself.)

Recommendation: Read Tony Hsieh’s Delivering Happiness. This insightful tome is brimming with practicable ideas on customer service, building a positive company culture, best hiring practices, how to motivate and train your team, and setting business goals and values. The core elements of Zappos’s DNA—purpose, happiness, culture, and profits—are an effective framework for making happiness a business model.

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Steak, Not Sizzle

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Mark Hurd, the recently-departed executive of NCR and CEO HP and Oracle, recalled this best advice he ever got:

When I moved to a head-office in Dayton in 1988, an NCR executive was giving a presentation; he had great slides and an even better delivery. The CEO, Chuck Exley, listened to the entire presentation in his typically gracious, courteous manner. At the conclusion, he nodded and said something brief but profound: “Good story, but it’s hard to look smart with bad numbers.” And as I reflected on it, the presenter, articulate as he was, as good as his slides were, simply had bad numbers.

That comment has always stayed with me. You have to focus on the underlying substance. There’s just no way to disguise poor performance. I’ve tried to follow that advice throughout my career. Deliver good numbers, and you earn the right for people to listen to you.

Idea for Impact: Don’t Succumb to Hype

Marketing and branding have conditioned society to play up—and be attracted to—sizzle over steak. Style over substance.

Sizzle can only get you so far.

Focus on the steak. It is considerate and farsighted and more fulfilling to focus on substantive ideas, products, and presentations.

For sure, sizzle is important. Only when you have a good steak, add some sizzle to promote the bejesus out of whatever it is you have to offer.

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Undertake Not What You Cannot Perform

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Each time you break a promise or commitment, even to yourself, you chip away at your claim—and your intention—to be a responsible, reliable, self-aware person.

Making promises and keeping them is how you build integrity, how you foster relationships of trust, and, more importantly, how you learn to trust yourself.

Every time you break a promise, your word has less value.

Giving your word is a serious undertaking, even on trivial matters. Never ever make a promise that you think there is even the slightest chance that you may break.

Idea for Impact: Don’t make a promise if a situation warrants a more open-ended response.

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Living with Rules You Don’t Like

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As a manager, sometimes you have to enforce rules that you don’t agree with.

Try your best to empathize with the rules, and if you can’t, you have no choice to accept the rules and implement them.

No manager wants to be the bearer of bad news, particularly when it’s about something the manager disagrees with. To avoid conflict with your employees, be concise, straightforward, and empathetic. Pass on the underlying principle communicated down to you. Then assert, “I’m afraid we have to live with this rule.”

Allow for venting, but discourage debate.

To maintain respect for those who have made the decisions, you may add, “Our executives have considered other options. They’ve made the choices based on what’s best for the organization. Decisions made at the top are often the final word on a subject. Rules are the rules. It’s okay to question them and not like them, but they still need to be followed.”

Emphasize that some disputes and disagreements are worth fighting, and others just aren’t. “I certainly don’t like it any more than you do. This isn’t the choice I would have made. But, let’s live with this rule, implement the change to the best of our abilities, and focus on our work and our team.”

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Why Your Employees Don’t Trust You—and What to Do About it

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If you have trouble getting employees to trust you, perhaps one—or more—of the following reasons are to blame:

  • You don’t model what you say.
  • You make promises you can’t keep.
  • You guard and selectively disclose information.
  • You don’t allow your employees to exercise their judgment.
  • You ask for input from your employees and ignore them.
  • You seek to monitor everything—including time spent on social media.
  • You tend to shift the blame.
  • You avoid giving credit where credit is due.
  • You ignore workplace concerns and problems until they become more significant problems.
  • You have double standards (employees tend to be especially very alert to this.)

Management scholars have suggested that trustworthiness entails three attributes: competence to perform tasks reliably (your ability,) having benign intentions (your benevolence,) and acting consistently with sound ethical principles such as fairmindedness, sincerity, and honesty (your integrity.) If you can exhibit these three attributes credibly and dependably, all will trust you. Get any of these three attributes wrong, and your standing will suffer.

Here are a few actions you can take to rebuild trust within your organization:

  • Communicate openly. Listen. Value everyone’s opinions equally. Involve employees in decision-making. Be as transparent as possible.
  • Empower employees. Encourage them to use their best judgment to identify and solve problems. Don’t be unnecessarily rigid with enforcing rules.
  • Make everyone accountable. Take responsibility. Invite and listen to feedback. Communicate expectations. Invest in commitments.

Idea for Impact: Trust is reshaped—strengthened or undermined—in every encounter

If your employees don’t trust you, then they won’t do what you need them to, and they won’t stick around long.

Trust is a consequence of your actions, not merely an intention or message. Trust is truly behavioral; it is complicated and fragile. Trust must be hard-fought, hard-earned, and hard-won every day, through actions, not words.

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Surrounded by Yes

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Social-Media Impose “Censorship” Through Recommendions and Filters

Google, Facebook, Amazon, and other media companies have built unbelievably powerful tools for collecting and organizing personal data. They’re developing and perfecting algorithms that track your activities and accumulate repositories of seemingly-trivial social media data.

They know whom you hang out with and what you like. And they can make extraordinarily good deductions about your demographics, social influences, political partisanship, social and economic preferences, and everything else. They’re influencing not just what content you see, but also which sites you visit in the first place.

These companies’ intentions are modest enough: to feed you the news you’re likely to want and to expose you to the kind of products and services you’re likely to respond to. The pages you’re shown are tailored for who you are, where you live, whom you interact with, and what you’ve previously clicked on.

The purveyors of the internet make money from advertising and paid subscriptions. Their goal is stickiness: they need traffic to thrive and prosper. Their success depends on their ability to draw you, keep you longer, and persuade you to return before you choose to leave.

Recommender systems have an enormous influence on the discourse you’re exposed to.

There’s a dangerous consequence here. What you should realize is that Google, Facebook, and Amazon have become gatekeepers of everything you see on the internet. Their content filtering and recommender systems are substituting editorial judgment. They’re not neutral and, given their economic objectives, often serve to amplify your biases.

The problem with filtering and recommender systems is that everybody likes them. The content you’re fed with is, in a sense, an endless stream of affirmations that you’re right—you’ll see more of what you’re interested in and associate with others who share your viewpoints. The consensus view is reinforced—the world seems to agree with you. Everything feels more normal!

On a broader scale, as people converge to likeminded people in virtual neighborhoods, you tend to operate in an intellectual bubble. Left to all these devices of today’s information-consumption patterns, much of your opinions and judgments are subjective, imprecise, incomplete, narrow-minded, or utterly unapprised.

All this has made it difficult for you to seek out contrasting views even if you feel so disposed. When you do venture out, all you’ll see are trolls who get offended by the slightest of disagreements—any attempt to challenge their beliefs is taken as a grievous insult. These trolls resort to bumper sticker-rhetoric, name-calling, demeaning attacks, and ill-informed declarations.

Idea for Impact: There’s Great Value in Listening Carefully and Charitably to Ideological Opponents.

Reach out. Consider alternative world-views that may cause you to philosophize differently. Find well-intentioned, respectful people who can challenge your viewpoints. Associate with ideological challengers who can help you improve your understanding of conflicting perspectives.

In On Being Certain: Believing You Are Right Even When You’re Not (2008,) neurologist and author Robert Burton argues that certainty is an emotion just like anger, passion, or sorrow. Once you develop a “that’s right” disposition about a subject matter, your brain subconsciously protects you from wasting its processing effort on problems for which it has already found a solution that you believe is good enough, and is continuously reinforced. In other words, your cerebral laziness could subconsciously lead you to “do less” by simply embracing a cast-iron certainty rather than re-examining your assumptions.

Don’t be lazy. Doggedly examine your biases and prejudices.

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How to Gain Empathic Insight during a Conflict

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One simple starting point for finding common ground during a conflict is to ask, “what if the others’ perspectives were true?”

When others tell you something that you don’t agree with, just suspend disbelief for a moment.

Imagine what it is to be like them.

Think, “what if the others’ perspectives are true.”

What would that mean to you?

What would that mean in the context of your shared interests?

How would that change your perspective on your own opinion?

Putting yourself in the other person’s shoes can help you identify how they’re feeling and why they’re feeling that way. This makes it easier to take the big vital step: treating them with empathy and compassion. Suddenly, the conflict is less personal—it’s not about you or them.

Idea for Impact: We human beings are not transformed as much by statistics and facts as we are by stories. When there are two alternative viewpoints of one story, being open-minded, listening honestly, and identifying the other through their stories could be really transformative. It changes the conversation. It helps you move forward and seek solutions that are favorable to both sides.

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Everything in Life is Perception

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When J. K. Rowling wrote the novel The Cuckoo’s Calling (2013) and published iu under the pseudonym Robert Galbraith, she sold less than 1,500 copies in print in three months. When word got out that J. K. Rowling had written the book, The Cuckoo’s Calling immediately jumped to the top of the best-seller lists. In just a few months, the book had sold 1.1 million copies.

When the internationally-acclaimed violinist Joshua Bell played his famous 300-year-old, $3.5 million Stradivarius violin at a Washington, D.C. metro station in 2007, only seven out of the 1,097 people who walked past him during his 45-minute performance stopped to listen. Dressed in street clothes, Bell made just $32.17 in tips tossed into the open violin case at his feet—plus $20 from one person who actually recognized him. People otherwise pay hundreds of dollars to hear him perform at fancy concert halls around the world.

The Yale psychologist Paul Bloom, author of How Pleasure Works (2010,) has described,

When we get pleasure from something, it’s not merely based on what we see or what we hear or what we feel. Rather, it’s based on what we believe that thing to be.

And so, someone listening to the music of Joshua Bell is going to hear it differently and like it more if they believe it’s from Joshua Bell. If you hear the same music and think it’s from some scruffy, anonymous street performer, it doesn’t sound so good.

And I think that’s a more general fact about pleasure. I think wine doesn’t taste as good if you don’t know it’s expensive or special wine. A painting is going to look different to you, and you’re going to value it differently, depending on who you think created it.

Bloom has explained how our minds shape the way a thing will be—because we behave in proportion to our expectations:

We don’t just respond to things as we see, feel, or hear them. Rather, our response is conditioned by our beliefs of where things come from, what they’re made of, or what their hidden nature is. This is true, not just for how we think about things, but how we react to things.

Idea for Impact: Perception is Reality

Expectations color people’s perceptions, and satisfaction with any experience depends on their perceptions going into it.

What you make others think you’re offering them—your skills, your services, your products—profoundly affects their experience. The right expectations can alter anything from valueless to priceless.

However, as Dr. Johnson has warned, “we ought not to raise expectations which it is not in our power to satisfy.—It is more pleasing to see smoke brightening into flame, than flame sinking into smoke.”

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The High Cost of Winning a Small Argument

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Winning a conflict with a colleague over who’s right may feel good at the moment. But you could lose a future battle when you may need her cooperation and support the most.

Insisting upon being right when disagreeing with your boss could be dearer.

It’s futile to win any argument by overpowering or silencing the other person. Even causal denigration and occasional microaggressions can eventually lead to feelings of alienation and anger.

Conflicts sometimes evolve quickly from simple disagreements into high-stakes battles. So, before it’s too late, consider if taking a step back is wiser. Take the initiative and concede a point—even if you may end up losing the argument.

Seeking small glory now may only spoil your chance of bigger success in the future. Focus on the outcome—often, it’s the result that matters, not your role in it.

Idea for Impact: When you think you can nail someone with a winning argument, take a deep breath, and check if you could control your ego and back down. You may actually lose something small, but avoid losing something bigger.

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