5. On another trip, I went to the covered football stadium to see Miami Hurricanes in a Bowl match against (I think) Alabama. I have never heard a noise that has equalled that made by the crowd when (unfortunately) Alabama took the field.
6. The city boasts one of the best quick-service dishes on the planet – the Po’ Boy sandwich. I had one that had shrimp as its main ingredient, and I managed to eat it. This I did by unhinging my jaw like a reticulated python, and swallowing it inch by inch – whole. It’s the only way.
7. Coffee and beignets in the Café du Monde, by the river, in the early morning sun. Why isn’t there one in every city? Why isn’t there one on the banks of the Thames in London?
8. Have you ever had shrimp straight out of the kettle, piping hot, and washed down with ice-cold Jax beer – in the approximate ratio of one beer to one shrimp? No? Try it, but I suggest you use a safety net to start with.
9. You can sit and stare, for hours if you want to, and I have, at Big Muddy (the Mississippi) rolling past. You can ponder where it’s been and where it’s going. You can reflect on its history. You can wonder at its size and stature. You can contemplate the meaning of life. I don’t know of any other river that offers this to someone sitting on a bench.
10. My favourite memory. When I visit anywhere, I like to dig down a bit and find places to eat that are a bit off-centre. I had heard about a restaurant, Dooky Chase’s, which had been going since 1941. Our son was (about) twelve at the time, and I called a taxi for the three of us (my wife included) and gave the cabbie the address of the restaurant. Now, I can’t fancy this up: the only way you can describe the skin colour of the three of us is white, as in really, deeply white. In addition, we were also, I suppose, really, deeply not poor. According to the taxi driver, neither of these characteristics would stand us in good stead in the neighbourhood that housed Dooky’s, and he was very reluctant to take us there. We insisted, although by the time he finished his health-warning speech, our inner confidence was a degree or two less than that which showed on the surface. Man, are we glad we did. We just had the best of times. We met Dooky’s widow, Emily, and cherish the memory of our son and her smiling together. Everybody was just great, and I had some fried chicken that I can close my eyes and still taste. We still use Dooky’s recipe book (put together by their daughter, Leah) – and in a cold, wintry England it can transport you to a better place.
I’m not sure my memories will be treated by the Louisiana tourist authorities which much enthusiasm. Having just re-read the list, it has the feel of Osama Bin Laden recommending somewhere for a holiday. But I had to stand tall in defending N’awlins against such an unjust attack, particularly after its recent nightmare. It is not a nice thing to do to shoot a Kink, but – considering all the extenuating circumstances above – the city should plea-bargain for a very light sentence.
After Katrina, it has a tough journey ahead. We should all wish it well.
50. Island in the sun
I think most adults have three places they could call home. Few people today live in their place of birth, but I suspect they are like me and look back on it (probably through rose-coloured lenses) as ‘home’. Then, of course, there is the place that is lived in now. This might be somewhere you love or hate, or anything in between depending on circumstances, but is another ‘home’.
There is, I think, a third home – a spiritual one. It might be a place you have visited or just a place you have seen in pictures and/or read about, but it is a place that you just know is meant for you and somewhere you could live in peace and happiness. I have one of those. It is the Greek island of Crete. I have never lived there, but I have been many times.
Crete is part of Greece, but my spirit is with the island and not with the nation. Greece has wonderful ancient history, but today the nation state is like most others – ridden with the angst and paranoia of modern democracy. The island, however, is something else.
For a start, it’s in the Mediterranean, that glorious pool of water that touches (and reflects) three continents. The flooding of the land basin that formed the Mediterranean is thought by many to have been caused by Noah’s flood, and the glories of the ancient history of the three continents somehow echo in the surf.
We landed on Crete nearly twenty-five years ago. I know the date exactly because it was that great moment in the story of a family when the youngest child reaches the age of three and you no longer need to drive around in a truck to carry the associated equipment. Our plan was for the four of us (our two boys were then aged three and eight) to land on the island, with one soft bag each, rent a car, and set off – staying at different (un-booked) places every night. Our tactics for finding places to stay (which remain the same to this day) were never to stop at somewhere on the way in to a new town, but to drive through it and work back. We did this when we hit Chania, out west on the island, and stayed at a tiny place that had five rooms to rent, right on the beach.
The family who owned the rooms consisted of Mama, Papa, and four children (three daughters and a son). We never moved for the rest of our trip, and I have just come off the phone from arranging this year’s visit. The logistics remain the same – it is 115 paces from my bed to my spot on the beach, itself about ten paces from the surf. In the intervening quarter century, Papa tragically died in an accident, and last month one of the daughters produced the first grandchild.
They now have twenty rooms, which have appeared in batches over the years. They bought the building next door, and one of the daughters runs a car rental business from it. Their beachside restaurant, still based on Mama’s cooking, is simple and stunning.
We have watched Chania grow as a town over the same period, but somehow – like the family business and the local community – it has grown and kept its heritage. Our visit last September coincided with the annual festival celebrating the success and safety of the local fishermen. It involved eating a lot of fresh sardines, drinking a lot of wine, and dancing a lot of dances. One of the family daughters, now a stunning, thoroughly modern, cell phone-clad, zero body fat twenty-something appeared in traditional costume and proudly joined the troupe on the makeshift stage on the beach. There was no embarrassment – it was entirely natural. The old ways and the new somehow go hand in hand on this island. We have watched the small family business grow over the years, overcoming the tragic death of Papa. It became clear to me that, without the benefit of business schooling, Mama and the children obeyed two simple rules that many of us forget in the clutter and competition of modern business. They have particular relevance for the quick-serve business – at all levels. Here they are:
1. Expand at a pace you can digest. This is not – repeat not – just about money. It is about operation and execution. Quick-service, at all levels, is now littered with the bleached skeletons of businesses that over-extended themselves to grow in step-functions. If you look below the skin of the current well-documented problems of Krispy Kreme, you find indigestible growth aspirations at the core.
2. Focus your energy on retaining your existing customers, and you will not need to spend much energy and money chasing new ones. When we got back from last year’s visit, we couldn’t get over the combination we had just experienced – the family, the beach, the price, the food, the weather, the town – and yapped about it a bit too much in the pub. The result? Six more of our friends are going next year. It is such a powerful message, but so often ignored or forgotten: We exist on a planet that swarms with ho-hum products and services. If you deliver something memorable, you are distinct. If you do achieve this, then word of mouth will get you new business.
Look, not everything is wonderful on Crete. There are too many top-heavy German ladies who insist on going topless, and these are sights that an impressionable Englishman should not be exposed to. Nor should Crete intrude on your own dreams of your spiritual home.
But try it sometime. And if you can’t make it, chew over Mama’s two lessons for today’s quick-service from the heartland
of ancient civilisation.
51. At your service
The relationship between the letters that make up ‘QSR’ have fascinated, and confused, me for some time. R stands for Restaurant, and I’m happy with that – they are not ‘stores’. Q is for Quick, and I understand the importance of that. The S trips me up. I’m never quite sure if it stands for Serve or Service, but I don’t believe, whether it’s a verb or noun, that it gets the weighted credit it should get in making a winning QSR.
Service, and its possible importance (even in our industry), has been on my mind recently. Out of a bunch of travel reading, I picked up two thoughtful studies on the subject, which should give us all a lot to ponder.
The first put forward the thesis that, with the internet/web revolution now behind us, the last great business breakthrough opportunity will be around mixing product, service and price together in a way that blows the customer away. For sure, this is not a new idea, and it has come and gone as a business fashion many times over the history of commerce – but the difference is that, now, all the cards have been flopped and we have to play the hands we have. It’s fifty years since The Guru, Ted Levitt, pointed out that the only purpose of being in business is to secure and retain a customer – an idea whose time has finally come. There are no more silver bullets.
A second study I read came at the same subject from a different angle. Imagine a graph with five points on the vertical axis, ranging from the ‘completely dissatisfied customer’ at the bottom, through the mid-point (‘satisfied customer’), to the top point (‘completely satisfied’). According to the study, if you want repeat purchases, an unsolicited word-of-mouth reputation and customer loyalty, the first four points on the graph won’t get it for you. Nope, that’s right, satisfied – or even very satisfied – customers won’t deliver those three things. Only those who are completely satisfied will. Now, read those three things again and figure out how much you would pay an agency to deliver those for you. Then face the fact that they can’t. You control the customer experience.
I digested these two studies then closed my eyes and thought. I went back as far as I could and tried to remember how many times in the past year I’ve been ‘completely’ satisfied. Our family buys a big bunch of products and services in the course of a year, and I ranged over as many as I could remember. Here’s the final score: once.
We were planning a trip to India and got a heads-up to use an Indian travel agency. Wow! The agency finished every e-mail with the mantra: Long after the price is forgotten, the service will be remembered. And so it will. Their total customer experience was stunning.
When I was a boy in England, the United States was the accepted role model for service. In 1989, I went to live there and found it wasn’t so. It was no better, and no worse, than anywhere else in the world. There was a lot of lip service and a lot of ‘Have a nice day’, but it was generally all ho-hum stuff.
After five years back in Europe, I recently hit the shores of the US again for a five-week, five-city visit, so I thought I’d put these two theses to the test. Car rental, hotel rooms, quick- and slow-service restaurant food and a whole range of other products and services – all were acquired during the stay. I was ready, even keen, to be completely satisfied by somebody, somewhere. It was a thorough test, conducted under rigorous trial conditions, and I have listed the complex empirical results in the following long and complicated format:
Number of times ‘completely’ satisfied: None.
This is not to say I wasn’t occasionally overwhelmed. When we hit Maryland, I was told I absolutely must have the lump crab cakes at a specific restaurant, so we went to the place and I ordered them. I don’t know what I was expecting, but two soccer ball-size creations arrived, each containing the equivalent of Europe’s annual output of crab. I set off gamely. After twenty minutes, I was convinced there was more on my plate than when I started. I think they were breeding. I fought my way through one, but then I had to wave my white napkin in surrender. At this point our waitress asked me if I would like to take the other one home. I explained that I was from Planet Europe, where we go out to eat a meal, not adopt it.
Big is not necessarily good. Neither is quick on its own. Only good is good, and only completely is completely.
Here’s a poser for you: ask yourself when you were last ‘completely’ satisfied by any product or service you bought. See? It’s hard.
But if you or your company could figure out some way to deliver a completely satisfying experience, the rewards would be such that no paid agency, discounting programme or new product could deliver them. So, pause for a minute and figure out what you could do to hit that jackpot with your operation.
I must go now. I’m going to take my lump crab cake for a walk. We brought him home, and we’ve christened him Jack. I’m sure we’ll learn to love him.
52. Oops! Sorry …
As you know, there are fundamental laws governing the universe. One of them, The Law of Unintended Consequences, is having a bigger and bigger effect on our lives. This law states that while many acts are committed with good intentions, those same acts can often result in unforeseen consequences that threaten to drown any positives.
This Law has been a big factor in my life. Here’s an example. My dad was a delightful man. Although we lived in a soccer-mad area of England, he was not a big fan. Still, he decided, one day, when I was about seven years old, to take me to see one of our two local clubs. I do not know why he decided to take me to watch Manchester City rather than Manchester United, but that act of paternal affection condemned me to a lifetime of tears and misery.
The incomparable Barbara Tuchman studied The Law of Unintended Consequences in her March of Folly (Ballantine Books, 1984). She actually tried to define the planet’s biggest-ever mistake, classifying them by the sheer weight of their unintended consequences. For the record, she came up with the decision, taken by the German High Command, to resume U-boat activity in the Atlantic in 1916. It had been halted after the sinking of the Lusitania, and its re-start effectively triggered America’s entry into the First World War. The result was a victory for the Allies instead of an exhausted peace. However, it doesn’t end there. That single decision brought defeat for Germany – but also reparations, war guilt, Hitler and the Second World War. Let’s be honest, that’s some mistake.
The Law of Unintended Consequences is in full flow today.
The internet has revolutionised our lives with many positives. It has also, however, provided undreamed-of opportunities for sexual predators, bomb makers, terrorists, identity thieves and copyright violators. Did Al Gore think about all those when he famously invented it?
The Law has also been at work in the quick-serve business, directly and indirectly. Consider the following developments:
The general move toward using fructose corn syrup as a sweetener, particularly in drinks.
The increasing mental correlation of food portion size with value.
The restructuring of the traditional family: more single parents and/or more working mums = reduced home cooking and at-home meals.
The emancipation of children.
Cuts in school funding.
Each occurred over the past twenty years, and though there was no master plan, they are all related to one unintended collective consequence – the rise of obesity among children. Again, there’s no single big villain at work here. Many of these developments happened in pursuit of the perceived interests of taxpayers, stockholders, customers, families and communities.
Forget obesity for a minute. According to the (US) Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (quoted in Greg Critser’s book Fat Land), of all babies born in the United States in 2000, one-third will become diabetic at some stage in their lives unless some or all of the unforeseen costs of the aforementioned developments are addressed. In the above sentence, you can probably substitute the UK for the US without changing the figures by much.
Let’s not fancy it up: quick-service play
ed a part – albeit by no means the dominating part that many would have us believe – in creating these unintended consequences. It can, and should, play a part in creating some intended solutions.
My point here, however, is rather more mundane than what caused mass-obesity and a type 2 diabetes epidemic. I want you to focus on the idea that any decision has the ability to create unintended consequences.
When you take a decision that affects the future of your business, at whatever level you operate, there is a tendency to focus on the known and positive consequences. If you do X, you are pretty sure Y will happen. Sure, you will probably factor in a pessimistic option, the consequences of it not going quite right. What you won’t factor in are the possibilities that the ripple-effects of your decision will trigger something completely unintended simply because you don’t, by definition, know what they possibly could be. My advice is to spend a bit of time, just a bit, on some wild, off-the-wall thinking about what just might happen consequently. It could pay back in spades.
I am smiling now. My two grown sons have just popped around. They are also Manchester City fans, and we have just lost – again. For some reason, they are so, so angry with me.
53. Ever since I could talk …
So there I was, in the Air France lounge at Mumbai Airport, waiting for a delayed flight, as you do. I wandered over to the magazine rack and there was a copy of Fortune. On the front cover was a list of business ‘Celebs’, and the headline referred to an article inside in which these Warren Buffett ‘wannabes’ were to tell us what advice had influenced them most in their lives and careers. Thinking that would pass half an hour, I filled up with coffee, grabbed the magazine and headed for a chair – only to find that somebody had ripped the article out completely.
Five Loaves, Two Fishes and Six Chicken Nuggets Page 15
