HALF TIME THOUGHTS, EPISODE 44: TIME TO MOVE ON

Before I dive into this rabbit hole, let me be clear that this article has been written from the point of view of a privileged individual living in an affluent neighborhood in a thriving city in the United States. I acknowledge that my situation is not representative of how everyone is currently experiencing the world. 

That said, the world that I’m experiencing isn’t behaving the way it used to.

Like the parent whose child comes home from school with unusual habits that they’ve picked up from other kids, I’m at times perplexed, frustrated, and angry at what I see.

More critically, I’m bothered by the explanations, excuses, and acquiescence that accompany the new reality.

We’re falling into the trap of blaming fixable issues on widespread challenges that either don’t apply, can be avoided, or never existed in the first place.

Let me give you a few examples.

Restaurants

My wife and I enjoy going out for a nice dinner. It’s one of the pleasures in life that brought us together and that gives us the time and space to briefly escape from our day-to-day.

We don’t eat out often. For health reasons and because we love to cook at home, it has always been something special. 

We pick cuisines and dishes that require more skill, equipment, and ingredients than we care to learn, buy, or stock, so that eating out becomes more than just having someone else do the cooking and cleaning.

Of late, though, we’ve been regularly disappointed.

The food, service, and atmosphere have – individually or collectively – fallen short of our expectations.

If you can’t get the ingredients, take the item off the menu

It’s not a supply chain issue. If you can’t get the ingredients, take the item off the menu.

It might be a people issue. There has certainly been disruption in the supply chain of willing and capable workers, although most of the places we’ve visited have seemed well-staffed front of house. Perhaps there’s a bigger issue in the kitchen.

No doubt it’s a money issue. Paying more for ingredients – and especially for people – would resolve most of these challenges. 

And potentially bankrupt the restaurant.

The real issue, I suspect, is one of structural finance. Many restaurants have operated for years on razor-thin margins and with negligible cash on hand.

This explains why good-but-not-great concepts come and go with metronomic regularity, especially in those “nothing ever survives here for long” locations. 

It’s amazing that financial institutions continue bankrolling them. Presumably it’s a portfolio game, where a significant percentage of restaurant loans are expected to fail. It’s easier to back a wide range of concepts and see which ones stick than to reliably forecast their likely success.

Which would we prefer – a wide range of restaurants, many of which are limping along and providing a sub-par product because they’re cash-strapped, or fewer but higher-quality places to eat?

The “new normal” must cost more across the board

The “new normal” must cost more across the board. The days of living on underpriced goods, services, and energy are gone. 

Reshoring supply chains and cleaning up our energy supply are going to drive higher prices onto the menu. That’s a correction, not inflation.

I wish the (better) restaurants I frequent would accept this reality and move on. It’s time to focus on delivering the quality product they once prided themselves upon while charging us whatever it costs. 

Better to go out of business because no one wants to pay for your best work than die a slow death as people refuse to pay for your half-assed attempt at making ends meet while pretending nothing has changed.

Service Providers

A similar story holds true for service providers.

I’ve railed about package delivery services and construction service providers in previous posts and they’re still at the top of my naughty list.

One construction project is about to hit the six-month mark on backordered materials. Six months! That’s enough time to load the goods onto pack animals, walk them from China to Rotterdam, and ship them on a slow junket to Miami.

Instead, the factory updates its spreadsheet every Friday and sends it to customer service reps who duly ignore it because there’s nothing new to pass along.

We’ve gone two months without hearing a peep from that company, including crickets in response to our emails. Note to self: it’s time to ratchet up the rhetoric.

Is this a supply chain issue? Sure. But it’s also a BS supply chain issue.

If you can’t get products within six months, it’s time to move on. It’s time to replace them with locally manufactured alternatives or simply fess-up and tell the customer they aren’t getting what they ordered.

That last option doesn’t sit well with me either. What am I supposed to do? You’ve installed bespoke products in my house that would require ripping out a whole wall to replace. It’s time to find creative ways of backfilling those product gaps.

Which makes this another people issue.

I’m sure the “concierge” that’s supposed to be our helpful point of contact is clueless as to what’s happening at the factory – and as to how she’s supposed to respond to my emails.

I suspect the production and procurement managers are equally out of their depth when it comes to retooling their business and reshoring their supplies.

Most businesses are deeply entrenched in their ways of working and have been constructed around predictable processes. When they need to work differently, things begin to break.

Their people weren’t hired, trained, or promoted to be adaptable. They were picked to be reliable, repeatable, and predictable. Just do, don’t think too much.

In an age when businesses of every size and shape need to rapidly adapt to new ways of buying, building, and supplying things, it’s their people and organizational structures that must adapt most.

It’s time to move on from the archaic, hierarchical, manufacturing-driven structures of the 1980s and accept that we need a radically different approach to compete in the 2020s.

Events

Everyone is chomping at the bit, desperate to return to in-person events.

Really? 

That’s the mantra I keep hearing from marketers and organizations that specialize in event organization. But it’s not what I’m feeling. And it’s not what I’m hearing from people in my immediate network.

Event organizers are finding this out the hard way.

I’ve yet to hear about an in-person event that took place this year and met its attendance goals. Hopefully some of you have had better luck.

Many events have drawn much smaller numbers than planned, to the point where it has become painfully obvious. Cavernous rooms with only a few people scattered among the rows of chairs. Empty aisles amid the exhibit booths, with vendors killing time talking to other vendors. Boxes of sandwiches heading for the landfill.

What’s going on?

I wish I knew because I’m helping plan events for a couple of organizations and we’re struggling with the same challenge.

Two years of filling their calendars with other things has fundamentally changed people’s availability

My favorite theory is that two years of filling their calendars with other things has fundamentally changed people’s availability – by which I mean both how they fill their time and how they evaluate the contribution in-person events makes to their lives.

Saying that virtual events don’t deliver the same value as in-person events is an excuse that’s wearing thin. 

People are very good at settling for an 80% solution if it requires a lot less effort to attend.

Many people are also figuring out what a new, perhaps hybrid or fully remote, working arrangement means and needs. Where in-person events once offered a welcome escape from the office, they might now be an unwelcome interruption to a newly crafted work-life balance.

It’s time to move on from assuming that everything will return to normal and that the same event structures we repeated year after year are right for today and tomorrow.

And please, stop presuming that in-person is what I want. It’s becoming borderline offensive, implying that there’s something wrong with me for not wanting to attend.

Retailers

I’m tired of the words “sold out”.

There comes a time when being unable to source the goods means you need to take them off the website (just like the restaurant taking dishes off its menu).

There will be structural issues to solve. The ecommerce site was built around showcasing the full range of products. Taking things off – temporarily or permanently – will require unpicking the code (especially if the company that built the site is no longer around) and making it work differently.

There are also optics and perceptions to consider.

What will our loyal customers think when they see fewer items on our website?

What will the analysts say when we admit that we can’t supply everything we’ve been claiming?

Talk about burying your head in the sand. 

How do those loyal customers feel when everything meeting their requirements (size, color, specifications) is unavailable? I bet they’ll look elsewhere. And I bet they’ll begin to question why they keep coming back to your site.

You can see where that will lead, and you can bet the analysts will notice.

It’s time to move on from (yet another) shadow of the past. Another example of overextended supply chains, artificially low prices, and wasteful inventories (that end up in landfills) that is broken, exposed, and ripe for transformation.

I’m ready to get back to a shopping experience – whether online or brick-and-mortar – where I can see what’s available, make an informed choice, and receive my goodies in a timely fashion. What a concept.

People with Opinions

Let’s get meta for a moment. A LinkedIn Article talking about people writing articles.

I freely admit to being part of this problem.

Too many people are expressing too many opinions about too many things they know too little about.

Too, too, too, too, much noise.

We’re drowning ourselves in a cacophony of complaints and conspiracies (and excuses) like a gaggle of geese trying to scare away the approaching wolf.

Except there’s no wolf. The only thing we’re scaring is each other.

And I think that’s the point. Many of the commentators are scaremongers in sheep’s clothing. Their motive is to keep the post-COVID crisis alive for as long as possible and to profit from it in some way.

We need to start making noise about positive changes and how things are better now than before

Whether that profit is financial, political, or egomaniacal is neither here nor there. We need to move on. We need to start making noise about positive changes and how things are better now than before.

This article spins a negative story about people and businesses that are stuck in the past and using excuses beyond their expiration date.

So, I want to end it on a more positive note.

Look for restaurants that are offering a simplified experience, a shorter menu, and superior service quality. They will be the ones that have reworked their businesses from the ground up (or which always operated at a higher standard).

Service providers will emerge – either newly formed or like a Phoenix from the ashes – that have robust supply chains, the right people, and can make and keep promises.

In-person events have their role to play. We will rediscover how they can add the most value, for whom, when, and where. Organizers will update their thinking and their plans to prioritize events that people want to attend. The barrage of misguided rah-rah about returning to days of former glory will subside.

Retailers, like service providers, will sort out their supply chains and rebuild their physical and virtual storefronts. Purchasing will once again become a low-friction experience, and the goods will be available and delivered on time (although the delivery companies have a long way to go to make good on their end). 

There is a great opportunity in play for many of those goods to be produced in ethical and more sustainable ways.

People will always have opinions. I will be one of them. Soon, I hope, we will move on to debating other, more productive topics. 

Let’s move on and make some positive noise about the great things that are happening in the world – while not losing sight of the atrocious and malicious.

Photo by frank mckenna on Unsplash