Does your company have a form for everything? Do you have acronyms and technical jargon and procedures and KPIs for every task?A lot of companies want their business to run like a machine, so they build it like a machine with different parts assigned different tasks, inputs and outputs all measured. It's well meant - they want to achieve consistent standards, reliable performance and dependable profits, which is good sense, right?
The problem is that if you run your business like a machine, people will expect it to perform like a machine. We get angry with machines when they don't work properly in a way that we don't get angry with people, as anyone who has owned a computer will know. When we deal with people on the other hand we make allowances, allow them to apologise, fix their mistakes and make good. When machines don't work we switch them off and throw them out.
It's good for companies to talk to their customers - and tweet and reddit and digg and email and instant message - but not because we enjoy it. It's good because then we know that they're not big pink robots who mechanically consume what we produce, and they know that we're not machines, we're little tribes of people who try hard but deserve a break when we show a blue screen once in a while instead of being shut down and binned.
(This post was inspired by Dave Peters at Reddress, whose clients love him more than their own children)
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