Author Archives: David

Paying Employees to Quit

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zappos

Stumbled upon this discovery on Harvard Business Publishing mentioning how Zappos, an internet shoe retailer (on course to exceed $1billion in annual revenues), has a very unique method of retaining committed staff – they pay their newly-hired staff $1000 to quit:

After a week or so in this immersive experience, though, it’s time for what Zappos calls “The Offer.” The fast-growing company, which works hard to recruit people to join, says to its newest employees: “If you quit today, we will pay you for the amount of time you’ve worked, plus we will offer you a $1,000 bonus.” Zappos actually bribes its new employees to quit!

Why? Because if you’re willing to take the company up on the offer, you obviously don’t have the sense of commitment they are looking for. It’s hard to describe the level of energy in the Zappos culture—which means, by definition, it’s not for everybody. Zappos wants to learn if there’s a bad fit between what makes the organization tick and what makes individual employees tick—and it’s willing to pay to learn sooner rather than later. (About ten percent of new call-center employees take the money and run.)

Wow. I’ve not dealt with Zappos personally – never bought or returned any shoes from them. But apparently the customer service are legendary. I guess this eccentric strategy (does eccentric have to be opposite of logical? Because if the numbers are balanced, this strategy seems really logical too) was one of the factors that helped them achieve this level of service.

I guess if it’s not already in every business case study textbook, it’d soon be!

Laziness -> Invention

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The old adage goes – ‘laziness is the mother of all invention’. Typically when a new invention comes up, it meets resistance for people who are used to the status quo, and denounce the new effort or time-saving invention as a farce, a device for the lazy. For instance, the automatic gear was once condemned as a luxury device for the lazy – “if you can’t even be bothered to stick out a leg and change your gear, why drive a car?”.

Of course, history has proven otherwise – automatic gear sticks are now very much the default in new cars. People get used to it, prefer it for the time and effort saved, and after a (short) while, the chorus of condemnation are all but forgotten.

That said, what’s your take on this?

Extreme Pants-Wearing

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Hypothesis: There are always people who do things that are technically difficult, and yet you cannot fathom exactly how do they come up with the idea of doing that act in the first place (not to mention capturing it on photo/video and posting it onto the Internet). Case 1 would be the dedicated art of extreme ironing, which surfaced quite a few years ago.

And here’s another new meme – extreme pants-wearing:

With all due respect to their tremendous agility, I must admit I’m quite perplexed at how did they decide to start this extreme pants-wearing thing? Do they just wake up and say, “I feel like stunt-jumping into my pants today to see if I could.”?

Old Creative Video

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Apple has the ‘demo-guy’ – you know, the guy wearing all black demonstrating how to use an iPhone etc in their guided tour? Well, it turns out that Creative Technology have their own equivalent too – and it probably pre-dates Apples.

It’s quite old, but I’ve just stumbled on it. Check it out:

Now don’t you feel like rock-and-rolling already?

Brand Tags

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Noah Brier has released a very interesting web-application called Brand Tags. The premise is this: a brand is really what the consumer has in mind, the sum-of-all-thoughts regarding that particular brand-name or logo. Using the commonly-used representation of a tag cloud (in which the most popular entry gets the greatest font-size), we can see exactly what each brand (-word) means to the masses.

From the dominant word association, you can get a good feel of what it means as a whole, as various nuances and reactions play themselves out in the word-cloud. It is also quite intriguing to note (as the examples below show), how each brand can embed itself differently in the minds of consumers.

Product/Function
For Bic, for instance, it is very strongly tied to its single most successful product – the pen. Its iconic and classic status mirrors the consumer’s impression of “Bic = Pen”. In this case, the brand is the product, much like how Xerox came to be a substitution for photocopying.

brand-tags-bic

Marketing Tagline
It could also be a reflection of the success of a brand-marketing campaign. For Intel, the most dominant word wasn’t chips, computers or anything like that. It was ‘Inside’. It just shows how strong the ad campaign was to imprint this message into consumer’s heads (even as you read this, perhaps the signature Intel jingle rang through your brain).

brand-tags-intel

Associated Emotion
I must admit I was rather surprised with Harley-Davidson though. In many business textbooks, Harley was a frequent example used to illustrate how the ‘freedom’ and ‘rebellious’ spirit was core to Harley-Davidson’s business. But it does seem like the crowdhas a rather different take (although it is still a feeling for a brand):

brand-tags-harley

Perhaps it’s time to rework the campaigns a little?

Anyway, there are quite many more brands on the website – head over and play around!

Wasted Food

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food-wasted

It is certainly not something to be boastful about. A household in North London was challenged to document how much food they actually waste and throw out – because they passed the expiry dates; because they were just tempted by the food marketers at the point-of-purchase; because they rot before they could eat them, etc. They all added up to almost half of their grocery purchase (!).

The average family throws away £610 of perfectly good food each year — much of it totally untouched — according to figures released this week. That works out at £11.73 a week. And all of that adds to the £10billion of waste across the country. But are these figures really representative of an ordinary family? Femail challenged Ursula Hirschkorn, 36, who lives in North London with her husband Mike, 32, and two sons, Jacob, four, and Max, two, to keep a diary for a week to discover just how much food her family throws out.

It’s quite astounding to see just how much perfectly good food thrown away – and this being a rather normal occurrence, a typical family in a developed world. Head here for the full article.

Life Ambition Chart

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life-ambition

I’ve been thinking about a shift in my mindset from pre-University days to post-graduation (and subsequently working), as I noticed my ‘I-can-conquer-the-world’ mentality starting to wane and fade. And so when I stumbled upon this comic from PHD it struck me quite strongly.

PHD Comic is primarily about post-grad education – check out their most popular ones here.