Den meisten Menschen ist gar nicht bewusst in welche Knebelverträge sie einsteigen wenn Sie mit einem der typischen deutschen Internetprovider einen Vertrag abschliessen. Mit einer gelungenen Mischung aus Inkompetentz und Impertinenz hat mich gerade die 1 und 1 AG (http://www.1und1.de/) zur Weißglut getrieben, worauf hin ich spontan beschloß meinen Vertragsstatus von Kunde in Ex-Kunde zu ändern. Und das geht so:

• Kostenpflichtiger Anruf bei der Hotline, die nach geschätzten zehn Minuten – 1,40€ Gebühren – zum Ergebnis kommt, ich müsste eine E-Mail an support@1und1.de screiben um die besondere Vertragskomponente (die ich nie haben wollte) zu kündigen. Dazu noch die freundliche Warnung: Es könnte sein, daß die Kollegen nicht erfreut wären, da eine Kündigung nur in den ersten drei Monaten nach Vertragsbeginn möglich sei.
• E-mail an den 1und1 Support mit der Kündigung.
• Antwort des 1und1 Supports: Kündigung per E-Mail sind nicht möglich, sie müssen schriftlich oder per Fax erfolgen. Ausserdem: “für die Kündigungen von Zusatzartikeln und Verträgen nutzen Sie bitte unser Vertragstool (https://vertrag.1und1.de/).
• Der Aufruf des Vertragstools, um den Vertrag zu ändern, bietet mir die Möglichkeit meinen Vertrag um weitere kostenpflichtige Angebote zu ergänzen, aber nicht, einzelne Elemente wieder daraus zu löschen. Also wird kurzerhand der ganze Vertrag gekündigt.
• Damit wird allerdings erst eine Kündigungsvormerkung ausgelöst, die mit einem Authentifizierungscode telefnosch bestätigt werden muss.
• Also: Erneuter kostenpflichtiger Anruf, der beim ersten Versuch in einer der üblichen Dudelmusikschleifen endet, und beim zweiten Versuch - doch noch schon nach wenigen Minuten neuen Fahrstuhlmusik-Terrors – bei einer menschlichen Call-Center-Einheit landet. Und schon darf man das Formular herunterladen, mit dem man die eigentliche Kündigung schriftlich bestätigen darf.
• Aber: “Falls uns die schriftliche Bestätigung Ihrer Kündigung nicht innerhalb der oben genannten Frist von 7 Tagen erreicht, wird Ihre Online-Kündigung automatisch storniert.”

Kundenservice bei 1 und 1? Bauernfängerei scheint mir eine treffendere Bezeichnung zu sein. Fast schon so schlimm wie bei den T-Konsorten.

In der neuen Heimat werden Unternehmen für solchen Umgang mit Ihren Kunden öffentlich angeprangert. In Deutschland scheint es dagegen keine seriösen InternetDienstleister zu geben.

Having managed to get my Win98 workstation up and running (and accessing the Internet), I found some more precious jewels from the past. Here’s one, dating back to 2003:

404 - Someone who's clueless. From the World Wide Web error message "404 Not Found," meaning that the requested document could not be located. "Don't bother asking him ... he's 404, man."

ADMINISPHERE - The rarefied organizational layers beginning just above the rank and file. Decisions that fall from the admini-sphere are often profoundly inappropriate or irrelevant to the problems they were designed to solve.

ADULT - A person who has stopped growing at both ends and is now growing in the middle.

ASSMOSIS - The process by which some people seem to absorb success and advancement by kissing up to the boss rather than working hard.

BEAUTY PARLOUR  - A place where some women go to dye.

BLAMESTORMING - Sitting around in a group discussing why a deadline was missed or a project failed and who was responsible.

BODY NAZI - Hard-core exercise and weight-lifting fanatic who looks down on anyone who doesn't work out obsessively.

CANNIBAL - Someone who is fed up with people.

CHAINSAW CONSULTANT - An outside expert brought in to reduce the employee head count, leaving the top brass with clean hands.

COMMITTEE - A body that keeps minutes and wastes hours. (See Task Force.)

CLM (Career Limiting Move) - Used among microserfs to describe ill-advised activity. Trashing your boss while he or she is within earshot is a serious CLM. (Also known as CEB - Career Ending Behavior)

CUBE FARM - An office filled with cubicles.

DILBERTED - To be exploited and oppressed by your boss. Derived from the experiences of Dilbert, the engineer in the job-from-hell comic strip character. "I've been dilberted again. The old man revised the specs for the fourth time this week."

EGO SURFING - Scanning the Net, databases, print media and so on, looking for references to one's own name.
 
IDEA HAMSTERS - People who always seem to have their idea generators running.

INFLATION - Cutting money in half without damaging the paper.

KEYBOARD PLAQUE - The disgusting buildup of dirt and crud found on computer keyboards.

MOUSE POTATO - The online, wired generation's answer to the couch potato.

OHNOSECOND - That minuscule fraction of time in which you realize that you've just made a BIG mistake. (See CLM)

PERCUSSIVE MAINTENANCE - The fine art of whacking an electronic device "just right" to get it to work again.

PRAIRIE DOGGING - When someone yells or drops something loudly in a "cube farm" and everyone's heads pop up over the walls to see what's going on.

SALMON WEEK - The experience of spending an entire week swimming upstream only to die, and someone else get the benefit.

SEAGULL MANAGER - A manager who flies in, makes a lot of noise, poops on everything, and then leaves. (See Management by Helicopter.)

SITCOM - What yuppies turn into when they have children and one of them stops working to stay home with the kids. Stands for: Single Income, Two Children, Oppressive Mortgage.

SKELETON - A bunch of bones with the person scraped off.

SQUARE-HEADED GIRLFRIEND - Another word for a computer. The victim of a square-headed girlfriend is a 'computer-widow'. (It would be politically correct to mention that computers be referred to in the masculine gender, and this would translate to "square-headed boyfriend".)

SQUIRT THE BIRD - To transmit a signal to a satellite.

STARTER MARRIAGE - A short-lived first marriage that ends in divorce with no kids, no property and no regrets.

SWIPED OUT - An ATM or credit card that has been rendered useless because the magnetic strip is worn away from extensive use.

TOURISTS - People who take training classes just to get a vacation from their jobs. "We had three serious students in the class; the rest were just tourists."

TREEWARE - Hacker slang for printed computer software/hardware documentation or other printed material.

UNINSTALLED - Euphemism for being fired. Heard on the voice mail of a vice president at a downsizing computer firm: "You have reached the number of an uninstalled vice president. Please dial our main number and ask the operator for assistance." (See also Decruitment.)

VULCAN NERVE PINCH - The taxing hand position required to reach all of the appropriate keys for certain commands. For instance, the Mac II computer involves simultaneously pressing the CONTROL key, the COMMAND key, the RETURN key and the POWER ON key.

Peter Lorenz, a good friend since decades, showed us his new designer pieces. His newest highlight: Schist with embedded pyrites, as seen in this necklace, and innovated by himself.

Unfortunately the photos hardly reflect the excellent craftsmanship.

Some pieces of the new collection are still available, although the term available is relative: It’s always a little more expensive to have an individual taste.

Let’s assume you run a small organization. Three people, or so. Now interview all members of your organization individually. Ask them just one question: “What do you do?” Then compare what you’ve heard. Does this reflect your organizations charter, mission, vision?

Now think a little bit broader: Envision the same people being questioned by prospects, all asking them the same question: “What do you do?”. Dou you like what you see, do you enjoy what you expect to happen?

Interesting, isn’t it? If you don’t like the outcome better get the people working for you into one room, and don’t let them out - unless they come up with the same response. And only let them out if the joint response reflects what they’re paid for, and only if it adds value to the people they’re dealing with. And have a real customer providing them immediate and honest feedback. Feedback is actually the most powerful ingredient of such a learning experiment.

More than a year ago Jeff Thull had shared some best practices (Beyond the Elevator Pitch: A High Credibility Conversation) with the rest of the world. It’s a pity that so few people are willing to pick-up such pearls of wisdom, and practice it. In Jeff’s words:

There is much to gain – or lose – in the opening moments of a conversation. It is critical to take the disciplined steps necessary to build credibility in that initial contact, ensuring the conversation continues and deepens. Otherwise, your prospective customer will always be just that.

From the moment the door opens you’ve got 30 seconds. Rest assured: It works. You just need to make sure that the immediate reaction to such a value proposition statement is not: “Hmmm, that’s very interesting.”

Oh, by the way: Why don’t you start practicing it yourself, let’s say with your family? Ah, your family doesn’t have a vision statement? No joint long-term objectives? You and your somehow significant others don’t know why you’re still living under the same roof? Don’t share the same values? Are still too busy with shopping for Christmas? Don’t have a clue what values are contributed to the temporary community called family? Don’t have any expectations? That’s ok, it’s not a family anyway. It may be a work group, or a chain gang – depending on how you reward them.

Microsoft’s Eric Brechner, Director of Development Excellence, recently published a post (How do you measure yourself?) about measuring and measurements. Not only measuring things, or stuff, but also people. Including yourself.

I found his insight highly valuable as it is easily adaptable to non-technical environments:

… enlightened teams don't guess. They rely on data.

is as true for engineers as it is for business people. Unfortunately I recently found that a lot of people don’t even have a baseline. And worse: a lot of people build critical decisions on prejudice. Simply take today’s meltdown of the financial markets as an example: The so called professionals believed to have all risk under control. Today we know how bad that judgment call was. The guys were clueless. They didn’t even guess, worse, they believed.

The key issue of such foolish attitude is a basic misperception of one’s position in life. Caused by not asking the right questions, or by not asking questions at all. Sometimes blind sighted by one’s own success, deaf to advice from others, and certainly trapped in one’s tiny world, with an extremely narrow horizon, and completely disconnected from reality. Just recall how kids learn: Dad, why do I have to go to bed now? Mom, why do I have to eat spinach? It’s because they ask the right questions.

Maybe I’m a little too thoughtful, maybe even intolerant – specifically to personal incompetence if it is complemented by bright shining professional skills.

A lot of times I find it hard to have the right answers. And I certainly prefer to ask the right questions over delivering the right answers. That’s why I liked the lessons Eric shares in his post:

• Don't measure how, measure what.
• Don't measure intermediate outcomes, measure desired end results.
• Don't just collect data, use measures to answer key questions.
• Don't use measures that make your decisions, use measures that tell you a decision is needed.
• Don't compare raw measures, use baselines and exemplars that provide needed context.

As a manager I like that approach. It’s the results that count. How they are achieved is not irrelevant, but it becomes only relevant in the context of existing results – or failure.

Eric’s list could easily be extended further. A long time back we trained a process called Hoshin-Kanri. The methodology focuses on breakthrough objectives that require much more depth and attention than the normal daily operations. The first hurdle of the process was always to figure out if something was worthwhile – or necessary – to evaluate at all. Why waste precious time with unimportant matters? The second significant challenge then was to come up with quantified goals, objectives. For example, if you want to be the best in your field of interest – how would you measure that? And stress finally escalated further down the line, when hard metrics had to be applied to strategies for figuring out if the strategy actually works, and if it really contributes to achieving the goal.

But how would you know if you’re on the right track otherwise? How could you know if you’re doing the right things? Everybody can do things right, with some training and experience. But true subject matter experts

Six Sigma applied to human relations - Go and have a look. First at the full thread, and then inward.

Yesterday’s conversation with a colleague reminded me of Jeff Thull’s blog entry in Sandhill.com’s best practices about software marketing. In The End of Solution-Based Selling Jeff explains why the new era of sales strategies requires a transition from the hardcore sales rep to a business advisor. As Jeff describes it, the ideal approach needs to address the different phases of the new sales cycle:

• Discover. Here, you set the stage for a compelling engagement and a continuing relationship based on trust and respect. You push beyond the traditional boundaries of prospecting to create a solid foundation on which to build a long-term, profitable relationship.
• Diagnose. You maximize the customer's objective awareness of her dissatisfaction, whether or not that dissatisfaction supports your company's offerings. You assist the customer in understanding her situation and, as a result, reinforce your credibility by refusing to alter the customer's reality to fit your needs.
• Design. This is where you help the customer create and understand the solution. It is a collaborative and highly interactive effort to help the customer sort through her expectations and alternatives to arrive at the optimal solution.
• Deliver. You begin with the preparation and presentation of a formal proposal, and the customer formally accepts your solution. Next comes the implementation and support of the solution and the measurement and evaluation of results. Finally, the Deliver phase includes the maintenance and growth of the sales team's relationship with the customer.

It’s interesting to finally see some people in the American IT industry starting to understand what solution sales is all about. Life may have been easier if the software executives would have read the advise written by sales professionals already 20 years ago (here are some good examples). Rants aside: Jeff made another trivial, but extremely valuable point:

In a process like the one described above, selling doesn't happen in a vacuum. It cannot. Every department in your company—from R&D to marketing to customer service—must work together with sales to create real value for your customers. That means ending "cross-functional dysfunction"—the state in which internal politics and the incessant maneuverings for corporate power and resources cause managers to wall off access to their domains and restrict communication.

Unfortunately, I don’t see that happening very often at the company that sends me my paycheck: Program managers have limited knowledge about real-life customer experiences (travel budget restriction don’t allow talking to customers), marketing operates in a vacuum without any competition (responding with PowerPoint decks to competitors’ technical innovation), account executives walk-away when the box is sold (why talking to customers if you have CRM to take care of all things). And sometimes the professional services organization is called-in after the fact, chartered with explaining customers how to implement the products they just purchased – and trying to sell that ‘service’ as a separate cost item, after the customer has invested the majority of his budget in the acquisition of the service-less off-the-shelf product.

What an insane uphill battle. And the executive’s position?

This is how our business model works, how it has always worked.

Interesting point of view. Good to know.

“Not only is .NET clearly a better development environment than the competition, but also Microsoft brings scores of developers who know how to use it.” (Burton Group’s Drue Reeves in Microsoft Windows Azure, Demystified)

It’s 28C/82F outside, but in the wake of the terror attacks in Mumbai I’m not sure if days or nights are hotter. Friday morning, 1:15 am: Delhi’s IGI airport is closed after two incidents indicate a possible terrorist attack.

The online version of Hindustan Times had some generic coverage on Friday, but Saturday’s edition provided more detail on the shooting (Delhi airport gets midnight terror scare), the terrorists’ escape (No clues in camera footage), the impact on passengers (Terminal fear), and the police car allegedly involved (Miscreants go looting in police car):

1:10 am: CISF guards posted near Gate no. 4 of Terminal 2 Departure area of the airport hear two gunshots. Passengers asked to crouch or lie down. 

“Please lie down on the floor and don’t move,” went the announcement on the loudspeaker, “There has been a suspected terrorist attack outside the airport.” People hit the floor wherever they were.

1:15 am: All entry points closed. Vehicles are thoroughly searched.

Gripped with fear of a terror attack, a woman passenger climbed on to the baggage conveyor and went right up to the baggage collection point, where security personnel stopped her. “The conveyor was not stopped as it might have proven difficult to reach the passenger,” said a spokesman of airport operator Delhi International Airport Ltd. (DIAL).

1:25 am: A Qualis tries to enter the arrival area from the wrong side. Asked to stop. It flees.

A CISF quick reaction team even chased the second suspect vehicle but it sped off.

2 am: After thorough combing, all-clear given. Operations resume.

3 am: Three miscreants not only went on a looting spree in a stolen Delhi Police Gypsy, beacon light atop, in Gurgaon through Thursday night, but also gave police sleeplessness as the incident was mistakenly correlated with the firing reported at Delhi airport the same evening.

“Soon after receiving information of the theft  at 3 a.m. on Friday, we ordered the barricading of the entire city thinking that the vehicle had been hijacked by those who had opened fire at the Delhi airport. We launched our entire machinery to ensure that the vehicle did not cross Gurgaon borders,” said Gurgaon Police Commissioner Mohinder Lal.

6:12 am Police also seized a Maruti SX4 car on suspicion.

“… while checking vehicles, we found some fire crackers in the boot of the car… ”

Guess, at what time my flight landed, and where I stayed. Hint: I went to sleep at 4 am – after several manual car and baggage searches, and a final body search in the hotel.

The really scary thing was the authorities’ decision to completely shut down the airport and close all gates. Passengers and visitors were held inside the departure and arrival terminals. There would have been no possibility to escape in the case of a serious incident.

This Saturday morning another news flash silences most conversations in my hotel during breakfast: The international airports of Delhi, Bangalore and Chennai are closed due to a hijack alert. It later turns out that the airports are actually not closed, only put on high security alert responding to an email threatening the hijacking of a commercial aircraft.

TV News coverage is extensive, claiming that security is extremely tight. An official states that passengers should sense a feeling of higher security. Not funny: The only thing I sense is chaos, with a swamped security force that is not on top of things, and hyperventilating media.

The consequence of the increased security status: Outbound passengers are supposed to report in at least three hours before check-in. And my driver warned me to expect a two hour ride for the seven miles to the airport.