Seth Godin | How to Use Soft Skills in Business to Gain New Customers and Attract Amazing Employees

[Applause] [Music] one of my favorite books of yours I well it's hard to choose thank you lynchpin so you're sort of alluding to becoming Lynch but you talked in that book about you know we're all geniuses and we're also all not going to be the best whether it's Michael Jordan at basketball or whatever but that we can be the best at what we do in our spot can you can you elaborate on that a little bit because I think it's a very important topic it's still relevant right now the scientific management a book written around the time of Henry Ford created this huge mythology of engineered industrial world where things everything is like sports there's a winner there's a loser there's a scorer there's efficiency there's RBIs it's all a status thing and so we have seduced ourselves into thinking that the doctor who's the best is the one who did the best on the test that the restaurant that's the best it's the one that has the most Michelin stars and on and on and on and that's a convenient narrative for industrialists and bosses because if if you're measuring something and your employees believe that that thing is the most important thing it's gonna go up right but in fact almost everybody whose works in the privileged world isn't just a cheap human machine right that as soon as it could be done by a machine we bought a machine to do it that what's left is all this soft stuff that's the core stuff so soft skills aren't an afterthought soft skills and what we pay for soft skills are the only difference between a nine dollar restaurant and a $90 restaurant the only difference between a two thousand dollar surgery and a 20,000 dollar surgery and soft skills get short shrift because we say well ha doesn't really matter it's all that matters so let's let's list off some of these soft skills that you're talking about that are become you know I think this model is completely flipped on its ear right flipped on its head so what used to be important or value before as a college degree and now it's become my skills let's list a few that you think are critical at the top maybe top five top ten well so let me do a short riff from my late friend Zig Ziglar before the internet he said what if there was this magical computer that knew everything about everyone and their work like LinkedIn and what if you could say to that person that computer everything that you're looking for in a boss or an employee or spouse or best friend what would you want and the list he used to do it in front of thousands of people I've watched him do it several times the list is always the same I'd want someone who's honest and loyal and hardworking I'd want someone who's perceptive and has a sense of humor and has emotional intelligence and is flexible and cares I mean all of us can come up with a list that's the person we want to be married to that's the person we want to hire that's the person we want to work for right and it turns out those aren't gifts we're not born with them right we're born unable to really see talk lying in a pool of our own poop that's the way we're born so somewhere along the way we learned them and they are attitudes but the cool thing about attitudes is their skills we can learn to be more honest we can learn to have a better sense of humor we can learn to be more flexible their skills their skills as important as using a slide rule or a calculator as skills as important as being able to draft if you're an architect so why don't we learn those skills and if we can learn them on purpose we'll get better and so when people ask about the author MBA the project that I'm spending the most time on what do you teach like give me the checklist show me the syllabus and my answer is if content was your problem you would have solved it already because just go to library just search on youtube the answer is there and that's why I reject all of those videos that say three simple tips to do blank because that's the linkbait thing to go around my industry is there's some shortcut that if you just knew this one simple trick not only will you have a flat belly you'll be rich right yeah and no it's this is the long difficult never-ending path to slow but surely to work their matters that's what we're talking about well who would have it any other way how do you teach integrity how do you teach other than just practice how do you teach that well number one other than just practice that's like what's fish and chips other than fish and potatoes other than just practice is an important thing okay right that's fair but it's not a value until it cost you something that the definition of values are things that are hard to do in the breach the only way you develop them is by being in the breach the only way you know that you actually care about these things is that when you're in a situation when it's hard to do them you do them anyway yeah or maybe you experience them on the other side and then you have empathy right you want to change that cycle yeah right let's shift gears a little bit see if he'll go with me down this path you're pretty private guy and and yet you're very public so I would say maybe you're purposely public and you know purposely guarded but can you share with us or just me and you something about yourself that is not commonly known well it should be commonly known that I wrestle with fear as often as anybody but it probably isn't commonly known that we would like to believe that people who are over there our fearless right that the person who did that and built this and but I got to tell you I don't know never met Tim Cook but I'm guessing he's as afraid as you and me all the time that that can be used as fuel and you can learn to dance with it or it can paralyze us and I think I could figure out how to have a day or a week with not a lot of fear in it and I would hate that because I wouldn't be productive and I wouldn't be doing this work that I care about but as long as I'm doing my work I am wrestling every day with a narrative that I don't want to have show up that will not go away and the big breakthrough for me was acknowledging I can't make it go away and as soon as you say welcome good to have you here you're my compass the edges get a lot softer it becomes easier to work with so it's your indicator light it's your signal right when you're feeling like this is terrible you know it's a great idea I know it has a shot at being a great idea it also has a shot at being a disaster well let's talk about that to talk about you told me once to the person who fails the most wins we don't need to repeat that lesson as great as it was but talk to us about talk to me about failing fast and and maybe let's put it in the context of if I manage people right right because usually there's an intolerance for this like you know how could you you just wasted all this money in my world it's a video so we usually get a creative brief and you know it's very detailed and the client tells us what they want and it's a mixture of Arts and Science where you know we're kind of commissioned to paint a piece and there's some latitude but like what if you're that manager how can you instill a culture of friendly failure and then how to how to fix that how to make it most efficient so Brian can I give you some feedback yeah the word feedbacks horrible the word advice is a lot better okay then if we can go to somebody and say I'm wrestling with this you have any advice for me we actually want them to say something whereas if we go to someone and say I made this video you have any feedback what we really want them to say is it's great right so this lien management thing this lien entrepreneurship thing has shown up and everyone's all excited about it because it seems like such a great shortcut fewer meetings faster moving lean is just a four-letter euphemism for a five letter word and the word is wrong that what it means to be lean is to be wrong wrong and wrong and wrong and wrong and wrong way faster than everybody else is polishing and if you can be wrong faster and faster and faster you will get write faster than the competition so what it means to be lean is to lower the water in the stream so you can see the rocks and what it means to be a bureaucracy is to raise the water in the stream so it doesn't matter if there's rocks and the problem with raising the water is you waste a lot of water and sooner or later rocks gonna hit the boat whereas if you can lower it have a just one piece in the just-in-time system and now it doesn't fit and you know where the problem is suddenly your whole system gets better because you exposed things that were wrong we only can get there with enrollment we can only get there if we agree to talk to each other honestly and respectfully and give each other advice on what's wrong and what's right if you don't have that enrollment it's an attack because we were taught to be perfect so no one wants to go to work and hear that they're not perfect but if you look at you know an institution like Danny Meyer's Union Square Hospitality Group Union Square cafe Shake Shack on and on the entire institution was built by Danny over 25 years on the idea of hospitality and learning from being wrong figuring out yet another way not to open a bottle of wine yet another way not to serve scallops if you don't do that then you're frozen and the people who are frozen are stressed all the time because they know they're not perfect but they're pretending they're perfect and I like the studio lifestyle a lot better that's a great segue into customer service and Dany is a great example of that I love Shake Shack myself what what does good customer service look like or sound like and maybe let's put it in the context of the company that is heavily reliant on this you know phone feedback you know you've been on hold probably for 64 hours at a time right um if you're in a business where you have phone customer service or some sort of interaction give us some classic do's and don'ts how would you improve the system okay so first let's divide customer service into three categories category number one the best customer service in many situations is customer service you do not need to do because you designed a product that doesn't break you put shower handles in that make sense you have a promise kept yeah that should be seen as a worthwhile thing to invest in second sort of customer service involves proactively engaging with people before trouble hits actually serving customers because if the customer wants to give you the benefit of the doubt things will go much better and we see this for example in malpractice suits for doctors that the doctors who get sued aren't the doctors who make the most mistakes there's a doctors who are jerks and so they forgot to do proactive customer service and care as a human and then there's the third kind of customer service which is how quickly can we get this interaction either over with because it's costing both of us or how beautifully can we recover it so they will trust us so I gave a talk at IBM two months ago to there watson AI group and talked about how a AI is going to completely transform that other form of how do we make it cheaper customer service and I don't want to repeat the whole talk here but the short version is first we outsource to other countries but really soon the computer is going to do customer service not after you call in but in the moment it will no wait this guy keeps pressing button number seven but he should be pressing button number nine I'll just tell him press button number nine that's way better than me being frustrated for 45 minutes than calling on the phone and bla bla bla bla bla that our phone is now smart enough and this happened to me eight weeks ago there are three airports near where I live my flight got canceled the airline texted me at 3 o'clock in the morning saying your 6 a.m. flight is canceled and that doesn't help me one bit and my computer and thus the airline know that I have a speech and they know what time is speeches and they know where it's being held and they know when all the other flights are but what I had to do when I woke up was scramble figure out there was another flight from a different Airport that left four minutes after my flight switched to that flight do all these that a computer should do it should have just sent me a note at 5:55 saying we know you thought you were leaving from Newark but you're actually now leaving from LaGuardia because we knew all the things that are going on in your life and with your permission in advance we fixed it don't worry right that's customer service so that's going to happen and so if your business is in the business of faster and cheaper you're in trouble because once Watson or someone figures it out they're just going to do it so what Tony Shea did it Zappos it's the opposite direction he paid people extra to stay on the phone the record I believe is 7 hours and 45 minutes for one call one person one call happily talking for 7 hours and 45 minutes probably not about shoes but if you are rewarding people to stay on the phone you're gonna create the other kind of customer service which is I like these people that's expensive and a bargain and the reason it's a bargain is that the brand value that come from fixing a broken relationship is priceless it lasts way longer than the value of actually doing it right door

Channel: Behind the Brand

Views: 9,575

Rating: 4.9840636 out of 5

Keywords: Bryan Elliott, Behind the Brand, entrepreneur, Seth Godin, adoption story, my roots, Lion movie, Find your family, reunite birth parents, Brian Elliott, Bryan Elliot, tenacity, persistance, never give up, soft skills, Best Advice Ever, Seth Godin best advice, Seth Godin Best Advice Ever, The Lost Interview

Id: Pee3ORD2LXc

Length: 15min 4sec (904 seconds)

Published: Tue Mar 12 2019