Most consumers are complaining to the wrong companies about the wrong things.
There are many (usually large) organisations that shut out consumers. There are politicians who don't listen. There are companies that are wilfully isolated. These are not the people getting yelled at.
So we all yell at the few companies that are actually trying and actually listening, rewarding their goodwill with a flogging. This needs to change.
In a way we are all programmers now. We all have to decide what to post next, what to point to next, what to launch next.
Is there a skill in dreaming up what happens next and what the sequence should be? I think there is. Yes, you must do great work. You also need to figure out how to program for your audience, even if the audience is only one person.
A company uses structure and resources and power to make things happen. They hire people, issue policies, buy things, build things, earn market share and get things done for their clients.
If you only show up when you want something, people will catch on. If you only learn the minimum amount necessary to get over the next hurdle, you'll fall behind.
If short term choices leave you focused on the urgent, you'll almost never get around to doing the important. A flustered programmer who grabs some online code for a short term fix with no real understanding of its impact or inner workings will be in the same chaotic state at some point in the future.
So make sure you do more than the minimum if you truly want to succeed.
The real point of the exercise is to build a company that makes a difference. To care a lot about who your clients are and why (or if) they're happy and if you are making a real difference for them through the work you do.
A shortcut to client and colleague intimacy is to respond in real time. A phone call is more human than an email. On the other hand, when you do your work on someone else's schedule, your productivity plummets, because you are responding to the urgent, not the important, and your rhythm is shot.
The trick is to sort by how important it is that your interactions be intimate. Build blocks of time to do serious work, work that's not interrupted by people who need to hear from you in real time. Not doing this is killing your ability to do great work.
An email inbox has been aptly described as the to-do list that anyone in the world can add an item to. If you're not careful, it can gobble up most of your working week. Then you've become a reactive robot responding to other people's requests, instead of a proactive agent addressing your own true priorities. This is not good.
Not all disasters can be avoided. Not all disasters are fatal. If you accept these two truths, your approach to risk will change.
If you build a disaster-tolerant company you will be more willing to challenge the fates and won't hide from things. The disaster-tolerant approach means that you can focus on the upside of risk instead of obsessing about the worst possible outcome.
And once you do that, the upside is more likely to occur. That outcome you were so afraid of isn't so bad, and once you realise you can tolerate it, it's (amazingly, perversely and ironically) less likely to happen.
Being ignored is the same as failure. So you need to not be ignored.
Most people, most of the time, don't buy things if there's a free substitute available. Millions will walk by a painting in a museum, but very few have the prints in their homes. Seeing something for free aids its discovery. It will attract attention, spread and then, lead to some portion of the masses actually buying something. What's easy to overlook is that a leap is necessary for the last step to occur. As we've made it easier for ideas to spread digitally, we've actually amplified the gap between free and paid.
Taylor Swift's music is basically free. It's the concerts and films that cost money. McKinsey & Company's consulting philosophy is free, it's the bespoke work that costs money. Watching a movie on Netflix is free - once you pay to belong. Playing golf at the local public course is pretty cheap, it's membership in the fancy club that costs money. The free culture is here and it's getting more pervasive.
The brutal economics of discovery combined with no marginal cost create a relentless path toward free, which deepens the gap. Going forward, many things that can be free, will be.
You don't know what to do.
You don't know how to do it.
You don't have the authority or the resources to do it.
You're afraid.
Once you figure out what needs to be fixed, it's far easier to find the solution (or decide to work on a different problem). Stuck is a state of mind, and it's fixable.