Podcast: Play in new window | Download

Subscribe: RSS

Have you ever been in the shower in a 5-star hotel, nice and wet all over and you reach for the shampoo bottle, only to find that there are three? That is not because you are drunk and are seeing triple but because you are faced with three identical bottles but with totally different contents. What is in the bottles is not a mystery of course. It has been helpfully printed on the label. However, the label was designed by a 20-something design engineer sitting in a sweatshop in India or Bangladesh, who has never seen the inside of a 5-star hotel shower and won’t until he gets old enough to need glasses to read and the money to pay for the hotel. Then he will realize what he did all his life when he is forced to play Russian Roulette with the shampoo, body lotion (complicated way to say ‘soap’) and conditioner. If you think this is funny, put conditioner on your head instead of shampoo and you will think that is even funnier. That is perhaps the reason why I had to decline a haircut recently which was for Rs. 350 on the plea that I refuse to pay more than Re. 1 per hair, aforementioned number being an optimistic hair-count of my head. The refusal of hair to adhere to my scalp may be ascribed to the times that I used conditioner instead of shampoo. No self-respecting hair can stand such treatment and so they decide to part company with me forever.

“What’s the big deal?” you ask me. “Why can’t you read the label?”

“I need glasses to read but I don’t need glasses to shower. So, I don’t wear glasses in the shower, which is where I need glasses to read the labels on the bottles.”

What is the solution?

Take all shower bottle label designers to a 5-star hotel, blindfold them, strip them naked and shove them into the shower.

Why blindfold them?

How else will they understand how it feels to hold the bottle in your hand and not know what is in it?

Customer Satisfaction and Customer Delight can be condensed into one phrase and that is, “See with their eyes.” The keyword being ‘Their’.

Let me give you another example. A good friend sent me this video: Titled Mumbai Motorman, peeing in front of local train. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K5lt4avsHsM

As they say, ‘When you gotta go you gotta go.’ But then the question arises, where does he go? And what’s more, what if he had to do more than just irrigate the tracks? And even more critical, what if the ‘Motorman’ was a ‘Motorwoman’. Incidentally for those who may think that I am being facetious, let me assure you that I have seldom been more serious in my life. This, lack of facilities to do it decently and in private, is a major problem with Traffic Police Constables also, especially women Constables. Maybe the fact that we don’t have a distinct word for a woman police constable is an indicator of our blindness to their needs.

To return to our ‘Motorman’ video and the lessons from it, the reason the man has to do what he did is because the designer of the engine driver’s cab, never drove an engine in his life. If you think I am exaggerating, let me tell you another story.

In 2000 I was invited to teach a series of leadership courses, which we called From Managing to Leading, for the design team of one of the two major truck manufacturers in India. There were totally two hundred engineers who would take this 3-day residential course at their training facility. They were all graduates from the IITs (Indian Institutes of Technology) with a sprinkling from REC’s (Regional Engineering College); some of the most highly qualified engineers in the country. The IITs have an entrance test about which someone asked one of the professors of MIT what he would do if he had to write that test. He said, ‘I would leave, in tears.’ In short these were very smart people with arrogance to match. I asked for a meeting with the Head of the Division, the Head of HR and a cross section of the design engineers to understand their issues so that I could design a program that suited their special needs. This is how that went:

Me: “Many thanks for agreeing to meet me. I am hoping to understand from you, what you see as the special leadership challenges that you face and what you see as being the key deliverables for this course. So, let me begin with a question to all and each of you; Do you have a heavy license (license to drive a truck)?”

They: Thinking: Total silence. Odd looks. “Looks like we made a mistake. This guy looks like he’s flipped it. Heavy license? Why on earth would we, IIT grads, have a heavy license? Do we look like truck drivers to him?” But then this is India and he is older than we are, so we can’t just tell him that he is crazy. So, we remain silent.

Me: “Hmm! Does this mean that you don’t have a truck driving license? Nobody has one?”

They: “Yes.”

Me: “You mean that you design these trucks but none of you has ever driven what you designed?”

They: Thinking: “Now this is getting uncomfortable. How do we answer this?”

“No.”

Me: Thinking: “Expressive lot!!” 

“Okay, let me ask you another question; How many of you sat with the driver in one of your trucks as he drove from Chandigarh to Chennai?”

Eyes roll, silence is now so heavy that it is oppressive.

They: “Nobody.”

Me: “Okay, Chandigarh to Chennai is long, though your trucks are being driven on that route. But let me make it simpler; has anyone sat with the driver as he drove from Chennai to Bangalore?”

Eyes roll again. More silence.

They: “No.”

Me: Now I am twisting the knife: “So, you are telling me that you design trucks that you have never driven or ridden in?”

They: Sheepishly: “Yes.”

Me: “Let me ask you another question: Who makes the buying decision in the case of a truck?”

They: “The owner of the trucking company.”

Me: “Right and wrong. The owner ‘decides’ but he is totally influenced by his drivers. If the drivers like a certain brand of truck, the owner will always buy that brand unless there is a huge price difference between that brand and its competitor. No owner wants unhappy drivers who are constantly complaining about the truck which results in slower turnaround time, directly translating to lower profits. The owner wants the best, most efficient transport and his driver decides. Who is that driver? He is the one whose reality you have not even tried to understand. You were looking at me like I was crazy when I asked if you had a heavy license. What do you say now?”

Sadly, this inability to see with their eyes is widespread and is the real reason behind bad design and bad service.

Try an experiment. Walk down a street that you usually walk down. Notice how it looks and try to remember the details. When you get to the end of the street or if it is a long street, then when you have walked a few hundred meters, turn around and look up the street you just walked down. How does it look? Does it look like it had been a few minutes ago when you walked down it? Or does it look different? This is a good way to understand how perspective is a factor of position. What you see depends on where you look at it from. The same principle holds in life. One of my friends, a senior police officer was talking to me about human trafficking, which is a very big issue in India. She talked about how her subordinate officers seemed to have become calloused about it. She asked me for ideas about how she could get them inspired to solve human trafficking cases and bring the perpetrators of urban slavery to book. I told her, “Ask them to give the victim a name. The name of their daughter.” Simple as it sounds, it worked. Things change complexion when we put ourselves in the shoes of the ‘other’. The other is no longer a stranger to be ignored at best or at worst, maligned and hated.

We see the other, and in him, we see ourselves.

This is the origin of the Golden Rule: “Do unto others what you would have them do unto you.” Or as someone else put it: “Don’t do to others what you wouldn’t want them to do to you.” Or as yet someone else put it: “People may forget what you did but they will never forget how you made them feel.”

Before I end, let me assure you that this is not about business or winning customers. The biggest lesson I learnt in this context was one week after I got married. I married when I was thirty and had been living alone since I was eighteen. We got married in Hyderabad and left the next day for the Anamallais (where I was an Assistant Manager in the tea gardens) we arrived in Madras at my aunt’s place. Jahanara Aunty and Mohammed Uncle were absolute gems whose hospitality was legendary and recalled to this day by everyone who was fortunate enough to enjoy it. Two days later we boarded the train for Coimbatore from where we drove up the Aliyar Ghat of forty hairpin bends. Samina was violently sick all the way up the Ghat. Being prone to motion sickness anyway, the Ghat road was not doing her any good at all. I was very concerned because this Ghat road was a given if we lived in the Anamallais and with Samina being so sick on it, it didn’t seem to portend well for us. The prospect of a repeat performance every time we traveled was definitely not something to look forward to. But as it happened after a couple of trips Samina got over her motion sickness altogether. Maybe the Ghat road shocked it out of her system.

It was a tradition that estate workers welcomed the Assistant Manager when he returned with his wife. But it was not something that happened always. The workers decided who they wanted to welcome and who they didn’t. In our case as our car rounded the bend off the Sholayar Dam and came towards ‘Black Bridge,’ we were stopped and requested to alight. Samina and I came out of the car, glad for the chance to stretch our legs. The road was lined with girls who sang a welcome song and showered us with flower petals as we walked through this guard of honor. We were taken to a pavilion which I realized had been made by tying the best sarees of the women to the poles and decorated with lots of flowers. Tea garden workers can be the most loving people in the world and if you were good to them, they appreciated it and reciprocated. I saw many examples of that in my decade long career. We were garlanded and sat at a table on the two grandest chairs that they could find. Then we were served tea and biscuits and sweets. It was then that a depressed fly decided to end its meaningless life in my wife’s teacup. But Samina, being the perfect lady that she is, merely fished the fly out and drank the tea without batting an eyelid. An amazing performance which saved us from a lot of embarrassment.  

Then speeches were made, and the women danced and sang a song in our honor in which we were mentioned repeatedly in sometimes a humorous way and sometimes with great respect. The amazing thing was that this song was made up then and there and they sang about various habits of mine, including singing while I rode my motorcycle. People observe you and remember and respond to you the way they perceive you. People listen with their eyes. They don’t care what you say, until they see what you do. I have seen this in my life more times than I can possibly recall. All the more reason to ensure that whatever it was, remained good and honorable.

At the end of all this song and dance there were some speeches by the local union leaders and one supervisor and then I was asked to speak. It was permitted for the manager to speak in English and the speech would be translated. But I had learnt Tamil for occasions such as these and spoke it well, much to everyone’s delight. When I had finished and thanked them for all their trouble and expressed our gratitude for the honor that we had been granted, they gave my wife a gold ring as their gift as a mark of their love and honor for me. I was floored. These were poor people who had collected money for this, something which was not expected of them at all. What could I say? As I mentioned earlier, Managers and workers in the plantations form bonds that are more like family than anything else.

That story was the background for the lesson I mentioned earlier. A lesson in seeing with ‘their’ eyes. It was about a week later when one day I was saying something to my wife about my car and so on when she stopped me and said, ‘If you keep talking about everything as my-this and my-that, how will I ever feel that I share it with you?’ I was flabbergasted. I didn’t realize the effect of my perfectly innocuous speech on my wife. I had lived alone since I was eighteen and was used to thinking of everything as being mine. Sharing didn’t come into it as I’d had nobody to share with. But now I did. I realized that I needed to change my outlook. I needed to see with her eyes. Today, thirty-four years later, I am very happy that I learnt that lesson.