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Operational transparency
A few months ago, the Harvard Business Review ran a piece by Ryan Buell on what he calls “Operational Transparency.” Here is the summary:
Conventional wisdom holds that the more contact an operation has with its customers, the less efficiently it will run. But when customers are partitioned away from the operation, they are less likely to fully understand and appreciate the work going on behind the scenes, thereby placing a lower value on the product or service being offered…. Managers should experiment with operational transparency—the deliberate design of windows into and out of the organization’s operations to help customers understand and appreciate the value being added. Witnessing the hidden work performed on their behalf makes customers more satisfied, more willing to pay, and more loyal.
If this sounds familiar, it’s a fancier way of saying, “Show Your Work!”
Today I visited my friend Wendy MacNaughton’s studio in the Dogpatch neighborhood of San Francisco. Piled and pinned everywhere was the physical evidence of how hard she works on her stories. She showed me a bug she was painting for a new story and now I can’t wait to read it.
Earlier, we were having lunch at the bar in Piccino and the chefs were preparing a lemon meringue tart. Seeing their delicate work, we immediately ordered one to split.
What windows into your own operations can you open for the people you serve?
Go by train
One of my favorite things so far on this tour has been taking Amtrak trains. I took one from Philly to NYC, Portland to Seattle, and yesterday I took The Coast Starlight from Seattle to San Francisco.
I had a nice little sleeper car, but I spent most of my time between the diner car (free meals with a sleeper — I ate very well) and the observation deck, which was surprisingly uncrowded.
The train is just a whole different vibe than flying. On planes people are sort of territorial and paranoid and a little aloof. On the train, everyone’s a little more chill. I felt incredibly relaxed after a day of riding.
The clouds parted a bit for some blue skies on my way up to Seattle.
Here are some photos of Oregon out the window…
Most surprising was getting up in the mountains south of Eugene and seeing all the snow and the trees which seem to be a mile high. After a big dinner in the dining car, I went to sleep and woke up to a sunrise in Sacramento:
And the last little bit around the Bay Area was especially pleasant in the morning light:
I highly recommend it at least once. If you’ve got the time, take the train.
You’re next
Seen on tour in Portland, Oregon: a particularly bitchin’ memento mori.
Shut up and listen
Some interviewing wisdom from Robert Caro’s piece on researching his LBJ biographies, excerpted from his book, Working:
In interviews, silence is the weapon, silence and people’s need to fill it—as long as the person isn’t you, the interviewer. Two of fiction’s greatest interviewers—Georges Simenon’s Inspector Maigret and John le Carré’s George Smiley—have little devices they use to keep themselves from talking and to let silence do its work. Maigret cleans his ever-present pipe, tapping it gently on his desk and then scraping it out until the witness breaks down and talks. Smiley takes off his eyeglasses and polishes them with the thick end of his necktie. As for me, I have less class. When I’m waiting for the person I’m interviewing to break a silence by giving me a piece of information I want, I write “SU” (for Shut Up!) in my notebook. If anyone were ever to look through my notebooks, he would find a lot of “SU”s.
Filed under: silence
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