A few days ago, i needed to get out of the office for a bit and grab some lunch. Feeling a bit cranky, i dropped by a greek themed greasy spoon that is run by a Korean gentleman and two guys from (i believe) Ecuador called "Gus's" . The place is scary as hell to look at, but serves fantastic gyros (off a wheel), and then grilled so it's all crunchy on the outside, moist on the inside. My kinda joint, really.
Seeing how it's located within a spanner's toss of a large number of car repair joints and serves tasty high calorie , it's a favorite spot for a number of mechanics as well. And where there's mechanics, there's going to be front-office folks. It was no surprise, then, that i heard one senior individual telling his new associate "It's about customer service. We're not in the car repair industry, we're not…"
i don't know what his meaningful insight was at that point because i realized that no matter what he said, he was wrong. i should have asked "What company do you work for? i'd like to make sure i avoid dealing with it."
A decade before, i probably would have bought into the whole "We're not in the [publicly stated and identified commercial interest] business…" crap as well. The world was pretty much full of it, and i'm sure i spread my share of "insightful" misinformation as well. There were plenty of examples citing Taco Bell as not being in the food industry, but in transportation, or Marriott not being in the hotel business, but in real estate. It's true, those companies are in those interests. One could even note that Taco Bell became significantly more profitable when it switched to filling their burritos with large bore caulk guns. There's just one problem. Taco Bell sucks as a restaurant.
Nobody who is sober, has more than $20 for the month, and gives a crap about what they shove down their gullet looks forward to eating at Taco Bell if there are better alternatives available. Hell, there are dozens of little taqueria's in our area, and even a pretty decent white guy taco joint that blows the doors off Taco Bell for less money. How many folks would go there still if they doubled their prices?
One thing i've learned from working at the new company is that you do best when you do your job. Netflix is about letting you watch movies. Period. You can get them in a number of ways, and we're rolling out new stuff all the time, but each item still boils down to "giving you something to watch". That's why Netflix doesn't do games or sporting events or pizza delivery because none of those are movies. Know what happens when you do your job? You get pretty damn good at it. It becomes your one focus and everything else you do supports that. Sure, we've got great customer service, because we want to make sure you can watch movies. We've got a sophisticated hub based inventory system, because we want to make sure you can watch movies. There's lots of things we could say we're in the business of, but we're not. Those aren't our job. Everyone at the company knows that.
Look at other successful businesses and you'll see the same thing. French Laundry, what many consider to be the top restaurant in the US, serves top quality food to guests. Southwest Airlines is about getting people from one airport to another for a reasonable cost. Heck, even the most successful components of large companies, Flickr and YouTube, still focus on doing pretty much one thing. When companies try to do everything, they usually start hitting problems.
Just do the damn job people expect and a lot of other issues resolve themselves, mostly because you realize they're not important. If you're not working for the task your company has set out to solve, leave now, because either your bosses will realize they're making a mistake, or the company will fail.
