One of my favorite authors is the British writer John Lanchester. He sits somewhere on the boundary between fiction and non-fiction, always with an eye towards examining politics and finance in modern society. If you’re interested learning about the world of finance his (non-fiction) How to Speak Money is a great read.
In his 2012 novel Capital, a sort-of examination of the 2008 financial crisis, there was one character whose romantic arc I especially enjoyed. The novel follows a wide cast of characters across different walks of life in late naughties London including “Bogdan the Builder” (real name Zbigniew), a Polish construction worker who’s migrated to the UK under the auspices of EU freedom of movement rules.
After a somewhat disastrous relationship, he falls for Matya, the nanny taking care of one of his client’s children. Psyching himself up to ask Matya out, he calculates that the fact he has reliable income and is basically responsible puts him in the top tier of potential suitors. Which — scroll to the next paragraph if my revealing a minor plot point will upset you — is eventually proved to be correct.
I think there’s a lesson there: in a lot of cases, just showing up and doing the basics can get you a long way.
In a business context, this popped into my mind recently because I needed to get a quote for a piece of software for one of the companies I’m working with.
I won’t name the company because I don’t think that’s helping anything. Suffice to say they’re pretty successful and really seem like they ought to have the institutional capacity to handle sales meetings.
When it came time to meet with them, I was pretty stunned at how difficult it was to get a meeting to potentially give them money. On my first attempt, I booked a call using their self-booking system and — despite the fact the salesperson proactively confirmed he’d show up and sent me a reminder — I sat there waiting for 10 minutes in a Google Meet room patently waiting for him to join.
Was I certain I was going to buy the product? No. For starters, I booked the call to get pricing information, and it was completely possible that their pricing was too rich for my blood.
At the same time, I was definitely a very live lead. I booked the call because I was pretty interested in buying their product.
Yet no one bothered to so much as show up for what would have been an easy win, assuming everything else lined up. I had buying authority. I had the need. And I presented myself on a silver platter.
In fact, it was so hard to get a meeting and I was so eager to learn more I worked my network to get connected with one of the company’s executives who did ultimately answer my questions.
It could be argued their biggest competitor has a better product at the margins. It’s a little less thoughtfully designed and definitely less flexible. When I got a salesperson on a call, I’m not sure they were the best sales person I’ve ever interacted with.
But they did show up. On time. And, even if it was a little clumsy, they eventually got my questions answered with a lot less effort than their upstart competitor.
While I wound up going in a completely different buying direction in the end, the company whose salesperson got the basics right had a vastly higher chance of getting me to sign up.
The same could be said for so much else. I’ve written before that, on hiring process, taking a few basic steps puts you in the top decile of recruiting operations because so few people get that right.
Doing user research calls for a company I’ve been helping out, I recently heard a story about a competitor tool from a company with hundreds of millions of dollars of revenue. Despite being the arguable market leader, this user told me their product had major downtime about one day a month.
The more I think about engineering team metrics, the more I’m convinced that the only thing that really matters is whether people get most task done on time most of the time. Worrying about anything else, unless you’ve really figured out those basics, is a waste.
Or, in another part of my life, I’ve realized that it’s surprisingly easy to exert political influence by simply being one of the few people who bothers to show up. Being one of the rare people who votes in elections for lower-profile positions like city council, I get personally courted. Candidates really care what I think. Being one of the rare people who shows up to community discussions with actual politicians and civil servant, my voice gets a lot more weight than worrying about the vice presidential pick over dinner with political hobbyist friends.
It’s so tempting to fret about optimizations at the margin. Whether to give sales teams a 10 or 11 percent commission. Whether to use Jira or Linear for tracking engineering tasks. Focusing instead on doing the basics and getting them right can get you a surprisingly long way.
Bonus: Taxonomy on Past Present Future
If you’re a regular reader here, you’ll probably appreciate that I’m big on nuance. It really irritates me that people want everything to be black and white. On this recent episode of PPF, biologist Adam Rutherford explores why taxonomy is perhaps not a great idea.
Enjoy this? Have an idea for something you’d like a perspective on? Drop me a line: I’d love to hear from you.