Sometimes people suggest I know nothing of male/female relationships in the workplace because I’m gay. To the contrary, metaphorically I’m in the stands so what I see is a different and possibly better view from those on the field (so to speak).
I asked one of the senior analysts if I could speak with him privately. I said: “Quit humping the leg of the intern.” Now, to be clear, he was a good man with strong ethics and very professional. I can’t read minds, but my guess is that he got his signals crossed.
Image courtesy of Tenor
The intern in question sat at the desk next to me. So I saw firsthand how uncomfortable she was with the attention from the senior analyst. (Finding reasons to drop by her desk every few hours, trying to get to know her personally with questions, etc., etc.)
I saw something and I took action.
Three Take-Aways:
1 If you see potential harassment, speak up. A lot of trouble for everyone can be averted.
2 There’s a big difference between a one-time thoughtless lack of judgement and a predatory repeat offender. A man who responds appropriately to being spoken to privately may not express thanks, but he will be glad.
3 You don’t have to be the person’s boss if you know them. This is a good way to de-escalate a potentially volatile situation.
Back to the gay thing: As a gay man, I’ve learned to suppress my instinct to stare at or pay attention to men I’m attracted to in the workplace. This is so because a lot of straight men hate being hit on by gay guys. Straight men ought to suppress their attraction to women in the workplace, too. Gay men who hit on straight men risk getting their ass kicked. Maybe the workplace would be better if straight men faced the same risk?
Use the Mozilla Firefox browser with Fàcebook Container extension
Unfriend people you don’t interact with much
All of these are described below.
IMPORTANT WARNING: If you are in an abusive relationship or being stalked, quit Facebõok, In-sta, and WhåtsApp immediately. Social media is the number one way abusers track down their victims. For help with domestic violence, telephone in the USA 800-799-7233 Don’t use the Internet for this because your abuser may have tampered with your browser. Better to phone. Even better if you can use a friend’s phone.
This was a friend’s humorous response to my observations about Facêbook’s social and privacy problems. These are the kinds of things people in InfoSec/Cybersecurity are trained to notice. The only people I know who quit or drastically cut back on FB are InfoSec/CyberSecurity professionals or victims of FB retaliation. (Retaliation)
To almost everyone else, it doesn’t seem so bad or they haven’t yet experienced any harm. This blog will provide some ways FB is less than good for ordinary people. Then it will suggest some ways to reduce harm while using FB.
What harm?
Betty White famously framed one answer when she hosted Saturday Night Live due to a FB petition gaining over 1,000,000 likes. She said: “I didn’t know what Facebøok was. And now that I do know, it sounds like a huge waste of time.” Yes.
FB: “And now that I do know, it sounds like huge waste of time”
When I’ve shared with people horrible things about Fß, the most common response is “But I only use it to keep up with friends and family.”
Thus, people who might agree that FB is leveraged for evil by others, they still use it for themselves. This isn’t the first time people do things that aren’t good for them. That’s why I’m a big advocate of harm reduction. This is the simple idea that if you give people factual information about options and respect their dignity, they will do things in a way that is least harmful. Example of Harm Reduction: Wearing a seatbelt while driving. (Controversy)
First of all, what harm does FB inflict on ordinary people? It
manipulates our emotions through it’s selection of what it shows us (CBS)
makes us feel worse when we’re sad, down, or angry (Sad)
wastes our time by making us look at things we don’t want (see Betty White above)
fills our feed with ads that range from idiotic (ads1) to disturbing (ads2)
Harm Reduction Tactics
So in the interests of harm reduction, I offer the following suggestions for people who want to have a richer, safer, and more satisfying experience.
Download and use the Mozilla Firefox browser with the FB container fence extension enabled (Fence)
Use the old, but still active mobile phone browser m.facebook.com
Unfriend people who don’t add positive value to your life
Unfriend people whose constant bragging makes you compare yourself negatively
Download and use the free version of CCleaner that will erase FB cookies and web storage files https://www.ccleaner.com(Reputable)
Harm Reduction Benefits
If you do these things, you will gain the following benefits:
Your feed will be more specific to your needs (and not those of advertisers)
You’ll enjoy better, richer interaction with friends and family
YOU will be in control of your FB experience more than the algorithm
Not a Personal Problem
One of the blindspots we westerners have is that we tend to cast everything as an individual problem. We’re not very good at group thinking. This hilarious mock educational film about Faceboök Manners is a good example of side-stepping group and corporate responsibility .
Spoof of Educational Film re: The Electric Friendship Generator
Privacy Badger
Although not specific to FB, when it comes to online protection, I highly recommend the Electronic Frontier Foundation’s Privacy Badger that can be added to Firefox, Chrome, Edge, and Opera https://privacybadger.org/
Additional Info
For me, FB is one big steaming pile of holocaust deniers, racists bigots, a flood of raw sewage disinformation and info-warfare by well-funded troll farms, and the target of many breaches of user data.
(Friend) This partial quote is wildly out of context. After listening to my technology and privacy concerns about Facébook, he humorously replied: “Well, you do security for a living so I respect your views, but it works for me, so fuck off.” Still makes me laugh recalling that.
(Controversy) Harm reduction for illicit drugs more controversial. Teaching people to use alcohol pads to cleanse needles can prevent infection, but many “guardian types” insist that they only approach should be “Don’t Do Drugs!!!”
(ads1) When I was active on F B, I received countless ads for very expensive gentlemen’s underpants. I would screen-capture those for fun. How do you say “gay” without saying “gay”? Code an ad to reach men in certain zip codes in a relationship with someone of the same gender. In 2018, FB made a video just for me. I was sure to use those screen-captures:
Very Expensive Underoos for Men
(ads2) An ad looking to drum up a class action suit against PrEP medicines showed up in my feed in 2018. When I clicked on “Why am I seeing this ad?” the info was the advertiser was looking for people who live or lived in California. They did NOT reveal the whole search criteria. They were looking for gay men, using advanced search logic such as zip codes, cities, relationship status with another of the same sex, gender, etc..
Some people deny that FB allows advertisers to target gay men. How many straight men would wear the shirt on the left?
Does FB Let Advertisers Target Gay Men?
(Fence) Faceböok Container works by isolating your FB identity into a separate container (like a fence) that makes it harder for Fa cebook to track your visits to other websites with third-party cookies.
(Reputable) There are many bad programs that claim to clean up your computer, but actually contain adware or spyware. Be sure to use one that has a good reputation such as CCleaner
“Firefox has blocked a popup.” I was bit shocked by this alert because I was on my brokerage web portal. WTF? Don’t their web developers know that only the most scurrilous and evil websites use popups? Didn’t they ever experience the screen being flooded with malicious popups appearing faster than humanly possible to close?
Then I found a website with detailed instructions on how to build popups using Java. It read, in part: “In the past, evil sites abused popups a lot. A bad page could open tons of popup windows with ads. So now most browsers try to block popups and protect the user.” It then went on to provide details on how to code popups.
I thought to myself: Am I really that old? Are evil popups only from a dim, murky past? Has the playing field for popups been so sanitized that popups are considered just another way to show more info to the user?
:: sigh :: The truth is probably somewhere in the middle. If a web developer grew up with modern browsers that blocked popups by default, then popups probably don’t seem so bad. Also, a “chat with agent” box at the bottom of the screen can be very useful. Finally, providing one special offer or survey when you close a B2C browser seems like a good way to increase user engagement.
Now I think the minimal use of popups makes sense. However, let’s not go crazy and try to make the BLINK attribute in HTML or CSS a standard element. If a scurrilous website is too lazy to simulate blinking with a gif file, then they should not be encouraged (lol).
In cyber security, we adopted the military model of red teams for penetration testing and blue teams for vulnerability analysis. I say it’s time for a new gray team – people charged with thinking through the misuse of systems. These are not attackers, but hostile users. This would be an uphill battle.
Everyone has heard the phase: “Move fast and break things.” However, there’s another mantra that is just as binding in software engineering: “You don’t need a solution until there’s a problem.” A gray team would take on this mindset. It would not wait until the problems occurred, it would prevent them.
Here’s example of a problem that should have been anticipated, but wasn’t: A woman using a P2P payment app kept receiving $1 payments accompanied by evil, threatening messages from a stalking douchebag ex, but there was no way to block someone sending a payment.1 It’s tempting to think: “Why would you ever want to block someone sending you money?” But the problem was the hostile use of the messaging aspect of the system. A gray team would know that almost all forms of human communication have been misused for abuse.
Another horrific example has happened to women who tragically have miscarriages, but their browsers and social media feeds remain flooded with ads for new baby things for weeks and weeks.2 Why isn’t there a way to report these ads for being in situationally poor taste? Organizations have been funding algorithm development to spot expecting parents, but a gray team would have identified that we needed a user-controlled “flush” command on this profiling. (If you’ve ever tried to report an ad for being misleading or in poor taste, you’ll soon find that those are not considered legitimate reasons to report ads.)
Some other examples of problems that could have been prevented:
Gay men have been hunted and beaten by homophobic thugs using the leaked location data from a popular gay dating app.3
A person set up a small business account with a credit reporting bureau. He then downloaded hundreds of thousands of credit reports. 4
Realtors are reporting that vacant properties are receiving multiple letters addressed to different people from State unemployment benefits departments.5
End-users have clicked on ads that contain links to malware sites.6
These are all examples of how a huge bling spot is created by the mindset: “You don’t need a solution until there is a problem.” When I first entered the work force, there was a humorous saying: “When you’re up to your ass in alligators it’s difficult to remember your original objective was to drain the swamp.” The main benefit of a gray team is that preventing problems will always be cheaper and easier than fixing them afterwards. Also, anticipating problems will prevent “technical debt” from piling up.
We need gray teams because it’s not realistic to expect individual software engineers to deal with this. It’s not about individuals, it’s about organizations. Organizations need to step up their game to protect end-users and conserve cash by avoiding costly rework.
Back in olden days (the 1980s), a wise mentor of mine observed: “Any system humans can create, humans can subvert.” Digital transformation will be a lot more productive and less abused if organizations methodically searched for and prevented ways to subvert the systems we create. Gray teams would be one way to do that.
Much respect and appreciation to Jonathan Rothwell and Steve Freeman for their excellent presentation “So You Can Sleep at Night” https://youtu.be/A5umy4lUOOY They approach this as an inquiry into software engineering ethics. My approach is to build upon this from an organization systems perspective.
I have often heard that “content is king” when it comes to demand gen. Yes, content can drive people to your web. Yes, content can fill the lead funnel with the names of people1 who download content after filling out a form. But, content alone cannot and will not help you understand your install base and how to find others who want to buy your product/service. Only data can do that.
A lot of companies spend tremendous effort on creating content for blogs, white papers, and social media. I guess it makes sense. After all, lead scoring and customer profiling are hard. If it were easy, everyone would do it, no? While it’s true that sophisticated tracking programs2 can determine which content is performing well, much more important data is elsewhere. Every company in this millennium uses some form of CRM,3 but strangely most companies don’t seem to use their CRM data base to capture vital information, such as:
Why did we win?
Who did we compete against?
Which people within a customer performed various roles?
What other technology is part of the customers’ stacks?
How many customers do we have by industry?
One of the blind spots here is that the answers to these questions are known by some people. Certainly, eStaff level executives have a good feel for this. For everyone else in an organization, it’s usually buried in emails (unstructured) or known to different people scattered in the organization (fragmented). This important knowledge is just beyond the grasp of effective up-sell, cross-sell, customer references, and other campaigns.
The last question about customers by industry is highly significant. When a company starts to grow their customer base, one of the first questions new prospects typically ask is: How many customers do you have in my industry? In olden days (15 years ago), we called this our “quals” — our proof that we are qualified to work in your industry. I find it remarkable that 5 out of 5 start ups I worked at could not run a simple query in their CRM to determine precisely how many customers they had. This was so, in part, because it wasn’t always clear what was a customer. (I used the word “precise” because cross-referencing the account receivables data base with the CRM data base and tediously resolving the inconsistencies is less than precise.)
A great management consultant4used to say: “The truth is usually found in the middle.” To that end, my take is that you need both content and data. If you don’t have an organized and systematic way to obtain data, maybe some of the resources applied to content could be redeployed for data.
Notes:
1 It amazing to me that most companies have to learn the hard way that people are clever enough to put in bogus information and disposable emails to get content. Thus, putting content behind forms is not a foolproof way to capture leads. At one company, I was in charge of the lead routing table. The first 3 of 80+ “routing rules” disposed of bogus names such as Buggs Bunny and swear words (lol).
2 Those sophisticated tracking systems are not cheap. Many companies pay tens of thousands each month for search engine optimization, syndication of content, pay-per-click ads, and “pixel fire” unique browser surveillance. Even more companies layer on more surveillance when they do not get tangible results. Is there any end to this?
3 CRM stands for “customer relationship management” (such as MS Dynamics or Salesforce.com). Here’s another unpopular observation: It’s the customers who manage the relationships they have with companies and not vice-versa.
4 My blessed mother taught me that line about the truth being the in middle. It has been borne out countless times in my experience. She also said: “People like to shop, but they don’t like to be sold to.”
For further reading
A simple online search for “best practices customer profile” yielded hundreds of results. One of them provides a nice step-by-step process for using customer profiles for revenue: Five Steps to Creating an Effective Customer Profile for Lead Scoring Note: This resource is 7 years old. Further support for the notion that there is no excuse for modern start ups to trip and fall because of this.
20-years ago, the biggest lie was “The check is in the mail.”
10-years ago, the biggest lie was “Please listen carefully as our menu options have recently changed.”
Today the biggest lie is “We care about your privacy.”
Recently my cable internet provider updated their privacy policy. They were actually honest about avoiding sweeping grandiose promises. When they rolled out their new privacy policy, they introduced it as:
“We know you care about your privacy and the protection of your personal information.
“We also know it is our responsibility to be clear about how we protect your information.
Like most companies, they then go on for about 2,000 words (10-pages) of detailed explanations of how they share your information with 3rd parties and adamantly refuse to acknowledge the “Do Not Track” setting of your browser. (I consider it less than honest to loudly proclaim “We do not SELL your information” when they have entered into 3rd party relationships to exchange data for the purpose of increasing ad revenue. Consumers are rarely given the information to block this type of sharing.)
Fortunately there is a wonderful browser plug-in called Privacy Badger that enables you to enforce “Do Not Track.” I’ve been using it for a few years now and commend it to you https://www.eff.org/privacybadger
When I was first promoted to managing people, I was fortunate to work for a big bank. Fortunate because they had a leadership training program. There we learned how to deal with both project and people problems – and how often they are intertwined.
Most of the startups I’ve worked for since don’t offer very
much training. Leadership is admired and promoted. However, no matter how cute,
funny, or cleverly worded the emails, “leaders” who ping people Friday asking
about project status are signaling a red flag of poor management skills.
This is so because project management is far more than
leadership. It requires organizing the people and the work. It also requires
controlling for progress. No amount of emails (or task management software) can
make up for disorganized people and/or lack of resources. If someone wants to
be a leader, then they must own the fact that it’s their job to get people and
resources organized. If someone else does that, they are not the leader (regardless
of title).
Note: Misusing task management tools such as Wrike, Asana,
or monday.com is not leadership, either. One can create to-do lists and assign
people all they want, but if there is no clear agreement on roles and
responsibilities, they are missing the all-important aspect of organizing for
success.
I once heard the phrase “heat seekers” used to describe the people who are always first to adopt new technology. I like it. This is just my opinion, but I’ve seen this at 5 out of the 5 startups. During the early days, the first customers are organizations that have ample in-house technical resources; they have “heat seekers.” These in-house engineers can evaluate different solutions using their own fairly objective proof-of-concept criteria. They quickly learn the technology and conduct the trial on their own. For these organizations, the superior technology wins the deal every time.
A Totally Badass Steam Punk Watch, No?
However, I suspect most companies do not have this in-house expertise. They rely heavily on analyst reports (such as Gartner Magic Quadrant) and references. They may struggle with developing criteria for a proof-of-concept trial. They may also give more weight to ease of use and low admin overhead than technical superiority. These potential customers vastly outnumber the early adopters. In order to grow revenue, you have to sell to ordinary companies — mere mortals.
Advice: Use the experience of early adopters to repurpose/reuse POC plans and create ease-of-use features. Makes sure your product benefits companies that do not have large in-house technical resources (use “wizards” and automation to streamline processes).
Better Advice: One of the great sales execs I’ve met taught the team: “When a customer asks for a POC trial, ask him if they’ll share the POC plan with you. They may well say, ‘I don’t have one, yet.’ That’s when you say: ‘Well, here’s one you can start with.’ That’s when you give them our POC plan. Of course our plan will highlight our strengths – the ones in which we’ve invested the most engineering resources and meet the most customer feature requests. Just be upfront about it.”
AI for Your Business — Not Just Your Product
I find it baffling how many starts up bloviate about machine learning and artificial intelligence in their product offering, but completely fail to use any of it in their own business processes. A classic example is RFP/RFIs. These start out as handcrafted, bespoke documents. But when a company becomes successful, they often receive more RFP/RFI requests than they can handle. Why aren’t automated tools for this standard best practices? We’ve had latent semantic analysis (LSA)* of unstructured text for more than 20 years. However, it seems mostly limited to advertising that is supposed to be “more relevant.” This automation could be a powerful force for streamlining proposals and quotes. This is especially true when it comes to answer GDPR and other questionnaires.
Advice: Start using ML/AI tools for proposals and quotes immediately. Don’t wait until you’re overtaxed and deals are falling through the cracks.
* Latent Semantic Analysis (LSA) is a theory and method for extracting and representing the contextual-usage meaning of words by statistical computations. It could be used to take a body of RFP/RFIs and then generate reusable content for completing new RFP/RFIs. While Wikipedia has an excellent overview article on LSA, the main point of this blog post is we can use natural language processing to eliminate the tedious handcrafted approach to a document that is almost universal in technology sales.
Some pretty good science fiction books and movies have started with a person waking up in an abandoned hospital. Complex. Confusing. That’s how I approach phoning any large consumer call center. I treat it as a bizarre game. It goes without saying that I’ve already exhausted searching their web site.* When you call, the first challenge is attempting to make the interactive voice-response (IVR) system to do your bidding. Different ways of asking or pressing menu options sometimes works. When it does, that’s victory. When that doesn’t work, the next challenge is to get past the IVR to an agent. (Some companies like Comcast make this very difficult.**) Before you can actually speak with an agent, you’ll hear a recording asking how ignorant you are: “Did you know that many tasks can be accomplished on our website?” Finally, speaking with an agent is often like finding the one other person in the abandoned hospital. They are just as dazed and confused as you are.*** They might know about secret rooms (transferring your call), but some of these secret rooms have no answers.
Drowning in Data, but No Insight
What’s the solution? This is yet another example of most companies are drowning in data gathering but don’t know how to use it. Somehow the Pareto Principle has fallen out of favor. We’ve all experienced it. It’s where we get the phase “80/20 rule.” Roughly 80 percent of your effects/defects come from 20 percent of causes/problems. But it’s hard to imagine that any customer call center has an analytics team who can identify customer call trends. Take for example that recording pleading with you to visit the website. Would it be so hard to ask: “Have your been to our website? Press 1 for yes, 2 for no.” This data point would provide a powerful spotlight on content that’s missing or too difficult to find on the website. It would also treat callers with the basic dignity that you don’t think of them as totally ignorant Luddites.
Are you wondering if I think any call centers are very good?
Yes, there are excellent call centers. The United Healthcare call center is at
the top of my list. The first contact people are off-shore, but very well
trained and professional. Insurance benefits in the US are very complex. The
first contact people know how to patch in the right people if needed.
The Uncanny Valley is Horsefeathers
Are you wondering if I know about “the uncanny valley”? Certainly I do. However, the American Express virtual agent suffers from a totally different problem than “the uncanny valley.” They gave the system a human name “Ava” and licensed the absolute best speech production and recognition. It’s my opinion that Ava has the conversational skills of a 13-year old boy barely passing his English class.**** The sound of the voice is young, perky, and professional, but “her” responses are fiercely tactical and argumentative. My guess is that they delegated the “conversation” scripts to one of the most junior people on the team. Would anyone buy at $400,000+ Lamborgini Aventador and then let a 13-year old drive it? It surely seems like hundreds of thousands were spent on the best technology, but human implementation was done on the cheap. ::sigh:: This is not the first time I’ve noticed something like this.
Notes
*I once overheard a frustrated coworker on the phone with a
call center agent say: “I’d rather shower in prison than use your call center,
but I have no other choice.” Yikes (and LOL).
**With Comcast IVR, if you’re calling from a mobile phone and ask to speak with an agent, the IVR terminates the call. (!?) Then an SMS chatbot initiates a session. Of course, the chat bot can only handle the same exact things as the IVR, so eventually the chat bot has to give up and put in a queue for a call back by a human agent. Again, would it be so hard to ask: Have you tried using our website? 1 Yes. 2 No.
***While I respect that being a call center rep is not easy, they are often at the mercy of scripts which – wait for it – are no better than the content on the website. Also, a very large company will have separate departments to deal with different types of problems. I call these “secret rooms” because you cannot call them directly. You must go through a first-contact agent.
****When Ava first launched, “she” was programmed to start the session by introducing herself: “Hello, I’m Ava…” However if you responded with “Hi, I’m Andrew,” the response was “I’m sorry, I don’t know what you mean.” In normal, human conversation when someone introduces themselves, the other person should, too. The correct response should have been: “Hello, Andrew. How may I help you today?”
So far, I’ve received 6 letters in the mail from SiriusXM (and many more emails) because my new car has a SiriusXM capable radio. First they begged me to start a free trial that came with my new car. I did not do this. Then they warned me that the trial would soon be over. Then they started begging me to subscribe even though my trial had expired. Not once did they offer me any explanation of what, how, or why I might want SiriusXM.
Previously, I have written that many product managers unwittingly take the approach that only customers smart enough to understand their technology should be allowed to buy it. Something else seems to be going on with SiriusXM. It seems like they believe if you just try it, you’ll love it. It reminds of some of the most challenging video games. There’s very little instruction or explanation. Part of the fun is figuring things out on your own.
One huge problem with this approach is that it’s leaving a lot of money on the table. There are many, many video games collecting dust on shelves. One of my good friends once said, “If a game gets too complicated or confusing, I just stop playing it.”
True, true.
But when it comes to revenue and customer satisfaction, I don’t believe this is a good approach.
So far, I haven’t received any communication from SiriusXM asking me why I didn’t take them up on the free trial.
I wonder how prevalent this approach is? Many companies offer free versions of their software, but I wonder if they follow-up with people who don’t take them up on their offer to ask why? (Or, if the customer abandons the free trail, do they follow up to ask why?)
