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Dear Michael Dell, Larry Ellison, Larry Page and other CEOs of large American corporations:
I am sure you all saw the news when Steve Jobs died. The spontaneous, international show of mourning was nothing short of amazing.
My question is, do you think we will cry when you die?
The irony is that Jobs was more like you than like us. Jobs was a multi-billionaire who lived in a walled mansion and flew around on private jets when he traveled. Most of us never got to meet Jobs and we certainly couldn’t call him or schedule a meeting with him – just as most of us will never have a chance to meet you either.
The reality is, you are much more like him than we are. You are all visionaries and innovators in your own right. You all imagined a world, far off in the future, that didn’t exist yet and set out to build it. Each of you, your products and companies really did change the way we live our lives…in the case of a few of you, arguably even more than Jobs did. You took big risks, sometimes winning and sometimes losing, and in the process you lived the America dream and built huge, multinational corporations. You’re all pretty remarkable people by any standards and, there is no question, we respect you. Though I’m sure you’re all pretty decent guys, we won’t cry when your time comes because, well, we just don’t love you.
And that’s the one thing Jobs had that resulted in mass shows of emotion when we lost him. We loved him. We didn’t love him for what he built or accomplished. Those things are not, in comparison to all of you, exceptional. We loved him for something he gave us that exists on a level far greater than any product or technology - he gave us something to believe in. It is that one seemingly minor thing, something deeply seeded in our reptilian, limbic brains, that he mastered and most of you have lost. Steve Jobs stood for something.
If you have any fantasies of spontaneous public love when your time comes, then you need to go back to your own roots. You need to rediscover your own cause – the thing that inspired you when you had nothing but a dream and a bunch of friends willing to help you build it. You used to be able to inspire a room with your words, now you work hard to ensure the analysts like what you say.
Go back to the time when you were the idealist, when you stood for something, when your dreams were clearer than the reality that told you that you were crazy. Go back to that. Be that person again…the one we used to love.
Jobs was not unique for what he built. He was not unique for the gift he had. It wasn’t even unique that he had a bold vision for how the world should operate. What made him remarkable was that he never lost it…not until the day he died. And for that, we miss him dearly.
“We have listened to our customers very closely over the last few weeks,” said David Darnell, co-COO of Bank of America, “and recognize their concern with our proposed debit usage fee.”
This is a standard line when a plan to gouge customers backfires.
In the case of Bank of America, they didn’t propose, as Mr. Darnell attempted to explain, they implemented a plan in which customers were charged a $5 transaction fee to use their debit cards. It doesn’t take Nostradamus to predict that customers may have a less than desirable reaction to such a preposterous idea.
This is a sad commentary on the direction business is heading these days. Companies like Bank of America no longer see their customers as people, they see them as cows to be milked. The problem is, instead of pacing and looking after the cow, they will keep milking to the point they get kicked in the face or the cow dies…whichever happens first. In this case of their new fees, they got kicked in the face.
Companies that really listen to their customers do so before they make decisions not after they need to pick up the pieces. Companies that listen do things that are actually intended for the customer. In contrast, companies that don’t listen only say they are listening when things don't go according to plan.
I would have more respect for Bank of America if Mr. Darnell was honest. “We were looking for ways to increase our profit and thought a transaction fee to debit card transactions was a good strategy. The negative reaction was much worse than we anticipated so we’ve decided to reverse course and look for other ways to maintain growth and profit.” A statement like that would at least be consistent with whom Bank of America really sees as their primary concern: their shareholders. And at least we can respect that the bank was telling us what we already knew or expected (it's called integrity).
I don’t care what companies choose to do to make money. I believe in a free market economy and believe customers can express themselves with their feet. If Bank of America wants to gouge us, more power to them. They wouldn’t be the first to try it or get away with it (think airlines charging us to bring luggage on our vacations). I just believe in transparency – which means giving us the REAL context for a decision (for more on this read The Battered-Wife Customer Service Model)
The only listening Bank of America did was to the sound of money trickling out as customers closed accounts in higher than expected numbers. And if you need more proof that they were just covering their ass with their new-found concern for customer opinion, why the heck is a Chief Operating Officer, a numbers and operations guy, making announcements about customer care.
Saddest of all, this is not an article bashing Bank of America. They are just the latest example of a modern company that has replaced a person with a number and erroneously called that number a customer.
