Two or three times now, I've come across a link to an article about how the most impressive people in the world run meetings and two or three times now I've come within a pixel of recommending it to you. Let me recommend it to you: it's Run Your Meetings Like a Boss – Lessons from Meyer, Musk and Jobs on 99u.
But now let me tell you why I kept not doing it. I'd follow the link, start reading the piece, and it begins with a description of Melissa Meyer from Yahoo and how she likes to run her meetings. Meyer is impressive, when I've read interviews with her I've rather admired her, but this particular article's first point about her keeps stopping me reading any further:
Mayer believes that numbers and facts are essential to having effective meetings. She thinks of data as the great equalizer: whether you’re an intern or a VP, you can have your way as long as you have the data to prove your claims. By making decisions with metrics, she can avoid lengthy debates stemming from opinions and organizational politics. Businessweek offered a peek into Mayer’s process:
Mayer discourages using the phrase “I like” in design meetings, such as “I like the way the screen looks.” Instead, she encourages such comments as “The experimentation on the site shows that his design performed 10% better.”
Bollocks.
I've friends who work in research and they are clever and talented. Also witty, as it happens. But you can't research the future, you can only research the past and a bit of the present, you can only analyse what you can show people. And people tend to be wrong. “We want a typewriter ribbon that lasts longer” does not lead you to the internet.
More, the folk who do rely on research are people too. So they tend to be wrong. Microsoft spends a deeply astonishing about of money on audience research (I want to say billions, but that can't be right, can it?) and look at them. Specifically, look at Microsoft Word 2007 for Windows. There was a fascinating blog about the development of that and its seemingly radically new way of making the word processor easy to use. Two things to take away from that blog and all of Microsoft's talk about Word 2007: first, the new system meant that whatever you wanted to do in your document, the right tools – and only the right tools – were presented to you in a ribbon. Second: they did extensive user testing. Extensive. I got bored with how much the blog went on about this.
Yet on the final day of that blog, Microsoft posted – ta-daaa! style – the first screenshot of the complete Word 2007 document screen. And there was no visible way to open an old document nor create a new one.
You can tell me you did your research extensively, you can tell me all about getting in loads of people to test out every scintilla of design paradigm you explored, but apparently none of them – none of them – either tried to open a document or to create one.
Microsoft, you were had.
There was probably a PowerPoint presentation somewhere that said 100% of people who used the new Ribbon thought it was much better. This thereby hiding the fact that 100% of people did not use the Ribbon.
I would've found it useful to be told that 0% of people could not use my product. I'd have found much to think about if told 75% of people prefer it when I write shorter Blank Screen posts. But setting up a situation where you get a huge amount of data and then setting up a scenario where you say you rely exclusively on that data, that's putting research on a pedestal. Doing all that and then just ignoring the bits you don't like, that's neither statistical nor creative, it's only stupid.
Well, probably also expensive, so not only stupid.
There are certainly people who need figures to deal with the world and there are certainly people who find them constraining. I think I clearly sit in the latter camp so your mileage may vary. But my sticking point with all this is not the use of research, is not the studying of figures, it's the mandate that you must do this. That you can't tell Melissa Meyer that an idea is bollocks, you have to tell her that it's 67% bollocks.
Doctors say that Nordberg has a 50/50 chance of living, though there's only a 10 percent chance of that.
Quote from The Naked Gun: From the Files of Police Squad! (1988)
A friend is an important accountant in a coach company. She once said to me that marketing and advertising was a problem because you couldn't tell how much of a return you got on it. You couldn't directly measure the success of a marketing campaign, you cannot say how much of your business you get from marketing, therefore she didn't like it, therefore it was a waste of money.
It's taken me years to think of the snappy rejoinder but there is one and it is this:
You can measure how much of your business comes from marketing and it is a very simple maths equation. It goes: equals 100%.
Don't believe me? Cancel all marketing. Stop TV ads, stop press, stop billboards, radio, internet. While you're at it, remove the signage from your coaches: that's nothing more than advertising anyway. Signage at the coach station, what's that really for? Kill it. Do you have a phone line? Don't advertise the number. Do you print your company name on the tickets? Stop that. It's just branding, it's a waste of ink.
You won't die overnight. Momentum from existing customers will keep you going for a while. They'll even get you new customers by recommendation. For a while.
But you'll die.
Melissa Meyer is cleverer and more successful than I am. If it works for her, it works for her. But if this really is how she operates, I couldn't work for her.
Do let me know if you manage to read on past that opening section of the 99U article and it turns out to be good, would you?