What this dog saw

As my readers know, at any given time I have no problems being pleaded not to be too tough on Vendor A, B, C….

What’s been more baffling has been the reaction to the overwhelmingly positive case studies in my books.

It started with BP in The New Polymath. The Gulf spill brought me a number of negative comments and when I presented about them a number of raised eyebrows. How can you be nice to someone that evil?

I have been generous to Best Buy in both books. It has led a couple of folks to comment: You must be long their stock. I profiled the supply chain of the HP PSG division in the New Technology Elite. People smirked.

Outsourcers tell me I am too nice to Cognizant. Software vendors say I am too nice to Salesforce.com. They conveniently ignore why - the pages in my book and blogs where these companies make me go wow. 

In BP’s case, I wrote about a tiny (12 people) group that has repeatedly delivered innovation to may parts of that giant empire. Due to PR constraints they would not let me profile in my book what the group did to facilitate the clean-up. I later blogged about it. Whatever you may think of the company, admire this team.   With Best Buy I wrote nice things about its customer analytics and social savvy. In The New Technology Elite, I also wrote Apple had become the “category killer” in consumer electronics, but can you not admire anything a company does because they have a few bad quarters? In HP’s case, the supply chain is impressive in its agility. It adjusts to countless hiccups — including ones caused by the Japanese tsunami and the Icelandic volcano — and also how it deals with longer-term shifts as it integrates acquisitions and transitions from PCs to laptops to Ultrabooks.

When it comes to vendors complaining about their competitors, I usually point out – I gave you a chance to present your best for consideration for my books. Your PR is constantly bombarding me with earnings reports, new customer signings. How about sharing operational metrics and post-implementation case studies?  

I heard Malcolm Gladwell present a few months ago, and he repeated something he wrote in the preface of “What the Dog Saw”

“Nothing frustrates me more than someone who reads something of mine or anyone else's and says, angrily, 'I don't buy it.' Why are they angry? Good writing does not succeed or fail on the strength of its ability to persuade. It succeeds or fails on the strength of its ability to engage you, to make you think, to give you a glimpse into someone else's head—even if in the end you conclude that someone else's head is not a place you'd really like to be.”

That’s what I ask for. Sit back and go wow about my episodes from BP, BestBuy, HP and other examples, even if you think the company is evil, doomed or worse.