Meet the disgruntled customer:

We’ll call her, oh, let’s say, Katherine. Katherine sees the infinitely shiny and appealing new application store on iTunes. Katherine wants. Katherine eagerly downloads applications and proceeds to cry a bucket of invisible tears when she realizes that she must wait (oh no) a whole ten hours for Apple to release iPhone software 2.0 (the worst sort of tease).

Katherine eagerly goes to sleep, wakes up, and, lo and behold, the infinitely shinier and OMG1!1!! iPhone 2.0 update is available! She plugs her iPhone in and clicks ‘check update’ followed by ‘download and install.’ Fail. She tries again: more fail. Katherine is a little distressed, but she perseveres. Everything now insists Katherine has the latest update (which is NOT 2.0), so Katherine unplugs and reconnects her iPhone to the computer, and tries again, only clicking ‘download’ instead of install. At last the sparkly new update downloads! But then it does not install, and mysteriously disappears from her hard drive. Katherine tries downloading the software again and updating.

Uh-oh. What. NO. NO. MY BABY. WHAT DO YOU MEAN ERROR, APPLE?!

Katherine tries doing a restore (because the iPhone still thinks it has the latest version of its OS system). All seems to be going well, it’s been restored, the firmware is updating–error. Katherine’s phone can’t find the iTunes store.

Katherine’s phone has NO OS, no contacts, no ANYTHING. Katherine effectively has no phone.

Dear Steve Jobs,Thanks for your extremely unshiny update that has just Black Plague’d my means of communication with the outside world to death. I really wanted to spend my entire morning trying to clean up your aftermath.  I’ll use my iPhone as a doorstop, because that is about all it is useful for, and it even stinks at doing that because it’s too small.

Sincerely,
Katherine

What have we learned from this? (Besides the fact that not all updates are shiny, and being technologically at the front of the line is not always worth it.) If your business deals in technology, you better make it easy for your old customers to update. Do NOT force them to connect to your ONLINE STORE in order to activate the update: I guarantee you that your bandwidth cannot handle it unless you have under 10 customers. (This is made more frustrating by the fact that I can access the iTunes store via iTunes–but apparently not with my phone? What?) Not everyone buys the new and shiny things right away.

Barry says to be there when your customers are ready to buy. Katherine says to be there when they’re ready to update with something that WORKS, and if it doesn’t, send an update–if you have no problem sending me 3726 emails about the iPhone 3G (or *insert shiny new product here*), how about one apologizing for messing up, or one that says ‘we’ll have everything up and running in an hour, your updates will occur then.’ Just because you are a large corporation with many customers does not mean you can ignore your old customers (unless, of course, it’s a plot to make us all fed up and buy the new product, in which case, all hail capitalism at its finest). But don’t just give me error messages and direct me to support pages, I want to know WHY you have failed to provide me the service I paid for. Communication is important.

Being there when they want to throw bricks (better known as useless phones) at your head, is, of course, up to you.

Ah, edit: Apple fails to provide because they didn’t learn from their failure last year. Barry says that there isn’t always something to learn from failure–let’s all remember to always make sure that there isn’t.

Cynthia Cooper- the courageous woman who blew the whistle on Bernie Ebbers and the financial fraud at Worldcom. She has a new book out, published by Wiley called “Extraordinary Circumstances“. I talked with her for awhile and she still does not see herself as a hero. Cynthia said it was the right thing to do. I congratulated her because I do not think that everyone would have done the same thing in her shoes- we all say we would do the right thing but I have found in my own experiences, sometimes we fail our own expectations.

Nadja Piatka who after her husband left penniless and she started baking to earn money. She now runs a baked goods company that supplies to Subway, Stop and Shop, etc. We talked about her experience of being on Oprah twice! and Don Peebles,  the owner of the largest African American real estate company in the country. A short 13 years ago he was swept up in the Marion Berry scandal. He now runs a $4B company! Talk about Bounce!

After I had met the other guests, I was then brought into makeup. There I sat under pictures of Maria Bartiromo and other CNBC personalities. I needed extra time in make up to take out all the shiny spots!I was then briefed by the producer on the outline for the show. Finally, it was my turn as I was brought to the studio to wait for a commercial break to join the other guests on stage. Donny’s interview style made it easy to easy to get engaged right away and participate with a high level of energy. I was impressed with how articulate each guest was and at times it was hard to get my contribution in, but Donny had the knack for spreading it around to welcome participation. Now I know why is show is so popular.

One of my favorite parts of the show was when callers asked their questions and what to do after sinking all their money into a failures. I gave guidance and encouragement. At the end of the show, Donny asks for a final playbook or comment. Mine was- “To mount your comeback, set patient goals for yourself. Small successes will give you the renewed confidence to achieve your long term visions.” Finally, after the show was over, the producer asked me to stay to do a “Web Only Special” and talk more about how the path to success is not a straight line: Watch the story of the Gossamer Albatross!

Check out my Blog Post on The Big Idea!

Before I knew it, it was over and I was off to catch my flight back to Chicago. My hats off to Donny and the high energy folks that put on The Big Idea. All of you make it fun and easy to participate!

Sometimes failure just sucks. Rick Dutrow feels like a loser because he can’t explain his losing. Big Brown is the latest example of sometimes when we fail there isn’t always something learn. Big Brown, on the edge to be the first Triple Crown winner in 30 years  inexplicably finished dead last in the Belmont Stakes this past Saturday. Why did he lose after being undefeated? No one knows. The horse seems to be fine. The track was fine.

This illustrates my point that when we fail in business, there always isn’t something to learn. In fact, constantly looking for something to learn after we have failed actually holds us back from moving forward. When you do fail, learn what you can, wallow in it for awhile, and cheer the darkness. Then let it go (bounce ! as I say) and take an action so you have another chance of success. 

A women recently wrote me a note that described how she felt after closing her business:

“I am finally starting to feel the pain and sadness that comes with closing a business. At first, I was hopeful that I could transform the business into a different format. However, I was afraid of yet a second non-successful outcome. The first time I opened my business my instincts compelled me; now I am a afraid to trust or listen to them…”

Ah, business instincts. It is what makes us take the jump and the leap of faith when we start out. I always joke that entrepreneur’s are not risk takers- if we were, there is no way we would start a business since it is too risky. And when you use that instinct and you fail, its tough to trust it again. The advice I gave this women was that she should find a stable job or other less risky source of revenue stream to rebuild her instinct. Time has a way of rebuilding your confidence. She will find her footing again. What advice would you give her?

What do you think?

In the documentary, Deep Water, Crowhurst, the owner of a less than successful manufacturing business for electrical components. He enters the first Golden Globe competition in 1968 to sail from London single handedly around the world against 8 other competitors. His boat was financed by an English entrepreneur, Stanley Best who used Crowhurst’s only asset, is house as collateral. According to the terms of his agreement, if Crowhurst failed to complete the voyage or quit early in the competition, his family would be homeless and bankrupt.

Although his boat was not ready, Crowhurst launches it by the contest’s October 31st deadline. Only two weeks into his journey (of almost an expected year), his boat begins to leak. If he gives up now, he loses everything. If he goes on to the treacherous Southern Ocean, his boat will sink. Crowhurst struggles to decides what to do.

Crowhurst decides on a third option (WARNING: MOVIE SPOILER ALERT).

He decides that he will lie about where he is. Forty years ago, without the GPS of today, he describes the progress he is making by radio and keeps a fake log book. He continues to fake is location through a series of intermittant broadcasts showing incredible progress and speed. Meanwhile, he is waiting for the other competitors to come around the world and then he will fall in behind him on their way back to London. His plan fails when all the other competitors (except one) sink on their journey and he is expected to be in England with the fastest time. Unable to sail into a hero’s welcome because of his lies, he abandons his boat and drowns himself.

There are so many themes here that I discuss all the time. Why could he not come back from his failure? Why did he see the only alternative as suicide? Was there too much pressure where we bet everything on this one trip? Do we crave that fame and fortune too much and will do anything to achieve it? Do we live in the kind of society that we live in where a man has no choice?

What would you have done? Turn around? Given up? Gone on to certain death?

Today, I was featured on a conference call with 250 of Michael’s students to talk about Bounce! We discussed strategies that service professionals need to use to bounce and build true business confidence.

Listen to the Podcast on Michael’s site.

1. It shows that people will compete to be the best at anything. We will do almost anything to get fame and how important fame is in our culture. We can get our respect and self esteem by being successful at anything. It can give us that bounce! that can carry us to success in other things or enable us to let go of our failures.

2. Most competitive processes there is politics and room for corruption. Billy, the current champion is the favorite of the ruling body who judges these things. In fact, one of the original taglines to the movie was to be: ” The highest form of corruption at the lowest levels.”

3. Some people like Steve see themselves as losers when they come in second place. Don’t get me wrong, I think we should try to win and that we usually don’t remember who came in second…but being second, does not mean we are branded a loser.

Watch the movie. You will enjoy it!

In his latest video post, he takes issue with the fact that I think that failure just sometimes sucks.

For most of our lives, we’ve been told to look at failure as just another opportunity for learning, an event that gets you one step closer to success. I’ve believed and shared this opinion many times. Because the alternative is a tough pill to swallow.