Why a Rare Single Malt is a sign of Success, (as is the Marshmallow)

To start with, the the idea spawned in many-an-advertisement, of single malt being a sign of success, or successful people, looks ridiculous. That bottle can signify success as another cola bottle signifies happiness. But then in the course of a recent conversation, I happened to think more about why some whiskeys are expensive. 

Expensive whiskeys, by-and-large, are expensive because they are old. Distilleries keep aside stock and age it over long years in oak barrels, and then connoisseurs and collectors buy these whiskeys and carefully store them for more long years (though they say that the taste doesn't improve on storing once bottled, it still gets rarer). All the dollar value the whiskey accumulates, on other words, is because it is not sold in the first year by the distillery and it is not drunk by the collector. And because it is not over-produced. The world's best whiskey it seems, is the Japanese Yamazaki. Just 18,000 bottles of the winning Yamazaki Single Malt Sherry Cask 2013 exist. Now if the whiskey is supposed to be that good, it'll take a lot of self-control for it to get old and not sold, and more for it not to be drunk. Incidentally, this was exactly what they tested in the marshmallow test. 

I'm sure you've heard about the Stanford Marshmallow Test, and in case you haven't, do read up on it. It seems researchers gave a marshmallow to children who had a choice of eating it immediately or waiting, in which case they got another marshmallow. The few children who could control and resist temptation went on to become successful people. The core variable is deferred / delayed gratification. If we substitute these children with distilleries and collectors, you can imagine how the logic can hold. 

Can you not kill your golden goose too soon, uproot your plants to check if they have grown, not spend your money just on traffic and advertising but build a better product, spend time on planning the next year versus this quarter, hold your card and not throw it at first chance, resist the party invitation the night before exams? It's probably the same question asked in different ways. 

Now can you resist drinking the Single Malt - provided you are successful enough to be rich enough to buy it in the first place ;-)  

What is, really, the "Best"?

Most of the world around - people, products, organizations, nations, what-have-you - everyone and everything is trying to be the best. It seems inane trying to define what the the best can mean. Do try defining it one of those poker nights - I'm promising you it won't be easy. Most of us know that this definition bit would be quite a painful and possibly pointless exercise. Now the curiosity point - when we spend so much of our energy trying to be the Best, won't it be worthwhile thinking about what it means?

Just to get you going, let me throw in a couple of colors on the palette. Is there an idea of two different 'Bests', from two viewpoints, e.g. the buyer and the seller? The best thing to buy (and therefore the best product to create?) could be, let's say, a reusable diaper. Once soiled, it goes for a wash and a dry and it's all ready to be used again. From the seller's viewpoint, this product could be a disaster. You are converting a stream of expensive purchases into one single purchase. Now who spends resources creating products - the customer or the company? The company, or the seller, has a different best - one diaper that has some sustainable claim justifying a higher price than the one currently selling. 

On the same thread of baby-products - can the best be too good for its own good? The feeding bottle is frowned upon because it makes it so easy for the baby to have milk that the baby will stop suckling. Can one formula feed be so tasty that babies refuse to have anything else? Tasty snacks are one kind of best, another kind of worst. Invasive species of plants could be another example - weeds a more common example. The Asian Carp in American lakes is yet another example and crows taking over cities from sparrows another. 

There can certainly be too much of a good thing. Disruptive innovation is based around the theory that products and technologies get better much faster than consumer's needs do. Again, being the best, at least in technical terms, may not be the best thing to be. How many mega-pixels or shaving blades do you really need? Or take the post iPod music systems - did any of us need the 11-band graphic equalizer? 

Interesting thought, perhaps leads to the point that 'good' has context around it, and maybe a limit too. We, or customers often don't qualify our expectation but that's what we mean. We want a hardy, native plant that's less-disease proof - but not the one that is so hardy that it chokes everything around and refuses to die. We want a product that 'works'. We don't want to run faster than the tiger - especially when it's just a pug chasing us. 

Interesting, right? 

Is there a link between Employee Loyalty and Customer Loyalty?

Well, employee and customer loyalty are different things, right? There are different programs, processes and owners that drive merchant or channel loyalty, customer loyalty and employee loyalty in many big companies. In other companies, all of these may not exist but what does exist, say customer loyalty programs, don't ever concern themselves with employees or partners. 

What if there was a link?

One end of the spectrum would be a great company, doing well, and selling a great product. Customers are happy, which is why the product sells a lot. Employees would be happier here than in a slumping company with sad products to push, no matter what the HR policies are. Employees of a successful company tend to gain more resume-value (e.g. doubled sales from X to 2X), have more promotion and increment chances since such companies tend to earn money and expand, and in general even if they're riding a wave, feel proud about their numbers. But while this logic may hold, there's a much better, simpler way to see the relationship between the two loyalties. 

A company is its products, its customers and its employees. 

Imagine a restaurant that you want to be loyal to, but that loses its doorman every week, chef every other week, barman now and then. Now what will bring you back? It can't be the food since the new chef will cook it a bit different, and it can't be the service. Most of all, you'd suspect the restaurant does something wrong by its stakeholders. Just the brand or the interiors can't create loyalty. And more than anything else, especially in the service industry, the product is a function of who delivers it. The trainer is the training, the salesman is the shop and the call-center employee is the company. Once these front-facing people leave, patrons think the place 'isn't what is used to be'. And it applies to product companies as well since IP finally resides in people. It's just that all of them aren't leaving together - else we'd know that KM systems can only do so much to preserve knowhow. 

Allow me to also claim, for a bit, that since a company is a set of employees, employee-loyalty is loyalty to other employees. Once a company loses some employees, it'll lose more since the act of employees leaving spoils the employer-brand ones and of-course, those that leave can poach. So if you think the doorman is okay to let go but not the chef, you may be right... but only till the doorman tells the chef about his great new workplace that also needs a chef.