Chick-fil-A Closed Sundays

Withholding: Why You Should Give Your Customers Less of What They Want

Withholding is a useful differentiation strategy for some organizations. Stan Phelps, IBM Futurist and Forbes contributor writes:

Most brands are trying to be strong, and they want to get stronger. They want to be powerful. This seems to make sense. Be the best. Do more. Expand. Grow. Benchmark your competition and then offer more features, more products, more services, and more locations.

Why do less? Why withhold?

Because withholding is zigging when everyone else is zagging.

Chick-fil-A, the chicken-centric fast food chain, is infamous for being closed on Sundays (amongst other things). And while withholding wasn’t an intentional tactic when the company was founded over 70 years ago, it has been an effective one. (Chick-fil-A chooses to remain closed on Sundays in order to give employees and customers a dedicated day to spend with their families and their communities.)

Withholding is doing less of what makes you strong, less of what customers love about you. It’s about limiting customer choices, limiting decision fatigue, and creating some scarcity – whether it’s false scarcity or not.

Withholding gives you or your business a chance to build anticipation.

Withholding involves offering fewer options, fewer locations, fewer features, fewer products, fewer services, fewer hours, fewer perks, and fewer discounts. This is about deliberately and relentlessly shrinking the things that everyone else is expanding.

Oddly enough, withholding is part of a differentiation strategy: Do less of something you’re good at in order to stand out even more. When executed properly, doing less can drive even more demand.

Growing up in Texas I’ve seen this first-hand a hundred times. Someone has the brilliant idea to grab some Chick-fil-A and you race over to the location down the street, your mouth watering. Before you even turn off the road you know something is wrong. The parking lot is empty. It’s Sunday.

While Sonic took our Sunday dollars, Monday was always Chick-fil-A.

Drive-thru Takeaway: How can you withhold to bring about more demand? To differentiate? How can you integrate doing less into your positioning and strategy?

I’ll leave you with a Chick-fil-A love song:

(Image Source)

Problem-Led Leadership

Vivienne Ming is blunt about her lack of traditional leadership skills:

I’m a pretty mediocre manager. I try to do the right things, but I’m much more focused on problems than I am on people. (HBR)

Ming is the co-founder of Socos, a machine learning company focused on helping people become better learners.

Ming is taking a different approach to leadership within Socos: leading by.. well not really leading. Ming focuses on solving problems, not playing CEO – an approach called “problem-led leadership.”

If I can get some people that are really good at the things that I’m not, then I can focus on my strengths. And my strengths are in creative problem solving — all the way down to writing the code myself.

The MIT Leadership Center is starting to research and codify this style. Problem-led leaders are distinct:

  • They choose challenge over trappings.
  • They let problems lead.
  • They choose collaboration.
  • They step up and step out.
  • They work the problem tirelessly.
  • They do what the data say.

This is a really different approach than we’re often encouraged to take. The obvious con to this approach is that if Ming’s team needs a leader and no one steps up, then the team goes without leadership and the whole project may fail.

But the pros are enormous too. Ming can focus on the big problem the company is trying to solve. And Ming always has the option to simply hire someone else to solve leadership challenges without forfeiting control of the company.

Finally, Ming is also sending a clear and consistent message about the company’s culture and values while also reminding employees that she’s not there to baby-sit anyone:

I get out there, and I solve problems. And I hope that motivates my colleagues to do the same.

Personally, I think problem-driven leadership is an interesting strategy. If more problem-centric individuals thought more about what leadership style would best fit their personality and strengths, we’d have a lot few bad bosses and a lot more successful companies.

What is Strategy? – A Presentation

This week I spoke twice at St. Mary’s College in Moraga, CA – 30 minutes east of San Francisco. I whipped together an hour long presentation for the students in a Strategy course in the Business school to answer the question: What is Strategy?

It was great to force myself to present some of my ideas – several of which were only half baked – and to get so much positive feedback and concrete recommendations for changes.

I haven’t had a chance to incorporate feedback into the deck yet so I just decided to publish it for you as-is. I plan to tweak things and give this talk again soon though.


One big note: I designed this deck to be presented by me so it’s not 100% ready for consumption without me. You’ll get the gist though.

I reference my piece last week about Puddles Pity Party and my research on Moneyball (the 2002 Oakland A’s season) – only some of which I’ve published so far. Check out those posts if you haven’t had a chance yet.

The students were excited that I was taking back the word “strategy” – not just using it sloppily like many of their course readings. They expressed a lot of interest in the etymologies that I shared too, which is surprising given how boring that sounds.

And, they really appreciated that I actually defined the word strategy.

What is Strategy?

Strategy is the process of creating a set of well-aligned activities with the aim of occupying a valuable position in a competitive landscape.

I really emphasized that strategy is a process, not a static outcome.

In case you missed some of my posts from the past few days, here they are:

PS: This is just for you.

PPS: If you’re not familiar with the trivium (slide 3), you’re missing out. I might write about it more next week.

New AI Report from McKinsey & Co

McKinsey & Co has a huge new report out about AI. It’s definitely worth a look if you need to get smart on AI in 20 minutes.

They looked at over 400 use cases across 19 industries and 9 business functions to create a detailed survey of how businesses are using Artificial Intelligence, in what industries, for what use-cases, what type of AI, and the “economic potential of advanced AI techniques across industries and business functions.”

AI, which for the purposes of this paper we characterize as “deep learning” techniques using artificial neural networks, can be used to solve a variety of problems. Techniques that address classification, estimation, and clustering problems are currently the most widely applicable in the use cases we have identified, reflecting the problems whose solutions drive value across the range of sectors.

I’m skeptical about the hype around AI right now and some of their findings support my stance. However, I did enjoy the first section where they draw the line between what they consider to be Artificial Intelligence and not, a brief description of each of the current techniques, and the problems that they’re good at solving.

Building on this educational foundation and the data they collected from their 400 use cases, the report shows heat maps of different techniques across both different business functions and industries.

McKinsey AI Technique and Business Function Heat Map April 2018

What’s interesting is that where Artificial Intelligence is making the most progress is in areas where pseudo-AI techniques are already working:

The greatest potential for AI we have found is to create value in use cases in which more established analytical techniques such as regression and classification techniques can already be used, but where neural network techniques could provide higher performance or generate additional insights and applications. This is true for 69 percent of the AI use cases identified in our study. In only 16 percent of use cases did we find a “greenfield” AI solution that was applicable where other analytics methods would not be effective.

Great report. Check it out – especially pages 2-6.

Oh, and there’s a cool history of Artificial Intelligence on page 3.

Metrics Fixation

Let’s talk about metrics fixation and unintended consequences.

Consider 3 ideas:

  1. Emphasize standardized measurements.
  2. Incentivize actors with rewards and punishments.
  3. Publish measurements in order to hold groups accountable.

They sound great. And they are great – sometimes.

However, when we let these three concepts mindlessly replace our judgement, we often end up with unintended consequences and dysfunction. Jerry Muller calls this fetishizing of metrics “Metrics Fixation” in his recent interview with Russ Roberts on EconTalk.

Where do things go wrong?

Tyranny of Metrics Jerry Muller

  • Oversimplification of organizations, their values, and their complex facets can lead to measuring and incentivizing the wrong things or an incomplete list of things.
  • Actors play games in order to attain the desired metrics, often at the expense of the organization’s vision. Creative energy is now being diverted into gaming the metrics instead of creating real value.
  • Measurements, incentives, and transparency all have costs too.
  • Unintended consequences are sometimes intended.

That’s all great, but let’s make this tangible. Muller gives a crazy example in his book.

The original situation: Emergency rooms in the UK (called A&E Departments for accident & emergency) had long wait times.

The solution: Incentives for reducing wait times to below 4 hours were introduced.

The unintended consequence: Patients were required “to wait in queues of ambulances outside A&E Departments until the hospital in question was confident that that patient could be seen within four hours.” To make matters worse, these ambulances were now unavailable for other patients who needed emergency services.

Take away: metrics, incentives, and transparency are all great when properly coordinated. But watch carefully for unintended consequences.