Recalls are nothing new and it’s all about restoring confidence. The 1982 Tylenol recall case continues to be the gold standard, when Johnson & Johnson immediately pulled every single bottle of Tylenol off the shelves across the country. And it wasn’t even their fault — someone had tampered with a few bottles and laced the pills with deadly cyanide. They did it quickly and offered replacement pills for free. At the time, Tylenol accounted for 17% of JnJ’s net income and 37% of the analgesic market. Market share plummeted to 7% immediately after, but by putting their customers first, that number jumped back up to 30% shortly thereafter. The long-term benefit of having a brand you can trust is priceless — in pharma, trust is the only thing that matters.

In this day and age, where the social space can magnify the perceived severity of a problem, it really pays to act quickly and I would argue, go far beyond what is required. Now that the cat is out of the bag, here’s what Toyota should consider doing to help restore the public’s confidence:

• Make yourself available. Establish a direct phone, email, Twitter, Facebook, you name it venue for anyone who has questions.
• Respond with action. Staff it with people who are empowered to take action and make decisions quickly. When it comes to safety, no one wants the run-around.
• Listen and listen carefully. Customers have all kinds of ideas on how they want the problem solved and how they want to be treated. Quantify and qualify sentiment and act appropriately.
• Go the extra mile. Toyota executives have refused to go the full-extent and their solution admittedly, doesn’t necessarily solve all of the problems. In this case, it would probably mean replacing cars outright — a very costly but potentially overwhelmingly effective. maneuver.
• Keep in touch over the long run. This isn’t a “one and done” effort. Automobiles are significant purchases, so be sure to reach out to affected customers 2 months, 6 months, 1 year, 2 years, 5 years from now. You get the picture.

Toyota is at a critical junction right now. In some ways they’re already behind the curve, so they should really shift into high gear and get going. Customers on the fence need to see action.

When the Web hit prime time in the late 90’s, Siegel was there pushing things forward participating in W3C standards setting and helping companies understand how to get online. Ten years ago, he wrote “Futurize your Enterprise,” which proposed open collaboration with customers — something that we all know as “social” technology and crowd sourcing. The technology finally caught up and the rest is history.

Again, we’re at a point where we can build the next generation of the internet and do it in a smart way so that we don’t have to rely on a few companies dictating the way we conduct business, search and manage our information. If you think this is all science fiction, think again — “Pull” contains real-life case studies of big companies embracing the semantic way of business, where data has context and ultimately, value. If you’re in a business that has been impacted by the internet, read “Pull” to see what’s next. You’ll be glad you did.

If you look at Google, they were competing with Yahoo, Excite and other burgeoning portal sites. Instead of coming out with an entire suite of services like email, calendaring, and other non-core features, they focused strictly on search. And did so for 5-6 years before expanding into email and other services. Many Google competitors have sprung up in the meantime and have fallen by the wayside because they’re either too complicated to use or simply aren’t as good. Since then, they’ve introduced a number of other complementary products that are logical extensions of each other and have the hallmark Google speed, understated design and reliability.

This philosophy need not be limited to web companies. We’ve all heard the companies that were “too big to fail,” but this piece by Ron Ashkenas adds that they might be “too complicated to succeed,” adding another viewpoint into the discussion. Proctor & Gamble acted quickly and nimbly and turned a small win into a big result.

Given the right organizational alignment and more importantly, discipline in product management, this could apply to all kinds of industries. Instead of the “go big or go home” Big Bang approach to product, service or site releases, consider releasing a small pieces of experience that are done really well. In software, we call this iterative development and with the right people, you can apply it to business too. A few things to keep in mind:

- Certain things should be fairly concrete, like strategy. You can’t keep iterating on it because the downstream implications of product development depend on the strategy staying relatively firm.

- In order to prioritize what to do, come up with 2 or 3 business goals for which your new offering ought to do. If it doesn’t meet the criteria, toss it out or move it out to a later release.

- Ask yourself, if your offering actually improves upon the competition or is it a “me too” product that isn’t sufficiently differentiated.

- Keeping your release tight will keep your strategy tight to your chest. Competitors will want to know what you’re up to, which is a good thing.

- Customer reaction to your initial release is critical. By gathering their feedback, you can make adjustments to the other parts of your approach that will be informed and more likely to gain acceptance.

Once you’ve got the first few pieces in place, the rest of your strategy fall into place and become clear to your team and your customers.

A few years ago, I started long distance running mostly for cardio fitness, with a goal of doing a marathon. One thing I didn’t expect was the amount of free thinking time that came with it. Training for a marathon involves a lot of long distance runs to build stamina, runs that go 2-3 hours easily. Coming up with a plan for a race is just as important as the training itself. Knowing what your fitness level is, your energy level, hydration, etc. are variables under your control. Race conditions like weather, crowds and the course are factors you have to learn to manage. The trick is optimizing the variables on race day and putting it all together. Marathons can be tricky because it’s hard to stay focused for so long. With enough experience, training and conditions, you can put mind over matter and push yourself beyond what you thought you were capable of.

I recently started doing triathlons to vary my training and work on swimming and biking, sports I had little experience in. In fact, when I was younger, I completely feared swimming to the point where I could go years without swimming and not miss it at all. I knew I’d have to learn to at least get comfortable with it if I was ever going to complete a triathlon.

One way to kick-start your training plan is to sign up for a race which forces you to train and come up with a “work back” schedule for training. While my experience is brief, I’ve learned a lot and believe you can apply some lessons from training back to your work:

Quickly assess your capabilities: One thing I soon realized is that in a lot of ways, training for a multisport event is like running a business; you have strengths to capitalize on, weaknesses to work on and a competitive field all doing the same thing. To be able to compete in triathlons, relying on one discipline to carry you just doesn’t cut it. The same thing is true in business — you need to come up with a strong product or service offering, make it competitive against others, market it successfully and learn how to make it better. If you’re deficient, figure out how to get good at it. Fast.

Get a coach: Sometimes you can go it alone, but most athletes do best when they have a 3rd party to guide and help push people to their best. Consultants can be this advisor, but be sure to clearly articulate your goals and learn to be realistic. If you exceed them, great but more often than not, getting a quantum leap in results requires a major commitment to do so.

Plan for worst case scenarios: I recently did a race in dreadful conditions: choppy open water, dumping rain, hilly courses. It’s easy to prepare for each individually, but also figure out what would happen if there is a “perfect storm” of challenges that seem to be conspiring against you. Don’t stress it, just figure out a game plan ahead of time and then execute against the plan.

Monitor and make adjustments: You can prepare all you want but sometimes life throws a wrench in the best laid plans. In racing, maybe you cramp up or get injured. Depending on the severity, you may or may not be able to continue but if you do, make the required adjustments to get yourself in the best possible position you can. In business, this can mean changing the way you compete such as how you market your offering or adjust it according to customer feedback.

Focus on details but don’t forget to look up to see the prize: It’s easy to obsess over details of your training, nutrition or equipment and yes, all of it does matter. At the same time, don’t neglect the simple things like listening to your body. At work, this means considering how the details relate to one another, how they interact and how they impact the business goals. Sometimes it’s best to keep things as simple as possible and ignore everything that doesn’t help you reach the finish line faster or in better shape.

There are probably 101 more lessons I could write up and I’m by no means an expert. But drawing on other experiences can take your career to places you didn’t know you wanted to go.

As organizations gain confidence — and comfort — with a social approach to doing business, they will see the merit of including customers in different parts of their company. As Jeremiah Owyang outlines, beyond PR and communication, there are natural extensions to marketing, support and product development. We’ve seen vivid examples with Starbucks VIA, Best Buy Twelpforce, and Dell IdeaStorm. I’ve personally had recruiters contact me via LinkedIn and Yammer does a great job as an internal tool. Executives from various Fortune 500 corps are even on Twitter.

So now that we’re well on our way, what’s next?

Organizational re-alignment. While we have momentum, let’s use it to make some fundamentally important changes to how companies are aligned. Right now, too many companies are stuck in silos that mean nothing to their customers. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve been on a call being transferred from one group to the next, as the buck was being passed around. With an organization that is setup to operate the way a customer would, the experience for them becomes a lot better and they get happier. Pretty simple.

Processes designed around customer thinking. Have you ever tried to return something or get support and are forced to learn that company’s language and way of doing things? Let’s make things as simple as they can be so that each step is intuitive and natural. If I bought something online, let me return it in the store. If I need service or support, assess my technical skill level before throwing a dozen pieces of information at me at once. Put yourself in my shoes.

There are probably more that I’m missing, for sure. Getting companies to where customers are going is hard work. The key, like Wayne Gretzky said, is to “skate to where the puck is going to be, not where it has been.“  Customers are moving very quickly and to go where customers are going will force companies to become more like their customers. And that begins by thinking like them.

The concept of alternative measures isn’t new. Back in b-school, we learned about something called the Balanced Scorecard, a way to determine whether a company’s activities were aligned with its strategic goals. By examining non-financial metrics of business such as operational efficiency, marketing and other components, it brought to light factors that contributed to the bottom line of the company. Ultimately, it helps managers make decisions on what to fix, where to invest and what to do next.

Businesses now live in a hyper-exposed world that demands a new level of transparency and open organizational design. It used to be that companies could force customers to jump through myriad hoops to return a product or get support. Today, that isn’t good enough when a negative experience can be propagated through Facebook, Yelp, YouTube or Twitter within minutes. Some people have been calling social media a fad, but clearly it isn’t going away anytime soon. If anything, it is exposing companies’ shortcomings in customer experience and expectations.

What to do? I propose using something I’ll call the Social Scorecard. It’s a way of indexing how engaged, open and transparent a corporation truly is. It would examine online & offline customer engagement points and assess how well customers are integrated into the company culture. Ultimately, it would include measures that align customer needs into business goals. It can be used as a touchstone for designing customer experiences or even a manifesto for rallying the troops. There would be a whole host of other measures too, such as a company’s adoption of social tools, such as how it uses social networks to find talent or how it uses crowdsourcing to generate product concepts or gather feedback. We could also look at the level of transparency in terms of how it treats its employees, vendors and suppliers and factor in what it’s doing to create a sustainably profitable operation. Collectively, these measures provide added perspective on how to run your business, perspective that can bring value in ways you didn’t realize.

It used to be that technological advance meant faster, better quality and cheaper. But today’s consumer under pressure to save money, are increasingly flocking to low cost netbooks as they are usually “good enough” to accomplish everyday tasks. While the high-end power users and gamers will always crave better video cards, faster RAM and system buses, computer hardware has progressed to a point where anything more is overkill. Little wonder the netbook market is growing like weeds.

This isn’t the first time we’ve seen this.

Back in 1997, the MP3 format came to prominence that took the music industry to a new and very uncomfortable place. While audiophiles and industry pundits poo-poo’d the format for its lossy fidelity, they were completely missing the point — given a decent encoding bitrate, MP3’s were “good enough” for the vast majority of the population. What they lost in quality was gained in convenience, portability and flexibility that the format provides.

Now that we’ve seen the “good enough” effect in technology, I suspect we’re going to start seeing that principle applied to business thinking. We’re already seeing it in software development methodologies, where iterative process and rapid prototyping trade rigor for speed. Getting something out the door quicker and into the market helps validate the concept and clues for future direction. Ryan Jacoby’s ideas about “time to first feedback,” demonstrates this concept deeper. After a few quick-turn Piece together enough clues and you’ll know where to go next.

In some cases, the answer isn’t so cut and dry. Quite often, we get requests to help completely redesign a customer experience or do something really innovative and differentiated but with limited time or budget. As a strategist, I like to think long-term and propose concepts and programs that deliver lasting value and are sufficiently differentiated. I certainly don’t envy the position that some of my clients are in, and we do our best to give them the most value considering the constraints. If you’re careful, constraints do not have to be blinders. However, when the resources are tight doesn’t that mean throwing out strategy and going straight for tactics?

To me, it doesn’t have to be a decision between strategy and tactics. It can be both and here’s how:

• First, stop thinking about the same old tactics. You can’t do the same thing over and over and expect different results.
• Start thinking about who you’re targeting and why they should give you the time of day. Seriously. I have been on both sides of pitches and a simple “how can I help?” approach helps draw out the deeper, more serious business challenges.
• Now the fun begins. Put yourself in your client’s customers’ shoes and think about what they need.
• Design programs that are worth talking about. Think of your customer’s lifestyle and what you can do to improve it. Easier said than done, but in the long run, it will do more for your brand than any gimmick will.

The more your program is aligned with your customers, the more they will see the value and adopt it. Now, the choice of which tactic to use should be relatively straightforward and grounded in a strategic approach that makes sense and delivers.

I was recently interviewed by the New York Times about “smartphone etiquette” in this day and age. The main question was whether or not I thought it was acceptable to type away in meetings. As you might imagine, I had an opinion on this and one of my observations made the cut in the published article. Here’s the article:

Mind Your BlackBerry or Mind Your Manners

As it turns out, there is something called the Dunbar’s number, 150, which according to Wikipedia “is a theoretical cognitive limit to the number of people with whom one can maintain stable social relationships.” This has come out of hundreds of years of communities developing and growing. Once they reach around 150, they need to split off and form new ones. This principle has been applied to many different areas of business, including organizational design and company growth patterns. Companies like Intel and Microsoft  have taken this to heart, which explains how their corporate campuses consist of many small buildings rather than huge single monoliths.
Enter Scoble’s Number. It is a new way of looking at social interactions. Instead of the focus on “stable social relationships” it is more about setting up types of relationships and having different levels of engagement and expectations for each. This dramatically expands the absolute number of people you potentially communicate with. So, unless you allocate more time to maintaining your network, this setup reduces the amount of interaction you have with each of them — something has got to give.

Perhaps this is the way forward; segment the type of connections you have and maintain a larger set of weaker connections for a diversity of opinion. As social networks continue to expand, this may well be the future. [Update: Check out David Armano’s recent thoughts on social becoming “to look less social.”