Here’s this week’s 200 word idea from The Hard Thing about Hard Things by Ben Horowitz..
At Opsware, Ben Horowitz’s Sales Engineering department constantly complained that the Customer Support didn’t reply to issues on time. The Customer Support department, on the other hand, said Sales Engineering didn’t qualify bugs and gave every bug top priority making it impossible to prioritize. The two functions hated each other.
Inspired by the movie “Freaky Friday” where a mother and daughter find their minds switched and begin to understand each other’s point of view, Ben Horowitz called up the two department heads and informed them that he was switching their roles.
At first, they reacted in shock and annoyance. But, within a week, they diagnosed the set of core issues and implemented a set of processes that enabled the teams to work well with each other. Until the 1.6 billion dollar sale to HP, Ben observed that the best two divisions that worked with each other were sales engineering and customer support – all thanks to Freaky Friday.
Source and thanks to: www.EBSketchin.com
‘Before you criticize someone, you should walk a mile in their shoes. That way when you criticize them, you are a mile away from them and you have their shoes.’ | Jack Handey :-D
A Learning a Day 