Godin isn't writing about some call centre. He isn't writing about people working at some random company. He's writing about people working at a brand. And he provides a reason for why that brand may be failing. For anyone working to establish or consolidate a brand, this is a valuable insight: your employees are an important part of your brand. Make sure they care.
This partly holds for any company: if a colleague of mine delivers bad work, people will throw nasty glances at me when they hear I work at the same company. Now you can go all "they shouldn't do that" on me, but that's just sticking your head deeper in the sand and refusing to acknowledge this reality, in which you live with people that think and judge that way. Therefore, I will criticise any colleague whose work isn't up to par.
I could picture this comment chain almost as soon as the story was posted. I'm with Ardit20, had anyone else posted the story, it would have been dismissed as a rant, but when people see sethgodin.typepad.com, it becomes a valuable insight.
had anyone else posted the story, it would have been dismissed as a rant
And that would have been a mistake, because this isn't really a rant. Its formal structure is that of a complaint, but in fact it is a short essay, in complaint form, about the nature of branding and company culture.
Why doesn't this count as a rant? There's no hard and fast rule. But one sign is that the company is unnamed and unidentifiable. There is a very good chance that it is fictional, or that it is a composite archetype that doesn't correspond to any specific company. None of which would change the meaning of the essay in the least.
In fact, I think that on HN a sethgodin post is more likely to piss people off.
BTW, I think that it's a bad sign how quickly these shallow dismissive comments rise to the top here. If you prefer arguments to be presented in a a logical form fine, but the information remains the same. It's not patentable, but it's worth thinking about if you feel like thinking about that sort of thing. Here's the translation:
A brand is presented as a brand. A way of of thinking about a collection of things (people, products, procedures, history) as a single thing. It is the psychological equivalent to a legal entity. A kind of Anthropomorphism. You can say: "Apple (the brand) did X" when obviously the reality is that a bunch of people or policies 'do'. This is a useful metaphor for letting customers interact with you. When you leverage a brand, you are working this metaphor to your advantage. But you can't say we (the brand) have excellent customer service & still say they (individuals making it up) are responsible for that bad product.
And that's a problem with us, not with the valuable rant. This will get philosophical, sorry.
When we hear a "wise person" say something, we assume it has meaning, no matter how meaningless it may seem. This is why Zen koans are meditated upon, while incoherent babblings of toddlers are not. This says nothing about the objective value of the koan or the babbling, but rather the subjective value it holds to the listener. The "wisdom" metadata, the color of the text if you will, makes it valuable in that it forces our brain to create an insight for itself that could be rationalized to fit the content of the rant. It becomes a sounding board, a way of finding inner knowledge you weren't consciously aware of. This is valuable, at least to me.
In that case, would it be fair to say that Seth knows how to build a brand? :)
I rarely learn something deep or insightful from his posts, except perhaps the power of a consistent message. But you can't deny that, at least when it comes to promoting the brand Seth Godin, he's pretty good.
Had anyone else posted this story, then nobody would make such silly accusations as suggesting that another commenter responds in a particular way merely out of adoration of the author of the story.
For the record: before I started reading Hacker News, I didn't know who Seth Godin was. I've never read any of his books and I haven't read any of his blogs besides the ones linked here, nor do I intend to. I'm not really interested in marketing and I share the general adverseness programmers feel versus 'marketing types'.
All of that doesn't mean that the guy doesn't make sensible points. It certainly doesn't mean we should deride him for stating 'obvious' things in a ranting manner, where we would loudly applaud the exact same behaviour in a software engineer. Hell, we do that half the time when Linus goes batshit again.
IMHO, if the brand you work at wants you to take responsibility for the actions of any and all other people and other departments at the brand, they should pay you accordingly. But they don't ever do that, do they?
However you look at it, the responsibility is with the board and top management. Not the people who "just work there" and are neither paid nor trusted with the kind of responsibility that Seth Godin is talking about.
I think Seth has a good point here. Employees should, at least to a degree, feel a pride in the company they work for, and if they do not they should find somewhere else to work (or at least try to.)
But more than that, when you are doing something on behalf of and in the name of a company then you are that company's representative, its "face" to those you are dealing with. As such, you can expect to receive both credit and blame for everything attached to that company and you are responsible for doing everything within your authority to fix problems. That limit may be nothing more than putting the person you are dealing with in the correct department, but if that is it you should pass along the contact information (in both directions!) respectfully and courteously, not dismissively with "I just work here."
As a manager, I would be unhappy to ever hear one of my employees say that no matter what their job. If it was a customer facing employee, then (depending on the nuances of the circumstances) it could easily call for a formal reprimand for damaging the companies reputation and being dismissive to customers.
Employees should, at least to a degree, feel a pride in the company they work for, and if they do not they should find somewhere else to work (or at least try to.)
I think he meant people working for companies who actually have a bad name. If you know the company you work for engages in some shady practises, you shouldn't dismiss that with "I just work here", but consider finding another workplace instead.
This partly holds for any company: if a colleague of mine delivers bad work, people will throw nasty glances at me when they hear I work at the same company. Now you can go all "they shouldn't do that" on me, but that's just sticking your head deeper in the sand and refusing to acknowledge this reality, in which you live with people that think and judge that way. Therefore, I will criticise any colleague whose work isn't up to par.