Found in 2 comments on Hacker News
zippyman55 · 2022-11-28
· Original
thread
I passed my copy on, but here is a nice 30 minute read where Tokyo waitresses were using the principles to sell sake.
https://www.amazon.com/Spc-Esquire-Club-Donald-Wheeler/dp/09...
My two questions (a) and (b) were not rhetorical. Let’s get concrete.
a) You are advising a company to “check back after a certain period”. After the certain period, they come back to you with the following graph:
https://commoncog.com/content/images/2024/01/prospect_calls_...
“How did we do? Did we improve?”
How do you answer? Notice that this is a problem regardless of whether you are a big company or a small company.
b) 3 months later, your client comes back and asks: “we are having trouble with customer support. How do we know that it’s not related to this change we made?” With your superior experience working with hundreds of startups, you are able to tell them if it is or isn’t after some investigation. Your client asks you: “how can we do that for ourselves without calling on you every time we see something weird?”
How do you answer?
(My answers are in the WBR essay and the essay that comes immediately before that, natch)
It is a common excuse to wave away these ideas with “oh, these are big company solutions, not applicable to small businesses.” But a) I have applied these ideas to my own small business and doubled revenue; also b) in 1992 Donald Wheeler applied these methods to a small Japanese night club and then wrote a whole book about the results: https://www.amazon.sg/Spc-Esquire-Club-Donald-Wheeler/dp/094...
Wheeler wanted to prove, (and I wanted to verify), that ‘tools to understand how your business ACTUALLY works’ are uniformly applicable regardless of company size.
If anyone reading this is interested in being able to answer confidently to both questions, I recommend reading my essays to start with (there’s enough in front of the paywall to be useful) and then jump straight to Wheeler. I recommend Understanding Variation, which was originally developed as a 1993 presentation to managers at DuPont (which means it is light on statistics).