GarthBox

Two hundred dollars of sushi weighs more in one pair of chopsticks than it does split five ways.

I know because I’ve held it. Dinner for one, a check that landed right around two hundred, and service I couldn’t fault on paper. Polite. Brisk. Plates cleared, water topped off, the whole choreography performed on time. Nobody asked me a single thing.

A bigger group nearby got the other version. The lingering. The extra check-ins. The whole room tilted toward them like a pool table with one short leg.

I understand the math. A bigger table tips bigger, and by the restaurant’s arithmetic the staff called it correctly. The house just wasn’t the one eating.

What nobody knew, because nobody asked, is that Japan sat with me the whole meal. (Next fall it’s Tokyo first, then Kyushu, two days on a motorcycle and an itinerary built around shochu and miso. I would have talked until the rice went cold.) For the group it was a good night out. For me it was dinner with an entire trip folded up inside it.

The check tells you what somebody spent. It has no way of telling you what it cost them.

Value is priced in their currency, not yours, and there’s exactly one way to learn the exchange rate. You ask. Asking has been industrialized, of course. First time with us. Celebrating anything tonight. How did you hear about us. The reservation app has an occasion dropdown, and somewhere tonight a kitchen is sticking a candle in a brownie because a box got checked three weeks ago. I didn’t even get the laminated version.

The first question can be laminated. The second one can’t, because nobody knows what it is until the first answer shows up… One “what brings you in tonight” and I’d have said Japan, and a server who was actually listening would have flipped on like the neon in the front window at opening. Oh, you’re going to Japan next year? From there it barely matters what they do next. The meal already got bigger.

At Garth’s Brew Bar our beertenders have comped a pour based off something a guest told them, but more often what they hear turns into a surprise instead of a fix. I once handed a barrel-aged beer to a couple visiting from out of state. Nothing had gone wrong. That was the point. Most comps are apologies, handed over after something broke. The good ones show up when nothing did.

None of that happens if the person who heard the answer has to track down a manager before acting on it. The line every server gets trained to say, the one about whether there’s anything else they can do to make tonight special, is a promise wearing a question’s clothes. You can’t ask a team to ask better questions until they’re allowed to do something with the answers.

I’ve been the brisk one, too. I once ran a product release I didn’t think mattered much to the company yet, and I worked it in pure get-this-out-of-the-way mode. Every box got its visit. Nobody got a second question. (Guilty.) Software tiers its customers by what they pay. I tiered a launch by what I’d already decided it was worth, and whoever was waiting on the other end got polite, efficient, yes… and nothing more.

Back to the sushi… The group brought their celebration with them. I brought a reason.

Both got served on time, and both walked out knowing exactly what they were worth to the room.

Stay Positive & I Probably Won’t Be Back…

Write out a bunch of responses until one clicks.

It may not be reality (yet), but every brain will start with the feature comparison.

Once that’s out of the way, you get to the real emotion and story to it.

Stay Positive & You’ll Know It When You See It

Hazy IPA.

The beer that looks like a porch light seen through a shower curtain is the style Madison drank more than any other this year, according to the 350-some people who answered the Madison Beer Census. It’s also the style the most people called overdone.

That’s a first slide. It’s tidy, a little scandalous, and it has the personality of a commemorative plaque. It tells you the room is worth walking into and then just stands there. (I’m proud of the 350. Pride is not a conversation, though.)

So I cut it. Pull apart the people who drink hazy from the people who are tired of it and they barely overlap. Across every other style on the list, the split is almost total. Eighty people named West Coast IPA among what they drank most this year, and one of them called it overdone. Fifty-nine leaned on barrel-aged stout. Zero. Kettle sours, two. “Overdone” turns out to be mostly what we call beer that belongs to somebody else.

Then there’s hazy.

Twenty-one of the 121 people who listed hazy among their go-to styles also said Madison makes too much of it. Twenty-one is not a market. It’s two tables on a busy Thursday. But it’s the only style on the board where the regulars showed up to complain about their own beer, and that’s where my eyebrows went up.

Now the guessing starts, and I can’t make it stop. Maybe they drink hazy because it’s the best thing on a tap list made of hazy. Maybe it’s become the house red of craft beer, ordered out of trust and a little fatigue. Maybe they love the style and are worn out on the sameness, every brewery’s version tasting like the one across the street…which would make it a positioning problem wearing a style’s clothes.

Each theory hands a brewery a different job. Brew a lager. Brew a weirder hazy. Fix the board. The topline couldn’t have started that argument. The cut did, and it didn’t settle a thing. It handed the room a suspect.

I’m at TechCrunch Disrupt this week, surrounded by more charts than anyone should see before lunch, and it’s the same on every stage. The first slide is the big number, and the room accepts it like a receipt. The second slide is the breakdown, and that’s the one that gets the eyebrows. People lean toward each other. Somebody’s theory of why shows up before the speaker finishes the sentence.

Which is why the best question in any survey is one you can’t write yet. In June I had no reason to ask it. Now I’d ask every one of those twenty-one: the last time you ordered a hazy, was it the beer you wanted, or the best thing on the board? That question only exists because the first round came back strange…the first survey is how you earn the second.

A brewery doesn’t even need a second survey for it. Its bartenders already stand exactly where that follow-up gets asked, one pour at a time. Hand them the second slide before anyone sees the first. (You know, in marketing we just call that voice of the customer…)

Twenty-one people are drinking something they think there’s too much of. I’d pour every one of them a pint to find out why.

Stay Positive & Skip To Slide Two

I’ve been hearing house lights all week.

I’m at a startup conference, sitting in the dimmed room with a lanyard around my neck, and nearly every speaker so far has reached for the same switch. They get three minutes into an answer that finally has some teeth, and then: “at the end of the day.”

Up come the lights. The room blinks. Whatever was about to get said goes and finds its coat. (I run a bar. I know exactly what that switch does to a room. It’s the one we hit when we want everybody to go home.)

I thought about keeping a list of what each speaker said mattered at the end of the day. I’m glad I didn’t. It would be unbearable, and not because it would be long. Every one of those sentences landed on a different thing. It’s about the people. It’s about the customer. Each one delivered as the final answer, each one quietly cancelling the speaker before it. Stack enough bottom lines on top of each other and you don’t have a bottom line anymore… you have a buffet of big ideas that make you need to loosen your belt.

What’s more after they say it..it is almost never something anyone in the room would fight about. Nobody stands up in the dark and says, actually, I don’t think it’s about the people. That’s the job the phrase is doing. It walks a speaker right up to the edge of a claim somebody could check, then sets them down somewhere carpeted and safe. It sounds like a conclusion. It works like an exit.

I’ve heard it at work, recently, too. Tell a team that at the end of the day we have to hit the number, and you’ve told them exactly whose clock counts. It isn’t theirs. They’ll set their watches to it anyway… right up until they don’t or can’t or worse, they head to another meeting where they hear someone else say “At the end of the day…”

Stay Positive & Maybe Better For Us To Pivot To “At the start of the day…”

Call it as you see it.

Every word in it is holding up a different wall.

Call it. A call is half of a thing. The singer at the front of a blues room throws a line out over the tables and leaves a gap the exact size of an answer, and if nobody fills it, that wasn’t a call. That was a guy yelling. Calling it means putting your read on the table so other people can push on it, poke holes in it, hand you the part you missed. It’s the first word, offered early so the second and third show up sooner.

As you. The current you, holding whatever you happen to be holding right now, and not the version who will have slept on it. A referee who blows the whistle on Tuesday is just a man with opinions about Sunday. The call is worth something because it lands while the turf is still torn up.

See it. The phrase points at the thing and leaves you out of it. “Here’s what I see” puts the problem out where everyone can see it and puts you beside them, squinting at the same mess. A witness can be wrong about the color of the getaway car and still be a perfectly good person.

Notice the sentence is an instruction. It’s aimed at somebody else.

Flip it to first person (“I call ’em like I see ’em”) and it tends to show up right before somebody gets rude, with all the weight slid onto the I.

Said about yourself, it’s a résumé.

Said to the person across the table, it’s a permission slip, and it hands over all three at once: say it before you’re sure, say it before you’re done thinking, say it knowing the work is on trial and you aren’t.

Stay Positive & How Many Times Did You Call It Today?

One of my daughters is assembled, as near as I can tell, from five parts: magic, dragons, lipstick, ice cream, and wrestling.

Nobody ran that lineup past a focus group. Nobody walked her through the brand tension between lipstick and a body slam. She just picked, out loud, and kept picking, and now she sits on those five like a dragon on a hoard, smug and glittering and ready to bite. You could shop for her blindfolded. Meet her once and you know exactly what to bring up the second time.

Adults keep picking. We just quit announcing it…

Every old house has a floor with a lean in it. Drop a marble in the kitchen and it rolls to the same corner every single time. Nobody chose that corner. The house settled, and the marble obeys.

You have a corner too. Pull up the last twenty close calls you made, the ones that honestly could have gone either way, and count. They won’t split ten and ten. Nobody’s do. You are already leaning on every coin flip you touch, and the only open question is whether you picked the direction or the floor did.

I picked mine a while back. Sooner beats later. Cold beats warm. Saying it out loud beats swallowing it.

They aren’t laws, and I break them. I once swallowed a sentence in a meeting because I was the new guy and it felt like too much, too early. Then I found out who actually owned the decision and walked the sentence straight to them. The lean didn’t disappear when I broke it. It took the stairs.

Sooner sends invoices too. I went down at the track because I was rushing and put in just enough gas for a session, and the fourth lap found out exactly how much “just enough” was. (Yes, the gas again. That fairing has earned its keep.) There was no trial afterward. The rider who rushes is the rider I chose to be, and some days he costs a fairing.

Sides aren’t for the easy calls. When the facts run ninety to ten, the facts pick and nobody needs a personality. Sides are for fifty-one to forty-nine, which is where most of a week lives and every sleepless night does. A declared side is one decision that saves you four hundred. When it loses, you pay a price you agreed to in advance. When it wins, the joy has an address.

Companies lean exactly like houses. One that won’t choose between faster and cheaper, or louder and safer, still has a corner. Its customers find it for them, usually in a review, usually in words nobody in marketing would have picked. Most positioning work is just naming your own lean before somebody with a one-star rating names it for you.

If you lead anybody, your tiebreakers are worth more to them than your goals. A goal says where to go. A tiebreaker says what to do at the fork when you’re not in the room. I ship eighty percent right, on time, and fix the rest where people can see it… once a team knows that about you, nobody needs a meeting to ask whether the rough version can go out. They know which way you’d lean. They can lean for you.

Some of her five will get traded in eventually. Sides are allowed to move. The part I’d fight for is the announcing, because an undeclared lean still decides every close call you make. It just never signs its name.

Stay Positive & Call It In The Air

Pour all 350 answers from a survey into one glass and you get a beer nobody brewed. Medium body. Medium bitterness. The exact color of a waiting room. It’s technically drinkable, and not one of the 350 would order it twice.

That glass is the topline. I just sent a survey out to 350 people, and when I started talking about it, nobody wanted a sip. They skipped right past the totals and asked the same thing: how did the people who answered one question one way answer the others.

The gold is in the cut. The drinkers who said one thing, and what those same drinkers said next. That’s where the glass separates back into the people who poured it…people with habits and reasons and a short list of breweries they’d drive an hour for.

This is why a chart still needs a person. Not to make it. Software will build a hundred charts in the time it takes to pour a pint. The person is there to pick one. To know who will actually show up to the meeting, what they already believe, what they’re quietly worried about, and which single slice would get them to change something by next month.

When my staff pulls a bad keg, I call the brewery myself. Nobody on either end of that call wants the whole tap list read aloud. They want the one thing that happened to their beer. The survey is that call, done 350 times. A brewery doesn’t need my data. It needs the slice that looks like its own drinkers, handed to the people who can actually change the beer.

A visualization isn’t a report. It’s a decision about what somebody else sees first, and it was always a decision, even back when it was pretending to be neutral.

So choose the question on purpose. Then let the answer be rude.

“Show what gets the result we want” can mean finding the one cut that finally gets a brewer to fix the label nobody can read from across the bar. It can also mean squeezing the numbers until they agree with you, which is a sales deck wearing a lab coat. The first one is generous. The second one gets found out.

And go easy with the knife. 350 people goes fast. Slice by favorite style, then by age, then by how often they go out, and you’re quoting eleven people like they’re a market. (The pivot table will never stop you. It’s the most enabling coworker I’ve ever had.)

The finer the cut, the quieter you should say it.

Stay Positive & Your Graph Should Have Remnants Of A Knife Somewhere