The Donuts Were A Joke

We ran a product launch webinar once, and afterward the survey came back the way surveys do. A column of scores, a few polite notes, and down at the bottom, in the free text box, one person had typed: “Next time can there be donuts?”

It was a virtual event. The only snacks in the room were whatever each attendee already had in their own kitchen, which is a hard thing to put on a catering invoice.

So I sent donuts.

Real ones, in a real box, to a real door, for a person who had watched our launch in whatever you wear to watch things from home. It wasn’t in the plan. It was a joke in a comment field and I decided to read it as an order. (What’s more… it was to someone on a university campus which is notorious for having too many halls, remote workers, front-desk workers, and locked office buildings… I had little confidence the donuts would get to the actual person but hell did I try!)

Another time, I got a national clothing brand to run the tagline Carpe Denim. Seize the jeans. Somewhere a Latin teacher sat up in bed and didn’t know why. The brief asked for a tagline. It did not ask for a pun with a dead language holding the door open.

Both of those live in the same drawer in my head, the one labeled “I can’t believe they pay me for this.” Say that sentence slowly and it starts to sound like a confession. It’s what a guy mutters walking out of a bank with something lumpy under his coat. The feeling it describes is getting away with something… and you are.

Nobody asked for the pun. Nobody asked for the donuts (fine, one person did, but they were kidding, and they don’t sign my pay checks).

Both moments came out of the gap between what the job asked for and what I decided to hand back. The job description covers the ask. The gap belongs to whoever bothers to stand in it.

They’re tiny at the moment of decision, too. The tagline eventually rode on a national brand, but the choice to make it a pun happened alone, before anybody had an opinion. The donuts never got big enough for anybody to have an opinion at all.

That free text box is the junk drawer of every survey. We build the whole thing to collect scores, then tuck one open field at the bottom where nobody looks, and that’s exactly where a customer stops being a respondent and starts being a person. A joke in a survey is somebody waving at you from across the room. Waving back costs about what a box of donuts costs, and I’d bet that person remembers the box longer than anything we demoed. (They also sent us an email saying they couldn’t believe someone sent them donuts…or that someone read their feedback.)

If you lead a team, you can’t assign this. Write “surprise and delight a customer” into somebody’s quarterly goals and you’ve turned the donut into a deliverable with a due date (and it will taste like one). What you can do is leave the small stuff unpoliced. Don’t make anybody justify the box. Team first, then customer. The donuts only travel in that direction. (Or, what I’ve done with my team at GBB – give a stipend with a no-questions-asked caveat to go above and beyond when they feel like it.)

The question of what you’re doing all this for shows up eventually, usually on a Tuesday afternoon when the work has gone the color of a filing cabinet. It’s tempting to wait for the job to hand you one of these special moments. It won’t, though. I can’t even replicate it at GBB. They were never in the job. They’re in the margins, in your handwriting, in your spirit for doing the work you’ve signed up to do.

Which leaves the strangest math in the whole thing. The moments that make you feel overpaid are the exact ones nobody is paying you for. The company bought the ask. The gap was always yours to give away.

Stay Positive & I’ll Send Those Donuts Every Single Time