CEO’s Blog

"We understand life backwards, but live it forwards." - Soren Aabye Kierkegaard (Danish philosopher and theologian, 1813-1855)

"We don’t like uncertainty. We have a need to understand and make sense of events. We refuse to accept the unknown. We therefore seek explanations for why things happen." - Seeking Wisdom, page 91.

We see this all the time in the media. Experts can always look back at events and tell us why they think they happened and how it should have been obvious that the event was coming. The current financial meltdown is one example. Everybody’s an expert.

The problem is that we don’t take into account chaos and randomness. There are a lot of books out there about human irrationality right now, so I won’t go into too much detail. Check out Fooled By Randomness by Nassim Taleb.

Here at Bodybuilding.com, we were victims of this error in one of our leadership meetings.

Each Wednesday we meet to check out the latest customer loyalty numbers (net promoter scores, etc.), customer feedback, customer success stories, and much more. We do this to make sure we all know how our customers are feeling, what problems they are having and what they want. It’s the most important thing we do!

One week we pulled up our latest customer loyalty rating and noticed that it dropped. Ugh! So we immediately started asking ourselves why it happened. We came up with all sorts of answers.

“It’s that change we made to one of our customer service processes! I knew it!”

“We ran out of samples last week in the warehouse again!”

“The holiday messed up the shipping times since FedEx didn’t deliver on Monday, and customers are mistakenly blaming us for the delay!”

We thought we had it all figured out. How smart we are!

Then we noticed something funny. We were looking at the wrong chart. We were not looking at the customer loyalty SCORE, but the number of customers that rated us this week. The number of customers that rated us went down (it fluctuates all the time) and we thought we were looking at a chart showing that our customers were not as happy with us this week.

Then we looked at the correct chart. Customer ratings actually WENT UP this week!

I immediately laughed. We fell victim to one of the mental errors that I’m always reading about. We thought everything made sense.

Does this happen to you?

Internet Retailer magazine did an interview with me for an article that just came out about e-commerce and the economy. Check it out!

http://www.internetretailer.com/dailyNews.asp?id=28038

Not sure if this is good or bad for the industry… haha… I guess it depends on if you are a McCain or Obama fan, but this was interesting:

"Campaign reps for Sen. John McCain obtained an herbal supplement touted to enhance memory and keep energy levels up for the candidate before his joust with Sen. Barack Obama, a source tells us. Four-time Super Bowl champ Bill Romanowski, whose company Nutrition53 produces the capsule Neuro1, said: “I won’t confirm or deny that Sen. McCain is using our product, but it’s phenomenal for any person with stress and an overwhelming travel schedule.”

http://www.nydailynews.com/gossip/2008/10/01/2008-10-01_celebrity_side_dish.html?print=1&page=all%0D

I’m constantly fighting the media and the marketing machines that are trying to brainwash my child, telling them that junk food is "fun!" and healthy food is "gross". We all know about Ronald McDonald and cartoon characters like Shrek promoting Twinkies (with green filling! cool!). In my house, I try not to let them see too much of this marketing, and I also tell them the other side of the story. "No, we don’t want to go to McDonald’s! It will make you sick! It will make you run slower. You won’t be able to jump as high. SuperMan would never go there! Sicky sick!"

So far I feel like I’ve done a good job. My 4-year old son, Raiden, never asks to go to McDonald’s or other fast food places, and when we see one, he points and says, "Gross daddy… look! McDonald’s! Sick!". It makes a father proud. Haha.

Well, you can imagine how SHOCKED I was when my son told me about his routine trip to his doctor for a vaccine. Because Raiden didn’t cry and was such a "big boy" during his shot, his doctor gave him a prize. Guess what it was?

A gift certificate to McDonald’s for a free bag of french fries.

I’m not even joking. When I heard about it, I just about passed out.

Think about the message that this doctor is giving out (and think about how smart McDonald’s is to give this doctor these free gift certificates). Basically, his doctor (a person that knows about health and a person you can trust) just told him that eating french fries at McDonald’s is okay. It’s a good thing to do. It’s something that is worthy of being a prize to cherish and work hard for. Nevermind that french fries are full of heart-disease causing saturated fat and that dangerous childhood obesity is on the rise. He might as well have given my son a pack of cigarettes too.

Oh, and by the way… what does your doctor look like naked? Like many "health professionals", my son’s doctor is obese.