Years ago I wrote a letter to Paul Raines, then the CEO of Gamestop.
Mainly I complained how terrible the store experience was. Whereas Apple stores feel like an avant-garde museum Gamestops feel like the inside of a Chuck E. Cheese circa 1987 -- games everywhere, no real organization, no marketing of individual titles or genres, it's just grabbag nonsense of plastic container after plastic container.
Days after I sent the letter, his secretary called me and scheduled a phone call for the next day.
Paul could not have been nicer. He said he appreciated the criticism and offered to have his district manager tour a location with me so I could share in greater depth my concerns.
I declined (too busy) but was obviously taken aback with his generosity and patience.
Sadly, he passed away in March of this year from brain cancer at the very young age of 53.
He had no real incentive to respond to an angry letter from a random customer, but he went way out of his way to at least listen to me (even if the stores haven't improved much).
I'm impressed but not surprised he responded; that sort of clear, actionable feedback can be surprisingly difficult for a CEO to get, especially in retail.
Most retail CEOs don't reserve much time for popping into stores and talking to customers, and store and district managers tend to dislike it--feels like micromanaging.
But at the same time, store managers and district managers are often not eager to feed a list of their stores' shortcomings up the chain of command. IMO it's a rare retail manager who is willing to stand up and say, "my store is bad and here is what I need to make it good." Most focus on putting the best possible face on things, internally. It's so hard to make good numbers in retail and there is so much pressure to do so... relationships between the management layers can often feel more adversarial than collaborative.
It seems like a hidden success factor of organizations is alignment between the success of each individual within the organization with the success of the organization. At the size of a large retail operation that seems exceptionally hard.
GameStop is sorely in need of some micro managIng. I was in there with my daughter the other day looking to buy a Nintendo Switch and some Pokémon cards. The place was a cramped disorganized mess. And the neck beard working the counter grunted half hearted responses to our questions for about 5 minutes before we left with nothing. About 20 minutes later I spent $350+ at Amazon using my smartphone while we ate lunch in the food court.
I would have taken him up on it. If an issue is important enough to me to write the CEO of a company then it would have most likely been important enough to me to respond pro-actively to a meaningful response. Otherwise what's the point of writing such a letter in the first place?
I never get this: you start a conversation and then when the other party engages you disengage. The CEO's response was about as good as you could wish for and would give an opportunity to influence the view of the company at the level where it matters. That's what you intend when you write to the CEO, you do that because they are the people that can make stuff happen, including putting you in touch with the right person further down the org, not because you want to chat with the CEO. They're just a very visible access point and writing them a letter is a way of saying 'this really matters to me'.
If you are too busy to follow up on such a response then maybe you could save everybody time by not writing the letter in the first place.
The District Manager left a voicemail for me asking when he could schedule a tour with me. He was 100% polite, but it sounded like he was gritting his teeth.
Maybe I was reading too much into it, but I interpreted it as, "My boss's boss is forcing me to give an idiot like you, someone probably with no experience in retail economics, a tour while I patiently pretend to listen to how you tell me to do my job better than me, a person with decades of experience in selling video games."
If the situation were reversed I wouldn't want some rando customer coming into my job and telling me everything he thinks I'm doing wrong.
Plus, I got the feeling (again, just my perception) that it would just be "here's what's wrong with this store" instead of "here's what's wrong with all of your stores."
Maybe it was all in my head and they would have taken me seriously, I don't know. But that was the impression I got.
And I was legitimately busy. Writing a letter takes 10 minutes, a tour and presentation of my ideas would obviously take a lot longer.
I suspect this is exactly why the CEO reached out to you in the first place--because they know how hard it is to get open and honest feedback from the store and retail managers.
Whether the district manager liked it or not, they absolutely would have had to report the results of your visit back to the CEO. And they would have had to be honest about it, since they knew the CEO could just call you back to check the accuracy.
I don't blame you for not wanting to get in the middle of that, but I bet the CEO felt like it was a missed opportunity.
You're probably not wrong. The internet's go-to description for CEOs and other executives is sociopath but I've found most leaders at the top to be humble and accommodating. If anyone fits "sociopath" it's more likely to be a middle manager, I find.
It's one thing to complain about poor service, it's an other to brainstorm with district manager to improve the location. It's hard to know exactly what was being proposed without more details but the way it's described by the parent I think I would've refused as well unless I had a genuine curiosity to visit a videogame store with a backstage pass.
I mean it's a bit as if you complained in a restaurant that the food was bad and they proposed that you visited the kitchen and told them what you'd do differently. I don't want to do that, actually I'm probably not even qualified to do that and if I was I probably wouldn't do it for free.
It's very kind and considerate for the CEO to take time to schedule something like that but I don't find it weird at all that he declined the offer.
To be fair, I don't think the district manager would likely have been totally engaged in what he'd view as babysitting an irate customer. Now if Paul had also offered to accompany the tour, there you're getting meaningful engagement.
I don't know about that. If it was just to 'babysit an irate customer' that would be one thing, but there is a fair chance that the CEO would have required a debrief after the tour to get a handle on whether the letter writer had a point. A district manager's time isn't free and you don't throw away resources like that as if they are customer support.
Also: Paul may simply not have been the right person to be there because he's too far removed from the floor to make a meaningful contribution. Delegation to the right person in the org is the hallmark of a good manager.
An "irate customers" time isn't free either. Plenty of reasons why one might take the time to write a complaint but decline the opportunity to provide free consultation in person.
The company should be grateful for whatever "help" (or pointers to improvement) they can get - even if it's just a letter - way more preferable than a rant on the phone or slating on social media.
this is an incredible story and has personally made an impact on me
i didn't know paul before he died (on my birthday even), but because of your comment, i researched his story
i work in sales, so rejection and silence are very frequent. it is rare for anyone to connect through writing or through voice, and quite often i feel like nobody desires to brainstorm and have fun thinking about ideas in a low pressure environment
i wish you well in life and i hope that we can both live every day to the fullest-- because not all of us have the luxury of time
Call it snark if you will, but it is intelligent, perceptive, witty snark, a rare combination.
(check out that username)
vouched
I think it's perfectly reasonable to have people socially pressure others to keep to the agreed upon conventions of communication. (It's kind of what this place is known for.)
If someone wants to do it in a funny way, all the better. Humor wins hearts and minds.
I don't understand the ignoring of basic writing conventions thing. If you think that's going to make your writing stand out, or be more expressive or whatever, you're wrong.
It is less expressive, and it only stands out for being disorienting and unpleasant to look at and read.
Seeing people write like this brings to mind this quote.
Be regular and orderly in your life, so that you may be violent and original in your work.
Write with the standard conventions, so that what stands out are your ideas, not the reader's effort to piece together your loose ends.
The post is readable to me. I've myself been called out for grammar and I find it kind of useless to be told my grammar is off. If you don't understand my post at all then tell me, otherwise I'm sorry that having English as a second language and not learning it as well as you have is not my top priority in life. I'm also sorry for my bad English, I'm American.
I don't understand your post, or at least the way I understand it I hope is wrong. You basically seem to be trying to win points based on your identity, a popular game these days, but completely out of place in this conversation, and everywhere really.
I think you misunderstood my post, I wasn't bemoaning that everyone's grammar isn't perfect.
I was pointing out that the things learned very early in language education, capitalization and punctuation are learned for a reason. And intentionally omitting them is distracting and detracts from what is trying to be said.
On the other hand, maybe too much importance is given to how the information is presented.
Rather than focus on the content and the ideas evoked, just make a passive-aggresive snark so that you gain useless points by people who couldn't give a crap about the discussion but found the comment funny.
After that, you can just ignore that person's opinions since they obviously are too incompetent to write in proper form.
You learn early on the importance of good language skills, you also ought to learn how to treat people with some respect by trying to ignore the minor things and not showcase them off like you've found anything worth of value.
If you value properly written text over others, fair enough, but don't waste your time and everyone's time by making a comment that contributes to nothing but elitistic egos.
Here, wait, let me type with proper grammar and punctuation on this one.
How depressing it is that the only response to my initial comment is talking about punctuation. My grammar is actually correct, too. Instead of using periods, I hit enter. Instead of capitalizing "I", I used "i" instead because I feel it is quicker, still readable, and unique.
> You learn early on the importance of good language skills, you also ought to learn how to treat people with some respect by trying to ignore the minor things and not showcase them off like you've found anything worth of value.
> If you value properly written text over others, fair enough, but don't waste your time and everyone's time by making a comment that contributes to nothing but elitistic egos.
Well said, this is the gist of it. Sometimes it can be tasteful, other times it's like those posts that we try to avoid here on HN such as "thanks", "lol" etc. Posts that just add uneeded noise.
> the compound annual return of the respondent group is 8.97% greater than the non-respondent companies.
That's actually interesting, because I could easily explain away the opposite result: CEOs who waste their time responding to personal letters aren't focused on improving company performance. For example, there's some potential negative correlation between time spent playing golf and company performance [1].
Granted, even if this were statistically significant you can think of explanations why it makes sense: "These CEOs have thought so deeply about their business that responding to these letters is trivial", or "Being forced to answer these questions is beneficial for the CEOs business acumen".
Of course the most likely explanation is that the correlation is just spurious and the two things are unrelated.
Here's my anecdotal-experience-driven theory of what's going on with the golfing-CEO companies underperforming the non-golfing-CEO ones: it isn't a matter of lost productive hours while golfing instead of working. It's that the golfing CEOs are, as a population, different from the non-golfing ones.
The golfing ones are a bit more extroverted and charismatic than the non-golfers; they "look like CEOs". They are more likely than the non-golfing ones to have attended a top-tier MBA program. Their average height is significantly greater than the non-golfers. And so on; you see where I'm going.
Certainly there are plenty of introverted, socially challenged golfers out there. But within any population whether CEOs or lawyers or cops or musicians or whatever else, the subset of people who golf is going to be, on average, more extroverted than the subset of people who don't.
I think this somewhat ties in to Taleb's argument that you should trust surgeons who don't look like surgeons, since their achievement of professional success despite their tendency to create a negative first impression is a robust heuristic of professional competence[0].
The population of non-golfers, averaged out as a population, were held to subtly higher standards that required better performance out of them. This means that non-golfers, as a population, tend to be more challenged at work over the course of their careers, and that it was less likely that individuals could "fail up" -- the Peter Principle extends further for extroverts.
This reminds me of when I read about Steve Jobs' having to be dressed up as a CEO for the cover of some business magazine in the '80's (Fortune, or Inc. I think). I distinctly remember as a young person seeing that magazine and thinking he's some conventional business dude. So of course I, and probably everyone else, assumed that to be at an innovative high-tech company you needed to be a conventional business dude. I didn't realize how wrong I was until I read his biography, needless to say I think the 'look like CEO' stereotype needs to be dropped finally.
In order to meaningfully answer this question, we need a much more well-articulated definition of "asshole". People's definitions vary widely. For example, suppose you see someone broadcast online about being very distressed about a problem and your response is to point them toward resources that might be useful to solve the problem -- some set of people would consider you an asshole for that pattern of behavior. Some would consider it very helpful. Is it? Not my point. The point is that there is disagreement.
In order to become a successful CEO (or team lead or spouse...), you do need to be able to muster the emotional backbone to have tough conversations with people. One thing that can hold you back from this is the internal worry about being an asshole. Unless you are able to say to yourself, "I hear a voice on my shoulder telling me I'm a terrible person. But this topic needs to be discussed and I need to do advocacy here. This is uncomfortable and I don't like it but I'm going to do it anyway", you will under-communicate and issue won't get resolved.
However:
1) It is possible to err. That difficult conversation? Might in fact just be you being an asshole. We are not lucky enough to live in a world with a 100% surefire way to avoid this. So, good communication involves being willing to risk some probability of being an asshole.
2) People without that "maybe you're being an asshole" voice are not going to have this problem.
Being an asshole has a lot more to do with the tone of the message than with the content.
In my experience, most people will accept feedback if you do it in a respectful manner.
You can tell someone they are underperforming without insulting them. Respect your employees.
Even when you tell people to read the manual, you can do so in a way that doesn’t feel insulting. There’s a world of a difference between “RTFM!” and “I believe the documentation addresses this problem on page X.”
> Being an asshole has a lot more to do with the tone of the message than with the content.
Bingo. God I wish more software developers realized this. Being open with criticism is important. But for most people who are not a very certain type of programmer, we don't want to hear the criticism given with words like:
"What were you thinking? Are you stupid? Of course you don't do x."
and
"I've found through experience that it's important to do X, because if you don't, then Y happens."
The fact that I run into so many people on software developer teams that communicate in the former manner has led me to leave traditional software development in favor of data analysis where I don't have to work on a team of 5-6 people, of whom 2-3 are complete assholes.
Plus, if you want to know why there are so few women in programming, this alone is a huge factor. Yes, there are a very few women who can give and take criticism in the abrasive fashion I outlined above, but most women prefer to give and take criticism in the polite, productive manner of my second example. Once again, the criticism is the same in both examples, all that's different is the tone.
Too many people in the software development industry have taken Linus Torvald's communication style as something to emulate.
Totally agree. And this amplifies the effect I mention above. If your picture of “steadfastly advocating for something important” is using an abrasive tone and not assuming good faith or intelligence, you’re going to be more likely to be either aggressive or passive not assertive
This is way more difficult in person than it is online in writing. And the fear of getting it wrong can increase with each time that you actually do get it wrong (leading to you replaying the event in your head, eg).
If you're actually worried or concerned about how you're communicating, you're probably fine or at least acceptable.
It's the people who are either oblivious to the need to carefully communicate who are the difficult ones, along with those who intentionally ignore societal norms in an effort to prove their "alpha" status.
> If you're actually worried or concerned about how you're communicating, you're probably fine or at least acceptable.
I think I've finally realized how to articulate what my frustration with statements of the form "If you're worried about X, you're fine" is. The person presenting the worry has a prior of [I am worried about this]. They then go seeking a solution that will let them alleviate the worry by taking concrete steps to address it. When they run into the advice "If you're worried, you're fine", they have two problems:
1) If being worried is the only reason why they are at least acceptable, then to continue to be acceptable, they need to continue to be worried.
2) They haven't actually gotten a concrete action to take or thought exercise to go through. That means if the commenter is wrong and they actually do have a habit to work on, the only thing they might be doing differently is telling their intuition (system 1 for the Khanemann fans) "Hey, you know that alarm? turn it off." Their intuition probably doesn't listen very well and probably keeps them worried, but it is also no longer acting as a useful signal whatsoever of the problem.
----
The approach I would take is to come up with a list of actually-answerable questions to ask myself, to have faith in my intuitions on those questions unless I get concrete evidence that they are wrong, and then to work to make peace with the remaining discomfort. For example, when driving a car:
- Buy a wide-angle rear-view mirror so you have better spatial awareness.
- When opening any car door from the insite, habitually practice doing the Dutch reach.
- When you are aware of a cyclist, know the reference points on the car that you should keep them at so you are a safe passing distance.
- Don't do anything else besides perhaps converse with another human in the car while I'm driving.
- Practice scanning my environment while driving and other generally-safe driving habits.
- Having practiced your duty of care -- Accept the reality that at some point I might end up crushing another person's ribcage and snuffing out the life of someone's father/brother/aunt/teacher -- a fellow human.
Not when you're so worried about how you'll be perceived that you soften your statements beyond comprehension. And yes, this absolutely happens, and no, you probably don't realize if you're doing it.
Try re-reading a peer performance review you've written after the fact. It can be eye-opening.
I think it's entirely plausible that the median woman in a coding job is better than the median man in a coding job because of this effect.
That's why vague claims (like in the google debacle) that women are biologically less suited to coding than men might not be relevant to your organisation even if we were to believe it true in general.
That's a good question. Best stab at an answer is that I think it's true for most companies where it's possible that the next CEO will have gone to HBS and worked for McKinsey.
Another theory (possibly complementary) is networking. Golfing / frequenting private clubs can greatly improve CEOs visibility among other CEOs.. I believe Mark Newman's network theory book mention exactly this example.
I agree, I think the networking aspect is central. Extroverted people are going to be drawn to sports that serve a networking purpose like golf, tennis, skiing, hunting quail, etc.
I'd suspect a valid correlation that's not a causation. If a company is generally doing well, presumably the CEO isn't under as much stress and doesn't have as many firefighting responsibilities as those whose companies are doing poorly. Hence having the time to write a letter to a stranger.
Maybe those underperforming companies will bounce back and you'll find a (much delayed) response in the author's mailbox a few months down the line!
I think the correlation is real. The type of person who writes to a CEO is likely to do other things for the company. For instance they might be a undercover reporter researching a story. Responding to the letter can give the company free press, which can be far more valuable than the time a personal letter takes.
Likewise, many companies have a comments toll free number. Almost nobody will call them (who has a comment about their toothpaste), but it turns out the type of person who does call those numbers is likely the type of person who tells all their friends which is the best toothpaste, and so it is important that whoever answers that phone is an expert on what makes their toothpaste great. (honest answers are important - this type of person already knows their stuff so lies will hurt)
Also, CEOs often know they have trouble connecting with their real customers. If a real customer writes, that is real information that they cannot easily get in any other way. A good CEO will pay attention because what one person writes 100 others think but don't say at all.
All of the above are things that make a CEO who doesn't respond under perform.
The example of an undercover reporter sending a letter to a CEO under the premise that they will write a nice article about the company if the CEO responds is pretty absurd.
It doesn't have to be a nice article. A request for comment can either be responded to, where you have a chance for your words on record, or you get "<companyname> has not responded to requests for comment as of publishing." which is worse than whatever spin you could have concocted.
Reporters who are reviewing products do. They might have 10 different blenders to review, and if there is a button that doesn't make sense a good response takes you from "2/10 the buttons don't make sense" to "9/10, the buttons are a little weird but once you get used to them..."
The time cost for CEOs to respond to your letters is likely zero - they've got staff to handle that. And so replies are really a proxy for "how deeply does the company care about its customers"
The author is certain that the CEOs responded personally. He says, "[CEO] wrote me a two-page letter that addressed my ideas point by point", "[CEO] sent me a handwritten letter", and "[CEO] forwarded my ideas to his marketing leaders".
There was a great article around a year ago about how the Obama White House handled letters to the president. Obama wanted to personally read and respond to about 10 per day (IIRC), but his response was in the form of jotting down thoughts and notes as he read the letter and handing them off to letter writers who knew the president’s speaking and writing styles well enough to write “his” response. I doubt the average CEO has dedicated letter writing staff, but those who are more serious about responding to customers probably have assistants doing something similar.
How many letters does the CEO get? If the answer is small the CEO of course handles it: it doesn't really take that long and the PR is worth it. If the answer is many, of course staff handles it, with form responses - even then the "interesting" letters get passed on.
My theory is CEOs that pay attention to smaller things miss fewer opportunities, and build a culture of doing so across the company. Look up Bezos' infamous "?" emails.
“?” is paying attention enough to recognize something is wrong and needs to be resolved immediately without spending the time to find the resolution yourself. To say that it’s not implies that every single email to him results in a “?” which is patently false.
I absolutely think it's paying attention. The way he describes it is "if the data says one thing, but the customers say another, it usually means there's a problem with how you're measuring". He says he personally reads the emails that come in (though rarely responds).
Why do most companies fail? Because of supplier or distributor relationships? Operational inefficiencies? Board relations? Legal compliance issues?
No. Most companies fail simply because they don't sell enough stuff. There's an old joke that "revenue solves all problems" in business. Simply put--companies fail when they don't build a big enough customer base.
CEOs who read and react to customer feedback are focused on the most important thing to their business: their customers. I would definitely not characterize that as a "waste of time." I'd argue it is some of the most valuable uses of time that a CEO can spend.
> CEOs who waste their time responding to personal letters aren't focused on improving company performance
To be fair, you can't always be working. Sometimes you need to wind down, and golfing or responding to your customers does sound like something a CEO would do while winding down.
My late father had great success in writing CEO's and receiving a direct reply. But I think times have changed because I've done it a few times and never had any luck.
There's a local automotive specialty repair chain in Michigan. My family has always done business with them. When they opened their first store which was in Detroit my grandfather took a picture of all the cars lined up. They were giving away two gallons of free gas which was apparently a pretty big deal in the nineteen twenties. My dad met the CEO at some business function and sent him a copy of the photo and they put copies in every one of their dozens of stores.
I've always had excellent service at our local branch. A good friend of mine asked for a recommendation so I sent him there. He received horrible service and a botched repair job which they refused to fix. I was embarrassed so I wrote the CEO. I mentioned my father so it would be clear to him who was writing. I didn't want anything for myself, I just wanted him to do right by my friend.
I never received a reply and moved my personal business to a competitor. I've also probably told two dozen people the story. The store changed managers and the new guy is driving business away. My letter should have tipped them off to problems but they ignored it.
I’ve had great success with e-mailing CEOs. I have engaged in (respectful) debates with them, and on more than one occasion they have come around to my point of view enough to actually implement changes at their companies.
Most CEOs are actually dying to know what their customers think of them. The hardest part of being a CEO at a major company is getting honest feedback without someone blowing smoke up your ass, so most good CEOs will make time to read direct feedback. Customers rarely have a political agenda the way a CEOs direct reports might.
That’s why I think these companies perform better. A responsive CEO is more interested in hearing the unfiltered voice of the customer. That’s a mindset that carries through to all parts of the business.
I got my first job in the tech industry by writing a thank you letter.
Many years ago I met the CEO of a tech company at a networking event for recent college grads that they hosted. Like a job fair but with a twist. Having read Brian D. Krueger's excellent "College Grad Job Hunter" [1], I had business cards prepared. This was long before Moo.com so they were printed out on my Deskjet on Avery pre-perforated card stock. I went with my ill-fitting suit and mismatched shoes/belt, and I was talking to someone from a small tech company and I got a tap on the shoulder, "Our CEO would like to get a picture with you." Having miniscule networking mojo and knowledge, I actually followed the PR person without excusing myself. We took the photo, and I asked if I could give him my business card. He said yes, and he gave me his.
The next day, I wrote him a letter. I honestly wrote how I liked that this networking event was not the usual deal but more like a classy cocktail event and a great opportunity to meet other companies in a less-networky, relaxed atmosphere. I thanked him and the company for hosting it.
I ended up later getting hired by his company (I was invited to apply, someone called me) and worked there for many years, as I learned the art and trade of software development, starting from nothing and someone who managed to bluff their way through the interviews.
It wasn't the CEO who wanted the picture, it was the PR person. So s/he suggests it to the CEO and he said "sure."
But when it came time to make it happen, the way to get the person on board as quickly as possible is to say "the CEO over there wants to take a picture with you."
I don't know. A fateful mystery. I was selected by the PR person. Her choice changed my life, as I would never had thought of approaching the CEO. I was fortunate, and I would never have made some long-term friends without working at that company.
It was a "deer in the headlights" moment. What happened, happened and I am not proud of it. When I heard "The CEO wants a photo with you", I was completely pattern interrupted with the current thread of what I was doing talking to whoever it was (keyword: CEO and keyword: you) and just System.exit(1)'d (e.g. left with the PR person). I didn't realize that I'd not excused myself properly until after the photo op was done.
As a tangent, on the topic of social niceties and navigating a party situation: If you ever need to get out of the awkward "I've been talking with this one person and I really want to exit the conversation", you never want to say "It was nice meeting you.". What you want to say is this: "I'd like to go meet those people over there. Come with me." This is genius (and I learned this from a social genius) because it gives the person a choice. If they don't want to go with you, you are golden. If they go with you, you've developed your own little temporary group of 2.
Because of this post, CEOs around the world are receiving 3x emails today.
Haha, just kidding. It's actually the opposite. The reason CEOs respond is because they get much fewer emails from customers than you'd imagine. They get their typical solicitations, internal meeting emails, external business discussions, but the customer emails can be interesting and more insightful than any internal letter could be. If you put time into it and write your letter which doesn't require a huge time investment to response (i.e. avoid dozens of specific questions and allow the discussions to be open-ended), you might get a response. If any human is contacted by another of our species, it's intrinsic to want to respond. Being a CEO doesn't remove that desire. Yes, you might be bothering them a bit if they sacrifice family time, but that's their own problem/choice!
How does one even discover the email addresses of CEOs (or board members)? It's not like they're searchable online and guessing common formats only gets you so far.
Rather than guessing, you can also connect to the SMTP gateway of that company using telnet then enter rcpt to:<ceo@company.com>. It'll tell you if that's a valid address or not. Rinse and repeat.
LinkedIn is a good place to start. Curriculum vitaes if you can find them. Asking around. Some CEOs of smaller companies than WD-40, typically startups with a younger age group, give them out in the About page of their website. Sometimes you can just guess (e.g. jeff@ some large used book company .com). Every time you discover one of these email addresses, you think "I could have guessed that on my first try."
The GDPR defines multiple legal grounds on which you are allowed to process personal data (such as collecting an email address for contacting). Consent is only one legal ground. Another one is "legitimate interest", which a lot of salespeople will use in order to find prospects. However the recipient is allowed to say "not interested, don't contact me again" and you'll have to comply.
Furthermore the GDPR does not apply to small-scale, ad-hoc, personal situations. Contacting a CEO as a customer is fine. Your personal phone's address book is fine. So is keeping a list of attendees of your birthday party. But wearing a camera on your body all day and recording everything and running face recognition on the video, even if you do it for personal reasons, is not ok.
> It may be the most appropriate basis when:
> you cannot, or do not want to, give the individual full upfront control (ie consent) or bother them with disruptive consent requests when they are unlikely to object to the processing.
You're not a business systematically or regularly storing and processing personal data. Pretty sure GDPR doesn't stop you from e-mailing random people for personal reasons.
I wrote a letter to Wal-Mart's CEO about 10+ years ago to apologize for switching the barcode from a less expensive Sony Walkman to a more expensive one because I didn't want to pay more. I was in college, about 19 years of age (mid 90's), and at the time felt that if I could get away with this, it's ok. And I did. Little did I know this act would gnaw on my conscience for many later. I asked them what could I do to make it right after so many years.
Soon after he received my letter, I got a call from the CEO's secretary to let me know he read my letter and that he forgives me and that there's nothing I need to do. Since I didn't expect the call, I was taken aback and moved to tears while I was talking to her. I expected some wrath and punishment for what I'd done. Instead, I experienced forgiveness.
Now if I could only quantify how much software, movies and music I've bootlegged while I was a student, I would probably write those CEOs a letter too, but I can't even remember it properly so I can quantify it. It wasn't a lot, and I mostly bootlegged because I thought it was "cool" to be visible on IRC #warez and what not... never really used or resold the software, just mostly did it cause I got to hang with the cool crowd.
Given I'm a software engineer for nearly 20 years now, I don't bootleg anything anymore... music, videos, apps.. and if I do, it's only because there's no trial for some of the apps. If I end up using the app, I pay for it or if I can't afford it, usually an employer will pay for it if I/we need it.
This looks like a lot of fantasy confidence. For instance, even if you are quite rich, it's unlikely that Colgate-Palmolive would consider you really an "investor". And of course if you write something to the CEO his 10+ PR team will respond to you, maybe even with something that is signed by the CEO. But do you really think the CEO sits down to discuss shower thoughts about product ideas with you?
If you think that would make sense at all, you don't understand how big companies work. The big company is in the later phases of a snowball effect. It's a huge thing that rolls by itself and can't really be redirected, stopped or sped up by anyone. A CEO knows that. He's mostly concerned about internal politics and external representation. He's not really doing anything like develop new products. Companies like Apple that move from one big product line to another are very, very rare.
So, what you get is a PR letter that can contain some insights into their current strategy. But nothing of real value. It's unlikely that such a response contains anything one could learn.
I think you're wrong. Powerful people are very often influenced by chance encounters, by mere happenstance.
I've seen it a hundred times: decisions (or at least discussions) driven by accidental meetings on planes or trains. Something overheard at the pool or in a bar.
It's because these guys know at some level that they're in a closed chamber, away from the reality that underlies their corporate activity and if they think they've suddenly been given an authentic glimpse of something, unmediated by their lieutenants then they find that extremely novel and exciting.
They're just human beings. Often they're very interested in people in general.
I actually think it's the opposite: really successful people get there because they are more vulnerable. At least in my experience, whenever I met someone like this, they always seem way more responsive and open than the usual joe.
Most of them exist in an echo chamber. It’s rare to see them talking to or having time to think outside the current situation. Especially if they are self made (meaning they are leaning closer to the control freak side). It’s rare for regular people like me get a blast of outside perspective on my day to day, let alone an evaluation of wtf I do at work or how I can do it better.
You are simultaneously missing the point of the article, and serving the point of the article.
The fact that CEOs have politics and PR to worry about is implied. The purpose of the article is that the majority of the CEOs took the time to respond to a small list of ideas from one of their (likely menial) shareholders. The author is highlighting that this there is a correlation between the type of person willing to do this, and a successful CEO. They are making time for the people below them, given the high level aspect of their day to day. They care about the core of their business and the small people that make the whole.
Its obvious that you would be one of the CEOs who didn't respond, and you will be missing out on that 8.97% ;)
>The big company is in the later phases of a snowball effect. It's a huge thing that rolls by itself and can't really be redirected, stopped or sped up by anyone. A CEO knows that. He's mostly concerned about internal politics and external representation.
This is one of the unspoken truths of business. It's the same whether you're a CEO or a manager.
The best people know this, but never EVER say it. The rest think they have to do more than they actually should; the most obvious manifestation of this is micro-managing.
When I was a teenager, I wrote to Marc Benioff, CEO of Salesforce, telling him how he's had such a huge impact on me, and how he's very inspiring to me.
I don't know if you sensed it, but both hajrice and Xavdidtheshadow were sarcastic in their posting :)
At least what I take from it, good CEO would answer you with "thank you" or whatever, as Benioff is know to be more of a Ellison / Jobs type of asshole CEO, rather than let's say polite Elon Musk, so hajrice made fun that instead, Benioff asked him to buy his book in order to just squeeze few extra bucks from someone that admires him :)
Xavdidtheshadow was pointing how creepy it is to get forced to receive someones book with their signature that actually is being signed by someone else.
Both their responses made me laugh, thanks guys :)
I get that impression from almost everything I've read about Musk over the last 15 years. He absolutely does not fit into that bucket. Bezos is also not in the Jobs / Ellison group in regards to behavior. Bezos is a difficult boss, he's not a terror like Jobs & Ellison, he isn't known for attacking people, belitting people, throwing epic temper tantrums, threatening people, etc - much less doing the borderline criminal things that Ellison has (such as hiring PIs to dig through Bill Gates & Microsoft's garbage).
With Jobs and Ellison there are endless examples of them behaving as assholes toward normal people. What are the examples with Musk? He overwhelmingly seems to treat most people extremely well by comparison. The worst I've seen about him is that he pressurizes the work environment, that he's hard charging, although it certainly doesn't appear to be anything like Apple or Oracle under Jobs / Ellison. I don't believe you can build Tesla & SpaceX without anything less than the approach Musk has used.
As he notes, the sample size is ridiculously small. It's simply too likely that he got lucky with 1 or 2 companies in his "respond" group.
e.g., if he wrote these letters in the the early 90s and Buffet responded, he's immediately skewed his returns up because Buffet outperformed the market SO much in the 90s. That's likely luck, not replicable skill.
Otherwise, interesting article and the 1/3 response rate is surprisingly high.
A friend of mine in high school tweeted to Mikko Hyppönen (CRO, F-Secure) and invited him with us for a beer.
A few weeks later we met with him in Helsinki over a pizza and discussed cybersecurity, arcade games, politics, pinball and miscellaneous topics. It was fun.
Sometimes contacting high profile individuals is all about making the step of reaching out.
One thing I would like to highlight here — writing a letter to a CEO is not just sending an e-mail message. Try writing an actual letter and printing it on real paper, and sending it through the real-world post office.
I feel this could be optimised further: how about emailing the CEO's secretary a PDF, and asking them to print it (on heavy but plain paper), put it in an envelope and deliver it with the rest of CEO's mail.
When I was in 4th grade in the '80s, I wrote a letter to the CEO of Atari. I was a stockholder(maybe 5 shares, ha), and I was concerned that Atari could do a few things to make their games more enjoyable. I received a really nice letter in return that addressed my concerns, and a bunch of promotional material was included. In retrospect I wish I had written more letters and perhaps built up correspondence with someone high profile.
> From the time that I mailed my letters, the compound annual return of the respondent group is 8.97% greater than the non-respondent companies.
If anything, I would have expected the opposite. "Successful companies are more busy, and have less time to write letters to strangers. Failing companies love to spend all their time justifying themselves." Glad to see that hypothesis disproven.
If the above correlation does hold across larger sample sizes, I wonder if hedge funds will start using it to identify profitable trades. Send anonymous letters to the executives of public companies, and weight your investments in favor of those who reply. At some point, the executives will wise up and start replying to everyone. But you could make a nice pile of money before that happens.
From my vague systems experience, it makes sense. If everything works, you have time for random nonsense.
You want a sysadmin that’s playing video games all day, because everything is in great shape. Not a constantly stressed , jaded, angry admin. I know nothing of being a CEO, but if the CEO is bored, the company is probably in great shape.
I work a lot for these guys. The larger companies have whole teams responding to these kind of emails. They triage incoming emails and then the team can send the emails on their own on behalf of the C-level exec.
Exactly this. Tim Ferriss had Frank Blake, the old CEO of Home Depot, on his show where he discussed this. Super interesting. https://tim.blog/2018/03/15/frank-blake/
I am listening to this podcast literally as I type this, and it frustrates me to no end to hear Frank's story and how much he cares about customers, and how shitty Home Depot is now. Their customer service is atrocious and their reps are poorly-trained to help with technical tasks.
I fear Frank's decrees were not carried over after he left office (2014).
Anything i get in CC - i automatically delete- some CEO i heard about. Sorry, but personal emails from a CEOs perspective are noise. And just that noise.
Even if you want to know about interesting things in the noise, you use dedicated people to filter out.
I believe that they're actually responding. Gabe Newell (the CEO of Valve) is worth billions[1], and has been known to respond to emails personally[2].
Story time: in college, I played a lot of the Team Fortress 2 beta. When the release came around, performance tanked. Absolutely went straight to hell. Annoyed, I fired a snippy email off to Gabe. Not impolite, but snippy, something around "I expect performance regressions like this out of companies less awesome than Valve." The next day, a senior engineer at Valve reached out to me, we hopped on Skype, played a few rounds with a bunch of Valve employees, and we monitored my system perf. A few days later, I got an email, "next patch should help you out, let me know if not"--happy as a clam afterwards.
These days I have more than a few beefs with Steam, but that sort of reaction sticks, and generates a lot of goodwill.
About 15 years ago I emailed Gabe Newell about something and got a response. It was just "Thanks, I forwarded this to someone in department x" and then the person in that department helped me but it was still cool to get that single sentence back.
I wrote to the CEO of a company with a market cap of ~6bn (For comparison, WD40 is 1.95bn) about opening an office in a town where I wanted to move (Also his home town), basically so I could work there. And I got a reply within a few hours. It wasn't a crazy big reply but it was still personal.
I think what really hit it in my case was the fact the town in question was his home town, so it was personal to him. We don't know what was in the letters that were sent to these other companies, but they may have hit a chord because they were pet projects of the CEO's, or because they had already invested capital into it and failed and it was already a mark on their resume etc. CEO's are pretty passionate people.
In government, there are constituent management systems that allow staffers to manage correspondence, calendars, etc. Letters get triaged and things of interest either due to subject matter, the person writing it, etc move up the food chain. Depending on the principal, they see a few dozen per week.
These systems also allow for tagging of people too. Crazy people, various group affiliation (union, conservative, pro-x, anti-y), VIP status, etc. They also queue up personalized responses to specific issues to be timed with events, press hits, etc.
Many high level people really enjoy hearing from real people.
I once wrote letter to Decathlon, the largest sporting goods retailer.
I complained about store and lack of empathy at stores. Next day I received call from store manager. Who offered me a 100$ gift voucher if i return to the store :)
I didn't write a letter but I did write emails to executives at Blackberry and Nikon. I felt I had strategies that could help them. I never got a response. So I'm wondering what it is this guy is doing that is promoting a response. Maybe it is just the fact that it's a letter and not an email, or the letters are written by someone in the PR department and not the actual CEO? I would love to reach out to CEOs and have an actual conversation with them even if my ideas are way off the mark.
I think he's made sure to put all the legal safeguards in there; normally companies will throw any idea they get from people right into the trash without paying attention to it, because (and this has happened in the past) if they then run with it, the sender will sue them for stealing their idea without compensation.
I’ve had similar experiences with CEOs of large tech start ups. I’ve learned that when an email is clear and concise, the response rate astonishingly high.
This is awesome. I've written Jeff Bezos dozens of emails, I should write a blog post on it. Most of them complaints that some time get directed to the right forum and a proper response, a few of them praise, and a few of them completely insane or mean that I assume are ignored or caused some secretary to ask for a vacation.
Time is a concept, it's not something we have or lack.
I spent a year working over 4,500 hours and recorded every task down to the hour and still never felt productive. I got a lot done and wrote thousands of lines of code, but it's of no use to anyone now.
I write letters to many different people, none really respond showing me that this is a thoughtful yet ineffective means of reaching out to people nowadays... Interesting thoughts nonetheless
This is some real ball-fondling born-into-privilege nonsense.
I could write to CEOs too, but I wouldn't be so impressed with their boilerplate social interaction, and the predictability of it is why I won't.
The substantive part is that nothing they wrote back to him, and nothing he wrote in this article was substantive aside from a vague claim about how CEOs who respond (with junk) are better CEOs.
i don't agree with your opinion, but don't think you should be silenced for having an opinion
it is always really refreshing to receive a response from anyone that is semi human. i'm in sales, and 99% of my outreach attempts end in silence or rejection
to form a personal connection with someone who is running a multi billion dollar business that could very well go bankrupt if mismanaged, well, its interesting to share ideas with them
I don't think it's a case of being born into privilege. From another blog post on the same site:
"I graduated from college with six figures in debt and no savings or investments. My first job out of college paid $400 per week. I ate dollar-menu fast food every day until I got sick and landed in the hospital. I paid $650 a month to live in a dank basement, ridden with bed bugs, and I slept on a mattress strewn on the floor. I hated my life."
Where's the part about not having a safety net?
Rich, secure people love to tout their riskless efforts as perilous when they did it voluntarily with no potential for long term negative consequence.
Mainly I complained how terrible the store experience was. Whereas Apple stores feel like an avant-garde museum Gamestops feel like the inside of a Chuck E. Cheese circa 1987 -- games everywhere, no real organization, no marketing of individual titles or genres, it's just grabbag nonsense of plastic container after plastic container.
Days after I sent the letter, his secretary called me and scheduled a phone call for the next day.
Paul could not have been nicer. He said he appreciated the criticism and offered to have his district manager tour a location with me so I could share in greater depth my concerns.
I declined (too busy) but was obviously taken aback with his generosity and patience.
Sadly, he passed away in March of this year from brain cancer at the very young age of 53.
He had no real incentive to respond to an angry letter from a random customer, but he went way out of his way to at least listen to me (even if the stores haven't improved much).
R.I.P. Paul.