Close-Up View (Zooming In)

Close-Up View (Zooming In)

President Franklin D. Roosevelt combined summaries of public opinion with detailed reports from people outside his immediate circle. FDR’s family physician, asked to describe the president, said, “He loved to know everything that was going on and delighted to have a finger in every pie.”

Like all presidents, FDR was concerned about the quality of information that reached him, worried that it would be polluted by the agendas of the people passing it along. Hungry for trustworthy data, FDR became the first president to make heavy use of polling to keep tabs on public opinion.

He was also aggressive about developing sources of “ground truth,” cultivating a network of sources outside the federal government, such as businessmen, academics, friends, and relatives. They served as his eyes and ears outside of the bureaucracy. “Go and see what’s happening,” he told one. “See the end product of what we are doing. Talk to people; get the wind in your nose.”

He had an able collaborator in the First Lady, Eleanor Roosevelt, who would often visit projects unannounced so she could avoid “stage-managed” situations. Once on-site, she’d interview the directors and staff and compile detailed reports for FDR. “As the years went by I became a better and better reporter and a better and better observer,” she said, “largely owing to the fact that Franklin’s questions covered such a wide range. I found myself obliged to notice everything.”

FDR was known for cultivating relationships with lower-level staffers, bypassing his own department heads, which made them furious. In his memoirs, FDR’s secretary of the interior, Harold Ickes, complained indignantly about the president’s penchant for calling on members of Ickes’s staff without consulting him first. During the lead-up to World War II, Roosevelt consistently circumvented Secretary of State Cordell Hull, developing a close relationship with his undersecretary Sumner Welles and even hiring his own personal liaison to Winston Churchill, so that he didn’t have to rely exclusively on Secretary Hull’s reports.

One of the White House staffers reflected on Roosevelt’s mastery of the flow of information: “He would call you in and he’d ask you to get the story on some complicated business, and you’d come back after a couple of days of hard labor and present the juicy morsel you’d uncovered under a stone somewhere, only to find out he knew all about it, along with something else you didn’t know.… After he had done this to you once or twice, you got damn careful about your information.”

Much more than prior presidents, Roosevelt used the mail as a strategic source of information. In his fireside chats, he encouraged Americans to send him their views, and they responded: The White House averaged 5,000 to 8,000 pieces of mail per day. If the volume of mail dipped, he groused to his advisers about it. Roosevelt insisted that the mail be analyzed scientifically; he had it sorted by category and by stance, and these statistical breakdowns were delivered to him as “mail briefs.” These briefs summarized the views of people who wrote to the White House. They were not, by themselves, representative estimates of public opinion.

FDR went a step further; he pushed beyond the base rates and reviewed a sample of the actual letters. What the letters added was texture. It’s one thing to know, in statistical terms, how people feel about an issue. But what’s their temperature? Are they concerned, or irritated, or angry, or violently incensed? The numbers can conceal the nuance.

This is why we need to add the “close-up” to our tool kit. Relevant base rates tell us what happened in comparable cases. Close-ups can help us understand how those outcomes arose or why a particular case might differ.

Imagine that you’re craving Mexican food for dinner, so you look on Yelp for a restaurant, and you find a nearby spot that garnered a 3.5-star rating, which is good but not great. Ordinarily you’d hold out for 4 stars, but in this case you decide to read a sample of the reviews, and what you find is that most people rave about the food but there’s a subset of people who are irritated about the high prices. Well, now you’re untroubled, because you’re a high roller! A Mexican-food connoisseur! You have no problem paying a high price for a truly tasty plate of enchiladas. The average rating concealed a distinction that mattered to you: complaints about price differed from complaints about the food.

Anne Mulcahy used a close-up approach during Xerox’s turnaround. When she took the reins in 2001, the company was $19 billion in debt and had almost no cash in the bank. Its stock price had dropped by 90% the year before. On the day Mulcahy was named CEO—as a 45-year-old, little-known executive—investors welcomed her with an additional 15% plunge in the share price. Six years later, Mulcahy had cut the debt in half and made the stock four times more valuable.

One of the many challenges Mulcahy faced was that her executive team had lost touch with the company’s most important customers. In response, she created a program called Focus 500, which was designed to provide a close-up view of Xerox’s customers and their challenges. In the program, Xerox’s top 500 clients were each matched with a top executive. Every senior executive—including the chief accountant and the general counsel—was responsible for working with at least one customer.

In addition, Mulcahy announced that executives, on a rotating basis, would have to serve as the customer officer of the day. The customer officer would have to deal with every customer complaint that came into corporate headquarters that day. Mulcahy said, “It keeps us in touch with the real world. It grounds us. It permeates all of our decision making.”

This program created perhaps the world’s most expensive customer-support department. But it also helped a group of top executives reconnect with the customers who were the lifeblood of the company.

Another variety of close-up involves going to the genba, a Japanese term meaning “the real place” or, more loosely, the place where the action happens. Japanese detectives, for instance, call the crime scene the genba. In a manufacturing firm, the genba would be the factory floor, and for a retailing company it would be the store. Practitioners of Total Quality Management encourage leaders to “go to the genba” to understand problems. If a problem occurs on a factory floor, for example, engineers should go see it firsthand, assessing the situation and talking directly to the people involved. Seeing the work and talking to the people doing it can reveal problems that a report misses.

So engineers diagnosing problems in a factory find it useful to have a close-up view of the relevant process, and Mulcahy found it useful to give her leadership teams a close-up view of how Xerox was treating its customers. A consumer research director at Procter & Gamble (P&G) named Paul Smith used a similar technique to give his colleagues a close-up view of their competitors.

For consumer products, such as paper towels or dishwashing soap or toothpaste, the competition is fierce, dominated by several multinational companies that wrestle one another for market share. The competitors understand one another’s products mind-bogglingly well at a technical level. In the labs at P&G, for instance, here are some of the scientific tests that paper towels are subjected to:

• The Caliper Test: A micrometer presses down on a single sheet to a set pressure and measures its thickness in thousandths of an inch. (thicker = better) • Rate of Absorbency Test: Allow the center of a sheet to touch a pool of water for a fixed amount of time. Measure the rate at which the water is absorbed in grams per second. (faster = better) • The Tensile Strength Test: Put the paper towel in clamps and pull from both ends until it tears; measure how many grams per inch of pressure it takes to rip. (tougher = better)

By conducting these tests in the lab—or, as we call it, the paper-towel torture chamber—the scientists can pinpoint the strengths and weaknesses of competitors’ products.

The precision of these numbers, though, can cloud a real understanding of the products. What do you really understand about your competitor’s paper towel when you know its tensile strength? So Paul Smith decided to arrange a close-up for his colleagues. He began stocking the competitors’ products in their office: paper towels, toilet paper, and facial tissue.

“We collect consumer reactions from thousands of consumers a year, but I wanted the people in my building to have a personal, visceral understanding of how good (or bad) our competitors’ products were,” Smith said. “The typical marketer thinks, ‘I’ve been working here for three years and I think my product is the best thing since sliced bread.’ Well, of course you do, because it’s your product. But if you actually try your competitors’ products yourself, it gives you a different kind of understanding.”

Initially, the presence of the competitors’ products was greeted with all the enthusiasm of Whoppers being served at a McDonald’s company picnic. The competitive chest puffing eventually yielded to another reaction, which Smith characterizes as “Holy crap, my competitors’ products are much better than I thought!”

One brand manager said, “I was really surprised. I liked the other brand a lot more than I thought I would! I didn’t think product performance was an area I needed to worry about much. Now I do.”

Others found that the close-up revealed important competitive advantages. One member of the Bounty team said, “I used the other paper towel to wipe off the sink in the bathroom after I washed my hands, but all it did was push the water around. I had to use two sheets to get the job done quickly.” As a result, the marketer began to brainstorm about ways to highlight Bounty’s advantage in advertisements.

By staging a close-up for his team, Paul Smith helped reveal important nuances that weren’t visible in the numbers.

• • •

When assessing a choice, we may rely too heavily on the details that first caught our attention. Comparing similar cases and examining the situation directly give us ways to test that first impression.

When we zoom out, we compare the experiences of people who faced similar choices. When we zoom in, we look for “color” that helps us interpret the evidence. FDR paired mail summaries with actual letters; Smith’s colleagues paired lab tests with using the products. Neither a vivid story nor an average tells us everything. Ask what each adds, what it leaves out, and whether the two accounts fit together.