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Bill Bartmann, CEO of debt collection company CFS2, does things a little differently. Instead of just calling, hounding, and suing debtors to pay what they owe, he calls them "customers" and provides them with free job-search services, such as resume help and interview prep. Perhaps the reason Bartmann runs his company differently is because he himself has never shied away from living life differently . A high school dropout who later put himself through college working at a hog slaughterhouse, he found himself $1 million in debt himself after his first business collapsed. He clawed his way back up by building CFS, the subject of this HBS case study — but then, that too, imploded . Now he's back (again), and doing things differently (again). What follows are edited excerpts of our conversation. What's it like running a debt collection company that's so different from the rest of the industry? It's a little bit like telling everyone that the world...

I came across this article which I think is really relevant to any business that has accumulated stockpiles of data about clients, and its operations. What to do with this and how it can be put to good use to identify opportunities. Below are the key points of the interview  Big data and analytics actually have been receiving attention for a few years, but the reason is changing. A few years ago, I thought the question was “ We have all this data. Surely there’s something we can do with it.” Now the question is “I see my competitors exploiting this and I feel I’m getting behind.” And in fact, the people who say this are right.   I get asked, “Who’s big data for?” And my answer is it’s for just about everybody. There are going to be data-based companies: Amazon, Google, Bloomberg. They’re great companies, and they have a lot of opportunity. But just because you’re not going to be a data company doesn’t mean you can’t exploit data analytics...

Why don't more project managers sound an alarm when they're going to blow past their deadlines? Because most of them have no earthly idea when they'll finish the job. They don't even think it's possible to know. Too many variables. Too much that's out of their control. That's the dirty little secret of project management. As the lead developer on one big software project put it: "Everybody knows the schedule is a joke, and we pay no attention to it. It will be done when it's done." It's funny, though. Big, successful companies that manage huge projects like highways and dams and office parks have to deal with many more variables than a software development team. Yet they usually know how far along they are at any given time, and they keep their customers in the loop. That's how they get to be big, successful companies. Granted, they have fancy project management software to help them stay on top of the sc...

Which is more effective in improving team performance: using positive feedback to let people know when they're doing well, or offering constructive comments to help them when they're off track? New research suggests that this is a trick question. The answer, as one might intuitively expect, is that both are important. But the real question is — in what proportion? The research , conducted by academic Emily Heaphy and consultant Marcial Losada, examined the effectiveness of 60 strategic-business-unit leadership teams at a large information-processing company. "Effectiveness" was measured according to financial performance, customer satisfaction ratings, and 360-degree feedback ratings of the team members. The factor that made the greatest difference between the most and least successful teams, Heaphy and Losada found, was the ratio of positive comments ("I agree with that," for instance, or "That's a terrific idea") to negative com...

How many views make a YouTube video a success? How about 1.5 million? That's how many views a video our organization, DoSomething.org, posted in 2011 got. It featured some well-known YouTube celebrities, who asked young people to donate their used sports equipment to youth in need. It was twice as popular as any video Dosomething.org had posted to date. Success! Then came the data report: only eight viewers had signed up to donate equipment, and zero actually donated. Zero donations. From 1.5 million views. Suddenly, it was clear that for DoSomething.org, views did not equal success. In terms of donations, the video was a complete failure. What happened? We were concerned with the wrong metric. A metric contains a single type of data, e.g., video views or equipment donations. A successful organization can only measure so many things well and what it measures ties to its definition of success. For DoSomething.org, that's social change. In the case above, success mean...

It’s dangerous to rely on your job description to tell you what to do, or to wait for your manager to fine-tune your job. It’s much safer, valuable, and satisfying to do it yourself. Here's how. Your job description gets stale the moment when it is first given to you. Then you need figure out how to evolve it. As we come up on the end of the year, it is a great time to evaluate your role, your company, and the market relative to your job description and your career. Don’t give this extra work of figuring out how your job needs to evolve to your boss or wait for direction. That is both a danger and a missed opportunity to stand out and contribute more value. Sort it out on your own and make a recommendation. I have collected some questions that will help you figure out how to evolve your job over time to make sure you are staying relevant and adding enough value to the business. 1. Who uses my work and what do they need most? Who are the consumers of each piece of work tha...

An audience can't listen to your presentation and read detailed, text-heavy slides at the same time (not without missing key parts of your message, anyway). So make sure your slides pass what I call the glance test: People should be able to comprehend each one in about three seconds. Think of your slides as billboards. When people drive, they only briefly take their eyes off their main focus — the road — to process billboard information. Similarly, your audience should focus intently on what you're saying, looking only briefly at your slides when you display them. Keep It Simple Research shows that people learn more effectively from multimedia messages when they're stripped of extraneous words, graphics, animation, and sounds. Lots of extras actually take away meaning because they become a distraction. They overtax the audience's cognitive resources. So when adding elements to your slides, have a good reason: Does the audience need to see your logo on each sli...

Jane wants to buy a TV and starts her shopping journey with a Google search. She finds an electronics review site, clicks on a banner ad, reads about the product details, and decides to go into the store to see the model. She speaks with a sales associate and posts a picture of the TV on Facebook for her friends' feedback. She also uses her smartphone to do a quick price comparison, and scans the QR code to get additional product information. Welcome to problem #1 for retailers: The company knows that a potential customer has interacted with it across a lot of touch points but it has no idea that all these interactions are with Jane. It can track each of these interactions across touchpoints, but doesn't know how to tie them to an individual customer. Since each touchpoint yields a particular piece of data, this becomes a complex data management challenge. Retailers are desperate to unlock this intelligence so they can make more personalized offers. Research shows that pe...

Single-question customer metrics have become very popular. Companies all have their favorites. Some go for the traditional Customer Satisfaction measure, others the now famous Net Promoter Score. The most recent addition to this panoply is the increasingly popular Customer Effort Score , which tracks the amount of time and effort that customers have to put into solving after-sales problems. Each claims to be the one metric that managers need to measure, monitor, and act on, because it promises a better correlation with business performance than any other existing measure. So which of these is actually the best? A lot depends on what you measure performance with. In making the case for their Customer Effort Score, Matthew Dixon, Karen Freeman, and Nicholas Toman correlated the three measures with levels of customer repurchase and overall levels of spending. The results are shown on the graphic in figure (1) below. But the picture is rather different if you correlate t...

There is a common myth about product development: the more features we put into a product, the more customers will like it. Product-development teams seem to believe that adding features creates value for customers and subtracting them destroys it. This attitude explains why products are so complicated: Remote controls seem impossible to use, computers take hours to set up, cars have so many switches and knobs that they resemble airplane cockpits, and even the humble toaster now comes with a manual and LCD displays. Companies that challenge the belief that more is better create products that are elegant in their simplicity. Bang & Olufsen , the Danish manufacturer of audio products, televisions, and telephones, understands that customers don't necessarily want to fiddle with the equalizer, balance, and other controls to find the optimum combination of settings for listening to music. Its high-end speakers automatically make the adjustments needed to reproduce a song with...