How will Sun bounce back?

Sun's pumped out some exciting news lately... Project Blackbox is the coolest thing ever, their financial picture continues to improve (less loss is the new profit), and they finally FINALLY open-sourced Java. The new(ish) CEO Jonathan Schwartz is making good things happen at the top. But if Sun is really going to pull this off, they need more than strategic decisions, hot products, and new technologies. Focusing on the top of the org chart won't work unless the bottom gets just as much attention. Maybe more.

Why is it that so often the employees who have the most direct human-to-human customer contact are the ones who get the least respect? Customer service is managed by someone, but you rarely catch a manager answering a customer call. Customer education is managed by someone, but you won't catch a manager training a customer. This doesn't apply particularly to Sun of course--I'm just picking on them because I was--and still am--a small part of that story. And given that Sun is overall a great place to work, whatever problems I see there are likely to be much worse elsewhere.

In the Good Days, most tech employees were treated like the scarce and precious resource we were. Most of us knew it wouldn't last, and once the bubble burst we didn't expect things to stay the same. It was a tough time. But here's where it gets both weird and wrong, because after the bubble burst, we were still the same people who were there when Sun was kicking ass. We were still the same people who were so highly valued just a few month's before. Yet as things began to slide, and the layoffs began, we were magically transformed into people who were just "lucky to have a job and better shut up with the complaints" (one of my manager's exact words) This isn't about layoffs--they were necessary (and in Sun's case, still are). This is about how a company treats the ones who weren't laid off.

I was at Sun last week--in the Colorado flagship customer training facility--and noticed the "Employee of the Quarter" plaque still on the wall in the main lobby. I saw that there had been no new "awards" since 2002. What message does this send to employees? What message does this send to customers? More importantly, what impact does it have on customers when the employees who interact with them are no longer as highly valued as they once were? Actually, it's worse than that--in so many tech companies including Sun, many of the employees who interact with customers have been outsourced. (Sun now outsources most of its customer education)

Most companies don't outsource things they need to win a customer, but they have no problem outsourcing things the customer needs to use the product. Technical support. Training. Customer support. Most companies keep sales in-house but then have someone with no passion for the company's products--help the customer actually use the thing. (Just one more example of the huge gap between how we treat customers before vs. after the sale.)

If we want customer evangelists, we better start with employee evangelists. Having killer technology and a great team at the top is not enough if the employees--people--who have the greatest impact on whether the customer kicks ass aren't valued as highly as those who have the greatest impact on acquiring a customer. It's not about an "Employee of the Quarter" Office-Space/Dilbertish reward system... it's about saying to employees, "We need you. You are the people who can make our customers succeed or fail with our products." Customers could not care less about the middle and upper management of a company. They care about the guy who answered the phone. They care about the guy who configured their servers. They care about the guy who taught them to make Java sing.

Think hard about how you treat the people who touch what should be the company's most valued asset--the existing customers. In my perfect world, we treat existing customer/users with great care, and we treat the people who interact with them with even greater care. If a company like Sun and so many others wants to bounce back, they should put just as much energy into the bottom of the org chart as they do at the top.

[Personal update: my back is much better, I'm still on pain-killers--but much less now. I'm planning to start real work again Monday. So, if you're still waiting for email or a call... hopefully tomorrow!]