The Kaizen Business

Update: There is quite the flame war going on over at the CDBaby forum… Here is the URL:

http://cdbaby.org/stories/07/09/14/3164901.html

If you aren’t already familiar with the prelude to this entry; during the month of August the CD distrubition website CDBaby.com ran a contest for who could sell the most CDs. Internet business maven James Brausch distributes his Time Life Management 101 audio disc via CDBaby and made a point of winning the contest.

Here are the URLs covering the whole situation:

http://www.jamesbrausch.com/?p=774
http://www.jamesbrausch.com/?p=765
http://www.jamesbrausch.com/?p=762
http://www.jamesbrausch.com/?p=756
http://www.jamesbrausch.com/?p=720

Anyhow, there have been instances where it appears CDBaby attempted to rig the contest by not allowing customers to order the Life Management CD while they would accept orders for other products and by not publishing the contest sales results, according to James there is a serious lack of communication from the CDBaby support people. Recently for some odd reason they have also removed the post on their website announcing the contest.

Now let’s talk about vendor relationships in 21st century business that is conducted online and off. First of all adversarial relationships between a customer and a supplier are definitely a relic of the past; you just can’t dicker around or treat the other party like crap causing them headaches and except to come out unscathed or not get screwed when you least need it.

When you cooperate, when you create a partnership with your suppliers and customers you will have shared success… in this case CDBaby has way more to gain by working with big time movers and shakers like James than by pulling an ostrich maneuver and claiming incompetence. I can tell you that if someone moved over one thousand of my products in a month I would treat them like gold. Perhaps a thousand CDs isn’t a lot at CDBaby, but being no Amazon.com I would doubt it.

So what’s my take? At this point it seems rather compelling something is awry at CDBaby and posting canned responses on blogs claiming stupidity gets you so far but it doesn’t fix the problem. What are you doing with your processes to ensure this type of issue won’t happen again? Have you even done some sort of analysis to discover and correct the root cause or opted instead to play the blame game and nail an employee to the wall (blame is so typical old school business). Let me give CDBaby some advice from a lean business and kaizen perspective; if in fact this wasn’t an act of malice then this whole mess is a failure in your business processes (or lack of) and not the people performing them.

As far as James goes; if these guys aren’t willing to communicate or become open and responsive and work better with you so you can develop a win-win relationship that’s ultimately going to benefit both parties while delivering more value to your customers (customers trying to place orders and getting the out of stock message is the perfect example of not delivering value) then it’s best to find a vendor who will… that’s what I would do.

Clearly by now all the negative publicity floating around the ‘net is starting to become a black eye for CDBaby and you can be certain that other business people like James are taking note to not do business with them.