What Spammers and Scammers Can Teach You About Lean

Every morning, as I clean out the assortment of spam, scams, and general junk mail from my inbox, it strikes me that the senders seem to have a fairly strong understanding of Lean principles.

Don’t mistake that comment for me saying that I approve in any way of what they do, or that they are in any way principled. I just mean that they are following some of the same concepts that I teach when trying to improve legitimate processes.

1. Spammers are flexible. They know what the current issues are, and they can quickly get their fake messages out. Lately, I have been receiving an Intuit email scam about my tax information being incorrect, and started getting job postings “that I may be qualified for” in recent days. They are able to quickly change their bait to match the needs of the day. It is only a matter of time before the “Help Syria” scams start. Similarly, Lean organizations must be flexible enough to change products in a fluid marketplace.
2. Scammers know human behavior. They know what makes people tick. The messages that get responses strike a chord with people. Obviously, the messages they send won’t hook everyone, but they don’t have the luxury a boss does of knowing her employees. But since leaders do know their workers, they can link their messages and incentives to the personal motivation of the members of their team.
3. Scammers improve incessantly. The grammar in junk mail seems to have improved considerably over the years. Still not great, but better. And recently, I heard about ‘pass-through’ websites. If they manage to sneak a password from you, they actually pull your real info off the real site so that you think it is real. But they scrub out the fraudulent transactions they are making. So the account looks clean. (By the way, those aren’t the “three reals” I advocate.) When something doesn’t work well, it costs scammers money. When your processes are poor, people get frustrated, waste is high, and profit is low.
4. Scammers break convention. Scammers don’t follow generally accepted ideas. In their case, it is the laws of the land that they disregard, which obviously, I don’t advocate. But I do suggest that you cast aside conventional wisdom. Some if it is founded in facts and data, but much is based on tradition or outdated assumptions. Challenge, challenge, challenge.
5. Spammers reinforce success. Spammers find something that works, and then pour their resources into it. Most people focus their energy on fixing the failures. That’s not to say you should let problems go, but you should add weight to the ones in areas where you are doing well. Your reputation is built on what you are good at, not what you are trying to fix.