Today’s interview is with Gerry McGovern who is the founder and CEO of Customer Carewords and the author of six books on all things digital, content, transformation and online customer experience. He has just published a new book called: World Wide Waste and joins me today to talk about the book, how it came about, what we can learn from it and why it matters.

This interview follows on from my recent interview – Scaling customer support and maintaining employee and customer satisfaction even through a pandemic – Interview with Nick Misewicz of Pura Vida Bracelets – and is number 345 in the series of interviews with authors and business leaders that are doing great things, providing valuable insights, helping businesses innovate and delivering great service and experience to both their customers and their employees.

NOTE: A big thank you goes out to the folks at Pega for sponsoring my podcast this month.

While PegaWorld iNspire, the annual conference from Pegasystems took place earlier this month (June 2nd) you can still view the sessions on-demand so do head over to www.pegaworld.com to check them out.

Here’s the highlights of my chat with Gerry:

• Gerry has just published a book called World Wide Waste.
• Digital is physical.
• Digital is energy.
• Digital is not green.
• The quantity of e-waste that’s created every year is equivalent to something like fifty million tonnes of CO2, which is the same as the weight of all commercial aircraft ever built.
• Up to 90% of digital data is not used. What sort of society accepts 90% waste?
• Digital is not just data and ones and zeros. It’s also old phones, old computers, old servers and old electronics.
• We have created more data in the last two years than in all of previous history.
• A huge amount of the data that we collect and store is crap and is not used.
• When we start to think about things systemically and the impact that we have on the planet, we also need to add in a digital dimension.
• However, we don’t care about how much data we store, where we store it and the impact it has because it’s cheap.
• Many systems are designed not to delete files and that is part of the problem.
• The biggest productivity improvement that any organisation can make is to cut the crap.
• We did a massive cull of eighty percent of the crap data that was on the Intranet of one organisation and productivity blossomed.
• Of all the people and organisations that we have worked with across the years, our success was founded not on new systems but actually just by deleting and training people not to create waste. For example, reducing an intranet contributor team from six hundred part time contributors to ten full time people.
• What to do: Scale back the junk creation and focus more on quality. Do less but do it better.
• This is also an organisational problem.
• A lot of organisations have become producers of information rather than producers of value and deliverers of services.
• In hierarchical organisations, there are layers of management whose job it is is to create information to prove they have a role and that they are of value to the organisation.
• Their behaviour suggests that they are more focused on the legitimization of their position rather than the delivery of value.
• If you focus on the right sort of outcomes and minimise control and the measurement thereof then you’re not going to go far wrong.
• Bitcoin and Cryptocurrencies…..like so much else in technology are designed from a waste mindset.
• Most of the pollution is caused in the creation of the digital products. Seventy eighty percent of the pollution is caused by the manufacturer of handsets, by the creation of actual servers etc.
• We’ve got this huge hidden pollution problem going on in the background.
• You’ve got a product where most of the pollution is it in its production. And, then you give that product a very short life cycle. That is a perfect storm of pollution.
• The greater the distance, the more the energy consumed. E.g. Saving a document to the cloud versus saving a document to your hard disc could consume up to three thousand times more energy.
• We need to be more conscious about what we do and how we do it, but also much, much more forensic about the the consequences of what we do in terms of waste.
• Every day. Ask yourself this question: What am I going to take away today? What am I going to get rid of today? It can be small or it can be big. But, get rid of something every day.
• Jerry’s Punk CX words: Anti authority, Challenging, DIY, getting straight to the results, No bullshit.
• Jerry’s Punk CX brand: 37 Signals.

About Gerry

Gerry McGovern is the founder and CEO of Customer Carewords and helps large organizations deliver a better digital customer experience. His commercial clients include Microsoft, Dropbox, Cisco, NetApp, VMware, and IBM. He has also consulted with the US, UK, EU, Dutch, Canadian, Norwegian, and Irish governments.

Gerry has developed a research and management model to help large organizations improve customer experience through identifying and optimizing customer top tasks. It’s called Top Tasks Management. A highly-regarded speaker, he has spoken on digital customer experience in 35 countries.

He has written six books on digital customer experience. His previous book is called Transform: A Rebel’s Guide for Digital Transformation. It shows that digital transformation is far more about culture change than technology change. The Irish Times described Gerry as one of five visionaries who has had a major impact on the development of the Web.

Check out Gerry’s website, the Customer Carewords site, Gerry’s previous books and his latest book: World Wide Waste.

Finally, do connect with Gerry on LinkedIn here and say Hi to him on Twitter @gerrymcgovern.

Image by Gerd Altmann from Pixabay