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An Introduction To The Broken Windows Theory Of Business

When is a dirty bathroom a broken window?

No, that's not

a riddle. It's a question that could today be at the core of a

business's success or failure.

Answer that question

correctly and use that answer as a beacon, and your business

could dominate its competition indefinitely.

Ignore the

solution to the puzzle, and you will be condemning your business

to failure in a very short period of time.

The "broken

windows" theory, first put forth by criminologist James Q.

Wilson and George L. Kelling in a piece called "Broken Windows"

in the Atlantic Monthly magazine in March 1982, explains what a

broken window is in criminal justice terms.

But the

brilliance of that theory goes much further than one

interpretation. It can and should be applied to business, too,

and it can make a critical difference- if American businesses

will simply take the time and have the courage to

notice.

The broken windows theory states that something

as small and innocuous as a broken window does in fact send a

signal to those who pass by every day. If it is left broken, the

owner of the building isn't paying attention or doesn't care.

That means more serious infractions...theft, defacement,

violent crime- might be condoned in this area as well.

At best, it signals that no one is watching.

This is the heart of the broken windows theory: Wilson and

Kelling write that "social psychologists and police officers

tend to agree that if a window in a building is broken and is

left unrepaired, all the rest of the windows will soon be

broken."

Why?

Because the message being sent out

by a broken window- the perception it invites is that the owner

of this building and the people of the community around it don't

care if this window is broken:

They have given up, and

anarchy reigns here.

Do as you will, because nobody

cares.

Wilson and Kelling suggested that a "broken

window"- any small indication that something is amiss and not

being repaired- can lead to much larger problems.

It

sends signals, they said, that the bad guys are in charge here;

no one cares about maintaining some kind of order, and anyone

who wishes to take advantage of that situation would be

unopposed.

I "Just as physicians now recognize the

importance of fostering health rather than simply treating

illness, so the police- and the rest of us- ought to recognize

the importance of maintaining, intact, communities without

broken windows," wrote Wilson and Kelling.

Years later,

Wilson told me that the idea behind the broken windows theory

"had to do with the responsibility of the police to take

seriously small signs of disorder because people were afraid of

disorder, and there was a chance disorder could lead to more

serious crime."

Still, critics of the theory greeted it

with skepticism, believing that attention to small infractions

would necessarily would necessarily decrease the amount of

attention that could be devoted to much more serious

crimes.

The same objection, in slightly less genteel

verbiage, was raised when Rudolph Giuliani, the newly elected

mayor of New York City in 1994, announced his intention to

eliminate graffiti on subway cars and move the hookers and pimps

out of Times Square, to make Manhattan more "family-friendly."

Giuliani and his new police commissioner, William Bratton,

believed that if they sent out clear signals to criminals, and

to New York's citizenry generally, that a "zero tolerance"

policy would be applied to all crime in the city, the result

would be a safer, cleaner city.

And the statistics bore

them out: Over the following years, the numbers of murders,

assaults, robberies, and other violent crimes all went down

dramatically.

And it had all started with graffiti on

subway cars.

I can hear you asking, "What does that have to do with my

business? It's all about crime and criminals."

That same

theory is applicable to the world of business. If the restroom

at the local Burger King is out of toilet paper, it signals that

management isn't paying attention to the needs of its clientele.

That could lead the consumer to conclude that food at this

restaurant might not be prepared adequately, that there might be

health risks in coming here, or that the entire chain of fast

food out outlets simply doesn't care about its

customers.

Given that scenario, it is not a stretch of

the imagination but in fact a point of logic to conclude that

the broken windows theory should be applied to business, as it

was to the problems of crime in urban areas.

Certainly,

the perception of the average consumer is a vital part of every

business, and if a retailer, service provider, or corporation is

sending out signals that its approach is lackadaisical, its

methods halfhearted, and its execution indifferent, the business

in question could suffer severe- and in some cases, irreparable-

losses.

This book is about broken windows in business:

how they happen, why they happen, why they are ignored, and the

fatal consequences that can result from their being allowed to

go unchecked.

It is meant as a cautionary tale, a

primer, a road map, a manifesto, and a salute to those companies

that fix their broken windows promptly.

It will explore

not only specific examples of broken windows, how they occurred,

and what their long-term results were but also the culture that

creates an environment in which windows are broken and left

unfixed.

I believe that small things make a huge

difference in business.

The messy condiment area at a

fast food restaurant may lead consumers to believe the company

as a whole doesn't care about cleanliness, and therefore the

food itself might be in question.

Indifferent help at

the counter in an upscale clothing store-even if just one clerk-

can signal to the consumer that perhaps standards here aren't as

high as they might be (or used to be).

An employee at

the gas station who wears a T-shirt with an offensive slogan can

certainly cause some customers to switch brands of gasoline and

lose an enormous company those customers for life.

But

that's only the tip of the iceberg. I think we as a society have

fostered and encouraged broken windows in our business by

standing by and letting them happen. If the waiter at a local

chain restaurant is impolite, or even merely complacent, about

our order, we chalk it up to a bad day, one employee in one

outlet of a large chain, and we don't send a letter to

management or the corporate level.

Even if we do change

brands of gasoline after seeing an attendant in an offensive

T-shirt, we do not write or e-mail the president of the oil

company to alert him to the problem.

We are enablers to

window breakers in every aspect of every business. We don't even

necessarily patronize those companies that fix their broken

windows, if the less attentive one is in a more convenient

location or has a slightly lower price.

That's not to

say we are all to blame when a company has broken windows and

doesn't fix them, but it does mean we all bear some

responsibility to stand up for what we actually want and have

every right to expect out of a company to which we're giving our

hard-earned money.

In a capitalist society, we can

assume that a company that wants to succeed will do its best to

fulfill the desired of its consuming public.

If the

company sees sales slipping but doesn't have data from consumers

as to what made them decrease their spending on a retail level,

the company will not necessarily know what to fix.

Still, corporations and even small businesses that don't notice

and repair their broken windows should not simply be forgiven

because their consumers didn't make enough of a fuss.

It

is the responsibility of the business to tend to its own house.

The owner of a Starbucks franchise who decides that

revenues are at a healthy level, such that he or she can put off

painting the store for another year, is asking for trouble:

Yes, things are fine now, but when the paint is faded

and peeling and consumers are no longer getting the experience

they've come to expect, it will be too late to fix things with,

literally, a fresh coat of paint.

The time to repair

broken windows is the minute they occur.

It's better,

however, to prevent such smashed panes of glass to begin with.

This book will examine the origins of broken windows

into two purposes in mind. First, we will see how the small

things that can snowball into large problems develop so we can

best illustrate how to repair the damage once it's been done.

But it is equally important to see how these things

happen so that a smart business owner can make sure to prevent

them at- or before- the very first sign of trouble.

If

you have a policy to paint the store every year, you'll never

have to worry about whether this was the year you waited too

long.

In order to best understand how the broken windows

theory relates to business, it's important to examine the

original theory- as it related to criminal activity- in some

detail. Because of the brilliant thinking of Wilson and Kelling,

"Broken Windows" illustrated a serious societal problem that was

going unnoticed, and helped turn around some of the country's

largest cities (including the largest of all) by paying

attention to detail. It began with a program in New Jersey in

the mid 1970s. The Safe and Clean Neighborhoods Program was

meant to improve the quality of life in twenty-eight Garden

State cities, and it was to do so, in part, by increasing the

number of police officers on foot patrol, rather than in patrol

cars. Police chiefs, Wilson says today, felt that such a move

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was not likely to lower crime levels, "and the police chiefs

were right: They didn't have an effect on crime rates. But they

did have an effect- and in my view, a powerful effect- on how

people felt about their communities and their willingness to use

it, suggesting that fear of disorder was as important as fear of

crime."

Indeed, as Wilson and Kelling wrote in the

Atlantic, "residents of the foot-patrolled neighborhoods seemed

to feel more secure than persons in other areas, tended to

believe that crime had been reduced, and seemed to take fewer

steps to protect themselves from crime (staying at home with the

doors locked, for example).

Moreover, citizens in the

foot-patrol areas had a more favorable opinion than did those

living elsewhere."

What does this all mean to

business?

It's not likely that having police officers

walk the aisles of a Wal-Mart store will increase sales. But it

was the perception that something was being done to increase

order that made the difference for the people living in these

New Jersey cities.

In a business (as we'll discuss in detail through out this

book), the broken windows can be literal or metaphorical.

Sometimes a broken window really is a broken window, and

a new pane of glass needs to be installed as quickly as

possible. Most of the time, however, broken windows are the

little details, the tiny flaws, the overlooked minutiae, that

signal much larger problems either already in place or about to

become reality.

We'll examine companies- huge ones,

household names- that have failed to notice and repair their

broken windows and have suffered greatly for it.

We'll

also look at those that have made it a priority to attend to

every potentially broken window and ordered plenty of

replacement panes to make quick, seamless repairs.

The

lessons learned will be many, and varied, and they will have

happy, and not-so-happy endings.

Sometimes companies

that deserve to be rebuked for their laziness will go

unpunished, but other times there will be retribution at the

hands of the public, which shows exactly what happens when you

give people what they don't want.

What the public wants

more than anything else is to feel that the business- retail or

service-oriented, consumer or business-to-business- that work

for them care about what they want.

Consumers are

looking for businesses that anticipate and fulfill their needs

and do so in a way that makes it clear the business understand

the consumer's needs or wants and is doing its best to see them

satisfied.

Broken windows indicate to the consumer that

the business doesn't care- either that it is so poorly run it

can't possibly keep up with its obligations or that it has

become so oversize and arrogant that it no longer cares about

its core consumer. Either of these impressions can be deadly to

a business, and we'll see examples of both as we

proceed.

If you run a business, and you truly believe

that little things don't make a difference, you really should

read this book- it may save your business.

If you don't

run a business but would like to, this can be the road map to

your success. IF you're merely interested in business and wonder

why one succeeds where a very similar one fails, perhaps the

examples contained here might help answer that question for

you.

But it can't be overemphasized that tiny details-

the smaller, the more important- can indeed make a tremendous

difference in a business's success or failure.

Sometimes, yes, a company can make a huge mistake (the

whole New Coke thing was less a broken window than a neutron

bomb placed dead center on corporate headquarters), but often,

even those are foreshadowed by the little things that go, alas,

unnoticed.

A broken window can be a sloppy counter, a

poorly located sale item, a randomly organized menu, or an

employee with a bad attitude.

It can be physical, like a

faded, flaking paint job, or symbolic, like a policy that

requires consumers to pay for customer service.

When the

waiter at a Chinese restaurant is named Billy Bob, that's a

broken window.

When a call for help assembling a bicycle

results in a twenty-minute hold on the phone (playing the same

music over and over), that's a broken window. When a consumer

asks why she can't return her blouse at the counter and it told,

"Because that's the rule," that is a broken window.

They're everywhere.

Except at the really sharp

businesses.

Read on.

About the author:

From Michael Levine's Ground-breaking New Book, Broken Windows,

Broken Business-How The Smallest Remedies Reap The Biggest

Rewards

http://BrokenWindows.com