At last, I bother readers with the story of the fish in the cowboy hat

Everything I learned about eCommerce I learned from Sesame Street

Hello Gobbledeers,

The Gobbledy crew is on vacation this week, and I debated running a Gobbledy Classic (tm), but I decided instead that I’d use this space to talk about the fish in the cowboy hat.

If we’ve ever worked together, I have talked about the fish in the cowboy hat. And after hearing about the fish in the cowboy hat for the 3rd or 4th time, you’ve likely asked me to stop talking about the fish in the cowboy hat.

Despite the dozens (??) of you who have asked/pleaded/begged me to stop talking about it, I have not stopped talking about it, and now I will inflict this upon you. You are welcome. Also it kinda explains how gobbledy happens.

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The Fish in the Cowboy Hat

Because I am a middle aged (but I look great!) Upper West Sider, I, of course, listen to the Ezra Klein podcast (because all of us Upper West Side guys think we could’ve been Ezra if we had just made some different choices in our lives, but we were never going to make those choices, and now we’re just a bunch of middle aged Upper West Siders listening to Ezra KIein.)

On a recent podcast, Ezra is talking with The Atlantic’s Jerusalem Demsas* about the struggle for blue states to build infrastructure.

(*Jerusalem Demsas is a 20something writer for The Atlantic who used to be with Vox and is an absolute journalistic rock star. She writes quite a bit about housing issues (though also about other stuff), and she’s brilliant and actually I really wish I were her, not Ezra).

As part of that chat, he talked about a bathroom that some community members wanted to build at a park in California. And it turns out that building that bathroom will take several years and cost $1.7 million.

Here’s what Ezra says about the project (apologies for the length, but the length gets at my point):

Why does installing a public restroom cost so much? As the answer unspools, I would not call it an explanation, but a description of process:

Construction costs are very high in San Francisco, and you have to pay a higher wage for work being done in the city. And there are like 7 or 8 or 9 different agencies that need to sign off on this.

And it has to go through a design review.

And then we have to do a feedback meeting with the local community to make sure they like the design. And then a million things pile on from that.

You can pass laws to make this move faster, but do you really want to exempt installing a toilet from passing an environmental review?

When you follow the line of trying to build things, you end up seeing a process that doesn’t seem to make anybody happy. And yet at no point did this end with them reforming the process.

And probably if you asked the people who complained about the cost and time to build the bathroom: “Do you want there to be a rule in the city that the city has to have a public notice when it’s going to do development, they would say ‘yes.’”

So that’s a little story I wanted to share: A bathroom costs $1.7 million and several years and everyone thinks that’s stupid, but everyone also thinks that every step of the way makes total sense.

Of course you want public input. Of course you want workers to be paid well. Of course you want an environmental review of a new sewer in a park.

Every step is smart, but the outcome is dumb.

This situation may sound familiar to you, but there is no term for it.

Well, there was no term for it until I started calling it the Fish in the Cowboy Hat.

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Here’s Why It’s the Fish in the Cowboy Hat

You should watch this video and then come back to this newsletter. (My apologies, there’s no YouTube link and that DailyMotion (??) link won’t embed.

For some reason I blame these 2 both for the inability of blue states to build needed infrastructure, and also for poorly written homepages.

Yes, that’s Bert and Ernie discussing why there is a goldfish swimming in Bert’s cowboy hat. If you didn’t watch the video (I know you didn’t), here’s the transcript:

(Ernie is trying to put a pot on Bert’s head.)

Bert: Why should I put that pot on my head?

Ernie: I’ll tell you Bert, a little while ago I accidentally broke the cookie jar.

Bert: Oh Ernie, you didn’t.  Well alright, you broke the cookie jar.  What does it have to do with that pot there?

Ernie: Well I had to put the cookie somewhere.  I broke the cookie jar so I had to put the cookie into the sugar bowl.

Bert: But if you put the cookies in the sugar bowl, where did you put the sugar?

Ernie: Well, I put the sugar into the flower pot.

Bert: Oh great, where did you put the flower that was growing there?

Ernie: I had to plant the flower there in this milk bottle.  Nicely planted, I watered it and everything.

Bert: (Increasingly exasperated) Now where is the milk?

Ernie: I’ll show you, Bert. I put the milk in the soda bottle.

Bert: I’m trying to be patient, but where is the soda?

Ernie: It wasn’t easy, but I put the soda in the fish bowl.

Bert: This is crazy! Where is the fish?

Ernie: I put the fish into the cowboy hat.

Bert: Ernie! Ernie!  That is MY cowboy hat.

Ernie: So?

Bert: You put the fish in it.  What will I wear when I want to play cowboy?

(Ernie puts the original pot on Bert’s head) Ernie: Ride ‘em cowboy!

I used to have conversations like this over and over when I was working in eCommerce at Tommy Hilfiger.

Me: Why does it take 4 weeks to get a product live on the site?

Person: Well, when it gets received at the distribution center, they have to check each item against the manifest. And if the item isn’t on the manifest, they have to call the shipper, and if the shipper isn’t available on the phone, it takes 48 hours to get a call, and if they have to add an item that isn’t in the manifest, they have to call the developer to add it to Websphere, and if you manually add it to Websphere, it needs to be added by a project manager, and our project manager only works 20 hours a week to save costs, so when she adds it to the project, that can take 48 hours, and then it’s added to the developer queue and it can’t really be sped up because we limited the number of developer hours to save costs, and if we skip that project ahead in the queue, then the promo won’t go live on time and there’s revenue associated with that, so we don’t want to bump it off, so it’ll just have to wait, and once the product is uploaded it needs to be QA’d, but the QA team is also smaller than we need because we’re trying to save costs, so it’ll go in their queue….etc….

We would have conversations like that all the time. “Why is such and such like that?” And then there would be 11 different reasons, all of which were reasonable, that led to an outcome that was completely unreasonable.

Sometimes when you’re not happy with the outcomes of a project, you can do a little root cause analysis, and you can fix that root cause - ah, we need to hire another person in the warehouse! (or whatever).

But sometimes the root cause is 11 different root causes, all of which aren’t a problem at all - in fact, all of which are actually the right answer to the issue you’re facing at that exact step in the process. But the outcome is ridiculous - it would be 1 month to get a product live, or it could be that a toilet costs $1.7 million and takes 2 years.

These are both a fish in a cowboy hat.

Or if you work in software marketing: Why does the homepage have gobbledy on it? Because everyone agrees you should get input from the product team, because they know the product. And from the sales team, because they’re having conversations with prospects (allegedly) every day. And of course from customer success, because they’re talking with people who actually use the product. And of course that guy (natch) on the Board who sold a company and made a zillion dollars, so obviously he knows what should be on the homepage. And we once sold to a company based in Zambia, so we should mention that we’re international, and we should mention that non-profits love us, and we should mention that every size team at every type of company buys from us, etc etc etc.

Every individual part of that is reasonable. And yet the outcome is unreasonable. A fish in a cowboy hat.

I don’t have a profound answer to a fish in a cowboy hat problem. I thought my first book would be called “The Fish in the Cowboy Hat” and be all about how to handle these. Except I never really had an answer, and now I care more about gobbledy than about fish in cowboy hats.

But on my vacation week I wanted to make sure - sorry Tanisha and Alex and all the others who have asked me to stop saying “fish in the cowboy hat” - you also know about a fish in a cowboy hat, and you start annoying your coworkers with it.

And if you have any ideas about how to solve these types of problems, I’d love to hear it.

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I really, really enjoy chatting with readers, which is why I include a link to sign up for a 25 minute chat: Here’s my Calendly link. How do these usually go? We’ll spend 5 minutes BS’ing, then 20 minutes going through your site and you’ll get some ideas about how to make it better. I will also always gladly talk about fish in a cowboy hat problems. Why wouldn’t you sign up for that?

And lastly, I’ve been doing a bunch of workshops around messaging, and the outcome is that your homepage will be SO much clearer. They’re 2 days. In person is best. If you want your homepage to be clearer, we should chat. You can reply to this newsletter, use that Calendly link, or email me at jared@sagelett.com. Same email if you want to advertise to several thousand marketers through Gobbledy newsletter.