Who Broke That Window?!

What goes through your mind when you notice something, well, a little icky about a place of business? You know, the used Kleenex in the seat pocket before you on that flight that's about to take off? Or what about your favorite table at Starbucks that's covered in muffin crumbs and haphazard puddles of someone else's coffee? In some ways, these small messes by themselves are no big deal (well, most of the time), but it's when our imaginations take over and start filling in the possibilities. What if the bathrooms on the plane are a mess, too? And, horror of horrors, what if the milk on the other side of the counter at the café is sour? I've always thought that everyone is creative and this is one of those instances during which our creativity can go wild much to a business's dismay.
This is, in part, what is at the crux of a super clever book called Broken Windows, Broken Business: How the Smallest Remedies Reap the Biggest Rewards by Michael Levine (no relation). Levine deftly brings a theory first introduced by criminologists James Q. Wilson and George L. Kelling in an Atlantic Monthly article published in March 1982. Levine writes, "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 areas as well. At best, it signals that no one is watching." Levine took this theory and smartly applied it to business. He goes on to say that "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." Rudolph Giuliani's plan to eliminate graffiti on subway cars in New York City is another good example of how cleaning up a small act can help change perceptions and send out a clear message: New York City was not going to tolerate crime. As Levine tells us, "Guiliani 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 yew years, the numbers of murders, assaults, robberies, and other violent crime all went down dramatically. And it had all started with graffiti on subways."
So what does this have to do with business? Clearly, perceptions are incredibly powerful and businesses have a short time in which to influence those perceptions. What's phenomenal (and stunning, too) is how quickly we tend to jump to certain conclusions about how businesses operate. Yet to ignore that fact is to do so at a company's own peril.
Next time: more specifics about the broken windows closer to home, in your own backyard, and otherwise within your midst.