To cut costs and boost profits, organisations must really consider the half-baked business model.
This bleeding edge approach first stormed into consumer consciousness when half baked bread rolls appeared in the supermarket.
The idea was simple. To save time and power, the bakers baked the rolls for half of the normal time. Then these discerning dough makers stuffed them into a packet with instructions for the consumer on how to finish the process at their own expense and time.
What a great business breakthrough! It cut costs and personally involved the consumers in the product creation process. As a result, the buyers blamed themselves when the final product was hard as a brick or chewy like a dog’s rubber bone. The shoppers took responsibility for any product problems because after all, the bread rolls, like their own children, were partly their own creations – they half-baked them.
Not all food products can be treated this way though. Half-baked chickens create more problems (and law suits) than they are worth. However I think half-baked beans have some potential for health conscious customers looking for a strength building bowel workout.
Banks and investment companies love the half-baked business model. Half-baked investment works like this. Firstly get the customers online so that they have to choose their own financial options no matter how complex the choices and catastrophic the implications of a wrong choice. Cut costs by providing no advice and let the clients take all the risks. Then provide so called support through an offshore call centre which is only available from midnight to 5 a.m. local time. Finally, ensure that the exploited call centre staff are untrained in the products and have only have rudimentary language skills in the client’s national language. This half-baked customer support will guarantee that pesky customer calls are cut off through frustration and problem-solving costs are slashed.
Flat pack furniture is another brilliant half-baked invention. The idea is to supply all the parts but leave it to the customer to do all the hard work of assembling them into a complete product, armed only with an Allen key and some cryptic instructions. These instructions contain no words, just diagrams with numbers and arrows, and a click icon to indicate if clicking is required. This non-literate method ensures that the non-literate consumer is not discriminated against and the literate customer is left puzzled and irritated. If the do it yourself factory assemblers / customers have problems with carrying out their part of the half-baked bargain, the company then offers a full assembly service at twice the original cost of the table, wardrobe or bookshelf. Truly half-baked self-assembly items are carefully designed so that some bolt holes can never line up and some screws are never long enough to actually join the parts together. Complaints to the customer service department will usually be answered with the response “You are the first person to ever complain about that issue”. This will cause the buyer to feel foolishly incompetent and willing to pay anything to solve the problem- another advantage of half-baked business processes.
Years ago TV’s Mr Bean pioneered half-baked dentistry in his famous episode “The trouble with Mr Bean”. I believe the time has now come to expand on his ingenuity. Medical costs could be slashed if hospitals offered half-baked options: half trained surgeons, a half dose of anaesthetic or a half price option allowing family members or friends to stitch up your surgical incisions.
How about half-baked university degrees for candidates who complete only half the exams, assignments and lab sessions? Saying you have a B.A.(H-B) degree still sounds impressive.
I would be interested to go to a half-baked rock concert where the band cut out half the instruments, leaving say the singer and bass player to carry the show with the help of air guitar players and air drummers from the audience to fill in the gaps.
Despite my enthusiasm for the half-baked service model, I have to admit that there are limitations. Municipal authorities have been working hard to implement half-baked ideas, but are encountering significant structural barriers. We recently had a stormwater drain pipe problem caused by an ageing pipe that carried stormwater from our property, past a tree, into the street gutter. It was all of two metres long. The first stage of the solution by the local authority was to dig up and remove the problem drainpipe and fill in the trench with gravel. This was a classic half-baked solution. The customer service staff told us that if the pipe was a problem and the pipe was now gone then surely we could see that the problem was gone. But another pesky problem immediately raised its ugly wet head. The stormwater now gushed up out of the gravel and flooded the footpath. A half-baked solution is still a solution isn’t it? No, sometimes it isn’t. However to their credit the municipal authority eventually provided a fully baked solution involving an arborist, a tree root barrier, a concrete cutting team, a pipe laying team, a concrete paving contractor, safety barriers and a site inspector. In fact it could be considered an over baked solution given that the end result was the replacement of two metres of plastic stormwater pipe. Nevertheless they did a very thorough job, for which we are grateful if exhausted by the process.
Now consider how the half-baked approach applies to creative writing. For the writer there is always the problem of how to finish the half baked…
