Business partners and a FREE Zappos Gift
T0day, I was fortunate enough to get to speak to an audience regarding co-branding and business partnerships! To draw out core concepts, I asked the group the following questions and thought they might help you consider your essentials of partnering: In your personal life or in business, where have you accomplished more because you partnered…
Wounded but Alive – Surviving Zappos Fun Experiences
I was at Zappos HQ today delivering an advance copy of The Zappos Experience book to Tony Hsieh and colleagues (the book will hit bookstores by Oct 15th). Honestly, I was minding my own business when I became a casualty of an errant foam dart flying across the Zappos Insights work area. You have to…
Give Them the Water
I was satisfied by my old dry cleaner but circumstances prompted a change, so I was in the market for a new one. I stopped at several local businesses but most did not accept my preferred form of payment. Finally, a dry cleaner that accepts American Express — but how will the rest of the…
Tell me a Story – Amplify and Humanize
I will make a bold assertion. To be an effective leader YOU MUST be a consummate story teller. The art of inspiring people to engage in consistently extraordinary service behaviors begins and ends with stories. While I can teach many transactional skills, amazing service is not a paint by numbers enterprise. It takes impassioned, other-focused…
Why your staff won’t think or act!
Ok, I know the blog title is harsh but today I observed a defining moment in staff disempowerment. I was in an airport (which shall remain nameless) watching a staff member at a food cart take complaint after complaint about a non-functional coffee vending machine by their cart. Each time the employee told the customers…
Who’s in Charge? The Customer or You
I see it all too often but today the confrontation was epic! Let me set the stage in my best boxing ring announcer voice…. “In the red corner, a loud, brash, entitled customer and in the blue corner a poorly selected and ill-trained staff…..” Cesar Ritz, the founder of the Ritz-Carlton Hotel Company, iscredited with…
Lessons from the Road
I have been traveling and consulting a great deal lately and each day serves as an amazing learning lab. Here are some random lessons from my journeys, which I hope will relate to your business: 1) A man in a coffee shop started talking to me about a concept he called “otherness.”. This made me…
Building the road with hope and positivity
Half full or Half Empty? A new Gallup poll suggests optimists outnumber pessimists 2 to 1 – at least when it comes to expectations for the US economy in 2011. Given that data, I have a series of questions for you and your company: Do you share optimism for 2011? If so, how are you…
An honest letter from YOUR customer. Do you dare read it?
I KNOW that my brain works in strange ways. But for some reason, I started thinking about what a customer would say to owners and leaders about their honest wants, needs, and desires if they wrote them in a compact letter. Here’s my take…. Dear Business Owner/Leader: Please do what you say you will and…
AT&T vs Verizon – A seriously improved customer experience?
Much will be written about the battle of the titans – AT&T vs. Verizon! Thanks, of course, to AT&T’s lost monopoly on the Iphone. AT&T will argue they have a “faster” customer experience and Verizon will suggest they are more “reliable.” In the end, prices should come down on Iphone data plans and features…
FREE RESOURCES
The Starbucks Experience: Leadership Tips eBook
Elevating Care in Healthcare: Lessons from the UCLA Health System eBook
