Tag Archives: Company

Service By Design

I’ve gone on at some length in this space about customer service and those companies that do it badly.  Today, I’d like to write about one that does it well and explain why I feel that way.  It’s nice to applaud rather than boo for a change!

I go on a golf trip each year.   I’ve also written about that band of brothers before but I don’t think I mentioned that one thing each guy brings is a gift for the others.  Generally these are relatively inexpensive – golf balls, pen knives – that sort of thing.  I think the biggest thing ever given to the rest of us was a cruise on the Inter-coastal Waterway one afternoon.  My contribution for the last few years has been a commemorative T-shirt of some sort.  I get them from a company named DesignAShirt and they’re the recipient of my applause today. Continue reading

2 Comments

Filed under Helpful Hints, What's Going On

Undercover Boss

A typical wheelie bin household waste receptacle

Like many of you (well, 38 million of you anyway), I watched the debut of Undercover Boss following the Super Bowl broadcast. Interesting premise – a CEO goes undercover at his own company to see how the “stuff” rolls downhill until it lands amidst the workers we see on the show.
On the show the CEO of Waste Management, a seemingly nice enough guy, got a taste of how the policies he sets forth get implemented. It’s like a big corporate game of telephone and he was looking to understand what came out the other end. What he found out was that even with the best of intentions (and we can debate for hours what came out in the editing room), policies often get screwed up on the way to reality.  And that’s what hit me throughout: Continue reading

1 Comment

Filed under Helpful Hints, Reality checks

What’s the Diagnosis?

Principle of the model-based diagnosis
Image via Wikipedia

I was having breakfast with a friend last week and we were talking about some of the things I do as a consultant.  He was listening attentively as I rambled on about the various things I do for my clients in many different areas.   When I took a breath, he said to me “at your core, you’re a diagnostician.  You can call it a consultant, but in reality you are a business doctor, performing diagnoses.  Just as a kidney guy specializes in one area but knows about the rest, you do that with digital media but you need to know about the rest as well because like a kidney, it’s all connected.” Continue reading

Leave a comment

Filed under Consulting, Helpful Hints, Thinking Aloud