The Little Things of Customer Experience Count I gotta share my morning experience, in an effort to illustrate the importance of customer experience to anyone who might, someday, interact with a customer. I wake up and get online, doing my usual surfing over coffee. That’s how I like to get my brain going in the morning. I recommend to everyone the combination of caffeine and internet thought provocation to warm-up the mental engine before trying to shift the brain into “driv

I was born in that strange era where doctors believed that women didn’t know how to properly give birth. Even though they had been doing it just fine for thousands of years, there was this short period of a couple of decades, where medicine’s conventional wisdom was that women were, apparently, doing it all wrong. When I was born, my mom was knocked out cold with anesthesia. My dad sat in a waiting room with a handful of cigars to pass out once the birthing procedures were al

Spinning Wheels Have you ever been a part of a meeting like this one that I was asked to observe? A group of diverse, talented, and smart individuals met to generate ideas for a product innovation. They were working on a big, complex set of issues with great potential impact. Each participant was passionate and engaged in the topic. The discussions were energetic and positive. For a while. After about an hour, the faces of the participants had changed. They looked tired. A to

Fear is one of the most basic human emotions. It has contributed significantly to mankind’s survival. Without it, our ancestors would have all been eaten in the Stone Age. Cronk: “Hey, didn’t that saber-toothed cat just eat Grog?” Thag: “Yeah, but look how cute it is…here, kitty, kitty…” So fear can be a good thing. Fear helped drive us together into social clusters through a strength-in-numbers survival strategy. And when groups of people get together, culture develops.

[Author's note: If you find listening to the Mission: Impossible theme music makes you feel like you can run through a brick wall, you can listen to it while you read. The old school version is at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tGSUjuSBt1A, while Moby's techno version is at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GW3UBM08CxE. I listened to it while I wrote, so it may enhance your reading experience...] The Difference Between Mission Statements and Missions Let me come right out and