QVIews

After two and a half weeks, it's clear that my new routine is working, but I still am trying to do way too many things. Trying to decide what to give up is hard. Restructuring the Creative Houston web site has turned out to be harder than I expected. And the work for the Columbia…

Some companies are designed to provide great customer service, but any company can emerge a good system by holding person-to-person interaction as sacred. The challenge is for managers to know what's going on, and probably the best tactics are 'management by walking around' and trying to 'be the customer' as realistically as possible. Relying on…

Having come to the crashing realization that my own loyalty stories are boring, I'm going to start collecting them from other people. Here's a good one from Danelle Reed. Feel free to add stuff for me.

Over the last few months I've come to realize that few of my associates share my fascination with loyalty, but Matthew Wettergreen spotted this charming comment in a Groupon ad.  Astor & Black treats each client as if clients were an endangered species and this particular client were the last egg-bearing client left in North…

Tribal Leadership is one of my favorite books, and this new video from co-writer Dave Logan really takes its lessons to the next level. The book gives examples of triads (two people connected by the leader), but this video does a better job explaining how to make them.  

To continue the story from last week…  When a trusted supplier lets us down, do we try and salvage the relationship or just move on? Clearly the biggest driver of that decision is 'switching costs.' The wireless phone companies have imposed hideous switching costs, and many other companies would like to follow suit. But analysts…

Last weekend I met with a couple of people about joint projects, and we clearly have interesting action items, but it's hard to hold everything together. I want the work to be shared, and that clearly means I need to help them with their goals. Moving things forward means trying to help them by doing…

Today's project is a loyalty tool that is initiated by the consumer instead of the merchant. I'm working on an idea that will start as a booklet connected to a web site and evolve to a mobile application. It allows consumers to keep track of whomever they want to express loyalty toward. 

Thinking about loyalty clarifies our relationships. We begin to understand where and why we're investing our time and money. We can become more intentional about who we support, realizing that we are shaping the future.  Isn't it great to use a dry cleaner that you pass most days on your way to work? Isn't it…