Customer Service means never saying “no.” I went into a sweets store at the mall this past weekend to buy a gift basket for a visiting client. As I browsed the store’s shelves, I noticed the goodies in the baskets looked less than appetizing, so I asked Jeff, the customer service representative, if he could […]
Are you customer service driven? I rent cars a lot. I rent them when I’m traveling across the country, but I also rent them when I’m doing events that are 3 or 4 hours away, so that I avoid putting extra miles on my own car. Consequently, I’ve come to know all of my local […]
They say that nature abhors a vacuum, but the truth is it hates all appliances. If you don’t believe me, leave a toaster in your yard for a couple of years and see what happens. Nature will not be kind to it. I live in the South, so seeing yard appliances isn’t that uncommon. There […]
One of the questions I am most frequently asked these days is: How do we hire quality employees who want to work? My answer is pretty simple, really: Always be recruiting. Recently, when I was speaking at a school nutrition conference, I asked for volunteers to stand up and tell me their best customer service […]
“… if you feed and indulge your dark nature, it will one day consume and control you.” A serious man in a dark laboratory contemplates a small vial of liquid briefly before upending the contents into his mouth. Almost immediately after swallowing the concoction, his face contorts in spasms of unthinkable pain. Slowly, his countenance […]
What would Sherlock Holmes deduce in regard to your Power of Choice? I was already in my early thirties before I discovered Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s wonderful books about master sleuth Sherlock Holmes. Like everyone else, I had been exposed to the character Homes all my life, but had somehow missed reading any of his adventures […]
In Charles Dickens’s A Christmas Carol, Ebenezer Scrooge is lead by the Ghost of Christmas Future to a cemetery and forced to look upon his own gravestone. The inscription had only his name, and yet it was a symbol of terror and despair for Scrooge, the physical manifestation of a life misspent. Suppose for a […]
Option X: the answer that’s not on the test paper. The answer that isn’t obvious. One of history’s most prominent examples of Option X thinking is found in the legend of the Gordian Knot. The legend goes that an oracle in ancient Phrygia foretold that whoever was able to untie a certain intricate knot tied […]
It’s time to take some occupational action! I walked into a little shop in an airport and asked the guy behind the counter how he was doing. He mumbled something about being as well as he could be, being stuck there. When I asked him where else he would like to be, he thought for […]
