For just a moment, forget about productivity. Forget about making your company more money. Forget getting a better performance review. To me, good customer service isn’t really about any of those things. To me, providing good customer service is about the person that I want to be. Think about the last time you were provided […]
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 […]
For dozens of years modern culture has told us that we can be anything that we want if we just believe hard enough. If you hold on to your Dumbo’s feather, you can fly! If you believe in fairies and clap your hands, Tinker Bell will spring back to life! But (brace yourself) the real […]
See if this sounds familiar. The first of the year rolls around and you say, “Maybe I’ll try one of those New Year’s resolution things this year!” So you tell yourself that you’re going to lose weight, start exercising, read more, or whatever it is that you would like to do. So you go to […]
Not long ago, a young man named Tucker came over to my house to give me an estimate on a home repair. I didn‘t have to talk to him for very long before I realized he had a severe stutter. Every third or fourth word he spoke was accompanied with an awkward pause while he […]
Can I get personal with you for a minute? From the moment I first saw the Monkees on TV as a kid (if you don’t know who that is, ask your mom), I knew that I wanted to be a singer. As soon as I could, I learned to play guitar and began writing songs. […]
Not long ago, my wife got all excited about the new season of Dancing with the Stars, so she signed us up for a dance class. The class turned out to be, um, less than ideal. It turned out that our teacher had no actual teaching ability and her dancing partner seemed to thrive on […]
In the past, I have mentioned the subject of discipline when I talked about learning to play the drums. Anyone who has ever learned to play an instrument or paint or play a sport knows that type of discipline—playing a phrase over and over until you get it right, running a play until it is seamless, […]
When I was in second grade, my teacher assigned my class to create our own science project. Like most kids at that time, I went straight to the World Book Encyclopedia to search for ideas. After a while, I spotted a scale that looked like it was within my ability to build. My chief obstacle […]
