Horsemen of Mediocrity? And How can you love a “customer”?
Posted by: adonis49 on: March 2, 2014
Do you love your customers?
There are two ways people think about this:
- We love our customers because they pay us money. (Inherent here is customers = money = love.)
- We love our customers, and sometimes there’s a transaction.
The second behavior is very different indeed from the first.
In the first case, customers are the means to an end, profit.
In the second, the organization exists to serve customers, and profit is both an enabler and a possible side effect.
It’s easy to argue that without compensation, there can be no service.
Taking that to an extreme, working to maximize the short-term value of each transaction rarely scales.
If you hoard information, for example, today your prospects will simply click and find it somewhere else. If you seek to charge above average prices for below average products, your customers will discover this, and let the world know.
In a free market (I like to call it Libre Market for its political connotation) with plenty of information, it’s very hard to succeed merely by loving the money your customers pay you.
I think it’s fascinating to note that some of the most successful organizations of our time got there by focusing obsessively on service, viewing compensation as an afterthought or a side effect.
As marketing gets more and more expensive, it turns out that caring for people is a useful shortcut to trust, which leads to all the other things that a growing organization seeks.
Your customers can tell.
Posted by Seth Godin on February 03, 2014
The four horsemen of mediocrity
Deniability–“They decided, created, commanded or blocked. Not my fault.”
Helplessness–“My boss won’t let me.”
Contempt–“They don’t pay me enough to put up with the likes of these customers.”
Fear–“It’s good enough, it’s not worth the risk, people will talk, this might not work…”
The industrial age brought compliance and compliance brought fear and fear brought us mediocrity.
The good news about fear is that once you see it, feel it and dance with it, you have a huge opportunity, the chance to make it better.
Posted by Seth Godin on January 30, 2014
Cheering you on when you lose
Who is waiting at the finish line, and who will be cheering for you at the final banquet, even when you don’t win?
Especially when you don’t win…
I’m not talking about the sometime fan who rewards the winner, or the logo-wearing baseball fan who shows up when the team is in contention…
I’m wondering about the person that is in it for your effort and your passion and your tears.
Almost nothing is more important to the artist who dares to leap. [HT to Mara]
Posted by Seth Godin on January 29, 2014
Adonis Diaries 
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