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Tag Archives: new york times
Unsolicited Advice on Taking Your Customers’ Money
The low point of a service experience is often the part where we have to hand over our money. Here are ten ways to make pricing less painful: Keep it simple, transparent and fair. Respect our humanity. We know one …
The Unstable Pack Leader
Amy Wallace of the NY Times just offered up a rambling, poetic tribute to Cesar Millan, better known as the “Dog Whisperer,” for the NY Times business section. Millan has an extraordinary personal story. He was a poor kid from …
Owning It
In a recent interview with the New York Times, Wendy Kopp, co-founder of Teach for America, gave an insightful answer to the question: What are you looking for in teachers you recruit? (Emphasis added below): We’ve done a lot of …
Service Showdown at the Four Seasons
The NYT described some recent challenges at the Four Seasons. Among them is healthy tension in the underlying business model, which separates asset ownership from service management. The Four Seasons — a management company that owns none of its hotels …
Leadership in Absentia
The decision to lead is not particularly complicated, at least not on the surface. It’s a simple, often quiet commitment to create the conditions for other people’s success. The NYT had a great illustration of this philosophy in its article …
Customer-Operators: Not Paying Them Doesn’t Mean They’re Free
People, it turns out, are desperate to be helpful. Verizon has discovered this and joined the growing ranks of companies using what I call “customer-operators” to do the work employees used to do, everything from generating new product ideas to …
Bring Me a Problem (Solution Optional)
In what is becoming a consistently provocative column for us, the NY Times recently featured Delta Airlines CEO Richard Anderson as part of its Saturday Corner Office series. Anderson came across as thoughtful, humble, and hopefully up for the task of saving …
Tom Brokaw, Heretic or Hero?
Have we moved beyond these cumbersome divisions we call states? In a recent Op-Ed Tom Brokaw proposed that local governments blur their administrative lines and work together to deliver services more efficiently. In discussing North and South Dakota’s 17 colleges …
The Two Faces of Facebook
Facebook is throwing Mom and Dad under the bus. As a recent NYT article chronicled, many of Facebook’s older users are in open rebellion against the service’s new Twitter-esque functionality that allows customers to broadcast every impulsive thought, feeling and …