I have a relationship manager at the bank where I have my business account. I wonder what relationship he’s managing.

Is that unfair? Here’s a bank trying to do better. The problem with their monthly courtesy call is that it is content-free. They offer me nothing. No information, no news, nothing that could be useful to me. In truth it’s unlikely they’ll chance upon something I want to hear anyway. It feels like something they’re measuring for their own purposes: “We call all our business customers at least six times a year and check all is well.” Read More

“It is never too late to be who you might have been.”

George Eliot Read More

Do you find queueing stressful? For me, it’s not the waiting, it’s the uncertainty. Give me an orderly queue with a guaranteed outcome at the end, and I can wait happily. Contrast that with the Apple store at Christmas. The dudes in their red t shirts and beanies are the same as always, chillaxed and cheerful. But in mid December, most people aren’t there for the joyous experience of a browse through all things Apple. Read More

“In theory there is no difference between theory and practice; in practice there is.”

Yogi Berra, legendary baseball player and manager. Read More

It’s 10 years since the development of the net promoter score by Fred Reichheld, a partner at Bain. It’s been widely adopted. Your bonus may be partly dependent on achieving an NPS target. Its promoters say simplicity – boiling everything down to one number – helps people across the business engage with customer satisfaction. Detractors argue that this simplicity obscures the causes of satisfaction and, more importantly, dissatisfaction. Whatever the chosen method, customer satisfaction scores are often one of the measures most tracked and quoted in large service businesses. Read More

“What I was given to study in school I have forgotten; what I decided to read on my own I still remember.”

Nassim Nicholas Taleb, in Anti-fragile. Read More

It’s all the rage to talk about purpose in business (I’m keen on it myself) but business also has to be about the numbers. The financial results are the ultimate numbers. Targets, KPIs and incentives are management tools to drive and track progress. But, there’s more to the old adage, “what gets measured gets done” than setting KPIs. Not all customer metrics are good for customers; even the best-intentioned metrics can have unintended consequences. Here are a couple of examples. Read More

“When you’re not concerned with succeeding, you can work with complete freedom.”

Larry David, creator of Seinfeld and Curb Your Enthusiasm Read More

That American business import, “the C suite”, gets some bad press. In the FT recently, Lucy Kellaway wrote a whole column about how she abhors it, prompted by the appointment of Charlotte Hogg as chief operating officer at the Bank of England. I confess I was a chief innovation officer for a while, though, in my defence, I never really called myself that. I don’t mind CMOs and CEOs, nor even COOs. But I do take grave exception to the latest addition to the C suite, Read More

“It is in our idleness, in our dreams, that the submerged truth sometimes comes to the top.”

Virginia Woolf

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