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

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

Larry David, creator of Seinfeld and Curb Your Enthusiasm 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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This may be the only business book you read that covers Greek philosophy, ancient myths, modern parables featuring Fat Tony and Nero (characters from Taleb’s earlier books) and some personal stories, both from the author’s early life in Lebanon and from his more recent experience as a hate figure for classical economists. It’s a demanding and exhilarating read – skim-read half a page and you could jump two thousand years – but it deserves to be read properly. Read More

Have you, as a customer, ever had it patiently explained to you by a sales or service person that “it doesn?t work like that”? Don’t you just hate that! To paraphrase Steve Jobs, it’s not the customer’s job to know how it works. On the contrary, it’s the marketer’s job to know how the customer thinks and acts and wants it to be. All the same, it is possible to create customer behaviour that is efficient and smart for your business. Read More

“Without leaps of imagination, or dreaming, we lose the excitement of possibilities. Dreaming, after all, is a form of planning.”

Gloria Steinem, American journalist and political activist Read More

“Making the simple complicated is commonplace; making the complicated simple, awesomely simple, that’s creativity.”

Charles Mingus, American jazz double bassist, composer and bandleader Read More

I heard the great Gary Hamel, co-author of Competing for the Future, give a talk on innovation a while back, at the London Business School. He cited the classic hotel clothes or coat hanger as “stupid” – this one. Because it is infuriating to use, isn’t it?

Professor Hamel used it as an example of poor innovation – and of course he’s right, it is rubbish for the end user, the hotels’ customers, Read More

“It’s always better to look for the strengths in a competitor’s innovation than the weaknesses. You may feel better attacking a competitor but in the long run it is wiser to learn from them.”

Terry Leahy, former CEO of Tesco Read More