In the last 24 hours I've had the privilege of spending a couple of hours each with two different mentors. As always, I'm ...

Amazed by their generosity ...

Motivated to be better...

Everyone should be so lucky.

"The future of your company is directly tied to the quality of talent you can attract and keep."

Hard to quarrel with that. It's also hard to find a business pundit who hasn't said it (including me). But how do you know who's going to be great? Testing? Interviews? How's that worked so far? Here's one of our hiring rules:

We don't make a permanent hire until we've had some experience actually working with the applicant.

Sometimes that's a small project. Sometimes it's a brainstorming session. Sometimes it's a short term contract. But, it's always something. I don't believe you can learn what you need to know in an interview or even an exhausting series of interviews. You can't really know someone until you work with them elbow to elbow. (Side note: the candidate is always paid appropriately for the work.)

Recently an applicant was "wary" of participating in a working session as a step in the hiring process. That told us everything we needed to know.

Teresa Amabile is the Edsel Bryant Ford Professor of Business Administration at Harvard Business School. Working with psychologist, Stever J. Kramer, Amabile conducted a three year study on the link between motivation and creativity. Several interesting insights:

"The desire to do something because you find it deeply satisfying and personally challenging inspires the highest levels of creativity ..."

In short, meaning matters.

"People have their best days and do their best work when they are allowed to make progress."

On the other hand, if they don't make progress, before long they're miserable. Or at least, lethargic. The prescription is actually pretty simple: Make sure people get to use their talent everyday doing work that matters to them and the company.

So I walk through the door at Kohl's and WHACK! Or maybe more accurately, WHACK! BAM!! SLAM!!! Freakin' "SALE!!!" signs everywhere. It felt like assault. Can all this stuff be ON SALE? Really?

I recover and make my way to the jewelry counter. After being ignored by the disheveled person behind the counter for what seemed like an hour (probably only 30 seconds), I tell him I'm there to buy some earrings for my Mom. I describe the earrings in detail, give him the price ($79.99)and explain they were advertised in the newspaper the day before.

You would have thought I'd asked him to solve a quadratic equation. (Full disclosure: I have no idea what a quadratic equation is, but it sounds hard.) He shuffled around for a while, mumbling a bit. At that point I happened to look down into the jewelry counter. There were some earrings exactly like I was looking for, marked with a price of $250.00 ON SALE! for $84.95. I point that out, to which our disheveled friend says, "Oh, those are MORE on sale."

Wanna guess the sale, sale price? $79.99 I bought them, made it out of the store without my head exploding. But as Arlo Guthrie said in Alice's Restaurant, that's not what I came to talk about.

I came to talk about the survey. Attached to my receipt is a survey notice. It says, TELL US WHAT YOU THINK TODAY! GIVE US YOUR FEEDBACK ON TODAY'S STORE VISIT and my personal favorite, RESPOND WITHIN 48 HRS TO PARTICIPATE.

The words please and thank you appear nowhere on this document. And they tell me (not ask, tell) to respond withing 48 hours. I declined their offer to participate. It's incomprehensible to me that a company can be so totally clueless. It will probably not surprise you to learn I will not be returning to Kohl's.

The book The Best Service is No Service refers to an Accenture survey from 2007. That survey reported:

75% of CEOs survey believe their company provides above average customer service

59% of customers were extremely dissatisfied or somewhat dissatisfied with their most recent customer service experience

Uh-Oh. I'm a CEO. Am I, too, deluded? Can customers who are dissatisfied be wildly enthusiastic about our company?

The ever insightful Nettie Hartsock sent me a copy of Mitchell Lewis Ditkoff's new book Awake at the Wheel. It's a terrific book about creativity and innovation. It's well written, clever and practical.

Mitch was talking about the need to slow our minds down to access our creative abilities. To that point he said:

"Our thoughts are often a blur, flying under the radar – great ideas mixed with odd bits about shoe sales, sex and salad dressing."

That gives you just a little flavor of this delightful book.

A product or service that is different in a way that really matters.

Seth Godin calls it a Purple Cow &ndash a product that is remarkable. Remarkable is worth talking about, worth paying attention to. If it's remarkable enough, maybe even worth being wildly enthusiastic about.

A product or service that offers a good value.

I was talking to a friend at dinner last Friday night. He mentioned he was thinking about moving from PC to Mac. I had just recently seen the new iMacs and I gushed a bit about an iMac for $1,200. My friend said, "Well, that's still a lot more than a PC." Yeah, but it's NOT a PC, it's a Mac. I'm not talking about price, I'm talking about value.

A product or service that's more Target than Wal-Mart.

This is about the experience or the gestalt or something I can't exactly name – it's about how the company makes me feel. Here's the thing: When I walk into Wal-Mart I feel tacky and downtrodden. When I walk into Target I feel cool, sensibly chic, engaged and slightly in awe. Target works for me, Wal-Mart doesn't. I understand that's not true for everyone (duh, Wal-Mart is the biggest company in the world) but it is true for me.

A product or service that is easy to buy.

If the purchase process isn't quick, easy and completely devoid of confusion, I simply don't care how good the product or service is, I don't want it. It's one of the reasons I won't go to Subway sandwich shops – the chaos of ordering (and repeating myself interminably) just isn't worth it.

A product or service that is well designed.

And I'm talking about the Steve Jobs definition of well designed. Says Steve, "Design is not just what it looks like and feels like. Design is how it works." If it doesn't work – easily and intuitively, I'm frustrated and on my way out the door.

At least a modicum of warmth.

In his delightful book, Setting the Table, successful restaurant entrepreneur Danny Meyer made the point that nothing is quite as important as how a person is made to feel in a transaction. There's a Chinese restaurant near my home. Their food is good. But every time I've ever gone there, I feel bad. The people aren't overtly rude. They're just obviously indifferent. Doesn't work for me.

I know a small sample size (me) is dangerous. But seriously, does anyone want a purchase process that is difficult, or a product that doesn't work well, or people who don't care? I doubt it.

If one of the deliverables of great leadership is wildly enthusiastic customers, leaders have to be asking, "What makes customers wildly enthusiastic?" I'd like to start this discussion at a very high level. Maybe too high for some tastes, but we'll zoom in a bit real soon.

The remarkable philosopher and author, Tom Morris, believes there are four foundations for sustainable excellence in any enterprise or relationship. Here's how he describes them:

The Intellectual Dimension that aims at Truth

The Spiritual Dimension that aims at Unity

I'm thinking those dimensions relate to wildly enthusiastic customers.

In January, I couldn't run a quarter mile. Yesterday I completed my first half-marathon. I learned some things along the way:

Listen to People Who Know – My friend, Ben, is a professional triathlete. He told me to start by running a little and then walking for a while. I guffawed. Sounded like a wuss thing to do. Maybe it is, but it's the only way I could have gotten ready to run 13.1 miles.

It's One Step at a Time – Not thinking was the most important part of my training. Early on, if I thought about 5 miles or 13 miles, I wanted to quit. If I focused on what I had to do in that moment, I was always fine. It's about persistence. As strange as it may sound to folks who don't run, my goal wasn't to get to the finish line – my goal was to get to the starting line.

It's More Fun with Friends – I ran with my friends Dianne and Carmen. I might have been able to do it without them (although I have serious doubts about that) but I KNOW it wouldn't have been anywhere near as much fun. Or as meaningful.

These lessons came to me through the experience of training for and running a half marathon. But they apply equally well, I think, to our work lives.

I just read a post by Seth Godin. His frustration and despair were palpable. He was commenting on the work of a new copyeditor &ndash here's what he said,

"By sanding off every edge, removing every idiom, making each and every fact literally correct, she made it boring and dry and mechanical."

I have so been there. For me, it's risk-averse clients, or occasionally, former associates. And sometimes they're right. But I hate safe. There is no chance of a breakthrough with safe. You don't change the world with safe.

Progress, innovation, exponential growth simply can't happen if we're afraid. In our businesses, we should be most afraid of being afraid.

Jim Collins has an interesting article in Fortune, In that article he says:

"Companies do not fall primarily because of what the world does to them or because of how the world changes around them; they fall first and foremost because of what they do to themselves."

Here's some reality: A number of products will soon be irrelevant. A number of industries will essentially disappear. Perhaps one product is the music CD. Maybe it's your product. Could be it's my industry. Not much we can do to prevent the world from changing. But we CAN change our products and our companies. The question is, will we?