I discovered Life Beyond Code this year and had the opportunity to (virtually) meet Rajesh Setty. Both have enriched my life. Here's part of a great post Rajesh put up this morning:

“By what percentage has my capacity increased (by participating in social media) to GIVE SOMETHING MEANINGFUL and VALUABLE to the world?”

Great question. Thanks, Rajesh.

I was reading Reality Check last night. That sucker is big – like 473 pages. I was reading in bed, if I had dropped the book, I'd have knocked myself out. But I digress.

Every single one of those 473 pages was jammed with insight and practical, real world, no bull shiitake stuff. Plus, it was really, really fun to read. Which is the problem. I stayed up way too late and then, as if that's not bad enough, I woke up at 3:00 AM thinking about how to put Guy's advice to work.

So, here's what I'd suggest: Go buy Guy's book. Right now. And go read Guy's blog. Right now.

And Guy, I get it about children and Mac and digital photography. But what's so great about Breitling watches? And hockey?

Nick McCormick, author of Lead Well and Prosper, just posted an interview we did together on his blog, Joe and Wanda on Management. You can listen to the interview here.

Thanks, Nick!

Danny Meyer, restaurant entrepreneur and innovator extraordinaire, said in his book, Setting the Table:

“Virtually nothing else is as important as how one is made to feel in any business transaction.”

He’s right. Which can be good news or very bad news, depending of course, on how you make your customers feel. What you want them to feel is simple: You want them to feel you care about them. Here’s what the National Study of Customer Loyalty had to say about that:

“Regardless of industry, when an individual strongly agrees that a company cares about them and satisfying their needs, levels of total satisfaction, strong company preference, loyalty, willingness to recommend, and willingness to go out of their way are also extremely high.”

Two Hallmark executives (Scott Robinette and Claire Brand) wrote a wonderfully insightful book entitled Emotion Marketing. In that book, the authors reported on a Hallmark/Harte-Hanks study on customer loyalty. The study examined four variables: caring, trust, length of patronage and overall satisfaction. As it turns out, caring is twice as important as any of the other three variables in predicting loyalty.

How your customers feel about how you feel about them really matters. And, that’s especially true when there is little competitive differentiation in product or price and supply exceeds demand.

When I'm thinking clearly, I'm aware that I've led a charmed life. Parents who have loved me unconditionally every day of my life. A wonderful woman who has been my wife for 34 years. A son whom I cherish and admire. Friends who enrich my life in profound ways.

I've never had to deal with a serious illness. Certainly, I've had miserable colds and more than a few ferocious cases of the flu. With each bout of short term sickness, I've been grateful (usually when I'm getting well). People think I'm kidding when I say that being sick is good for me. But I'm not kidding and it is good for me – because it reminds me of how marvelous it is to be healthy.

I suspect most people (especially me) would appreciate their vision more if they were blind for a day. Most people would assign greater value to their mobility if they were unable to get out of bed and get themselves to the shower. The same concept holds true for our ability to speak, to hear, to think, to live without debilitating pain, and all the other things we often take for granted.

On this Christmas Eve, many of us are facing the scariest, most uncertain financial times of our lives. But the truth is, in our worst case scenarios, most everyone reading this blog will still live in far greater abundance than the majority of the earth's inhabitants. Most of us will not want for nourishment or shelter. And most of us will probably retain a substantial portion of the material goods we (mistakenly) believe we can't live without.

But I have hope for a greater outcome. I have hope that these difficult times will cause us to reevaluate some of our most unquestioned assumptions. That we will make a concerted effort to acknowledge on a daily basis just how blessed we are. That we will come to understand what truly brings us joy. And that we will all learn to be more loving, more grateful and more capable of contributing.

Merry Christmas.

New satisfactions often emanate from new utility. But more than ever before, new satisfactions also spring from other sources - sources that speak to our desire for artistic beauty, emotional significance and meaningful experience.

Design has taken center stage in the quest for new satisfaction. Target stands toe to toe with the Walmart Goliath, primarily by bringing a design ethic to the masses. A decade ago could we have imagined a toilet brush designed by a renowned architect, Michael Graves, or a trashcan by Rashid Garbo that has sold millions at retail and appears in The Museum of Modern Art in New York?

As Daniel Pink explained in A Whole New Mind:

“For businesses, it’s no longer enough to create a product that’s reasonably priced and adequately functional. It must also be beautiful, unique, and meaningful …”

And as it turns out, great design has not only compelling emotional value, but functional value as well. In one study, patients in well-designed hospital rooms needed less pain medication and were discharged two days earlier than patients with identical ailments who were treated in less appealing hospital rooms.

In an age of abundance, design is an indispensable tool for creating wildly enthusiastic customers.

In my last post I promised to tell you how my friend, Mike, invented new satisfactions for his customers in a decidedly old-line industry. Here's the story:

Most companies that sell packaging equipment and supplies have structured their businesses for their own efficiencies. They prefer to deliver large orders on an infrequent basis. Large orders reduce the company’s processing cost and enable the company to utilize its own trucks for delivery. All of which makes sense – for the company.

What doesn’t make sense is that these practices penalize the customer. An insistence on large orders and infrequent deliveries puts a huge burden on the customer. Customers must plan well, invest resources in larger inventory, and warehouse that inventory until it’s needed.

What Mike’s company has done is to say:

"Order anytime you want, order any amount you want – we’re delighted to have your business."

Mike has one truck for emergency deliveries, but generally utilizes outside delivery services, which means he has virtually unlimited flexibility and capacity. From the customer’s perspective, Mike offers “exactly what I want, exactly when I want it.” He has invented new satisfaction in a commodity business. That's one sure way to create wildly enthusiastic customers.

In my last post I talked about how Cirque du Soleil had invented new satisfaction for me. Much the same holds true for my relationship with the iPod and iTunes from Apple. Never once had I sat around and said to myself, “I sure wish I had a digital music player and a cool application to buy music online.” Just didn’t happen.

Today, my iPods (plural) are among my most useful, enjoyable possessions. Again the point is, Apple created new satisfaction for me. And apparently a few other folks – iPod unit sales are north of 200,000,000 since the product launched in 2001.

Cirque du Soleil and iPod are epic, breakthrough ideas. And there’s nothing wrong with shooting for epic, breakthrough ideas. But not every business is Cirque or Apple. And not every breakthrough idea has to be epic in order to create new satisfaction. Here’s a business and a story many of us can relate more to:

My friend, Mike, owns a company that sells and distributes packaging equipment and supplies. Not exactly sexy. But, it’s a well-operated company with a multi-year history of steadily increasing sales. Here’s the interesting thing: The products and services that Mike sells are true commodities – several local companies have the exact same products and services. But Mike’s sales and share continue to grow. They grow because Mike has found a way to invent new satisfaction for his customers.

In my next post, I'll tell you how he did that.

In my last post I asked: When there is already more than enough of every product and service known to man, how do you create a customer? More to my point, how do you create a wildly enthusiastic customer?

I guess you could choose to continue doing battle in a bloody marketplace, saturated with parity products, staggering competition, excruciating price resistance and ever-escalating customer expectations. You could try to be a little better, faster, cheaper. But in that scenario, I’m thinking two things: 1) Any sort of appreciable success is unlikely, 2) Survival is probably a crapshoot. But there’s another approach to creating wildly enthusiastic customers:

Invent new satisfactions. Give them something they’ve never had and probably never even thought of.

A personal example: A decade ago, I took my son to Las Vegas to celebrate his 21st birthday. We went to see a show called Mystere at Treasure Island. It was one of the most remarkable experiences of my life. If you haven’t seen Mystere or one of the other Cirque du Soleil shows, there’s really no way mere words can do them justice. They’re an innovative, sensuous, curious amalgam of theatre, music, art, dance and athleticism. A cab driver once told me Mystere was like a circus on acid. Not a bad description.

The point is, I didn’t know I needed Cirque du Soleil until I first experienced Mystere. Cirque invented new satisfaction for me. I could never have conceived of the Cirque experience. Now, I can’t imagine missing any Cirque show I have an opportunity to see.

In my next post, I'll offer a couple of more examples – one of them in the most mundane of industries. Please come back ...

Not so long ago, the extent of choice in television programming was CBS, NBC and ABC. Today, cable and satellite systems routinely offer several hundred channels. And just forget about trying to count internet news and entertainment offerings – I’m not sure even Google can do that accurately.

When I was a kid (which, admittedly, was quite awhile ago) breakfast cereal meant Corn Flakes, Cheerios or Frosted Flakes and maybe a handful of others. Wander through the aisles of your average grocery store tonight and you’ll find in the neighborhood of 275 different kinds of breakfast cereals.

And how about plumbers, telephone service, dentists, hair stylists, dry cleaners, clothing stores, restaurants, movie screens and banks? Good grief, especially banks – they’re freakin’ everywhere. More products and more companies selling them in virtually every sector. And don’t be fooled, this is not a “business is tough and getting tougher” situation. What we’re experiencing is a fundamental transformation. We’ve crashed full speed, head first into a world where we have more stuff to sell than people want to buy. And it’s never going back to the way it was.

So when there is already more than enough of every product and service known to man, how do you create a customer? More to my point, how do you create a wildly enthusiastic customer?

That's what we're going to talk about in the next few posts. Stay tuned ...

In previous posts I’ve said that one of the deliverables of great leadership is wildly enthusiastic customers. I’ve even had the gall to suggest you can’t be considered a great leader unless you create wildly enthusiastic customers. While there’s considerable resistance in some quarters to that idea, I’ve yet find anyone who thinks it’s a bad idea to have wildly enthusiastic customers. So, in a series of posts, I’m going to explore the topic of creating wildly enthusiastic customers.

Peter Drucker once said, “The purpose of a business is to create a customer.” And he was right. But he said that a long time ago and things have changed since then. One of the most profound changes has occurred in the dynamic of supply and demand. When Dr. Drucker first defined the purpose of a business, life was characterized by scarcity. Today, the dominant characteristic of life (at least in the U.S) is abundance. Ridiculous abundance. Think about this:

“The United States spends more on trash bags than ninety other countries spend on everything. In other words, the receptacles of our waste cost more than all of the goods consumed by nearly half of the world’s nations.” (Polly LaBarre - Fast Company, March 2003)

In most of the developed world, the supply of almost everything exceeds demand. Think about any product or service you might want to buy – do you have more choices or fewer choices today compared with twenty years ago?

To be continued ...

Yes, these are tumultuous times. None of us knows what lies ahead. It's easy to wring our hands and worry. But that does little good. My friend and mentor, Barnett Helzberg, has often told me, "If there's an issue you can do nothing about – forget about it." I believe that to be wise counsel.

There are many harsh truths we can do nothing about. But there are some harsh truths that we can address. Here are four of those harsh truths:

You aren't a great leader if you don't have wildly enthusiastic customers.

You aren't a great leader if your company isn't growing.

Times are tough. Can you do anything about tough times? Probably not. But surely, there are some things in the four items above that most of us could improve upon. And in the final analysis, it's important to remember: Leadership is not about style or personal attributes – it's about results.