Like any hang glider knows, it is hard to control the wind. What about Reed Hastings and Netflix? A decade ago he was embarrassed to tell his wife about late fees on a video rental he forgot to return. A trip to the gym had him thinking, “why can’t I make renting a DVD video like my membership at the gym? You pay a flat rate per month and use it all you want.” Does Blockbuster wish they could turn back the clock and not charge this one guy a late fee? Here comes a wind gust. Now Mister Hastings
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Posts by Kordell Norton
Don't Drink the Woolite
Don’t ask. I can’t tell. Her name will stay anonymous. She was on cruise control as she readied herself for the daily grind. With an aspirin sized headache she looked around for liquid to help down a couple of Tylenol. She spied the small glass of liquid, threw back the pills and washed them down handily with the glass of “water”. That was when she remembered that she had filled that glass with Woolite a few days before. This handy dandy cleaning solution – that will do wonders for “your sweaters and unmentionables” – had done a wonder in disguising
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Pearls and NOT shooting yourself in the Foot
Wanna raise? There is an online retailer called The Pearl Outlet. Now who buys pearls? Especially on line? Well that is something that they wanted to know. If they did a marketing campaign that said, “Say you are sorry with pearls” would that work? So they commissioned a study of 8,000 customers and a real surprise popped up. Those customers who were willing to say they were sorry earned more money. In fact they earned twice as much as those who rarely, or never apologized. It turns out that those who earned $100,000 a year or more were twice as
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Leadership should smell like Miracle Whip
Kraft Mac & Cheese, pantyhose, and Apple iPods. When times get tough, we see the emergence of true leadership and vision. The choice is to wallow in pity, self doubt and second guessing or – to act and charge ahead, WITH COURAGE. It is during hard times that we most need to look for opportunities, to get creative, to hone our capabilities and look for new ways to succeed. In the recession of 2001 and 2002, General Electric, with billions of dollars of sales in light bulbs failed to keep up with the inventiveness of rivals who were developing more-efficient
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I stole a souvenier from the Ritz – Kordell's antics are fixed by Nine Professionals
It has been ten years. That is what the celebration is all about. Ten years ago Jim Gilmore and Joe Pine wrote the book, the Experience Economy. If you have not read it . . . you probably ought to consider it. More about that in a moment. I met Jim for the first time when he was a consultant to our company in Texas. I had no idea that he would, in the future, co-author a book that would change my life and the way that many Fortune 500 companies did business. I have to say that my first
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What Should YOUR Business Look Like In a Speedo?
Mike Vance is, in my opinion, one of the greatest business speakers in the last 100 years. His work on developing creativity is cornerstone. He introduced the three methods to create something. Those were: Invention Invention (i.e. the light bulb) Invention Extension (i.e. the flashlight) Invention Devention (see below) An old Nike T-shirt had a saying plastered across the front that read, “The older I get the better I was!” That is me. Believe it or not, there was a time when I was the captain of the swim team -many, many, many pounds ago with the svelt torso to
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I Almost Ran Over Mister Incredible – an incredible customer experience
I was just finishing a meeting at the Crowne Plaza hotel in Columbus when pulling out of the hotel breezeway, I was brought to a screaming stop by Mr. Incredible. Actually in the world of Customer Experiences, there is not many that measure up to The Arnold Classic. Each year 150,000 atheletes and visitors converge on the Columbus, Ohio Convention Center for this yearly event. What started as a body building expo for steroid and testerone overdosed Herculian types has now morphed into competition for fencing, archery, karate, and a dozen other sports. Now the interesting thing to note is
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What You Can Learn from the Worlds Greatest Youth Violinist
Bill Gates, The Beatles and Chad Hoopes. Chad Hoopes? Who is that? Hang on. As pointed out in Malcom Gladwell’s latest book, an Outlier is someone who lies outside the norms found in a bell curve. So Outliers becomes a descriptive term for super achievers. These super performers, who so outstrip the rest of the world with skills that dazzle, amaze, and inspire have several things in common. For example Gladwell introduces the concept of 10,000 hours. These shooting stars don’t just happen overnight. They have paid their dues. By doing some basic calculations Gladwell calculates that before they become
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Never have children, only grandchildren. ~Gore Vidal
A month ago we had the arrival of our third grandchild. Of course he is gorgeous. How do we know? We have pictures of him. His mother and father were the recipients of a new Flip Video camera for Christmas, a gift from Grandpa Norton. This neat little device allows the less than competent (like me) to take instant digital videos and then move them at will to other people. How do I know they are so easy to use? Recently I was a speaker at a conference in Mississippi. At the end of my presentation, I pulled out my
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A GREAT Cure for your Virus – If you are reading this on your computer, you need to know about this GREAT Customer Experience.
I don’t know how the virus got through, but attack it did. I had a computer that had a mind of its own, and was as ill behaved as a college freshman away from home for the first time. As I discovered the name of the virus, the prognosis did not look good. As a former executive at one company who had 2,600 computer “engineers” on the payroll (for example, we had 26 people on-site at Microsoft to fix their computer problems) I knew that this problem was going to either 1. cost me a lot of money to fix,
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