Are you feeling pressures to provide your value and reduce your price? Average. The best of the worst and the worst of the best. The Bankruptcy Gap is the phenomina the requires you to drive down your costs and compete on price OR move your to offering unique and improved value and move up in the pricing world. If you stay in the middle, the average . . . you are courting bankrutpcy . . . until time serves it up to you. This is comparing Dell to Apple. Dell competes on price, Apple on the customer experience. This is
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Donuts join Axle Grease to showcase a true Artist
Ralphs! Found by referral it is an awesome auto mechanic here in my town. I refer friends and they call with accolades and thanks. Add to the list “Georges Donuts.” The local that are in the know all go there. When you stop several times and find out they are closed during the day you wonder why until finally figure out that he sells out everyday and closes up shop till the next round of caloric rich goodies are created. I stopped last Saturday. A glazed Croissant? Are you kidding me? It was awesome. Like eating air and sweetness.
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Wal-Mart Redeems Themselves
So my post yesterday was on Wal-Mart and how they fell on their sword. Magic things happen. I called 1-800-Wal-Mart and told them how they were messing up. You will not believe this. They called back. And within 4 hours. And they fixed the issue. So in a few minutes I am heading over to get my meds and now I have a great success story for customer service FROM WAL-MART of all places.
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Happy New Year? Stop! Don't go there! "Warning Will Robinson! Warning"
One of the great stories in business was when the Kimberly Clark company decided to sell off all of it’s paper mills and focus on their consumer products in the 1971. All of business told them that they were absolutely crazy. The result was a focus that allowed them to chase after, catch, and trounce their largest competitor. Procter and Gamble. Within a short time period they were so profitable they were able to buy back their paper mills at a fraction of what they sold them for. Image that. Sell you manufacturing capabilities. What kind of crazy person does
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The World’s Worst Motivational Speaker is Malarkey
George Campbell is good at being bad. A professional standup comedian, he found his clean humor appealed to the corporate meeting crowd. One day he was thinking about how much easier it is to speak to a conference than it is to entertain a crowd in a Comedy Club. In his conversation with a friend he said, thinking out loud, “I ought to put together stage personality and act as the ‘world’s worst motivational speaker’.” It took him two years before he was ready to introduce Joe Malarkey, this over the top, cheesy, motivation speaker. For example he parodies the
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A Small Town Pays Attention to the Small Stuff and Get BIG Results
< !--[if gte mso 10]> You gotta love someone who does their job with simple elegance and ease of execution. Many moons ago I was putting on a morning workshop for three smaller Chambers of Commerce in a small remote Ohio hamlet. I know I need to get over myself, but I have to tell you; this was pretty good stuff. Great information on how to grow your business, ways to communicate your value . . . all of that doctrine. So afterward Craig Brown, who works for the Small Business Development Center in that area says, “This is something
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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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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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