• 70% of organizational changes fail and these failures can be traced to ineffective leadership.

  • 78% of consumers say their most satisfying experience occurred because of a capable and competent customer service representative.

  • It costs 10 times more to gain a new customer than it does to keep an existing customer.

  • The quality of a person’s life is in direct proportion to their commitment to excellence, regardless of their chosen field of endeavor. Vince Lombardi

  • Effective coaching is a key method for increasing productivity and profitability in an organization. Recent studies have shown that 85% of the workforce wants holistic coaching so that they can continually improve and grow.

  • Leadership is being the best you can be, and helping others be the best they can be.

  • It is estimated that 80% of mergers and acquisitions that occur today fail to meet initial expectations.

  • The key to building a culture based on Trust and Personal Responsibility is getting all employees to be committed to the organization’s Vision and the Values That Build Trust.

  • Corporations can work five times harder and spend five times more money to gain new customers, or they can keep the ones they have.

  • Learn something every day. Never stop learning.

  • 85% of business leaders agree that traditional differentiators alone are no longer a sustainable business strategy.

  • The key to keeping customers satisfied and loyal is to value and train employees while making them an integral part of corporate success.

  • Personally, I am always ready to learn, although I do not always like being taught. Winston Churchill

  • Employee loyalty builds customer loyalty, which builds brand loyalty. It’s as simple - and as difficult - as that.

  • Change is constant. To implement change you must listen, engage, and empower individuals in the change process.

  • The number one fear in the world is public speaking. “You” vs. “I” messages are powerful tools for capturing your audience’s attention.

  • If you want 1 year of prosperity, grow rice. If you want 10 years of prosperity, grow trees. If you want 100 years of prosperity, grow people. – Chinese Proverb

  • People are the core strategic asset. To be successful, a company must listen, involve, encourage, nurture, support, empower, and reward all its constituencies.

  • Companies Don’t Solve Problems.
    People Do.

  • The great thing in this world is not so much where we are, but in what direction we are moving. Oliver Wendell Holmes

  • The brighter you are, the more you have to learn.

  • "High performing organizations are constantly focusing on improving their capabilities through learning systems, building knowledge capital and transformational learning throughout the organization.” - Ken Blanchard

  • Leadership IQ being equal, it is believed emotional intelligence – how we manage ourselves, our emotions and the emotions of others – accounts for 85 – 90% of what separates the most outstanding leaders from their peers.

  • No one of us is as smart as all of us – when teams function well, miracles happen.

  • First, people don’t grow and change much unless they’re in a supportive environment where people know what they want to do and encourage them to do it.

  • 25 of every 27 customers who have a bad experience fail to report it because they don’t believe anything will change.

  • 50 – 70% of how employees perceive their organization can be traced back to the actions of one person – the leader.

  • A survey of 350 executives across 14 industries, 68% confirmed their companies experienced unanticipated problems in their change process. – International Consortium of Executive Development Research.

Portsmouth Herald - Loyalty, for advantage and profit

April 30, 2005

Portsmouth Herald

By Michael McCord

PORTSMOUTH -- I couldn’t help but ask the question. "Do you have a loyalty fetish?" "Yes. I do," Dianne Durkin said with a laugh, via her mobile phone while driving somewhere in Connecticut. "I’m just loyal. What can I say?" she told me while talking about her new book, "The Loyalty Advantage," which recently hit bookstores.

At least one gentleman in Des Moines, Iowa, devoured her 200-page tome to loyalty in one sitting. "And then he got on the phone and called me right away to tell me he had to call because it’s one of the best business books he’d ever read," Durkin said during a brief dinner break on the road.

Pinning Durkin down is no minor affair, because she’s often on the road between her new home in Portsmouth (she recently moved from New Castle) and, well, just about anywhere, because when she talks about loyalty, many corporate executives listen and pay her to find out more. Loyalty is her passion, her calling card and her unique approach for breaking through the clutter of top-shelf business consulting. Guess what’s on her N.H. license plate? Loyal."

It’s proven to be a successful niche for her. I mean, who’s against loyalty? It’s like mom, the flag and apple pie. One risks being labeled a social outcast by doubting the healing powers of loyalty.

But as we all know, loyalty, like religion, is often much different in practice than in theory. Dianne Durkin would like to make loyalty one of the top commandments for business executives. As in "Thou shalt practice loyalty, not because it’s nice but because it’s smart, profitable and will prove to be your salvation in the coming decades." Or something like that.

Durkin is the founder and president of Loyalty Factor LLC, based in Portsmouth. She specializes in the areas of change management and developing employee and customer - you guessed it - loyalty programs.

As I said, many rarefied-air executives have heard the call and called her. Her current clients include IBM, Lotus, Kronos and Monster.com.

She has a good idea of how they think and react because she used to be one of them during her stints as a senior manager with outfits like General Electric, Gulf Oil and Digital Equipment. She also has been bitten by the entrepreneurial bug. One of her adventures included starting a sheepskin hat factory in Poland long before it was fashionable for Western entrepreneurs to set up shop there.

She has spunk, energy aplenty to burn and isn’t afraid to speak her mind. Durkin told me she was once asked on a golf course - she’s a passionate golfer who has been women’s club champion at Wentworth By The Sea - what she did for a living.

"I told him, ‘I make CEOs like you extremely successful.’" The bold trick here is that her fellow golfer hadn’t told her he was a CEO. She had read him like a book and, lo and behold, he was a CEO. And, she added, she closed a deal with his company a short time after the round was over. (She’s a golf-course closer - at least four consulting deals sealed before the 18th hole.)

Now she’s an author just starting to hit the promotion circuit for book signings and other related appearances - including Barnes & Noble in Newington on May 7.

"The Loyalty Advantage" took a while to get going, Durkin said. A book agent saw a New York Times article about her and said there’s a book waiting to be written with the loyalty there. Durkin was busy with her own business at the time, and then her first ghostwriter on the project didn’t, uh, work out. "It was garbage. All garbage," Durkin told me when she got back on the highway to continue her ride home.

Frustration with the book project got her dander up. She found a new ghostwriting partner who understood the loyalty universe and then set a date to finish the darn thing, which she did. I finally caught up with Dianne Durkin in person a few days ago and asked her why loyalty was such a Holy Grail for her. To paraphrase Sherlock Holmes, it’s elementary demographics.

American businesses, she explained, "will have a severe labor shortage" by 2031 - possibly 35 million fewer workers than potential jobs in the economy. With baby boomers set to retire en masse over the next two decades, this could have a serious impact on businesses as well as the overall economy.

That means a serious shift, at least in theory, toward more bargaining power for the remaining workers (whose jobs haven’t been outsourced to Venus or Mars), and companies will have to readjust the relationship parameters with their employees.

According to Durkin’s loyalty paradigm, this looming demographic train wreck can be an opportunity. Happier, nurtured employees do a better job of creating brand loyalty for customers. Employers get the benefit of more loyal customers and employees. They may not even have to move their operations to Venus or Mars.

"If it isn’t true to me, why should I work anywhere?" Durkin said, assuming the role of an employee in a dysfunctional company. "If I’m not learning and growing and advancing, if I don’t know what’s happening with the company I work for and don’t feel I’m making a contribution to the world, why should I stay here?"

And older baby boomer executives had better check their own paradigms, because, she told me, the communication gap between generations isn’t small.

"Younger workers work to live rather than live to work. If you don’t understand that, you are in trouble," said Durkin, a baby boomer herself.

She’s a hard-headed idealist. She understands bottom lines and returns on investment and why companies are often so shortsighted in the practices and policies. She believes loyalty has to be learned (and learned again), because effective cooperation between human beings isn’t a given.

Durkin said she doesn’t expect to make much money from her book but wouldn’t mind if she did. What she really wants to do is use the book as a "big tease" to generate even more clients. While the book is helpful," she told me, "there is no substitute for Dianne."

But given the level of corporate incompetence, greed and shortsighted stupidity out there, Dianne may have to clone herself to spread the word of salvation by loyalty.

Michael McCord is business editor of the Herald.


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