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

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

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

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

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

  • 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.

  • 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.

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

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

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

  • Companies Don’t Solve Problems.
    People Do.

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

  • 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.

  • Learn something every day. Never stop learning.

  • 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.

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

  • 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.

  • 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

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

  • 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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Portsmouth Herald - 'Tis the Season for American Excess

November 26, 2006

Portsmouth Herald

By Michael McCord

'Tis the season to be aware of, well, 'tis the season that brings out the most extreme of charitable and neurotic behaviors.

'Tis the season of press releases that remind me of the hottest holiday gift ideas, how not to act at the company holiday party, and how not to offend my boss, colleagues, Salvation Army bell-ringers or clearly deranged folks shopping for PlayStation 3 units.

'Tis the season we are guaranteed to see Faux, ah, Fox News sledgehammer Bill O'Reilly spin himself into a frenzy about anti-Christmas conspirators consisting of liberals, atheists, agnostics, public school teachers, secular humanists, university professors and terrorist coddlers, to name a few of his favorite holiday gremlins.

'Tis the season, I've been informed by Consumer Reports, to hibernate. By the time you read this, an estimated 62.7 million clearly disturbed Americans will have exercised their constitutional right and duty to shop on Black Friday, a retail shopping narcotic if there ever was.

'Tis the season to watch out. For those on the shopping road, be on the lookout for falling timber in the form flat-panel televisions -- 19 percent of Americans plan to purchase them. For the record, Consumer Reports tells me that 39 percent of men want the flat panels for the better picture, while 39 percent of women are determined to stand by their man and satisfy this bigger is better obsession.

'Tis the season, a company called GP Shopper tells me, to use your mobile phone to become an even more efficient and happy holiday shopper.

By using a "revolutionary" software technology called Slifter, you can use your mobile to add even more up-to-date gift options, communicate with the home front (text messaging suggested because the stores can be, needless to say, rather noisy); keeping the kids occupied (pictures with Santa); and "getting in the zone" by listening to music, iPod style, on your mobile. With this in mind, holiday shopping seems more and more to require the logistical savvy of a military unit on maneuvers.

'Tis the season to reaffirm my need for fewer technological gadgets and to celebrate more practical solutions for living. For example, the addition of hundreds of public toilets in the Times Square area of New York City . Having actually spent holiday time (including one very cold and bladder uncomfortable New Year's Eve) in this neighborhood, this is an achievement on par with Euclidean geometry and walking on the moon.

'Tis the season for meaningful statistics, such as New England households will lead the way in holiday spending gluttony.

According to the good folks at The Conference Board, Americans are expected to spend an average of $449 per household, a dip from $466 last year. The New England spendthrifts will spend an average of $545 -- while relative frugality is expected to break out in the mountain region from Idaho to New Mexico , which will spend $348 per household. The real mystery is the sizable, almost $200 per household disparity -- perhaps it's the air and wide-open spaces.

To be more statistically specific, the older the household head (55 to 64) and wealthier (more than $50,000) will spend the most, averaging $508 and $631, respectively.

'Tis the season to avoid yuletide shame arising from questionable (though sometimes entertaining) office party behavior, according to the folks at WorldWIT, which bills itself as "the world's largest online community for professional women."

WorldWIT tells me that the top of the charts holiday party regrets include excessive drinking, forgetting a colleague's name, becoming romantically involved with a colleague whose name you remember, getting caught gossiping after one too many egg nogs, and "brownnosing with upper management."

Needless to say, these missteps could be career killers, but they do offer plenty of revealing material. "Sober, my colleague told me how much he loved his wife. Drunk, he told me how much he loved ME," said one holiday party survivor.

'Tis the season to turn your holiday party into a quasi-reality television show of competition and cooperation. That's the promise of Diane Durkin, the president of New Castle-based Loyalty Factor that offers a holiday corporate culinary workshop to foster more spirit by creating a feast or dessert through team-building and camaraderie-enhancing exercises.

'Tis the season to choose the right corporate gift to make an end-of-the-year product placement statement. The folks at the Hampton Beach office of Adventures in Advertising, a national franchise firm, have offered me "the ultimate two-minute guide" for choosing that oh-so-right gift for a current or prospective client.

Executives, they tell me, appreciate food gifts, drink ware sets, fleece items ("will be appreciated for years to come"), desktop accessories and leather goods.

Dumping, uh, giving these logoed gifts onto your favorite CEO ensures a high "cost-per-impression," or CPI ratio, that can't be beat ( coffee mugs, for example, "that stay on desks two years or more can generate 750 to 2,500 impressions a year, assuming they get somewhere between 15 to 50 impressions in a standard five-day workweek").

These special corporate gifts also end up frequently on the yard sale circuit.

'Tis the season to prepare for short tempers when it comes to telephone customer-service confrontations over retail mishaps. The good news for those who have gotten through 67 frustrating roadblocks and detours just to talk to an actual human being, they can tell when you are ready to blow a fuse.

The folks at NICE Systems, which specializes in digital-recording systems, have a voice-detection alert that can tell when we're about to hit the high-decibel anger roof. "This can bring speedier intervention by a (call center) manager and swifter resolution of your issue," a NICE Systems press release said.

We can only hope the call center manager is an actual human being and not another recording.

'Tis the season to savor the digital joys of Cyber Monday, the logical Internet-age holiday tradition in the making after the excesses of Black Friday. The folks at SortPrice.com tells me "this is the ceremonial kickoff of the online holiday shopping season." And for those who are wondering, an estimated $32 billion will be spent online while not in line, an increase of 18 percent from last year.

Who's buying what? Books top the list of online gift purchases with toys and games coming in second, and footwear and apparel running third.

What's interesting is that while Cyber Monday has a designation, the busiest online shopping day was, no surprise here, actually two weeks later.

'Tis the season for procrastinating. According to Consumer Reports some annoying and clearly anal-retentive types, 29 percent of them to be exact, said they got a head start on their holiday shopping by Oct. 15.

Another dubious claim by the American public is that nearly half of them will be done by mid-December. An expected 22 percent of us (myself included) will still be shopping by Dec. 23. But the royalty of delay, and possibly the most honest folks in the country, will be around 6 percent who say they won't be done until after Christmas.

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