The most important rule
Have you ever recommended a doctor?
On what basis?
Did you do an analysis of the outcomes of his treatments along a wide range of patients and compare those outcomes to similar doctors in the same community?
Or was it based on his bedside manner or even how polite his receptionist was?
And what about the accounting firm or law firm or personal trainer you were talking about the other day?
Is it possible that people recommend a Mac so often because of things that having nothing to do with a side-by-side analysis of the speed of data entry in Word?
All a rhetorical way of pointing out that businesses (and people) do two things. Most of focus on just one (at least when we’re doing the task at hand) which is the task at hand. But, there’s something else that’s far more important, something disconnected from what’s produced but certainly related: how you made the customer feel.
How’s this for a 98% rule: By a factor of three, what you do is not nearly as important as how it makes people feel.
If you buy that, then the question is this: why do you spend almost all your time on the wrong thing?