December 19, 2007
How To Disappoint Your Customers
by Dan WooldridgePC World Magazine just listed Windows Vista as #1 of The 15 Biggest Tech Disappointments of 2007. I gleaned a list of how to disappoint customers from Dan Tynan's review.
"It's not that Vista is awful."
Lesson 1: Disappointment is achieved not by being utterly horrible, but by being just bad enough to disappoint. Just don't live up to expectations no matter how much you hype them.
"It's just that Vista isn't all that good."
Lesson 2: Disappointment is achieved by a lack of excellence and a lack of improvement over what came before. Encourage people to go back to what they were using before.
"When it debuted...incompatibilities were rampant."
Lesson 3: Disappointment is achieved when you make your product hard to use and difficult to integrate into what they have and use. And along the way, make sure that those who would help you such as hardware and software makers stay unenthusiastic about working with you.
Click here to read the next 4 lessons on how to disappoint your customers...
Back to the Cottage — PDF Downloads
Back to the Cottage unpacks John's numerous leadership experiences and traces the development of the values that made him an effective leader. These are the lessons learned not in a high powered educational institution or a corporate leader development boot camp, but in the family's cottage business of his youth.
Preface
Chapter 1: Field Tested
Chapter 2: The Cottage
Chapter 3: Cottage Principles
Chapter 4: Shuttering the Cottage
