Tagged: Malmo

I was having lunch near my office downtown. The restaurant was almost full, and I was by myself, so I took a seat at the bar.

Even though it's a place I don't go often, I knew most of the other people at the bar, common among us downtowners. And they all knew the bartender, Mark.

Mark was an octopus, serving food and drink customers at the bar, which equaled several tables full of people. Service was good, but secondary, because every one of us was enjoying ourselves. It helped that it was Friday.

An expression I don't hear much any more is, “don't sweat the small stuff,” but I absolutely see demonstrations of it everyday. It means don't worry about the details and concentrate on the “big picture.”

Yet, little matters more than the details, because it is the details that determine the quality of the execution, and most great strategies or plans fail, not because they were bad, but because they were executed poorly. Billions in a retail chain with check-out clerks who don't even look at the customer.

Seth Godin says that few businesses really understand how much a customer is worth.

Amen, Seth.

Godin, author of The Tipping Point and a couple other 200-page best-sellers, figures that, for instance, an average AT&T or Verizon customer is worth at least a couple thousand dollars.