Phil Dourado

I just heard a psychologist talking about how people perform better when they feel they are being watched or 'on show'. It reminded me of Pine & Gilmore's book The Experience Economy and the notion that all business is now theatre and your people are players.

As European Customer Management World is coming up next month in London, that, in turn, reminded me of last year's event. My friend Chris Daffy had invited some people to a pre-conference dinner. Each course was introduced by the chef and then the servers flowed in, around twelve of them I think, emerging like two rivers of people from two doors on the side.

I watched them - six on each side of the long table - step back in unison and glance at the head waiter, who gave a small signal with a nod of his head, like a conductor of an orchestra setting the timing.

All twelve moved forward at the same time...

I heard the late, great Fred Newell once talk about a Jack Nicholson exchange with a waitress in the movie Five Easy Pieces that illustrated how rules or company policy can generate conflict with customers instead of giving them what they want.

Here's the dialogue from the scene:

Jack Nicholson: I’d like a plain omelette, no potatoes - tomatoes instead - a cup of coffee, and some toast.
Waitress: (Points to wording on menu) No Substitutions.

Jack Nicholson: (Still polite. Softly spoken.) What…you mean you don’t have any tomatoes?
Waitress: (Irritated) Only what’s on the menu. You can have a Number 2: A plain omelette. Comes with cottage fries and rolls.

Jack Nicholson: (Still polite) I know what it comes with. But, it’s not what I want.
Waitress: I’ll come back when you’ve made up your mind.

Jack Nicholson: (Still polite…but determined) Just a minute: I HAVE made up my mind. I’d...

Yesterday, London's Heathrow airport opened its multi-billion pound Terminal 5. If you're not in the UK, you can read below what happened.

I'm not going to comment, as it's a bit like shooting fish in a barrel, apart from to say that it's just as well they were forced to cancel at the last minute their plans to fingerprint every single passenger passing through the new Heathrow Terminal 5.

If they had fingerprinted customers as well as telling them their luggage could not go on the plane and as well as making some of them sleep on the floor last night and as well as blaming a whole series of stupid problems that proved they simply hadn't worked the bugs out of the system (damn: I couldn't resist commenting after all) they'd have had a riot on their hands instead of just a fiasco.

Since British Airways already loses more bags than any other airline, how are they going to recover from this self-created service farce (they are the only airline allowed to use the...

Lee McEwan in his Serendipity Book blog spots an interesting approach to innovating for customers. This is a simple variant of what Vijay Govindarajan at Tuck Business School, currently seconded to help GE with their innovation, calls 'adjacency innovation': Take two unrelated things and stick them together to produce a novelty.

Govindarajan defines 'adjacency innovation' as taking a core competence and looking for an 'adjacent' space you can expand into. I'd broaden that a bit and say you can also take a well-established practice in one sector, and transplant it into a sector where it is a novelty. Customers instantly recognize what they are supposed to do with the new proposition, because they are used to it from other sectors. Therefore, the danger of novelty - The "What on earth is that...