Lou Holtz said many years ago that customers walking into your business
have three basic questions that you have to answer for them.
The first question: “Can I trust you?”
"Without trust, there is no relationship," Lou said.
"Without trust, you don't have a chance. People have to trust you. They
have to trust your product."
The second question: “Are you committed to excellence?”
Lou explained that "You must send a message that you are committed
to certain standards. You must do
everything to the best of your ability."
Their third question: “Do you care about me?”
Holtz said: "Do you care about me and what happens if your product
doesn't do what it's intended to do?
Caring about people is not making their life easy. Caring about people
is not being their friend. Caring about
people is enabling them to be successful."
“So if you always do the right thing.
If you always do the best you can with the time you have. And if you always show people you care, the
chances are that you and your business will be successful and your customers
will remain loyal and true.”
It just goes to prove that doing the right thing is never the wrong
thing to do.
It’s hard not to be aware of the struggles going on in Tunisia, Libya,
Egypt and more recently Syria. Democratic
aspirations (at least on the surface,) have caused governments to topple and
people to take to the streets demonstrating at great personal risk. The Internet (Twitter and Facebook primarily)
has gained a lot of notoriety in helping facilitate these populist movements
and rightfully so.
But a recent comment about the value of Facebook made by an Egyptian
friend of NY Times columnist Thomas Friedman, got me thinking about Facebook’s
role in these movements and in our own lives.
Friedman’s Egyptian friend said “that in the Egyptian movement that
caused the overthrow of our President, Hosni Mubarak, Facebook really helped
people to communicate, but not to collaborate.”
And that’s an overwhelming weakness of applications like Facebook and
Twitter.
Friedman went on to say that, “No doubt Facebook helped a certain
educated class of Egyptians to spread the word about the Tahrir Revolution.
Ditto Twitter. But, at the end of the day, politics always comes down to two
very old things: leadership and the ability to get stuff done. And when it came
to those, both the Egyptian Army and the Muslim Brotherhood, two old “brick and
mortar” movements, were much more adept than the Facebook generation of secular
progressives and moderate Islamists — whose candidates together won more votes
than Morsi and Shafik combined in the first round of voting but failed to make
the runoff because they divided their votes among competing candidates who
would not align.”
Does that imply, that while millions of younger generations of Americans
use Facebook and Twitter to communicate, their communication is trivial and
meaningless, and that no higher purpose will derive from it? Is expecting more than just communication,
too much for us to expect from Facebook and Twitter?
A king visited his dungeon once a year to talk to the prisoners there.
Every year, each inmate insisted that he or she was the picture of innocence:
They'd all been framed, or treated unfairly at trial, or victims of
circumstances, or otherwise completely free of all guilt. Not one had a
dishonest bone in their body.
One year, the skeptical king asked the newest prisoner in the dungeon,
"I suppose you're as innocent as a lamb, too?"
This man shook his head sadly and said, "No, Your Majesty. I'm a
thief. I was caught fair and square, and my sentence was just."
The king blinked in surprise. "Release this man!" he
proclaimed, and the thief was promptly set free.
The other prisoners began shouting. "Your Majesty, how can you do
such a thing? How can you free a confessed criminal while we rot in here?"
"I'm doing you a favor," the king said. "I can't risk
leaving that evil scoundrel in here to corrupt all your innocent souls, could
I?"
This goes to prove once again that honesty is always the best policy.
