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“Loyalty” is an old-fashioned word describing being deeply committed
to one’s country, family, or friends. It came into marketing with
the term brand loyalty. But can people be loyal to a brand? Tony
O’Reilly, former CEO of H. J. Heinz, proposed this test of brand
loyalty: “My acid test . . . is whether a housewife, intending to
buy Heinz tomato ketchup in a store, finding it to be out of
stock, will walk out of the store to buy it elsewhere.”
All managers should be leaders, but most are administrators. If you are spending most of your time on budgets, organization charts, costs, compliance, and detail, you are an administrator. To become a leader, you need to spend more time with people, scanning opportunities, developing a vision, and setting goals.
The Internet offers radically new possibilities for conducting business
more efficiently. Just look at what you can do now that you couldn’t
have done (or done easily) before:
A company that masters only its domestic market will eventually lose
it. Strong foreign competitors will inevitably come in and challenge
your company. It is now business without borders.
The modern balance sheet is a lie! It omits the company’s most important
assets. Probably 80 percent of a company’s value lies in its intangible
assets; but they are not on the books. The value of a
company’s plant, equipment, inventory, and working capital hardly
reflects a true value of a company.
A former CEO of Unilever said that if Unilever only knew what it
knows, it would double its profits. The meaning is clear: Many companies
sit on rich information but fail to mine this information. This
has led to an explosion of interest in knowledge management: organizing
a company’s information so that it is easily retrievable and
learning can be extracted from it.
Guarantees are getting more fashionable. Guarantees can be powerful
builders of corporate value and credibility. They may promise
money back, compensation, or product replacement. But they must
be relevant, unconditional, believable, and easy to understand. Ignore
those who promise to help you use 30 pounds in a week, speak
French in a day, or cure baldness.
