Dreamfeed

Last week, I encountered the phrase customer loyalty at several places and I experienced a growing feeling of uneasiness with it. Johnny Moore has also written a blog entry about this.

The phrase customer loyalty and the way it is used suggests a mental model in which the customer - company relationship is not “balanced”, not reciprocal, but mostly unidirectional and based on punishment and rewards. It’s about companies trying to get customers to be loyal using carrots and sticks (well, discounts, air miles, trading stamps, and stuff like that) - a mental model in which a customer being loyal to a company is like a dog being loyal to its owner? It feels a bit manipulative to me, being all about the customer, but without getting him/her involved.

The website of the AYE conference offers an interview with Gerald Weinberg, conducted by SDMagazine. It’s an interesting read.

A quote on blaming:

Q: What’s the most important piece of management-related advice anyone has ever given you?

GW: If you blame your employees, you’re a bad manager. You hired them, accepted them, supervised them, and directed their training. You’re responsible. If you don’t like what’s happening, look to your own behavior. But, if there’s credit to be given, it’s theirs.

On outsourcing and lack of innovation:

Q: Is this bad behavior coming from the developers themselves, or do you mean to say the entire industry is to blame for not staying on top of innovation?

GW: It starts with the developers, and managers, too. But the overall result is, as you suggest, the entire industry getting too involved in navel-watching and competitiveness over the wrong values. For a long time, customers had nowhere else to go for service and had to put up with whatever we gave them. Now they have choices, and they’re getting even.

It’s going to be quite busy in November: this week I got notice that the Systems Thinking workshop has been accepted for XP Day in London. I’ll run it together with Willem.

That’s three XP Days and three Systems Thinking workshops in slightly more than a week…a kind of systems thinking tour around Europe