Best Buzz Phrase: "Customer sacrifice": a more precise measure than customer satisfaction. The authors' definition: "Customer sacrifice = What customer wants exactly -- What customer settles for."
Best Warning: "The easiest way to turn a service into an experience is to provide poor service -- thus creating a memorable encounter of the unpleasant kind." Check, please!
Vaguely Pornographic Business Advice: "Ing the Thing": The authors want companies to focus on "the experience customers have while using" your product rather than on how the product performs. "Apparel manufacturers, for instance, could focus on the wearing experience, the cleaning experience, and perhaps even the hanging or drawering experience. . . . Any good can be inged."
Worst Industry Buzzword: "Eatertainment": the category to which some analysts assign theme restaurants like Hard Rock Cafe and Bubba Gump Shrimp Co. -- places where "food functions as a prop" (and sometimes tastes like one).
Let's Get Metaphysical: "You are what you charge for."
Big Idea: Free, Perfect, and Now: Connecting to the Three Insatiable Customer Demands: A CEO's True Story, by Rob Rodin with Curtis Hartman (Simon & Schuster, 1999). Rodin, CEO of Marshall Industries, understands that survival in a fast-paced economy rests on one thing: giving customers what they want. His book tells you how to do it.
Best Practice: Profit Patterns: 30 Ways to Anticipate and Profit from Strategic Forces Reshaping Your Business, by Adrian J. Slywotzky (Times Books, 1999). The author of the cover story in the February:March 1999 issue of Fast Company refines his take on how winning companies achieve the sweet spot of profitability.
Sleeper: The Entertainment Economy: How Mega-Media Forces Are Transforming Our Lives, by Michael J. Wolf (Times Books, 1999). Wolf, who built Booz, Allen & Hamilton's entertainment-consulting practice, invokes Disney, MTV, and Martha Stewart to make his case: that "the line between entertainment and the rest of the economy [has] disappeared."
Keeper: Difficult Conversations: How to Discuss What Matters Most, by Douglas Stone, Bruce Patton, and Sheila Heen (Viking, 1999). From the team that brought us the classic Getting to Yes comes a user-friendly guide to mastering the talks that we dread -- from asking for a raise to ending a relationship to just saying no.
Daniel H. Pink (dan@freeagentnation.com) is a Fast Company Contributing Editor. His latest experience has been writing a book about the free-agent economy.
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