Many companies, and the individuals in them, suffer from a self-imposed version of Orwell’s world. The person that starts asking the tough questions is quelled by management or ultimately leaves the organization in defeat. Companies stop questioning the ways they have always done business, and ultimately create a fabricated and inflated view of themselves.

These companies are now in a state of atrophy and can’t understand why they are not growing, not attracting top talent, and are generally directionless. The solution begins with the asking of simple questions. Here are a few that come to mind:

• Who are our clients and when was the last time we talked to one face-to-face?
• Do our clients promote us to others? If not, why not?
• What is our current business strategy?
• Do our employees know the strategy and where they fit into it?
• Why are we in business and what is our company’s vision?

Toyota terms this culture of questioning the ‘Toyota Way’, or continuous improvement. American automakers have spent the last 20+ years trying to imitate the success of Toyota, but they have continually failed. They are still not ready to cultivate a corporate culture that encourages questioning at all levels of the business. Successful businesses, like Toyota, are able to pull this off.

They say you learn everything you ever need to know in kindergarten. Today I attended an orientation event at my daughter’s elementary school. The principal gave us parents some sage advice on what we should be doing to prepare our kids for kindergarten:

1. Read to them
2. Read to them
3. Read to them
4. Keep an open dialogue with them, and ask lots of questions.

This advice applies beautifully and simply to those of us in the business world. The written word, in all its forms from Orwell to Deming, is a powerful tool for shaping your company and your own personal worldview. It will spark you to question and never stop, which builds stronger, focused, and more passionate businesses.

We are accepting registrations through November and the winners will be announced in March of 2010.  To sign up head over to www.bestofstaffing.com.

Second failure, once I allowed images to be shown for the third-party email address that Adobe was using, the image was basically just text in image form.  On top of that, none of the links worked.  This is due to the use of an image map, which isn’t supported across all email applications.

In our many years of doing online satisfaction surveys we know that the email survey invitation is critical to gaining a good response rate from your clients and customers.  This email from Adobe provides a good example of common mistakes that lead to low response rates.  These two main failures will drop the response rate significantly for Adobe.

A few easy changes would make this campaign much more successful:

1. Take all of the text out of the image and include it in the email as actual text, so email recipients with blocked images actually see something in the email when they open it.
2. Take the Adobe logo and make a single image of just that, and include it in the email.  Making sure to set the alt text so the email recipient knows what it is even if images are being blocked.
3. Personalize it!  They know who I am, so include my name in there somewhere.  We find this improves response rate as well.

Many things were done right, including:

1. Company name was in the subject line.  We find this improves open rates on the emails.
2. Plain text version of the email was included as well, which helps avoiding spam filters.
3. All of the proper CAN-SPAM stuff is in there, like unsubscribe instructions and such.

Over on Andrew Chen’s blog he recently posted a fascinating article on the correlation of interview performance to long-term job performance.  If he is right, what does this mean for the staffing and recruiting industry?  Read his article below and feel free to provide your thoughts below.

What if interviews poorly predict job performance? What if dating poorly predicts marital happiness?

Four simple reasons why I love Rackspace so much:

1. Support – I can IM with them 24×7x365!  No more “on-call” pager numbers = no more guilt when I contact support at 1AM.
2. Killer Product – the Cloud Sites and Servers are so easy to use and scale exactly as promised.
3. Communication – I always know if something is being planned that could affect my sites and even get nice emails warning me of issues with my Cloud Server and how to resolve them.
4. Fanatical Client Service – At Inavero we specialize in measuring a firms attention to client service, so I have seen the good, the bad, and the ugly.  Rackspace is definitely a good egg.

I have one final example of why I love the client centeredness of Rackspace so much.  Rackspace recently experienced some failures in it’s technology systems that ended up affecting their clients.  The client recovery from these failures is the best I have ever experienced with a technology services company.  Below is a video that the CEO released within days of the outages that goes into great detail explaining what happened, sincerely apologizing for the downtime, and detailing what they will change to make sure it doesn’t happen again.  This is how exceptional companies recover from failure.  They take 100% of the blame and quickly move to make things right.  Way to go Rackspace!

American Airlines customer service manager says: “We can only take 50% of the blame for the problem. I mean…how do we know for sure that it was our fault that you don’t have reservations on the flight? You could have put a hold on the reservation and then let it expire. We just can’t know for sure.”

I reply: “Maybe because my 5 year old daughter is booked on the same flight, but now by herself? In what world is it ok to send your 5 year old on a plane ride to Disneyland by herself?”

After pondering this conversation and experience I wonder, should it matter? Why should any customer ever have to answer to an argument from a customer service manager about the % of blame they are willing to take in a problem like this? The real question is not who is to blame, but how can a solution be found?

American Airlines would serve it’s shareholders, employees, and customers much better if it took a play from the Southwest Airlines playbook and created a customer service culture that avoids laying blame and instead strives to find the solution. A solution that sends the customer off to promote the company’s great customer service and not off to write a blog post about how poor the customer service was. That is what leads to long-term profitability in tough economic and industry environments. It also generates Net Promoter Scores that crush the industry average.

Is the customer service culture within your company one that focuses on who’s fault it was? Or one that focuses on finding a solution that creates happy, loyal, and long-term customers?