Seven Habits of Highly Effective People

levels -- no downtime, no maintenance. He runs the machine day and night. The
production is phenomenal, costs are down, and profits skyrocket. Within a short
time, he's promoted. Golden eggs.
But suppose you are his successor on the job. You inherit a very sick goose, a
machine that, by this time, is rusted and starts to break down. You have to invest
heavily in downtime and maintenance. Costs skyrocket; profits nose-dive. And
who gets blamed for the loss of golden eggs? You do. Your predecessor
liquidated the asset, but the accounting system only reported unit production,
costs, and profit.
The P/PC Balance is particularly important as it applies to the human assets
of an organization -- the customers and the employees.
I know of a restaurant that served a fantastic clam chowder and was packed
with customers every day at lunchtime. Then the business was sold, and the new
owner focused on golden eggs -- he decided to water down the chowder. For
about a month, with costs down and revenues constant, profits zoomed. But little
by little, the customers began to disappear. Trust was gone, and business
dwindled to almost nothing. The new owner tried desperately to reclaim it, but
he had neglected the customers, violated their trust, and lost the asset of
customer loyalty. There was no more goose to produce the golden egg.
There are organizations that talk a lot about the customer and then
completely neglect the people that deal with the customer -- the employees. The
PC principle is to always treat your employees exactly as you want them to treat
your best customers.
You can buy a person's hand, but you can't buy his heart. His heart is where
his enthusiasm, his loyalty is. You can buy his back, but you can't buy his brain.
That's where his creativity is, his ingenuity, his resourcefulness.
PC work is treating employees as volunteers just as you treat customers as
volunteers, because that's what they are. They volunteer the best part -- their
hearts and minds.
I was in a group once where someone asked, “How do you shape up lazy and
incompetent employees?” One man responded, “Drop hand grenades!” Several
others cheered that kind of macho management talk, that “shape up or ship out”
supervision approach.
But another person in the group asked, “Who picks up the pieces?”
“No pieces.”
“Well, why don't you do that to your customers?” the other man replied.
“Just say, 'Listen, if you're not interested in buying, you can just ship out of this
place.'”
He said, “You can't do that to customers.”