Below is an Autogenerated Transcript

Don: So in the book, ‘Uplifting Service’, you talk about this paperclip moment in terms of an organization and I kind of come back to that even in my career, that there were certain moments that I’ve seen with different organizations where you either have the opportunity to shine or not and leaders have to choose. Maybe you want to take a moment and describe the paperclip, you know, first and then, you know, maybe we kind of come back to the question of ‘how do you decide?’.

Ron: By the way, for those who are interested, if you go to YouTube and you type in my name, Ron Kaufman, and you type in either “paperclip” or “what’s my coin?” Because these are two sides of the same issue. What they’re both speaking to is there are very small things that you can do that can actually send out a very clear message without having to write memos, without having to change company policies, etc. 

The paperclip story is one where it was Kōnosuke Matsushita, visiting a factory that had cleaned up, you know, in anticipation of his arrival, rolled out the red carpet, and he was a fanatic for housekeeping. One of the things that he did is he walked down the red carpet, out of the corner of his eye, he saw underneath one of the big industrial machines a paperclip on the floor and literally stopped on the red carpet, turned, walked over, squatted down, picked it up, held it up in the air, put it in his suit pocket and went back to the red carpet and kept walking. Didn’t say a word. Shocked the heck out of everybody. 

Boy, did they get the message.

So there are little things like a P.S in an email to a supplier. It simply says, P.S., I just want to say thank you for being one of the organizations that we count on to help us be successful with our customers. It could be: a customer has a complaint, you’re sitting in a meeting with some of your team members, and you don’t roll your eyes and say, “Oh, that guy”, right? You instead are the one who says, “Let’s look at this again from fresh eyes”, you know, etc. So, just the power of a small gesture can be leveraged quite significantly. And I think all the more so in this particular era where so many of our normal practices have been disrupted. 

Don: I think one of the big things that continually comes back that I frequently hear is just the overall cost of, you know, what is the cost of good service while the cost of not good service is pretty expensive from my point of view.