Socrates Says

Friends are angels who lift our feet when our own wings have trouble remembering how to fly. It is not what happens to you but how you respond to what happens to you No one has ever made himself great by showing how small someone else is.

This is a most interesting time, isn’t it? I listened to Jimmy Rogers on CNBC the other night. He was pointing out there is an election this year in the United States, there is one in France. Germany has an election next year. In fact there are 40 governments that will face elections this year. […]

A number of years ago, 2005 to be precise, Ken Blanchard and Barbara Glanz published a short book called “Johnny the Bagger.” It is based on a story than Ms. Glanz used in her talks. Her signature, for her customer service talks, was a room surrounded on all sides by colorful posters. She told stories about […]

Over the years we have collected labor to apply to work orders in a myriad of manners. We started from an attendance time card which the mechanics completed at the end of the day telling us what times they worked on which jobs. Then we moved to individual job time cards while still retaining an […]

The first article I wrote for an Industry publication I called “The Only Part That Matters.” This is of course the part that you don’t have available. I was referencing the fact that too often we are driven by metrics. Off the shelf availability has to be more than 90% of some such number. That […]

Al Wiley, an executive of Xpectmor, sent us a comment on our recent Market Share post. He says that “market share is the definitive measure of customer satisfaction.” Of course he is right. The measure of market share, however,  is what causes the dilemma for many of us. In the equipment market it is reasonably […]