Hi, this is Jeanne Bliss. And what I know is that when you admire a company, and its people, and how they conduct themselves, it turns into growth. So what I call this—what I want you to think about is not just growth—but ADMIRABLE growth.
How are you taking steps to deliver what you do? Across your business? In the way that you sell in the way that you service and the way you take care of your customers and their lives? Are you willing to step outside the bounds of what everybody else does? And take an admirable act in how you do it?
Act Admirably in How You Deliver
For example—Lands’ End story coming here—a million years ago, we, when I was at Land’s End, we sent out a bunch of towels to customers, they had slubs in them. What a slub is—I’m sure you’ve all seen these—it’s a little piece of the looping that sticking up shouldn’t be sticking out. But it is. You got this little crazy loop that’s longer than the others.
So in the QA testing and reviewing of the towels that came in, we noticed there were slubs in a lot of the towels, and we didn’t know what customer had gotten a towel with a slub or not a slub—nobody knew. So we sent a letter to every customer who had sent been sent a towel in that time period, I think it was about 25 or 30,000 customers at the time. And with the letter, we also sent them a new towel. And we said, “Look, we don’t know if you got a bad towel or not, we found some in our QA review. But because of that, we sent you a new towel. If your old towel is fine, here’s another one on us. If the old original towels got a slub in it, we hope you can use it to wash the car or wash your dog or whatever. Your friends at Lands’ End.”
That’s admirable. People had admiration for what we did.
The other way we could have done it was to a send everybody letter and said, “Hey, if you’ve got a bad towel, call us and we’ll send you a new one.” Or simply hope they didn’t notice that the slub was there.
When you act admirably to your customers, what you also do is model the behavior that you want the rest of your organization to take forth in how they make decisions.
Would YOU Admire This Action Inside a Company?
So think about this word: admiration. Think about what happens when you act admirably—not only in how you price your products—but in how you deliver them, in how you get rid of fine print, and other things that create an imbalanced relationship with your customer. And perhaps as you’re making decisions, ask yourself, will we be admired for how we’re performing this act? Would I admire this action inside a company?
Final Thoughts
What we’ve learned through COVID and through the past three years is that the humanity of who we are as people is translated and defined by how we act in business. Admirable growth comes from holding that mirror to ourselves as we make decisions and only taking actions that we ourselves would consider admirable and proud of.
And I have to say it: something we would do for our mother. So that’s what I know, everybody .
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