Chapter 5
Marketing, Sales, and Service, Step 1
Organize Around Customer Engagement
Some of life's most influential moments startle you, capturing your attention; others are subtler, perhaps noticed only with the benefit of hindsight.
A cultural appreciation class in middle school provided a startling moment for me. On our first day of school, we clever boys thought we would play a prank on our teacher, a proper and elegantly dressed French woman who could not have been taller than 4 foot 11 inches. Having borrowed a live frog from the biology lab, we tucked it inside a boy's athletic supporter and placed it on her wooden desk at the front of the classroom. Confident that we were in control and setting the tone for the class, we sat back, giggling, waiting for the bell to ring. When madame entered the room, carrying something discretely behind her back, she glanced at her desk, completely ignoring the frog and the strap. Surprising us all, she pulled a knife from behind her, and thrust it, forcefully, into the surface of her desk, just missing the frog. Wood chips flew. The frog went jumping. Madame never missed a beat.
“Today's lesson, boys,” she said, “is about time. You cannot cut it with a knife. People did not go to sleep in the Renaissance knowing that they would wake up in the Baroque Era. It is not always clear when one era is ending and another beginning—it's not like the precise slice of a knife. D'accord?”
Needless to say, she got our attention. Through her atypical ...
