I watched a great video today of customer talking about one of the products that I worked on at Mobysoft. One of the things I loved about working at an entrepreneurial company like Mobysoft, and now at a customer-obsessed company like Amazon.com, is delivering products and services that make a real difference for customers. Knowing that I am delivering value to a customer makes all the work worthwhile.

Here’s the video [1 min, 30 seconds] of Matthew Gardiner, Chief Executive of Trafford Housing Trust talking about working with Mobsyoft and the RentSense product.

In closing here’s a quote from Sam Walton, another visionary who understood the importance of serving customers:

There is only one boss. The customer.
And he can fire everybody in the company from the chairman on down,
simply by spending his money somewhere else.
—Sam Walton

As I was reading up on the Chainstore Paradox I came across an interesting point on the economy of decision effort which classified decision making effort into 3 levels

1. Routine
2. Imagination
3. Reasoning

At the Routine level decision making is requires little effort as decisions are typically arrived at by default in this situation. At the Imagination level the decision making requires more effort and the ability to see oneself in the opponents position, it is here that the majority of decision making in business is made due to the additional costs of moving to the next level of decision making, Reasoning. Interestingly moving from the imagination level to the reasoning level may not yield better results, especially if the computational complexity introduced is prone to error or bias.

Determining at what level to make a decision is a real skill. I have read a couple of contrasting books on this subject, Blink by Malcolm Gladwell and Think by Michael LeGault. It is the decision, whether to approach a decision with the intuitive thinking promoted by Gladwell or the critical thinking promoted by LeGault, that is of interest to me. In the end I guess it comes down to situational factors, what is the timeframe for the decision, the relative costs, and ability to change a decision when more information is known.

“If you believe that pleasant interviewing skills, a good handshake or the right outfit are a better predictor of future performance than what the person has actually shipped in the past, I think it’s worth pointing out that you’re nuts.” – Seth Godin

Well interview season is coming up for me as I look for an internship this summer. One thing I’ve learnt from my HR class last semester was that behavioral interviews were one of the most accurate way of assessing future performance. So I’ve been busy practicing to be a good interviewee, it’s a different mindset than I had approaching it from the other side of the table as a hiring manager!