Shesh is well known in the Marine and Offshore community on Singapore and beyond and someone well worth listening to when he give his opinions and advises, which he does on Splash and in LinkedIn from time to time.
Question:
In America, “the customer is always right”. In Europe, “the business is always right”. Why is there such a difference? Why don’t European businesses compete by being nicer to the customers? - Quora.
Real life episode from young engineering days.I was working in a new manufacturing factory in the US as an student intern engineer. Our power was steam and the boilers were heavy fuel fired. Located near a residential area the wind was checked before blowing soot but the direction indicator malfunctioned and the guys blew soot one night that went on a lot of cars and people’s houses. There was a big uproar and this made the TV news. The mayor even got involved. A private meeting was held with the mayor, a couple of council members and even a congressman with the senior French management. They berated him saying the company didn’t care about the community and was only interested in the profit for stockholders etc. He calmly explained his first priority was the employees, many of whom lived in the community, his next priority were the customers who enabled the employees to be paid, the next was the community because we lived there and last were the stockholders because they only got something if all the previous things he mentioned went well. He promised the company would pay all damages and would take steps to insure this never happened again. All was well after that. I had already been tasked with finding out what happened with the wind direction indicator and I had discovered a wasp nest stopped the shaft but we didn’t get into that.
Since then I have often thought about how much better off everyone would be if the thinking hadn’t been reversed since then to “shareholder first”.
From my experiences, this is sadly true with giant publicly traded companies. Shareholders come first. What’s even worse, shareholders come & go as fast as investors can click a mouse. Share price falls 20% & maybe 10% of shareholders sell out & you get a bunch of new owners. But people are dumb. Just lying to them, telling them that they come first fools many of them. Take McDonald’s marketing campaign for the last couple of years. “I’m Lovin’ It”. McDonald’s just tells customers that they love McDonald’s while humming a catchy tune & McDonald’s is making money by the truckloads.
One of Einstein’s students asked him, “What does logic mean?”
Einstein replied: “I’ll answer you with a question. Suppose two workers go down a chimney to clean it. One comes out with a dirty face and the other with a clean face. Who will go and wash their face?”
The student replied immediately and without hesitation: “Of course, the one with the dirty face.”
Einstein replied: “Your answer is incorrect. The one who washes their face is the one who has a clean face, because they have looked at their colleague’s face and assumed theirs was also dirty. The one who has a dirty face does not wash their face, thinking it is clean like their colleague’s.”
The student said: “That’s true and logical.”
Einstein replied: “No, that’s not true because the question itself is illogical. It’s not logical that two men would enter the same chimney at the same time and one would come out clean and the other dirty.”
Sometimes the problem is not the answer, but the imperfect question itself.
Source: https://qr.ae/pFZnIq
