John Caddell

This is from the autobiography of Four Seasons founder Isadore Sharp, "Four Seasons: The Story of a Business Philosophy." Four Seasons has an unparalleled reputation for customer service. 

I’ve attached a pdf document that represents Chapter 1 as it will be laid out. Note that the illustrations are not yet the final scans, but this gives you a sense of what the whole book will look like. I hope you like it!

It has been a spectacular year for books about mistakes and learning from them. Here’s the list of must-haves:

1. Brilliant Mistakes, Paul Schoemaker. Five years after publishing a terrific HBR article on the subject, Schoemaker celebrates mistakes as, in Joyce’s words, “portals of discovery,” a way of navigating through a largely unpredictable world.

From The Mistake Bank:

The Toyota “North American Quality Advisory Panel,” put together in the wake of the sudden-acceleration incidents in 2009-2010, has released its report, and it’s fascinating reading of how a large company’s strengths can turn into weaknesses under stress. [A copy of the full report is available at this link.]

From The Mistake Bank:

The Toyota “North American Quality Advisory Panel,” put together in the wake of the sudden-acceleration incidents in 2009-2010, has released its report, and it’s fascinating reading of how a large company’s strengths can turn into weaknesses under stress. [A copy of the full report is available at this link.]

From the terrific new book “Better Under Pressure: How Great Leaders Bring Out the Best in Themselves and Others” by Justin Menkes. Here he discusses the need for leaders to show “realistic optimism” and “face actual circumstances” head on:

It’s always refreshing to hear mistake stories from companies whose successes have given them mythical status. Consider Google. There have been so many stories written about their engineering prowess (here & here), their unique culture (here & here), etc., that it’s easy to view them as mistakes (Though it’s fair to say their public image has taken a bit of a beating recently.)

I’ve spent most of my career working the interface between suppliers and their B2B customers. One lesson I’ve learned involves understanding how customers view time; specifically, how they view deadlines when their suppliers make promises. Let me explore this by telling two stories.

Foursquare is the latest Big Thing in the social space, following in the footsteps of Friendster (RIP), Myspace (nearly RIP), Facebook (world’s third largest nation) and Twitter. If you’re not familiar with it, Foursquare is a mobile application that uses GPS to know where you are and allows you to “check in” at places you visit. Friends can learn from the application where you are and on the spur of the moment decide to pay you a visit. (Is it obvious that the application started with young people in New York?)

A guy I used to work with left an all-hands meeting one day. The company had just announced a layoff (it was long enough ago that this was still stunning, not an everyday occurrence like it is now). He turned to me and said, “They always get rid of the mailroom guy.”

What he meant was that the burden of whatever circumstances caused the company to cut back fell on the lowest-paid employees. And whatever mistakes the mailroom guy had made, they hadn’t caused the company’s distress.