How to Make Your Customer a Hero

Everybody wants to be a hero! We all want to be the shining star that our family, friends, peers, industry, and customers look up to!

However, to be that hero, a business leader must take a counterintuitive step backwards and become a supporting character.

Our customers do not want to hire a hero, they want to be the hero!

The best thing we can do for our businesses and careers is to make the customer the hero. In doing so, we will accelerate our business and career and, in a round about way, become heroes ourselves!

What does this supporting character look like? Well, Luke Skywalker would never have succeeded without Yoda by his side to equip and guide him. James Bond would have died in his first movie if Q had not outfitted him with state of the art gear. This theme repeats over and over again in movies, comic books and in real life!

No great leader has ever risen to the top without being supported and guided along the way by a cast of supporting characters. We all have teachers, mentors, coaches, and advocates in our personal and professional journeys that have shaped us into who we are today. This applies to world leaders, business people, innovators, athletes and entrepreneurs. It applies to Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, Warren Buffet, Bill Gates, Michael Jordan, and to you, me and our customers!

So, how do you become the supporting character and make your customer the hero?

How Elite Executives Beat Burnout

Some studies have shown that 1 in every 3 working adults is suffering from varying degrees of burnout!

Burnout has been linked to coronary artery disease, hypertension, sleep disturbances, depression, anxiety, and increased drug and alcohol use. Besides the huge personal toll, this obviously flows over into productivity and work performance. This costs your business money! Estimates peg the cost of this lost productivity due to burnout in the $10’s of billions per year in North America alone!

According to psychologist Christina Maslach in her 2016 HBR article, burnout arises from:

The 11 Commandments of Business Success

Reid Hoffman, the co-founder of LinkedIn, knows a thing or two about business success. LinkedIn was founded in 2002 and sold in 2016 for $26B USD. Not a bad rate of return for “only” 14 years of work!

Prior to LinkedIn, Hoffman was involved at Apple, started SocialNet.com, and was an integral part of Paypal’s success and its subsequent sale to Ebay. Hoffman knows business so when he shares some of his husiness secrets, we should all take notes!

Recently, he spoke about 11 components to his success on Timothy Ferriss’ podcast (episode 248). Although he calls them commandments of start up success, they apply equally well to any successful business. I have been able to apply each of these commandments in any business that I have been involved with. Doing these 11 things well will definitely accelerate your business!

I have listed each of the 11 commandments below along with my brief commentary on each point.

Reid Hoffman’s 11 Commandments of Start Up Success

50 Powerful Leadership Lessons from Authentic Leaders

I recently attended the 2017 Global Leadership Summit put on by Bill Hybels and his Willow Creek organization. It was an amazing leadership training event that was attended by over 400,000 people through a global simulcast!

The speakers were amazing and the entertainment between speakers was world class.

What follows are the top one-line lessons from the two day event.

50 Leadership Lessons From the 2017 GLS

Bill Hybels

Why You Need to Eliminate Your Single Point of Failure

A single point of failure, SPoF, in your business can literally devastate your business overnight yet many business leaders spend little or no time at all protecting their business against these risks!

In 1995, a rogue trader brought down Barings Bank through fraudulent, unauthorized, speculative trading. The bank, which had been established in 1762, had a single point of failure and did not have controls in place to protect itself. It’s SPoF destroyed it!

Similarly, uncontrolled trading of oil futures has crippled more than one oil company in recent years. Other businesses have been bankrupted due to manufacturing shutdowns caused by natural disasters, social uprisings, political unrest, wars, etc.