Businesses Should Never Break Promises. Customers Should Never Accept Broken Promises!

"A promise made should be a promise kept" - Steve Forbes


As a business or as a customer, you must demand that promises made are promises kept. If you are a business and you don't keep promises, expect to be out of business. If you are a customer and you allow promises to be broken, expect to always be treated poorly and to get second-rate goods and services. That's the way it is. History proves it. Just look at the old Soviet Union or Socialist Britain for evidence of that.

PROMISES, PROMISES

Keeping a promise is important morally, spiritually and in business. In the west, they say that, "The customer is always right." But you wouldn't know that by the poor attitude of many people working in customer service or at cash registers all over the west and in North America. Many people seem like they are pissed off at the world and just hate their jobs.


I've always found this sort of person not just annoying, but quite curious. If they hate their jobs so much, then why don't they just quit? Or, as my Punk Rock friends would say back in the late 1970's, "If you hate your job so much, why don't you just kill yourself and do us all a favor?"   

In Japan, reverence for the customer is even more extreme than the west. I reckon that also might explain why service in Japan is always so excellent. In Japan, we don't say that the customer is always right, we say that, "The customer is god."


I suppose that being god does trump being right all the time, doesn't it? I guess I'd rather be god than a nagging housewife who insists that she is right all the time.


But I digress....


Sometimes, though, the Japanese can have a bizarre attitude about this. In some cases, the Japanese, even when they are god (paying money) will be more concerned with getting along than with getting what they paid for.


I can give you several good examples: When my daughter was 1 1/2 years old, she came down with a rare form of children's cancer. The doctors gave her two months to live. My then-wife was very concerned with getting along with and "communicating" with the doctors. I would have none of that. I was only concerned with my daughter's recovery. I fired those doctors (they didn't believe that she had a chance to recover) and I hired the best doctors in Japan who did believe that there was a chance.


The result? My daughter recovered and is now 18 years old and a very happy and popular high school student. My then-wife and I divorced (the price that had to be paid for my daughter's recovery I told myself). And my attitude on demanding the best from people; insisting that the people I work with believe in what they do; and insisting that people do what they say they are going to do was set in stone forever.

It was also one of the most difficult to understand lessons for me in how the Japanese think. I was floored that my wife put so much emphasis on getting along with the doctors over results.


I believe that the end result of this affair showed that I was right about being demanding.


Another weird example of the Japanese who are the people paying the money - the "Gods" here - yet are being so compliant is happening right now around me.


Recently, the neighborhood school completely cancelled summer school even though in all prior documentation from the school it is plainly written that "Due to poor enrollment, courses may be cancelled on May 11." Not to nit-pick but it says "courses" not "summer school."


I am upset about this. Some parents don't seem to care. I am astounded that they don't seem to care. Customers get poor service and broken promises and they don't seem to care? 


What has the world come to when a business (in this case, a school) can just arbitrarily cancel promises made on paper and the clients (in this case, the parents) go down and don't complain and demand that the business does what it said it was going to do?


Some parents seem worried that this business (school) is going to lose money. I find that ridiculous. Not that the school is going to lose money, that the parents would be concerned with that. You'd think they'd be more worried about their child's education. 


I wonder if, every time these people go into, say, a restaurant, are they concerned that the restaurant makes enough money on their purchase?  

Promises. That is the point here in this second example. Not money. Not business finances. Promises. A bond of trust between clients (children & parents) and the business (school). 

Mad Magazine. Remember that? Oh, yeah. 

What was this article about? Broken promises! That's it!

What lessons are are people teaching their kids when they allow people to break promises so easily? 

I can tell you that if I sent out documentation to my clients promising some service and then I cancelled it arbitrarily before the deadline date, because my company would lose money, then I'd rightly have a bunch of angry ex-clients. If some company management made such a critical mistake, that person should be fired. 

The point of this post is very simple. I always ask that organizations that I do business with keep their promises. Or, if they can't, then they make sincere efforts to do something to rectify the situation. My organization will always keep its promises. That's the only way businesses can survive into the future.

Yeah, I know asking people to keep their promises is old-fashioned, but I'm that kind of guy. 

Smart clients shop around when the places they do business with do not keep their promises. I can promise you that I always do. That's just common sense and smart business. I hope your business keep all its promises - or just do not make any if you can't keep them. If you can't keep them, then expect to lose business or be out if it soon.

If you are a client, on the other hand, then you must demand that businesses do as they say they are going to do otherwise the goods and services we all receive drop in quality and that does no one any good.

I will go even more demanding than Steve Forbes' quote at the top of this post when I quote famous US statesman Alexander Hamilton, "A promise made must never be broken."

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PS: If your child ever gets cancer (I pray not) and you want some practical advice from someone who has now helped 4 people recover from cancer, write to me. I am not a doctor, but I can tell you some common sense things about what is going on and how you can do something to actually help your loved one greatly.    

The 25th Anniversary of Chernobyl and You - Some Surprising Facts

Yesterday was the 25th anniversary of the Chernobyl nuclear accident. Couple that with the ongoing problems at Fukushima and we are looking into a future of disastrous consequences. 

Photoshop makes some great propaganda, but the truth is quite different. What is appalling is that some people see this stuff and believe it to be true!

The online technology and culture publication, Spiked, has a brilliant essay about Chernobyl on the 24th anniversary of the Chernobyl disaster.


Here are some selected parts:


Yesterday was the twenty-fourth anniversary of the accident at the Chernobyl nuclear power plant in Ukraine. That incident has become one of the main obstacles to the expansion of nuclear power, with environmental groups like Greenpeace demanding that we ‘Remember Chernobyl’. Indeed, we should – but we should remember what actually happened, not the nightmarish spectre summoned up by so many greens.


Just before 1.24am, a series of explosions blew the huge metal and concrete safety lid off the reactor, exposing the core. Enormous quantities of radiation poured out. In the next few days, a number of the plant operators and firemen fought heroically to seal the reactor, and many of them died horribly from radiation sickness as a result. 

Radioactive material was scattered far and wide, most notably in the surrounding parts of Ukraine and Belarus, but thousands of miles away, too. In the UK, for example, many sheep are still tested (almost certainly pointlessly) to ensure that no dangerous radioactivity enters the food chain.

Chernobyl was by far the world’s worst nuclear accident. However, official studies suggest that the accident was not as apocalyptic as we have often been led to believe over the past 24 years. According to a report in 2005, produced by the World Health Organisation (WHO) and the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), "4,000 people could eventually die of radiation exposure from the Chernobyl nuclear power plant…" 

As of mid-2005, however, fewer than 50 deaths had been directly attributed to radiation from the disaster, almost all being highly exposed rescue workers, many who died within months of the accident but others who died as late as 2004.’

Others claim that the WHO-IAEA report is a gross underestimate. Not surprisingly, considering it is a stalwartly anti-nuclear campaign group, Greenpeace published a report in 2006 claiming that ‘the full consequences of the Chernobyl disaster could top a quarter of a million cancer cases and nearly 100,000 fatal cancers’, with tens of thousands of premature deaths from other causes. However, there is good reason to believe that the WHO-IAEA claims of 50 deaths so far is nearer the mark. Apart from the poor souls who fought to deal with the accident directly, the actual radiation dose received by the population in the countries around the plant was quite small. 

The picture of Chernobyl in many people’s minds is of a nuclear wasteland for miles around. Nothing could be further from the truth. 

Injecting some balance into the discussion of the accident and death toll at Chernobyl is not to suggest that this incident was an irrelevance. It was a very serious accident. But the lesson to be learned is not that nuclear power is inherently dangerous. In fact, Chernobyl aside, nuclear power has an astonishingly good safety record. The only other nuclear incidents that any member of the general public can ever remember were an accident at Three Mile Island in Pennsylvania, USA in 1979 - which resulted in no deaths at the time and produced an average exposure to radiation for the local population equivalent to a single chest x-ray - and a fire at the Windscale nuclear plant (now called Sellafield) in northern England in 1957, which again passed without immediate casualties (though about 200 cases of cancer were estimated to have been caused as a result in subsequent years).

This all sounds very good and promising for the nuclear power industry. But what is even more shocking is that many leaders of the Green Parties - who were adamantly anti-nuclear - have come out as pro-nuclear one they bothered to research the facts. The article continues:

Ironically, many leading greens have recently come out in support of expanding nuclear power, including James Lovelock, Mark Lynas and former Greenpeace UK director, Stephen Tindale. Another veteran green, Stewart Brand, in his book Whole Earth Discipline, offers a mea culpa for opposing nuclear power for so long. ‘My opinion on nuclear has flipped from anti to pro. The question I ask myself now is, “What took me so long?” I could have looked into the realities of nuclear power many years earlier, if I weren’t so lazy.’

Finally, Spiked says it better than I ever could with their closing arguments:

Nuclear power is a safe, reliable and developing technology. We should be building new nuclear plants as soon as possible. And the fact that we have rejected nuclear for so long, and are still dithering about it today, has a lot to do with the myth of Chernobyl, its exploitation by anti-modern greens, and its impact on the increasingly risk-averse, investment-shirking governments that rule over us.

What people who want to stop nuclear energy fail to realize is that the economy is bad enough now as it is. The oil and coal industries have raped the environment and have caused untold misery in wars to control those resources. 

The way the current economy is - and will be for the foreseeable future - we cannot afford a world without cheap, clean nuclear power.  To think other wise is just plain foolish.

Can you imagine a near future of gasoline and oil prices hitting new world records - at prices three or four times higher than they are now - not to mention how skyrocketing oil prices will exponentially increase our grocery bills? What are our realistic options? 

Solar, wind and power from things like ethanol and bio-fuels that must be subsidized by you, the taxpayer, are generations away from being efficient and generating more energy per unit than they cost to produce.

The facts should be as plain as day to even the most vehement green. It has been to the leaders of the Green Parties:  T

he very worst thing that could happen to us, the little guy, (that's you and me) is for our gas and electricity costs to skyrocket in the middle of this recession. For the betterment of the environment and for our children's future and for our economic well-being, we need cheap, clean renewable energy.

All of our current alternative energy sources are dirty, destroy the environment and are not cost efficient. The only choice we have is nuclear power. We must continue to develop it and make it into the ultimate safe energy source. We have no other choice. 

Thanks to Michael Distacio of Rock Challenge Japan