Quotes from the writings of David Freemantle

From "HOW TO CHOOSE"

"You can only meet your predictions if you expose yourself to an increasing number of random events (encounters and experiences). "

"If you spend your whole life living in the same village, without setting foot outside it, the probability is that you will marry someone from that village. "

"The more you choose to expose yourself to random opportunities, the luckier you will become and the higher your performance will be. "

"High performance is random. "

"Selection for employment is an emotional choice in which rationality plays a subordinate role. "

"The best leaders rely on common sense or 'gut feel' to determine the choices they make. "

"There is no such thing as pure 'objective', 'rational' or 'logical' choice."

"Any business decision is no more than a behavioural choice. "

"It is the small choices that present our biggest and most difficult challenges. "

"We rarely make big decisions. It is our microbehaviours that determine our fate. "

"Your choices will make a great impact on your team and your business. "

"Change your choices to change yourself. "

"You are a product of all your choices. "

"The person you are is a sum of all the choices you have made in life. "

"The person you could be is the sum of all the choices you can make in life. "

From "WHAT CUSTOMERS LIKE ABOUT YOU"

"Likeable leaders establish emotional connectivity with their people"

"Visions must turn people on, they must create excitement and enthusiasm"

"Subjectivity is essential in selecting the right candidate when recruiting"

"Two heads are better than one in the selection process"

"Little learning takes place on most customer service training programmes"

"To train people in new customer service systems is easy - to train them in the psychology of customer service is much more difficult"

"Customer service training can be a precious voyage of self discovery"

"Few difficult customers set out to be difficult"

"Relish the problems customers throw at you, the bigger the better"

"How you deal with difficult customers is all to do with your own state of mind"

"Too many companies measure what they think is important rather than what the customer feels is important and what they like"

"Too many organisations develop measures that do not relate to their service promise"

"If customers like your company and the people in it there is a higher probability that they will buy from you than if they do not"

"The degree to which customers like your company and your people is a function of the emotional value you add to the relationship"

"When there is no emotional value in a relationship there is effectively no relationship"

"Those companies that are consistently successful in business excel at adding emotional value to virtually everything they do"

"The cold application of even the most sophisticated business logic and associated systems is insufficient to command customer loader"

"With the help of inspirational leadership, successful companies have evolved by adding a wide range of valuable emotions to the way they do business and interact with customers"

"To deliver 'most-liked' customer service a front-line person must add emotional value during each interaction with a customer, whether that is by telephone, face-to- face contact or in writing"

"The more policies and procedures there are requiring employees to seek permission to please a customer, the less creativity there will be in the organisation"

"It is well known but not well accepted that customer choice is rarely based on rational decision making alone"

"We frequently delude ourselves that we are being rational when in fact what we are doing is rationalising our emotions"

"Rationality is an important force in decision making, but its potency is severely diminished if emotion is absent or ignored"

"Everything customers buy is based on an emotional decision of some form or another"

"Emotion permeates every facet of our life. Without emotion we just have bare facts"

"When you try to reduce business to a set of logics, formulae, facts and figures you are doomed to failure"

"Common sense is of paramount importance in business and customer service"

"Emotions cannot be separated from our rational thinking processes but are an inextricable part of them"

"The majority of customers like front-line employees and organisations who both trust them and can be trusted"

"To create a relationship and therefore a likeable connection with a customer, physical energy is required"

"To create added emotional value to your business transactions you need to create new clusters of thinking and feeling patterns to please your customers"

"Customers move towards products, services and people they like and away from those they do not like"

From "THE STIMULUS FACTOR"

"To be effective you need to factor a stimulus into everything you do "

" All movement results from a stimulus All motivation results from a stimulus All types of performance result from a stimulus"

" All our behaviours, actions, communications and decisions result from our responses to stimuli"

" To change behaviour we have to change the stimulus"

" The stimulus factor at work Is the mind at work The heart at work The soul at work As well as the body at work"

" It is not enough to have needs and wants It is not enough to prioritize these needs and wants These needs and wants have to be stimulated"

" To be stimulating is to be: Thought Provoking Inspirational Fascinating Entertaining Dynamic Lively Incisive"

" To be stimulating is to be: Vibrant Motivating Colourful Encouraging Appreciative Compelling Trusting Understanding"

" To be stimulating is to be: Ambitious Challenging Creative Innovative Imaginative Exciting"

"To succeed we need to relate as well as to reason To relate we need to feel as well as to think To feel we need to work from the heart as well as from the mind To work from the heart we need to stimulate positive emotions as well as positive thoughts"

"Every single thing a manager does or says at work is a stimulus and people respond accordingly"

"High performance is not just a function of energy,skill, experience, talent and knowledge but also a function of the stimulus factor at work"

"Stimulus deprivation leads to the atrophy of the vital energies which employees need to perform and customers need to buy"

"In today's world drudgery is out and stimulation has become an essential need. Life together with hard work is becoming less of a boring chore but more a roller coaster ride through a thousand interrupts"

"Stimulus is the missing third dimension in all theories of motivation."

"To motivate customers to buy and employees to perform a stimulus must be factored into interactions with them."