Name a company you love, a company you are loyal to, a company you buy things from all the time, and you will inevitably find a company that’s connected to its customers, that knows who they are and what they care about.

Learning is making progress toward a goal, so people need to know what they are shooting for.

Our companies have all been optimized for a perfect one-way stream, the line of production, and these pesky customers are mucking about in our operations, and we have now a completely different problem to solve. We need to optimize not for the line of production but for the line of interaction, the front line — the edge of the organization — where

Service networks thrive by making a set of complementary services more easily available to customers.

This works for McDonald’s because they have narrowed customer expectations to match a factory-like service.

Learning is fundamentally different than training. Training is when a company teaches people how to do stuff that the company already knows how to do. Learning is a way to deal with new, uncertain, and ambiguous situations, a process of exploration by which you come to find and discover new things.

No way to speak up quickly on our own behalf, to talk directly to customers, investors, as well as partners, or let them talk directly to us…we were losing control of our story, in the stores as well as the real world.

Customers not only compare your service to what you have done in the past, but they also compare it to their other alternatives, or even similar experiences in entirely different domains.

A service is different. While processes are designed to be consistent and uniform, services are co-created with customers each and every time a service is rendered. This difference is not superficial but fundamental.