WestJet: Great Customer Service

I was flying back to Toronto from Quebec City on West Jet a couple of weeks ago and all flights into Toronto were cancelled due to stormy weather. Needless to say all of the customers were quite agitated. Carl, the West Jet gate agent was SO apologetic even though there was obviously nothing that West Jet could do about it. Not only was he apologetic, but the company apparently has a policy to pay for its customers to stay overnight in hotels even if it’s a weather related delay. I was agog. In today’s airline industry, who provides meals, taxi chits and hotel rooms for a weather delay? Certainly not Air Canada. In fact, Air Canada now charges to help you if your plane gets delayed.

But that’s not all.

On the way back to the airport from the hotel, the taxi driver wouldn’t accept my voucher so I paid with a credit card. When I got to the check in desk I told the agent that I had to pay for the cab. She took my credit card receipt and told me she would photocopy it and send it to head office to process a charge back to my credit card and would give the receipt back to me at the gate before I boarded. I guess we missed each other because I never got my receipt back and I figured I would be out $30 but that was still way better than if I had flown with Air Canada.

10 days later I get an envelope in the mail with my receipt and a letter from the agent’s home address with a hand written note apologizing for having not met me at the gate. A very nice touch. I figured I would have to give West Jet a call the next day and mail in my receipt in order to get a refund. The next morning I got a call from West Jet asking me if I would prefer to get my $30 back on my credit card or $75 towards a future flight.

Guess which one I took.

Corporations Need More Right Brain

Jill Bolte Taylor’s TED talk is pretty astounding. It’s an inspiring story that she tells very well. If anyone is looking for a bit of a “how-to” on presenting, check out her talk. I’m pretty sure it would have the Heath brothers’ seal of approval.

But rather than write about her presentation, I thought I would mention one of the points from her talk. In short, she is a neuro-scientist and she says that the “right” side of the brain, which is normally associated with creativity, is the side of the brain that sees big pictures, gestalts, overall patterns. The right side of the brain is also responsible for imagining possibilities, combining things in novel ways, modeling, seeing things with the mind’s eye, etc.

The left side of the brain is the analytical side. It’s linear and is responsible for vertical thinking, which tends to select, while in the process of decision making, one option to the exclusion of others. The left side is responsible for absorbing the data that it is constantly collecting and assigning it into the bigger categories that the brain is so good at creating. This saves time so that we aren’t constantly evaluating each new piece of information that comes into us but we can pick little pieces of data and draw conclusions based on our past experience.

So, what Taylor says is that the right side of the brain is responsible for the past and the future and the left side of the brain is responsible for the present. What’s the connection to corporations?

One leading management thinker (the name escapes me now) said that corporate strategy is simply a series of predictions. If that’s true, executives should be thinking a whole lot more time in right brain intensive activities than they are. More serious play, more work with images, more work with divergent sets of knowledge and experience, more work with looking for weak signals and imagining those signals being amplified 5 years from now….but this isn’t happening. It seems as though the higher up the food chain they get, execs are more and more concerned with the present rather than learning from the past and making better predictions about the future.

Powerpoint doesn’t equal Presentation

I had the opportunity to attend a webinar by Nancy Duarte of Duarte Design (Thanks to VizThink for arranging.) Her firm is responsible for the design and updates to Al Gore’s presentation for An Inconvenient Truth, among other high profile projects.  The topic of the webinar was around the design of PowerPoint presentations.

One really important point that she made is that Powerpoint equals Presentation and she likened PowerPoint slides to the set design of a play. The design of the set is very important for setting mood and tone and adding to the narrative, but it’s the actors, props, lighting, sound and writing that makes the complete play.  Without all of those components working together it’s not much of a play.

That analogy was a real insight for me and I think it’s a great way to consider the use of PowerPoint. Too many presentations try to jam tons of data, bullets (paragraphs even) into the slides and the “thing” becomes a “slideument”. Not a good slideshow and not a good document. Presenters should have a story to tell. They should have passion for their story and use that passion to help motivate the audience towards action with PowerPoint as one of the tools to help.

Powerpoint doesn’t equal Presentation

I had the opportunity to attend a webinar by Nancy Duarte of Duarte Design (Thanks to VizThink for arranging.) Her firm is responsible for the design and updates to Al Gore’s presentation for An Inconvenient Truth, among other high profile projects. The topic of the webinar was around the design of PowerPoint presentations.

One really important point that she made is that Powerpoint equals Presentation and she likened PowerPoint slides to the set design of a play. The design of the set is very important for setting mood and tone and adding to the narrative, but it’s the actors, props, lighting, sound and writing that makes the complete play. Without all of those components working together it’s not much of a play.

That analogy was a real insight for me and I think it’s a great way to consider the use of PowerPoint. Too many presentations try to jam tons of data, bullets (paragraphs even) into the slides and the “thing” becomes a “slideument”. Not a good slideshow and not a good document. Presenters should have a story to tell. They should have passion for their story and use that passion to help motivate the audience towards action with PowerPoint as one of the tools to help.