“I’m always relieved when someone is delivering a eulogy and I realize I’m listening to it.” — George Carlin, May 12, 1937 - June 22, 2008

I’ve become hooked on Ramsay’s Kitchen Nightmares, the BBC show where restaurateur Gordon Ramsay spends a week with a struggling restaurant, trying to turn it around. It’s a show full of business lessons, from finding a market, to pricing, to product presentation, to accounting.

I’m going to be pulling some of the quotes from the show and posting them here over the next few days. Today’s is…

Don’t put your ego before your customers.

Said to an award winning chef who’s fancy pretentious menu and sky high prices scared away customers.

I can’t find wifi at Under The Radar, but I’m going to twitter as much of the sessions as my iPhone battery allows. Watch my twitter stream.

Update: Wifi is here, just not obvious. Still twittering, though.

Fred Wilson is running a series of quotes from a book about the father of venture capital, Georges Doriot. Today’s is from Dennis Robinson, CEO of one of Doriot’s portfolio companies, High Voltage Engineering.

At early board meetings, I would try to give an accurate accounting of the profit and loss. He would look through me and ask what I really thought about when I was shaving.

Fred asked if people were enjoying the quotes because he hadn’t received any comments. I commented that short quotes are like candy. They’re fun but without substance. They’re empty calories. What I’d really like is to talk about what the quote means, tie it to some examples, and start a conversation around it.

Doriot was looking for the true picture of an early stage company. What the numbers look like is important, sure, but in a very early company, what what Doriot wanted to know is what was occupying the CEO’s thoughts. Not everything that’s important can be measured. Not everything that can be measured is important.

I had dinner with a friend last night and we were swapping war stories from the dot com meltdown. He was working for one of the big interactive shops, running the technology projects for the company. He’d often attend analyst presentations and related how they’d share new projects or interesting technologies with the financial analysts. The analysts didn’t care. They simply wanted to know how many new seats the company was adding. How quickly is headcount growing.

Because the analysts were basing their recommendations on this measurement, the company was leasing space like mad. Their stock price tracked closely to how many square feet of expensive downtown Manhattan office space they leased. They were being judged on measurements that weren’t important.

What occupies a CEO’s mind can show you where a company is heading. What issues are being faced. Where the strengths and weaknesses of the company are. And where the strengths and weaknesses of the CEO are. In an early stage company, these questions are critical. What’s more, during down time, you’re more likely to think about philosophical questions. Big thoughts without tidy answers. Things that are important but not measurable.

Want to ruin a customer relationship before it even starts? Take your process for signing up new customers and disappoint them at every turn.

I’m shopping for a new car and looked at a few rates from local credit unions. The Golden 1 advertises locally about their great rates and service, so I decided to give them a try.

After filling out the multi-page application, I got an email confirmation back and discovered that in contrast to most other banks that give instant approvals on auto loans, The Golden One promises a decision within 24-72 hours. That’s annoying, considering I’d found a car I liked and now need to sit around and wait.

The next day, I get an email back from customer service explaining that I need a bank account with them before they can even process my loan. What? They couldn’t have explained that to me before I started the whole process?

I replied to the email and expressed my disappointment.

Why not tell me that before I fill out the loan app? Your site says “Membership in the Golden 1 Credit Union is required prior to funding your loan.” Note that it says “funding” not “processing.”

The loan app is a new customer’s first experience with you. And you’ve failed to deliver an experience that leaves me excited about the company.

Most financial institutions promise instant approval on loans — that’s the norm and what the customer expects. It wasn’t until after I completed the loan app that I’m told it’s going to take at least 24 hours to get a response. First disappointment there. When the response does come, it’s another disappointment. I have to jump through another hoop to even get a response on the loan.

Within a few hours, Emily Summers in customer service replied.

The website states the following: If you are not yet a Golden 1 member, you can still apply for a loan; however, before we can process the application, you will need to become a member.

She followed this up with a description of how to print out an account app and mail it in. Then she helpfully included the link to the page that the above quote comes from.

Great idea. Take a customer who expressed annoyance with you and call them a liar. That’s sure to make things better. I replied with the screenshot below, showing exactly what the first page of their loan application says.

Nice going. Now I’ve gone from slightly irritated about the process to angry.

I’m playing with Sprout and needed to publish something to see how the reports work. You can safely ignore this silliness.

Some good reading on customers, products, and leadership.

First, Union Square Ventures’ Albert Wenger looks at why it’s hard to listen to customers. The hard part isn’t hearing what they say, it’s knowing what to listen to.

How should you reconcile listening to your customers with your strategy? This is often the hardest part. You have a strategy that you believe in. It’s difficult enough to not outright ignore any customer feedback that’s not on strategy. After all, you don’t want to be a flag waving in the wind and shifting with every breeze. But how can you tell that apart from your customers telling you that your strategy is actually wrong? What if you are trying to solve too hard a problem, when the customers really need something much simpler?

Next, a Brooklyn apartment building decides to allow residents to decide how to paint the building, floor by floor. Hilarity ensues. 37Signals has the choice quotes and makes the observation, “when it comes to designing something, a benevolent dictator is sometimes a welcome alternative to the chaos of democracy.”

Finally, Media Post looks at how strong product driven companies have strong product driven leaders.

Product-centric leaders, the ones that are obsessive about what gets shipped out the door, are customer-centric by nature. They understand the importance of that magical intersection between product and person, the sheer power of amazing experiences. They focus attention on the importance of that experience, and know, somewhere deep down inside, that if they get it right, the revenue will take care of itself.