If Disney Ran Your Hospital: 9 ½ Things You Would Do Differently By Fred Lee

Summary:

This was a very enjoyable book about how to effectively align your organization to achieve excellence and not just a “satisfactory” experience for your customers. The initial focus of the book is about creating the A+ experience for a customer. It’s more important to take the time and help the customer than it is to close service tickets or achieve X job. However, despite the name, the book really effectively runs the gambit of how to take drive meaningful changes across the organization.

Some key points:

• Courtesy >> Efficiency - he gives the example for calling another executive who personally answers his phone. He does not use an assistant for the role. By valuing courtesy you more naturally put focus externally (customers) rather than internally.
• Satisfactory is not delighted and does not yield loyalty. Will a customer come back or send a friend back is a real measure of satisfaction.
• Measure to improve. Don’t bias customers by telling them you need to get the highest rating in every category or you fail. Internal feedback is important.
• Decentralize authority to say yes. This was the Target 10% rule about pricing. It’s better to give anyone who is customer facing the power or authority to make things right for the customer than it is to centrally align power in an organization.

Like:

• At first I thought this book was going to simply about how to delight customers, specifically “how to do right by a customer”. But it really is about changing the culture of the organization to be about putting the customer first. The topics span quickly about how all aspects of a business effects how it serves it’s customer.

Dislike

• For whatever reason, this book was a slow read for me. I’m not sure why. I didn’t find the writing style particularly confusing but it took me a while to get through all the content.

Overall, I thought the book was very good and would recommend it.