Christopher L. Hedges's Blog, page 5

Find the Right Players not the Best Players

“I’m not looking for the best players, Craig. I’m looking for the right ones,” Herb Brooks told his assistant coach after Herb selected the players for the US Olympic Hockey Team, the team that would compete and win gold in the 1980 Winter Olympics. Herb recognized a very important fact that seems to be overlooked now a days, the best players aren’t necessarily the right players to win. Herb Brooks put together what is considered to be one of the best teams in sports history with a bunch of misfits. They were all good players, but if that team was built by the numbers half of those players wouldn’t have made that team.

Alma mater, GPA and class rank are just some of the ways by which we evaluate future talent. Even though Herb Brooks showed us that a Harvard MBA with a 4.0 GPA who graduated at the head of his class might not be good enough to make our team we are still unwilling to listen. Society wants a short cut to predicting success. The truth is there is no shortcut. If you try and play it by the numbers then chances are you’re going to discard the people that would not just have made you successful, but that would have made you legendary. Every time Human Resources trashes a resume because it doesn’t have the right key words in it HR isn’t being efficient in it’s search, HR is playing Russian Roulette with corporate success out of laziness.

There is statistical evidence that shows that a non-stop full-court press defense is the best defense you can employ in basketball, yet no one employs it as their primary form of defense for an entire game. Teams with sub par talent can even the odds, if not flat out stack the deck in their favor by using the full-court press, but they don’t use it.

The full-court press isn’t used for the same reason HR tosses out those resumes after a quick key word search, laziness. The success of legends isn’t easy to achieve. Success is hard work, and there are no shortcuts. If you’re in search of success be like Herb, spend the energy to find the right players, don’t be lazy and just look for the best players.

 

 © Christopher L. Hedges and AverageJoesStory.com, 2015. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this blog’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Christopher L. Hedges and AverageJoesStory.com with appropriate and specific direction to the original content.

Be a Part of the Solution

“Are you kidding me? Is he really returning a thing of milk?” That was the remarks of another customer in the customer service line the day I returned my faulty packaged milk jug. That was the same “who gives a damn” attitude my mother gave me when I told her I was going to Costco and I wanted the receipt to exchange the faulty product while I was there.

Even though the Costco team member made my experience enjoyable and stress free, Mr Who-Gives-A-Damn managed to ruin my day with his smart ass remarks. I could careless what some random person thinks about my shopping habits, but Mr Who-Gives-A-Damn left me stewing over how much I’m aggravated by society.

Without fail you can roll out of bed and before you climb back in to drift off to sleep someone, or many someones, will complain about a problem they have or some underlying problem with society. I’m not flustered with people expressing their displeasure for what they perceive as injustice. I’m agitated by the fact that they will complain about it while simultaneously applying their “who gives a damn” attitude.

The “who gives a damn” attitude comes from feeling irrelevant, which enables a person to defer any sense of personal accountability for his or her sort in life. This sense of victimology is the philosophy that permits problems to fester and intensify. The “who gives a damn” attitude is exhibited by someone who thinks that he or she is just one person and his or her contribution has no impact. If you feel that way, change is accomplished by countless small actions not by some mythic large event.

There is a great story Malcolm Gladwell uses in his book The Tipping Point. Malcolm talks about the out of control crime rate that existed in New York in the 1980’s and the city leadership’s perceived impotence in controlling the problem. Malcolm showed how the tide began to change when David Gunn was brought in as the new Subway Director for the New York Transit Authority to apply James Q Wilson and George Kelling’s Broken Windows Theory.

In a nutshell the theory said that crime was the result of disorder. In order to decrease the crime rate city leadership had to take back the streets and show that they were in charge. Gunn did this by attacking minor criminal offenses like stall jumping, that had previously been disregarded, as if they were capital offenses. Gunn was initially mocked for his tactics, but he eventually could kick back with a grin on his face when he was vindicated as the decrease in crime statistics proved him right.

Wilson and Kelling’s Broken Window Theory is all about taking the jug of milk back. If you are unsatisfied with something you effect change by accumulating thousands of little victories, not by looking for one monumental win. If we had a few more David Gunns and a few less Mr Who-Gives-A-Damns we’d have a lot more to be thankful for and a lot less to complain about. So when the jug of milk is defective be a part of the solution, take it back and let society know that you deserve better.

 

 © Christopher L. Hedges and AverageJoesStory.com, 2015. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this blog’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Christopher L. Hedges and AverageJoesStory.com with appropriate and specific direction to the original content.

Some Companies Still Value Customers

Costco took a lot of flack last year for not carrying America: Imagine a World Without Her by Dinesh D’Souza. The speculation was that Costco was censoring someone’s voice with whom the chain didn’t share political views. Costco’s senior management denied that allegation, eventually backtracked from it’s position and restocked the book after the level of public out cry was too loud to ignore. We can argue the details of this specific finger pointing incident indefinitely, speculating as to what the truth is. However, with enough public pressure the wholesale giant finally succumbed to the will of the people.

Costco is famous for it’s customer focus, which is epitomized by Costco’s limited markup strategy. The strategy caps the amount that the retailer will markup any good it provides regardless of any potential profit loss from selling said product under the market value, a philosophy that large corporate stakeholders despise. Well I put their customer service to the test last week, mind you it was a very small test.

I returned to Costco’s Clearwater, FL store to return a jug of milk that was purchased three days earlier. I went to open the carton, I removed the resealable top and the protective seal, that is in place to ensure against contamination, was only partially attached. I don’t think an employee at Costco or some other person tampered with the milk. I think it was a minor processing glitch that resulted in a faulty seal being applied. Regardless of how or why the seal wasn’t applied properly it is there for a reason, to prevent product tampering.

I know people who have bought tools to use for a specific job, and then returned them a few days later for some “reason” or another. I know people who have purchased televisions for a gathering to watch a sporting event with the intention of returning the TV the following day. So I was fully expecting to get some resistance from Costco when I walked back into the store to get a refund for a jug of milk. To his credit the associate just asked for my membership card and handed me $2.69. “Sorry for the inconvenience. Have a nice day.”

At the very least I would have anticipated a query as to why I was returning the milk. Perhaps the milk didn’t trigger any red flags, or the amount fell under some benchmarked amount that left the exchange/refund at the discretion of the Costco associate, who knows. This is how customer service should be handled. If you are at fault own up to your mistake, and find a way to make the customer whole without making the customer crawl through the mud to get the issue resolved. I’ve experienced a ton of terrible customer service this past year so it was nice to see that, at least at present, one corporation appears to value its customers…even if I may have been jipped on my 7% sales tax.

 

 © Christopher L. Hedges and AverageJoesStory.com, 2015. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this blog’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Christopher L. Hedges and AverageJoesStory.com with appropriate and specific direction to the original content.

A Source of Inspiration

You’ll meet thousands of people over the course of your lifetime, if you are only minorly social. If you are a social butterfly like some of my friends you’ll probably meet in the tens of thousands. I wish I was more like my social friends and less of a recluse because if I was I’d probably meet more people like my friends Jeff and Bobbi’s son Keoni.

Having recently competed in the Ironman World Championship, one of the most grueling physical challenges you can attempt, Keoni was looking for his next challenge. Undecided as to what he wanted to do with his life he set out to walk 2,900 miles across the United States. You can read more about Keoni and follow him on his journey at JoinTheWalk.net. Having just completed a similar journey for the release of Average Joe’s Story I could empathize with the life experience Keoni was going to be living. So I decided to pick up 29 bracelets, one for every 100 miles, from his online store to gift to other inspirational people.

The story of Downtown Dallas’ redevelopment was equally inspirational. In the early part of the 2000’s Dallas was suffering ginormous vacancy rates, all that was missing was tumbleweeds blowing through town. That is until an aggressive redevelopment project began. Through public and private partnerships the vacant office space was converted to high-end residential. By bring the people back to the city as residents new life was breathed into the metropolis. Today Dallas isn’t just considered one of the best cities in the United States, it’s considered one of the premier cities in the world.

Inspiration’s appeal, whether it be a man’s journey or a city’s rebirth, is that it seems unattainable. Inspiration appears to be rare, and that makes it valuable. In reality inspiration is very simple to create. Basically inspiration is the result of someone following through with a challenging idea that they came up with. Creativity, adversity and follow through is all it takes to be inspirational. So what third of that equation is holding you back from being inspirational today?

 

© Christopher L. Hedges and AverageJoesStory.com, 2015. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this blog’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Christopher L. Hedges and AverageJoesStory.com with appropriate and specific direction to the original content.

Success is a Function of Perseverance

One of the many signs that something you have created is successful is the extent of your creation’s ripples. I know the ripple effect is imagery that has been, figuratively, beaten to death, but the image of ripples spreading and interconnecting across a pool of motionless water is one of my favorites. A simple picture can be used for so many metaphors; for example it could be used to depict two otherwise unrelated events being connected when two different ripples collide at a point of intersection, or to talk about the growth you may have experienced.

Blue Ripples #1 by Murray Bolesta

Recently I’ve come to see the pool of water and ripple effect as a complex equation for success in life, that has no final solution. If you look at ripples one thing you’ll notice is that they never really stop. The energy dissipates over time because it’s spread out over a larger distance, but the energy doesn’t disappear. If you think of your own contributions in life like ripples, your presence on this planet can truly be mind blowingly powerful.

All of the little successes I’ve had in the process of writing Average Joe’s Story: Quest for Confidence up to this point in time are insignificant as far as society is concerned. I haven’t sold very many books, and I’m in the hole to the tune of about $50,000 as a result of having written the book. In fact most people would say that is pretty darn close to failure, unless you apply the ripple effect to what I’ve done.

I wrote a book that was picked up by a publisher, and from here until civilization comes crashing down that book has the potential of impacting countless lives. All it takes is for one other person to connect with Average Joe’s Story and I have had an enormous impact on the world.

When I set out on my book tour I was looking for connectors, people that share. Connectors are the most important people you can find if you are looking to spread an idea, a product or even a dream. Connectors will share things they have found valuable with the people they know, they’ll introduce people they’ve met to their circles of influence, and given enough time connectors will inevitably be the reason you have the opportunity to succeed.

Sadly I only met one connector on my book promo journey, but I now believe that having found him made the entire trip successful. My journey inspired my new friend Jim Langley from California. Since we met, Jim has started his own blog Fourth Quarter Strategies that is intended to inspire Christian business professionals. Jim’s blog posts also have recently been translated into 20 different languages and disseminated to Christian Business Men’s Connection International’s (CBMC) worldwide membership base.

In one of Jim’s Fourth Quarter Strategies, that was picked up and used by CBMC, he gave me a moniker, Mr Perseverance. Hearing that news was difficult for me to accept because he let me know right when I was ready to put writing on the  back burner for a while. How can you walk away from something when you evoke the sensation of perseverance for someone else? So I continue to trudge along in this little adventure of writing working my way to society’s definition of success.

The funny thing is if you see yourself as the ripple instead of trying to measure up to society’s definition of success you might just persevere long enough to live up to society’s expectations.

 

© Christopher L. Hedges and AverageJoesStory.com, 2015. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this blog’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Christopher L. Hedges and AverageJoesStory.com with appropriate and specific direction to the original content.

A Sale can be Made Anywhere

I found a new way to market and sell my books two weeks ago, but I don’t recommend it because it is most definitely not cost effective. So if you ever thought that the valet may have rummaged through your car and critiqued your CD collection, or the detailer may have pocketed some cash that you left in the center console when you handed over the keys, the answer is possibly yes. If you left five cases of books in the back of the car because you were just too lazy to put them in storage after a long road trip, then chances are your mechanic may have taken a peak when you dropped off the car to get some work done.

Tailgating Author Style

I delivered my car to my mechanic, Boris, for some emergency work. By the time I got my car back I sold a copy of Average Joe’s Story and never even had to make the awkward pitch that I so loath. Boris came out with a copy of Average Joe’s Story: Quest for Confidence in hand and asked, “Is this you?”

“I wrote it, but no that isn’t me walking across a volcano.”

“Well is it for sale? Can I buy a copy? Books, they are one thing I really enjoy.”

I said sure, and he came back with a pen to have me sign the book for him. Then he handed me the tally for services rendered, $1,800 for parts and labor. A hole had materialized in a cheap designed-to-fail plastic tube connecting the oil supply to the engine, and I ended up pumping out all of my oil. Boris replaced the part with an indestructible metal connection tube, filled the tank with oil, checked the engine for any potential damage from running dry for the 15 minutes it took me to get to his shop, took it on a few test drives and gave me the invoice for $1,800. Now if I was smart I would have used some of my bartering skills that I learned on my book tour, like when I traded a pair of books for a haircut and shave in Minnesota. Even if Boris only knocked off an hour’s worth of work for the book I would have been much further ahead, and in the grand scheme of things it still would’ve been cheap in comparison to the true cost of producing Average Joe’s Story: Quest for Confidence.

It may not have been the most cost effective book sale, but it was a book sale. I’m sure that there are all sorts of ways for authors to move books with a little out of the box thinking, I’m just hoping my next book sale isn’t quite as costly as my last one was.

Signs of a Financial Recovery

I’ve seen signs like this posted online all the time, and they are usually photoshopped to put some vulgar or antagonizing statement up to elicit an emotional response from a group of people. If you are willing to put in the time to look hard enough you can usually find the original sign that said something else entirely.

Well this pic is completely 100% legit. The only photoshopping I did was to crop out the name of the Church and any identifying markers.

Every once in a while life gives an author precious material like this sign for inspiration. I saw it out of the corner of my eye as I was being driven over to my mechanic’s shop to pick up my car. When I first saw it I said, “There’s no way that sign said what I think it said.” So I went out of my way to drive back past it on my way home to double check. I stopped at a Chick-fil-a down the street for lunch, and decided I had to go back and get a keepsake snapshot with my iPhone.

Those hacks that work in DC, who claim to “represent” us, like to throw statistics around to make it seem like they are actually doing the job they got elected to perform. My favorite is when one of those tailored suit frauds claims that unemployment is some absurdly low number like 7% and declining. The interesting thing about statistics is that if you understand them then you also know how to manipulate them to portray whatever delusional story pops into your head.

I lived in Paris for nearly half my life, and it is a beautiful city. France is an amazing country to visit, but it has one major drawback if you’re a French National; it’s historical unemployment rates float in the high teens to mid twenties. That’s the problem with bloated social based government that wants to micromanage your life; it’s so inefficient that it’s impossible for businesses to prosper, so growth is usually stagnant and the population becomes addicted to government handouts. Does any of this sound familiar?

Well if you ignore the bullet points, like 7% unemployment, that the bureaucratic boneheads want you to believe are true just because they’re plastered across lamestream media, and you look at the raw data that politicians manipulate to distort reality, then you’d probably see that our true unemployment rate is likely in the low to mid 20s, and has been there for some time. The excessive unemployment exists because we no longer have that picture of efficiency that our founding fathers granted us when they risked their lives to tell King George to kick rocks in 1776, limited government. We got lazy! Some modern day elitists that are no better than the British nobles we rid ourselves of 239 years ago, whom would have seen us all as serfs had we not told them to pound sand, found a way to usurp a Constitutional Federal Republic while we were asleep at the wheel and instal a bureaucratic leviathan….shame on us!

But who knows. Maybe you’re buying the B.S. they’re selling. If you are then I guess we really are in a financial recovery and I can point you to a church that is apparently having an open house for the mob this Sunday, if you’re part of the 7% unemployed. However, if like me you’re not eating the crap they’re serving, then I hope you’re an active participant in the game of life. We need more active players to fix this debacle those clowns have left us with. We need to become much more active much quicker, before we cross a point of no return where we no longer have the means to right the ship, and the greatest experiment in liberty is lost at sea forever.

 

 © Christopher L. Hedges and AverageJoesStory.com, 2015. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this blog’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Christopher L. Hedges and AverageJoesStory.com with appropriate and specific direction to the original content.

Bob They may be Gone Forever (6/2/15)

I wish you could have been there to see this. I was walking through the parking lot to the grocery store when I was nearly hit by a car that was trying to do a 173 point turn so as to save 500 yards of distance traveled by driving up a one way lane the wrong direction. The driver disregarded all of the clearly displayed ONE-WAY indicators. To hell with the inconvenience to the other drivers, the rules of law and public safety for that matter. For this grocery store patron life is all about him, everyone else be damned.

I hated witnessing that event because it forced me to do the one thing I absolutely despise, eat crow. Two weeks prior my friend Bob asked me a question that in a rare moment of brazen optimism I affirmed with a resounding, “YES IT’S POSSIBLE.” Bob’s a Navy Vet in his 70’s and he asked me, “Do you think we’ll ever make it back to those good ol’ days?” Bob was referring to the 1940’s through the early part of the 1960’s, a period of time when hard work, ethics and morality were cultural norms. He was talking about a time when family values, pride and people were more important than just the bottom line. He was talking about a point in time where it appeared we were growing closer together socially and economically.

Well I have to reverse my ground with my crow in hand to that yes or no junction and say, “Bob I haven’t got a clue, but I’m leaning towards NO.” In the past 60 days I’ve called one of the best hospitals in the world on three separate occasions just to get them to simply send me my bill. It only took me two customer service representatives and one supervisor to have my bill dispatched. I was assured by the customer service reps on two separate occasions that the bill was going out that day, and I later discovered from the supervisor on day 50 that the invoice was not sent out on either occasion. When I finally received my hospital bill I found out that it wasn’t processed properly and as a result the claims were denied by my health insurance provider. This was an issue I dealt with in the past with this hospital. I did the job of my insurance providers and hospital billing department to get that previous issue resolved and the hospital still illegally sent my bill to a collection agency for lack of payment because someone in the hospital billing department neglected to apply insurance adjustments. I only found this out when I was denied emergency care for “lack of payment”.

So Bob I lean towards no because 125 years of progressivism has made it impossible to reverse the damage. Discipline is treated as child abuse making it impossible to teach accountability and responsibility during the formative years, which has a crippling effect on society as a whole. Family values have eroded with the basic model of what a family is, two loving parents who help raise well rounded children who then have the opportunity to become productive members of society; as indicated by the over 25 million children that were in single parent households in 2013 in the United States. You can’t talk about someone’s performance even if the facts and statistics validate their ineffectiveness because you’ll be labeled a bigot. You can’t talk about reforming the welfare system because only people who hate the poor and disenfranchised want to reform the entitlement system we have in place. I could sit here for hours typing up all the reasons we are never going to see those good ol’ days again Bob, but I’d rather take a minute to look at what it might take to see them.

The apathy to life in general that has infected society like the Bubonic Plague has to go. Society as a whole needs to reengage. The empowerment of the one man can move mountains attitude has to replace this debilitating notion that I’m just one person and I’m not that important philosophy.
We have to begin to truly communicate. That means you can’t shy away from expressing yourself on controversial issues where your opposition’s only line of defense when confronted by the facts is to resort to name calling. Real communication is at the heart of conflict resolution, but as a society we are shamed into silence.
We have to begin thinking again. This idea that someone else is right just because he has a position of authority in our lives is ludicrous. A shared background and life experience doesn’t mean that someone is correct or even has your best interests at heart. If you aren’t willing to think for yourself and ask questions you might as well go back to the days when the Earth was flat and the Sun and every other astral body revolved around the Earth.
The notions of immediate gratification and entitlement need to be eradicated from existence. Just because an 80 inch TV is on the market doesn’t mean you have to go out and get it just because you want it, especially if you are using credit it to get it. All credit really means is you can’t afford this. However, we’ve been conditioned to live outside of our means by commercialism. Commercialism has taught us to believe that if your friend Billy down the street got the new pair of Nikes you are entitled to them as well, even when you can’t afford them.

Will those four points get us back to the good ol’ days? No that is just the foundation to get us moving in the right direction. We need that foundation to build upon if we ever hope to get back to a brighter tomorrow. We have advanced so far a species. We have traveled into space and are on the verge of colonizing new planets. We have learned to harness the destructive power of the Universe to power our world. We have accomplished amazing feats in a short period of time, but we can’t muster the strength or the courage required to overcome our own self-destructive nature that has been permitted to infect society like a Biblical plague. Bob I don’t think there are enough people or enough diversity amongst those people to ever reclaim the good ol’ days, but if we are lucky perhaps life will offer to serve me up a second helping of crow.

© Christopher L. Hedges and AverageJoesStory.com, 2015. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this blog’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Christopher L. Hedges and AverageJoesStory.com with appropriate and specific direction to the original content.

Thank You for Your Terrible Customer Service (5/28/15)

Machine Zone you got a bit of a reprieve from our communication because I was recovering from surgery and didn’t have the strength and energy to suffer through talking to you. In fact my previous post was one that should have gone out months ago, but I neglected to set the publishing date so it was rescheduled to publish on 5/26/15 instead.

We have finally reached the end of the line in our discussion MZ. I have chosen to give away my GoW: Fire Age account to some kid I have never met because I simply can’t deal with your “I could careless about my customers” attitude. People asked if I was selling my account and to them I replied “Why bother! I couldn’t get 10 cents on the dollar for what I’ve spent.” So I gave the account to some teenage kid who cant afford to dole out the thousands of dollars it takes to be competitive in your digital world.

Listening to a girl talk about how she had saved up months of game based bonuses in hopes of winning some of your stupid quest prizes, so that she too could advance her account and possibly become just a little more competitive in the GoW community was the final straw. This girl who can’t afford to spend limitless amounts of hard earned money was cheated out of prizes she rightfully earned because of yet another flaw in your system. She was literally brought to tears because she knew her only recourse was to send you customer feedback which would only fall on deaf ears. She knew she would get some generic email auto reply that would tell her that she was to blame for the system’s malfunction and that MZ had nothing to do with it. You would shift blame to the victim like you always do and deflect anything that remotely appeared to be accountability on your part.

Normally your modus operandi of “deflect accountability by blaming the victim” wouldn’t be enough to elicit a reaction from me, but this time it was special. This time the cries of complaints coincided with the rollout of two new features. It would have taken countless hours of coding and weeks of preparation in order to write the required code and beta test before rolling those features out. I took fifteen minutes to do some simple math and it would take at bare minimum $2,000.00 to receive the full benefit of just one of those new features. You are more than willing to find ways to make money, but you aren’t willing to correct the preexisting flaws in your system or make your customers whole for the losses they suffer at your expense.

MZ you are the textbook definition of bad customer service, I am done with you and for that I must say THANK YOU.

Thank you! My sunk cost of nearly $4,000.00 was written off as I gifted my account to some teenager I have never met, an action that will save me infinitely more in potential future sunk costs by having deleted your app Game of War: Fire Age from every device I own.

Thank You! I’m saving on not only inevitable future expenses, but on possible lost time as well. GoW: Fire Age is a time vampire. You log onto the app and before you know it hours of your life have vanished, disappeared up in smoke.

So THANK YOU for your terrible service Machine Zone, for without it I may still be sitting on my Kindle pissing away both time and money.

What You Could Learn From Amazon MZ (5/26/15)

Machine Zone if you intend to maintain any form of relevance over the long haul you may want to look at how some of your peers in the industry have decided to focus on their customers, and the level of service they provide them.

For the purpose of today’s lesson MZ we are going to look at two technology based companies. The first is Amazon. Now, I don’t particularly love Amazon’s business model because it literally puts their competition out of business. No mom and pop shop can compete with the low cost, selection and efficiency that Amazon operates with. Amazon is Wal-Mart on steroids. Amazon is only an estimated $157 billion company that has been around for give or take 21 years that has annual sales of around $74 billion.

The other company we are going to look at is Apple. Apple has a slightly different model than Amazon in the sense that they are a niche company that has a much more focused target customer than Amazon. Apple doesn’t try to be the cheapest product under the sun, they made their mark by being innovative and a trend setter. From what I can see that has worked for them. I mean Apple was only valued at a meager $483 billion. That’s an old number reported by Forbes; I have seen reports that Apple exceeds $700 billion. Now whether or not they can maintain their reputation as an industry leader, or Apple’s dominance slowly erodes without its visionary leader Steve Jobs remains to be seen. However, it’s safe to say that they will be around for at least a few years when they have annual sales of about $174 billion.

MZ do you know what both of these companies have in common other than being two of your largest points of sale? They both love their customers. They actually do everything they can to make sure their customers have the best experience possible. This may only be rumor, but I heard that Amazon was considering removing Game of War: Fire Age from its store shelves. Considering the number of unaddressed flaws in your product, and the countless customer complaints I couldn’t blame them.

MZ you haven’t been kicked to the curb yet, but I would say the reason you haven’t is a direct result of the fact that you still appear relevant as a product to companies like Amazon and Apple. Although it will be interesting how long you appear relevant if you are experiencing mass defections of people like Grog, Jules, Ryan and Ion. Mind you those are only partial names of players in kingdom #194, more commonly known as Lynx, but you would be wise to take note of them. They are players that have either sold their accounts, are in the process of selling them, or have flat out abandoned them. Those four accounts combined are probably worth in excess of $32,000. Perhaps you’ll have no problem finding people to replace them, but why replace them if you could have kept them as customers by listening to and following through with some customer requests. Who knows?!?! Maybe Machine Zone wants to be a one hit wonder that cashes in and dwindles off into irrelevance. If that’s the case your business model is working perfectly. If not you might want to listen to, and start showing your customers you actually value them.