Nail the Small Stuff

I was talking to a friend of mine the other day and he mentioned that his wife had been turned down for some dentistry that she needed performed. It turned out he had been paying for family dental coverage but his company had only signed him up for single. Once the mistake was realized, his company corrected the error. He might have to re-fill out some forms, and her surgery will be delayed, but all will be put right.

I mean it was a simple mistake, how could he possibly hold it against them?

You can spend lots of dollars on big gestures, perks, and what-not but it can all be wiped away by a bit of faltering on the basics. People need to know that the ground beneath their feet is solid -- That they can trust the people who employee them to take care of certain details. When that trust is shaken they start asking themselves questions about other things.

It reminds me of Maslow's hierarchy of needs:

Maslow's hierarchy of needs is often depicted as a pyramid consisting of five levels: the four lower levels are grouped together as being associated with Physiological needs, while the top level is termed growth needs associated with psychological needs. Deficiency needs must be met first. Once these are met, seeking to satisfy growth needs drives personal growth. The higher needs in this hierarchy only come into focus when the lower needs in the pyramid are satisfied. Once an individual has moved upwards to the next level, needs in the lower level will no longer be prioritized. If a lower set of needs is no longer being met, the individual will temporarily re-prioritize those needs by focusing attention on the unfulfilled needs, but will not permanently regress to the lower level. For instance, a businessman at the esteem level who is diagnosed with cancer will spend a great deal of time concentrating on his health (physiological needs), but will continue to value his work performance (esteem needs) and will likely return to work during periods of remission.
Which is a long winded way of saying that if you don't nail the small stuff your grand plans are all for naught.

Comments

Anonymous said…
Although 'common sense' the idea is quite profound!
October 1, 2008 at 3:41 PM
Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

What's a Good Flog Score?

I've been using Flog to measure the complexity of my Ruby code and I was wondering how others interpret Flog numbers. I'll go first with my opinions: Score of Means 0-10 Awesome 11-20 Good enough 21-40 Might need refactoring 41-60 Possible to justify 61-100 Danger 100-200 Whoop, whoop, whoop 200 + Someone please think of the children (note: these are scores for an individual method) The 20 - 60 range is interesting to me. Sometimes the complexity of what you're doing will justify the score and other times the method is in desperate need of refactoring. The highest Flog score I've seen in the wild was in the 300's. What's you're personal high and what do you think of my rankings? In other news, I've redesigned the look of my blog so if you only see my post through a reader you might want to stop on by, take a look, and tell me what you think.
Read more

SICP Wasn’t Written for You

The number of software luminaries who sing the praises of “ Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs ” (referred to as SICP) is such a long list that you might think only a crazy person would take issue with it. However, to ignore SICP’s problems and continue to blindly recommend it seems just as crazy. SICP was the textbook for MIT’s introductory programming class and was a bit of a departure from other into to computer science textbooks at the time.  Wikipedia sums it up nicely:  “Before SICP, the introductory courses were almost always filled with learning the details of some programming language, while SICP focuses on finding general patterns from specific problems and building software tools that embody each pattern.”  Which sounds awesome, but does essentially say that abstract principles will be introduced before the nuts and bolts of a language.  If you think about that for a minute, you may see where the problems will be. When I was training to be a teacher I took a b
Read more

Point Inside a Polygon in Ruby

Recently my team needed to find out if a point was inside a given polygon and, as usual, we found some code on the internet that did what we wanted. And, as usual, there wasn't much explanation as to what it was doing. Here's the code (after we converted it to Ruby): 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 def contains_point? (point) c = false i = -1 j = self .size - 1 while (i += 1 ) < self .size if (( self [i].y <= point.y && point.y < self [j].y) || ( self [j].y <= point.y && point.y < self [i].y)) if (point.x < ( self [j].x - self [i].x) * (point.y - self [i].y) / ( self [j].y - self [i].y) + self [i].x) c = !c end end j = i end return c end end So, you know, it works and I'm grateful to somebody for posting it but we had no idea how it works. So we wrapped 2 tests around it (one where the point is not in the polygon and another where it is
Read more