Travel Weekly Blog

Former TW web editor Martin Couzins, now working in the HR market, tweeted this list of 'flawed assumptions' about management from a Stanford Engineering School professor.

One in particular caught my eye:

Assumption: HR should focus on finding, hiring, and developing the very best people
Reality: Bad is stronger than good - about 5 times stronger  -- so screening-out, reforming, expelling the very worst people is more crucial to collective performance.

'Bad Is Stronger Than Good' comes from broad 2001 research which identifies the same pattern - bad events or impressions are more intense and/or durable - in a wide variety of scenarios.

So this has HR implications, but what does it mean externally, i.e. for customer relations?

Alex Bainbridge recently wrote about the difficulty of achieving Zappos-level customer service in travel, saying:

The odd thing with 'super-amazing service' is that if you only give 5% of your service experiences at that level (and all other service is at average level) you will still create such positive word of mouth than you don't need to over deliver on every occasion

BISTG suggests a flipside to that - that brands may derive greater long-term benefit from  avoiding or neutralising high-profile negative stories than from relying on a small number of exceptionally positive ones to go viral.

The problem with that, of course, is that you have to see the negative stories coming, which is somewhat harder than promoting positive stories after the event...