Never Lie About Who You Really Are

Never Lie About Who You Really Are is such a great post…taking the notion of being who you really are and applying it to product design.

“People at all levels, especially management, witness the slow undoing of good customer service, product quality, or safety standards, and they don’t say a thing about it. Even if it violates their own value system and the mission of the company. But if everyone at a crummy airline, for example, had the same zero-tolerance for bad customer service as a lesbian has for lying about the fact that she’s married to a woman, it wouldn’t be a crummy airline for long.”

There is also a subtle subtext here…that those in management positions set the tone for what everyone cares about. If an airline manager consistently points out and works to make customer service the number one priority, then all those who work for them will follow suit. This reminds me of Jonathan Ive’s tribute to Steve Jobs, in which he says that Steve cared “more than anybody” that they were making something great, and therefore it drove him to follow suit.