When you’ve got satisfied customers who love you to bits, you’re in trouble. People who are happy are your company’s worst enemy. These statements don’t seem to make much sense, do they? After all, satisfied customers don’t complain, they pay on time, they don’t clog up the lines complaining to the help desk. In fact, most businesses would love nothing more than satisfied customers. Most businesses probably believe that their major goal is to keep satisfied customers happy. But according to Seth Godin in Free Prize Inside, satisfied customers are unlikely to radically increase your sales. They are unlikely to push you and your business to stay ahead of the competition. One day, the competition will overtake you, and your satisfied customers will quietly leave you.

Yes, I know that I tend to go on about the uses and abuses of PowerPoint, but I must share with you what marketing guru Seth Godin writes in Free Prize Inside!, his follow-up to Purple Cow. In a section called “Avoid really bad PowerPoint,” Godin writes that PPT could have been the most powerful tool in the computer. The reason it isn’t is that people use PPT the way Microsoft wants them to instead of the right way. Communication is the transfer of emotion – we communicate in order to get others to adopt our point of view, and to help them understand why we are excited, sad, optimistic or whatever. If all we are doing with PPT is to create a file of facts and figures, it makes more sense to cancel the PPT presentation and send all the attendees a written report.

Sometimes, I read something that piques my interest about a person or event of which I have no prior knowledge, and I naturally go off to investigate further. While leafing through egonomics: what makes ego our greatest asset (or most expensive liability) by David Marcum and Steven Smith, I came across the story of Sojourner Truth, the African-American abolitionist and women’s rights activist who was born a slave in 1797. American readers of this blog might gasp at my ignorance, but I had never heard of her until I came across her famous “Ain’t I A Woman?” speech. Born Isabella Baumfree, Truth dictated her memoirs to her friend Olive Gilbert, and The Narrative of Sojourner Truth: A Northern Slave was published privately in 1850. The same year, she spoke at the first National Women’s Rights Convention in Worcester, Massachusetts. In May 1851, Truth attended the Ohio Women's Rights Convention, where she delivered a speech that adopted the slogan from a famous abolitionist image of a kneeling female slave with the caption "Am I Not a Woman and a Sister?"

The answer to the Trivial Pursuit question “What is the first English-language business book?” is: The Wealth of Nations, the influential economic treatise by Adam Smith. First published in 1776, it was recently voted the best business book of all time, in an online poll conducted by The Financial Times.

My first encounter with IQ tests was during my first year at university, where an acrimonious debate raged between two factions in the Psychology Department. One faction - the behavioural psychologists - believed that IQ was everything. The other faction - the social psychologists - argued that intelligence was much more complex than the formal IQ intelligence that learns how to manipulate and use formal rules, e.g. grammar and mathematics. Although the social psychologist faction did not yet use the term, but they were actually expressing the same unease with IQ that later prompted Daniel Goleman to make his breakthrough regarding EQ, emotional intelligence. EQ is associated with our ability to understand and manage our own emotions of fear, anger, aggression or resentment. If we don't control these emotions, says Goleman, they will control us.