The S.A.L.T. and Pepper Weblog

We are going to keep this one “short and sweet” because if you do not get it as “short and sweet” you are probably not going to get it as long and detailed either. Here is the philosophy for this article: “My success is something I can almost absolutely and totally control” What do we [...]

We are very sad to announce that our team recently lost a key member.  In April 2011 we were forced to say goodbye to our faithful, loyal and very much loved Chief Security Officer Athena The Dog.  Athena was a vibrant, charming and beautiful 7 year old bull terrier lab mix.  She spent most of [...]

It’s not often I get to write happy e-mails about customer service, but let me tell you about something that just blew me away. I (like most of you, I assume) received a bunch of mail from AMZN a couple of weeks ago trying to get me to try their Cloud Drive — basically a [...]

I have been teaching a lot of customer service and client relationship management workshops lately.  In many of them we have heard from a host of novice leaders about the importance of things like: “strict adherence to standardized scripting for customer facing professionals to ensure a consistent customer experience.”  Hold on for a second…. I [...]

Soft skills are the new hard skills! Let me say that again so it has some time to sink in:  Soft skills are the new hard skills! Often overlooked as an innate set of skills, soft skills are fast becoming the key attribute for success in an increasingly disconnected world.  You heard me right!  I [...]

Just wanted to share my New Years Resolution with all of you. Inspired by a neighbor who decided to give up television for a year, I have decided to cut my television viewing in half. I have also decided to use the television as more of an educational tool in 2011. I will use it [...]

I absolutely love writing this post about The Rainforest Cafe!  And I am going to keep it short and to the point. If you have read my story in our book “S.A.L.T. & Pepper” then you probably remember I share many of my customer service experiences with my much better half Faye.  We dine together, [...]

This morning I was out at the dog park directly in front of our building.  We are pretty big “dog people” so when we bought our place we made sure it was in a thriving dog community.  Our little buddy, Athena The Wonder Dog, is very lucky as she shares a big grassy hill in [...]

As a follow up to some of our earlier posts we have decided to post our entire SALT & PEPPER book summary for free and in PDF format.  For our readers we hope you find this to be a valuable reinforcement and/or coaching companion to the book itself.  For those who have not read SALT [...]

There has been an endless stream of conversation over the past decade about transforming managers into leaders and coaches instead of administrators only.  When we wrote SALT & PEPPER we were really trying to get at this exact issue.  We wanted to show management that managers who actively lead and coach people to achieve success [...]