Nincompoopery: Why Your Customers Hate You--And How to Fix It

CEO and award-winning business writer John R. Brandt offers concrete examples of how any organization can innovate in ways that delight customers and attract top-level talent.

Nincompoopery--terrible customer service, idiotic business processes, and soul-crushing management practices--surrounds all of us. We lose time, patience, and profits as stuck-in-the-past organizations actively prevent us (and our customers) from getting the value we (and they) deserve.

In Nincompoopery, Brandt leverages research across thousands of companies to show leaders how to find and kill the corporate stupidity that drives customers crazy.

It usually starts by asking simple questions, such as:

• Why should our customers have to rekey their data multiple times to make a single purchase?
• Why are there four levels of approval just to order basic supplies?
• Why can’t we get qualified candidates for open positions, or provide new employees with decent training?
• In short: How did we become such nincompoops? And when will we stop?

Brandt has worked with hundreds of companies to help them outwit competitors, and in this book, he shares his unique blueprint for success. Nincompoopery offers leaders the answers they need--and the profits they crave--with a scoop of humor on the side.

John R. Brandt, CEO and founder of The MPI Group, has devoted more than two decades to studying leadership in effective, purpose-driven organizations. An expert on how companies can adapt themselves to the realities of new markets, new corporate structures, and new customer expectations, Brandt is an accomplished management innovator and an internationally recognized expert on manufacturing and technology.

Before founding The MPI Group in 2003, Brandt followed a unique career path combining two decades of experience in marketing, management, and consulting with a passion for journalism that has earned him more than twenty awards for reporting, writing, and editing. He was publisher and editor-in-chief of IndustryWeek (IW) magazine. Additionally, Brandt served as president, publisher, and editorial director of the Chief Executive Group, publisher of Chief Executive, where his leadership transformed the magazine into one of publishing’s most surprising comebacks.