About John Horton

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So far John Horton has created 107 blog entries.

Which questions best describe your view of customers?

Superficially, customer insight is "the collection, deployment and interpretation of information that allows a business to acquire, develop and retain their customers." "Superficially?" Yes. The pursuit of customer insight tends to generate a heavy investment in market research. And yet, relatively few businesses actually have customer insight (noun - the capacity to gain an accurate and deep intuitive understanding [...]

By |2021-01-19T09:45:48-04:00November 19th, 2012|Strategy, Thinking Differently|0 Comments

Three management pretenses to stop today

Once the curtain has been pulled back and we understand that The Wizard is just an ordinary person, the booming voice from the disembodied, intimidating head doesn't work well anymore. There are three management practices that don't work well anymore (if they ever did), yet many pretend that they do. These are pretenses you need to [...]

By |2021-01-19T09:45:49-04:00November 13th, 2012|Character, Competence, Leadership|1 Comment

Stories are difference-makers

"Stories are how we think. They are how we make meaning of life. Call them schemas, scripts, cognitive maps, mental models, metaphors, or narratives. Stories are how we explain how things work, how we make decisions, how we justify our decisions, how we persuade others, how we understand our place in the world, create our identities, and [...]

By |2021-01-19T09:45:49-04:00October 10th, 2012|Communication, Competence, Leadership, Life|0 Comments

Leaders Align

Some years ago I was returning from Montreal to Atlanta after a consulting project. The airplane had a scheduled stop in Boston. Prior to our landing the pilot informed the passengers of "terrible" crosswinds at Boston's Logan Airport and that we could expect a "bumpy" landing. Understatement on both points. We survived. This, only after [...]

By |2021-02-20T19:25:08-04:00August 11th, 2012|Competence, Leadership, Thinking Differently|0 Comments

Leaders Improve

Thankfully, the balance of the economy is resting quietly, your customers are comfortable with the level of service and quality that you provide, and your competitors are complacent and content with their share of the market. Oh, wait… that’s wrong. The exact opposite is true. Of course things are changing. And quickly. So here’s an [...]

By |2021-02-21T14:19:43-04:00July 25th, 2012|Competence, Leadership|0 Comments

Now, more than ever before

"We hold these truths to be self evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness." With these words, our founding fathers began a proclamation to the world that America was a democratic republic. In [...]

By |2021-01-19T09:45:49-04:00July 3rd, 2012|Life|0 Comments

Leadership has always been hard

As the year 1776 drew to a close, the American experiment was in trouble. In recent months the Colonial forces had suffered much at the hands of the British troops and Hessian mercenaries. They had been routed from Long Island, chased from Manhattan across New Jersey into Pennsylvania. Boston, New York and Rhode Island were [...]

By |2021-01-19T09:45:49-04:00May 8th, 2012|Competence, Leadership|0 Comments
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