My number one goal in leading Fisher's is to build a customer-centric culture. An integral part of that effort includes a more subtle cultural shift to an innate sense of individual accountability. It is easy, and disastrous, for a company culture to become one of passing the buck and pointing fingers.

In this light, I wanted to highlight a great point made by Rieva Lesonsky, Editorial Director of Entrepreneur Magazine.  If you'll remember on February 14 of this year, JetBlue airlines left hundreds of passengers sitting on the tarmac for up to 11 hours at JFK.  Those delays, in turn, led to a full week of delayed flights in all locations.

Most airlines would have blamed some other cause--weather, airport errors, etc.--and would have steered clear of any monetary compensation for the passengers.  JetBlue, however, took a completely different approach.  JetBlue's CEO, David Neeleman, publically announced that he was humiliated and mortified, admitted JetBlue screwed up, and immediately took action to make sure nothing like that ever happened again.  Passengers on those planes not only got their tickets fully refunded, they each received a free ticket to use for future travel.  And all JetBlue customers got a letter admitting the failures and outlining the new policies that would keep this from happening in the future. 

These actions not only saved JetBlue's stock from tanking, it actually strengthened JetBlue's customers' opinions of the airline.  This is an important lesson for all of us.  We will screw up, it's inevitable.  Taking ownership of your errors and not passing the buck to someone else gains you credibility, allows you to directly right a wrong, and lays the groundwork for a relationship based on trust and doing the right thing. 

That is the culture we want at Fisher's and that is how we want to interact with our customers.  I have learned a lesson from David Neeleman and I strive to continue to make this lesson an integral part of Fisher's culture.