The Radical Question

The powerful Net Promoter Score system started out by asking a very simple question: What is the likelihood that you would recommend Company X to a friend or colleague?

And if you think about what that question really asks, we end up with the significant conclusion that NPS essentially measures the degree to which your customers love your company.

In a post on the Net Promoter blog, Intuit CEO, Brad Smith, says that their product guys call NPS the “love metric.” And it boils down to the question, “Will customers love [our product] so much that they will recommend it to friends?” And the more your customers love your company, product, or service, the more successful you’ll be.

Since “cultivate Love,” is, of course, the core of the LEAP Extreme Leadership framework, this comes as no surprise to any readers of this blog or of my books. And “Do What You Love in the Service of People Who Love What You Do,” has long been the Extreme Leader’s credo.

As I look back over the last 20 years at the rise of individual-as-brand/CEO-of-your-own life kind of thinking (which gathered a lot of steam with Tom Peter’s groundbreaking 1997 The Brand Called You article in FastCompany magazine), it occurs to me that we should all be asking a similar, “Love Metric” question about ourselves, our lives, and the way we lead.

But let’s make it a bit more direct by turning the credo into a Radical Question:

To what degree are you doing what you love in the service of people who love what you do?

Try an experiment:

Think about yourself.  Take the full measure of your business and personal life, including all your circumstances, relationships and roles—co-worker, businessperson, parent, friend, neighbor—and conduct an honest, self-assessment by breaking down the Radical Question into three parts:

To what degree…

…are you doing what you love?

…are you serving others?

…do others love the service you provide them?

That’s a good starting place, and I suspect it’ll provoke some great insights.

Try it out and let me know what you discover.

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