Razors are a little like that: Buy the handle and there’s only one set of blades that fit. For many years I used a Gillette Mach 3 man’s razor. Why? Because I got the handle free, tried the blades and liked them. Then, one day, I bought a package of Rite Aid blades, whose label suggested that they would fit in the Gillette handle. They didn’t, so I bought a Rite Aid handle to go with the blades. Gillette lost my repeat business while Rite Aid made certain that I had to come to their store whenever I needed blades, at which time I would also buy … whatever: Greeting cards, candy, sunscreen, lip balm.

The other day I went to Rite Aid to buy more blades. The package didn’t say what handle they’d fit, but they seemed OK. Nope. The alternative blades didn’t fit, either. Well, heck. If I’m going to buy a new handle, I’m going to buy a national brand, so I won’t be restricted to Rite Aid.

With that failure, Rite Aid potentially lost hundreds of dollars of my business.

It gets better. I started comparing devices and costs and discovered that the unit cost of a single, triple-bladed cartridge can go as high as $2.60, while a package of twin-bladed disposable razors have a unit cost of 38 cents each. Note that those were men’s razors. Those for women – pink instead of green but otherwise apparently identical – were 41 cents each. Are my legs more sensitive or complicated than my husband’s face? I think not. (The women’s razors with the Susan Komen brand logo were even more but I wasn’t going there!)

The lesson here is about preserving customer loyalty. You can never, ever let up. Of course you have to continue to provide value, but a satisfied customer will pay a premium to avoid having to shop around for a replacement. Remember, too, the adage that a satisfied customers tells three people while an unsatisfied customer tells seven. Look at me: I’ve just told 850 people about my dissatisfaction and how to find a decent shave for less than 38 cents a day.

Website Magazine effectively made this case in this article. It says websites are getting quieter. It argues for clearer calls to action, simpler color schemes, better mobile compatibility, larger images, simpler typography, more video, more prominent social icons and shorter registration forms. Simply put, websites should be simpler. (Thanks to Kim Adams of Professional Pours for this tip.)

Think of your company’s graphic designer as your barber or hair dresser. You need somebody who cares about how you look and has a track record of making other people look good. You need someone who listens and cares. You need a relationship. That’s why I recommend a request for qualifications (RFQ) process to choose a designer. Certainly ask about their billing rates, but base your decision on whether you like their work, whether their other clients like them and, most important, whether you like them.

•  Modesty is not a career-enhancing character trait
• All business decisions are ultimately made by one or a handful of multi-cellular organisms closely related to chimpanzees, not by rules or by algorithms
• “Read ad. Send in resume. Go to job interview. Receive offer.” is the exception, not the typical case, for getting employment.
• Actual grooming is at least moderately important, too, because people are hilariously easy to hack by expedients such as dressing appropriately for the situation, maintaining a professional appearance, speaking in a confident tone of voice, etc.

• Microsoft has developed a sensational tool for creating panoramic photos. I can’t wait to use it! Learn more about it here.
• This website will proofread your documents for you.
• Torn  between two lovers? Feeling like a fool? Let Simon Decide and Lifehacker offer two options for better decision making.
• Hashtag? Meme? Reddit? WTF? Go to this site for a glossary of social media terms.

Disguising the circumstances, I’ll say that I encountered this at a recent event where I ran into two old friends whom I hadn’t seen in a long a time and one person whom I knew slightly and the others didn’t know at all. Person number three not only monopolized the conversation but did so with topics completely unrelated to the event. Celebrity names were dropped, information about excretory symptoms of illness was overshared. Our naked attempts to seize control of the discussion sailed over the offender’s head like Titan rockets.

I was thus happy to find this article about conversational narcissism from artofmanliness.com in a Lifehacker article on how to make a good first impression.

Here are a couple of subspecies of conversational narcissists:

 The Punctuation Deprived: One thought flows seamlessly into the next. There are no pauses and, by the time you realize the subject has changed, there’s no way to go back to comment on the previous one or to derail the runaway train of thought.

The Provocative Interjector/Hijacker: This guy often thinks he’s a real card. In a conversation about sleep disorders, he pops in with “Well that’s only true if Herman Cain wears red pajamas” and, next thing you know, you’re talking about the GOP debates.

That’s the great thing about blogging. It’s the written equivalent of conversational narcissism. That’s enough about me, but you can talk about me some more by using the comment box below.

“The Done Manifesto is a set of working rules based on a sense of urgency.” These rules aren’t for every industry – you wouldn’t want them applied to nuclear plant operations or brain surgery – but in the creative sector they can light a fire under the seats of procrastinators and perfectionists.

In my business, we used to obsess over printed materials that had to be “perfect” because they were so expensive and had to have a long shelf life. You can change web-based content immediately and infinitely. Having something up there online, however preliminary, is often better than having nothing at all.

This article about koshering the White House kitchen for a banquet appeared in the December 14, 2011 New York Times. In it, Rabbi Shemtov showed similar view of perfection: “We are very careful, we are meticulous but we are not O.C.D.,” he says. “Otherwise, no one would ever get to eat.”

In a free market economy, things that are rare are expensive. Good designers have innate artistic talent, professional training and experience plus the ability to understand their clients and give them not just what they think they need but what they didn’t even realize was possible and brilliantly appropriate.

Adagio Graphics is a frequent partner for us at Douglas Communications Group. They’ve written this excellent guide to using a graphic designer. Note these important tips:

• Know yourself
• Let us be free
• Twice is not nice. Revisions that seem simple to you may be time-consuming (= expensive) to change in the graphic design software, thus the following:
• Organization = money

I enjoy espionage fiction, in film, books and on TV. It’s a pure escape from reality, which is not to say that I don’t learn from it. Take, for example, “tradecraft,” the label for all those spy tricks. I know how to follow someone, how to lose a follower, how to use a dead drop and how to change my identity and disappear.

Here’s how to communicate secretly and securely with one or more other people: Create an email account with an online service, like Gmail or Yahoo. You and your associates know the log in ID and the password. You write messages but you don’t send them; instead, you save them as drafts. Your associate reads the drafts when they log into the account and permanently deletes the messages. Nothing is ever transmitted and, even if the account is hacked, there’s nothing there to read.

Happy to share something so useful.

The presentations have overwhelmed the content; no, they have usurped it. They have become the very purpose of the session: I Powerpoint therefore I am.

Powerpoint makes people with little artistic ability think they are artists. Hey, they chose a colorful background and a creative font! They used dissolves. They found a cute caricature; never mind the fact that they had to revise their script to rationalize the picture. They Powerpointed!

Public speaking is story telling. Your objective is to make the audience believe or feel or do something. Even if you are presenting mind-numbingly dry technical information, you still want them to at least exclaim “Aha!” at the end of your talk, if not write you a check.

Because it’s a story, a presentation needs an arc: A beginning, a crisis, a dénouement and a conclusion. Powerpoint slides trudge along at the same tedious pace, sabotaging the rhythmic changes and drama that make your story compelling. Nobody ever complained that a speaker was too entertaining.

And while we’re talking about drama, why are you standing off to the side of the room hiding behind a podium while that projection screen hogs the spotlight? You are the star. Don’t share the honor. Any actor will tell you that downstage center is the place to be.

I think the problem is that, as speakers plan their presentations, they start not from the story but from the Powerpoint. They do Powerpoint, not persuasion. If you’ll promise me that you’ll knock it off and write your story first, I might allow you to use Powerpoint as a noun: As a tool to deliver images that explain, expand and enhance your story.

You don’t need a fancy template. You don’t need a continuous stream of slides. Maybe you only need three or four images that you call up when a picture really will replace a thousand words.

That’s easier said than done, because relevant, evocative images are hard or expensive to create. If you want to take viewers’ breath away when they see the scope of your factory, you’re going to need a photo. Shot from a helicopter. If you’re going to show illustrations – maps, artists’ renderings, site plans – they have to be well-executed to begin with because, if they’re bad, they’ll be worse when they’re 10 feet tall instead of 10 inches. One dramatic pie chart is better than a dozen wishy washy ones and those created in Excel look like it. What story does the picture tell that words cannot? Is it therefore obvious that slides with words on them are equally limiting and pretty much useless?

Here’s a parenthetical reason to use Powerpoint as a noun: Murphy, who correctly said that, if anything can go wrong, it will. The projector bulb burns out, the technician shows up with an immobilizing hangover, your computer rewards your optimism with a blue screen of death, the lights in the room either can’t be dimmed enough for slides to show up or is so dim that you can’t see your notes. If you were planning to Powerpoint (verb), you’re dead. If you were planning to Powerpoint (noun) the show will go on.

For grins, here’s a site with some examples of spectacularly bad Powerpoint slides.