Silos are deeply rooted in human nature. We should stop complaining about them and instead ask: How can we harness the tribal behavior that generates silos to create value for customers? To learn more, I turned to Gillian Tett of the Financial Times. Her book, The Silo Effect: The Peril of Expertise and the Promise of Breaking Down Barriers, explores the role of silos in the financial crisis and in our everyday lives. "Silos exist for the very simple reason that we're human," she says.

In this podcast, Raj Sivasubramanian, customer experience insights manager at Airbnb, explains how Airbnb is experimenting with a system that makes it easy for customers to provide video feedback. I admit, I was skeptical. But Raj explains why that often provides longer, more detailed and often richly emotional feedback. More important, he says, when transmitted directly to frontline employees and leaders, that emotion often generates the sort of empathy that inspires and motivates thoughtful action.

Kim Scott's book, Radical Candor, focuses on the role that feedback plays in helping other people succeed and the idea that delivering tough messages to colleagues is important when done right. But, Kim discovered, "an awful lot of people are using Radical Candor as an excuse to act like a garden variety jerk." In this episode, we talk about the revised edition of her book, which addresses some misconceptions about her ideas. We also listen to one of the funniest examples of radical candor gone wrong, from the HBO series Silicon Valley.

Luis Angel-Lalanne, vice president of customer listening for American Express, explains how his team goes beyond the mechanics of simply providing Net Promoter scores and the drivers behind them. At American Express, that can mean combining Net Promoter data with other operational data and performing an analysis to uncover previously unrealized links that affect customer experience .

Sandy Rogers's efforts to measure customer experience at Enterprise Rent-A-Car were part of the inspiration for the design of the Net Promoter system. Today, Sandy is the global practice leader for loyalty at Franklin Covey and coauthor of Leading Loyalty, but in this podcast, he also describes how he managed to convince the leaders of Enterprise, a large, successful company, to take chances that would wind up changing their fundamental approach to customer service. It started with figuring out how to measure customer experience. Sandy is someone I've been learning from for many years, and as usual, speaking with him was both inspiring and educational. I hope you enjoy the conversation as much as I did.

One of the most important, and difficult, roles of any leadership team is to instill in the workforce a culture and sense of purpose. Back in 2014, I did a podcast interview that put this challenge in simple, stark terms that have stayed fresh in my memory. That's largely thanks to my guest at the time, the inimitable Horst Schulze, co-founder of the Ritz-Carlton hotel group and founder of the Capella Hotel groups. He's an exceptionally plain-talking common-sense leader who just doesn't take excuses for poor service. And he believes, passionately, that good service depends not on management, but on inspired employees.

Horst Schulze is famous for being the visionary co-founder of the Ritz-Carlton and Capella hotel groups. They are two brands that set the bar for luxury service, and yet, Horst will tell you, his vision of luxury depends on employees how share that vision and feel a true sense of purpose to deliver it every day.

Former GE executive Beth Comstock has a long and successful track record of finding stories within a company and using them to create strategies, build entrepreneurial teams and take imaginative risks. The author of the recent book Imagine It Forward: Courage, Creativity, and the Power of Change, Beth spent nearly three decades at GE. As vice chair of business innovation and, before that, chief marketing officer, she led efforts to accelerate new growth, develop digital and clean-energy initiatives, seed new businesses and build brand value. She was also part of GE's pioneering efforts to adopt Net Promoter® and learn how to use it as both a metric and as a vehicle for telling customer stories.

For Francesco Lagutaine, Manulife Asia's chief marketing and experience design officer, Asia is a market of contradictions. On the one hand, insurance products are relatively new to the region, so simply delivering well and reliably on business basics will still wow customers. On the other hand, customers have enormously high expectations for fast and simple digital services, because they compare them with platforms such as WeChat in China or Go-Jek in Indonesia. In this episode, he talks about how Manulife Asia has begun creating specialized teams to improve customer experiences.

Most of us think about Uber as a true digital disrupter. Yet, there is a very large human side to Uber. When a driver, a rider or "an eater" (someone ordering food through Uber Eats) needs help resolving something that can't be addressed purely in-app, they contact Community Operations, an organization of some 30,000 people run by Troy Stevenson. In this episode, Troy describes how he helped Uber navigate its rapid growing pains. He also has something many customer-focused executives would envy: vast amounts of real-time customer data, most of it in modern, accessible databases. In this podcast, he shares some of the ways that he makes sure that data gets turned into action, and talks about why that's both a science and an art.