Most days of the summer, you will find me walking along Cape Cod’s Shining Sea Bike Path, where the vista over Vineyard Sound inspired the poetry of Katharine Lee Bates, author of the words to “America the Beautiful.” There continues to be something magical about the setting and the way the sea sparkles in the sunlight. This special place also happens to be where I do some of my best thinking. During one walk along the path, it struck me that the only way to really change the way people were treating one another in business was to help change the way they measured success, both organizational and personal. That eventually led to the creation of the Net Promoter System. Granted, there is a long way yet to go, but the progress on NPS over the past few years has been most gratifying. Hundreds of the world’s major companies—and likely many thousands of smaller firms—have begun to measure their success with NPS.
And now, as the hips on the rosa rugosa turn a deeper shade of scarlet and the marsh mallow blossoms herald the beginning of the end of summer, I again find myself asking some of those perennial existential questions that seem to come with the season. You know the kind: Why do we exist? What is our purpose? And so on. One particularly thorny one got stuck in my head: Why in heaven’s name did my parents name me Fred?
Fred. There were no noteworthy relatives on either side of the family by the name of Fred. And I couldn’t think of any particularly famous Freds that might have inspired my parents’ selection. There were no US Presidents by that name. Millard, Grover and Calvin, yes, but no Fred. There weren’t even any vice-presidential Freds, although that group managed to include a Chester, a Hannibal, a Hubert, and a Spiro. In fact, my parents never mentioned any Fred-logic that made sense to me. So I decided I would have to find (or invent) my own explanation. I paced up and down the Shining Sea bike path pondering secret codes and mnemonics that might be hidden within those letters F-R-E-D. And I am happy to report that I think I found the answer.
The Net Promoter System is much more than a score. It embodies a philosophy so basic that it can be captured in just four words: Foster Recommendation, Eliminate Detraction. FRED! That must have been it. My parents were magically anticipating the philosophy that would underlie NPS, and that’s why they gave me this otherwise inexplicable name.
OK, so FRED doesn’t scale the poetic heights of purple mountain majesties or alabaster cities. But everybody loves an acronym, and acronyms like LASER (originally Light Amplification by Stimulated Emission of Radiation) have become part of the language. And doesn’t FRED provide a laser-like focus on a good way to run your business and maybe your life? Someday, perhaps, FRED too will become a popular mnemonic—a reverse acronym if you will—morphing from common name to shorthand for a code of conduct worthy of loyalty. And if organizations continue to adopt this philosophy of FRED, America (and the rest of the world) will indeed be Beautiful.
