Idea 31 - Loyalty Management consultants devote many long hours, days and months hunting the snark - hoping for a better management idea, an undiscovered causal link between how businesses do what they do and the size of the bottom line. Frederick F. Reichheld and his colleagues at Bain &: Company came up with a winner when they identified close connections between customer retention, growth and profits. They called it 'loyalty' and discovered that, in the best-performing companies, it was intertwined with employee and investor loyalty. Each one reinforced the others. All those loyalty and rewards cards you don't know where to keep, from shops you can't remember visiting? Blame Reichheld. Loyalty programmes are nothing new, but his 1996 book, The Loyalty Effect, made them a competitive must-have as companies scrambled to put his ideas to work and retain their best customers. For those who thought that loyalty had died along with chastity and good manners,...