There was a time when publicly attacking the The Humane Society of the United States (HSUS) would have been like attacking Mother Teresa. How could anybody be against helping animals?

But social movements are like physics. For every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction. You don’t meddle in other people’s business—working to end inhumane slaughter methods, alleviate suffering among laboratory animals and stop the practice of supplying research labs with dogs from animal shelters, as The HSUS accomplished shortly after its founding in 1954—without raising the dander of some powerful interests.

OK, true confessions – I’ve never bought anything form Zappos…but I’m a huge fan of the company. Why? Because Zappos is living proof of the Customer Alignment Model that Conga espouses:

• To earn true customer loyalty, align your people and processes to deliver the customer experience your customers want…and to do that, define and live by the values that enable your people to put the customer first – always!

Zappos is winning on the 3 key metrics:

You almost have to feel sorry for Netflix. Once a towering paragon of transformative online business and delivery models, the entertainment giant has done a face plant.

Netflix launched in 1997. Using an online ordering system (the “Net” in “Netflix”), customers could choose from a huge selection of movies (the “flix”) and receive them by mail under a flat monthly subscription rate. This unique delivery system, combined with the ubiquitous red banner ads that were inescapable for many years, served to make Netflix such a powerhouse that it drove brick-and-mortar stores to bankruptcy.

You knew the 10-year anniversary of 9-11 would be an emotional weekend – retrospectives on TV, the reading, once again, of all 2,996 killed by surviving relatives, including kids not yet born when they lost a parent, commemorations in every state.

Here in Minnesota, the weekend offered an additional performance of wide-ranging emotion. It was the debut of new University of Minnesota head football coach Jerry Kill. This plain-talking Kansan has taken the market by storm – not easy to do when the state’s one big-time football program hasn’t won a Big 10 championship in 44 years.

My wife’s birthday was last week and that meant it was to time place my annual order for a Coconut Cream pie from Wuollet, a Minneapolis bakery that has been pleasing customers for nearly 70 years.

But no one gets it right every time. And this looked like one of those times.

A couple of recent stories on the national scene illustrate how acting in alignment with values to deliver on ‘customer expectations’ applies beyond traditional consumer brands.

In one case, Star Tribune writer Jim Lenfesty brilliantly recounted the demise of Republican presidential hopeful Tim Pawlenty. His move away from more centrist perspectives (i.e.,  global warming) to appeal to the Tea Party faction contributed, in part, to his crash and burn in the Iowa straw poll and subsequent withdrawal from the race. Having watched Pawlenty perform for governor for eight years, I never believed that he was truly invested in the more conservative platforms of his party, but felt compelled to give them lip service. His original support of renewable energy standards marked him as a more centrist candidate who could rise above the cacophony of social issues to attack the critical policy issues of the day. But he quickly recanted that position and a once bright, articulate politician was roundly thumped by the made-for-Fox Michelle Bachman.

As America’s teachers hand out the first homework of the year, we have an assignment we’d like to see the schools complete themselves. It’s one we thought we’d never have to request, but must today in self-defense of a public education system that suffered black eyes this summer.

First, there were proven, substantive cheating escapades – by teachers, not students – in Philadelphia and Atlanta. Then came the efforts in Wisconsin and elsewhere to strip away teachers’ collective bargaining rights. All played out behind the backdrop of No Child Left Behind and the ongoing frenzy around standardized testing and teacher accountability. In the polarizing sound bites that pass as national discourse today, a noble profession has come under relentless attack.

At Conga, our Customer Alignment Model demonstrates the importance organizational values play in aligning company performance to deliver on customer expectations. We believe those values create the ‘authentic brand’ customers come to know and, hopefully, love.

It’s a model we mirror in our personal lives – we act, daily, in accordance with some set of values – the only question is whether they’re the ‘official’ values we profess, or the ‘authentic’ values we live out.

The royal wdding reminds us how a brand is created and brought to life by people.

An international organization with 1,200 employees and millions of global customers, the brand of the royal family (let's call it Royal Inc.) is as strong as any in the world. And it's build solely on people

A few months ago, I finally broke down and dumped my old style 12-year-old television set. After all, all the country’s broadcasters were going digital and even a novice looking at a flat screen TV could see that HDTV was not your father’s viewing experience.

But the decision process was intimidating: