What Stories Do People Tell About Your Company?

At the NCEO's recent annual conference, Southwest Airlines President Emeritus Colleen Barrett said that people are always lining up to her to tell her their favorite Southwest stories, usually about how employees went out of their way to help customers, make people laugh, or otherwise go well beyond what people expect from airlines. One of the attendees got up and told his own story about how a colleague who was lip-synching to the safety message at the start of the flight was asked to do it out loud on the P.A. system (he did it flawlessly) and then later given an apron and told to help pass out nuts. Barrett said that most airline employees would not be thrilled with the idea of people coming to tell their stories as they usually would be of some dreadful experience.

That suggests a whole new metric for how your company is doing. What stories do your customers and suppliers tell about you and your competitors? If there are good stories, do they become part of the company folklore everyone knows?