Mindspring's 14 Deadly Sins

Worth keeping in mind and adapting for just about any business. From Wikipedia, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MindSpring and credited to Mike McQuarry:

THE 14 DEADLY SINS OF MINDSPRING (or ways that we can be just like everybody else)

1. Give lousy service--busy signals, disconnects, downtime, and ring no answers.
2. Rely on outside vendors who let us down.
3. Make internal procedures easy on us, even if it means negatively affecting or inconveniencing the customer.
4. Joke about how dumb the customers are.
5. Finger point at how other departments are not doing their jobs.
6. Customers can't get immediate "live" help from sales or support.
7. Poor coordination across departments.
8. Show up at a demo, sales call, trade show, or meeting unprepared.
9. Ignore the competition; they are far inferior to us.
10. Miss deadlines that we commit to internally and externally.
11. Make recruiting, hiring, and training a lower priority because we are too busy doing other tasks.
12. Look for the next job assignment, instead of focusing on the current one.
13. Office gossip, rumors, and politics.
14. Rely on dissatisfied customers to be your service monitors.

I took the liberty of correcting the grammar in two places: 'jobs' in 5 was singular, and 9 contained a comma splice. Also, Wikipedia used a hyphen rather than a dash in 1; since it's unclear if this was Wikipedia's error or Mindspring's, I did not correct the Wikipedia page.