Once the famous Chicago merchant Marshall Field was walking through his Chicago store and heard one of his clerks arguing with a customer.

"What are you doing?" he asked the clerk.

"I'm settling a customer complaint," said the clerk.

"No, you're not," said Field. "Give the customer what she wants."

Is the customer always right? If you are a business owner, the answer almost always is yes. Otherwise, they aren't customers. They are people who do business with someone else.

Years ago, I saw a study for Travelers Insurance that showed persuading people to complain could be, in fact, the best business move a company could make. Only 9 percent of the noncomplainers with a gripe involving $100 or more would buy from the company again. On the other hand, when people did complain and their problems were resolved quickly, an impressive 82 percent would buy again.

I have a philosophy about customers -- ours or anyone else's. A customer who has a good experience with a company will tell five other people. But a customer who has a bad experience will tell 15 other people, and with social media today, it can become tens of thousands. So anything I can do to decrease the bad while increasing the good is right at the top of my agenda.

Part of that philosophy assumes that you will get a second chance. If you get that chance, don't mess it up. You may be looking at the best customer you've ever imagined.

Customers can also be your best teachers. True, you often learn a lesson the hard way. But it's an education in Customer Service 101 that you won't learn in any school.

Stew Leonard, founder of a famous chain of supermarkets in Connecticut and New York, said: "Customers who complain are your friends because they are giving you a chance to improve instead of just walking away."

No one likes to hear that they have done a lousy job, but criticism from customers is more valuable than praise. You want your customers to tell you when you screwed up, so that you can take care of the problem and take steps to ensure that it doesn't happen again -- to them or anyone else. If they don't tell you, they will walk away and they'll never come back. Worse, you are likely to alienate someone else in the future by doing exactly the same thing.

To paraphrase a famous line, ask not what your customer can do for you, ask what you can do for your customer.

Now put the shoe on the other foot. Think like a customer. Stop to consider whether your own customers are receiving fair treatment. When you have a complaint, you want it addressed quickly and fairly. When you approach the problem from the customer's side, the view is quite different.

As consumers ourselves, we should be able to expect a satisfactory result. When you don't get what you paid for, agree to, contract for, or reasonably should expect, you should look for a resolution to the problem. And you should give the vendor the opportunity to fix it. Isn't that what you would want your customers to do? Remember, most reputable companies want to make the customer happy.

I recommend following these steps:

-- Determine the solution you want. Do you want a replacement, your money back or some other remedy? Be specific so you can convey from the start that you expect a resolution to the problem.

-- Start in the right place. Don't go to the CEO of the company until you've exhausted the lower rungs. Customer service is usually the best place to start. If customer service can't help you, ask to speak with a manager.

-- Target where to take your complaint next. Don't just call headquarters and voice your complaint to the receptionist. Find out who has the authority to address your complaint.

-- Control your emotions. When you're overwhelmed with frustration, vent your anger in a letter -- but wait a few days to decide whether to send or rewrite it. Humorous complaint letters are more likely to get noticed and acted upon. Also, remember to single out those employees who tried to help. Praise can be just as effective as criticism.

-- Keep copies of all correspondence. A good record of your attempts to resolve the problem can be helpful if you ultimately need to take legal action.

Mackay's Moral: If a business knows what's good for it, it knows what's good for a customer.

In 1935, Charles Darrow brought a board game to Parker Brothers. The experts at Parker Brothers rejected the game, Monopoly, for "containing 52 fundamental errors."

The persistent Charles Darrow had spent the year after his rejection demonstrating the potential success of the game by selling numerous editions of the board game himself. Ironically, in 1936, Darrow was well-received by the embarrassed Parker Brothers, which eventually helped make the unemployed heating engineer from Germantown, Pennsylvania, a multi-millionaire.

Since that time, over 275 million copies of Monopoly have been sold in 111 countries. Each year Parker Brothers prints more than $40 billion worth of Monopoly money -- more than twice the amount printed annually by the U.S. Mint. Monopoly's success has produced 6 billion of those little green houses, enough to circle the globe.

Charles Darrow was hardly the first or last person who showed persistence and had a strong belief in his product. Many famous Americans have packed up their product and sold it out of the trunk of their car.

Phil Knight, founder of Nike, sold his first shoes from the trunk of his green Plymouth Valiant. Curt Carlson, founder of Carlson, the world's largest hospitality company, Radisson Hotels and TGI Fridays restaurants, sold his first Gold Bond trading stamps out of his car.

Wayne Dyer wrote his first book, "Your Erroneous Zones," in 1976. He told me that when his publisher didn't want to promote the book, he felt so strongly that he decided to sell it himself. Dyer purchased the remaining copies and drove from New York to California, stopping at bookstores along the way and sleeping in the car. He also did as much media as he could. One night while doing a 2 a.m. radio interview, one of the listeners was Johnny Carson. He booked Dyer on "The Tonight Show," and the rest is history. Dyer has since sold more than 35 million copies of "Your Erroneous Zones" and written over 30 other books.

Few people had as difficult a time getting their invention accepted as Alexander Graham Bell. Even U.S. President Rutherford Hayes said of the telephone in 1876, "... who would ever want to use them?"

Chester Carlson, another young inventor, took his idea to 20 big corporations in the 1940s. After seven years of rejections, he was able to persuade Haloid, a small Rochester, New York, company, to purchase the rights to his electrostatic paper-copying process. Haloid has since become Xerox Corp.

In the 1950s, Bette Nesmith Graham began using white, water-based tempera paint and a thin paintbrush to cover her typing errors. She sold her first bottle, originally called Mistake Out, in 1956. Graham later patented the office product. After starting out with just 100 bottles a month in sales, Liquid Paper was selling 25 million bottles a year when Graham sold it for a reported $47.5 million in 1979.

In 1927, the head instructor of the John Murray Anderson Drama School instructed student Lucille Ball to "Try any other profession. Any other." I wonder what would have made him say "I Love Lucy"?

Buddy Holly was fired from the Decca record label in 1956 by Paul Cohen, who was known as Nashville's "artists and repertoire man." Cohen called Holly "the biggest no-talent I ever worked with."

Chuck Yeager, the famous test pilot, threw up all over the back seat on his first flight as a passenger. He vowed never to go back up again, but eventually he reconsidered. Then he became the first man to break the sound barrier.

These are all examples of ordinary people with extraordinary persistence. None of these folks was famous or rich or even particularly successful before their big breaks.

We've all heard it before, but there really is no substitute for persistence. In fact, persistence is sometimes as important as talent. It must come from within. You either want it or you don't. Giving up is not an option.

I remember when I was first starting out and asking a colleague I respected how many sales calls he would make on a prospect before giving up. He told me, "It depends on which one of us dies first."

Confucius said, "It does not matter how slowly you go so long as you do not stop."

Don't be discouraged. It's often the last key in the bunch that opens the lock.

Mackay's Moral: A flower has to push through a lot of dirt before it can blossom.

Do you have a tough decision to make? Or are you trying to build consensus among other employees? If so, you might want to follow the way bees make their decisions, because according to researchers, human beings can learn volumes from bees when it comes to making group decisions.

Cornell University biologist Thomas Seely, in a Cornell Chronicle Online story by Susan S. Lang, explains how bees build coalitions until a quorum develops. Seely says bees rely on disagreement and contest, whereas humans often rely on consensus and compromise.

Researchers know the bees make excellent decisions because they set up situations that offered choices to the bees, some superior for bees and others not so great. The bees almost always chose the superior solutions.

For instance, a swarm of perhaps 10,000 honeybees decides where their next new home is going to be by sending out a few hundred scouts to look at real estate. If one finds a site it likes a lot, it begins dancing, which is the scout's way of advertising the site to other scouts. Then the scout will revisit the site frequently and dance all day.

Other scouts select other sites and advertise those to other uncommitted scouts as well. Bee scouts build up at the best sites quickly, because they grade the level of recruitment, which is directly linked to site quality. When 15 or more scouts have gathered around a particular site, the scouts then signal home to the others to get ready to fly to the new home.

So what should humans learn from the bee dance? For starters, that frank discussions and disagreements coupled with some friendly competition might just help human committees achieve a little collective intelligence and avoid collective folly, researchers say.

Information hoarding is counterproductive in any organization. Knowledge sharing is central to companies' success, and generally encouraged by management. But often, employees are reluctant to give up what may be their best bargaining chip -- some particular piece of information or expertise -- and thereby maintain job security.

Or perhaps there is an element of revenge or payback, trying to get even with the company or other employees.

In any event, the end result is lost productivity and mistrust. How do you know this is happening? Your colleagues refuse to help, blaming the boss for not wanting the information to come out. Or they ignore you completely. The situation becomes toxic when the organizational culture promotes secrecy.

Managers need to encourage knowledge sharing if they want their companies to be successful. They must promote positive relationships among employees, making sure employees understand the benefits to everyone in the organization. Fair and respectful treatment of all employees is critical, because employees sense when management plays favorites and suddenly the atmosphere goes from cooperation to competition.

In short, management should not underestimate the importance of giving employees a real sense of ownership in the organization.

To help employees feel actively committed to success, management strategy should be based on the acronym STALL:

S: Share information. Financial information is crucial, of course. But operational information is just as vital. Employees should understand how one person's work affects others in the organization -- the domino effect. Other information to share: strategies, successes (especially employee success stories), setbacks and internal and external pressures.

T: Teach. Employees may not be aware of everything they need to know about company operations. Explain what the numbers on the financial reports mean, and show how individual efforts affect budgets and revenues in different areas.

A: Ask. Request the workforce's full participation. If trust is high between management and workers, the organization probably has high levels of participation already. If not, ask employees to offer suggestions on how to improve operations.

L: Listen. To foster a sense of ownership, commit to being open to new ideas from unexpected sources. Reward employees for their ideas. And don't be surprised if their insights provide new perspectives that hadn't been considered.

L: Learn. Talk to staff and learn who the most influential employees are, who the "squeaky wheels" are and how to bring them on board.

Finally, don't stall on the decision-making. It will only frustrate employees and engender mistrust. And then you're right back where you started.

Mackay's Moral: Knowledge is not power until it is used.