Leader: Learning business lessons the hard way

It's been a week of lessons learnt. Whether there was a whole lot of learning going on at Comdex is arguable - staying focused on business issues and not just treating the get-together as a huge jolly may count but then that's hardly enlightened thinking on the part of participants in the current climate.

Instead, let's give some praise to a retailer in the UK who learnt a lesson the hard way. B&Q, a week ago exactly, was found with a fair amount of egg on its faceafter weaknesses in its website log-in procedure. To its credit, it fixed the problem pretty quickly and then this week - albeit after some silicon.com prompting - it emailed its registered users to say there had been a problem.

Only a very small number of the higher-ups at major retailers or banks or other companies with customer relationships (just about all of us) ever want to admit a breach. We hear stories all the time about that kind of behaviour. They would rather stay quiet and consider that a PR victory.

But let's get this clear. A policy of trying to bury a mistake is worse than just coming clean. Customers we spoke to of B&Q - and later Argos - wanted to be treated like grown ups. Maybe they're a tech-literate minority of the overall customer-base but they actually respect the vendor that holds up their hands and says they've improved.

Well done B&Q. It is possible to snatch victory from the jaws of defeat.

Unfortunately another area where defeat will increasingly seem like the norm is directory enquiries - or 'DQ', to that (contracting) industry. This afternoon Scottish telco Thus said it is pulling out of the game. It had only managed around 25,000 calls per month, albeit with minimal advertising.

Make no mistake, this market will contract. There are too many companies who set up operations as a punt for a new area. A handful will remain standing. We'd put our money on 118 118 (owned by a US DQ specialist), perhaps Orange, one or two budget providers such as 118 888, one or two operating purely on a wholesale basis for high street names or business customers and - you guessed it - BT. That's about half a dozen from a field of over 20 now.

Maybe the only lessons we should all remember is that business is a process of trial and error - that's how things get better and we shouldn't be too surprised. There, that was the Jerry Springer moment.