An idea for big businesses struggling through hard times: you probably have a rule book in your possession that was compiled in order to keep customers from getting too much out of you.

Take Blockbuster: they have a rental policy about their in-store rentals that spans several pages, so long that even the employees working in their stores don't understand all the legal-sounding garbage in its pages. They did this because there were a few movies that didn't get returned on time, and some that didn't get returned at all. To deal with the misfit renters, they started making rules, instilled fines, all in the interest of keeping transgressions to a minimum. Or, more likely, in the interest of the bottom line.

Zappos.com has an extremely liberal return policy. Buy a pair of shoes, and if you feed them to your dog, you can send them back, at Zappos' expense, for a replacement pair. Does Zappos get anything out of this? No. They lose money on customers that do this. But the ones that do are few and far between, and more important than that, they understand that the lifetime value of a customer is worth much more than fighting to keep a single sale.

Blockbuster, along with many other companies, might still need the rulebook. But they can make it a bulleted list of no more than five bulleted items, very short and to the point. Make them entertaining, and post them on the wall. When your past puts you into a quagmire, it might be time to cut it loose.