When the participants were asked to repeat the fingerexercise the next day, the group of participants who received direct compliments from an evaluator performed significantly better than participants from the other groups.
If hardware, software and consulting are delivered by the same outfit, the customer doesn't get caught in the middle of a finger-pointing exercise when something is broken.
The finger-pointing goes back to January 1998, when Spartis won exclusive rights to exercise stock options for all 10, 000 WorldCom employees who held them.