September 17, 2021
Not just for prospects
Starting from where they are isn’t only for prospects.
Your team will appreciate this treatment too.
Category: Keep Promise
July 21, 2021
Double bubble
What could be more energising than knowing that every action you take contributes directly to a customer’s experience? Nothing superfluous, nothing bureaucratic, nothing but the relationship being created or maintained between you and the person you are serving.
So the perfect marriage of customer experience and operational efficiency, turns out to be the perfect marriage of employee engagement and operational efficiency too.
Double bubble.
What’s not to like?
July 20, 2021
What you do is what they get
Repoussé is a metalworking technique in which a malleable metal is ornamented or shaped by hammering from the reverse side to create a design in low relief. What appears on the front of the object is a direct and immediate result of what is done on the back. No more, no less.
It’s the ultimate LEAN process. There is nothing extraneous, nothing intermediate, nothing behind the scenes. Every action contributes directly to the result.
And as Wikimedia also says “There are few techniques that offer such diversity of expression while still being relatively economical.”
The perfect marriage of customer experience and operational efficiency.
Something to aim for in your business?
July 12, 2021
Cobbler’s children
At the end of my road there lives a builder. His house has been a mess for years.
I know commercial knitters who wear old jumpers out at elbow, and doctors who smoke, drink and eat junk food.
As a business owner, it’s helpful to ask yourself – regularly if possible – ‘If I was my client, what would I be telling myself to do?’
Then follow your own advice, the way you’d expect a client to.
If nothing else, you’ll find out what it feels like to be your client.
July 8, 2021
Goals
I’m not remotely into football, but inevitably I catch the odd England game – or at least snippets of them.
What’s struck even me this time round, has been the aim to win rather than merely not lose. There’s been a definite effort to actively score more goals than their opponents, rather than get away with letting fewer goals in, or relying on penalty shoot-outs.
This is not rocket science. If you try and score goals, while preventing the other side from scoring against you, you give yourself more chances to win, and win conclusively. It also makes for a much more exciting game to watch and to play – for both sides.
Delightful as it is to win, winning isn’t everything. How you win matters. The process matters. And speaks volumes about your priorities.
June 16, 2021
By heart
You don’t see The Rolling Stones following a score. Because they know the music by heart.
That doesn’t make every performance the same. On the contrary, knowing the ‘original’ by heart means they can play with it, tweak it, customise it in real time for the audience in front of them.
At first, you need a score, so you can share with everyone in the band what needs to happen to make your music.
But the score is the beginning, not the end.
June 14, 2021
Amplification
The genius of a composer like Mozart, is that no matter who plays his music, or what they play it on (even a synthesiser), you know it’s Mozart.
The genius of a musician like Grappelli or Menhuin, is that no matter what they play you know it’s Grappelli or Menhuin.
A genius musician playing a genius composer amplifies the experience of both. And shows other musicians and composers what can be achieved.
It’s the score that makes this amplification possible.
Every musician get’s told what notes to play, what mood to create. No less, no more. The how is completely up to them – as long as it delivers the required experience, or better.
Discipline makes Daring possible.
June 9, 2021
Selling up
Your business doesn’t have to get big. It should however, be capable of lasting longer than you do. Of continuing to make and keep its (your) promises long after you’ve gone.
Otherwise, all there is to sell when the time comes is your customer list.
How do you think your customers will feel about that?
The good news is that scalability equals saleability.
Which means you really can sell up, not out.
May 17, 2021
Managing what matters
When you pay a traffic warden by the ticket, you’ve incentivised them to find the easy targets, not to prevent illegal parking, and certainly not to keep the roads safe for other users. Worse, you’ve incentivised them to pursue minor infractions over major ones.
That’s why my street is full of traffic wardens just before school opens and just after it closes. It’s why parents arrive 30 minutes before they need to in order to grab a legal parking space, wasting an hour a day just sitting in their cars. It’s also why everywhere else in my town centre remains plagued by illegal, inconsiderate and dangerous parking.
This kind of simplistic proxy for performance has become endemic, because its easy to measure. If you can say ‘I’ve hit target’, you’re off the hook as a person, a school, a company or a government department. Never mind that you’ve actually made life worse for everyone, and really dreadful for some.
What gets measured gets managed, they say. True.
So start with what you really want, then explore different, creative and possibly multiple ways to measure whether you’re achieving it.
The answer’s unlikely to be a simple tally. And you may just come up with a completely new approach to the problem.
April 23, 2021
Fallibility
The danger of software systems is that because we talk about them as being ‘engineered’, we take them to be infallible, in a way that would be reasonable if we were talking of a bridge, or a train, or a road.
Bridges, trains and roads obey the laws of physics.
There are no such laws behind software systems, only human beings, with prejudices, pressures and sometimes perverse incentives.
We would do well to remember that, especially when the system is accusing a human of being in the wrong.