Metrics versus atmospherics

As the political world reacts to the 'stunning' upset of Scott Brown's senate election in Massachusetts the media is full of talking heads saying "the people have spoken" and this marks the turn around point for Republicans. They say it is the beginning of the end for the Obama presidency. But on closer inspection Scott Brown won his senate seat with a majority of little more than 100,000 votes. That equates to 1.7% of the Massachusetts population or 0.04% of the US population. Does such a marginal change in the political landscape merit such hype?

Planning for the New Year

"Here is Edward Bear, coming downstairs now, bump, bump,  bump on the back of his head, behind Christopher Robin.  It is, as far as he knows, the only way of coming downstairs, but sometimes he feels that there really is another way, if only he could stop bumping for a moment and think of it, and then he feels that perhaps there isn’t."

A. A. Milne

As we start a new year invariably our thoughts turn to New Year resolutions and how we are going to make this year better than the last.  In management if you have not already started working on your 2010 plan (most large organizations will have started this process in September of the previous year) then it is not something you should put off for much longer as the window of influence for the year is rapidly shrinking.

Removing the reset button

As we exit the ‘noughties’ and prepare to enter an exciting new decade it seems an appropriate time to reflect on change, as this seems the only constant we can predict for the future.  Managing change is difficult.  People work to type and even though you can introduce new ways to do things it is hard to prevent old habits coming back and people reverting to the previous ways they did things.  I recall a friend once telling me that it is less about how you tell your child not to do something, and more about how often you tell them.  I guess this is a trait not limited to children and is part of the reason change is hard, and change management itself has developed into a discipline in its own right.  It is important to bear in mind that maintaining change can almost be as hard as enacting it in the first place, as often there are embedded reasons why things have occurred a certain way in the past.

The Egg and Spoon race growth strategy

I had the thought the other day that growing a new business is a bit like running an egg and spoon race. Everyone wants to run as fast as possible but the danger of running too fast is that you drop the egg.  So judgement has to be used in order to maximize speed but prevent the set back of dropping the egg, or worse still breaking it.  So who is in the best position to judge the speed at which you can run?

No canned laughter allowed

I have long been interested in management theory and since my postgraduate studies have read countless management books from the classic "Effective Management Skills" by Scott & Rochester; to the novel "The One Minute Manager" by Blanchard and Johnson; to the much hyped such as Tom Peters’ transition from prescription management in his book "In Search of Excellence" to his more liberal and flexible views in "Liberation Management". Recent best sellers such as "Good to Great" by Jim Collins, "The Five Dysfunctions of a Team" by Patrick Lencioni or "Tipping Point" by Malcolm Gladwell are all interesting reads.

Happy 100th Birthday Mr Drucker. I am glad to say you were not a management guru

This week would have been the 100th birthday of Peter Drucker who is widely regarded as one of the greatest management thinkers of all time.  Drucker, who died 4 years ago, was not one for pomp and circumstance.  Rather he was a practical thinker who developed his guru status through 60 years of management thought and incite.  Affectionately known by even his peers as “the father of modern management” and “the world’s greatest management thinker” he was an intellectual who was influenced by the likes of John Maynard Keynes and Joseph Schumpeter.

Customer appeasement versus customer satisfaction

Early in my career, when I was a customer service manager, I interviewed for a job where I was given a hypothetical problem to resolve.  It was one of those questions where there is no right answer; rather the interviewer is simply trying to test your lateral thinking skills.  The hypothesis was that the customer had experienced terrible service and wanted the problem resolved immediately.  After running through a number of potential solutions, including involving my manager, escalating up the tree etc., all of which were ruled out by the interviewer, I eventually suggested I would go back to the customer and explain that regrettably what they wanted was not possible and proceeded to offer what I thought would be attainable.

The plural of anecdote is data

In Operation's management data is vital.  But calibrating data is equally as important.  Mark Twain is famously quoted as saying "Lies, damn lies and Statistics" as data can always be misinterpreted if the information is not used correctly.  But the reality is anecdotes have no place in Operations Management...indeed I would go so far as to say they are the enemy of any decent operations manager.  Particularly as for non-operationally focused managers they seem to carry such weight.  My personal pet hate is the Sales manager who uses the 'customer anecdote" as if that in itself should carry the day.  Don't get me wrong every customer issue should be treated based on the individual circumstances of their situation but one incident alone does not a trend make.  Just because one customer has an issue or questions your process does not mean that everything else you have done to date is wrong.

Panic Rules but doesn't resolve

Recently I received an escalation from a customer who had experienced a couple of issues on a service we had just launched. The customer was rightly concerned because if not resolved these issues would have an impact on the success of the program and clearly the customer was nervous. However, not as nervous as some of my management team. Within 5 minutes of the customer's email I had received a call, a text and a visit from two executives and the customers account manager requesting status or offering me advice.

In operations it is important to retain a cool head and focus on identifying and resolving the problem at hand. Probably the worst thing you can do is overreact. One thing I have learnt over 20 years in operations management is that things rarely look as bad after the storm as they do in the middle of it. So it is imperative you take that into account in your decision making or else you are likely to simply over correct and make a bad situation worse. The title of this post came from one of my operations managers who appreciates the importance of a cool head. As Kipling says, "If you can keep your head when all about you are losing theirs..."

The world is round - really!

In 1492 when the Italian explorer Christopher Columbus set out from Spain on a western route to find India he was in the minority in believing that the world was round.  Before his ship spotted land - what actually turned out to be the Bahamas - his crew were close to mutiny expecting to fall off the edge of the world at any point.  You can imagine that the debate between round and flat was all the rage in the 15th century and most scholars had the arguments well honed on either side.