Archive
thursday news from monday musings
A rare mid-week post, but I have a couple of pieces of news to broadcast.
First off I had some kind feedback on last year’s Christmas Story and so I am working on a couple of humorous posts again for the next two, maybe three, Monday Musing columns and the first of these is already scheduled ready to run.
The other piece of news is that, having become aware that I need to prune the archives here to maintain space I have put together a collection of the older posts that seem to generate repeat traffic and added a lot of new and original material to be published as an e-book. The completed volume is with Amazon at the moment and will be exclusively available via Kindle to begin with. If you don’t own a Kindle, then Kindle for PC can be downloaded from the Amazon site at no cost. Click here to buy the book from Amazon.
As 2011 runs out I’d like to thank all those who have followed my blog(s) and supported my efforts over the year. Seasonal greeting to all and best wishes for a good 2012.
putting customers first takes more than just calling them customers
At one time there was great trouble throughout the land. The people were not getting their just desserts, but this had gone on for so long that they had ceased to complain and they had become stoic in their acceptance.
It came at first as a whisper, as the first stirring of a breeze breaks the calm when a hurricane is due and, like a hurricane the word was to sweep through the land uprooting the trees of resistance in its path. And the name of this hurricane was Customer First, although it was to have as many names as it had priests, for each was to brand it according to their own ways (and fee scales).
And Lo! The people did become customers; not just those in the shops and retail premises, but no longer they that travelled by train, ship, ‘plane or bus would be called passengers. No longer would those who occupied premises, whether domestic or for their trade, be called tenants. No longer would those in ill health and needing to see the physician be called patients. No longer (yes, yes, all right; we get the picture – ed).
From that day hence they would all be customers and all would be well. Their time of strife would be over and they could rest easy for, when they handed over their hard earned coin, all would be well and they would be treated in the manner to which they should.
And so the priests, gurus, mentors, consultants and trainers did prosper, their pockets full of their client’s gold, and there was great rejoicing throughout the land. Those who proclaimed the way of the Customer grew rich and, in some cases, famous. Those who had sought their help (he’s off again. Enough! – ed).
Ok, let’s cut the pseudo biblical stuff, leave this fantasy world behind and consider ours. Are you getting better service because your train operator calls you a customer? Or anywhere else where you have become “a customer”? I doubt it. Sure there have been improvements in some places, yes, but that is because people have been better trained, not because of a name change. You might argue that the name change brought about a change of thinking, but I would suggest that such influence was limited. When I travel in someone else’s vehicle I am a passenger; when I have treatment at the medic’s I am a patient and so on. I find inappropriate use of customer patronising, how about you?
Maybe I am in a minority on this (that would be good, I might have rights), and I know I am being a bit obtuse here, but the point of this missive is that you have to mean it to make a difference. Just calling something by a different name doesn’t, on its own, make a change. For me it is the equivalent of the old dodgy car dealer’s “change the plates and give it a re-spray”, and is about as salubrious.
My train of thought here came from having been pulled up for referring to the people who were renting premises as tenants. “They’re customers” I was told, but then the attitude towards them would not have been out of place for the inmates of a labour camp. Calling them customers made no difference to the way they were seen or treated, so why bother with the pretence. OK, this is an extreme example, but does calling me a customer improve my rail service? No, but what would make a difference is changing the service I get for my money. That’s the challenge.
avoiding the swings and the roundabouts and getting things done
I was discussing here the other week how business goes round in circles; the pendulum swings from one way of working to another and back again, and I argued that we needed to be less reactive. It’s a question of balance.
Conversations arising from that blog suggested that I was against radical change, but I’m not when it is necessary. If you have to swerve to avoid someone then it makes sense to do so rather that endure a painful collision. However, I would ask the question, why did you not see them coming earlier?
This is getting to the heart of running any operation, and those of us in #facilitiesmanagement know the issue only too well. We are often having to fire fight, and most of us in the business will have seen times when we were so busy quelling the flames that we didn’t have time to stop them starting.
One of the things that I’m passionate about in any job I take on is giving myself time to be able to do things properly. Anticipation is really 90% experience allowing you to expect the unexpected. You also develop your own toolkit of things that allow you handle things quickly when the need arises to stop matters getting out of hand.
Being able to anticipate is also a product of reading the situation and spotting the possibility of a problem and preparing for it, taking remedial action. “Perfect planning prevents p**s poor performance” as one of my team used to put it, and that really summed it up for our team. Yes we had our fair share of panics in the early days, but we worked on them, thought about them, talked about them and would listen to any idea, no matter how daft it might have sounded at the time.
Over the first year we had got most of the seasonal issues better planned and, no matter how well our solutions worked we would always review them because sometimes they were too good and we could get the right results with less effort and/or cost. Sure there were times when we got it wrong as well (I used to tell them that if we were perfect we’d be running FM beyond the pearly gates), but getting it wrong teaches you far more that getting it right.
Having the drains up in a non threatening way I also covered recently. Building a team where people can speak frankly requires a tremendous trust in each other. It isn’t the easiest thing to achieve, and you can lose it in an instant if you’re not strong enough as a leader, but when you have it the team can, and will, fly. Team spirit is another major factor in being able to anticipate problems and head them off at the pass. The team will be watching each other’s backs and playing for the good of the team rather than for themselves.
I’ve used the FM environment here to illustrate the point, but it applies just as much across the whole business spectrum. A fired up and motivated team will have the bases covered and negate the violent swerves because they will see things coming. A business in this shape is not going to get caught up in the pendulum swings because they don’t need to. They can make and cope with the fine adjustments to strategy by deployment of the right tactics to achieve objectives.
The only circles you will find a team like this going round are of the Plan, Do and Review kind as they constantly improve their performance.
Home thoughts from abroad; a postcard from America
Oh to be in England, now September’s here? Not really, no.
I’m taking a few minutes of quiet time in between business and the essential hospitality that goes with it, at least it does more so here in the USA that maybe back home. Shortly I will be back on show when my host’s guests start to arrive and we get down to some serious socializing and, it has to be said, networking.
So, home thoughts from abroad? For me this is more home than home in the sense of where I live. Yes I know that I am British, and I am proud of that, but I am more at home here in the US than I am back in Wiltshire and, if I had the chance, I’d set up home here for good.
For me there is a lot about America that we have seen wiped out in the UK. People do care about each other here and there is a much greater sense of community spirit. In many ways it is like the England that I grew up in in the 1950s and 1960s. Nostalgia may not be what it used to be, but I am nostalgic for a time when people were far less self centred; my Monday Musing last week talked of the Musketeer’s motto of “One for all and all for one”. So much of what I see back home is more like one for all and every one for themselves.
Here there is a much simpler attitude in most people, and it shows up in the way that I am being looked after. The whole concept of me being over here and staying alone in a hotel is an anathema to the people that I’m meeting, so a range of hospitality gets lined up for me to meet families and friends. This isn’t expense account stuff either; it is a genuine desire to welcome a stranger and look after them.
Back home people often mock the “have a nice day” culture, but here it is, in most cases, genuine. This morning I went for a walk down a couple of blocks to buy a newspaper. I’d not got far before I fell into step with someone heading the same way. By the time we got to the news stand I knew his name, what he did, the names of his wife and his children and how they were doing at school and he’d had broadly equivalent information from me. When I used to commute into London by train there would be the same herd of us heading off to the station each morning for the run into Liverpool Street, but in three years of doing that I got to talk to two other people. Everyone else just kept their heads down and ignored those around them.
The Americans bring this warmth into much of business, whether that be BtoB or BtoC. In most cases there is a real need to give the customer service that goes a bit further and that’s great. It makes doing business a pleasure. Sure they are hard negotiators, and yes there are sharks, but doing a deal here is a very different experience to doing one back home.
Maybe some of this is just because it is a change for me. It’s nearly a year since I was last over and it could just be the grass being greener on this side of the hill. Maybe I would find it less attractive if I was here full time. Maybe not, and I have to come home soon anyway.
[tweetmeme source=”bowenjohnj”]
Cracking codes and getting the secrets – a day in the life of JB
They meet in a quiet office overlooking the restricted area. Security guards with fearsome dogs patrol behind razor wire topped fences. She knows why JB is there. They waste no time on small talk; she slides a single sheet of A4 paper across the desk to him. He glances down the two columns typed upon it and nods. He puts the page into his briefcase, they shake hands and he leaves. Read more…
let the train take the strain, or is the car better by far?
Recently I had a meeting near London Bridge, but which way to travel? I go up to town about 15 times a year on average these days, and I’ve had bad luck with trains to and from Swindon one way and another in recent years.
An additional issue is that the cost is very high if I can’t book well in advance, and I try to keep costs down regardless of whether it is I or my client who is paying. A spontaneous run up to The Smoke from Swindon will cost about £120 including the car park for example. Another problem is the latter; car parking is a bit hit and miss if I’m not there reasonably early and, if I get there and can’t park, I’ve driven 15 minutes in the wrong direction and have therefore wasted about half an hour by the time I get to the M4 heading East to try an alternative.
Over time I’ve developed options for driving part way, usually to Reading where there is covered parking next to the station, a connecting walkway to the platforms plus extra train options from other routes that converge there. Nett journey time from my house to Paddington is about the same as going from Swindon, but the rail and car park charge is so much less that, even allowing for a mileage charge at HMRC rates, I can still do the run for about £35 less that by rail from Swindon.
Another option is to drive to Basingstoke. The extra mileage cancels out the slightly cheaper rail fare making it on a par with the run to Reading, but the traffic is easier and the cross country drive via my home town of Newbury is pleasant. The trains take me into Waterloo, so it is an easy walk from there to London Bridge, or across the river into central London if I’m going to, say, the IoD or Whitehall.
So I favour this hybrid journey of road and rail combined. Certainly it is less effective in terms of my green leanings, but it provides me with a cheaper and less stressful journey and, for the part I do in the car, is far more comfortable. Trains these days I find appallingly uncomfortable, and yes, I do understand that my size has something to do with that, but, whilst I accept responsibility for my girth, I can’t do a lot about my skeletal height and width. Train seating these days is clearly designed for dwarves and midgets and the lack of anywhere decent to park my carcass takes a lot of the pleasure away from what used to be a treat.
I loved taking the train, especially in the 80’s when I travelled around a lot of the UK by British Rail. And also trains in Denmark, Germany, France and the USA.
Even in my various spells of commuting into the City during the 60s into the 80s there was a bit more space and the seats were tall enough for me to have somewhere to rest my head, but then some idiot design team came in and refurbished all the carriages with small seats, plastic and strip lighting and the world of rail travel went on a downward spiral for me.
Now we have these ultra modern trains with their garish and lurid colour schemes that offer a period of torture rather than the pleasures of old. Yes, they are usually clean and reliable, but are they what we need to attract people onto public transport, especially given the, often extortionate, cost?
Such is progress.
[tweetmeme source=”bowenjohnj”]
what goes where
I started this blog with no clear idea of what I was doing. Social networking was new to me and I just wanted to get started.
Today I’ve put into place the thoughts that have been coming together thanks to the input of others around cyberspace that have helped me.
This blog will now become my area for blogging thoughts on leadership and team building together with sharing my own experiences so that others can, I hope, benefit from my failures and successes.
John J Bowen’s blog will take the more random thoughts that I sometimes come up with and be a bit more of a personal blog.
Gulfhaven News will blog updates from my primary business identity.
Links to the other blogs are over on the right of this blog page and, when I’ve worked through the mill later today all three blogs will have links to each other and my various web sites.
You’ll also find links here on this page to some of the other business sites and blogs that I find useful.
Thanks for dropping by, or following me, and I’ll try and keep it interesting and relevant. Let me know what you think.
The Principles of Warehouse Design 3rd edition
I was honoured to be invited to contribute 2 chapters to this latest edition and am pleased to confirm that the launch has been announced for 10 March 2010. More news will be on the web site of the Chartered Institute of Logistics & Transport (CILT) and I’ll update this blog and my own web sites as the timing and venue are confirmed.
Congratulations to Peter and his team for their efforts in pulling the project together.
monday musing on sunday?
Tomorrow (Jan 25) will see my eleventh Monday Musing post and I’m quite proud of that. The original idea was that I would sit down on a Monday and write something, but work looked like it would interfere so I began to write in advance and set up scheduled publishing. Tomorrows was written today, and is the first of a different challenge.
When I began these weekly blogs (as opposed to the random postings that crop up here) it was in response to a suggestion from I guy I met at the airport lounge in JFK earlier last year. He gave me some good advice on social networks generally and which I’ve followed up on since, but it was he who suggested that I write weekly and to use a general thread, in my case teambuilding and leadership.
My new challenge is to write to a consistant length of 600 words (tomorrow’s is 599). This has come from a friend who is a former journalist and we have a bet of lunch riding on it. I have to deliver 600 words (plus or minus 10) for the next 6 weeks. If I can she is paying, if not it’s down to me.
So I shall try. I follow a number of columists and admire their ability to punch out their daily or weekly thoughts, so now it is my turn to try and emulate them. This entry doesn’t count by the way, it is the Monday morning entries that payment for our lunch will hinge on. I’m looking forward to trying.
thought for today
My successes have shaped me, but my failures made me.
I support this charity
British Blogs
the Monday Musings column from that consultant bloke 