Archive
unclutter your organisation
I wrote last week about supporting the front line, and the importance of having a focus on what you have to do to deliver what your customers need. As regular readers will know I have a strong dislike of process for the sake of it and a belief in concentrating on what you need to do and not allowing yourself to be distracted by nice to have fancies. Read more…
supporting the front line doesn’t mean holding it up
I have been very lucky over the years in that I have been able to be part of some massive changes in the businesses for whom I have worked, from small parts in the early years through to influence and then responsibility. These days my role is usually one of influence because that is what mentors and consultants do (I can’t recall who said it, but I love the line about a consultant being like a castrated bull; he can only advise), but I do love the opportunity to get back into the trenches and do something. Read more…
asset management; a hard lesson
Asset management is very much at the forefront of my thinking at the moment, and in a very personal sense. It was about 4 weeks ago that I took a long look in the mirror and decided that I needed to apply some first principles to my main asset; myself. Read more…
you have what you’ve got: use it well and more will come
This wasn’t written with the financial crisis in mind, but, in proof reading it, it could well have been. My thoughts were more on developing teams and, because teams are made up of them, individuals.
If you lived in that ideal world of fluffy bunnies and blue skies then you could always pick your own team. Fortunately, at least for me, we don’t live there. It wouldn’ be much fun anyway as there would be no challenges, and so back here in the real world we will, as leaders, have to make something of what we have. Read more…
how hard is it to deliver decent customer service?
Back to customer service this week and a trio of unrelated incidents that have got me thinking about this again. Read more…
learning from crisis management
Last month our fridge-freezer had a glitch just as we hit that warm spell. The fridge wasn’t cool enough and the freezer stopped freezing. The auto-defrost had iced up and we had to write off some of the contents, but I found a cure and we got it working again, and over the weeks since some weekly maintenance had kept it working well. Read more…
the joys(?) of cold calling
Last Thursday I blogged about a marketing company who would not stop cold calling me.
I am no stranger to cold calling; it was something that I, along with almost everyone else in sales in those days, did a lot of back in the 1970s. I did some more as recently as 2007 when trying to revive the fortunes of the business unit that I was attached to for nine months or so. Cold calling is a fact of life and it does, sometimes, work. Read more…
it began with a closed deserted diner, and a man too long without sleep
It had been a long day. The client meeting at a multi occupier office complex on a business park in the North East had been the usual bloodbath, but his ruse of putting the reallocation of car parking spaces onto the agenda had ensured that all of the big guns turned up instead of sending a minion. As a result he had managed to get his budget plans agreed, but it had been well after 5pm before he got away and the drive home was a six hour run if he could make it non-stop.
The early stages had gone well; just some heavy rain as he crossed into Leicestershire, but then warnings of overnight lane closures on the motorway had seen him switch to an old favourite cross country route that followed the approximate line of an ancient Roman road. Read more…
mid week musings on blogging and plans for this site
I am in the process of taking a look at how this blog should work and to reduce the amount of time that I spend each week on keeping this and its companion web site running smoothly. Read more…
I support this charity
British Blogs
the Monday Musings column from that consultant bloke 