Archive
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…
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…
technology should push us as well as pull us
If you’ve followed my Tweets over the last few days you’ll know that I have changed my mobile (cell) ‘phone last week. This was part of a long overdue strategic issue for me; overdue because I had been procrastinating about making the change from something that I used for calls, and the odd text, to something that made sense as an integrated office tool for the itinerant way of working that is my life. Read more…
just how well do you communicate with modern technology?
In recent years we have begun to rely on emails, voicemail and text messages as primary methods of communication as we seek that immediacy of communication. Like me you probably know people who run more than one mobile ‘phone (maybe you do yourself?) and can’t bear to be out of touch. We seem to have developed an insatiable appetite for instant contact, but without any thought of the consequences. Read more…
midweek musings on thank you notes, and why it is wrong to solicit them
One of the things that have been doing the rounds on various blogs and social media posts for a while now is the lost art of the thank you note. Now I like to write one of these where appropriate, and I do mean write; pen and paper and my own hand, not typed.
But many of these recommendations to write thank you notes are for where you have been interviewed for a job, the suggestion being that you should always write a thank you note after the interview or you won’t get the job. Read more…
when you need to, saying sorry is the only option
Reports down here in North Wiltshire of local footballers apologising for their behaviour got me thinking a bit about saying sorry. It isn’t an easy thing to do in private, let alone in public, but it is something that a leader has to face up to from time to time. And if apologising for something you said or did is hard enough, what about saying sorry for something that you didn’t say or do? Read more…
leadership lessons from Michael Schumacher
Taking a sporting theme for the second week in a row I’m going to refer to the aftermath of Michael Schumacher’s early exit from the Chinese Grand Prix after one of his wheels was not properly attached during the first round of pit stops; “I don’t have any hard feelings. I feel a bit sorry for one of my boys that I guess he feels responsible, but it’s part of the game”.
And this after he lost the chance of his best result since making his comeback and, possibly, a win on the circuit that he won his last race on. No tantrums, no ranting or raving, just a straightforward comment. Read more…
has Gary Neville got it right? more musings on ethics and standards
Continuing my recent theme on morals and ethics I read Gary Neville’s column in the Mail on Sunday sports section yesterday. My loss of interest in the professional game of soccer must have about coincided with his rise to prominence in the game (having checked, he did play in the last professional game that I watched; England v Georgia, 30/4/97, but that was the first game I had watched for about 8 years), and so I can’t comment on his abilities as a player, but his piece for the MoS got me thinking. Read more…
keep calm and carry on? it would be nice if we did
Seeing the lines of cars queuing for petrol got me thinking about how prepared we are for when things go wrong. You can’t foresee everything of course, but experience tends to help you come up with ideas as to how best to cope with things that you’ve not expected. The trick is often not to over react to a problem; why are all of these people queuing for petrol and creating an artificial shortage (and a lot of traffic chaos)? They have panicked on a wave of media hype when there was no real need to and some of the stupidity that has been reported is beyond belief. Read more…
I support this charity
British Blogs
the Monday Musings column from that consultant bloke 