"Yes Customer, Have Your Cake!"

Saying “Yes!” to all that customers ask is not a viable customer retention tool!

If you want your customers satisfied, tossing a quick “yes” or habitually agreeing to deliver whatever is definitely not an appropriate response - if this is routine and habitual to you and your team, your customer might start doubting your credibility. If you are serious about delivering on your promise, remember that diligence is prudence!

Take time and assess:

• if customer needs fit into your and their strategic goals and
• if what is asked solves real needs

...and then say “yes” (or “no” if necessary). 

This might seem either counter intuitive (culture of collectivism) or an obvious thing (culture of individualism) depending on where you are from. However if customer satisfaction is important to you, actually delivering on promise matters more than giving an impression that you can! 

Many employees of Indian IT services companies are prone to say “yes” when they are supposed not to - this behavior has its roots in culture of collectivism - where disagreeing and responding in negative is seen as disrespect and disloyalty and hence is avoided.

Affected firms should invest in mandatory behavior training (not just cultural orientation) to help employees cope with such habitual behaviors and responses with roots in their culture to help employee get into customers’ shoes.

(Embedded Dilbert strip is my mashup - copyrights owned by Scott Adams)

Death with Detail

There is devil in detail! Details tempt people to look away from their goals and purpose and get carried away in filtering, slicing and dicing data endlessly.

This preoccupation with detail is next only to our desire for riches. Whatever the position in hierarchy, senior, middle, junior, day in day out are busy on obtaining and making sense of details without which most of them cannot do their jobs. Detail of operations, projects, business and so on. Phone calls, emails, meetings costing countless dollars and hours of effort are spent on obtaining details that might not really help.

Sure, details give a sense of control and focus, they give comfort of knowledge, feeling of being hands on and a reassuring sense of  control. But details need more detail to understand and more and more detail to explain and make sense of and soon, we are lost in them. Details matter less than the purpose, goals, objectives.

Details shield us from focusing on goals, purpose and objectives of the mission on hand. details destroy our sense of direction.  With excessive details, 'means' start to matter more than the ends. When purpose is ignored, thoughts drift, actions chase themselves in a futile pursuit.
With no big picture, no map in hand, we loose our way, it might sound counter intuitive, but we don’t actually loose our way not without detail, but the other way round. What you need to find direction and reach your destination is a compass and a map, not the details of how exactly the next turn looks like...for instance.

                             

If it were not for the detail, meetings will be shorter, there will be lesser confrontations, more harmony for individuals with their surroundings, others and within themselves.

How do we know if we are lost in details?

Ask yourself why you need the data/detail in the first place? What conclusions does it help you make, what insights it is expected to give. If the answer doesn't relate to your mission goals, you are lost in details for sure.

If you are not sure why you are doing the next level of drill down, just don’t dig further - perhaps you already have data you need.

What are your thoughts?

Don't Sweat the Small Stuff

Simple questions are potent. They carry power to strike at the root of our assumptions; simpler a question, better the insight, a good answer can give.

Here are my questions to you: 

• "Are you sweating the small stuff?" 
• "Yes/No?" 
• "How do you know either way for sure?"

Do this simple exercise to find answers. List out all the stuff you and your team sweats on and place them on the quadrant (below). 

Something that scores higher on y-axis does more of championing, sponsoring, defining, deciding, course correction and less of routine transactions. 

Business integration (y-axis) is easy to tell: ‘does it help get money in':higher if 'yes'.

(Just like many things in life, it is not yes or no or black or white exercise. Use your judgment to place activities at  places they truly deserve.)

Ask yourself or your team, “Why we do xxx activity?” for each of the activities on the list...

Quality - A Place Holder or a Game Changer?

Assumptions are mothers of all hidden factories (not just screw-ups). Carried through years, assumptions protect 'hidden factories' and prevent changes that can bring dramatic improvements.

An expensive assumption that potential customers expect certifications from IT Service providers created hidden factories within Quality that dole out variety of badges at whatever the cost. Soon this became the predominant or the only preoccupation of Quality function in most companies - to seek and obtain certifications of different flavors. Like all hidden factories, this will have negative impact on the competitiveness and profitability - because the assumption that customers look for certifications is not entirely defensible. Customers want their requirements met - customers want return on their investment, they really don't care how many certificates their vendors got.

Shifting focus from certifications and compliance on to...

World Without Badges

What happens if US Navy SEALS are ISO9001 certified? Well, this might sound ridiculous, but several police stations in India are certified…not that these two organizations are comparable (far from it). But if they were, SEALS would have definitely asked OBL for his ID and a succession plan before shooting him in the head. Thank god, SEALS don’t carry ISO badge. But that's how Indian police would approach. ISO certification actually gave them something to do for the police - engage some consultant to do some paper work to get another on the wall. There are other, more important things police in India are supposed to do, we all are aware, they are most ineffective in doing that...that is public knowledge too. The ISO badges are just an unpleasant distraction.

But matter of interest is how having or not having ISO badge makes a difference.