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Is your performance ranked “A”, “B” or “C”? PDF Print E-mail

What has management learnt from the global economic crisis (GEC) about getting the best out of their people?  Two recent examples of the way in which people's performance is managed, suggest that the answer might be "a lot" and "not much".

 

In the first case, it's been reported that auto maker GM, the recipient of large government handouts, is actually improving its performance management system.  Under the old system, senior managers were evaluated quarterly on criteria that were spelt out in exhaustive detail.  Such reviews were many pages long - in fact they needed to be contained in a ring binder!
Read more... [Is your performance ranked “A”, “B” or “C”?]
 
How clean is our language? PDF Print E-mail

Wink wink... nudge nudge... say no more... Do you recognise some of these sayings?  Perhaps you've used one or more recently - as recently as the last five minutes! 

That's music to my ears
She ran like the Wind
I'm Heartbroken
It's raining cats and dogs
He's bouncing off the walls
A heated debate
Chill out!
Cool!
You light up my life
My memory is a little cloudy on that
It's like beating a dead horse
Let sleeping dogs lie
Blind as a bat 

Yes, they are metaphors.  And we use them in every conversation we have.  They are a fabulous way of getting complicated messages across or merely speeding up the communication by saying in a few words what might otherwise take paragraphs.

But there may be more to metaphors than we think.

Read more... [How clean is our language?]
 
Customer Relationship Management - System or Attitude? PDF Print E-mail

A colleague recently lamented to me "I was so annoyed that the XYZ coffee shop in the ABC Centre took sooooo long to give me a second coffee one morning, even though I was close to the machine and kept looking expectantly, I decided to ‘punish' them by going elsewhere for a year. 

At an average of three coffees a day @ $3.20 each = $9.60 a day for about 220 working days a year, that could cost them $2,112 a year.  (That's why my new office now has a cappuccino machine!!)  Given that I was traveling a fair bit, I figured their poor service cost them at least $800 to $900 for the year that I gave them a miss."

Do you know how much business each individual customer brings you?  More importantly, do your front line staff know?  I wonder what impact it would have on the staff at this coffee shop if they knew that every regular customer had the potential to bring them at least $2,000 gross revenue each year.  Do the staff know how many "regular" customers they have per day?  And, what does it take to turn a "drop in" or "first timer" into a regular customer?

Read more... [Customer Relationship Management - System or Attitude?]
 
The value of headlines – What will your first 7 words be? By Andrew O'Keeffe PDF Print E-mail

© Hardwired Humans

Headlines fit the instinctive way we process information. Humans are hardwired to make sense of information through a process of classification. We quickly classify ideas, people and situations into categories such as "good" versus "bad", "like" versus "dislike", "us" versus "them".

There are two key dimensions to the process of classifying. First, classifying usually takes no more than a few seconds. Second, our classification is based on the emotion we feel in that first instant.

Read more... [The value of headlines – What will your first 7 words be? By Andrew O'Keeffe]
 
Who is your customer? PDF Print E-mail

Who is your customer? 

To any savvy business manager, that may seem a simple or even silly question.  "Of course I know who my customers are, I wouldn't be in business otherwise" might be the natural response.  However, one organisation who recently got this drastically (and what could have been tragically) wrong, and which almost crippled an entire country (well at least for a couple of weeks), was the US Federal Aviation Administration.

Read more... [Who is your customer?]
 
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