Archive for the 'people' Category

From a host preparing for a dinner party to a country constructing a new national stadium, we all tend to underestimate how long things are going to take - an error that’s been dubbed the ‘planning fallacy’. According to Ola Svenson, contributing to this proclivity for tardiness is our inability to accurately decide between time-saving options.
Consider these increases in speed for a 100km car journey. Don’t work out the detailed mathematics. Rather, for both pairs, just make an intuitive judgement about which jump in speed will make the largest difference to your time of arrival (i.e. save the most time):
a) Travelling at 50km/h instead of 40km/h.
b) Travelling at 130km/h instead of 80km/h.
a) Travelling at 50km/h instead of 30km/h.
b) Travelling at 130km/h instead of 60km/h.
If you’re like most of the participants in Svenson’s study, you will have assumed that option (b) in both pairs is the most time saving. In fact, for the first pair, the time saved is equal (allowing for rounding off), and for the second pair, option (a) saves more time. From analysing participants’ judgements, Svenson found that people seem to be mistakenly comparing the ratios of the two changes in speeds - applying what she calls the Ratio Rule.

It can also apply in other contexts. Consider an administration overhaul at a hospital clinic, such that the number of patients treated by each doctor per day is increased. In each pair, which improvement would free up the most doctors to go and work elsewhere?
a) Each day 11 patients treated per doctor instead of 5.
b) Each day, 8 patients treated per doctor instead of 4.
a) Each day, 8 patients treated per doctor instead of 4.
b) Each day, 16 patients treated per doctor instead of 7.

Svenson again found that her participants consistently applied the Ratio Rule, so that most of them said erroneously that option (a) was more time saving for the first pair, and that option (b) was more time saving for the second pair.
So why do we always apply the Ratio Rule if it consistently leads to the wrong judgement? Svenson said the Ratio Rule works when both options start from the same point (e.g. the same speed, or the same number of patients treated). This may then lead it to become a reinforced and favoured rule applied in real-life experiences.

According to Svenson, this bias in the way we compare time saving options has real-world implications. For example, people who are already driving fast will overestimate the time saved by driving even faster. Meanwhile, politicians may be prone to improving an already fast operation, rather than making improvements to a slower operation with more time-saving potential.

SVENSON, O. (2008), Decisions among time saving options: When intuition is strong and wrong. Acta Psychologica, 127(2), 501-509, http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.actpsy.2007.09.003 Author weblink: http://www2.psychology.su.se/staff/osn/

Jonathan Wilson

Strategy, measurement, people, planning, process improvement | No Comments

Our LimeBridge colleagues Bill Price and David Jaffe couldn’t join us for the Best Service is No Service book launch event we held recently. We all (except Jonathan!) demonstrated our extraordinary skill of balancing books and smiling at the same time. We practiced for a least 10 seconds and prefected the art. If you want to read the book then you can ask us (nicely) for a review copy or help to make David and Bill happy by buying a copy from Amazon.com!

events, journalism, people, the best service is no service | No Comments

I sit writing, bleary eyed, having just taken off from Milan very early this morning after an excellent night on the tiles at Stream’s annual user conference. The conference circuit has been taking its toll on my blogging of late….. In the last 30 days, its been ECMW, a telco CRM event in Lisbon, our own Chief Customer Officer forum, then Dusseldorf and Paris with LimeBridge external events, LimeBridge’s 10th global gathering. This week it’s been Milan and the British Bankers Association. Finally next week I chair Advanced Customer Management in London and the “season” finishes. I probably need to buy an acre of Brazilian rainforest to offset the flights and the midnight oil that has been burned.

There’s at least 10 blogs to back date from the interesting things I’ve heard people talking about, Prahalad, Eisner. Updates on how LimeBridge is jumping to its next iteration etc – I’ll catch up at the weekend….may be.

What just caught my eye was an article in the FT titled “In the pursuit of happiness”. The story goes that the long held premise that happy staff make happy customers is not backed up by the evidence. Crumbs, I just noticed I know the journalist – will have to shoot him – Alan I know where you live !

On the conference circuit I’ve been talking a lot about our passion of “how do we stop doing dumb things to our customers and people” and trying hard to get people to feel the feelings that customer facing staff feel when they deliver dumb things in what we call the “stupid factory” of poor processes. How it feels when they are not supported by management, and worse when they are controlled by management practices and measurements. And how they perform when they are supported rather than managed (see the blogs on red nose day, and on the 4 questions that Happy use). I’ve been working hard to recognise that change in attitudes starts with them, not someone else. How they respect people by saying hello in the morning, how they listen to their frontline staff who know what customers are saying. How they are as managers and designers of the operation around them.

There’s also a fundamental that people won’t get off their backsides for money, to make shareholders another million. But they will for a real purpose, for a passion that matters. When we did the CCO forum we calculated that about 30 million customers and 90,000 staff would be affected by how the influential people in the room drove their businesses – that matters. Not how much more money their businesses would make as a result. I realised I had to shout this from the roof tops when I heard a colleague of mine say he thought our passion didn’t make our sales proposition clear. Bollocks to propositions, its not about business – its about how frustrated and fed up we’re making those 90,000 people and 30 million customers. And how quickly can we stop it happening.

So as you see the FT article got me going! It refers to the seminal HBR article “The Service Profit Chain” (you can read it in our library at http://www.budd.uk.com/ ) and how the authors now admit its not that direct a linkage from satisfied staff to satisfied customers to higher profits. That’s its not that linear. Of course it isn’t. But that doesn’t mean that happy staff don’t deliver better results.

The article falls into the trap of measuring results only in shareholder terms ie profit. 21st century business is also about measuring social returns on customer time wasted, staff lives wasted and natural resources wasted from paper wasted on junk mail to midnight oil burned trying to get your laptop to work with all its new software and PDAs and printers. This matters far more to people. It gives purpose to what businesses are for.

In fairness the article does touch on the need for both dimensions, the process and the motivation, to be right in order to deliver a good result for customers. And it emphasises a key thing – that workers should redesign work, not managers or consultants. They already know what’s broken – you just have to free them to change what happens. It’s managers “managing by getting in the way” LINK that’s the problem with the Service Profit Chain logic, not the service profit chain itself. And the article does emphasise the Gallup 12 questions ( see previous post) bringing out that its your direct manager who affects most how you feel and therefore how well you perform

Alan must have been reading our blogs when he put his FT article together, given all the things he mentioned!!

Well that’s another half hour lost to ranting, but I feel better for it! A bientot

chief customer officer, dumb things, managing, people | No Comments

I met Henry Stewart, CEO of Happy, an IT training firm that has won numerous awards for being what it says on the tin. What a nice bloke. With 50 employees, they have a waiting list of 2000 people to join and are top ten in the FT top companies to work for apparently.

His secret goes back to MBGITW – management by getting in the way. He did a great exercise to make you think about it. Try it:

What do you think is most important to do when you are managing?

Think about when specifically you did your best work

What did your manager do when you did your best work? (Most common answer – nothing, they got out of the way!)

So what should you do when you’re a manager and want to get the most out of your people?

Scary thought eh?

managing, people | No Comments

The earlier post on managing by getting in the way seemed to hit a rich stream. Not least in terms of re-thinking some of the things I do!

One of the rich veins to tap when looking for waste and MBIGTW is the purchasing department and paying one’s bills.

I won’t say which companies are concerned, but needless to say they are 3 major companies I could example, household names, coincidentally European companies. The systemic problem they have is that the business leaders are not so much supported by good purchasing practice, as ruled by them. They cannot run the business at the pace or in the way they would like. The cultural impact of purchasing is major.

Worse still, in these companies, there appears to be an accidental, but systematic inability to pay their bills. This results in major time wasting for executives, managment and their staff. The effect on culture and morale is palpable. The effect on retaining the best talent can’t be measured, but it’s there.

Ok, the CFO might make an argument for the financial benefits of not paying the bills owed. But the human impact in the business ( let alone the suppliers) is bigger.

Is this the biggest example of managing by getting in the way that you can suggest, or do you know of a bigger one?

managing, people | No Comments

Jonathan Wilson is moving from our advisory board (see www.budd.uk.com/people.html) to lead Budd’s executive coaching and change management. He reminded me the other day about the Gallup data on the 12 key questions to ask your staff ( and yourself !) if you want to know what happy bunnies they are.

I won’t fire them all at you, but the first four are an interesting self test. Try them:
1 Do I know what is expected of me at work?
2 Do I have the right materials and equipment I need to do my work right?
3 At work, do I have the opportunity to do what I do best every day?
4 In the last 7 days, have I received recognition or praise for good work?

Let us know what you find…. Email us - peter.massey@budd.uk.com

I started to find the 12 questions by Googling but, as is too often the case these days with Google, lots of intermediaries are top of the list. Luckily Amazon was one of them. I pressed one click to go to the book that contains them “First, break all the rules”. I pressed one click to add it to my basket, one click to check out and one click to confirm. Approximately 20 seconds. That was Thursday and the book arrived today Saturday. That’s what we call fast+simple.

Had any similar experiences? Email us with them - peter.massey@budd.uk.com

Amazon, fast+simple, people | No Comments