Trust or control? Imagine a scenario where your employees keep on changing things. All in the name of improvement and innovation. Everybody is spending time making your organisation run that little bit better. It sounds great, a management nirvana, until you realise that they are tinkering with processes, messing with procedures and running roughshod over […]
Standards Make Good Servants but Poor Masters
Standard work I found an interesting post about standardisation in public services. The post argues that standardisation doesn’t work in the service industry. Each customer or citizen is different and because each citizen is different they want different things. So if you standardise everything and then force your staff to follow the standard process […]
Cigarettes and Alcohol
Prohibition Noun: The act of forbidding something, especially by law In 1919 the US government attempted to reduce levels of alcohol consumption. They passed legislation that prohibited its production, transportation and sale. The ban was almost complete, bar a few exceptions for religious and medical use. During the 1920’s the U.S government spent about $220m […]
Serious Business
I travel to London on the train more regularly than is pleasant At the end of each journey a steward passes through the carriages with a big plastic bag, collecting the rubbish. They never look too enamored with their job. This morning the steward entered the carriage and announced with a flourish: Any rubbish Laptops iPads Mobile […]
Payback Time
Maz Iqbal told me a great story this week…. Imagine you were an employee of a large business. You worked in a factory, or a shop, or a warehouse or maybe you were an agent in a call centre. A big call centre where they measured your every move: how long your calls were how long […]