Employee engagement is everything. If your employees engage with your strategy they will work hard, go the extra mile, look after your customers, come into work when they are sick and at weekends… and generally push your strategy forward at pace. Employee engagement, you want it, right? You want them to just get behind what […]
Constraints and Excuses
It is really easy to blame other people when you can’t do something, when constraints get in the way. To rail against the inadequacies in life, to find somebody to blame. It makes us feel vindicated, it isn’t our fault, and because it isn’t our fault we can’t be held accountable. Poor performance becomes OK. […]
Fessing Up
The Americans have an unpleasant phrase: to “fess up”, or admit what the issue is and take responsibility for it. It isn’t a nice thing to have to do. Running a long way isn’t nice either. The first time you do it your heart pounds, you get hot and sweaty, your lungs feel like they […]
Lotus Notes
I have just started working somewhere new. They use Lotus Notes as an e-mail solution instead of Microsoft’s ubiquitous Outlook. It has some novel customer focused features: 1. E-mail addresses often contain random X Y or Z middle initials. Users can have multiple addresses with these random initials in. This helps confuse senders. 2. Large […]
Hiding in the Numbers
Does your management information come from databases? Do you employ analysts to “mine” the data? It’s amazing, you can slice and dice the data any which way you like; changing reports on a daily basis, creating pages and pages of beautiful graphs, comment and analysis, showing what a great job you are doing. Or, instead […]