Discovering the Soul of Service: The Nine Drivers of Sustainable
Business Success by Leonard L. Berry
Len Berry directs the Center for
Retailing Studies at Texas A & M University and is America's leading
thinker on customer service. His books are packed with compelling
case studies and "how to" advice. Several years ago I was
blown away by the quality of his annual
symposium, shooting the breeze with top executives from WalMart,
CompUSA, Radio Shack, Barnes & Noble, and PetSmart. For building
a service strategy around the principles of reliability, surprise,
recovery, and fairness, see Berry's prior book, On Great Service.
Drucker, as usual, is way ahead of the pack. My excerpts from a Forbes
ASAP article (and now reflected in his Management Practices for the
21st Century).
drucker
one doesn't "manage" people. you lead them. the way one
maximizes their performance is by capitalizing on their strengths
and their knowledge rather than force them into molds.
increasing, managing people is a marketing job. marketing doesn't
start by asking, "what do we want?" rather, it asks what
the other party wants.
once companies competed within an industry. now industries compete
with industries.
the customer never buys what the supplier sells. value to the customer
is always something fundamentally different from what is value or
quality to the supplier.
Non-customers are as important as customers, if not more important:
because they are potential customers.
neither technology nor end-use are foundations for management policy.
the foundations must be customer values.
four entrepreneurial activities nec. in all firms. note that they
start outside the organization.
· organized abandonment of products, services, processes,
markets, channels, etc that are no longer an optimal allocation of
resources.
· organize for systematic, continuing improvement (kaizen)
· organize for systematic and continuous exploitation, especially
of its successes
· organize systematic innovation
when it comes to outside data, we are still very largely in the anecdotal
stage. the main challenge to information technology in the next 30
years will be organizing the systematic supply of meaningful outside
information.
the function of management is to organize the resources of the organization
for results outside the organization.
Internet
Time Group
