The Squawk Point

Organisational Mechanics

  • Home
  • Blog
    • People
    • Data
    • Process
    • Wild Cards
    • Index
  • Podcast
  • Book

Just Following Instructions

19 February, 2010 by James Lawther Leave a Comment

Bureaucracy is bad; it is hopeless when people just follow the instructions to the letter.  They can’t help but mess it up.  Think of the last interaction you had with a call centre, chances are it was horrific. Check-lists are great; it is super when people just follow the instructions to the letter.  They can’t […]

Filed Under: Blog, Process Improvement Tagged With: bureaucracy, checklist, error proofing

Are You Cheap Or Nasty

15 February, 2010 by James Lawther Leave a Comment

spam

You get what you pay for Product quality and cost are correlated; “you get what you pay for”. It is easy to cut costs, just reduce the quality of what you offer: 1.  Take longer to answer the phone 2.  Close the local branch 3.  Supply Spam instead of Ham Unfortunately the customer wants what the […]

Filed Under: Blog, Process Improvement Tagged With: cost saving, cost versus quality

I Hate Problem Solvers

11 February, 2010 by James Lawther Leave a Comment

Three true stories: 1.  A senior IT executive for a bank has an office in Manchester but works regularly in the London head office.  Whenever he visits London he spends 15 minutes cooling his heels in reception because he can’t get security clearance to enter the building (despite the fact he has his own desk […]

Filed Under: Blog, Process Improvement Tagged With: purpose, root cause analysis, tampering

Retail Therapy

9 February, 2010 by James Lawther Leave a Comment

I tried using Ocado for my internet shopping this week.  I was expecting it to be remarkably like all the other home delivery services, but it wasn’t.  They did a number of things that impressed me: 1.  The delivery man offered to bring my shopping into the kitchen rather than dumping it on the front […]

Filed Under: Blog, Process Improvement Tagged With: continuous improvement, customer focus, purpose, video

Legal Eagles

5 February, 2010 by James Lawther Leave a Comment

The BBC ran a story yesterday about the effectiveness of the jury system.  A two year research programme looking at 68,000 verdicts has been undertaken. They came up with the following statistics: 70% of jurors said they understood the judge’s instructions. 31% of jurors actually could recall the judge’s instructions. 48% of jurors could recall […]

Filed Under: Blog, Process Improvement Tagged With: error proofing, legal system, work instructions

  • « Previous Page
  • 1
  • …
  • 47
  • 48
  • 49
  • 50
  • 51
  • 52
  • Next Page »

Explore

accountability assumptions beliefs best practice blame bureaucracy capability clarity command and control communication complexity continuous improvement cost saving culture customer focus data is not information decisions employee performance measures empowerment error proofing fessing up gemba human nature incentives information technology innovation key performance indicators learning management style measurement motivation performance management poor service process control purpose reinforcing behaviour service design silo management systems thinking targets teamwork test and learn trust video waste

Receive Posts by e-Mail

Get the next post delivered straight to your inbox

Creative Commons

This information from The Squawk Point is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.
Creative Commons Licence
Customer Experience Update

Try This:

  • Fish Bone Diagrams – Helpful or Not?

  • Call Centre Metrics the Zappos Way

  • Shit Happens

  • What is Sample Bias?

Connect

  • E-mail
  • LinkedIn
  • RSS
  • YouTube
  • Cookies
  • Contact Me

Copyright © 2025 · Enterprise Pro on Genesis Framework · WordPress · Log in