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Ever feel the service your organization gives is too procedural, too much ‘going through the motions’? Show them this cartoon from Doug Savage, if so. Source and copyright: www.savagechickens.com

Henry Stewart on Pre-Approval (from The Thinkers 50 website)

REF: Mumbai to Heathrow 7th December 2008

“I love the Virgin brand, I really do which is why I continue to use it despite a series of unfortunate incidents over the last few years. This latest incident takes the biscuit.

Ironically, by the end of the flight I would have gladly paid over a thousand rupees for a single biscuit following the culinary journey of hell I was subjected to at thehands of your corporation.

Look at this Richard. Just look at it: [see image 1, above].

I imagine the same questions are racing through your brilliant mind as were racing through mine on that fateful day. What is this? Why have I been given it? What have I done to deserve this? And, which one is the starter, which one is the desert?

You don’t get to a position like yours Richard with anything less than a generous sprinkling of observational power so I KNOW you will have spotted the tomato next to the two yellow shafts of sponge on the left. Yes, it’s next to the sponge shaft without the green paste. That’s got to be the clue hasn’t it. No sane person would serve a desert with a tomato would they…

more here

When it comes to a customer experience, it’s the detail that will make or break you. There are no small things. That’s what I’m uneasy about with the ‘go when it’s 80% right’ approach. Or the ‘ready, fire, aim’ approach, as Tom Peters puts it. I guess you can bring the two approaches together – Launch something at 80% then refine it while it is ‘out there’, using customer feedback in real time to adapt it to reach 100%, then keep on going to improve it.

It’s a strategy of ‘emergence’, which fits fast-changing times.

Anyway, what sparked off that thought is a blog post on the BNET network, which is itself fast-emerging as a great portal that aggregates sources from around the net then puts a layer of distillation on top in an attractive way. On this occasion by working with commentators from Harvard. No, I have no affiliation with BNET whatsoever, I just like their output.

Here’s the blog post, from Sean Silverthorne, on working with perfectionist and extremist leaders to produce a stand out innovative customer experience - James Cameron and Steve Jobs: Passionate Leadership .

This is from the website of Mac Anderson and his team, Simple Truths, which has some really nice ‘encapsulated’ leadership tools – clips and short books that distill things down to their essence. Renee Stevens at IHG put me onto them and I think much of what they do is great.

“For the strength of the pack is the wolf, and the strength of the wolf is the pack.”
~Rudyard Kipling

“The Wolf Credo written by Del Goetz truly captures what the wolf is all about:

Respect the elders
Teach the young
Cooperate with the pack.

Play when you can
Hunt when you must
Rest in between.

Share your affections
Voice your feelings
Leave your mark.

© Del Goetz”

I know C K Prahalad has a picture of wolves above his desk and says we can learn a lot about leadership from how they work together, with different members of the pack taking the lead at different times. And I’ve always liked this, which is completely a different point but mentions wolves, so I throw it in here anyway:

More on wolves and leadership in a book on Mac Anderson’s Simple Truths site here

Bill Taylor, in his Practically Radical blog, over at Harvard, says that the lesson here is that size, as a strategy in itself, is no longer enough. Companies get big because it’s a sign of success and it gives them the muscle, the clout, to carry on getting bigger – their buying power increases, economies of scale kick in, suppliers offer them favourable prices, competitors can’t match their marketing power, blah, blah, blah.

But, says Taylor, if you haven’t figured out how to harness the smarts of the loads of people that work with you, then you are part of the ranks of ‘big and stupid’ companies. And your days are numbered because you aren’t close enough to the customer.

Taylor doesn’t explicitly say this, but when you get really big, you have enough critical mass in terms of brain power to be able to do the ‘wisdom of crowds’ thing – as long as you simplify, streamline, strip out bureaucracy, keep people close to reality so they aren’t cushioned from the world by your very size, then bigger and smarter is what you become.

Only very few big companies do that. Most remain big and dumb. But, they don’t care. Because they think they are big and strong and the odd customer here and there who doesn’t fit their ‘customer service policy’ doesn’t matter. Yeah, right.

“Pete Carril, the Hall of Fame basketball coach, has a trademark expression that sums up the relationship between size and success. ‘The strong take from the weak,’ he likes to say, ‘but the smart take from the strong.’ If you can figure out, as Jack Welch did, how to add to your company’s muscles without atrophying its brain, then maybe you’re not too big to succeed. But most big-company leaders, who don’t share Welch’s fervor for staying close to customers, better figure out how to make their organizations smarter — or they will keep getting weaker.” – Bill Taylor

So, anyway, when I try explaining to colleagues that I have reservations about using case studies as training material because people get hung up in the particularities, the detail, which is non-transferable, and that we should tell stories, yes, about what companies do, but don’t be naive enough to think that if you present enough facts, figures, analysis, charts, graphs, cobbled together as a case study then you have done something scientific.

You haven’t.

As usual, Seth Godin explains it better than me. They’re analogies (stories in other words), stoopid, he says.