HPMD Home Page
# | Title | Short Quote |
|---|---|---|
| 027 | Moments of Truth | "A decentralized company is much more in need of good measurement methods than is a hierarchical, centralized organization. ...in a decentralized organization, employees at all levels must understand exactly what the target is and how best to achieve it." --Jan Carlzon |
| 028 | Moments of Truth | "Imagine a situation in which a soccer player breaks away toward an open goal and suddenly abandons the ball to run back to the bench and ask the coach for the order to kick the ball into the goal. Before he can run back to the ball, he has lost not only the ball but also the game." --Jan Carlzon |
| 029 | Moments of Truth | "SAS is 'created' 50 million times a year, 15 seconds at a time. These 50 million 'moments of truth' are the moments that ultimately determine whether SAS will succeed or fail as a company. They are the moments when we must prove to our customers that SAS is their best alternative." --Jan Carlzon |
| 030 | Customers for Life | "We should know exactly how we're doing, so we can find out where we should improve. The only way we are going to find that out is by measuring everything that we possibly can. ...We want to know how everyone's doing and, equally important, we want to know what it's going to take to be the best." --Carl Sewell |
| 031 | Growing a Business | "Most policies are in response to a few bad experiences. They punish the 95% of your good customers who deal honestly with your company. The lesson: don't legislate exceptions!" --Paul Hawken |
| 032 | Six Tips for SOA Design | "... remember that the perfect is the enemy of the good." -- Brent Sleeper (Cf. Voltaire: "The best is the enemy of the good." ) |
| 033 | Goal of Customer Service | "The goal of customer service is to get a positive customer response, the thank-you for helping me get what I need to be successful, to reach my goals." --E. Happ |
| 101 | Value of a Strong Customer Service Culture | "You'll never have a product or price advantage again. They can be easily duplicated, but a strong customer service culture can't be copied." --Jerry Fritz |
| 102 | Thriving on Chaos | "Customer perception (CP) equals delivery (D) divided by expectation (E). Maximizing CP [by under-promising and over-delivering] is essential in the squishy, real world, where perception of the intangibles is really everything." --Tom Peters |
| 103 | Thriving on Chaos | It costs five times more to go out and get a new customer than it does to maintain a customer you already have. --Tom Peters |
| 104 | The Service Edge | "[The top service companies] recognize and reward service accomplishments, sometimes individually, sometimes as a group effort, in particular celebrating the successes of employees who go "one step beyond" for their customers." Ron Zemke |
| 106 | Growing a Business | "Every person in the company carries the dignity and responsibility of ownership. Or should. ...If every employee is responsible as an owner, the payoff in customer relations is immediate." --Paul Hawken |
| 107 | The Case of the Cajun Popcorn | "The point is that no matter how fast or automated a service is, if it doesn't meet the customer's needs, it's not excellent service." --Steve Happ |
| 108 | Tour Guide, Senator and Cheer leader | "The Customer Service Representative needs to realize that they represent the customer. Their job is to play the roles of 'company tour guide,' 'customer senator,' and 'corporate cheer leader,' helping customers get what they need" --E. Happ |
| 109 | Asset Appreciation | "The irony of the situation is that what motivates people the most takes so relatively little to do--just a little time and thoughtfulness for starters ... personal congratulations by managers of employees who do a good job was ranked first." --Bob Nelson |
| 110 | Management's New Paradigms | "People pay little attention to the succession process, though it is, in fact, the ultimate test of good management." --Peter Drucker |
| 111 | Brain Drain | "Flexibility pays. As some companies have learned through their experiences with working mothers and others, retention means meeting your most valued employees' needs." --Jennifer Reingold |
| 112 | Your Car Will be Ready at Noon | "Even though the actual performance of completing the work is the same, most people will perceive that the service is better if it beats the estimate... so, under promise and over deliver!" |
| 113 | Hearts & Bones | "When times are mysterious, serious numbers will always be heard." --Paul Simon |
| 114 | What's Strategy? | "If you can't do it, its not a strategy; its only an exercise." --E. Happ |
| 115 | Dirty Little Secrets | "The right consultant is someone who will take the time listen to your problems and to learn about your company, rather than selling you on their past achievements, their literary degrees or their prepackaged solutions." --Jim Cotton |
| 116 | Executive Information Systems | "Executives [using Information Systems] are intolerant of slow response. Response times from instantaneous to 5 seconds are acceptable, but longer response times cannot support just-in-time thinking (i.e., being able to access information while still thinking about it)." --Hugh Watson |
| 117 | That "Vision Thing" | "If at first the idea is not absurd, then there is no hope for it." -Albert Einstein (1879-1955) |
| 118 | Are You a Horizontal or a Vertical Consultant? | "A horizontal consulting practice is one which focuses on a specific discipline applicable to many different industries. And a vertical consulting practice is one which offers a general management consultancy applicable to one industry only (or to a just a few closely related industries)." --Biill Birnbaum |
| 119 | Perfection and Procrastination | Procrastination is an avoidance reaction --not primarily of the work required, but of the level of self-perfection required. Only when the pain of avoiding a task (i.e., it's negative consequences) exceeds the pain doing a task "perfectly," will the probability rise high enough for success. |
| 120 | Managing the Organizational Impact of Global Operations | "'dissatisfaction' times 'passion around the 'vision' times 'the difficultly of the first steps toward change' must be greater than 'the resistance to change'" --Rita Heise |
| 121 | Rightsizing Angst | "Virtually every U.S. business is in the midst of a technological revolution that rivals other major paradigm shifts in industrial history." -- Alice LaPlante, Forbes ASAP, 1993. |
| 122 | The best is the enemy of the good | "The best is the enemy of the good." --Voltaire |