ByHBR.org
HBR reckons that any big company, and few departments will be as instantly recognizable as customer service. The call center usually resembles a factory floor, with row after row of reps, headsets on, sticking to the script and rushing from call to call as they try to minimize “handle time.” But walk into a T-Mobile…
According to McKinsey & Co, we certainly all know examples of bad product and service design. The USB plug (always lucky on the third try). The experience of rushing to make your connecting flight at many airports. The exhaust port on the Death Star in Star Wars. The question comes to the fore: How do the best…
Operational Excellence (OpEx) is a term that embodies many things that CEOs seek to achieve, such as consistent strategy execution, profitable growth and sustainable cost reduction. While there are many definitions of the term, most would agree that it entails focusing on customers, cross functional execution and consistent delivery of outcomes that create value for…
The date is September 15, 2008. The crisis in subprime mortgages had been going on for a little over a year. It was triggered in the last half of 2006 when house prices began to fall as the housing bubble in the United States burst. This caused those who had taken NINJA (No Income, No…
Welcome to this edition of the Outliers Inn podcast: Episode 33 – Six Pack Abs. Topic: Most companies strive to be high-performing organizations – the equivalent of having “six-pack abs”. But getting fit takes a lot of dedication and hard work – and unfortunately, most companies just have “ab”. In this episode of The Outliers…
“Insanity: doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.” –Albert Einstein. Over on Sourcing Innovation, the Sourcing Doctor has an excellent series of posts on driving adoption of Procurement technology. As someone who spent most of the last 15 years in the field of Procurement technology: in a Procurement organization, as a user first and, then, as…
