Service ? - Yea right ! Most people in business consider themselves to be really good at customer service, when the truth is that they often have no idea what good Customer Service is. Many businesses view their businesses from the inside out where internal procedures and processes are always more important than dealing with customers. You only have to wait at a supermarket service counter to see this in action. The other day I was waiting to pay for a newspaper, at one such &q...

Innovation is just a word. Innovation is not a giant leap, it is a mindset that is enabled as the norm. With management actively participating - listening - engaging - encouraging and experimenting, the best results are achieved when this process is incremental and continuous. The battle is never to prove that something is wrong, but rather to encourage activities and habits that will improve outcomes and to redirect any disjointed behaviour, however, nothing can be achieved when ...

Change In my experience people change for one of two reasons. Things are going very well or things are going very badly. While your business or personal life is running in the comfort zone, there is no pressure to consider change, without a damn good reason. Whenever one considers organisational change I would suggest to first answer two questions 1.  What is the purpose of proposed change and what are the positive benefits we anticipate  2.  Will the...

Courage A word we tend to associate with David standing up to Goliath, where the power imbalance is extreme. I would suggest the word courage also reflects much smaller "battles" at every level of the community as well as in our working lives. Whenever there is a need to speak truth to power courage is required because experience often teach us how badly this can backfire on the poor sod who has the temerity to question what is sometimes the elephant in the room. ...

So many buzzwords, with so little meaning. New fads and fancies abound and there is never a lack of some "new" ideas to distract and divert our focus, if we let it. Recently I discovered some old study notes on the subject of communications and spent some time reading this old material and when I say old I mean old. They were created before the days of the modern photocopier when pages were typed and duplicated on a machine called a stencil duplicator  and a process ...