November 27, 2006
Sears, Lies and Process Measurement
This weekend I got into the holiday spirit and bought an air hockey table at Sears. When I went to pick up the table a day later, I was very impressed with the customer pick up area. The electronic scanner allowed you to log in your pick up request and this information was transferred to a scoreboard above the warehouse door and to an employee in the back. They had a sign promising five minute delivery of your item to you or you would get a $5 gift certificate and a board showing that 100% of yesterday’s pick ups and 92% of the previous month’s pick ups had been completed within five minutes. Since it wasn’t crowded, I was confident that I would be in and out of the store in plenty of time to watch the end of the Florida/FSU game.
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Posted by Greg Robinson at 01:14 PM | Comments (0)
October 23, 2006
Leadership Lessons Learned from the Soccer Pitch
Over the Labor Day weekend, I attended a soccer tournament and witnessed the type of parental behavior that is often heard about on CNN. Usually the stories of overzealous parents have either a Woody Hayes or Bobby Knight quality to them. You know the story. Old guy loses control over bad play and attacks child from other team or berates his own player or attacks fan from other team. The stories are so numerous that they make the news for a day then fade into the background.
Two things make this story unique: (1) the blatant lack of concern that a parent showed for his child’s safety and (2) the lack of action taken by the soccer leagues for which this team plays. Here is the situation.
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Posted by Greg Robinson at 01:09 PM | Comments (0)
July 31, 2006
Develop Them or Lose Them
Employers, welcome to the new millennium! You have no pricing power in the marketplace, barriers to entry into your markets are at all time lows, and your employees have tuned into WIIFM and are asking not what they can do for you but what will you do for them. Having fun yet?
There may be little you can do to change the market conditions facing your business, but there is a lot you can do get your employees to be more productive and committed to your business. And it all starts with employee development.
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Posted by Greg Robinson at 01:53 PM | Comments (0)
June 20, 2006
Increasing Employee Cynicism
Why would you want to do that? Well obviously you wouldn’t intentionally want this to happen but it seems as though businesses are doing everything possible to reduce employee morale and productivity through their actions and communication.
It used to be that the person in an organization that employees trusted the most was their direct manager. This may still hold true, but the overall levels of trust seem to be declining to the point where the word “trust” should not be used to describe company/employee relationships. This is particularly true during times of significant change within an organization when the rumor mill fills the void left by sterile announcements from senior management.
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Posted by Greg Robinson at 11:37 AM | Comments (0)
May 02, 2006
Keeping Up With The Joneses
Many organizations conduct employee surveys once a year to assess climate and management issues that impact retention and productivity. As part of their analysis they often use external norm bases to compare the performance of their organization to the their competitors and "best-in-class" companies. While the data comparisions from norm bases are often interesting, they may mislead organizations in setting improvement priorities.
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Posted by Greg Robinson at 11:13 AM | Comments (2)
