01.20.10
Posted in Work at 10:30 am by JohnB
I got this through on am email today and, although I don’t usually share stuff that comes through that medium, this kinda worked for me…
No one can make you serve customers well…. that’s because great service is a choice.
Harvey Mackay, tells a wonderful story about a cab driver that proved this point.
He was waiting in line for a ride at the airport. When a cab pulled up, the first thing Harvey noticed was that the taxi was polished to a bright shine.. Smartly dressed in a white shirt, black tie, and freshly pressed black slacks, the cab driver jumped out and rounded the car to open the back passenger door for Harvey .
He handed my friend a laminated card and said: ‘I’m Wally, your driver. While I’m loading your bags in the trunk I’d like you to read my mission statement.’
Taken aback, Harvey read the card.. It said: Wally’s Mission Statement: To get my customers to their destination in the quickest, safest and cheapest way possible in a friendly environment….
This blew Harvey away. Especially when he noticed that the inside of the cab matched the outside. Spotlessly clean!
As he slid behind the wheel, Wally said, ‘Would you like a cup of coffee? I have a thermos of regular and one of decaf.’ My friend said jokingly, ‘No, I’d prefer a soft drink.’ Wally smiled and said, ‘No problem. I have a cooler up front with regular and Diet Coke, water and orange juice..’ Almost stuttering, Harvey said, ‘I’ll take a Diet Coke.’
Handing him his drink, Wally said, ‘If you’d like something to read, I have The Wall Street Journal, Time, Sports Illustrated and USA Today..’
As they were pulling away, Wally handed my friend another laminated card, ‘These are the stations I get and the music they play, if you’d like to listen to the radio.’
And as if that weren’t enough, Wally told Harvey that he had the air conditioning on and asked if the temperature was comfortable for him. Then he advised Harvey of the best route to his destination for that time of day. He also let him know that he’d be happy to chat and tell him about some of the sights or, if Harvey preferred, to leave him with his own thoughts…
‘Tell me, Wally,’ my amazed friend asked the driver, ‘have you always served customers like this?’
Wally smiled into the rear view mirror. ‘No, not always. In fact, it’s only been in the last two years. My first five years driving, I spent most of my time complaining like all the rest of the cabbies do. Then I heard the personal growth guru, Wayne Dyer, on the radio one day.
He had just written a book called You’ll See It When You Believe It. Dyer said that if you get up in the morning expecting to have a bad day, you’ll rarely disappoint yourself.. He said, ‘Stop complaining! Differentiate yourself from your competition. Don’t be a duck. Be an eagle. Ducks quack and complain. Eagles soar above the crowd.’
‘That hit me right between the eyes,’ said Wally. ‘Dyer was really talking about me. I was always quacking and complaining, so I decided to change my attitude and become an eagle. I looked around at the other cabs and their drivers.. The cabs were dirty, the drivers were unfriendly, and the customers were unhappy. So I decided to make some changes. I put in a few at a time. When my customers responded well, I did more.’
‘I take it that has paid off for you,’ Harvey said.
‘It sure has,’ Wally replied. ‘My first year as an eagle, I doubled my income from the previous year. This year I’ll probably quadruple it. You were lucky to get me today. I don’t sit at cabstands anymore. My customers call me for appointments on my cell phone or leave a message on my answering machine. If I can’t pick them up myself, I get a reliable cabbie friend to do it and I take a piece of the action.’
Wally was phenomenal. He was running a limo service out of a Yellow Cab. I’ve probably told that story to more than fifty cab drivers over the years, and only two took the idea and ran with it. Whenever I go to their cities, I give them a call. The rest of the drivers quacked like ducks and told me all the reasons they couldn’t do any of what I was suggesting.
Wally the Cab Driver made a different choice. He decided to stop quacking like ducks and start soaring like eagles.
How about us? Smile, and the whole world smiles with you…. The ball is in our hands!
A man reaps what he sows. Let us not become weary in doing good, for at the proper time we will reap a harvest if we do not give up… let us do good to all people.
Ducks Quack, Eagles Soar.
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01.13.10
Posted in Work at 12:52 pm by JohnB
Most, if not all, organisations have in some form an “Internet Policy” which would typically describe what is acceptable to do with your browser during office hours. I’ve seen these range from ‘anything as long as it’s legal and you don’t waste time’ to ‘these 3 sites for these 5 people ONLY’.
And this is fine if you expect people to leave their brains at the door on the way out of the building and their mobile devices at the door on their way in. The problem is that neither of these are practical in the world today (OK certain security-sensitive organisations do actually require that you NOT bring mobile devices into the building but they kind of fall outside of my scope of general business here). So even if the strict policies of the organisation are enforced at the desktop, folks are still able to access Facebook, twitter, blog-spaces and the like from their “mobile phones”. I’m quoting here because as time passes these devices have become so much more than phones and the name increasing doesn’t fit. These are the the small screens which make up the screen triumvirate of most of our lives; small screens = mobile devices, mid-screens = desktop systems (PCs, Macs etc) and large screens being our TVs which are also becoming a source of rich media and not just TV broadcast.
But I digress, the point here is that very few organisations have put in place policies and guidelines to help the individual employees understand what they should and should not share outside of the company, how they communicate what they are doing and who that communication is available too. An example of this would be the Facebook invitation to ‘Friends’ to attend a party. The intent was honest but the method and audience hadn’t been properly considered, the result was several hundred people turning up and a seriously wrecked house. Translate that into Business terms and you get my point.
I’m not any sort of advocate of nannying at all, and I believe that in the majority of cases common sense prevails and individuals are reasonable sensible. HOWEVER, we live in a statistical universe and given enough people, someone will do something stupid and potentially damaging unless strongly advised otherwise, simply out of ignorance or lack of thought.
So policies ARE necessary to help to mitigate these statistical certainties and to enable businesses to protect themselves. As an employer, ask yourself these simple questions:
- If someone blogged about their working day, could they unintentionally reveal sensitive information?
- Could someone updating their Facebook status as “This place sucks, no-one EVER listens!” reflect poorly on you as an employer?
- Could a Twitter update of “Another meeting, I wonder what bad news is coming now?!” impact your business confidence?
While it’s true that the comments of one person may not even register, it’s also true that it only takes one person to start a rumor.
Being able to identify and address ANY sort of communications channel and how it could be used or mis-used is vital. Those forward thinking businesses have adopted social media as a marketing medium and done so with great success, so it MUST hold true that bad news has the same, if not greater, impact.
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12.09.09
Posted in Work at 12:00 pm by JohnB
Cloud technologies… it’s all everyone is talking about at the moment. You can’t scan a blog site, pick up a magazine or log on to any technology forum without have “Cloud” shoved in your face.
And I’m as guilty as everyone else! When ones livelihood depends on the adoption and deployment of technology you sometime have to kick back and ride the wave and certainly there are new technologies emerging which are simply fantastic and would not have been possible without the recent developments in browser/OS/platform technologies. The Software as a Service Cloud is probably the most visible evidence of this, I can now write a document, put together a spreadsheet and edit graphics and a myriad of other cool stuff using free online services – brilliant!
But there’s another side (or two) to the picture. Let’s not forget about the techncal layers, the Platform as a Service and Infrastructure as a Service versions of the “Cloud” definition. In particular I’m more than a little smug that, what I would have termed well designed, internal infrastructures are now being heralded as ‘Private Clouds’.
We did a project in the Middle East nearly two years ago which involved the deployment of a virtualised environment for a corporate development team. The idea was to provide the team with a scalable platform within which they could spin up or down servers and systems without needing to refer to the IT department for every build. The stated business goals here were improved productivity, reduced overhead costs and flexibility with control. The control element came into play by allocating ‘points’ to each developer allowing them to create and use ny specification of virtual server or servers as long as the ‘cost’ fell inside their points allocation. Simple, easy and all delivered within the functionality of the chosen underlying technology.
This, dear reader, is a Private Cloud, we were doing it before it had a name! Of course there are now entire solutions built around the idea of the Dynamic Data Centre and the technology has moved on to allow even greater levels of administration, deployment and management to be achieved but the concept is the same; abstract away from the hardware and introduce services which are scalable, flexible and resilient without even needing to think about how these features are achieved.
And pretty much any business can take advantage of this kind of solution for a minimal level of investment. I’ll put good money on most businesses have at least one important if no critical systems or service which runs as a single point of failure. It’s economics, running multiple physical servers for resilience costs money. Not only in the original purchase of the time and it’s ongoing update/upgrade/replacement cycle, but also the power, cooling and administration side of things too.
By using virtualisaion and some central storage (this is were some investment may be needed) EVERY service can be resilient, monitored and flexible in it’s consumption of resources. Private Clouds are not just for giant enterprises and Universities they are for anyone who values their technical infrastructure and who would love to see their IT move from being an overhead cost to forming part of the strategic assets of the business.
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