Last week I called our head of HR and told him "We are going to have trouble with Mr. X, please have someone talk to him. He was not surprised because I do this often. I also walked up to our operations manager and told him "Please have extra QC on the Mr. X's work." He too knows my so called gut feel.   Later in the week we found out this employee (his internal QC scored had dipped) had a personal problem and was planning to resign  The VA team is efficient and would have caught it anyway. But how did I know this? It is really simple.   When I walk the floor I make polite conversations but not disturb too many people at their work. Over a period of time I have developed a sense of how people work from their typing pattern, to their processing flow, to the information that they have up on the screen most of the time. When I notice something out of the norm it almost hits me in the face and forces me to talk to them. That leads to me to find out more things about them and their work. That is...

Management gurus say it, we running companies know it better... The key to our success is to come up with an idea, create winning strategy, build a winning team that can execute your strategy to success and let them execute it!     Great but HOW???!!!!   Let us break the problem down. Ideas are cheap. We (CxOs) who have been around the block have more ideas than most people around us. In fact, most of us can come up with a good strategy as well. But what about execution? Even that is possible, IF we have a winning team. Ideally, a winning team can operate the company to our mission and vision statement down to the last employee  even when we are not around. Something like this. This is a true story: A young person walked in for an interview at a progressive company. The hiring manager said, "Please talk to the next five employees that come walk past this chair and ask them about the company and write about what you think this company based on that discussion. It does not have to be to good or bad, it just has to be real and touch the very essence of what we...

  Sunday 7:30 AM: "Ring… Ring…" my mobile goes off. I see it is my childhood friend and golfing buddy Jawahar on the line. Along with having the misfortune of knowing me for nearly 40 years, Jawahar is the CEO of one of the finest universities in India with over 15,000 students (PES) that he has built literally ground up.         He and I have share this passion for exploring food different places. Today his pick was a place that was 'hole in a wall' place in the remote inner cities of Bangalore. He told me that he had gone to this place a long time ago and remembered that the food was good. We traveled nearly half an hour to get to this place.      As we drove close to this 'hole in a wall' in Jawahar's blue BMW SUV into some narrow streets. I noticed quite a few nice cars parked around the restaurant. As we parked and walked up to a small house (of the chef) that was converted into a restaurant by day, there was a long line of nearly 50 people. We joined at the end and waited and waited and waited for nearly an hour. The...

Dashboards have become far more common in organizations of all sizes and in virtually all industry types. Marketers spend a significant amount of time trying to identify the “right“ metrics and communicate them effectively to internal constituents in an effort to better understand (and in some cases even justify) the relationships between marketing expenditures and financial value creation for the firm. In this paper, the authors define marketing dashboards and examine the reasons behind their managerial popularity. Moreover, they show how effective dashboards can be developed and how roadblocks to their use in organizations may be overcome. They conclude by making recommendations for further research in the utility and practical implementations in the organization   Why VA Matrix? VA Matrix (dashboards) address the increasing complexity and diversity of data faced by senior management in the information age. At least five factors are mentioned by managers as driving the need for dashboards: 1. Poor organization of the many pieces of potentially decision-relevant data, 2. Managerial biases in information processing and decision-making, 3.The increasing demands for marketing accountability, 4.The dual objective of companies to grow the top-line while keeping down costs for a healthy bottom-line   Contact us for a demo and how...

I have been a part of service teams or have managed service teams both as a supplier and as a customer since 1996. After all these years, in over 100+ engagements (Having partners ranging from fortune 50 companies to one person startups), I have come to the conclusion that as a “Customer” we hold more keys to making any service project successful than the service providers themselves! Most customer companies work really hard on the contract, beat up the supplier J, and once the contract is signed, just let the supplier and their internal teams ‘WING IT’, while just checking in on the project once in a way in hallway conversations. This is a sure recipe for disaster. Instead follow the 10 commandments listed below and we guarantee that you are going to get your partner to help bring value to you and organization by having them execute your strategies to success. Customer 10 commandments for managing service   1. One point contact: Make sure that you assign one person whose success at work (Key Result Area or KRA) depends on the success of the service provided by the supplier. You need to have one person that is interested in your team to...