Dodo Loves Marketing

“I am ultimately responsible for the quality of all teaching in my district. Yet every day, in every classroom, there is a teacher and there are students . . . and the door is shut.”

Gerry C., a superintendent for a large public school district, captures the manager’s challenge perfectly: How can you get people to do what _you want them to do when you are not there to tell them to do it? Gerry knows what all great managers know: As a manager, you might think that you have more control, but you don’t. You actually have less control than the people who report to you. Each individual employee can decide what to do and what not to do. He can decide the hows, the whens, and the with whoms. For good or for ill, he can make things happen. ..more

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Level 3: At this level customers expect partnership. They want you to listen to them, to be responsive to them, to make them feel they are on the same side of the fence as you.

Service businesses have long realized the importance of this partnership expectation. That’s why Wal-Mart positions hearty senior citizens at their front door to smile a welcome and remember names. That’s why all airlines create loyalty clubs offering special treatment to frequent fliers. And that’s presumably why video stores offer a “staff picks” section: “We’re like you. We watch videos, too.” ..more

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The language of “average” is pervasive. Reservation centers calculate the “average” number of calls a customer service representative can handle in an hour. Restaurant chains project staffing needs by estimating how many servers are needed to staff the “average” restaurant. In sales organizations, territories are divided up based on how many prospects the “average” salesperson can handle. “Average” is everywhere. ..more

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Even if you thoughtfully examine the match between the employee and the role, you’ve still got a problem. No matter what conclusion you come to, the employee will invariably want to move up. The employee will want to be promoted. Every signal sent by the company tells him that higher is better. A larger salary, a more impressive title, more generous stock options, a roomier office with a couch and a coffee table, all this and more awaits the lucky employee on the next rung on the ladder. No wonder he wants to move up. ..more

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Great managers have to survive in a hostile world. Most companies do not value excellence in every role. They do not provide alternative career paths for their employees. And they do not give their managers the leeway to design graded levels of achievement or broadbanded pay plans. If you find yourself living in this restricted world, what can you do? ..more

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• First, do your homework. Find out if anyone else in the organization is working — or has worked — from home. Your union as well as the personnel department may know. If so, arrange to have a drink or meeting with them, to find out how they tackled the subject, how the arrangement works or, if it has stopped, why it ended.

• When I decided to move to the Isle of Bute, in Scotland, I thought I’d have to leave the bank,’ says Kevin Attwood, Strategic Planning Development Officer for Nat West who now works two days from home, and three in London. ‘In fact, I kept the move so quiet that when I told my boss I’d moved to Scotland over the weekend, he was flabbergasted. When we had lunch I said flippantly, that if I’d got my act together I would have come up with a strategic plan for teleworking. He told me to come up with a proposal. I rung up people in the bank who were already working from home some of the time and talked to them extensively before coming up with my plans. Listening to their experiences helped me make a convincing proposal.’ ..more
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George has owned a small machine shop for about twenty years. He’s very good at what he does. He delivers precision parts at good prices on time. He is so good that his customers are always pushing him to expand his capacity. You see, George has maintained his on-time delivery reputation by having the audacity (and the discipline) to turn down work he knows he can’t deliver on time.

Five years ago George had eight employees. The business consisted of a bookkeeper, an estimator, a production supervisor, and five machine operators. George took home $90,000 a year and paid cash for each new machine. He owned the building free and clear. He had no bank debt. ..more

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“Joe will be leaving us soon and we want you to fill his role for a while. You will, of course, maintain your present responsibilities as well.”

Directives like this are becoming increasingly common, as organizations embark on acquisitions, mergers and downsizing to meet competition. Salaries are often the first costs to be cut, and middle managers are asked to double up on responsibilities, assuming the dual roles of first- and second-line manager.

What are some of the prime difficulties of maintaining these two responsibilities simultaneously? Among them are: ..more

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U.S. business spends billions annually to rev up workers. In the travel incentive business alone, there are now thousands of service companies that develop and/or run trips to reward employees, as opposed to a few hundred companies a decade ago.

What methods are most used? How can you choose and implement a motivational program that will match your needs and get results? Matt S. Walton III is a managing principal in Los Angeles for Sibson & Co. Inc. , a management consulting firm based in Princeton, NJ that develops compensation and incentive programs. He describes the most common types of programs and offers insights and guidelines:

• Rewards. Trips, televisions, cash—all can be powerful incentives to pump up performance and boost profits. “Reward programs are especially effective when used with sales and customer service representatives,” says Walton. He cautions that, for the reward to be meaningful, it should relate to specific performance measures established in advance. For example, bank personnel might be offered a reward for getting a certain number of customers to buy a CD within a 30-day period. ..more
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If your company has a formal employee appraisal system, do you feel that:

A high rating will boost an employee’s enthusiasm for the organization?

A satisfactory rating will provide a motivating push for better work?

An unsatisfactory rating will provide a motivating push for better work?

The actual answer to all of the above questions is definitely “no.” Studies show that (perhaps contrary to logic) most employees consider their own work performance to be “above average.” ..more

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The workplace is becoming more racially diverse, thanks to affirmative action and increased educational opportunities for minorities. Unfortunately, racial tensions often manifest themselves. These can disrupt working relationships, slow down productivity, dampen motivation, alienate clients and customers, and even invite legal action.

When racism erupts, managers tend to make some common mistakes, like:

• Setting ultimatums. “Some managers simply say, ‘You two will work together or else,’ ” says Maudine Cooper, staff director for the District of Columbia government mayor, Washington, DC. “This approach only makes matters worse.” Forcing a relationship does not change people’s feelings, which are at the root of the problem. As long as they continue to harbor the hatred or mistrust or whatever it is they feel, the problem will tend to persist. ..more
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Traditional methods for building trust between managers and workers are to stress common objectives, build group spirit, and offer motivational rewards.

But this “shared fate” approach is flawed, contend Samuel Culbert and John J. McDonough, co-authors of Radical Management: Power Politics and the Pursuit of Trust .

“It is impossible to keep redefining every situation so that all employees feel they have the same goal, and it is unrealistic to expect people to continually subordinate their personal interests,” says McDonough, a professor of management at UCLA. He has found that real trust grows when employees are consistently shown that their needs are understood and respected. ..more

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If a company’s strategy represents its overall approach tomaximizing business success—stated in terms of achieving certain sales, profits, product delivery, and employee turnover goals—then the mission statement represents a more generalized and idealistic vision of the company’s purpose in life. If done right, a mission statement can go a long way toward energizing everyone in an organization to achieve the ideal.

Unfortunately, in the rush to develop mission statements, many companies have established statements that are somehow too general and lofty. I have seen a number of missionstatements that commit companies to being “the producer of the highest-quality (name the product) in the world” or “the top company in the (name the industry).” In my experience, the best mission statements are oriented in either of two directions: ..more

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Assembling a cash flow statement: chronicling the past. To help you get started in putting together your own cash flow statement, this section describes the cash flow statement of a hypothetical architectural firm, ABC Architectural Services.

The cash flow statement is for the four months just ended (For the purpose of the exercise, we assume that we’re now at April 30.)

A few notes about this company:

It employed seven people in January and received two new architectural design contracts in January for $25,000 each. These jobs should each take five months to complete and are payable as completed. ..more

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A key role of modern marketing is that of a management `mindset’ implemented throughout an organization rather than confined to a particular department (Payne 1995). This viewpoint regards marketing as a guiding management philosophy or ‘attitude of mind’ that puts the customer first, and it is commonly described s a ‘marketing orientation’. It is a much broader view of the role of marketing an has been envisaged in the past, and it cuts across a wide range of organizational functions. Successful adaptation of a marketing orientation requires effective management of all stakeholder groups (this means people with a particular — although not necessarily the same — interest in the activities of the company) such as staff, business partners, shareholders and suppliers, as well as customers. As Chaffey et al. note, ‘The marketing concept should lie at the heart of the organisation, and the actions of directors, managers and employees should be guided by its philosophy’ ..more

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While press attention has focused on the achievements (and, more recently, the struggles) of Internet entrepreneurs in dotcom companies, comparatively little mention has been made of the increasing numbers of service workers who make up the bulk of the demand for labour in new technology industries. Leibovich, in an article appropriately entitled ‘Service workers without a smile’, provides an interesting account of employment conditions at Amazon, world famous for its ground-breaking policies of online customer relationship-building. He notes how staff are pressured to work as quickly as possible in order to achieve customer satisfaction targets, particularly those who earn low wages packing books at the firm’s distribution centres or answering emails from customers, and goes on to observe the irony of the Amazon geography: ‘Customer service employees work in a patchwork of cubicles scattered over three downtown Seattle buildings. The quarters have an old industrial feel, with gritty exteriors that belie the company’s sleek online identity’ (1999: 3). Many other ‘new economy’ employees work in call centres that have been dubbed ‘the new sweatshops’ because of pressure to work as quickly as possible under electronic surveillance that monitors, for example, the number of customer emails responded to per hour. ..more

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