Category: Productivity

Wednesday, 19 May 2004

A Best-ter Buy. Part 2

by Garrick van Buren 1 Comment on A Best-ter Buy. Part 2

Updating the stores to appeal to a specific customer segment is great, Best Buy goes the extra mile in this renovation and makes sales more visible to staff.

Employees begin their day by reviewing the previous day’s figures, which are written on a dry-erase board and compared to the previous month. At a Westminster store meeting open to the media, Chris Smith, an operating supervisor, pointed out that the store had $550 in overtime costs the previous day, and asked employees to suggest ways to reduce it.

SF Gate has a great follow up on my earlier Best Buy persona post

Over the next few years, each of Best Buy’s 608 stores will focus on one or two of the five segments, with 110 stores scheduled to make the switch by February.

There are two interesting points here:

  1. Starting each day reviewing sales figures with the staff
  2. Looking for improvement from the people with day-to-day knowledge

Like a page out of James Womack’s Lean Thinking. These two points reinforce Womack’s patterns of “visual controls leading to continuous improvement” and “asking for improvements from the people on the front-line leads to a continued commitment”.

Best of Luck to Best Buy.

Monday, 17 May 2004

Outsourcing to Nebraska

by Garrick van Buren Comments Off on Outsourcing to Nebraska

Sending those jobs to India would cut the costs even more, to maybe $10 an hour in wages and overhead. But JetBlue thinks the better service from home agents offsets that price advantage, notwithstanding the occasional barking dog in the background.

His [David Neeleman, the discount carrier’s chief] motivation was mainly to make agents happy, the theory being that happy workers sound better on the phone than morose ones.

Some of the clients we’ve worked with have call centers in North Dakota handling their customer inquiries and concerns. The exerpts above are from The Slipper Solution at Forbes.com outlines discount air maverick JetBlue’s call-center strategy – call-center employees work from home.

First, cost-cutting eventually cuts service quality and brand reputation. Two things JetBlue should be averse to compromising. Secondly, happy employees make for happy customers. The relationship front-line employees have with customers is reflective of the employer-employee relationship. That’s why Working Pathway’s focuses on improving the employee experience.

Monday, 1 March 2004

The Zone vs the Clock

by Garrick van Buren Comments Off on The Zone vs the Clock

This weekend, we worked on the home renovation – continuously – tiling until we ran out of tile, tweaking the bathroom sink until it stopped leaking. There were no phones, no radios, no email, no meetings pulling us away. We were able to focus on the task at hand until it was complete….really focus. I’m reminded of Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi’s research on the subject of work – where he finds that it takes 2 _uninterupted_ hours to get into any given task.

Two hours of not glancing at the clock or checking email or answering the phone.

Compare your daily routine against these 2 hour blocks – does your schedule support you getting into your work? Or is it more about managing distractions?

Sunday, 29 February 2004

Measure Once – Cut 5 or 6 Times

by Garrick van Buren Comments Off on Measure Once – Cut 5 or 6 Times

As I mentioned in an earlier post, we spent the weekend redoing our bathroom & entryway. The biggest a-ha I can offer you:

Iterate For a Snug Fit.

For each piece of sub-flooring, each tile, and the new mopboard – we would:

  1. Make the measurement
  2. Cut off a hair little less than we measured
  3. Massage the piece in place
  4. Mark where it didn’t fit, and take off a little more
  5. Repeat as necessary

This gave us a much closer fit everywhere – and taught us more about the house than measuring and cutting exactly. Which wouldn’t have worked perfectly anyway because, as my father-in-law says, “The blade has width.”

For more on iterative prototyping check out Michael Schrage’s book Serious Play.

Tuesday, 10 February 2004

Veen’s Presentation Tips

by Garrick van Buren Comments Off on Veen’s Presentation Tips

I highly recommend Jeffrey Veen’s Seven Steps to Better Presentations

My personal favorites:

  • #3 Don’t Apologize.
    Apologizing for your own performance so directly and swiftly weakens.
  • #4 Start Strong and #5 End Strong.
    I was in a sales presentation recently where the main presenter apologized 5 times in as many minutes. From the audience’s perspective – it’s painful, frustrating, and transforms what could be an engaging conversation into an unfortunate waste of time.