Greg Baker, on June 10, 2016
As the U.S. and other developed countries continue their evolution toward a service economy, the number of service groups is multiplying rapidly, and service group excellence has become essential. But what exactly is a service group? There are two types.
Whether a service group is internal or external, it faces certain intrinsic challenges.
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Greg Baker, on November 3, 2014
Developing Customer Focus is a theme that has been prevalent over the past two decades. Organizations commonly talk about becoming customer-focused, customer-centric, or customer-centered. And if they’re not talking about that, they are often waving their flags in a “One Company” drive to become unified in service to their customers – which actually amounts to the same thing as customer focus in terms of what has to be done to achieve it and the net result.
Greg Baker, on March 19, 2014
There are seven critical elements you need to consider when planning your Consultant Development Program if you want to truly enhance the level and type of service your professional service employees provide to their clients. We refer to these elements as The Seven Pillars. Together they make up, and hold up, a complete approach to building effective consulting organizations.
No organizational structure is perfect, but many of them across business today could be a lot better. The challenge is that many structures out there breed unintentional conflict. Does yours? Perhaps it’s time to rethink your organizational structure.
In my recent blog article, A Solution for Managing Unintentional Conflict in Operations, I described how a client company resolved the “unintentional conflict” created by their contract processing operation. They resolved it by creating a “shared operational space” where work was accomplished with much greater harmony and efficiency. Their results were stunning – a near 300% improvement in contract cycle time. In this article I provide some “how-to’s” for you to align your business operations to manage conflict, and talk a little more about the importance of creating shared space in business operations to prevent conflict in the first place.