Customer Service – Are you standing out from the crowd?
I just purchased a new set of garden furniture from a retailer synonymous with good service and the treatment I received from order to delivery was excellent. This retailer always stands out because of their truly outstanding customer service to their customers. I know which retailer I will be using for my next purchase, but what does that mean for their competition?
Continuous Learning in Business: It’s good for you!
“Knowledge has to be improved, challenged and increased constantly, or it vanishes.” – Peter Drucker, management ‘guru’.
I’m a fan of Peter Drucker, so many of the predictions of how management would need to develop over the last twenty years for a changing business world have proven to be really accurate. He is the Warren Buffett of management thinking! He also proves how continuous learning and development is important in our businesses.
I’m at a client location this morning overlooking a building I walked into some 25 years ago as a freelance consultant and walked out a few hours later as a director of a public company. It reminded me you can sometimes think you have ‘arrived’ in your career and there’s nothing much left to know. A quarter of a century on and of course I realise I still don’t know all the things I need to know – but I still aspire to learn!
Traits of a successful entrepreneur
Many professionals prefer to work alone. We can vouch for how difficult it is to keep a group of professionals in the same room for any period of time. It can be a nightmare running workshops and seminars when organising professionals becomes like trying to herd cats!
Many professionals have been trained to be analytical and are prepared to spend hours in sceptical debate over the smallest of issues. Professionals sometimes do not naturally operate in a team environment. Yet the benefits of teamwork are too great to ignore. The word often associated with teams is ‘synergy’ – the sum of the whole is greater than the sum of the parts. Or in other words, when people work in a team the results obtained by the team is greater than the results obtained if the individuals worked alone.