Transform Your Business

My article is featured in CATS Recruit Section, page C30, of The Straits Times today, 17 June 2009. We have it reproduced here for your reading pleasure.

Businesses will need to manage the process of cost reduction well to ensure that they do not unwittingly compromise their product quality or service standards. Cost-cutting is a short-term strategy. It is far more important that companies take a long-term view to build and strengthen their organisation and its capabilities now, positioning themselves for the eventual economic recovery.

Over the years, businesses have worked hard to win customers to get to where they are today. To lose their customers now would be tragic indeed. Studies have shown that it costs up to six times more money to acquire a new customer than to retain an existing one. In the slow economy, it would probably cost even more to win a new account.

Businesses must have an unrelenting focus on delivering the best customer experience. There must be the line of sight from the top to the bottom of the organisation. Take care of that and you will enjoy customer loyalty – and revenues and profitability will follow. Many companies find that 20 per cent of their customers provide over 80 per cent of their revenue. Thus, high levels of repeat customers will lead to high levels of profit.

To achieve that, companies must remain constantly vigilant about the changing requirements of their customers, understand their business models and the markets they operate in, know what their customers want and deliver these to help their customers succeed.

Achieving excellence

To achieve business excellence, everyone in the organisation needs to focus on delivering customer satisfaction by taking personal responsibility for improving processes and be empowered to make changes.

Departments need to become self-managed teams; cross-functional teams are needed at the company level; and the organisation needs to be flatter and more efficient for faster decision-making and response. When the company finds a problem or an opportunity for improvement outside, they need to collaborate to find the solution.

For that to happen and for that change to be successful and sustainable, a holistically integrated approach to business excellence, which engages all parts and elements of the organisation and its leadership, is required.

Leadership for change

Executives must lead the change process, the thinking about productivity and quality to learning to create a company that consistently delivers high value and customer satisfaction.
They must establish a culture of continuous improvement that seeks to remove bottlenecks, eliminate sources of wastes and customer dissatisfaction, and become more efficient and more effective.

There must be a focus on reducing cycle time, rapidly transferring knowledge and delighting the customer – these help the company to maintain its competitive edge.

Management must also be able to spot changing customer preferences, be aware of the changing competitive landscape, harness advances in technology, seize opportunities and implement new solutions rapidly.

Product and service standards have to stretch from the top to the bottom of the organisation and need to cut across all departmental lines. The organisation’s own learning and development process must be structured, systematic and focused on building on its strength. Critical systems that support hiring, training, recognition, career advancement and information access need to be in place.

Employee engagement

Organisations can reorganise, downsize and streamline their way to efficiency. These approaches are necessary but often not sufficient to catapult organisations into high performance mode because they neglect one essential component of performance – engaging employees in their work.

To mobilise the entire organisation, leaders must ask for employees’ inputs and their involvement, especially in areas that need improvement. Unfortunately, in modern day continuous improvement process this step is often missed which causes communication and ownership problems that hinder success. Employees must be trained and equipped to go from “good to great”.

Total approach needed

For companies to be successful in their business, they need to be responsive to their customers’ needs at every step of the business process involving every function, employee and leader. Anything short of a total approach is unlikely to deliver the desired outcomes.

Organisational transformation is a long-term process requiring a fundamental change in management practices and culture – a paradigm shift.

Finally, the organisational direction that advocates the strategic intent has to be clear about the objectives that needs to be achieved, the type of values and capabilities that are needed and how all this is going to be implemented for successful change to occur.

If you like this article, please subscribe to our blog and get our FREE Report on “10 Secrets to Successful Employee Engagement”.

Written by Robert Chew
Principal Consultant and Corporate Trainer
Website: www.quartonmanagement.com

P.S. Register NOW for his powerful workshop on 29 and 30 June 2009 at ST701 Seminar and Workshop and enjoy early bird discounted fee. Please logon to www.jobs.st701.com. Hurry, limited seats left!

Transform Your Business

My article is featured in CATS Recruit Section, page C30, of The Straits Times today, 17 June 2009. We have it reproduced here for your reading pleasure.

Businesses will need to manage the process of cost reduction well to ensure that they do not unwittingly compromise their product quality or service standards. Cost-cutting is a short-term strategy. It is far more important that companies take a long-term view to build and strengthen their organisation and its capabilities now, positioning themselves for the eventual economic recovery.

Over the years, businesses have worked hard to win customers to get to where they are today. To lose their customers now would be tragic indeed. Studies have shown that it costs up to six times more money to acquire a new customer than to retain an existing one. In the slow economy, it would probably cost even more to win a new account.

Businesses must have an unrelenting focus on delivering the best customer experience. There must be the line of sight from the top to the bottom of the organisation. Take care of that and you will enjoy customer loyalty – and revenues and profitability will follow. Many companies find that 20 per cent of their customers provide over 80 per cent of their revenue. Thus, high levels of repeat customers will lead to high levels of profit.

To achieve that, companies must remain constantly vigilant about the changing requirements of their customers, understand their business models and the markets they operate in, know what their customers want and deliver these to help their customers succeed.

Achieving excellence

To achieve business excellence, everyone in the organisation needs to focus on delivering customer satisfaction by taking personal responsibility for improving processes and be empowered to make changes.

Departments need to become self-managed teams; cross-functional teams are needed at the company level; and the organisation needs to be flatter and more efficient for faster decision-making and response. When the company finds a problem or an opportunity for improvement outside, they need to collaborate to find the solution.

For that to happen and for that change to be successful and sustainable, a holistically integrated approach to business excellence, which engages all parts and elements of the organisation and its leadership, is required.

Leadership for change

Executives must lead the change process, the thinking about productivity and quality to learning to create a company that consistently delivers high value and customer satisfaction.
They must establish a culture of continuous improvement that seeks to remove bottlenecks, eliminate sources of wastes and customer dissatisfaction, and become more efficient and more effective.

There must be a focus on reducing cycle time, rapidly transferring knowledge and delighting the customer – these help the company to maintain its competitive edge.

Management must also be able to spot changing customer preferences, be aware of the changing competitive landscape, harness advances in technology, seize opportunities and implement new solutions rapidly.

Product and service standards have to stretch from the top to the bottom of the organisation and need to cut across all departmental lines. The organisation’s own learning and development process must be structured, systematic and focused on building on its strength. Critical systems that support hiring, training, recognition, career advancement and information access need to be in place.

Employee engagement

Organisations can reorganise, downsize and streamline their way to efficiency. These approaches are necessary but often not sufficient to catapult organisations into high performance mode because they neglect one essential component of performance – engaging employees in their work.

To mobilise the entire organisation, leaders must ask for employees’ inputs and their involvement, especially in areas that need improvement. Unfortunately, in modern day continuous improvement process this step is often missed which causes communication and ownership problems that hinder success. Employees must be trained and equipped to go from “good to great”.

Total approach needed

For companies to be successful in their business, they need to be responsive to their customers’ needs at every step of the business process involving every function, employee and leader. Anything short of a total approach is unlikely to deliver the desired outcomes.

Organisational transformation is a long-term process requiring a fundamental change in management practices and culture – a paradigm shift.

Finally, the organisational direction that advocates the strategic intent has to be clear about the objectives that needs to be achieved, the type of values and capabilities that are needed and how all this is going to be implemented for successful change to occur.

If you like this article, please subscribe to our blog and get our FREE Report on “10 Secrets to Successful Employee Engagement”.

Written by Robert Chew
Principal Consultant and Corporate Trainer
Website: www.quartonmanagement.com

P.S. Register NOW for his powerful workshop on 29 and 30 June 2009 at ST701 Seminar and Workshop and enjoy early bird discounted fee. Please logon to www.jobs.st701.com. Hurry, limited seats left!

The Strength of BNI Renaissance Lies in a Strong Tripod (Part 3 of 3)

Welcome to Part 3 of “The Strength of BNI Renaissance Lies in a Strong Tripod”. In this final instalment, I would like to cover the final leg of the 3-legged tripod supporting a strong BNI chapter – People. While this leg is as important as the other 2 legs- Leadership and System- in building a strong BNI chapter, you will probably realise that without this final leg, the first 2 legs could not have even existed.

When the seeds for BNI Renaissance were first planted way back in October 2006, we set ourselves a simple vision to find and attract good people, which is “To be a magnetic chapter whereby talented and committed people were naturally attracted to be part of us”. The first step is choosing the right team members and getting them to play 
together. Attracting talents is important because it is a powerful way to continuously raise the bar and motivate one another to push for our best. As such, talents have to be applauded. But having talented but not committed members will only result in a chapter with very short lifespan. It takes strong commitment from every member to achieve outstanding attendance, punctuality, high referral rate, high visitor rate, etc. In a big chapter, it is easy for the mentality of “it’s ok if I am not around this week because my absence will not be felt anyway” or “it’s ok not to invite visitors this week because other members will bring anyway? to seep in. Judging by the historical 
experience of other BNI chapters, once commitment in the chapter starts to take a backseat, it is guaranteed that the chapter will begin on the path of decline.

With talented and committed members, the battle is only half-won. The leader’s job is to harmonise the members. The star shines even brighter in a team than in the individual.  Just imagine BNI Renaissance as the Dream Team in US basketball. Each member can be fantastic star, but they also operate very seamlessly as a team. The moment members in our chapter do not play as team and allow individual agendas to set us apart, we will start to fall apart too. Therefore, it is also of utmost importance to build trust among members, especially during a period of fast growth, because at the end of day, we want to be “building ties that bind” (by the way, this is BNI Renaissance slogan).

In conclusion, let us recap again; if you imagine a BNI Renaissance sitting on top of a tripod, our chapter has to be supported by 3 very strong legs, namely: Leadership, System and People. The 3 legs are interdependent and a weakness in any one of the legs will result in the chapter “sliding down”. Last but not the least, a winning chapter will attract winners, thereby further strengthening the chapter.

Next Page »