Performance Appraisal

A performance appraisal is one of the best and most important ways to recognize a person. When you recognize people in this way you accomplish two objectives. You let the person know how you feel about him and you provide a permanent documentation of the recognition. The documentation will be important to the person’s future growth and advancement within the company.

When you recognize a person through the performance appraisal, make sure you provide as complete a list as possible of his major accomplishments. As you note the accomplishments, be specific. A person who is unfamiliar with the work of the area should be able to read the appraisal and get a fairly complete picture of the person’s accomplishments.

My Consultancy–Asif J. Mir - Management Consultant–transforms organizations where people have the freedom to be creative, a place that brings out the best in everybody–an open, fair place where people have a sense that what they do matters. For details please visit www.asifjmir.com, and my Lectures.

Business Visionaries

The days of doing business as we have been doing in the past are gone. We can no longer afford to continue using traditional approaches in managing our companies. Executives or organizations that insist on clinging to outmoded ways of thinking will find themselves standing on the sidelines as new traditions are being established by forward thinking business visionaries. The business leaders of the future are awakening, sensitive to the personal responsibility the public now demands from the business community.

All of us share certain values and beliefs. We value the human spirit and believe that modern society must change in a deep and fundamental way the way it thinks, if we are to have a sustainable future. We also believe that the most effective leverage in achieving such a global transformation is through the business community.

It is doubtful that the business community would take this leadership role out of altruism. However, we believe that if business leaders recognize a need to operate responsibly, and feel that their personal values are in accord with organizational values, they will begin doing business in a new way—establishing new traditions in business communities around the world.

My Consultancy–Asif J. Mir - Management Consultant–transforms organizations where people have the freedom to be creative, a place that brings out the best in everybody–an open, fair place where people have a sense that what they do matters. For details please visit www.asifjmir.com, and my Lectures.

Anticipating Events

Events can develop at a frightening pace. Directors need to ensure they and their companies can monitor and react effectively to rapidly changing circumstances. Apparently healthy situations can quickly crumble. Hence directors need to think through the implications of their actions. Corporate reputations can also erode rapidly. Directors must ensure that people throughout the organization act and behave to protect and build internal and external expectations and perceptions.

My Consultancy–Asif J. Mir - Management Consultant–transforms organizations where people have the freedom to be creative, a place that brings out the best in everybody–an open, fair place where people have a sense that what they do matters. For details please visit www.asifjmir.com, and my Lectures.

Customer Commitment

Great companies are extremely market-oriented and are incredible at creating value to their highly satisfied, loyal customers. Greatness in marketing and customer service is a function of attitude, not resources. Most companies do not do a very good job as marketers. Consider when you have been put on hold endlessly when calling for technical support, when you have been ignored or treated indifferently when visiting a retail site, or when you have been supplied inferior goods or services. While second-rate firms may survive in the short term, they will not last in the long run unless they change their philosophy and start creating superior value for their customers.

My Consultancy–Asif J. Mir - Management Consultant–transforms organizations where people have the freedom to be creative, a place that brings out the best in everybody–an open, fair place where people have a sense that what they do matters. For details please visit www.asifjmir.com, and my Lectures.

Japan’s Manufacturing Techniques

Nations are built not with bricks and stones but with the capacity to create and apply knowledge. The result of knowledge creation and application in manufacturing and management practices is well demonstrated by Japan. Today we are witness to many industrialized economies that are strengthening their manufacturing activities simply by adopting these techniques.

The distinguishing characteristics associated with Japanese manufacturing techniques include an emphasis on designing and redesigning processes to optimize efficiency and a strong commitment to quality.

The manufacturing techniques that Japanese companies practice provide a competitive advantage and outstanding economic performance. The key for success is an understanding of the broad context of manufacturing culture, infrastructure and environment. These sound manufacturing and business techniques created and adopted by leading Japanese manufacturers have turned out to be the secret of their market leadership in many industries.

Following are a few of these concepts, which can help in managing any business set-up in a better way:

• Kaizen is one such technique, which in Japanese means ‘improve.’ This is commonly recognized as practices focusing on continuous improvement in manufacturing activities, business activities in general, and even life in general, depending on interpretation and usage. By improving standardized activities and processes, Kaizen helps in eliminating waste.
• Another management Japanese technique is the 5-S. It is a technique used to establish and maintain quality environment in an organization. It has five elements: Seiri (sorting out useful and frequently used materials and tools from unwanted and rarely used things); Seiton (keeping things in the right place systematically so that searching or movement time is minimized); Seiso (keeping everything around you clean and in a neat manner); Seiketsu (standardizing the above principles in everyday life) and Shitsuke (inculcating good habits and practicing them continuously). The 5-S practice helps everyone in the organization to live a better life.
• Kanban and ‘Just in Time’ are two other practices in inventory management practices that were pioneered by the Japanese automobile manufacturers, such as Toyota. Quality improvement, on the other hand, is the result of lower proportion of component scrap since the components spend less time in the supply chain.
• Poka-yoke is a process improvement focused on training of workers for mastering the increasingly complicated tasks to selectively redesign the tasks so they could be more easily and reliably mastered. It involves designing a foolproof process to eliminate the chance of errors.
• Jidoka is a practice by means of which an individual worker runs several machines simultaneously. Japan thus designs such machines that eliminate both error and the need for constant supervision.
• Muda is another technique that reduces wasteful activity in service processes. It ensures process efficiency and effectiveness.
• Mura curiously combines rigidity and flexibility and thus teaches service process improvement.
• Reducing Muri means reducing physical strain. In services process improvement, Muri applies to convoluted and unnecessary routings, physical transfer, and distances paper files may have to travel for a process to complete.
• Genchi Gembutsu means going to the actual scene (genchi) and confirming the actual scene (gembutsu). Observation of service processes at the point where it is actually delivered may unearth a host of problems such as lack of training, unnecessary steps, or a number of other areas that would benefit from small but significant process improvement ideas.

This is a glimpse of manufacturing techniques that Japan has so intellectually created and so profoundly practiced in its manufacturing systems that even with no natural resources, it has acquired the status of one of the most industrialized nations. Can we learn from Japan?

My Consultancy–Asif J. Mir - Management Consultant–transforms organizations where people have the freedom to be creative, a place that brings out the best in everybody–an open, fair place where people have a sense that what they do matters. For details please visit www.asifjmir.com, Lectures, Line of Sight.

Unfair Competition

Where government-owned companies compete with privately owned companies, the private companies sometimes complain that the government companies have unfair advantages. Some of the complaints are 1) government-owned companies can cut prices unfairly because they do not have to make profits; 2) they get cheaper financing; 3) they get government contracts; 4) they get export assistance; and 5) they can hold down wages with government assistance.

Another huge advantage state-owned companies have over privately owned business concerns in the form of direct subsidies, payments by the government to their companies.

My Consultancy–Asif J. Mir - Management Consultant–transforms organizations where people have the freedom to be creative, a place that brings out the best in everybody–an open, fair place where people have a sense that what they do matters. For details please visit www.asifjmir.com, Lectures, Line of Sight

Shaping the Corporation

What will be the shape of the new corporation—the company that survives and thrives on the difficult path to the twenty-first century? Will it be a flattened pyramid, a networked cluster, a hollowed-out donut, or possibly even a shamrock?

These and other nonhierarchical possibilities stimulate a great deal of interesting speculation. The art of organization design is at a significant crossroads. Many of its old truisms are coming under fire, and few new proven ones have emerged to replace them. But at least some sense of direction for the new corporation is apparent: It will be a business with few walls. Its structure will minimize barriers between staff thinkers  and line doers, between functions and divisions, and between the company and the outside world.

My Consultancy–Asif J. Mir - Management Consultant–transforms organizations where people have the freedom to be creative, a place that brings out the best in everybody–an open, fair place where people have a sense that what they do matters. For details please visit www.asifjmir.com, Lectures, Line of Sight

Virtual Corporation

As more and more companies are outsourcing various organizational functions and are paring together down to their core competencies, they might not be able to perform all the tasks required to complete a project. However, they certainly can perform their own highly specialized part of it very well. Now, if you put together several organizations whose competencies compliment each other and have them work together on a special project, you’d have a very strong group of collaborators. This is the idea behind an organizational arrangement that is growing in popularity—the virtual corporation. A virtual corporation is highly flexible, temporary organization formed by a group of companies that join forces to exploit a specific opportunity.

Technologies are changing so rapidly and skills are becoming so specialized these days that no one company can do everything by itself. And so, they join forces temporarily to form virtual corporations—not permanent organizations but temporary ones without their own offices or organizational charts. Although virtual corporations are not yet common, experts expect them to grow in popularity in the years ahead.

My Coultancy–Asif J. Mir - Management Consultant–transforms organizations where people have the freedom to be creative, a place that brings out the best in everybody–an open, fair place where people have a sense that what they do matters. For details please visit www.asifjmir.com, Lectures, Line of Sight

Customer Value Checklist

1. Does your company do a good job of listening to its customers? Give a specific example of how listening resulted in improved service quality to your customers?
2. Reliability is the ability of the company to perform the promised services dependably and accurately. On a 10-point scale, where 1 is unreliable and 10 perfectly reliable, where would you place your company and why?
3. How well does your company perform the “service basics”—that is, knowing and responding to the fundamental service expectations in your industry?
4. How effectively does your company manage the service design elements or systems, people, and the physical environment? Provide an example of how a lack of planning in one of these areas resulted in a “fail point” during a customer encounter.
5. Service recovery refers to how effectively companies respond to service failures. Cite an example of when a service failure occurred in your company and how it was handled.
6. Teamwork is an important dynamic in sustaining service workers’ motivation to serve and in minimizing service-performance shortfalls. Rate your company on its ability to foster teamwork on a scale of 1 to 10, where 1 indicates the absence of teamwork and 10 indicates maximum teamwork. How would you improve teamwork if you rated your company low on this attribute?
7. Internal service is crucial to service improvement, as customer satisfaction often mirrors employee satisfaction. To what extent does your company assess internal service quality (i.e., asking employees about the adequacy of systems to support the service, how the systems interact and serve one another, and where service failures are occurring)? Give examples of how internal service might be measured in your company.

My Consultancy–Asif J. Mir - Management Consultant–transforms organizations where people have the freedom to be creative, a place that brings out the best in everybody–an open, fair place where people have a sense that what they do matters. For details please visit www.asifjmir.com, Lectures, Line of Sight

Employee Orientation

Employee orientation provides new employees with the basic background information required to perform their jobs satisfactorily, such as information about company rules. Programs may range from brief, informal introductions to lengthy, formal courses.

The HR specialist (or, in smaller firms, the office manager) usually performs the first part of the orientation, by explaining basic matters like working hours and vacations. The person then introduces the new employee to his or her new supervisor. The supervisor continues the orientation by explaining the exact nature of the job, introducing the person to his or her new colleagues, familiarizing the new employee with the workplace, and helping to reduce first day jitters. Orientation typically includes information on employee benefits, personnel policies, the daily routine, company organization and operations, and safety measures and regulation, as well as facilities tour.

My Consultancy–Asif J. Mir - Management Consultant–transforms organizations where people have the freedom to be creative, a place that brings out the best in everybody–an open, fair place where people have a sense that what they do matters. For details please visit www.asifjmir.com, Lectures, Line of Sight