Listening

Listening to the other’s point of view starts during pre-selling. Don’t switch off when you’re through talking, Listen. Understand. If you don’t understand, ask questions until you do. Then you can do a better selling job because you know more than you did when you started.

Listening is one of the best times to pick up sales points and disagreement between otherwise agreeable allies. Listen to the words and to the tone. You will be able to tell who is leading whom. You can’t learn without listening, and the more you know, the better your chance of obtaining your goal.

Don’t let your mind wander or focus on objections, and don’t spend your pre-selling time trying to develop responses instead of concentrating on what has been said.

Listen, listen, listen. There is no substitute for listening, especially during the pre-sell period

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.

Actions that make Most Sense

We make judgments of the kinds of actions that should be taken to resolve high priority concerns. The questions we ask lead to partial or full use of Problem Analysis, Decision Analysis or Potential Problem Analysis. It is important to remember that two equally critical factors must be considered in making this judgment: the nature of the concern and the kind of answer that is required.

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.

Quality or Excellence?

The question is what is the organization trying to accomplish? Is it striving for quality, or excellence or both? Quality and excellence are two different terms. Quality is an absolute state—in the control of total quality management, quality is conformance to requirements, doing things according to standards. Excellence is a relative term, to put it simply, it is being better than others. It requires comparison. So it can be said that quality is built in, while excellence is designed. If the goal is quality, it means individuals will be assessed on whether they meet the established standards. It is assumed that they possess the minimum competencies. If the goal is to achieve excellence, individuals will be assessed on their competence levels based on a continuous evaluation scale. Hence when evaluating for excellence, it would be necessary to compare the relative competence between two employees in addition to measuring their competence against the standards scale.

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.

The Human Context of Management

In addition to understanding the ongoing behavioral processes inherent in their own jobs, managers must understand the basic human element of their work. Organizational behavior offers three major perspectives for understanding this context: people as organizations, people as resources, and people as people.

Above all, organizations are people, and without people there would be no organizations. All organizations differ from each other dramatically in size, purpose, and structure, they have one thing in common: people. Thus, if managers are to understand the organizations in which they work, they must first understand the people who make up the organizations.

As resources, people are one of an organization’s most valuable assets. People create the organization, guide and direct its course, and vitalize and revitalize it. People make its decisions, solve its problems, and answer its questions. People are at the core of many of the possible contributors to this trend. To reverse declining productivity, many organizations have taken steps to boost the contribution from their human resources. Some companies have encouraged management and labor to cooperate better; others have increased employee participation in decision-making and problem-solving.

There is another perspective—people as people. People spend a large part of their lives in organizational settings, mostly as employees. They have a right to expect something in return beyond wages and employee benefits. Employees seek satisfaction, and many want the opportunity to grow and develop and to learn new skills. An understanding of organizational behavior can help managers better appreciate these needs and expectations.

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.

Direct Sales Calls

• Do sufficient research to identify potential customers who appear to need your product. This means pulling together names, addresses, and telephone numbers of companies in your market area that use the types of products you are trying to sell. Calling on companies that do not use your products only wastes time, energy, and money.
• Get the name, address, and telephone number of the specific individual responsible for purchasing the  types of products you are selling. It won’t do much good to talk to the marketing manager if you’re trying to sell computer programs, or the general manager if you’re selling machine tools.
• Know your sales pitch before calling. No one has time to chit-chat about superfluous subjects. No one cares about how you feel, nor do they care to tell you how they feel. One sentence describing your product and why the listener should buy it is all you’ve time for. If you continue beyond one sentence, either you’ll be thrown out or you’ll lose the interest of your  potential customer. When buyers want to hear more, they ask questions. If there are no questions, there’s no interest.
• Don’t attempt to close an order at the first contact—either by phone or in person. If the person is interested, ask what would be convenient time and place for you to return and elaborate on your product offering, including prices, delivery schedules, and quality guarantees.
• Focus on the benefits to be gained from using your product, not on its price. Explanations of product pricing and delivery options should wait for second contact. If you’re forced to the wall, try to keep your description of your pricing structure general.
• Follow up all potential leads with another call, a letter, or a sample of your product. The scret to building a first-stage business base through direct sales is to continually follow up with any potential customer that seems the least bit interested in your product.

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.

Personality Structures

Comparing individual differences to a jigsaw puzzle leaves an important question unanswered: What is the source of the pieces and their interrelationships? In other words, how are personalities structured? Although we do not have all the answers, the prevailing theories suggest that personality structure can be understood from the standpoint of three elements: determinants, stages, and traits.

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.

Sentence Making

Words are like building blocks—we can put them together in all sorts of different ways in order to make many different kinds of sentences. When we write, it is very important to make complete sentences. It is a common goof  to write incomplete sentences—also called sentence fragments.

Punctuation marks do the same thing for a sentence that road signs o for a highway. Punctuation marks tell the reader when to speed up, when to slow down, when to stop, and what to expect up the road.

The ultimate separator is the period. It says, “Stop here.”  Question marls and exclamation marks are usually periods with special missions. The comma is then most common separator. It says “slow down.” Without commas we wouldn’t know when to pause. There are five other separators: colons, semicolons, parentheses, dashes, and brackets.

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.

Travel Stress

We travel to get to work, we travel during our work, and we travel to get to distant meetings. Travel comes in all forms: short and long timeframes and short and long distances. For most people, the commonest hurdle is the daily grind to and from work. This is most acute in large cities. The problems are truly international, but some of the ugliest and best-studied traffic jams are now everywhere.

The levels of stress that this brings are extremely significant. For those who handle it poorly, it can be damaging  to their health, and may even endanger the lives of others. Medically, we know that stress mechanisms all fire at once when the body identifies a crisis. Adrenaline pours out, the stomach shuts down, the pulse races, and the hair stands up on end. The blood pressure soars, muscles clench in spasms around the shoulder tips and jaw,  and primal aggressions rise, ready for fight or flight.

With immediate flight brings out of the question, more and more frustrated drivers are turning to the fight option—either inside their cars as they tip at the heels of slower drivers, or outside their cars, where they may stomp up and beat a dent into the roof of an offending vehicle. Even the mild and polite become aggressive when they strap themselves into their bumper cars to drive to work. This means they usually arrive late, enraged and spent before they even start to face the day’s stresses on the job.

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.

Compliance and Integrity

In the earliest stages, organizational ethics centered on the narrow perspective of ethics—the notion of compliance. Are we following the laws? Are we at risk from litigation? If so, how do we minimize that risk?

Ethics programs matured and ethics officers, most of whom are selected from the managerial ranks with little, if any, special preparation, developed increased sophistication regarding the challenges facing their organizations. Both the ethics officers and their organizations began to embrace personal and corporate values in decision making (value-based decision making) as the logical expansion of the definition of what it means to be ethical. What has emerged is what many ethics officers today characterize as the “best practices” model of the ethics office and of a values-based corporation.

But change continues. What is emerging today is a more holistic definition of what it means to be a “good” corporation. This new, global view will again help to reshape the responsibilities and focus of the ethics officer.

The shift to a global perspective means another broadening of the definition of ethics. “Global Integrity” is the latest descriptor, and it embraces both compliance and ethics. It also adds concern for rule of law, human rights, good governance, labor/child labor concerns, anti-corruption/anti-bribery, concern for the environment, safety, social responsibility, good corporate citizenship, and respect for the whole diverse array of local cultures to the definition. This increases the organization’s obligation to reach beyond traditional company boundaries to consider how decisions would affect the surrounding community. One consequence of this new global definition of the organizational ethics is increased scrutiny by stakeholders, especially advocacy groups and the media.

Corporate ethics officers, especially those in multinational corporations and/or corporations with global suppliers/markets, are being challenged with fundamental questions in this expanded integrity area. Perhaps the most common, and most challenging, is how the corporation will balance the desire for global standards (consistency) against the need for local application of standards.

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.

Employee Rights

This issue actually spans a wide range of controversies. For example, issues have surfaced regarding the individual’s right to smoke in the workplace. As more and more organizations limit or ban smoking, this issue will continue to be somewhat controversial. Broader controversies involve issues associated with job ownership and individual rights while at work. A popular (albeit not entirely correct) assumption about Japanese organizations is that their employees have lifetime job security/ to the extent that US firms adopt this practice, the question becomes one of due process and the right to appeal in instances of dismissal or reassignment.

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.