Closing the Customer Gap

The gaps model says that a service marketer must first close the customer gap between customer perceptions and expectations. To do so, the provider must close the four provider gaps, or discrepancies within the organization that inhibit delivery of quality service. The gaps model focuses on strategies and processes that firms can employ to drive service excellence.

Customer perceptions are subjective assessment of actual service experiences. Customer expectations are the standards or reference points for performance against which service experiences are compared and are often formulated in terms of what a customer believes will or should happen.

The sources of customer expectations consist of marketer-controlled factor (such as pricing, advertising, and sales promises) as well as factors that the marketer has limited ability to affect (innate personal needs, word-of-mouth communications, and competitive offerings). In a perfect world, expectations and perceptions would be identical: customers would perceive that they receive what they thought they would and should. In practice these concepts are often separated by some distance. Broadly, it is the goal of service marketing to bridge this distance.

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.

Leadership and Symbols

Person-centered leadership is about helping people get real at work. What you do does not usually have to be right the first time, but it always has to be real. When you remove posturing, pretension, and false communication, people are free to be themselves—to use their good ideas and energies to give themselves and their organization a lift.

The leadership is responsible for the atmosphere and morale in any organization. Executives and managers are not responsible for knowing the solutions to all the organization’s problems. That’s what the experts are for—and the experts are always the people who actually do the job for you on a daily basis. The most effective leaders are not the ones who know how to give good orders. Most effective leaders know that good communication is a two-way street and they are skillful at using symbols to convey truth. Every leader needs a metaphor that defines his leadership style.

The door is just a symbol of commitment to person-centered attitudes and actions. Symbols are exquisitely important, but they have to be your own symbols—a genuine extension of yourself. Just like all other aspects of this approach, the leadership symbols you choose have to be real

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.

Audience-Centered Approach to Communication

Beside other things, effective organizational communication is audience-centered approach. Keep your audience in mind at all time during the process of communication. Empathizing with, being sensitive to, and generally considering your audience’s feelings is the best approach for effective communication. The audience-centered approach is more than an approach to business communication; it’s actually the modern approach to business in general, behind such concepts as total quality management and total customer satisfaction.

 Because you care about your audience, you take every step possible to get your message across in a way that is meaningful to your audience. You might actually create lively individual portraits of readers and listeners to predict how they will react. You might simply try to put yourself in your audience’s position. You might try adhering strictly to guidelines about courtesy, or you might be able to gather information about the needs and wants of your audience. Whatever your tactic, the point is to write and speak from your audience’s point of view.

 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.

Shopping for Credit

Just as you shop around for the best deal when you are buying goods and services, you should shop around for the best buy in credit terms. Look for the lowest interest rates but keep in mind that you may be required to pay for other services too, such as life insurance to cover the amount you are borrowing. The cost of these services and other conditions of the lending agreement will vary from lender to lender.

 Sometimes the cost of borrowing may not be the most important consideration. For example, even though the interest you pay on credit card or department store charge accounts is high, you may actually be able to save in the long run if you sell them  to buy things you need but don’t have the cash for, while they are on the sale.

 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

Job Rotation

Job rotation means moving management trainees from department to department to broaden their understanding of all parts of the business and to test their abilities. The trainee—often a recent college graduate—may spend several months in each department. The person may just be an observer in  each department, but more commonly gets fully involved in its  operations. The trainee thus learns the department’s business by actually doing it while discovering what jobs he or she prefers.

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 Financial Strategy

Financial strategy examines the financial implications of corporate and business-level strategic options and identifies the best financial course of action. It can also provide competitive advantage through a lower cost of funds and a flexible ability to raise capital to support a business strategy. Financial strategy usually attempts to maximize the financial value of the firm.

The trade-off between advancing the desired debt-to-equity ratio and relying on internal long-term financing via cash flow is a key issue in financial strategy. Many small and medium-sized companies try to avoid all external sources of funds in order to avoid outside entanglements and to keep control of the company within the family. Many believe that only by financing through long-term debt can a corporation use financial leverage to boost earnings per share, thus raising stock price and the overall value of the company. Higher debt levels not only deter takeover by other firms (by making the company less attractive), but also leads to improved productivity and improved cash flows by forcing management to focus on core businesses.

A very popular financial strategy is the leveraged buy out—a company is acquired in a transaction financed largely by debt—usually obtained from a third party, such as an insurance company or an investment banker. Ultimately the debt is paid with money generated from the acquired company’s operations or by sales of its assets. The acquired company, in effect, pays for its own acquisition. Management of the leveraged buy out is then under tremendous pressure to keep the highly leveraged company profitable. Unfortunately the huge amount of debt on the acquired company’s books may actually cause its eventual decline by focusing management’s attention on short-term matters.

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.

Rolling up your Sleeves

If there’s one way that you can get other people to become more interested and more focused on improving themselves, it is to lead by example. Take time out to go on training courses, even though you may be too busy. Take time to read useful information, not just novels, books or newspapers but actual up-to-date books and texts from the experts within your industry. Practise your skills, use them and make sure that they’re developed as far as they possibly can be. If it means learning a new language or learning a skill that you don’t have then take on that challenge. It is very difficult to manage people well if you have low self-esteem, but if you feel good about yourself and you have that feeling of progress and achievement, then it is very hard for this not to rub off on other people.

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.

Meaningless Corporate Values

The desire to go through a long-winded process to develop corporate values that are meaningless to everyone except those involved in their creation is a classic symptom. Incredibly, common in large corporations, it is not only a waste of time but can actually be damaging. This type of badge engineering puts a gloss over deep-rooted problems and causes employees to become not only ineffective but also disenchanted.

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.

Anima and Animus

Carl Jung wrote about how each woman has a male and a female side, called the anima and animus. As a woman gains more power in business, her male animus increases, which means that her  shift in the internal balance of anima/animus shifts, which leads to a shift in the balance of power between her and a man (with his own internal anima-animus dynamic). This shifting is not only taking place in the interactions between an individual woman and man but also collectively between women and men. On the whole, the dynamics of the relationship between the sexes in the society is being thrown out of whack.

Women must take responsibility for their part in this.

Many women, out of insecurity about their newfound power, as well as, fear of attack for attaining this power and, while women are at it, actual attack for attaining this power, are reaching and overreacting by drawing more and more from their male side for protection. Indeed, there are some women who mistakenly believe that succeeding in business requires imitating men—and even more mistakenly, not nice men.

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.

Ethical Decision-making

1. Define the problem carefully and be certain that all the pertinent information has been gathered. Too often we act without taking time to obtain the necessary information;
2. List all the parties that you believe may be affected by the decisions (the stakeholders). A decision that does not take into account the way in which  it will affect others is not an ethical one regardless of its actual consequences;
3. List all the relevant core values that you believe are involved in the decision that you had previously developed;
4. List all the possible alternatives of what you can or cannot do.
5. Choose and prioritize:

• Of all parties you have listed above, select the one that you believe is the most important for purpose of making this decision;
• Of all the core values you listed above, select the one that  you believe is the most important for purposes of making this decision;
• Of all the options you listed above, select the one that you believe will cause the greatest good or least harm

6. Make decision based on the above priorities;

7. Devise a strategy that will effectively implement your decision.

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.