Soft Customer Standards

Not all customer priorities can be counted, timed, or observed through audits. As Einstein once said, “Not everything that counts can be counted, and not everything that can be counted, counts.” Understanding and knowing the customer is not a customer priority that a standard that counts, times, or observes employees can adequately capture. In contrast to hard measures, soft measures are those that must be documented using perceptual measures. We call the second category of customer-defined standards soft standards and measures because they are opinion-based measures that cannot be observed and must be collected by talking to customers, employees, or others. Soft standards provide direction, guidance, and feedback to employees in ways to achieve customer satisfaction and can be quantified by measuring customer perceptions and beliefs. These are especially important for person-to-person interactions such as the selling process and the delivery process for professional services.

Exceeding Customer Expectations

We often focus on meeting customer expectations by closing the gap between customer perceptions and expectations. There’s a difficulty in meeting expectations because of all the factors that must be coordinated to deliver on the firm’s service promises. However, an increasingly popular service maxim urges companies to “exceed customer expectations.”—to delight, excite, surprise, and otherwise amaze. According to this formulated belief, merely meeting customer expectations is not enough; a company must exceed them to retain customers. This is an appealing slogan as well as one that sets a high performance standard for employees, but it holds the potential to overpromise to both customers and employees. In attempting to exceed customer expectations, a company must understand a) what type of expectations can and should be exceeded, b) what customer group or segment is to be targeted, and c) the impact exceeding  expectations has on future expectations of 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.

An Organizational Challenge

An organizational challenge that has taken on renewed importance relates to ethics and social responsibility. An individual’s ethics are his or her beliefs about what is right and wrong or good and bad. Social responsibility is the organization’s obligation to protect and/or contribute to the social environment in which it functions. Thus, while the two concepts are related, they are also distinct from each other.

Both ethics and social responsibility have taken on new significance in recent years. Scandals in organizations have made the headlines around the world. From the social responsibility, increasing attention has been focused on pollution and business’s obligation to help clean up our environment, business contributions to social causes, and so forth.

Leadership, organization culture, and group norms—all important organizational behavior concepts—are relevant in managing these processes. And because employees know the organizational culture so well that they know they would be expected to respond.

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.

Mistake

The term mistake is used in contract law to describe the situation in which one or both of the parties to an agreement acted under an untrue belief about the existence or nonexistence of a material fact. In mistake cases, unlike fraud and misrepresentation cases where the victim is also acting under a mistaken belief about the facts, the mistaken belief about the facts is not the product of a misstatement by the other party. Mistaken in this sense does not include errors of judgment, ignorance, or a party’s mistaken belief that he or she will be able to fulfill certain obligations under a contract. The things that were said about materiality and fact in the law misrepresentation hold true in mistake cases.

In deciding mistake cases, courts often seem to be trying more obviously to do justice than in other kinds of cases. This is why decisions in mistake cases sometimes seem to depart from the announced rules of law dealing with mistake.

Mistake cases are classified as mutual or unilateral, depending on whether both or only one of the parties was acting under a mistaken belief about a material fact. Mutual mistake is always a basis for granting rescission of the contract at the request of either party. Clearly, no meeting of the minds took place and therefore no true contract was ever formed.

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.

Judges as Social Engineers

Our courts still follow the idea of stare decisis. This adherence to precedent furnishes a system whereby a businessman or businesswoman may act in a certain way, confident that this action will have a known legal effect. At times, however, some modern judges feel that it is their duty to engage in the practice that lawyers term social engineering—shaping the law to the judge’s own individual social and economic beliefs.

When a judge tailors a decision to personal ideas about how society should operate, the holding of the court may be directly opposite to what the legislature intended by the passage of the law. Many legal observers feel that this social engineering by judges is an outright usurpation of the privileges and responsibilities of the legislature. Many critics feel that the laws should be made by the legislative branch of government, not by the holding of a court. Business and trade interests usually favor the idea of permitting the legislature to enact the laws.

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.

Elaborative Creativity

Elaborative creativity is the innovative amplification of a core idea or principle. The difference is between say, staff empowerment as a core belief and its amplification into personnel policies, participative management structures, training programs, and so forth. Elaboration can become innovative when it is creatively contextualized, that is, creatively fitted to the organization’s situation rather than simply borrowed from elsewhere. It can become innovative when it is done participatively, involving various viewpoints and much brainstorming, and the ideas are creatively synthesized. It can become innovative when not just one but several powerful, possibly partially conflicting ideas are fused together to form its basis, such as the ideas of centralization and decentralization, control and authority, or internal entrepreneurship and efficiency. Elaboration can also become innovative when it is periodically reviewed and creatively modified to suit changing circumstances. And it can become innovative when it is benchmarked, not with practices of the leading competitor, but the world’s best practitioners. And not necessarily in the organization’s industry, but in any sector of activity, for then it may reveal gaps that can be bridged only innovatively. When elaboration is made innovative in these ways, it is difficult for others to copy it, and therefore such elaboration confers a competitive advantage on the organization.

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.

Misrepresentation

The basic idea of misrepresentation is that one of the parties to a contract created in the mind of the other party a mistaken impression about an important fact about the subject of the contract. Acting in reliance upon this mistaken belief, the victimized party entered into a contract he or she would not otherwise have entered if the full truth had been known. The elements of misrepresentation are ordinarily given as misrepresentation of material fact justifiably relied upon to the detriment of (causing harm to) the person  relying.

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.

Power through Recognition

A manager empowers others by giving them recognition which enhances their self-esteem and motivates them to continue to do their best work. A person’s power to achieve success is dependent upon his belief in himself and his desire to do consistently excellent work. A manager has more power to achieve his own objectives when the people who work for him are confident and motivated to do their best work.

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.

Equity Theory of Motivation

First articulated by J. Stacey Adams, equity theory is based on the simple premise that people want to be treated fairly. The theory defines equity as the belief that we are being treated fairly in relation to others and inequity as the belief that we are being treated unfairly in relation to others.

Equity theory is just one of several theoretical formulations derived from social comparison processes. Social comparisons involve evaluating our own situation in the context of others’ situations.

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.

Forces in the Environments

Environment is the sum of all the forces surrounding and influencing the life and development of the firm. The forces themselves can be classified as external or internal. Management has no direct control over them, though it can exert influences. The external forces are commonly called uncontrollable forces and consist of the following:

1. Competitive: kinds and numbers of competitors, their locations, and their activities.
2. Distributive: national and international agencies available for distributing goods and services.
3. Economic: variables (such as GNP, unit labor cost, and personal consumption expenditure) that influence a firm’s ability to do business.
4. Socio-economic: characteristics and distribution of the human population.
5. Financial: variables such as interest rates, inflation rates, and taxation.
6. Legal: the many kinds of foreign and domestic laws by which international firms must operate.
7. Physical: elements of nature such as topography, climate, and natural resources.
8. Political: elements of nations’ political climates such as nationalism, forms of government, and international organizations.
9. Socio-cultural: elements of culture (such as attitudes, beliefs, and opinions) important to international businesspeople.
10. Labor: consumption, skills, and attitudes of labor.
11. Technological: the technical skills and equipment that affects how resources are converted to products.

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.