Appointing a Dealer

1. The Branch Manager perceives a need for an additional dealer in an area. Need occurs if any existing dealer leaves or is removed. It could also happen when the company expands into new territory.
2. The Branch Manager has to convince the general manager of the division about the need for anew dealer.
3. The selection process for the dealer begins with placing advertisements in newspapers and trade magazines inviting applications. Applications for dealership are directed to the concerned branch manager.
4. The branch manager then reviews the application forms and prepares a shortlist if necessary. The company has not laid down any concrete guidelines for shortlisting at this stage. The branch manager is allowed to exercise his discretion.
5. The shortlisted applicants are interviewed by the branch manager along with the regional sales manager of the division. Whatever additional information is required is obtained from the applicants during the interview. The dealers are evaluated on:
   1. Prior business record
   2. The capability of maintaining and running his own showroom
   3. Financial strength
   4. Inventory: The dealer must have enough working capital for maintaining specified level of inventory. This condition is however is applied only in the case of dealers whose territories are located considerably away from a branch office. This is because there is a company owned warehouse along with every branch office and for dealers located in the same cities there is no necessity to maintain separate inventory
   5. Contacts with customers
   6. Availability of salesforce to service customer effectively. In addition, technicians also need to be present to meet the after-sales service requirements of the products
6. The final selection decision is made after talking with the bankers of the applicant. This is done to check the veracity of information regarding financial strength and prior business experience. It is only after the company is satisfied regarding all aspects of he information, that it sends the dealer an appointment letter
7. The appointment letter lays down several terms of the contract that have to be fulfilled by the dealer. The company expects the dealers not to sell any competitors’ products. The dealer is also expected to conduct his business only within the clearly demarcated sales territory allocated to him by the 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, 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.

Entrepreneur

Most businesses start as a dream in somebody’s mind. An entrepreneur is a person with an idea. He or she also is someone with the energy and drive to turn that idea into a business. An entrepreneur needs these characteristics because in a young firm he or she must often do everything at once—manufacture the product, sell it, find enough money to keep going, and manage few employees.

The entrepreneur must be willing to take great risks, too, for most new businesses fail within a year. The odds against success are stiff, partly because many business ideas simply are not very good. After all, whoever wanted to buy paper dresses or quadraphonic sound. Factors that create special risks for new businesses are those over which entrepreneurs have little control. Also, technology has become highly complex and many new products—a filter to remove the salt from sea water, for example, require many years and teams of scientists and engineers to develop. Then, too, a vast array of government regulations creates additional burdens of time, energy, and expenses for owners of new businesses.

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.

Truth and Reconciliation in Business

Access to the truth is a fundamental human right and as such it must form the foundation of any truly amazing organization capable of maintaining long-term, mutually respectful and beneficial relationships. This is as true of organizations as it is of nation states or families.

Truth and Reconciliation in business aims to achieve exactly what it says. It aims to get to the truth about the way relationships are being conducted and it aims to use the acceptance of that truth as the basis for reconciling the organization and building fresh new relationships.

If we want our organization to be amazingly successful we must confront and overcome the practice of having completely separate management, employee and stakeholder perspectives, dividing the way we see our organization’s current and future priorities.

We need to develop one working culture capable of uniting our un-reconciled and incompatible aspirations and goals. This requires us to focus not only on our systems and processes but to build strong, dynamic relationships based on dialogue, interaction, genuinely shared values, mutual respect, inclusiveness, openness and trust.

Truth and reconciliation, as practiced by nation states, such as, South Africa, is a detailed process used under the most extreme situations – far removed from anything or indeed any of us has probably seen in any organization.

But let’s not miss the lessons these experiences can teach us about unity and strength, and about how to create harmony in inharmonious situations. Truth and reconciliation in business is significantly scaled-down version with reduced scope based on a drastically reduced need. What it does do, however, is adhere to principles proven in the most extreme environments where demands for forgiveness take on monumental proportions.

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.

Carryover

Carryover refers to a situation where the effects obtained in one phase appear to carry over into the next phase. The term carryover is generally used in the context of  removal designs. Thus, if you attempted to remove a successful intervention to recreate a sound baseline to determine whether your intervention was actually affecting the problem, and the problem remained unchanged despite the removal, carryover effects would pertain. Carryover effects might also be produced by totally extraneous outside influences having some impact on the target problem.

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.

Deming’s Service Quality Principles

1. Maintain a constancy of purpose
2. Adopt the new philosophy
3. Cease dependence on mass inspection
4. End the practice of awarding business on the basis of price alone
5. Improve constantly and forever the system of production and service
6. Institute training
7. Institute leadership
8. Drive out fear
9. Break down barriers among staff
10. Eliminate slogans, exhortations, and targets
11. Eliminate work quotas
12. Remove barriers to pride of workmanship
13. Institute a vigorous program of education and self-improvement
14. Put everyone to work on the transformation.

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.

Resistance to Change

Resistance to change may develop for a variety of reasons. A common one is that people do not know how to change or do not understand why it is important to do so; they may perceive their relative social economic status endangered or diminished. Another reason is that an individual might feel psychologically threatened, his self-concept endangered. Another important but often overlooked reason for some resistance is that the change involved is not a good idea. Not all change is good, and some resistance can be considered as being intelligent.

Resistance to change occurs often more for social process than for technical change reasons. Thus, it is important that change agents understand in depth the psycho-social aspects of a particular system so that they will know how people will be effected and perceive the contemplated change. People often resist any changes that alter their customary social and working relationships. For this reason, technical and staff personnel who are concerned with developing new approaches must be alert to considering more than just the technical or logical value of their proposed ideas. If they hope to gain successful implementation, they must also consider the important social relationship dimensions of the change.

Resistance can be countered by trying to remove the causes or reasons for it and/or by increasing the pressure for change. Which of these two general approaches to take must be determined situationally; there is no easy answer as to which is better, and combined approach is probably to be preferred.

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 Marketing

Direct market refers to direct mail, mail order, or coupon advertising, telephone marketing, or any method of marketing that attempts to make a sale right then and there. It does not require a middleman. It does not require a store. It only requires a seller and a buyer. And because of that, much unnecessary game playing is removed from the marketing process, leaving only accountable results. When you run a TV commercial or newspaper ad, you do all in your power to make sure that it works, but you don’t really know if it does. But when you engage in direct-mail advertising, the firm of direct marketing you will know clearly whether or not your mailing worked. Either it did or didn’t. If it worked, you’ll know how well it worked. And if it failed, you’ll know how dismally it failed.

Direct mail is the least expensive method of marketing on a per sale basis. The overall cost may be high, but if it works for you, it is inexpensive marketing. Direct marketing is more science than art. This is not to downplay the art of creating a successful direct mail package.

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.

 

Becoming Process-Centered

Your organization is probably divided into separate departments, such as R&D, sales, IT, and accounts. These departments don’t work independently, but should all cooperate to achieve the organization’s goals. To help with this, many organizations have become ‘process-centered.’

A process-centered organization removes the internal divisions and focuses everybody’s attention on the process of satisfying customer demand. Process centering means that all people in the company recognize and focus on their processes. When an order comes to a traditional organization, everyone does their separate part of the process and seems to work in isolation – sales collect orders, manufacturing makes goods, warehousing adjusts the stocks, transport delivers the goods, accounts sends out the invoices. The problem is that no one looks after the whole process, integrates different operations, or even makes sure that customers actually get their products.

In a process-centered organization, everyone has the overriding purpose of contributing to a process that leads to satisfied customers. Everyone works as part of a team, with:

• The single purpose of satisfying customer demand;
• Concentration on the whole process of delivering products;
• Expansion of traditional roles, with empowered employees making decisions and dealing with all types of customer issues;
• Responsibility for all aspects of the process;
• Access to all types of information throughout the organization;
• A matrix or cross-functional management structure;
• A team leader who has overall responsibility for the success of the process.

This emphasis on the whole process of satisfying customers has many implications. One is that your organization becomes more flexible to customer needs. Traditional organizations imagine that operations are smoothest when customers are kept at a distance, if customers become involved they try to expedite their order, change designs, demands difficult adjustments to the products, ask for detailed progress reports and generally get in the way. A process-centered organization welcomes customer involvement, forms partnerships, increases satisfaction with products and gains a huge competitive advantage.

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.

Let People Fail

Throughout history people who have achieved the greatest success in life have been those who were not afraid to fail. In fact, most of them failed time and again and often in a very big way.

Thomas Edison tried 2,500 times to invent the light bulb before he finally succeeded. Abraham Lincoln ran unsuccessfully for public office 6 times before he was elected president. History is replete with stories of famous people who were well acquainted with failure; people who set goals higher than what they at first could achieve and who then preserved until they became conquerors.

If a certain amount of failure is intrinsic to great success, why is it such an evil word? Why do most of us place severe limitations on ourselves in order to avoid failure, even to the point of sacrificing our dreams?

A person trained in the behavioral sciences could have a field day with this question. For our purposes here, in very simple terms, we can say that people are afraid of failure because they never learned to see it as friend. Instead of seeing it as a stepping-stone to success, they view it as a blockade.

In order for people to realize their full potentials they must be given permission to fail. When this permission is granted the element of fear is removed. Fear is the great enemy of power. As long as people are consumed by the fear of being rejected, the fear of losing face with their peers, or the fear of losing their job, they can never reach their full potentials.

When people are denied permission to fail, they play it safe. Their reach never exceeds their grasp. They set goals lower than what they are capable of achieving. The result is that the company loses valuable productivity. Mediocrity instead of excellence is the norm. business opportunities are missed. And the people are deprived of the exhilarating experience that comes from taking risks, beating the odds, and accomplishing the near impossible.

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.