The Working Week 11: Andy Hanselman
Wayne’s guest this weeks on the Working Week is Andy Hanselman, business competitiveness specialist, blogger and passionate advocate of maximising customer relationships. Among the issues they discuss are customer service, collective irresponsibility and greenwashing.
0:50 - Wayne muses on an article which claims that $150 billion are being lost due to lost productivity every year because people are simply too tired to do their job properly.
1:30 - Apparently there is an increase in ethics and legal violations being highlighted by
whistleblowers from within organisations - especially where there is a financial reward on offer.
1:40 - Wayne flags a new book by Gurnek Bains, Meaning Inc, which focuses on the need for companies to have meaning and to use this as their guiding force.
2:20 - Finally, it appears that British businesses are using UK legislation as a below-the-line way to curb staff taking smoking breaks.
3:20 - This week’s guest is Andy Hanselman, a business competitiveness specialist and contributor to Management-Issues.com. You can also read more by Andy on his blog.
Picking up on new research by PWC, Andy believes that many CFOs are missing a trick by only producing financial information and figures and omitting important non-financial information which could help their businesses to improve.
4:20 - Andy refers to customer service data as one example of this.
5:00 - Wayne asks Andy what kinds of things beside customer service should we be measuring?
5:40 - Andy believes that the best approach is to ask what information is needed to maximise performance and work backwards from that. Any explains that a key issue is that information is often collected but nothing is done with it or it’s analysed and still nothing is done with it. Andy continues with some examples.
7:20. Andy has coined a phrase “collective irresponsibility.” When a company knows there are things it should be measuring yet nobody measures it.
8:00 - Growing businesses also suffer from this problem. When they are small the CEO tends to work on gut instinct but as company grows the same methods will not work.
9:00 - Co-inciding with Live Earth day, Andy picks up on a piece by John Blackwell discussing the merits of a carbon neutral position. Andy has a bug- bear with insincere organisations that use `green` to promote their products as environmentally friendly - “greenwashing” as he calls it.
Co-incidentally, Wayne will be discussing green issues in business and how companies can improve their carbon footprint with John Blackwell in next week’s Working Week. Stay tuned!
