Service Quality
by Karl Albrecht
The Big Six
Six primary imperatives for business success
offer enormous challenges and promise
for most organizations.
The big word in business these days seems to be focus. Business leaders
in many industries all over the world face the challenge of aligning their
strategy, people and systems around the premise of creating superior customer
value.
As the head of a consulting firm aiming to offer resources that enable executives
to implement service-management principles, I find it refreshing to contemplate
the need to take our own medicine. In urging our clients to focus their
resources, we are compelled to face the need to focus our own. In that sense,
we must face the same challenges as any of the firms we work with. Focus
and concentration are critical aspects of any successful business concept.
No business, large or small, can succeed by trying to be all things to all
people.
For the past five years, my colleagues and I have held ourselves to a commitment
to come together at least four times a year to completely re-examine the
basic premise of our business and to open up all of our basic business assumptions
to careful review. Every time we do this, we know more about ourselves and
our business.
We know we must concentrate our efforts in a few areas that offer the most
promise and in which we can make a real difference. Our focus, we conclude,
must mirror the problems and challenges business organizations must face
in achieving their own unique focus.
We recently spent considerable time reviewing the trends, events and major
developments of today's business environment in an effort to discern the
few critical elements of success that seem to be most compelling. We sought
to bring into focus for ourselves the most important dynamics of organizational
performance in the new business environment.
As a result of that review, we believe it is possible to translate the challenge
of business success into six critical organizational imperatives for the
next decade. These six primary imperatives for business success offer enormous
challenges for most organizations, and enormous promise at the same time.
They are: strategic focus, customer centeredness, creative leadership, ethical
work cultures, organizational synergy and continuous reinvention.
As businesses rebound from the recent difficult economic period, create
greater clarity of direction for the coming years and work to build ever
more solid foundations for growth, these six imperatives can serve as helpful
navigation aids. Each of them implies a learning process, which has the
goal of reshaping the organization to an ever-clearer sense of its focus.
By integrating them and reconciling their disparate demands into a unified
theory that is unique to the business, its leaders can operationalize the
strategic focus they have created.
I view these six critical imperatives over the next decade as:
n Strategic focus-Creating the unifying concept for success that can drive
everything the organization does. This is the common cause, the strategic
truth, the fundamental driving concept of the business before which all
resistance crumbles. It is both the message to the market and the message
to the culture. Senior executives must work hard to achieve that strategic
focus, craft their unifying concept and deploy it throughout the organization.
This is the "northbound train" concept I presented in my recent
book The Northbound Train: Finding the Purpose, Setting the Direction, Shaping
the Destiny of Your Organization.
Customer centeredness-An unwavering focus
on uncovering the secrets of customer value and concentrating the organization's
attention on delivering that value. It is a leadership commitment to aligning
the strategy, the people and the systems of the organization around the
customer, and tackling performance problems in the context of creating superior
value. The past few years have seen the development of some very effective
concepts and methods for discovering the "invisible truth" of
customer value and for translating it into business strategy and front-line
performance.
Creative leadership-Emergence of the servant
leader. It is a commitment to service leadership at all levels of the organization,
from the chief executive down to the front-line tactical leaders. Service
leadership is the ability to lead (not necessarily "manage") with
a service focus: service to the customer, to the organization and to the
employees, as well. The techniques are at hand to translate the philosophy
of service management and customer value into leadership behavior, and to
help leaders at all levels learn the new skills they need to lead with a
service focus.
Ethical work cultures-Developing and sustaining
a healthy work culture that combines a strong performance orientation with
respect for human needs and human potential. This has become a critical
issue, particularly in the United States, where societal problems such as
alienation, violence, substance abuse and dishonesty affect the cultural
fabric of the organization. Organizations now desperately need a new "contract"
with their employees, one that combines fair and ethical treatment of workers
with fair and ethical behavior by those workers. We need thoughtful models
and methods that can help executives redefine that critical contract and
make it explicitly a part of managing and working.
Organizational synergy-The need to reduce
the "frictional" losses within the organization, i.e., the loss
of energy due to lack of focus, misalignment of resources, conflict, political
infighting and plain "collective dumbness." In our work, we have
sought a range of interventions for making the organization more intelligent,
using methods such as added-value negotiating, added-value relationship
management, creative problem solving and teamwork.
Continuous reinvention-Helping the people
in the organization to rethink, retool, remodel and reframe their work and
their systems. This goes well beyond the customary process reengineering
that became popular as part of the quality movement. It involves creative
rethinking from the macro-level to the micro-level. It requires liberating
individual brainpower as well as rethinking the big picture. In their book
Customer Centered Reengineering: Remapping for Total Customer Value, my
partners Ed Crego and Peter Schiffrin show convincingly that no process
redesign effort will succeed without the critical elements of leadership
and empowerment. This is not a mechanical process; it is very much a human
and cultural one.
Any short list such as this one creates the possibility of oversimplifying
the issues behind it. On the other hand, the myriad issues facing businesses
today create the need to simplify and focus, if only to find a starting
place to go to work on them. In any case, these six critical imperatives
demand our attention. What we learn about them and how we respond to them
promises to make a great deal of difference for our organizations' success.
About the author . . .
Karl Albrecht is a management consultant, speaker and prolific author.
He is chairman of The TQS Group, based in Chicago, which implements his
Total Quality Service approach.
His 20 books on management and organizational effectiveness include the
best-seller Service America!: Doing Business in the New Economy, as well
as The Only Thing That Matters: Bringing the Power of the Customer Into
the Center of Your Business. His latest book is The Northbound Train: .
. . Shaping the Destiny of Your Organization.
© 1995 Karl Albrecht. For reprint permission, telephone (619) 622-4884
or fax 622-4885.