Why cant we deliver "wow" instead of just the project?

I am a big fan of Tony Hsieh, the CEO of Zappos. One of their company values is to "deliver wow through service". Isn't that amazing?

Here is a great post on how Zappos scales customer satisfaction. If you don't have time to read the whole article, skip to "I just want a Pizza" story at the end. Its a must read..

Why cant we deliver "wow" instead of projects, applications or services like Zappos? May be not to the level Zappos does. But we definitely can make our users say "wow" if we go an extra mile on anything we deliver.


Thoughts?

How free is your calendar?

One of the things I am passionate about and I have been working on in my new assignment is to create the next set of leaders from the managers we have. It is a big mental shift for lot of folks. For some it is a great opportunity to learn new skills and become a leader. For very few others it feels like losing their power and losing everything they have created for themselves in the organization. Anyway, I don't expect everyone to make the cut  : )

One rule of thumb I gave them was to check how free their calendars were. This tip was given to me by my boss years back. That is a good measure of how much of a micro manager you are. If you are in every meeting, that means that your calendar is full, and most importantly you don't trust the folks to make decisions. Start by not attending few meetings even if you are uncomfortable with it. Empower the team to make the right decision. If you worry that the team is not going to make the right decision, tell the team what you care about... I call it "drawing the box of constraints"... and let them make the decisions within the box so they feel ownership of it. It frees up your time so that you can think more about the big picture...

No doubt, its a tough skill to learn.... I am still learning this art of figuring out how much to get involved...

How free is your calendar : )

Employee first.. customers second!

Wow! That is a real bold statement from any CEO, especially from that of an Indian company...

This is actually the title of an awesome must read book written by Vineet Nayyar, the CEO of HCL, an Indian IT giant. Indians having grown up seeing only statements like "Customer is the king" "Customer is God" etc, this could be a shocking statement for many. His approach transformed the company... and made them the number one in employee satisfaction and has made HCL one of the fastest-growing and profitable global IT services companies.

His approach is very similar to some of the ideas we strongly believe in here. Tranforming traditional command and control managers to leaders (servant leaders) and empowering the folks who really do the work (or create value) is the only way to create a world class organization today. Gone are the days of traditional management style using command and control. It is great to see another example of why this idea works really well..

Stop singing when your voice is good; don't wait till it gets bad!

That is a saying in a local Indian language. It is more applicable for classical singing, where the quality of singers voice is very important. If you don't stop at the right time, all the name and fame you made by putting lot of hard work, might just fizzle away.

I had a similar advice to this high performing team mentioned in the previous post.  This is also applicable to many teams we see everyday, hence thought of sharing. It is about the art of figuring out when to stop.

This team has done all the hard work, made some high impact organizational and behavioral changes. Once they started to find it hard to make an impact on any particular workstream, or when they could not figure out what is next in a particular workstream, they could have closed that workstream. They could have celebrated all the achievements they made, and announced that they are closing those workstreams. That way all the hard work they did could have got the due credit and they can move on to new things. Because of not doing that, they opened themselves up to the critics who started questioning their impact based only on some recent developments.  I have seen this in many projects too... the projects we call " the ones with the long tail". So I would encourage you to think about "when to stop" whether you are in an initiative, or in a project, or even when you are in a job : )

By the way, I want to congratulate this team for all the great work they have done so far. They deserve all the credit ..

reactions?

Story of an high performing team...

I want to share a story of an high performing team..

This teams mandate was to take the organization to next level in agility. It had multiple workstreams and there were a pair leading each workstream. In the last few months, these teams had made major changes in the organization. Their impact was huge.

However, during recent weeks, couple of workstreams have been struggling to make an impact. They weren't sure how to take it to the next level in their particular workstream. In fact it came to a stage where they started to get negative press internally. Some were even questioning what they were doing... as the progress and value addition was not visible in recent times. What should they do at this stage?

I will write about my take in the next post...