“If you want someone to do a good job, give them a good job to do” (Location 272)
When expertise is “pulled” does it arrive quickly? Should the expertise be designed to be “pulled” offline, or does demand dictate it be built into the front line? (Location 645)
When work has to be passed to another person or function for service delivery, does it travel “clean”? How well is this working end-to-end? (Location 647)
The better model is to “design against demand”: focus on what creates value for customers in their terms and measure achievement of purpose in customer terms. (Location 661)
At Vanguard, what we want to know is how many customer acquisition processes a company has. This might seem a strange question. But customers come in through a variety of processes, and when you have a handle on what they are and how well or badly they work, you are in a position to bring customers in more effectively – and turn off sales and marketing initiatives that don’t, thus saving money as well. (Location 714)
the focus for day-to-day management is knowledge of how the system consumes money, which is also used to project future costs. (Location 900)
As Russ Ackoff taught us, like all attempts to do “the wrong thing righter”, this only makes them wronger. (Location 926)
The political narrative is driven by the unquestioned assumption that demand is rising and someone has to pay – this is the whole basis for austerity, for example. Yet the evidence suggests that demand – at least the original “my-life-has-fallen-off-the-rails” demand – is stable. It is failure demand that is growing inexorably. (Location 971)
Ensuring that leaders are completely knowledgeable about operations as a requirement for determining what to change • Making the decisions at the lowest hierarchical level (Location 1345)
The study phase addresses two different and more useful questions: “what does go wrong?” and “how predictable are these failures?” (Location 1364)
If, as it should be, the focus of service operations is to create value for customers, then the focus of the central functions should be to create value for the front line, the place where organisations make or use money. (Location 1376)
Because the work passed to tradespeople isn’t “clean” (right diagnosis, right expertise, right materials, right time allocated), (Location 1433)
Denning tells us the new paradigm has not been easy for traditional managers to understand and implement. He says their antagonism is understandable: we would say to be expected. What actually happens is that the “old” controls remain in place, tied in as they are to the core management processes of budgeting and resource management, only downplayed – until, of course, catastrophe occurs, in which case they click back into place as the default option, the stranglehold as rigid as ever. (Location 1930)
the vital purpose for leaders is to gain knowledge of how their system generates and keeps customers. The starting-place is to comprehend how well or badly their current system does those things now – and in the case of a command-and-control system (which it will be most of the time) the leaders will be astonished how much scope there is for improvement. (Location 1949)
Then go through your list and ask yourself which of the causes are attributable to the system and which to the worker. You will arrive at an approximation of the 95:5 ratio: the vast bulk of the causes will be in the system. (Location 2153)
