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Jiffy Lube OD culture leadership: creating the strategic context

The OD toolbox is full of incredibly useful techniques for improving how organizations function. There are 360 surveys, conflict resolution strategies, team-building approaches from personality...

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Executive Presence and Duke Basketball's "Next Play!" leadership: managing yourself

Talk of Executive Presence, Power Posturing and the like is everywhere. Amy Cuddy’s TED talk on Body Language and Power has been viewed an astonishing 28M times. A recent study by Sei Jin Ko,...

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Gut the Chicken: The Problem with Generational Platitudes leadership: developing others/building teams

I was shopping for a birthday card for my son. There was one in the poke-fun-at-generational-differences genre with this old geezer on the front. The outside of the card said something like,...

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A Few Things We are Doing to Undermine Our Relationships leadership: developing others/building teams

We are all engaged multiple relationship networks:  family, extended family, neighbors, associations, hobby groups, meet-ups, religious groups, country clubs, friends, significant others,...

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Schrodinger's Cat and the Value of Uncertainty in a Continuously Connected World leadership: developing others/building teams

In 1935, Erwin Schrödinger suggested the following thought-experiment. A cat, a flask of poison, a radioactive source and a monitor are placed in a sealed box. If the monitor detects a single...

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How to Handle the "Hit in the Mouth"​ first 100 days / career

For my money, the greatest quote about strategy was not spoken by General Schwarzkopf. It is not in Sun Tzu's Art of War, nor in Musashi's Book of the Five Rings. Genghis Khan didn't say it. Nor...

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Deming Not DiMaggio leadership: delivering operational outcomes managing call centers

Call Center quality is abysmal.  And it has been for the entire forty years the call center industry has been in existence.  We can make cars with near perfect quality, but after 40...

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The AHT vs. CSAT Debate: A Possible Reframe managing call centers

There was a recent discussion in the Customer Experience Management group in response to an article by Ondra Synek entitled Why AHT is dead and how to do better.  

I would link to it, but...

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The Horse/Cart Problem in Call Centers managing call centers

There are horses and there are carts and getting them ordered properly makes all the difference.  

Unfortunately, when it comes to improving center-wide outputs, call centers often have the...

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The Futility of Call Center Coaching managing call centers

One-agent-at-a-time coaching is the go-to method in call centers for trying to improve center-wide output measures. But it is less valuable than many believe. Through the use of...

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The Two Widely Held and Deeply Flawed Mental Models Perpetuating Call Center Mediocrity managing call centers

It is no secret that call center industry performance is mediocre at best.  High error-rates are tolerated (see What is an Acceptable Contact Center Error Rate?).  Employees...

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Yellow Smiley Balloons & Laminated Cards: Cutting Edge Call Center Quality Improvement Strategies managing call centers

I wish this story wasn't true, but you can't make this stuff up.

We were at an outsourcer's offshore location recently, where they had tied yellow, smiley-faced balloons to the agents' cubes.

When...

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