Short and sweet, this book provides uncommon insights and practical advice for helping organizations nurture their employees...
James uses experiences gleaned from the health care industry to reveal every employee’s importance in organizational efforts to provide top-quality customer service and ramp up overall effectiveness.
In the author’s analogy, a table that rests on the floor represents the physical facilities of an organization. The tabletop is the organization’s customers and clients. This book focuses on the table’s legs, which symbolize an organization’s managers and administrators, its key professionals and knowledge workers, and its frontline service staff—all interdependent, with different responsibilities but similar opportunities to deliver the best possible customer experience. Though James bases his book on his experiences in the health care industry, he draws clear lessons and guidelines readers can apply elsewhere. Other books on the topic, such as Customer Service for Dummies (2006), the Customer Service Training 101 series and Indispensable: How to Become the Company Your Customers Can’t Live Without (2005), focus on the nuts and bolts of positive interactions with customers. James advocates a more strategic, systematic approach. He argues for the importance of establishing and maintaining good relationships within the organization, likening small conflicts to paper cuts that cumulatively weaken an organization’s effectiveness. Corporate culture, its values and vision, also come under his discerning eye. The culture permeates and conditions every employee’s perception of what’s going on, positive or negative, within the organization, how fairly policies are enforced, and especially how thoroughly one is appreciated and respected. According to James, customers sense both the organization’s culture and its impact on employees, and this greatly influences their feelings of confidence and trust. Perhaps most importantly, James discusses the importance of nurturing leadership at all levels of the organization as “an ongoing process” and arranging opportunities “allowing every team member to advance and show their skills.” The book concludes with James’ proposal for “Ten Commandments of the Work Environment,” highlighted by the dictum that “finding the best answer often requires everyone being involved.”
Short and sweet, this book provides uncommon insights and practical advice for helping organizations nurture their employees while delivering the best possible customer experience.Pub Date: Dec. 26, 2012
ISBN: 978-1479156610
Page Count: 80
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: May 20, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2013
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Striking research showing the immense complexity of ordinary thought and revealing the identities of the gatekeepers in our...
A psychologist and Nobel Prize winner summarizes and synthesizes the recent decades of research on intuition and systematic thinking.
The author of several scholarly texts, Kahneman (Emeritus Psychology and Public Affairs/Princeton Univ.) now offers general readers not just the findings of psychological research but also a better understanding of how research questions arise and how scholars systematically frame and answer them. He begins with the distinction between System 1 and System 2 mental operations, the former referring to quick, automatic thought, the latter to more effortful, overt thinking. We rely heavily, writes, on System 1, resorting to the higher-energy System 2 only when we need or want to. Kahneman continually refers to System 2 as “lazy”: We don’t want to think rigorously about something. The author then explores the nuances of our two-system minds, showing how they perform in various situations. Psychological experiments have repeatedly revealed that our intuitions are generally wrong, that our assessments are based on biases and that our System 1 hates doubt and despises ambiguity. Kahneman largely avoids jargon; when he does use some (“heuristics,” for example), he argues that such terms really ought to join our everyday vocabulary. He reviews many fundamental concepts in psychology and statistics (regression to the mean, the narrative fallacy, the optimistic bias), showing how they relate to his overall concerns about how we think and why we make the decisions that we do. Some of the later chapters (dealing with risk-taking and statistics and probabilities) are denser than others (some readers may resent such demands on System 2!), but the passages that deal with the economic and political implications of the research are gripping.
Striking research showing the immense complexity of ordinary thought and revealing the identities of the gatekeepers in our minds.Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-374-27563-1
Page Count: 512
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: Sept. 3, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2011
BOOK REVIEW
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These are not hard and fast rules, but Meyer delivers important reading for those engaged in international business.
A helpful guide to working effectively with people from other cultures.
“The sad truth is that the vast majority of managers who conduct business internationally have little understanding about how culture is impacting their work,” writes Meyer, a professor at INSEAD, an international business school. Yet they face a wider array of work styles than ever before in dealing with clients, suppliers and colleagues from around the world. When is it best to speak or stay quiet? What is the role of the leader in the room? When working with foreign business people, failing to take cultural differences into account can lead to frustration, misunderstanding or worse. Based on research and her experiences teaching cross-cultural behaviors to executive students, the author examines a handful of key areas. Among others, they include communicating (Anglo-Saxons are explicit; Asians communicate implicitly, requiring listeners to read between the lines), developing a sense of trust (Brazilians do it over long lunches), and decision-making (Germans rely on consensus, Americans on one decider). In each area, the author provides a “culture map scale” that positions behaviors in more than 20 countries along a continuum, allowing readers to anticipate the preferences of individuals from a particular country: Do they like direct or indirect negative feedback? Are they rigid or flexible regarding deadlines? Do they favor verbal or written commitments? And so on. Meyer discusses managers who have faced perplexing situations, such as knowledgeable team members who fail to speak up in meetings or Indians who offer a puzzling half-shake, half-nod of the head. Cultural differences—not personality quirks—are the motivating factors behind many behavioral styles. Depending on our cultures, we understand the world in a particular way, find certain arguments persuasive or lacking merit, and consider some ways of making decisions or measuring time natural and others quite strange.
These are not hard and fast rules, but Meyer delivers important reading for those engaged in international business.Pub Date: May 27, 2014
ISBN: 978-1-61039-250-1
Page Count: 288
Publisher: PublicAffairs
Review Posted Online: April 15, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2014
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