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
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
Occasionally wonky but overall a good case for how the dismal science can make the world less—well, dismal.
“Quality of life means more than just consumption”: Two MIT economists urge that a smarter, more politically aware economics be brought to bear on social issues.
It’s no secret, write Banerjee and Duflo (co-authors: Poor Economics: A Radical Rethinking of the Way To Fight Global Poverty, 2011), that “we seem to have fallen on hard times.” Immigration, trade, inequality, and taxation problems present themselves daily, and they seem to be intractable. Economics can be put to use in figuring out these big-issue questions. Data can be adduced, for example, to answer the question of whether immigration tends to suppress wages. The answer: “There is no evidence low-skilled migration to rich countries drives wage and employment down for the natives.” In fact, it opens up opportunities for those natives by freeing them to look for better work. The problem becomes thornier when it comes to the matter of free trade; as the authors observe, “left-behind people live in left-behind places,” which explains why regional poverty descended on Appalachia when so many manufacturing jobs left for China in the age of globalism, leaving behind not just left-behind people but also people ripe for exploitation by nationalist politicians. The authors add, interestingly, that the same thing occurred in parts of Germany, Spain, and Norway that fell victim to the “China shock.” In what they call a “slightly technical aside,” they build a case for addressing trade issues not with trade wars but with consumption taxes: “It makes no sense to ask agricultural workers to lose their jobs just so steelworkers can keep theirs, which is what tariffs accomplish.” Policymakers might want to consider such counsel, especially when it is coupled with the observation that free trade benefits workers in poor countries but punishes workers in rich ones.
Occasionally wonky but overall a good case for how the dismal science can make the world less—well, dismal.Pub Date: Nov. 12, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-61039-950-0
Page Count: 432
Publisher: PublicAffairs
Review Posted Online: Aug. 28, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2019
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