Last August I attended a "strategic planning" seminar organized for funeral service companies. The program involved looking at the techniques described in a book called Blue Ocean Strategy: How to Create Uncontested Market Space and Make Competition Irrelevant.
I won't try and summarize the book. I have spent the last ten minutes trying to come up with a two sentence summary and it all sounds like gobbledygook. Let's just say it's a complex approach to business planning that most funeral homes should not waste time trying to learn.
HOWEVER, if you want to chew on some more practical ideas of how to make new and wonderful things happen with your business, take a look at Tom Peters' new list of 50 "Have yous..." I post the first 10 below followed by a link to the remainder.
Do these things and amazing transformations will happen with your business. No doubt about it, with none of the pain and suffering and lost time and energy wrapped up in a planning process that you do not understand.
Have you in the last 10 days ... visited a customer?
Have you called a customer ... TODAY?
Have you in the last 60-90 days ... had a seminar in which several folks from the customer's operation (different levels, different functions, different divisions) interacted, via facilitator, with various of your folks?
Have you thanked a front-line employee for a small act of helpfulness ... in the last three days?
Have you thanked a front-line employee for a small act of helpfulness ... in the last three hours?
Have you thanked a frontline employee for carrying around a great attitude ... today?
Have you in the last week recognized—publicly—one of your folks for a small act of cross-functional cooperation?
Have you in the last week recognized—publicly—one of "their" folks (another function) for a small act of cross-functional cooperation?
Have you invited in the last month a leader of another function to your weekly team priorities meeting?
Have you personally in the last week-month called-visited an internal or external customer to sort out, inquire, or apologize for some little or big thing that went awry? (No reason for doing so? If true—in your mind—then you're more out of touch than I dared imagine.)
The list continues at: Tom Peters "Have Yous"
Let me know how it goes. Post a comment. Thanks. And more importantly, thanks for reading.
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