Customers First and Systems Thinking

 A loved one was in hospital for better part of last 5-6 weeks. I got to observe many things having spent most of my time as primary attendant. This is one of the better known hospitals and does indeed have an impressive mission statement that aims to put the customer (patient in this case) first. Doctors are very good, nursing staff excellent, administrative staff are very helpful, so are the lowest rung of staff. 

One problem is that each set works within their own framework:

• No one knows what time does the Doctor would come for rounds. When they come, and they definitely come, they are very patient, answer all the questions etc., Because they can't or don''t want to stick to a committed time, planning things become difficult. 
• Due to specialisation, it is very common to hear "my part is fine, you need to check with X for that other problem". At one time there were 4 specialists taking care, but I wondered whether they talk and co-ordinate amongst themselves. Hope they were, but it wasn't apparent.
• Nursing staff have their own pre-defined timetable to check vitals, draw blood, give medication etc., It doesn't matter to them whether the patient has just slept, or having some pain or need something else etc., I have to plead with them to come some 30mins later as my loved one might be fast asleep having completely missed the sleep the previous night! Ofcourse they are understaffed and it becomes difficult during weekend and holidays. 
• Billing, Insurance and other admin related are in their own world. It takes about 7-8hrs from the time the Doctor approves discharge for the patient to get home. They need to complete billing etc., write a lengthy discharge summary, send it to insurance company and they have to approve etc.,
• Insurance companies do not go over the bill incrementally say once every 2-3 days or so, even if they are all available. Everything has to happen on the day of discharge. 
• I met with the PRO (yes they have one) and gave him multiple suggestions. Guess his job is to only say "great suggestion sir, I'll see how best I can implement" and really not worry about it.

While each actor is doing fine within their own specialisation, no one seem to care about how the system as a whole is working and how does it affect the customers (patients and attenders).

No need to pick just on hospitals. We see such a thing happening in best of the organisations. Every group thinks that they are indeed doing well and perhaps are when looked from a narrow angle of their own department. However the overall result may not be satisfactory. 

Many organisations want to put their customers first, respond to customer's needs, be customer centric etc., etc., But when the goal/intent gets trickled down the systems perspective gets lost. Someone at the top cannot fix it. It calls for every person in the chain to see whether their actions are in line what the CEO wants to achieve and whether they can be open to let go of their "authority" for the greater good of customer. 

Rules vs Principles

My first job was with a company (now called Sasken) that had only 20+ employees when I joined and I  witnessed it grew to 1000+ over the next 10 years. Being one of the early employees, I had a great opportunity to participate in framing the policies as the company grew from a "start-up" to an established one. I had a great fortune of learning directly from the founders and some very senior executives on building and sustaining culture, governance, ethical behaviour at all times and I've been able to use these learning later in my career when I built teams from ground-up and even running large teams in established MNCs.

One of the key learning of those early days was the striving to make decisions based on "principles". Infact, one of the apt repeated question was "what is the principle behind it?". Sticking to principles removes any biases one might have towards a particular person or an idea. I continue to ask this question when we struggle to make a decision or there are multiple competing choices - each favouring one or the other aspect. Once the discussion moves from this vs that to agreeing on a principle, the natural decision or the outcome becomes clear and obvious.

I also frequently run into folks that act as bureaucrats (one definition that I like is "a bureaucrat is a person that believes his job is to say NO"). They'd be very well and perfectly operating within the rules and seem to believe they are doing as expected and getting needlessly blamed. Such people do not bother about the spirit, but really go with the letter. Principles are "spirit", Rules are "letter". How to spot them? These people:
- add more non-value adding work to colleagues
- have their first instinct to usually deflect the work to someone else citing the (correct) rules
- cannot (or do not want to) distinguish between routine vs emergency
- are pretty good in telling everyone "not my job" (and they'd still be right)
- do not understand the concept of (internal) customer or more precisely
- are quick to escalate "deviations" by other colleagues who might be bending the rules, but operating within the principles
- do not understand the concept of being of "service" to someone
- insist on sticking to "rules" even when rest of the world agrees it is stupid to do so.

etc., etc., (all these while strictly being within the rules)

Now how do we deal with such people?

There are some standard ways - provide direct feedback in STAR/STAR-AR format detailing how such an attitude is creating problems, talk to the person's manager and seek help, provide formal feedback via survey offer to mentor etc.,

However if you are in a leadership position and such behaviour is counter-culture, one cannot escape responsibility from setting it right. Remember culture is not a set of beliefs, but a set of actions. When not corrected quickly the org can quickly degenerate into a huge bureaucracy.

I'm not suggesting we bend rules all the time. If we can do justice to both letter and spirit it is great. However, sticking to rules for the sake of it and at the cost of principle is grossly incorrect - foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, said the great Ralph Waldo Emerson.

Next time when you instinctively say NO or quote some rule, think whether you are acting from principles or against it.

Day 1 vs Day 2 Companies

Amazon founder CEO, Jeff Bezos's annual letter to shareholders  is out (thanks to Jin Bains for drawing my attention to this). Jeff Bezos talks of an interesting concept called Day 1 and Day 2 companies (full letter attached to this post).

Day 1 companies are companies that are beginning at their potential. Day 2 companies on the other hand are companies in stasis.  Followed by irrelevance. Followed by excruciating, painful decline. Followed by death. He says, Amazon therefore always wants to be a Day 1 company. 

Followed by irrelevance. Followed by excruciating, painful decline. Followed by death. (Notice that this is applicable in our personal capacity too - Irrelevance, Decline, Death - chilling, isn't it)

Bezos credits Amazon's precise focus on customer outcomes for the company's success. He said Amazon focuses on always giving customers something better, even if it means inventing something totally new, like Amazon Prime.

"Staying in Day 1 requires you to experiment patiently, accept failures, plant seeds, protect saplings, and double down when you see customer delight. A customer-obsessed culture best creates the conditions where all of that can happen," Bezos writes.

To that end, Amazon tries not to conflate the process of serving customers with the results, Bezos said.

"[In Day 2], you stop looking at outcomes and just make sure you're doing the process right. Gulp. It's not that rare to hear a junior leader defend a bad outcome with something like, 'Well, we followed the process,'" Bezos writes. "A more experienced leader will use it as an opportunity to investigate and improve the process."

The company has also embraced, and even pioneered, outside trends like cloud computing and artificial intelligence. While trends like those can be easy to spot, "Day 2" organizations resist them, he writes.

"The outside world can push you into Day 2 if you won't or can't embrace powerful trends quickly. If you fight them, you're probably fighting the future. Embrace them and you have a tailwind," Bezos writes.

That means making what Bezos calls "high-velocity decisions." That doesn't mean making low-quality decisions, but it does mean most decisions should probably be made with somewhere around 70 percent of the information you wish you had, Bezos said.

"You need to be good at quickly recognizing and correcting bad decisions. If you're good at course correcting, being wrong may be less costly than you think," Bezos said.

Bad experience with both HDFC and ICICI

Both HDFC and ICICI groups are the new faces of new India in the financial and banking sector. They have played their role in making the life of lot of us in India and have forced nationalized banks also to change with the changing times.

I have my accounts in both of these banks and also subscribe to MutualFunds from the AMCs of both these conglomorates. However, I'm in the middle of a painful experience dealing with ICICI AMC and HDFC Bank.

It all started when I noticed that there was no auto debit for a SIP with ICICI AMC, from my designated ICICI Bank account, but it was interesting to see that the units were allocated. However, I figured out that the money instead was debited from my HDFC account instead. Thanks to this unwanted debit from my HDFC account, I had to request my father not to present a cheque that I had given him, as it would have bounced. I complained to both ICICI and HDFC. So far I've made and received about 20 calls and have sent and received about 30 emails. HDFC blames ICICI and vice-versa. ICICI has washed-off its hands by telling from next month the SIP would be debited from my ICICI bank itself. HDFC is still clueless as to how did it allow ICICI to take money from my account when there was no mandate for them to do so. They are not giving me details of higher level officials to escalate despite my repeated requests. It scares me to note that anyone can take money from your account and you don't even get a proper response. Atleast I'm happy that money went into my own Mutual Fund account and not to someone else's. Never thought these two corporates would be so casual.

JetBlue

From the last several months I'm increasingly intrigued about what it takes to start a great organization. So, whenever I get a chance I keep talking with like minded folks on the problems that plague "not-so-great organizations" and what could be done to build one, if at all I get a chance. BTW, my definition of a great company would embody the following:

1. There is a well defined purpose
2. Encourage risk taking at all levels
3. Dignified - graceful, respects individuals
4. Expects "excellence" in every pursuit
5. Led by leaders that are willing to serve

(I've been greatly influenced in my thinking by Tom Peters).

I'm reading some books which give me an inside view of how such organizations are built.
Last weekend I completed BlueStreak: inside jetBlue an upstart that rocked an industry, story of jetBlue, one of the most successful airlines in the USA. It is a great read for anyone looking to build an organization.


Few things that stuck me are:
1. Being Different: The CEO and founder Neeleman was very clear from the beginning that he wants to build an airline with a difference, not just yet another airline. This philosophy is evident in every action/policy of the airline. Interesting to understand their culture.
2. Vision: The importance of having a dream team to start-off. He managed to persuade some of the very best people in the industry to join him so that they together can serve the people better.
3. Leadership: Leaders at all levels. With a flat hierarchy and empowered staff, JetBlue can make decisions faster than competition.
4. Excellence: Hunger to be the best. The team went systematically acquiring market share and beating the competition in almost every route that they decided to operate.
5. Training. New recruits are trained not only on the technical skills needed to do their job, but also on the values of the organization. Neeleman himself teaches the new recruits the Economics101 and drills in the importance of CASM (Cost per Available Seat Mile) and
6. Employee First: Neeleman refused to divulge the name of the manager who by mistake revealed some private data to the govt. Such acts would get a great level of commitment not just from the manager in question, but by the whole company.
7. Humane: Numerous examples are littered throughout the book that tells us that the staff at JetBlue put humanitarian needs ahead of business. In fact there was one occasion where they took care of stranded passengers of a rival airline, as what they saw was the need to serve the needy and nothing else.
8. Innovation: First airline to introduce live TV, leather seats etc., These are all typically unheard of in a budget airline.
9. Profitability: Any for-profit organization has to make profits to survive. JetBlue has achieved the same year-on-year and has shown the world that one can he humane, serve, excel in what they do and still make profits.

I haven't flown with them yet. But surely shall do as soon as I get a chance.

Buying a PC/Laptop

While buying something, it has become a habit for me to see the level of customer service, being offered by my vendors - from small grocery shops to big retail chains. Sadly, my experience has been not so great in Bangalore, barring some flashes of brilliance here and there.

From the last two weeks I've been shopping for a branded desktop PC - a commodity that might become extinct very soon. To start with only big retail chain stores in Bangalore have something on display. I visited the stores of Tata Croma, Reliance Time Out, eZone and Metro cash & carry. In almost all the places, the sales staff were not interested in answering to my numerous queries and infact most of them didn't had answers. Typical response was "I think it should work" and when I insisted that if they'd take back if it doesn't work, the person used to run away with an excuse that he/she would bring in a superior, who used to read from the box and tell what you already know. In all the four places I mentioned, no sales person bothered to have my number. Worse, when I called them back for some more clarification, I had to start all over again. The only spark of customer service, if I can call so, was from the salesman of an MNC brand, in an MNC outlet, who pulled me aside and in a hushed voice, recommended his brand without an OS and offered services of his friend who'd install XP or Vista and all the rrelated drivers for only Rs.1000. He also admitted that the brand he was selling had several missing drivers which would take enormous time for anyone to search and download from the net.

Next I thought of exploring smaller neighbourhood stores that were proudly displaying the logos of major brands on their shops. The interaction got better, but there was not a single piece of a desktop PC on display and they were only too eager to sell me an assembled one. They were good at it and 3-4 shops where I enquired came up with several confusing quotes on the assembled ones.

Tired of all these things, I thought I'll directly contact these big brands. I was put-off immediately as Dell's online "make your own PC" blew up the price by several thousands comparable ones from HP. I struggled all over the place to get the contact of local HP dealers from hp.com. Same with Acer and Lenova. I gave up and have now started looking at buying a laptop instead, as there are too many laptops on display and on the face of it, it looks lot easier to buy one.

In the process, I've got a product idea, which is reverse of standard yellow pages approach. Lets say, I want to buy a PC, I'll "broadcast" my requirements through an app installed on my mobile. This request can be caught by interested sellers who are tuned into getting such requests through the app. All such people can contact the buyer through email, SMS or a simple call. You may argue it sounds like eBay, but I feel its little different. Planning to write an Android app.