There are three taboos in Toastmasters. Three taboos! The three taboos are politics, religion and sex. So as Toastmasters all over Nigeria join the rest of the citizenry to perform their civic responsibilities let’s uphold the finest tradition of Toastmasters by resisting the temptation to peddle politics in the hallowed chambers of The ACROPOLIS. In the light of Toastmasters tradition, I will toe a very fine line in this write up not to cross the rubicon (we do not endorse any candidate), as we gear up for the general elections starting today.
Victor Frankl in his Man’s Search for Meaning proved beyond all doubt that between stimulus and response there is a space. That space, he called the freedom to choose. Unlike the birds of the air, the fish in the waters, and the animals in the fields, man is the architect of his destiny. Beginning tomorrow, we begin the arduous task of constructing our destiny. Alexander the Great was given two choices when he was seven, and then known as Alexander of Macedon. Instead of a long and uneventful life, he chose a short life full of glory, and today Alexander the Great is amongst the handful of men in all of human history to have the title ‘Great’ appended to his name. So beginning tomorrow, let’s go out and choose greatness. It’s our choice! We have the privilege to choose between greatness and mediocrity, between greatness and the enemy called average, between greatness and the status of also ran as a nation.
Remember, when we all become great, our families will become great, when our families become great, our neighbourhoods will become great, our communities will become great, our local government areas will become great, our states will become great and our nation will become great. Let us take empty sloganeering with a pinch of salt. Let us close our ears to meaningless grandstanding. Let us close our hearts, our minds, and our eyes to barren ‘politics’. Let us seize the moment. Determine the destiny of Nigeria with your vote.
When that line of our national anthem that says NIGERIA’S CALL OBEY echoes on the plateaus of the middle belt, the flat lands of our far north, the mangrove forests of the south-south, the undulating plains of the east, and the lagoons of the west, and our children ask, daddy, mummy, did you obey NIGERIA’S CALL? What shall we tell our children? What shall we tell our children’s children? What shall we tell the children yet unborn? Shall we tell them we failed? The answer is in your vote.
I call all Nigerians to choose greatness. Greatness will help us hew great highways out of our dilapidated roads. Greatness will help us mould grandiose dams for first class power generation out of our epileptic electricity system. Greatness will help us engineer superlative citadels of learning out of our moribund and cult ridden schools. Let us CHOOSE to bring light where there is darkness, enlightenment where there is backwardness, and progress where there is retreat into the stone-age. A pessimist says, one tree does not make a forest, an optimist says it takes a tree to begin a forest; a pessimist sees the glass as half empty, an optimist sees the glass as half full; a pessimist sees darkness, an optimist lights a candle. Let’s choose wisely. Let’s make our votes count. Nigeria deserves no less.
Aristotle tells us that the roots of progress are bitter but the fruits thereof are sweet. Aristotle further tells us that the leader ought to stimulate people to virtue and urge them forward by the notion of the noble. A great leader is a servant, a shepherd, and a steward. An old Indian proverb says when you were born, you cried and the world rejoiced. Our leaders should live in such a way that when they die, the world cries and they rejoice. Is there one amongst them? Choose that one! Remember, leadership is not a right, but a privilege.
As we had earlier announced, in the light of the elections, the doors to the ACRPOLIS will be under lock and key on April 2nd and 9th. However, practise your speaking and leadership skills even while queuing up to cast your vote. Remember the rule of three. As Carmine Gallo posited, three is more dramatic than two, three is funnier than four, three is more memorable than six.
Saturday, 2 April 2011
Sunday, 13 March 2011
The Top Five Lies About Service Excellence
The Top Five Lies About Service Excellence!
A business that makes nothing but money is a poor kind of business.
Henry Ford (1863 – 1947)
The idea of this article came as I was going through some business cards I’ve collected over the past five or so years. I was looking for cards I needed to trash. Management consultants call the exercise I was embarking on house maintenance. I was almost half way through when I saw the card a general manager in one of the second tier banks gave me at a seminar Risk Management Association of Nigeria organised in 2006 or so. A card deserving of a bank’s top gun, it had all the details carefully listed including website, fax, telephone numbers, email address, name, and of course title boldly written: General Manager. I was about to trash it for irrelevance, when I instinctively flipped to see if there was anything written at the back, and sure, there they were: The New Ordinary Bank Plc, Ass + Goat + Sheep, N50bn shareholders’ fund, N150bn in assets, 100 branches nationwide.
Can you see it? Look closely. I guess by now you have seen it. Nothing was said about marching confidently into the future with five million strong enthusiastic customers, and nothing was said about the army of dynamically engaged people that would see the bank through. So the first top lie is: customer retention is irrelevant, while the second top lie is: the people are replaceable. Customers and employees are the two sides of the same coin. They are variously referred to as external and internal customers and great organizations go to great lengths to win their hearts and minds. Mediocre organizations pay lip service to customer and employee retention and engagement. Mediocre organizations retain the best parking slots in their premises for their top brass. At their car parks you’ll see ‘cars parked at owner’s risk’ boldly displayed. Great organizations instinctively know that the little things matter, like reserving convenient parking for customers, and like promoting their people when due. They know that the only thing that matters is the law of action. Action wins, not the words we say because we can lie with our words but we cannot lie with our actions.
The third lie is: our size matters, the fourth lie is: the popular press and our corporate communication unit say we are great so we are indeed great, and the fifth and last lie: we have been around for a thousand years so we are unconquerable. All the lies in the world will not make you great. A wise man once said, the fact that someone is willing to lay down his life for an idea does not necessarily make the idea correct. If you wish to know how great you are, just go and ask your customers and employees. Only the market place determines who is great and who is mediocre. The market place rewards great companies. The society at large respects great companies and their leaders. Recently I attended an event where the best and brightest, and the highest and mightiest in Nigeria Africa . It was there I understood how society apportions respect and dispenses honour. The CEOs of some supposedly high flying companies were not recognised as the high and mighty filed in. To the compeer, the companies the CEOs represented were inconsequential, deserving no attention. It didn’t matter that most of them were quoted on the Nigeria Stock Exchange.
To the customer, the size of your balance sheet, the type of car your CEO drives, the décor of your CFO’s office mean nothing. Whether the floor of your reception area is made of marble or granite is certainly immaterial to the customer, all he wants to know is what you have in stock for him, and how you make him feel. To the employee, the only thing that matters is that all your actions tell him he is valued. Letting your people have the first crack at the latest opening in the organization says more than all the tonnes of verbiage you put in between the covers of your glossy annual report. Size will not save you, ask GM. The popular press will desert you, ask Merril Lynch, Lehman Brothers and Long Term Capital, Enron and Author Anderson. That you are as old as Methusella and have had a glorious past is irrelevant to the market place, ask SONY, the once electronics icon.
Peter Crosby once said, ‘if we take care of the customers and the employees, everything else takes care of itself. It is hard to find an organization that both customers and employees regard with continuous affection and appreciation'. Martha Rogers reminded business people and readers in The Conference Board article: One Customer at a Time: Competing in the Interactive Age to brace up for competition as ‘everybody everywhere wants your most valuable customers and will approach them from all channels and geographies in ways unimaginable just a few years ago. So, like it or not, yours is a global enterprise.’ The internet means people can shop anywhere anytime so even people in your neighbourhood will avoid you because of mediocre service and shop somewhere else as the five top lies will not save you.
Paul Uduk
Author, Bridges to the Customer’s Heart
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