Taking Ownership

“Leaders take ownership of the results and do not try to excuse those or blame someone else for them.” - Henry Cloud

Workers, on the other hand, do a job. They do what they are told, and that is all they are responsible for, in their mind set. If the desired result does not happen, that is not their problem because they did what they were told. And at the “worker” level, they are right. They are not held accountable for results, but for what they do, i.e. whether or not they follow instructions and implement what management tells them to do (p. 186).

Leaders and, more than that, all successful people do not worry about just making the authority happy. They worry about the results…. It is not enough for the integrated character to be seen as “having followed orders” if the ship sinks or the company is not profitable… Integrated characters want good fruit. They want things to work, and they take ownership of the results as well as their own performance (p. 186-7).

It is human nature for us to blame and externalize. Losers excuse practically every result in their life and blame something outside themselves for what happens. They do not see themselves as contributors to the result...

Successful people, on the other hand, do not blame the outside world for their lack of success in any given venture or relationship.... Successful people care very, very little about ‘fault”. They do not worry about things “being their fault”. Fault to them does not have the most important implications, as it does for immature characters. What has the most important implications for mature characters is solving the problem.

If it means that they need to do something differently, that the way they did it was part of the problem, to them that is good news, not bad. They love knowing that. It gives them control of making it better (p. 188).

Source: Henry Cloud, Integrity

GUEST Service

I have not been keeping this blog updated in the past few months as it has been a very hectic period for me. I am beginning to see the light in the tunnel, with the semester of teaching coming to an end soon. Below is a blog posting entitled, "Treat Your Customer as Your Guest" by NUS office of quality management which I find very meaningful. It is also appropriate since we have been hosting a number of professors visiting Singapore.

photo: Geoff, US (July 09)

One of the key success factors of great service organisations like Ritz Carlton and Walt Disney is that they treat their customers as guests. Therefore, to deliver great service, we first need to embrace the paradigm of treating our customers as guests. This involves learning and practising the "Guest” philosophy, a set of principles for delivering the extraordinary guest experience.

photo: Tony, US (Oct 2009)

Generosity in hospitality : The word “hospitality” is known as the act of generously providing care and kindness to whoever is in need. As a host, one should not only be concerned about meeting or exceeding the guest’s physical and functional needs, but also about satisfying his psychological and emotional needs. In the paper “Customer Experience: The Next Competitive Battleground” by Beyond Philosophy, 69 per cent of all consumers surveyed said that emotions accounted for 50 per cent or more of every customer experience. Therefore, to win your guest’s approval, satisfy his psychological needs; and if you want to win his heart, satisfy his emotional needs.

photo: Gianluca, UK & Dogan, Australia (Oct 09)
Unique individual : Every guest is an individual with unique physical, functional, psychological and emotional needs. Service thus has to be personalised as this would make the guest feel special, instead of like a digit in the stream of customers that come and go.

photo: Simon (UK), Kyung-Hwan (S.Korea) & Charles (HK)

Everyone is welcome : As all customers are your guests, every one of them should feel welcomed and be treated with dignity and respect. There should be no discrimination, prejudice or bias against your guest in terms of age, race, gender, religion or culture. Your guest is a human being; hence, any mistreatment will be felt and such hurt will not go away easily. The damage will be greater if the guest complains about the company to his friends, relatives, colleagues and business partners.
photo: Brent & Cinda (Oct 09)
Service to others : The hallmark of treating your customers as guests is to be of service to them. The host can feel an emotional sense of satisfaction when he sees and senses that his guest leaves the premises happier than when he first arrived.

Total guest experience: The contact that you have with your guest is not simply a short engagement but a summation of all physical and non-physical contacts the guest has with the organisation and its staff. People remember experiences and not just services or products.

photo: HRH The Prince Andrew, UK (Oct 09)
In summary, GUEST Service stands for (1) Generosity in hospitality, (2) Unique individual, (3) Everyone is welcome, (4) Service to others, and (5) Total guest experience.

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Source: Quality Blog, NUS (adapted from the article “Treat Your Customer as Your Guest”, Today’s Manager Jun-Jul 2009).

Words - Scrambled

1. PRESBYTERIAN: When you rearrange the letters:BEST IN PRAYER

2. ASTRONOMER: When you rearrange the letters:MOON STARER

3. DESPERATION: When you rearrange the letters: A ROPE ENDS IT

4. THE EYES: When you rearrange the letters: THEY SEE

5. GEORGE BUSH: When you rearrange the letters: HE BUGS GORE

6. THE MORSE CODE: When you rearrange the letters: HERE COME DOTS

7. DORMITORY: When you rearrange the letters:DIRTY ROOM

8. SLOT MACHINES: When you rearrange the letters: CASH LOST IN ME

9. ANIMOSITY: When you rearrange the letters:IS NO AMITY

10. ELECTION RESULTS: When you rearrange the letters: LIES - LET'S RECOUNT

11. SNOOZE ALARMS: When you rearrange the letters: ALAS! NO MORE Z 'S

12. A DECIMAL POINT: When you rearrange the letters: I'M A DOT IN PLACE

13. THE EARTHQUAKES: When you rearrange the letters: THAT QUEER SHAKE

14. ELEVEN PLUS TWO: When you rearrange the letters:TWELVE PLUS ONE

15. MOTHER-IN-LAW: When you rearrange the letters: WOMAN HITLER

Thompson Seedless Grapes

Grapes, however, are the very picture of fragility: nothing more than thin-skinned little bags of juice.

In her book, How to Pick A Peach, Russ Parsons described "table grapes are essentially nothing but guilt-free snack foods – conveniently packaged sugar water that allows you to feel virtuous while you eat it."

The dominant table grapes today are varieties such as Thompson Seedless, Ruby Seedless, Crimson Seedless and Flame Seedless. Their primary selling point is self-explanatory: seedless. It’s hard to be a popular convenience food when people have to interrupt their snacking to spit out the pips.

photo: Vineyard @ Rhine Valley, Germany (2009)
Originally called the Sultanina Bianca, Thompson Seedless was popularized in the US by William Thompson, a Californian nurseryman in the late 19th century. Today the Thompson seedless grape is the most popular table grape as well as one of the most versatile. It is also used for juice and inexpensive wine and accounts for 95 percent of the raisins produced in California.

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Properly grown and matured to full ripeness, the Thompson Seedless has startlingly good flavor – a pleasingly flowery quality. The problem is that you can rarely find a fully mature Thompson Seedless in the market. When ripe, the variety has a tendency to ‘shatter’ – that is the grapes fall off the bunch. This is inconvenient for the growers, the retailer and the consumer. And so Thompson Seedless are usually picked when they are still green. At this point they can be sweet, but they are never much more.

The Thompson Seedless is coddled like some kind of exotic bonsai tree. Not only are the vines trained to grow along specially designed trellises, but they are also meticulously pruned to manage the right number of leaves, the right number of shoots and the right number of grape clusters. And that is just the start.

photo: Vineyard in Melbourne (2005)

Left on its own devices, the Thompson Seedless vines produces grapes that are quite small, particularly when picked early. To get around that, farmers have come up with some innovative techniques to increase grape size. Between girding and gibbing, a farmer can increase the size of an individual grape by as much as a third.

Girdling – which involves cutting a ring in the bark all the way around the base of the vine just as the grapes begin to emerge (and often again as the grapes begin to gain color). This interrupts the flow of nutrients to the leaves and concentrates them in the fruit.

Gibbing – applying gibberellic acid, a naturally occurring plant growth regular extracted from a cultivated fungus. It increases the size of individual grapes and also stretches out grape clusters, allowing better air circulation and thus reducing disease.

source: How to Pick a Peach