As somebody who is frequently a customer, so knows how it feels to do business with both good and bad companies, but also as somebody who has worked in small businesses and the retail and service industries I can find fault with the
recommendations made by Simon Caulkin in his Observer management column. He suggests the following:
"Quit thinking about cost - give people what they want. Customers aren't interested in your costs. They are only interested in being able to get from you a product or service with the minimum of fuss and the maximum of convenience - their convenience"
This is achieved according to the following guidelines:
- Forget productivity, work on quality
- Stop obsessing about scale: think flow
- Size doesn't matter
- Stop trying to performance-manage people; focus on improving the system
- Forget about competition and build co-operation
This basically sums up to:
"Do good business, please your customers and cut costs at the same time".
