Mike has his own unique style. He draws on more than 27 years experience. He has worked most positions in the service industry and feels at home in more major cities than most people.
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A dash of honest doubt turns out to be not so bad after all.
The coaching gurus all seem to agree. To reach your goal you need to declare it and abracadabra you are already halfway there.
Well, it turns out that they could be wrong.
According to research performed by a group of American scientists last year and document by Daniel Pink there is a significant difference in performance between 2 groups performing the same task and where one group uses what the scientists called declarative self talk ( I can do it) and the other group uses interrogative self talk (Can I do it?).
The self questioning group performs a lot better than the self affirming group.
In Denmark we had an interesting example of this recently.
As the Danish handball team departed for the European Championships they self confidently declared that they were going for gold. They subsequently lost their first few games and in no way looked as if they were going to get anywhere near the finals. The fans at home of course were furious and the players and trainer were all accused of hubris. Subsequently the declarations from the trainer and players took a subtle shift from ”we can do it” to some serious self questioning around ”can we do it?” and ”what would it take to do it?” – and – abracadabra, they brought home the gold medals to everybody’s surprise – including their own I guess.
The research seems to indicate that people who ask questions somehow come from a more humble place and that in turn creates a space to come up with a deeper solution.
For those of us who have been working with action learning for years that does not come as a big surprise….
Inspired by the principles developed in the “Service Profit Chain”, Mike Hohnen takes you through each of the steps needed to create an outstanding service business.
We live in a world of abundance – there is plenty of choice everywhere. And since 2008 we have experienced significant drops in demand as consumers became more careful. The result is a widening gap between supply and demand in virtually any category you can imagine.
When that happens, many companies have a knee-jerk reaction, and the recipe is more or less always the same: initiate rigorous cost-cutting programs, reduce staff and/or services, offer discounts in many forms, and increase advertising aggressively.
This, however, is the equivalent of trying to steer and brake as your car begins to skid on black ice while going through a sharp curve.
As you hit that declining demand curve, you need to perform what at first seems like a counterintuitive move: hold your price, increase your services, improve your quality, and narrow your focus in the market.
In this book, you will not only understand why but also see how you can do that.
I spent some delightful hours over Christmas deeply immersed in the Steve Jobs biography. Not only was his life an amazing story but there are also an of abundance of wisdom nuggets throughout the book.
One that struck me in particular was the story of when Jobs returned to Apple after his years of involuntary exile. At that point in time Apple was on the ropes and the market was rapidly losing faith.
Jobs convened a product review meeting – Apple at that time had 10–15 different versions of the Mac on the market and even more in the pipeline. Jobs went to the whiteboard and drew a 2 x 2 matrix. On the one side he wrote home/professional on the other he wrote desktop/laptop. Jobs then announced: That is it – four products. A laptop for professional or home use and a desktop for professional or home use. Everything else is as from now abandoned/discontinued.
The lesson for us all of course is: focus. Decide what it is you want to do and do it well.
Trying to be all things to all people invariably results in being nothing to anybody.
Internet has only been around seriously for the past 15 years – but it has evolved enormously from the time I was linking up to CompuServe with an acoustic modem and dismantling phone plugs in hotel rooms to get my crocodile grips to connect with the raw wires in order to get a connection…
We don’t yet know what is next – but we do know it will be different. One thing you can be sure of is that in the next 5 years you will see more innovation than you have experienced the past 15 years – what will that mean for your business?
