theIdeaStudio (Customer Crossroads)

The Key Question for Assessing Loyalty

This month's Business 2.0 heralds a "radical new research technique".  Well it's not really all that new or that radical, but it is starting to catch on.
First popularized by Frederick Reichheld, author of The Loyalty Effect, the method is relatively simple:

1. Ask your customers "would you recommend us/this product to a friend?"
2. Subtract the number of strong positive responses from the number of Negative plus neutral responses
3. The resulting number is the "net promoter" score

If you don't have a positive number, you have work to do.

Correlates with revenue growth

Reichheld's research says this number -- the net promoter score -- is strongly correlated with revenue growth. Companies with high scores, such as SouthWest Airlines, have higher revenue growth. He says most US businesses have a net promoter score of 10% or lower.

Other reasons to ask

While the net promoter score is a good metric, there are other reasons to ask the "would you recommend" question.  A good research analyst can do a lot more with that question than you might think at first glance, if it is part of a larger questionnaire.  You can run all manner of correlations and similar analyses to determine what elements of the product/experience are driving the response to that question.  You can produce those great quadrant charts that are so helpful in seeing where you stand versus competitors.  You can determine if some groups/segments are more likely than others to like or not like your product/service. 

If you do customer surveys, you really need to include a question of this type, sometimes more than one, because it is so valuable in analysis.

One number that everyone can understand

Reichheld's measure can give you a single number that everyone can understand and mobilize around. This is a big advantage when dealing with front line staff, who have a lot of information coming at them. 

If you want to use this approach, here are a few more best practices to think about:

1. Sample customers as soon as possible after they have interacted with you.  This means within days or weeks of obtaining a new car loan, for example
2. Ask them a few questions related to their experience.  A good place to start is whether they experienced the standard of service you are targetting. (ie. did anyone call you by name?  Did we thank you for your business?  etc.)  Keep it short, maybe five questions or even fewer.
3. Organize to collect this information in a systematic way.
4. When you see trends you don't understand or don't like, use other methods to find out why.  For this, nothing beats a good qualitative study. 
5. If you want to do this on a shoestring budget, develop a script and have your area managers and head office executives make the calls. 

One of the things that Damon does not really acknowledge in the article is that this one question does not solve all your problems.  If you want to know why the number is low (or why it is high), you will actually have to ask a lot more questions.  And the companies that are cited as examples, such as GE, do a LOT of other kinds of customer research.

Credits, Resources:
The neat typeface comes from Misprinted Type
The Business 2.0 article: "The Only Question that Matters", Damon Darlin, September 2005

Service Recovery: Speed of Response is Critical to Success

I had an annoying incident at the video store this morning.  We've all been there, so I won't bore you with the details. 
I was ticked off having to start my week in a bad mood, however, so used the online contact point to send an e-mail with my complaint.  That was less than four hours ago.

I just got this lovely e-mail response from the area manager responsible for this particular store, and didn't she do a good job with this?  It put a smile back on my face.
AND, they probably saved me as a customer.

Ms. Abbott,

Please accept my sincere apologies for your experience this morning at our Sunnybrook location.  Your email was forwarded to me, as I am the new Area Manager responsible for that location, effective today.

I want to assure you that your feedback has been taken very seriously, and I will be visiting the Store Manager this week to discuss the level of customer service in the Store, and ensure that there is a plan of action to improve it.  We have already scheduled a meeting together and this will be the first item on our agenda.

I would be happy to offer you a couple of free New Release rentals on your Rogers Video account if you feel this would be something of value to you.  I don't want to presume, but I would really like to do something to demonstrate our appreciation of your business.  Please let me know how you would feel about this.

Thank you again for your timely feedback, and please know that it will be used to follow up with the staff who created a negative start to your week, and to ensure that all our customers at Sunnybrook feel valued in the future.

With sincere apologies,

Jane Doe
Area Manager - Area 5
Rogers Video

Speed of Response Essential

Service recovery best practices have been researched many times.  One of the most important factors always turns out to be SPEED OF RESPONSE. 

For a complex problem, maybe one that needs investigation, it is still very important to acknowledge the issue, even if there is no resolution yet. 

Depending on the issue, frequent telephone calls to keep the customer informed are appropriate.  Certainly, the customer should always be clear about when they can expect to hear something from you.

If there have actually been emotions running high, or hostile words exchanged, you will have an additional problem to fix.  For some reason (haven't seen any research on this yet), even after a problem is fixed, complaining customers are often reluctant to return.  The negative emotions are now wedded to the source.  It's not rational, but it is often true. 

If you see it once, it's a pattern

It's important to remember that very few people actually complain.  (This has also been researched).  A good rule of thumb is that it's less than 10% for consumers, and less than 25% for businesses.  And sometimes much less than this. 

I learned a bit of wisdom from a sales trainer once, that totally applies to this issue:  "If you see it once, it's a pattern". 

So every complaint that you hear about as a manager represents many that you didn't hear about. 

I suspect the same thing holds true for compliments -- if you have staff that receive formal compliments, these are probably not isolated either.  They are probably winning fans for the business every day.  So do something nice for them.

And if you are hearing neither complaints nor compliments, then you have a challenge in fixing your cusotmer feedback mechanisms. 

Focus on the message, not the navigation, or why you should leverage behavior patterns, not try to change them

I just finished reading a rather disappointing e-mail item from IT Business, that appears to be sponsored by Telus. When they were Clearnet, they were customer-focused and very very good marketers.  Unfortunately, Telus bought them, and things have changed.

I opened the click-through e-mail to find out more about Telus' videoconferencing capabilities.  Instead, I spent maybe 30 seconds trying to figure out how to scroll. 

My touch-pad scroll was disabled.  My arrow keys were disabled.  My Pg Up and Down keys were disabled.  Finally I clued in -- see if you can figure it out. 

So the time I could have spent absorbing their message about video teleconferencing, I spent being irritated by their clever navigation scheme.  And I chose to write this blog article instead of reading the case study, or finding out what their product can actually do for me.   

Behavior is Hard to Change, Don't Try

I hear the phrase "educate the customer" every so often.  This is code for "make them do it our way".  It's hard to change people.  It's much easier to be where they are, help them do what they are already trying to do.   

Navigation is a good example.  People now have some expectations about where menu items will be, and how to move around on a page.  Why waste your energy teaching them some new method, when you can spend those precious seconds providing some value added? 

Let's just make the point really clearly:  if you make your customers or prospects spend time on something that isn't ADDING value, then you're spending some of your brand capital. 

Okay, enough ranting from me.  Let's hear what the experts have to say about this.

Is the navigation in this info-advert stupid, or is it Susan?

Enquiring minds want to know.

Acknowledgements
Thanks to staticfree.info/graphics for the animated gif.   
Thanks to web expert Tema Frank for her useful comment (see below)

Watching Trends and Other Pastimes

I've recently learned about some new sources for watching trends, new ideas, new business concepts and similar stuff. 

Springwise
Springwise calls themselves the global new business ideas newsletter.  They publish monthly. 
If you click on the sample newsletter you can subscribe via RSS*.  Or they will e-mail it to you. 

Out of the current issue, the example about Benjys caught my eye -- the reinvention of the coffee truck, bringing a better food experience to industrial parks.  I remember eating white-bread sandwiches and overheated coffee one summer in my youth; this looks like a big improvement.

Trendspotter
Trendspotter is a monthly newsletter of consumer trends.
The RSS button is located right on the main page, or you can sign up for the e-mail version.

In the current issue, I liked their discussion about Minipreneurs.  These are individuals that are finding ways to make money using their own creativity.  There's the army of E-Bay people, of course, but many other forms as well, including support industries.

Smart Economy
Walter Derzko, who has been commenting on the new technology space for a long time, has written a book, and now has a blog to support it.  An article about flexible cement was one of the pieces that caught my eye.  If you're not a real techno-phile, you may find this material heavy going.  True geeks , and the black-helicopter crowd should find plenty of good stuff here.

Tips on Reading this Stuff
The world is littered with examples of trends, technology and business concepts that looked cool enough to someone, but didn't turn into a success.  I find you really have to turn on your sense of judgment to read this stuff, and not get caught up in "gee whiz" thinking.

Here are a few questions you can ask to keep the BS detector running: 

• What problem does this solve for consumers or businesses? 
• How many people have this problem? 
• Can I envision myself using this thing? 
• Can I envision my friends kids using this thing? 
• What value would someone place on this? 
• What distribution issues would this idea have to overcome? 

*Too Much Information!
If you too would like to clean up your in-basket by converting to an RSS reader, just set up a Bloglines account and start subscribing. I find there is just too much e-mail clutter, and having an RSS reader makes it easy to browse when I have time and am bored, keeping my in-basket for actual communications from others.   

Acknowledgements
Thanks to Apoorv Dwivedi for bringing Springwise and Trendspotter to my attention, and to Walter Derzko for Smart Economy.

Designer Salary Survey, and an interesting web site too

Paul Bauer writes:

It would really be great, if you could maybe add this to your blog:

"Designer Salary Survey http://www.coroflot.com/community/salary_survey.asp. The Coroflot Designer Salary Survey is now open and collecting data for the fifth year. Designers are invited to submit their own annual salary informationand review results from other disciplines, locations and job titles. Complete results will be published after October 1, 2005."

Core77, Inc. 
www.core77.com

 

[Happy to help.  I'm just another wannabe and fan of designers everywhere.  For the Organization Design people who are reading this, you will probably notice some interesting patterns in the salary data, suggesting that not all design work happens at the same level. Not like that's a surprise, just more data.]

Why Mobile Phones Succeeded -- and the Next Two Billion

Marko Ahtisaari, currently director of design strategy at Nokia, deconstructs the reasons for rapid deployment and adoption of cell-phones in his article Blogging Over Las Vegas. 

1. It's an object with a social function tied to a service
2. Service providers subsidized the product to trade-off for customer relationships, preventing users from seeing the true cost of the elements, and rapidly speeding up adoption
3. The shift from a collective shared object -- the family phone -- to a personal object that becomes an extension of the self

The rest of this interesting article explores the challenges of the future.  The one that got my attention is that we have not planned for how to disconnect in an era of "always on, always accessible".  Maybe there's an opportunity there.

I am off to the Appreciative Inquiry event with David Cooperrider, and will report in on learnings on Thursday. 

Acknowledgements:
Thanks to Putting People First for bringing this to my attention.  A very interesting blog, don't go there if you only have five minutes.

Are you Losing Sales? Your Call is Important to Us Revisited

I have just booked a holiday online using my Gold Travel Visa points. Which actually proved to be relatively painless, (not what I was expecting) because there is now an online link via Sabre.  Hotel and airfare for a week in Paris pretty much cleaned out my account, but I'm happy. 

However, the bank lost a sale of travel medical insurance that they COULD HAVE HAD.  I pressed the button requesting a quote.  They did indeed e-mail me a quote, on a Sunday, with a notice that I had only 24 hours to say yes, providing me the 800 number.  When I called on Monday, I was advised of "longer than usual wait times" and asked to hold for "10 minutes or more".  Tried again later, and it was worse. 

So I sent an e-mail saying "I don't have time to wait on hold, but I would like to buy the travel medical.  Please call me if you need further information". Well, a confirmation invoice has just arrived, and there's no travel medical on it. 

Just a few days ago, I tried to call the same organization to get a hold-funds removed from a personal cheque I'd deposited.  Forget that I had more than enough in other accounts to cover the cheque.  Forget that I have been a customer for about 20 years.  They put a hold on my cheque, because ... well, that's the procedure. 

However, I did think I could get them to take it off if I called.  Guess what?  "Longer than usual wait times, please hold for TWENTY MINUTES".  Get a grip.  I'd rather eat dirt. 

Appreciative Inquiry: The nicest thing to happen to change management in a long time

  Appreciative Inquiry (AI) is a whole system approach to change, that delights in the ability of people to organize to help themselves move forward. 

It might sound flaky, but it's proving to be one of the most effective approaches to mobilizing people ever discovered.  Even better:  people enjoy the process. 

Instead of thinking of organizations as problems to be solved, AI looks at organizations as evolving, living systems to be embraced. 

Instead of looking for "the answer", AI looks for powerful questions to ask.  When people start asking powerful questions, powerful new directions and ideas start to emerge. 

AI is part of a growing body of knowledge called Positive Organization Scholarship (POS).   

If you're going to be in the Toronto area on September 14, you can attend a day-long session with David Cooperider, best known as the originator of much of AI theory and process.  Check out the attached PDF for details.  Download david_cooperrider.pdf

(Disclosure: we are not a sponsor, just planning to attend, and the price is right.  Don't miss this opportunity to meet some great people, learn some new things, and get charged up)

To find out more about Appreciative Inquiry, the AI Commons is a good place to start, as it contains quite a few free resources, case studies, and tools. 

The Ross School of Management at U Michigan maintains a knowledge base on Positive Organization Scholarship, which will give you a better perspective of the number of people working in this field, as well as some excellent resource lists and introductory reading.

These are some of the best tools I know of to get those transformational improvements in customer experience that I know of.   It's not about HR -- it's about the people who are on the front lines. 

Customer Experience Design De-mystified: The Carnegie Public Library in Pittsburgh

The Carnegie Public Library in Pittsburgh wanted to update their user experience.  The old library was out of date, confusing and intimidating for users.  The new library has an integrated multi-channel experience that users are raving about.  Find out what they did and how they did it here. 

The presentation provides a clear illustration of the kinds of tools available to use to rethink the user experience, and the principles involved.  Even better, it is a delight to read, has wonderful graphic illustrations, and will get your creative juices flowing. 

The presentation comes from Marc Rettig and Aradhana Goel's presentation at
Adaptive Path's User Experience Week 2005 in Washington, D.C. 

A few of the gems inside this presentation:

• When tested, library users preferred the term "Customer Services" with the s, to "Customer Service".  Customer Services sounded to them like a place they could get help with many things, whereas Customer Service is a place you go when you have a problem
  

• Using user-centred language meant changing "Reference Desk" to "Ask a Librarian".  The online and offline experiences have been mapped to be as similar as possible, so "Ask a Librarian" is a button on the web site, as well as a sign in the physical space. 

• Signage used to be stuck on top and on the sides of desks.  It was quickly hidden by other people in the library.  And it was hard for users to tell which information was important, and which trivial.  (Sounds familiar, doesn't it?)

This is one of the best presentations I've seen in ages, and only wish I was actually AT the conference, which is going on my wish list for next year.

Acknowledgements
Thanks to Gavin McGovern at Play with the Machine for bringing this to my attention.

Web Analytics: Today in ClickZ

Neil Mason at ClickZ writes in Beyond Web Analytics Data: Online Surveys:

Total reliance on Web analytics data can be likened to driving down a road at full speed while only looking in the rear-view mirror. You can tell where you've been, but you don't know what's about to happen. Getting beyond the "what" and more into "why" enables you to predict where the business is going. To do this, you must learn why your customers do what they do and how they feel about it.

Surveys are one of the most common methods of understanding what customers think and how they feel. Developments in usability and affordability of online research tools make conducting research among a customer base easier than ever. However, there's a huge difference between deploying surveys that generate useful insight and pulling together a few questions or doing a site poll.

Well said.

Katrina Relief Effort

Remember how good you felt when you gave to the Red Cross to help the West Indies after Hurricane Ivan?  And then again, after the Asian Tsunami?  It still works. 

My favored charity for this kind of relief is the Red Cross.  I was happy to see that the Canadian Red Cross is sending 25 volunteers to Houston.  [There are lots more charities and helping organizations listed here.]

I don't know about you, but I'm finding this event tremendously distracting, if you'll forgive me for being trite about another huge disaster.  I spent half the morning today looking at all of the New York Times' pictures, amazing as always.  (free registration). 

What's very different about this situation than the ongoing catastrophe in Africa, for example, is that it's much easier to identify with people who shared a lot of lifestyle characteristics with you and I.

I've been to N'awlins three times now, and loved it every time.  But have never been to Indonesia or Africa.  Or Iraq.  Or Israel. 

So it's suddenly a lot easier to understand what it must really be like to be living in a refugee camp.

At one point yesterday, as a helicopter-mounted camera showed a teeming swell of furious, gun-toting Louisiana residents mobbing a busload of supplies, a stunned British TV anchor spoke his mind on the air: "I'm having trouble believing that we're watching the continental United States of America. I mean, it looks like Rwanda."  (Globe & Mail, Sept 2, "Nasty, brutish -- society's net snaps")

I'm also following with considerable interest the big thinkers who are trying to help the rest of us understand a few things:

1. Why people stayed
2. Why social structure broke down so quickly

The most useful thing I've read about #1 is that people routinely underestimate the risk in these situations.  A good problem for some psychologists or economists to study.

And #2 is so far being attributed to culture.  The companion to all the incredible independence and can-do thinking that has made America great is a rapid shift to "every one for himself" in times of trouble.   

In U.S. cities like New Orleans, in the analysis of the American-British organizational psychologist Cary Cooper, social cohesion depends on a shared belief that individual hard work, good luck and God's grace will bring a person out of poverty and into prosperity. But those very qualities can destroy the safety net of mutual support that might otherwise help people in an emergency.

"Fear itself motivates people in the U.S. -- the fear that you could lose everything," Prof. Cooper said in an interview yesterday from his office at the University of Lancaster. "That creates the best in American society, the inventiveness, but the moment the net is pulled out, it becomes a terrible jungle."

Observers have long recognized this tendency to societal breakdown concealed within the mass psychology of U.S. success.

"The moral mandate to achieve success exerts pressure to succeed by fair means, if possible, and by foul means, if necessary," the sociologist Robert Merton wrote in the 1960s. In times of crisis, fair means are too often replaced by foul.

There are exceptions: The extraordinary mass acts of mutual support that followed the Sept. 11 attacks in Lower Manhattan or the floods in the Dakotas, for instance, or the charitable activity that has all but ended the AIDS crisis in the United States.

But historians point to a constant threat of self-destructive breakdowns that seem to dot U.S. history, belying the thin veneer of civility that sits between entrepreneurial prosperity and mass chaos. The individualistic, egalitarian, anti-authoritarian values that have made the United States succeed have always been accompanied by an every-man-for-himself ethos that can destroy the system itself.  (Globe & Mail, September 2, "Nasty, brutish")

Social breakdown has apparently not happened to this extent in other disasters, such as the Montreal ice-storm, where people were without power in the middle of winter for extended periods, and food supplies became problematic.   I don't remember hearing about a lot of crime in the Tsunami aftermath either. 

I did, however, read that in a recently flooded neighborhood in Toronto people are finding their treasures being stolen from the piles of stuff in their front yards.  Not looting exactly, but pretty slimy.  

Back to New Orleans. It is easy to understand why all those people in the pictures are ANGRY.  Waiting for days with no food or water.  Being prevented from leaving the Superdome.  Having police drive by you without stopping or offering help.  It's truly shocking to see this catastrophe unfold. 

It's hard not to make linkages with the color of people's skin.  Or perhaps it's rich versus poor.  Here was another report that horrified me:

The residents remaining in the city are overwhelmingly black and extremely poor. At times, the racial divide evoked images of the Old South. At one point in midafternoon, a group of heavily armed state policemen, all of them white, ran into the cavernous Amtrak railway station, apparently to check out reports of looting. The black families congregated outside waiting for transportation looked on in fear.

The French Quarter seemed to draw particular attention from the Municipal Police. "Now be careful. Don't stop for anybody," said one young policeman, his wraparound glasses on his forehead, his hand grasping a very large handgun. (Globe & Mail, September 2, "All you can do is fend for yourself")

Apparently some tourists have been abandoned by authorities.  In one case, buses hired by a hotel to take tourists to safety comandeered by the police. 

In the meantime, show YOU have a heart and make a donation.  Because it's not over for those people, and it isn't going to be over for a very long time.  Thanks for listening.

We now return to our regular programming. 

Dell Executives Teach Leadership

In an interview with Chairman Micahel Dell and CEO Kevin Rollins, HBR captured some interesting ideas corporate culture, innovation and developing leaders.

On innovation:
"For every dollar we put into R&D, we get about six dollars back in profit...But Sony invests $1 Billion and gets back only $200 Million in profits.  Sony is overinventing.  They invest in things that might be exciting but that aren't valued by customers. So they can't generate good returns." ~ Dell

"The true test of a company's innovation is whether the customer is willing to pay for it" ~ Rollins

On execution:
"Most companies like to talk about investing for the future.  We say the future is today and tonight.  Good execution requires a sense of urgency.  The notion of investing for the future can become a trap"  ~ Rollins

On leadership development:
"Our own executives teach, and we use our own material and facilities.  Rather than bringing employees to a central location, as GE does, we travel to them.  Either Michael or I meet with the top 10% of Dell managers around the world every quarter and give them a short training dose.  We also have an intense ten day leadership training program, which our people tell us is the best session they've ever attended. 
It's been a huge retention tool among our high potential employees.  We were surprised at how well they responded to the time and attention from us and other senior executives." ~ Rollins

"Kevin and I each spend three full days teaching.  We review individual development plans, compensation and career paths for all these people.  We now consider them the corporate talent and they're 'owned' by the office of the CEO, not by their immediate supervisors" ~ Dell

On culture:

"We knew we couldn't get to $60 Billion in revenue without changing the culture.  But it's not like you just flip the swithc and it's done.  First, we implemented [the] Tell Dell [survey] to measure how good a job we were doing of managing people. The survey is voluntary, and 92% of our employees participate.  Based on what we learned from Tell Dell, Kevin created the Winning Culture initiative, which has become a top operating priority at Dell." ~ Dell

"We asked, 'what's the social contract we offer at Dell?' That led us to define the Soul of Dell: Focus on the customer, be open and direct in communications, be a good global citizen, have fun in winning.  These were all elements of our traditional culture that had just never been articulated" ~ Rollins

Acknowledgements:

HBR March 2005 "Execution without Excuses", by Thomas Stewart and Louise O'Brien.  (purchase)

Getting the Right People Doing the Right Things

I'm going to tell you a secret that could save you the price of a mid-sized consulting project.  Let's say $40 - 50 K at a minimum.  In addition, you'll make your staff a lot happier, AND you'll reduce the cost of delivering your services.  Ready?  Here it is:

Move the work to the most junior person that can competently handle it. 

That's it, that's the whole secret.

What got me thinking about it today was a very personal example of how I am managing my own time.  But I meant what I said -- I've made some good money telling clients how to do just this.  If you keep reading, you'll see the brilliant simplicity of what I'm saying. And might just be inspired to do a little workplace reengineering of your own.

Just because you can do the work doesn't mean you should

I am wrapping up a process of building a stronger support structure around my own work.  Today I hired a new systems administrator that will give me on-the-phone fix-its, and ongoing behind the scenes maintenance for our PCs, both here and when we are on the road, worldwide. (YAY!)  No more doing my own updates, configuring my own firewall, calling Microsoft support, etc.  Now Charles will be doing it.  He's not cheap, but guess what:  he still costs less than half what I charge, and he's about five times as fast. 

We also put in place a new bookeeper earlier this summer.  Once again, not cheap.  In fact, fairly expensive as bookeepers go, and overqualified for the complexities of a boutique firm like mine.  But she finishes in a couple of hours what I would take most of a day to do, after procrastinating for weeks.  (And of course, not get done at all if I'm too busy with client projects)

There is no such thing as spare time

Many of us are guilty of hanging on to work that's easy for us to do -- whatever your equivalent of my scenario is.  Others might call it micro-managing, but you think of it as managing the details.  Or worse -- like me -- you think you have the time to do these things yourself and thereby keep overheads under control.

My brother, who is a maxillofacial surgeon, once helped me wash dishes after a family dinner.  He made some remark about how much his time was worth, doing these dishes.  My response to him: "You're not worth that much when you're washing dishes".  Cheeky, perhaps, but true. 

Inside big organizations, the problem is much more insidious, and plastered over with a million rationalizations about why things must be the way they are.  Nonsense.

Redesigning the Work

Here's a real example of what I'm talking about.  We had a project where some bank staff who were responsible for lending arrangements also had to complete all the paperwork after they did a new deal.  They hated the paperwork.  They grumbled about it.  But it also kept them from doing more deals.

We created a new position (by re-jigging some of the other roles) to shift the paperwork completion to more junior employees.  The lending staff had a lot more time -- several more hours in a day, in fact.  And they used this time to see more customers, and shorten wait times.  Were they happy about this?  YOU BET THEY WERE.  Many of them told me this was the best thing that had ever happened to their job.

The people who took on the paperwork were happy too.  They had much more interesting work, taking a single customer's file and ensuring that everything went along smooth as silk.  Their roles were also enriched.  Many of these people loved the sense of completion that comes from an empty in-basket every day.  They didn't really care for the face-to-face sales oriented encounter, and the stresses of handling multiple customer needs.  THEY WERE HAPPY TOO!

As a result of this project, the company had created new capacity without increasing staffing costs, and had also made employees happier at the same time.  It doesn't get much better than that.

 

This works for managers too

This rule applies all the way to the top of the organization.  It just can be harder to see as you get into bigger titles. 

I used to work for an SVP that wanted to personally select the colors of new counters in new shops we opened.  Here's the thing:  head office had already specified a relatively small range of acceptable options.  And we had a design staff.  But he always mucked around in the final selections.  It was probably fun.  But it sure wasn't worth his hourly rate. 

Levels of work

What you need to think about in any organization is what level of work you have.  Is it SVP work?  Is it Director work?  Is it Senior Manager work?  Manager work?  Analyst work?  CSR work?   

And then you need to look in a really systematic way at what activities are assigned to what roles.  When you clean up where the activities belong (using rule #1 above), you're on your way to having an efficient AND effective organization. 

This is not just a process of guesswork, by the way.  Although there is some art and judgment involved, there are also some fairly scientific methods for conducting this type of analysis. 

When you are finished, people at every level will have challenging and interesting work. 

On the other hand, your managers and executives won't be able to pretend they are adding value by picking out paint chips, at 5 times the hourly rate of an interior designer.  And I'll have to spend time on clients, instead of software updates.