"It is common for us to receive an e-mail from a customer apologizing for not responding sooner because they thought our automated follow-up was being done manually. The key to a successful follow-up program is personalization and making it relevant for the customer." John Hopkins. Why did Apple's iPod revolutionise the music industry? Was it because of the technology of the iPod itself? Unlikely. There were…
Read More »"Clouds come floating into my life, no longer to carry rain or usher storm, but to add color to my sunset sky." Rabindranath Tagore. In yesterday's blog I discussed the aircraft carrier analogy when bringing rapid change into a legacy OSS. The CSPs of the future will need to be based around partnerships. Not just the handful of partnerships of past, but partnerships with a multitude…
Read More »"All changes, even the most longed for, have their melancholy; for what we leave behind us is a part of ourselves; we must die to one life before we can enter another." Anatole France. In the past, CSPs had such significant barriers to entry and economic clout that they could price almost any smaller player out of the market. I've seen community buyer's groups set up…
Read More »"True courage is being afraid, and going ahead and doing your job anyhow, that's what courage is." Norman Schwarzkopf. What is the scariest role in OSS? On one project I was in a position of leadership on a major OSS implementation. Working on the customer site, under great duress from the customer's representatives, we were developing and configuring significant functionality enhancements on an almost daily basis.…
Read More »“People with a scarcity mentality tend to see everything in terms of win-lose. There is only so much; and if someone else has it, that means there will be less for me. The more principle-cantered we become, the more we develop an abundance mentality, the more we are genuinely happy for the successes, well-being, achievements, recognition, and good fortune of other people. We believe their success…
Read More »“There is nothing noble in being superior to your fellow man; true nobility is being superior to your former self.” Ernest Hemingway Throughout this blog, I talk of linchpins, the people within an organisation that make most of the connections and add most of the value to their organisation. These individuals are usually quite rare in an OSS organisation and it is the responsibility of the…
Read More »"Everything starts with an idea. This is the first of the four jobs – the Thinkers. Builders convert these ideas into reality. This the second job. Improvers make this reality better. This is the third job. Producers do the work over and over again, delivering quality goods and services to the company’s customers in a repeatable manner." Lou Adler in this interesting blog entry Adler states…
Read More »““Most people do not listen with the intent to understand; they listen with the intent to reply.” Stephen R. Covey. Enlist and silent are both anagrams. They also have one other anagram that is important for OSS consultants and integrators in particular. Can you guess what this vital skill is? A hint would be that enlisting silence is likely to help you to develop this skill.…
Read More »"The promised land of new data-driven businesses, greater transparency into how operations actually work, better predictions, and faster testing is alluring indeed." by Stefan Biesdorf, David Court, and Paul Willmott in their article "Big Data: What's your plan?" Like it or not, the information age is changing the way we do business and our reliance on e-everything. But it also means that there is more electronic…
Read More »"So, young person, travel. Travel wide and far. Travel boldly. Travel with full abandon." Jeff Goins in his blog entry "3 Reasons to Travel While You’re Young" Jeff goes on to give the following three reasons to travel while you're young: Traveling teaches you to live an adventure Traveling helps you encounter compassion Traveling allows you to get some culture I bet you're wondering what this…
Read More »"In giver cultures, employees operate as the high-performing intelligence units do: helping others, sharing knowledge, offering mentoring, and making connections without expecting anything in return. Meanwhile, in taker cultures, the norm is to get as much as possible from others while contributing less in return. Employees help only when they expect the personal benefits to exceed the costs, as opposed to when the organizational benefits outweigh…
Read More »"How far would you go to find your passion?" Drew Dudley in this thought-provoking blog entry that I really recommend that you should read. OSS are one of the fundamental building blocks of the Communications Networks that are driving the Digital Revolution. OSS have the ability to make the Digital experience better. As a rule, OSS have so many ways to improve that almost any effort…
Read More »"What do you think the difference is between having 2 reasons to achieve a goal and having 100 reasons? When you have 100 reasons, reaching a goal is pretty much a certainty." Ron Whitaker in this interesting blog that recounts an urban legend study about goal setting. Ron's blog also provides a downloadable worksheet for planning and goal setting. The goals and action plan are designed…
Read More »"I used to say of him (Napoleon) that his presence on the field made the difference of 40,000 men." Duke of Wellington. If you really want to learn about your OSS deeply, you have to get out into the battlefield - at the customer site, with the OSS operators, with the developers, with the innovators in your field, with the CSP's customers who are touched by…
Read More »"Why would any company pay a computer programmer with out-of-date skills a salary of say $150,000, when it can hire a fresh graduate — who has no skills — for around $60,000? Even if it spends a month training the younger worker, the company is still far ahead. The young understand new technologies better than the old do, and are like a clean slate." Vivek Wadhwa…
Read More »"Resilience is accepting your new reality, even if it's less good than the one you had before. You can fight it, you can do nothing but scream about what you've lost, or you can accept that and try to put together something that's good." Elizabeth Edwards. Many leading OSS products have been built around concepts that have little relevance today. They have been enhanced and enhanced…
Read More »"I consider each business investment based on concept and revenue." Daymond John. Many CSPs are in an era of reducing revenues as their historic cash-cows such as voice calls (especially STD and IDD calls), text messages and data are becoming increasingly commoditised or replaced by Over The Top (OTT) service offerings. They're also scrambling to identify revenue replacement mechanisms. Smart grids, mobile payments, increasing smart-phone usage…
Read More »"48% of sales people never follow up with a prospect 25% of sales people make a second contact and stop 12% of sales people only make three contacts and stop ONLY 10% of sales people make more than three contacts 2% of sales are made on the first contact 3% of sales are made on the second contact 5% of sales are made on the third…
Read More »"Companies can get too big. There is such a thing as diseconomies of scale, which occurs when companies get less efficient after reaching a certain size." Chris Mayer In the agrarian age, a vendor typically had a small, local, loyal tribe. In the industrial age, "factories" dominated creating vastly more product more efficiently and was able to reach a much larger tribe. In the information age,…
Read More »"Courage is not the absence of fear, but rather the judgement that something else is more important than fear" No OSS analogies apply today.
Read More »"Commitment and talent are unconnected unless you connect them" John C. Maxwell. OSS live and die on the quality of the connections you are able to make with them. Commitment and talent are but one of many. There are so many others including: Performance and maintenance; Process and life-cycle; Outages and spares; Resolutions and knowledge sharing; Designs and delivery; Usage patterns and capacity planning; Inventory and customer…
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