Are You Engaged?

HOT READS FOR THE PRACTIONER

Title: Human Sigma: Managing the Employee-Customer Encounter (2007)

Competencies: customer service, leadership, communication skills, empowering others, driving change, strategic planning

Who benefits: employees, customers, organizations’ bottom-line

Consultant Usage: multiple uses in training and consulting, executive coaching

What’s it about? Any professional book with a quote from an Arnold Schwarzenegger movie and references to The Terminator School of Management on the first page gets my attention.  The authors raise the question themselves on what is the connection to a book on management.  To tell the truth, I never did get the connection.  But the introduction was still most interesting, so I read on.

I am glad I did. 

And I can give this book my highest recommendation if you are in the customer service business.

I can also give one of my shortest ever reviews: Human Sigma does for customer service quality what Six Sigma did and does for manufacturing quality.

Not that I am quite ready to stop.  Here are some areas of interest covered in the book: (1) Understanding the nature of talent; (2) How employee and customer engagement interact; (3) The five new rules for management; (4) Customer satisfaction – a flawed measurement; and (5) Where employee engagement happens (hence the title to this posting – and it is not a Harlequin moment).  

For a summary or to whet your appetite, you can view a five-minute video clip on YouTube featuring one of the authors and a dead raccoon.  Yes, a raccoon.  And the raccoon story is either terribly funny or terribly sad.  But at least watch the video to that point! 

Did I mention that Human Sigma has a major impact on the company’s bottom line?

Catch you next week.

 
[tags]customer service, six sigma, human sigma, customer satisfaction, employee engagement, rules for management, bottom line, bill bradley, william bradley,  bradley[/tags]

Bill Bradley

Bill Bradley (mostly) retired after 35 years in organizational consulting, training and management development. During those years he worked internally with seven organizations and trained and consulted externally with more than 90 large and small businesses, government agencies, hospitals and schools.