ServiceFriday: Embrace the Future or Become Like the Dinosaur – A Warning to Service Managers

Technology is evolving at an incredibly mind boggling pace.  Those within the service sector who resist or refuse to accept the ever-changing forces of technological advancement will not only be left behind, but are at risk of being crushed by competitors. In a piece in Mother Jones magazine, Kevin Drum calls out services managers and points to inadequacies within the service sector in this regard:

“unless they’re forced to at the point of a metaphorical gun—as so many manufacturing managers were in the 70s and 80s—service-sector managers are lazy. But they’re lazy in a very specific way: they don’t really understand technology; they don’t want to understand technology; and they refuse to bother making their underlings understand technology. They much prefer to do all they stuff they enjoy doing instead: schmoozing customers, holding meetings, reading and writing reports, and so on.

This needs to change. In the same way that successful companies in the 50s benefited from rigorous old-school management techniques that needed to be daily routines, successful companies today need to really, truly, and rigorously insist that everyone from the vice presidents down understands and uses the best possible technology. Stop complaining that it’s boring. Stop complaining that it’s hard to use. Stop complaining that typing is hard because of your arthritis or whatever your excuse of the week is. If you’re not spending ten hours out of every week deeply engaged with other managers and lower-level workers about the technology that runs your company and how to make it better, then you’re probably wasting your time. 

Good technology, diligently and rigorously applied, is what differentiates companies today. Use it. Hire only people who are willing to use it. And fire anyone who won’t.”

To read the original article in Mother Jones, visit: https://bit.ly/2CnYh1p

HT: bradford-delong.com