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Customer Service: an iPhone Case Study

by Pete Abilla on March 16, 2008

In some organizations, the Customer Service function is largely viewed as a cost center, draining resources of the firm.  I maintain that this viewpoint is one that less mature companies support.  In what follows, I’ll take a hypothetical iPhone defect case and show how customer service in this example plays a pivotal role in the [...]

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Barack Obama, “Yes We Can”: A PowerPoint Deck

by Pete Abilla on March 13, 2008

PowerPoint is a world of incomplete sentences, fragmented thoughts, unemotional, dispassionate, and semantically-empty byte-size blob of consultant-speak. Okay — maybe that tone is too strong but, generally, PowerPoint is not the most effective medium of communication.  I think most people would agree with that.  There are ways to communicate and effective ways of creating an [...]

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Visual Mismanagement

by Pete Abilla on March 12, 2008

hospital facility management, facility design

A few months ago we adopted our baby girl, Mylie.  During that hospital experience, I had an encounter with a faucet fraught with featuritis and one that wasn’t humane and, during that same time, I noticed a piece of visual management in the hospital room that wasn’t effective in its intention to provide or share [...]

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Black Holes and Supply Chains

by Pete Abilla on March 4, 2008

lack of communication in supply chain logistics

It’s critically important in any transaction to be able to answer the question “where’s my stuff” or “where are we in the process?” This requirement is often referred to as Traceability and Visibility; sometimes, people refer to this overall process as Click-to-Ship. Almost all transactions have Traceability and Visibility as a requirement. From the customer’s [...]

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Abraham Lincoln on Genchi Genbutsu

by Pete Abilla on February 25, 2008

I just finished reading the book Lincoln on Leadership. I found it to be an excellent book, highlighting the leadership lessons that made Lincoln one of the most revered and respected people in the world. I highly recommend this book. Abraham Lincoln’s life, in my view, was a personification of the Toyota Way — his [...]

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Lost-in-Translation in Large Teams

by Pete Abilla on February 24, 2008

team dynamics, team dysfunction

Team size can make a big difference in the success of your service or product.  What is counterintuitive for most people is that the larger the team size, the lower the likelihood of success for your service or product.  Why?  Entropy can set in and large teams are inherently bad vehicles for communication.  In what [...]

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Fun With The 2×2, Happiness Edition

by Pete Abilla on February 21, 2008

Following Kevin’s Fun With Statistics series, I’ll be doing a Fun With The 2×2 Matrix series.  In this part of the series, we’ll be looking at the dynamic between Success and Happiness. Most variables in life can probably be better modeled as a function, showing th inflection point at which there might be too much [...]

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2007 Year-in-Review

by Pete Abilla on February 18, 2008

I meant to post about site metrics for shmula.com in 2007, but am obviously very late.  In what follows, I’ll summarize the shmula.com blog traffic, reader demographics including gender, household income, and geolocation, feed subscribers, and also other site metric items. 2007 was a good year, though a much slower year in terms of posts [...]

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