People Business

Aug 3, ’11 5:01 PM

Bill Marriott describes one of the vital aspects of Marriott’s business – standard operating procedures (SOPs). These rules and guidelines are devilish in the details and they have helped sustain the standardized and consistent product and service offerings at Marriott. An example of an SOP is a guide setting out sixty-six separate steps for cleaning a hotel room in less than half an hour. It is an example of operations on steroids.

However, he understands the limitations of this engineering approach and makes the point that it has its place.

“What solid systems and SOPs do is nip common problems in the bud so that staff can focus instead on solving uncommon problems that come their way … by nailing the basics into place, systems allow employees to provide more customized customer service. They can just get on with the job of delivering the kind of quality attention that distinguishes extraordinary from ordinary” (Marriott and Brown, The Spirit to Serve, p. 25-26).”

He describes this type of extra-mile customer service as “stuff that no SOP can cover.” It reminds me of Atul Gawande’s point about checklists in the surgery room. Gawande shared during a lecture that the pilot who landed the plane over the Hudson river was only able to do so because he didn’t have to worry about the basics (since they were all covered) and could focus entirely on landing the plane over the Hudson, something that he wasn’t trained to do.

An excellent passage on the humanistic aspect of Marriott’s philosophy and some thoughts on service design possibilities:

“The philosophy of putting employees first is particularly important in our industry, because Marriott is in the people business, not just the service business.
What do I mean by that? When your job is to supply customers with answers to two of life’s basic needs – food and lodging – you’re touching on pretty special human territory. Even if our customers aren’t conscious of it, they have very definite expectations about not only the tangible parts of eating and sleeping – good food, a comfortable bed – but also the intangibles of those experiences: how they’re greeted, how their questions are answered, how their special problems are handled. That’s where the right human touch can make all the difference between a mediocre or poor experience and a positive, even unforgettable one” (Marriott and Brown, The Spirit to Serve, p. 35-36).

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Relationship Between Rhetoric and Poetics

Jul 21, ’11 2:34 PM

Logic is from rhetoric to poetics – from what Buchanan calls the forethought (which is captured in Western culture as an “architectonic” or “master” art, p. 31), “the particular conception of design that stands behind the product” (p. 27), to making. He captures the humanistic narrative of design’s history and demonstrates how the relationship between design as rhetoric and making (poetics) changes – and really gets separated following the Renaissance when people arbitrarily separated thinking/thought and doing. The 20th century has seen an emergence of rhetoric, or design as a new liberal art. For example, the original Bauhaus was a struggle between rhetoric and poetics … they had a vision of making but not a systematic vision of forethought … the intellectual, thinking aspect was only captured in the personality of the leadership. Therefore, it did not last. We are at that point in history where rhetoric is coming on the scene again and design, as an architectonic art, has the ability to close the gap between thinking and making (Basically, a summary of Buchanan’s Rhetoric, Humanism, and Design).

If the subject matter of design is indeterminate – potentially universal in scope, because design may be applied to new and changing situations, limited only by the inventiveness of the designer – then the subject matter of design studies is not products, as such, but the art of conceiving and planning products. In other words, the poetics of products – the study of products as they are – is different from the rhetoric of products – the study of how people come to be as vehicles of argument and persuasion about the desirable qualities of private and public life. The interplay between rhetoric and poetics of products is a significant issue in design studies, but the orientation in logical sequence is from rhetoric to poetics.

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Management Science and Medieval Christianity

Jul 21, ’11 1:53 PM

As much as I love simple and straightforward phenomenon, I really love it when a concept or idea has multiple layers of meanings. Interesting that Drucker points out the depth of the Scriptures in his essay on Management Science:

This however means, that ultimately “Management Science” may have to develop a logic which assumes that no statement is meaningful unless it is valid on several different levels of meaning. At the very least a way will have to be found to “translate” from one level to another, or to “transmit” from one model to another. There are developments in modern mathematics that seem to tend in such a direction. And the attempt has a distinguished precedent from which we might learn a good deal: Medieval “symbolical” logic with its assumption that every statement in Holy Writ has equal and full validity on four levels of meaning: as a historical account, as an allegory of Christ’s coming, as a moral precept and as spritual experience (Drucker, Management Science and the Manager, p. 125).

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