EXCERPTS FROM MY SECOND BOOK - Take Your Service To Maximum "REDUCING ERRORS One way to reduce errors is to learn from the mistakes of others. Errors, whether made by you or others, can be turned to good effect if you learn from them. The only value in a mistake is the lesson it provides. One of my colleagues used to say that there are so many errors to make in a man’s life that he cannot afford to repeat the mistakes that others have made. That was his own way of conditioning his mind to learn from the errors of others. A company that I once worked for instituted a Learning from Incidents programme that committed a whole team to collating and disseminating lessons learnt from incidents (within and outside the company) to every department and active site. The sole aim was to prevent similar incidents from occurring in its own operations. At first it seemed that setting up an entire team just for this purpose was an unnecessary addition to the operating cost of the company, but the longer term benefit in the reduction of incidents became apparent, and made the pro- gramme worth the investment. Following the disastrous 2010 oil spillage in the Gulf of Mexico which sent British Petroleum’s share price plummeting, other major petroleum companies around the world took a deep interest in that incident and began to tighten their spill emergency response procedures. BP eventually lost its prime position on the performance charts to its competitors. It is only a naive business enterprise that repeats the mistakes of its competitors. You can beat your competitors by avoiding their errors. Every sensible service provider must identify their competitors, learn their strengths and weaknesses, and appropriate the learning into their own processes and systems for quality improvement. Any service provider that is not on a continuous improvement programme is moribund. It is headed for extinction. Service competition is getting stiffer and stiffer by the day, and only those who administer a generous doze of error-free injections into their operations can survive the competition. The competition field is a cruel turf. It has no sympathy for mistake makers."
Posted on: Mon, 10 Jun 2013 09:00:44 +0000
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