Today, people are working harder than ever, especially in non face-to-face customer support centres. People and organisations are reshaping. They are still re engineering. They are reinventing wheels. They are attempting to improve quality...sometimes. They work to reduce cycle times.
But in a seeming paradox, these organisations are not maintaining a competitive edge. In many/most organisations today, people are watching helplessly as traditional market leadership positions erode.
Some become gripped in a death spiral of cost cutting in which real solutions are increasingly elusive and downsizing replaces common sense strategy. The turnover in the ranks of Fortune 500 companies continues to accelerate, standing today at one third ever decade and rising. The same pointless churning is found everywhere: in the private sector, in government, in not-for-profits.
You cannot build a winning organisation by simply adapting, trying to accommodate what is going on around you. To win, you have to get out front -- and stay there !
Embracing speed, quality, or cost cutting as a strategy is tantamount to saying that you're going to run faster and faster, better and better, leaner and leaner -- forever! And that is just impossible. You cannot run faster and faster forever. You can fine-tune your engine, you can surge, you can stretch capacity -- there are many ways of improving performance, but they ALL have limits.
At some point, neither speed nor quality is a sustainable competitive advantage. Cost cutting as an end in itself is worst of all because it merely forces the old engine to labour harder and harder. To be effective, change must be substantive -- it must add value and contribute to the long-run health of the organisation.
When unaccompanied by real change, cost cutting is all pain and little gain.
