Job Satisfaction And You

It was a recent posting on 24/7 Wall St. (“Insightful Analysis and Commentary for U.S. & Global Equity Investors,” at www.247wallst.com) that put my column-writing brain into gear this month. Entitled “The Most (and Least) Satisfied Professions,” it discussed a 2012 telephone survey of 172,286 individuals over the age of 18 that was conducted by Gallup-Healthways. The findings were reported in something called the “Gallup-Healthways Well-Being Index” that tracks—tada!—well-being in the U.S. I was so troubled by the results noted below that I considered clicking on a link about miserable American cities just to make myself feel better.

Getting The Most From Your Reliability Consultants

This month’s column is dedicated both to consultants and their clients (with a bit more emphasis on the clients getting the most out of mutually beneficial client-consultant relationships).

Consultants abound. There are plenty of them (us) offering a range of just about any type of assistance and services your business might ever need. I’ve served as a consultant to hundreds of businesses and thousands of individuals for much longer than I care to add up. I have also rubbed shoulders with countless consultants in related and unrelated fields. You can trust me on this: All consultants are not created equal. Celebrate the differences!

Is Benchmarking Part Of Your Strategy?

When was the last time someone in your organization suggested a benchmarking study, for maintenance or any other company function? Here’s my guess: A long time, if ever. A chief exception: multi-site operations where cross-site benchmarking is policy. But that’s internal benchmarking, which was not the focus of this month’s questions for our MT Reader Panel. We were looking for Panelists’ experience with external benchmarking (where an organization’s cost and performance data is evaluated against that of the same function at a different, similarly sized company, especially one identified as best-practice).

Little Acts Produce Big Results

As we ponder ways to improve customer intimacy, we are inundated with tools like CRM, VOC, RSS and a slew of other TLAs (three-letter acronyms). While the concept is making some software companies and consultants very wealthy, I’m struck by the desire to build a customer-intimate culture—one focused on delivering a positive experience for the customer. This desire reminds me of a story one of our associates recently shared with me.