I was reading Time magazine’s special Style and Design special supplement and it highlighted that China is now the world’s third largest consumer of luxury goods, accounting for 12% of global sales.

It could surpass US or Japan as the world’s largest purchaser of luxury items by 2015.

One brand that is famous is Rolex, which is known by 76% of those people surveyed, and it is estimated that 22% of the affluent consumers in China owns one.  66% of affluent Chinese men is said to have bought at least one watch in the past six months and the average paid was $2,253 per watch.

If you are a manager, or an entrepreneur, you know that you win or lose competitiveness in the effectiveness and efficiency of your people’s productivity and operations.  How well you execute an order, how well you respond to a routine issue of customer complaint, how well you manage your inventory, cash and receivables  -  all will define your position in the marketplace.

It is for this reason, that mastery of production management, or in the newer lingo, operations management is a skill that many companies covet  ( production management was the old terminology when many companies were predominantly industrial and manufacturing.  Operations Management was termed with the recent shift of many enterprises into service operations) .  If you look at the way Wal Mart squeezes every cent cost off to give their lower prices everyday, or the way McDonald’s have grown to over 30,000 stores worldwide, it is operations management at work.  McDonald’s is hardly known for having the best tasting food, but the efficiency at which it serves its customers highlights the importance of proper operations and process.

Read the rest of this entry »

For the last few days, I have been grappling with changing the work function of an employee. I believe he has not been quite effective nor efficient, so I sat down, and told him why there were certain things he needed to prioritize, and set out to sit down with him on the task list that needed to be accomplished, and the reporting that he needs to do.

So far I have been unsuccessful.  I think introducing change is not so difficult if not that you are also trying to change a person’s habits, and his years of attitudes and outlook.  Even if he agrees with you logically that it is better for him to set out to do what you outlined to him, his ability to do or change his workstyle may not be so easy.  

 It is many times easier for you to get a job where his interests, inclination, and workstyle will be a natural fit to what you want to do rather than cram a person into a position, as if trying to squeeze a cube into a round hole.

I remember too well the advice of Peter Scholtes, " Employees don’t resist change.  They resist being changed." 

Related Posts:

-Change Management

-The People Who Corrupt You

-Changing Processes or Habits

-On Change and On Reading

-Shifting Gears