I have been swamped for the last while, hence the poor record on blog posts. I thought I would share an article I wrote recently for our internal employee publication:
THE POWER OF QUESTIONS
One of the things that I like about SYNNEX is our tremendous efficiency. And although efficiency isn’t always a simple task, in the short time I have been here, I have come to see a willingness to change as long as it increases our efficiency. For example, look at the number of new positions in China. Look at the number of changes made to the systems and think how differently you did your job two years ago versus how you do it today.
After 25 years of running EMJ, I had developed systems and methodologies to deal with my time and my schedule. When I started working at SYNNEX, those systems that had served me well for so many years, no longer worked. All of a sudden I had too many emails; I had too many meetings; I had too many people asking for a piece of my time. I wasn’t being efficient and I needed a change.
The question that I asked myself was "How can I change my systems to allow me to handle the increased volume?"
For a company to continue to thrive, we need to ask ourselves these "how" questions and never accept the status quo. We need to look at every process to figure out if there is a better way of doing it. There is tremendous power in the questions that we ask.
If I were to ask the question, "How can we ship 5 percent more?", usually the answer is that we keep doing the job the same way that we have always been doing it except we need to work a bit harder. If we ask big questions like, "How can we sell 50 percent more?", our mind automatically figures that we need to do something differently than what we have been doing and come up with more creative solutions.
Other companies depend on us to provide such efficient work on a daily basis, so by asking the question "How," we can open up the possibilities.
Good Question, We asked how come? as well as How, and realized we are far behind in our thinking about how we run our internal systems. We've made the decision to outsource the app hosting to a data centre, leverage those resources and free ours for the "sales" improvement. two birds, one stone. In the process we discovered what an inexpensive solution it really is and that we should have been "selling this a long time ago", so we started selling it.
ReplyDeleteThe second one that came of this, since it dovetails into the first, is, Sell Logistics and Web integration for a manufacturing co. or mini distribution companies, or just plain sellers on the web these services by integrating tools and security into their businesses, tremendous value to these accounts and a completely new way of thinking for them. Funny thing is it makes sense to them, its usually not that easy, now the next question is - How - do we access Many accounts, handle them with the Almost Free, perfect, Now model and keep clients happy. Still working on this one...
Regards,
Kevin.