• At Harvard Business Review, Adam Richardson writes about using Customer Journey Maps to improve Customer Experiences. I highly recommend this approach which allows you to understand and optimize your customer touch-points.
• The SystematicHR blog urges HR professionals to develop their own linkage analyses to show the impact of HR activities / initiatives on business outcomes. What is the point of running initiatives after initiatives if we cannot articulate its impact on the business!
• Mary Lorenz touches upon How NOT to Motivate People!
• From the Bersin & Associates blog, here is an interesting piece on why is it hard to hire during a economic recovery.
• How about rejuvenating capitalism? Is it dead in the wake of one of the biggest crises that hit us over the last couple of years? Gary Hamel shares his thought on “Capitalism is Dead. Long Live Capitalism.”
• Julian Birkinshaw takes a closer view of management. What happened to it, how it lost credibility and what is the future?
• If you are an Enterprise 2.0 advocate working in a traditional organization and you want to implement “social tools”, what would be your argument? Gautam Ghosh shares his thoughts.

• So, what is the purpose of business? To make money, right? And where did that “mission” take us in the last couple of years! Michael Skapinker, a columnist in Financial Times, has a different perspective. He says the purpose of business is to earn respect. Must read!

• For those of you don’t know, Marketing is another subject that is close to my heart. I did spend some time in that area. Here’s a piece from the McKinsey Quarterly titled “A Marketer’s Guide to Behavioral Economics.” Now, behavioral economics is such an interesting subject and this piece talks about its basic applications in marketing. The possibilities of this field are endless.

• David Zinger contemplates about the future of Employee Engagement. He puts down his predictions about Employee Engagement in 2020.

• Finally, on the HBR blog, I found some really cool stuff. If you are a data visualization fan, you are going to love how Twitter data can be visualized. See here and here.

Here are the charts:

Fascinating stuff!

UPDATE: From the GigaOM blog, here’s a fresh post that “exposes Nokia’s Achilles heel”.

Let me stop here and let’s hear from the man himself.

Check it out!

I was discussing a company’s employee benefits package with a group of people the other day. Specifically, I found their health insurance program very intriguing and couldn’t help chuckling about it. 

This company is based in Singapore and has a self-administered health insurance plan i.e. the company doesn’t buy group insurance for the employees from the market, but instead provides health benefits to employees from it’s own funds. In Singapore, the medical system typically works in the following way:

• You have a health problem. You can go to a local clinic where a General Physician (GP) will try to diagnose the problem, conduct tests and suggest appropriate medication. 
• If the GP’s treatment solves the problem, you are fine.
• In case the GP feels that you need to seek specialized medical advice & treatment, they would refer you to a Specialist doctor in one of the hospitals and then the patient has to take it forward from there. 
• Needless to say, specialized medical care is more expensive than GP services.

The insurance plan of the organization I was talking about, reimburses 80% of the total medical expenses, if you go to the GP. And, it reimburses 70% of the total medical expenses, if you need to see the Specialists after the GP consultation. So, effectively, if you have bigger health problems, there is a lower percentage of reimbursement. One could look at this benefit structure as the company’s way to manage risks i.e. not making itself liable for higher payouts for medical bills of employees with relatively more complicated health problems. But, to me, there is a more subtle message in here. I also sense that this is a small, gentle incentive for employees to pay attention to their health and stay healthy. It is almost akin to having a small penalty if you have slightly complicated health problems.

The economics of incentives continue to fascinate me!

A $100 million push to bring Singapore service to the next level has been launched.

The money will go towards funding training and other programmes for staff and supervisors in the retail, food and beverage, health and transport sectors.

It will also be used to pay for research on service, and to monitor customer satisfaction levels.

Also part of the plan: Promoting, publicising and recognising good service.

While this is a well-intended initiative, I hope there is sufficient focus on “incentivization” of good service. As I noted in my earlier post on the “built-in” service charges in Singapore restaurants, the practice doesn’t adequately encourage great customer service, because the “incentive” is guranteed. So, in my humble opinion, a more balanced approach which focuses both on behavioral changes and up-skilling, alongwith dangling a ‘carrot’ would be more useful.

• Many of these jobs are held by well-paid expats, who also help, in their own way, consumer spending. With this outflux of people, consumer spending is also likely to take a hit, further fuelling the downturn.
• This does not portray Singapore’s policy of attracting and retaining foreign talent. The “make hay while the sun shines” syndrome is not great for building an image as a top-talent destination.
• Worst case – even if this happens, can companies look at a “CRM” kind of a solution to manage talent? I think this will be especially relevant for roles which are highly specialized and/or senior level. A nice starting point to think about this can be found at this SystematicHR blog post.

As per this article in The Economic Times, India received a total of about 5 million tourists from abroad. Contrast this to the tiny island-nation of Singapore – it got over 10 million tourists in 2007 alone! I mean India is hundred times bigger than Singapore and has far too many  attractions and things to see & do. The culture is rich, there are great food choices, there are the hills and the plains and the beaches and the backwaters. But, the numbers fall very short of expectations. It may be just inadequate marketing. Or it can be bad perceptions about the tourism & general infrasructure in the country. Or it can even be poor word-of-mouth from tourists who had a not-so-pleasant experience. Whatever is the case, there is an urgent need to come up with a holistic approach to tap this important revenue stream.

What do you think are the top reasons for the below par performance of the Indian tourism sector?