NEWS AND ARTICLES

Lifted from the Book One Day at a Time by Francis Kong

A man went into a restaurant and ordered breakfast. He told the waiter, “I want two boiled eggs, one of them so undercooked that it runs, the other one overcooked so hard, that it feels like rubber. I want my coffee cold and rancid, and my butter so hard it can’t be cut.”

The waiter said, “ We can’t do that.”

He said, “Sure you can. You did it yesterday.”

Sarcastic, wasn’t he? But the customer has made a salient point. We must continually strive to improve. We can’t do things today the way we did them yesterday and still expect to be successful.

The 21^st century customer is highly informed and offered many choices. Therefore, quality in product and service becomes of utmost importance. Yet if there’s one thing we need to know about quality, it is that everything starts with attention to detail.

Consider the restaurant business for example.  A white tablecloth with one tiny food stain on it is 99% clean. But, does the 99% matter to the customer? Every person who sees it will remember the stain, not the rest of the cloth.

Details can build empires. Walt Disney’s huge business was made in large part by how much attention he paid to details. From creating cartoon images, to flying over to Disneyland twice a week to spot-check for cleanliness, Disney knew that if enough details were perfect, the end product would be too.

I have been to Disneyland Anaheim, Orlando, Paris, Tokyo and Hong Kong. The one thing that amazes me is that the same level of cleanliness and quality of service is standard anywhere I went.

The average life expectancy of a piece of gum discarded on Main Street at Disney World is less than fifteen minutes. Little details add up to more than just a clean park. They reflect an attitude that pervades the organization.

Seth Godin in his Wisdom Incorporated gives us more stories of actual business cases that exhibit the importance of giving attention to detail.

• For the Opticon Company, a three-cent earplug translated into a tremendous increase in new business. The hearing aid company was getting requests from customers, mostly audiologists, for free replacement parts. After the Chief Financial Officer revealed that an earplug cost the company only three cents, management decided to send people five free earplugs every time they asked for just one. Not only did the new policy attract new business, many customers who had previously dropped Opticon came back. A three-cent earplug isn’t a big deal. Until you need one and can’t find it. Because of such attention to detail, according to Company President Peter Hahn, monthly customer calls went up from 4,000 to 10,000 within six months.

• There is an accountant at Fidelity who has worked hard all his life. He stayed late, kept his nose to the grindstone, and moved up the organization. Then, when working on a spreadsheet that computed the annual return of the Magellan Fund, the largest mutual fund in the world, he failed to recheck his numbers. The result: Magellan reported a profit instead of a loss. When the mistake was found, it generated international headlines. All the hard work, all the late nights, did not mean anything because of one missed detail. For the rest of his career, the accountant will be known as the guy who made the mistake on the Magellan Fund.

• Lack of attention to detail can result in tragedy. The Space Shuttle Challenger exploded because a fifteen cent rubber part did not function in unusually cold weather. Several brilliant scientists were killed and a multi-billion dollar program was jeopardized because this one tiny detail was overlooked.

An old hand in training seminars for American Airways always used the following example to explain the critical importance of details:

Every day, thousands of employees worked incredibly hard to ensure a passenger’s loyalty to American Airlines. But if a reservation was wrong, or the ticket was written out incorrectly, or the flight got out late, or one crew member wasn’t friendly, or a bag went missing, it didn’t matter to the passenger that everything else was perfect. One mistake by one employee could mean that the work of thousands – from the corporate office to the maintenance hangars to the cockpit crew ­–­ had gone for naught.

That is how details can make or break you. We need to understand that giving attention to detail means furthering quality. When it comes to thoroughness, understand that sometimes it is not the lack of a system but the lack of effort that causes a lapse in details.

A diligent heart and a purposeful approach to your work would make you give more care and attention to detail. Big things, after all, is simply the totality of tiny things put together.