Academic Management
Author Alasdair White
There are different interpretations of the term ‘customerization’ and in my next few blogs I will look at one aspect: the process in which the customer is encouraged or made to carry out the transactional activities of the business.
Close on 50 years ago, my father, then working for Mobil, was project manager for the development and subsequent opening of the very first 24-hour self-service petrol station in the UK somewhere near Southampton. Today, just about every petrol station/service station is self-service but back then this was a radical shift in the operating model for retailing petrol.
The logic behind the move was impeccable as far as the company was concerned. The margin on petrol sales was minute, often as low as pennies per gallon, and the government saw it as an easy target for taxation which meant that there was adequate cash-flow but very little operating margin with which to develop the services on offer and to pay the staff of attendants who, until then, had filled the cars (‘pumped gas’), cleaned windscreens, checked the oil and water and generally provided a useful service to the customer. Now that was about to change – the attendants were to be no more, the customer himself or herself would now have to get out of the car in all weathers and fill their own tanks, clean their own windscreens, check their own oil and so on whilst still paying exactly the same price for their fuel as they did in pre-self-service days. The retail margins were simply too small for price discounting. Read the rest of this entry »
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Author Alasdair White
Recent reports in Business Week and The Economist suggest that business schools are not as recession-proof as once thought.
But there is more to this than first meets the eye and there are other possible implications – Business Week reported that business school applications (particularly for MBAs but also for undergraduate degrees) have been sliding downwards since the middle of last year. The immediate impulse has been to blame the recession (and it certainly has an impact) but research is showing up a more worrying issue: business schools and particularly the MBAs are seen as being too closely aligned with the thinking that has led to the current recession – and that the degrees being offered are not supplying the skills needed – skills such as thinking and interpreting rather than simply analysing, understanding the range of strategic Read the rest of this entry »