Organizing for digital leadership

Companies will need to relook at the entire business model in order to succeed in the digital space. Today, for example, the traditional boundary between marketing and sales has become blurred. This evaluation will involve establishing new structures, metrics, and processes to ensure that marketing and sales are adequately linked with all the areas of the business that could contribute to the company’s ability to understand and engage with consumers.

Three ways to organize for digital leadership
Take marketing beyond the marketers. Each component of the organization—from finance to operations—should view itself as part of an “engagement engine” that informs product, service, and customer interactions. Traditionally-structured and linear market research efforts should be replaced by more test-and-learn approaches in order to keep pace. This enables the company to engage their customers across proliferating media and interactive channels on an ongoing basis—and on the rapid time cycles digital media demands.
Enhance marketing and sales as the publisher and content driver. Marketers are generating an ever-escalating volume of content, often becoming publishers on a global scale. They create videos for marketing, selling, and servicing every product; coupons and other promotions delivered through social media; and applications and decision support tools. Our research shows that in companies where the marketing function takes on the role of publisher in chief, consumers develop a clearer sense of the brand and are better able to articulate the attributes of specific products.
Harness marketplace intelligence effectively across the business. As more touchpoints become digital, opportunities are increasing to collect and use customer information to understand the consumer decision journey and knit together the customer experience. More advanced marketers are using digital channels to involve consumers in their strategic marketing and product development to an unprecedented extent. This approach enables them to communicate with consumers in new ways, sell in new ways, service their customers in new ways, and obtain insights about their customers in new ways. These developments affect every aspect of marketing and sales work: product development, pricing, communication, multichannel management, and customer relationship and lifecycle management.

Team performance is critical to an organization's success, but many teams feel they're not performing as well as they should be. Poor team performance, especially among teams that work across departments or functions, tend to breed silos, competing agendas, turf wars, and indecision; high performance produces organizational coherence and focus. 

Many teams have difficulty focusing their efforts in the right places. In our research on teams of senior executives, only 38 percent said their teams focused on work that truly benefited from their top-team perspective. Only 35 percent said their top teams allocated the right amounts of time among the various topics they considered important, such as strategy and people.

What are they doing instead? Everything else. Too often, these teams of senior executives fail to set or enforce priorities and instead try to cover the waterfront. In other cases, they fail to distinguish between topics they must act on collectively and those they should merely monitor. The same can be true of teams at all levels of an organization who face a challenge investing team time on the aspects of their work that requires them to work together.

These shortcomings create jam-packed agendas that no team can manage properly. Often, the result is energy-sapping meetings that drag on far too long and don’t engage the team, leaving members wondering when they can get back to “real work.” Team leaders need to to respond when such dysfunctions arise; it’s unlikely that the team’s members— who have their own goals and personal career incentives— will be able to sort out a coherent set of collective top-team priorities without a concerted effort.

Here's how one team found its focus: The CEO and the top team at a European consumer goods company rationalized their priorities by creating a long list of potential topics they could address. Then they asked which of these had a high value to the business, given where they wanted to take it, and would allow them, as a group, to add extraordinary value. While narrowing the list down to ten items, team members spent considerable time challenging each other about which topics individual team members could handle or delegate. They concluded, for example, that projects requiring no cross-functional or cross-regional work, such as addressing lagging performance in a single region, did not require the top team’s collective attention even when these projects were the responsibility of an individual team member. For delegated responsibilities, they created a transparent and consistent set of performance indicators to help them monitor progress.

This change gave the team breathing room to do more valuable work. For the first time, it could focus enough effort on setting and dynamically adapting cross-category and cross-geography priorities and resource allocations and on deploying the top 50 leaders across regional and functional boundaries, thus building a more effective extended leadership group for the company. This, in turn, proved crucial as the team led a turnaround that took the company from a declining to a growing market share. The team’s tighter focus also helped boost morale and performance at the company’s lower levels, where employees now had more delegated responsibility. Employee satisfaction scores improved to 79 percent, from 54 percent, in just one year.

Senior executive teams frequently struggle to distinguish between the strategic priorities that they must focus on and the operational details, which they should delegate. Indeed, teams at all levels must decide where to focus their efforts, but the issue is particularly important for senior teams who must invest their efforts on strategic decisions that affect the entire organization, while resisting the temptation to micro-manage the operational details.

When the culture in an organization becomes more risk averse, increasingly minor decisions get shifted to the top. To guard against this and the inefficiencies that accompany it, teams at all levels must get more comfortable with their own decisions. Senior managers have a crucial role to play in this: if the first crisis that results from a bad decision results in a punitive atmosphere, teams are more likely to pass the decision upward next time. On the other hand, if the organization's culture can maintain accountability while allowing teams and individuals to learn from their mistakes, it can build over time the right level of confidence for teams to make their own decisions.

Team performance is critical to an organization's success, but many teams feel they're not performing as well as they should be. Poor team performance, especially among teams that work across departments or functions, tend to breed silos, competing agendas, turf wars, and indecision; high performance produces organizational coherence and focus. 

Many teams have difficulty focusing their efforts in the right places. In our research on teams of senior executives, only 38 percent said their teams focused on work that truly benefited from their top-team perspective. Only 35 percent said their top teams allocated the right amounts of time among the various topics they considered important, such as strategy and people.

What are they doing instead? Everything else. Too often, these teams of senior executives fail to set or enforce priorities and instead try to cover the waterfront. In other cases, they fail to distinguish between topics they must act on collectively and those they should merely monitor. The same can be true of teams at all levels of an organization who face a challenge investing team time on the aspects of their work that requires them to work together.

These shortcomings create jam-packed agendas that no team can manage properly. Often, the result is energy-sapping meetings that drag on far too long and don’t engage the team, leaving members wondering when they can get back to “real work.” Team leaders need to to respond when such dysfunctions arise; it’s unlikely that the team’s members— who have their own goals and personal career incentives— will be able to sort out a coherent set of collective top-team priorities without a concerted effort.

Here's how one team found its focus: The CEO and the top team at a European consumer goods company rationalized their priorities by creating a long list of potential topics they could address. Then they asked which of these had a high value to the business, given where they wanted to take it, and would allow them, as a group, to add extraordinary value. While narrowing the list down to ten items, team members spent considerable time challenging each other about which topics individual team members could handle or delegate. They concluded, for example, that projects requiring no cross-functional or cross-regional work, such as addressing lagging performance in a single region, did not require the top team’s collective attention even when these projects were the responsibility of an individual team member. For delegated responsibilities, they created a transparent and consistent set of performance indicators to help them monitor progress.

This change gave the team breathing room to do more valuable work. For the first time, it could focus enough effort on setting and dynamically adapting cross-category and cross-geography priorities and resource allocations and on deploying the top 50 leaders across regional and functional boundaries, thus building a more effective extended leadership group for the company. This, in turn, proved crucial as the team led a turnaround that took the company from a declining to a growing market share. The team’s tighter focus also helped boost morale and performance at the company’s lower levels, where employees now had more delegated responsibility. Employee satisfaction scores improved to 79 percent, from 54 percent, in just one year.

Senior executive teams frequently struggle to distinguish between the strategic priorities that they must focus on and the operational details, which they should delegate. Indeed, teams at all levels must decide where to focus their efforts, but the issue is particularly important for senior teams who must invest their efforts on strategic decisions that affect the entire organization, while resisting the temptation to micro-manage the operational details.

When the culture in an organization becomes more risk averse, increasingly minor decisions get shifted to the top. To guard against this and the inefficiencies that accompany it, teams at all levels must get more comfortable with their own decisions. Senior managers have a crucial role to play in this: if the first crisis that results from a bad decision results in a punitive atmosphere, teams are more likely to pass the decision upward next time. On the other hand, if the organization's culture can maintain accountability while allowing teams and individuals to learn from their mistakes, it can build over time the right level of confidence for teams to make their own decisions.

Libyan Col. Muammar Abu Minyar al-Gaddafi's death

First accounts are almost never correct, but if the circumstances of Libyan Col. Muammar Abu Minyar al-Gaddafi's death prove to be as reported, they will provide yet another, final irony in a life replete with them. The man whose success relied upon a combination of great-power manipulation and the ability to sustain the fantasy that he embodied the aspirations of his people succumbed in the end to a combination of great-power military intervention and the genuine aspiration of his people for a future free of his vicious domination.

Gaddafi's passing brings with it a welter of thoughts and observations. The world of 1969, when he first came to power, was very different from the world in which he died. It was a far simpler world, in which it was still possible for a handful of officers, led by one Captain Gaddafi, embedded in a puny, 6,000-man army, to overthrow a supposedly entrenched regime in a matter of two hours. The regime of King Idris was swept aside in part due to its irrelevance in an age of Pan-Arab nationalist revolution. Now, in our own time, the death of Gaddafi provides an exclamation point to the end of the succeeding era of supposed revolutionary renewal, the last vestiges of which are succumbing to the rising floodwaters of the Arab Spring.

In the valley of the blind, it is said, the one-eyed man is king. Gaddafi may have had an imperfect grasp, at best, of the revolutionary doctrines he espoused, but he reflected for a small, impoverished and isolated people the zeitgeist of 1960s and ‘70s leftist revolution and romantic pan-Arab socialism of his time. Like all such "revolutionaries", Gaddafi's avowed populism and devotion to equality were a sham. Instead, he and his Revolutionary Command Council would act as the "vehicle of national expression", in order to "raise the political consciousness of Libyans". He would embody the will of the Libyan people only after their will had been sufficiently instructed by their "Brother Leader".

One might have said of Gaddafi, in paraphrase, what Henry Kissinger once said of Archbishop Makarios of Cyprus: He was too great a man for such a small nation. Apparently much of the same opionion, Gaddafi quickly set about using Libya as a secure and easily-dominated platform from which to pursue far greater ambitions abroad. He shortly began to bestow the benefit of his world revolutionary leadership - and, more pointedly, his considerable petrodollar income - upon a smorgasbord of radical leftist, terrorist and separatist groups around the globe: From the IRA in Ireland, to the Baader-Meinhof Gang in Germany, to the FARC in Colombia, to the Moro National Liberation Front in the Philippines.

Curiously for one so rhetorically devoted to the cause of Palestinians, Gaddafi's relations with Palestinians themselves were generally wary and marginal. It cannot have been an accident that his most sustained relationship with a Palestinian group was with one almost unimaginably dysfunctional, internally murderous and sociopathic: The Abu Nidal Group.

Finding his brilliance sadly underappreciated among his fellow Arab leaders, despite his endless political manoeuvering, Gaddafi soon devoted the majority of his considerable energies upon the black African countries to his south, where poverty, political weakness and endemic religio-ethnic conflict provided a much more attractive forum for the Libyan Colonel's idiosyncratic combination of whimsical ideological fads, cynically selective philanthropy and Lilliputian military adventurism.

Gaddafi's scars on Libya

But nowhere were the consequences of Gaddafi's unique combination of pathologies more disastrously in evidence than in Libya itself. A little knowledge, they say, is a dangerous thing. To the longstanding cost of the Libyan people, Gaddafi managed to cobble together a collection of bits and pieces from his sophomoric understanding of the great ideologies and philosophical traditions of the modern era, sufficient to create his own crack-brained "Third International Theory", which found its practical expression in the Great Socialist Popular Libyan Arab Jamahiriyah. The administrative chaos and social atomisation created by some 2,000 overlapping "people's committees" created an environment perhaps uniquely susceptible to domination by the Brother Leader's signature combination of political manipulation and brutal intimidation.

Despite his professed lifelong aversion to Communism, the wily and ambitious colonel from Sirte was able to consistently manipulate cold-war and great-power rivalries to his benefit. He was thus able to acquire huge stocks of weapons from his Soviet and East-Bloc friends without ever subordinating himself to their ambitions, but most importantly, he was able to harness the expertise of the East Germans in one skill area critical to his long-term survival: social repression. This writer had a great deal of contact with people from many Arab countries during the 1980s and 1990s, but nowhere did he encounter a people so thoroughly cowed and intimidated in those years as the Libyans. The life of a Libyan official or anyone in a position to harm the interests of the regime was life in a snake-pit. Brother could not trust brother. In any group of three, at least one would have to be assumed by the others to be a regime informant.

In retrospect, it seems that Gaddafi's great turn to the West in 2003, when he accepted responsibility for the Lockerbie bombing, divulged so-called WMD programmes, and began to cooperate on counter-terrorism, was a sign that the end was nigh. Tired now, and focused on transferring power to his sons, Gaddafi could no longer claim to be in the ideological vanguard of the region, let alone the world. Nasserist Arab nationalism had run its course, and had long since been replaced by Islamism as the leading political current in the region, posing a direct threat to him and his intolerantly secular regime. A manipulator to the last, Gaddafi was willing to deal with his long-time enemies in the West in order to better preserve his power at home.

This marriage of convenience was never a comfortable one, based as it was on a very limited and highly tactical convergence of interests. Such cooperation might have been justifiable under the circumstances, and indeed was supported by this writer, but must also be acknowledged for what it was: An accommodation to an unfortunate reality in a highly imperfect world. Some might have thought that the opening between Libya and the West was a potential means of eventual reform, that the transition to the younger elements of the Gaddafi clan might carry with it the possibility of an evolving accommodation to the people's legitimate rights and wishes. What it signalled instead was a turn to the defensive, as a hideously outmoded and incorrigible regime found itself swimming against multiple tides of history.

A regime such as Gaddafi's is almost unimaginable now in all but the most regressive portions of the globe. A world in which street-sweepers have cell phones, where even the most humble citizens are intimately connected to a wider world, is one in which a bizarre historical artefact like the Gaddafi regime could never survive. The fact that he is finally gone will not by itself enable Libyans to realise their most ambitious and noble aspirations, but it must be seen for what it is: A necessary, if insufficient, start.

Robert Grenier was the CIA's chief of station in Islamabad, Pakistan, from 1999 to 2002. From October 2002 until December 2004, he was the CIA Iraq Mission Manager. He was also the director of the CIA's counterterrorism centre.

The views expressed in this article are the author's own.

Source: Al Jazeera 

Organizational Development through Team Building

There are a variety of situations where new teams are formed. The project based, cross-functional work team has become the basis of industry in the 1990’s. Virtual team organization is rapidly becoming the model for flexibility and agility in organizing quickly and effectively to get jobs done. New teams usually have a clear task focus in the early going and there is usually a clear understanding of the short term goals. The new team members are also generally technically competent and there usually is a challenge in the project that will draw on their technical capabilities. While the early activities of a team are clearly focused on task and work issues, relationship problems tend do develop as they do in any human system. By the time these interpersonal issues surface the team may be well along in its activities. The issues may become very difficult and very costly to work out later in the game. There is a significant benefit if a new team takes a short time at the beginning of its life to examine collaboratively how it is going to work together.


Developing Winning Teams

Every organization uses some kind of formal teamwork to get projects done. Many of them create teams up by giving them a vague, imperfect plan, sending them on their own way somehow expecting victory. Even if individual players are talented and creative, teams with firm goals and ways to achieve them alone succeed. Winning teams thrive on structure that’s created from the bottom up, yet guided by strong, confident leadership from the top of the organization. A good team relationship requires nurturing from a strong leader.

Communication in Teams

Communication, the most basic of management essentials, is needed to ensure timely feedback and immediate updates in teams. In teams, clarity, frequency and responsiveness are the keys of communication. Most of the communication is nonverbal and the verbal forms used need to be clear and delivered often. Regular meetings in a place or via conference call or other technology are essential for teams. Team coordinators should keep the agenda posted electronically in an area the whole team can access and encourage them to add to it. They should make answering team members’ emails and phone calls a priority. Although team members hardly need to be affectionate to each other to work well together, some level of personal interaction is crucial for team bonding. Supporting tools that can be obtained inexpensively or free like telephone and email, instant messaging systems, collaboration software, group bulletin boards or discussion areas and chat rooms are all useful for working and meeting together. Varying methods of communicating and learning which methods work best for which team members are vital steps. One of the most often neglected pieces to building a team is providing a safe place for interaction and discussion without the manager. Teams need a staff room. Members often develop ideas they might not feel comfortable expressing in public. Teams need them and if they ignore this need, they eliminate a chance for a more free change of ideas. Accomplishments must be acknowledged and celebrated, as a group when possible and appropriate. Organizations adopt several ways to achieve this, such as creating a periodic newsletter and email with a section in it for accolades, institution of a peer-to-peer award system, sending greeting cards or gift certificates from websites dedicated to these purposes. The principles of managing teams well are similar to the principles of managing anybody or anything well.

Practices to facilitate development of Teams in organizations

Organization Development facilitators should enable firms to hire team players by putting all job candidates through demanding office-wide scrutiny. Performance Incentives should be designed in such a manner that they are group-based and performance appraisals should include team working as a criterion. Intra-team conflicts should be resolved in the early stages. Unresolved conflicts caused due to employees’ mutual bickering can kill office morale and productivity. Organizations are deploying paid ombudsmen to help staffers get along and stifle office conflicts. As conflicts often arise in work teams, timely interventions to diffuse tensions and strengthen members’ interpersonal commitment should be introduced. A good team relationship requires nurturing from a strong leader. Leaders might cling to the idea of success being based on individuals, but the value of a great group must not be ignored by the leader. Effective interpersonal interaction would take place among team players communicate more effectively.

Organization development process should result in the development of a comprehensive and sustainable in-house leadership training program that would foster teamwork. The training programs should enable employees to learn how to handle different types of personalities. Towards the completion phase of team building intervention, team members should be capable of avoiding reciprocal rudeness and maintenance of unconditional politeness, escaping the trap of cliques, prevention of polarization of members into opposing factions, perpetrating the value of teams, overcoming the phenomenon of group think which occurs out of excessive demand for unanimity and illusion of invulnerability of the group, understanding the power of group synergy and social-facilitation in raising an organization’s productivity are quintessential qualities of the members of winning teams.

२७ असोज, काठमाडौँ । गैरआवासीय नेपाली संघ एनआरएनको अध्यक्षमा आगामी दुई वर्षे कार्यकालका लागि जीवा लामछिने निर्विरोध निर्वाचित हुनुभएको छ ।

अध्यक्षमा पुनः उम्मेदवारी दिएका निवर्तमान अध्यक्ष देवमान हिराचनलने निर्वाचनको मुखैमा आएर उम्मेदवारी फिर्ता लिएपछि लामिछाने सर्वसम्मत अध्यक्ष चुनिनुभएको हो । एनआरएन संस्थापक एवं संरक्षक उपेन्द्र महतो र पदाधिकारीबीच दुवै उम्मेदवारको रोहबरमा भएको बैठकले उम्मेदवारी फिर्ता लिन आग्रह गरेपछि हिराचन पछि हट्नु भएको हो । लामिछाने रुसमा उद्योग व्यवसाय सञ्चालन गर्दै आएका छन् । एनआरएन स्थापना भएको सन् २००३ देखि लगातार सक्रिय रहँदै आएका लामिछाने यसअघि एनआरएन उपाध्यक्ष र अन्तर्राष्ट्रिय समन्वय परिषदका अध्यक्षसमेत हुनुहुन्थ्यो । दोहोरो नागरिकता र एनआरएनले विदेशमा रहँदा आम्दानी गरेको रकम सामूहिक लगानीका लागि नेपाल भित्र्याउने विषयलाई लामिछानेले आफ्नो चुनावी एजेण्डा बनाउनुभएको थियो ।

जारी साधारणसभाका सहभागीलाई संक्षिप्त सम्बोधन गर्दै संरक्षक महतोले लामाछिनेलाई निर्विरोध निर्वाचित भएको घोषणा गर्नुभयो । हिरचानले उम्मेदवारी फिर्ता लिएर त्याग गरेको संरक्षक महतोको भनाइ थियो । निवर्तमान अध्यक्षसेत रहेका हिराचनले लामिछानेलाई पद हस्तान्तरणको घोषणा गर्दै ५७ देशमा रहेका एनआरएनहरुलाई एकताबद्ध बनाउन आफूले उम्मेदवारी फिर्ता लिएको बताउनुभएको छ ।

यसअघि पनि सर्वसम्मति बाटै चार कार्यकालका लागि एनआरएन नेतृत्व चयन हुँदै आएको थियो । एनआरएन पाचौँ विश्व सम्मेलनको तेस्रो तथा अन्तिम दिन राजधानीको सोल्टी होटलमा आज बिहान ११ बजेदेखि निर्वाचन हुने कार्यतालिका थियो । हिराचनले अघिल्लो कार्यकालमा थालेका काम पूरा गर्न आफू पुनः नेतृत्वमा आउन आवश्यक रहेको बताउँदै उमेदवारी दिएका थिए भने लामिछानेले हिराचनको कार्यकाल असफल भएको आरोप लगाउँदै आफू अध्यक्ष हुनुपर्ने तर्क अघि सारेका थिए । एनआरएनको कूल २० पदका लागि ३४ जनाको उम्मेदवारी परेकोमा अध्यक्षसहित ६ पदमा निर्विरोध भइसकेको छ भने २ जनाले उम्मेदवारी फिर्ता लिएका छन् । उपाध्यक्ष र महासचिवलगायत बाँकी पदमा पनि निर्विरोध निर्वाचित गर्ने प्रयास जारी छ ।

असोज २६ गते । चिकित्साशास्त्र विषय अध्ययन गर्न अब २५ लाख रुपियाँभन्दा धेरै तिर्नु नपर्ने भएको छ । चिकित्साशास्त्र अध्ययन गर्ने विद्यार्थीसँग सम्बन्धित शैक्षिक संस्थाले मनपरी शुल्क असुलेपछि त्रिभुवन विश्वविद्यालयले २५ लाख रुपियाँभन्दा बढी लिन नपाउने नियम बनाएको छ ।

विश्वविद्यालयको हालैको कार्यकारी परिषद्को बैठकले विद्यार्थीसँग किस्ताबन्दीमा शुल्क लिन पनि शैक्षिक संस्थाहरूलाई निर्देशन दिएको छ । त्रिवि योजना महाशाखाका प्रमुख प्रा. प्रल्हादराज पन्तले कलेजले मनपरी ढङ्गले शुल्क असुल गरेपछि त्यसलाई नियन्त्रण गर्न २५ लाख रुपियाँभन्दा बढी लिन नपाइने निर्णय विश्वविद्यालयले गरेको जानकारी दिनुभयो ।

त्रिविको निर्णयपछि मातहतका सम्बन्धनप्राप्त क्याम्पसमा एमबीबीएस र बीडीएस विषय अध्ययन गर्ने विद्यार्थीसँग तीनपटकको किस्ताबन्दीमा शुल्क लिनुपर्नेछ । तीन किस्ताबन्दीमा पहिलो पटक ५० प्रतिशत र बाँकी किस्ता दुईपटकमा तिर्नुपर्नेछ ।

महाशाखा प्रमुख पन्तका अनुसार तीन किस्ता कुन समयमा तिर्ने भन्ने कुरा त्रिविको चिकित्साशास्त्र अध्ययन संस्थानले निर्धारण गर्नेछ । यससम्बन्धी निर्णय हुन भने बाँकी रहेको बताइएको छ ।

त्रिवि मातहतका क्याम्पसमा एमबीबीएस अध्ययन गर्न बढीमा ३९ लाख रुपियाँसम्म एकमुष्ट लिने गरिएको थियो । काठमाडौँ उपत्यका र बाहिर सञ्चालित अन्य कलेजले पनि ३० लाखको हाराहारीमा शुल्क लिने गरेका थिए ।

महाशाखाका प्रमुख पन्तका अनुसार राजधानीको किष्ट कलेजले विद्यार्थीसँग सबैभन्दा बढी ३९ लाख रुपियाँ लिँदै आएको छ । शुल्क अत्यधिक भएको गुनासो गर्दै अभिभावक र विद्यार्थीले उजुरीसमेत गरेका थिए ।

२५ लाख रुपियाँ तीन किस्ताबन्दीमा तिर्न पाए सामान्य विद्यार्थीलाई पनि एमबीबीएस अध्ययन गर्न सहज हुने विश्वविद्यालयको मान्यता रहेको छ । योजना महाशाखाका प्रमुख पन्तले यसले सामान्य विद्यार्थीको पनि एमबीबीएस अध्ययनमा पहुँच बढ्ने विश्वास व्यक्त गर्नुभयो । त्यसैगरी विश्वविद्यालयले बीडीएस अध्ययनका लागि १२ लाख रुपियाँभन्दा बढी नलिन पनि सम्बन्धित कलेजहरूलाई निर्देशन दिएको छ ।

शुल्कको सीमा कार्यान्वयन भए नभएको बारेमा तत्काल अनुगमन गर्ने निर्णय पनि विश्वविद्यालयले गरेको छ । अनुगमनको जिम्मा चिकित्साशास्त्र अध्ययन संस्थान र त्रिविको योजना महाशाखालाई दिइएको छ ।

योजना महाशाखाका प्रमुख पन्तले अनुगमन तत्कालै सुरु गरिने जानकारी दिँदै यसै वर्षबाट सो शुल्क लागू गराइने बताउनुभयो ।

त्रिविको मातहतमा हाल वीरगन्ज मेडिकल कलेज, युनिभर्सल मेडिकल कलेज, किस्ट मेडिकल कलेज, जानकी मेडिकल कलेज, गण्डकी मेडिकल कलेज, पिपल्स डेन्टल कलेज, केडिया डेन्टल कलेज, चितवन स्कुल अफ मेडिकल साइन्सेसलगायतका कलेज सञ्चालनमा छन् ।

त्रिविका विभिन्न १७ वटा कलेजमा मेडिकल विषयको उच्च शिक्षाको पठनपाठन हुने गर्छ । ती कलेजले मनपरी ढङ्गले शुल्क असुलेको गुनासो अभिभावक र विद्यार्थीले गरेपछि किस्ताबन्दीका आधारमा शुल्क लिने व्यवस्था मिलाउन सर्वोच्च अदालत र अख्तियार दुरुपयोग अनुसन्धान आयोगले निर्देशन दिएका थिए । सोही निर्देशन पालना गर्दै शिक्षा मन्त्रालयले पनि शुल्कसीमा निर्धारण गर्न विश्वविद्यालयहरूलाई निर्देशन दिएको हो ।

GAP Model in Service organizations

The Gap Model of Service Quality has been developed by Parasuraman and his colleagues which helps to identify the gaps between the perceived service qualities that customers receive and what they expect. The model identifies five gaps:
Consumer expectation – management perception gap.
Management perception – service quality expectation gap.
Service quality specifications – service delivery gap.
Service delivery – external communications to consumer’s gap.
Expected service – perceived service gap.

Gap – 5 is the service quality shortfall as seen by the customers, and gaps 1-4 are shortfalls within the service organization. Thus gaps 1-4 contribute to gap – 5. These gaps are given in the following figure:



The first gap is the difference between consumer expectations and management perceptions of consumer expectations. Research shows that financial service organizations often treat issues of privacy as relatively unimportant, whilst consumers consider them very important.

The second gap is the difference between the management perceptions of consumer expectations and service quality specifications. Managers will set specifications for service quality based on what they believe the consumer requires. However, this is not necessarily accurate. Hence many service companies have put much emphasis on technical quality, when in fact the quality issues associated with service delivery are perceived by clients as more important.

The third gap is the difference between service quality specification and the service actually delivered. This is of great importance to service where the delivery system relies heavily on people. It is extremely hard to ensure that quality specifications are when a service involves immediate performance and delivery in the presence of the client. This is the case in many service industries: for example, a medical practice is depending on all the administrative, clerical and medical staff performing their tasks according to certain standards.

The fourth gap is the difference between service delivery intention and what is communicated about the service to customers. These established expectations within the customer may not be met. Often this is the result of inadequate communication by the service provider.

The fifth gap represents the difference between the actual performance and the customer perception of the service. Subjective judgement of service quality will be affected by many factors, all of which may change the perception of the service which has been delivered. Thus a guest in a hotel may receive excellent service throughout his stay, apart from poor checking out facilities. But this last experience may damage his entire perception of the service, changing his overall estimation of the quality of the total service provided from good to poor.

The gap model outlined above provides a framework for developing a deeper understanding of the causes of service quality problems, identifying shortfalls in service and determining the appropriate means to close the gaps.

Positioning Strategies in Marketing

Services firms are not identifying their key market segments and then determining how they wish consumers to perceive both their company and its products and services. Positioning is of particular significant in the services sector as it places an intangible service within a more tangible frame of reference. Thus the concept of positioning stems from a consideration of how an organization wishes its target customer to view its products and services in relationship to those of its competitors and their actual, or perceived, needs.

“Positioning is concerned with the identification, development and communication of a differentiated advantage which makes the organization’s products and services perceived as superior and distinctive to those of its competitors in the mind of its target customers.”

Positioning offers the opportunity to differentiate any service. Each service firm and its goods and services has a position or image in the consumer’s mind and this influences purchase decisions. Positions can be implicit and unplanned and evolve over a period of time or can be planned as part of the marketing strategy and then communicated to the target market. The purpose of planned positioning is to create a differentiation in the customer’s mind which distinguished the company’s services from other competitive services. It is important to establish a position of value for the product or service in the minds of the target market, i.e. it must be distinguishable by an attribute, or attributes, which are important to the customer. These attributes should be factors which are critical in the customer’s purchase decision.

There is therefore no such thing as a commodity or ‘standard’ service. Every service offered has the potential to be perceived as different by a customer. Buyers have different needs and are therefore attracted to different offers. It is therefore important to select distinguishing characteristics which satisfy the following criteria:
Importance – the difference is highly valued to a sufficiently large market
Distinctiveness – the difference is distinctly superior to other offering which are available.
Communicability – it is possible to communicate the difference in a simple and strong way.
Superiority – the difference is not easily copied by competitors.
Affordability – the target customers will be able and willing to pay for the difference. Any additional cost of the distinguishing characteristic(s) will be perceived as sufficiently valuable to compensate for any additional cost.
Profitability- the company will achieve additional profits as a result of introducing the difference

Each product or service has a set of attributes which can be compared to competitive offerings. Some of these attributes will be real, others will be perceived as real. A company wishing to position itself should determine how many attributes and differences to promote to target customers. Some marketers advocate promoting one benefit and establishing recognition as being the leader for that particular attribute. Others suggests that promoting more than one benefit will help in carving out a special niche which is less easily contested by competitors. The selection of the differentiating attribute(s) is most successful if it confirms fact which is already in the mind of the target market. Denying or fighting customers’ perceptions of different offerings in the market is unlikely to be successful. A successful positioning strategy takes into account customers’ existing perceptions of market offerings. It determines needs which customers value and which are not being met by competitors’ services. It identifies which unsatisfied needs could be satisfied. The positioning strategy seeks to integrate all elements of the service, to ensure that the perceived position of the service is strongly reinforced.

Services have a number of distinguishing characteristics which have special implications for the positioning and selection of which attributes to emphasize. Three of the key characteristics of services, make positioning strategies of particular importance in marketing a service. These are the intangibility, the degree of variability or heterogeneity in quality of a given service, and inseparability – the fact that the performance of a service will often occur in presence of a customer.

Positioning can permit an intangible service bendfit to be represented tangibly. It can help the customer see an intangible benefit – cleanliness; and this view can be reinforced by plastic covered glasses in rooms and a paper cover over the lid of a lavatory stating ‘sanitized for your protection’. This helps the customer to associate cleanliness with the service offering, reinforcing the position that the hotel wishes to portray. Service companies often promote their reputations in an attempt to ad tangibility.

Services are also highly variable and rely to a great extent on input from company employees for their production. For example, in a restaurant the waiter is the main point of contact with the customer and his service performance will be a major factor in the say the establishment will be judged. His performance will vary at different times, and there will also be variance between his service and that of another waiter or waitress in the restaurant, as a result, the quality of the delivered service can vary widely.

Further, the quality of small elements of a total service offering may affect the received quality of the service as a whole. For instance, a poor check-out procedure from a hotel, may greatly affect the perceived quality of the overall experience of staying on it. The customer’s perception of the quality of the service is therefore greatly affected by the quality of the overall experience of staying in it. The customer’s perception of the quality of he service is therefore greatly affected by the quality of the staff who are responsible for delivery. An advantage can be gained by providing better trained and more highly responsive people. A positioning strategy may therefore include the distinctive characteristic of employing ‘better people”.

Services tend to be inseparable and are characterized by the fact that they are performed in the presence of the customer.

The distinctive features of the services outlined above provides the basis for competitive positioning strategy.

Positioning can be considered at several levels:
Industry positioning – the positioning of the service industry as a whole.
Organizational positioning – the positioning of the organization as a whole.
Product sector positing – the positioning of a range or family of related products and services being offered by the organization.
Individual product or service positioning – the positioning of specific products.