One of my mentors, a guru in the field of IT, taught me about the 7Ps that make all the difference and distinguish the good from the great in IT. Seven is a lot, but if you would know the individual, you would not be surprised. He has and had a lot to say about this business, so seven is ok.

Let me list them and allow you for some introspection:

. Passion for superior performance
. People of exceptional quality and motivation
. Persistence to optimal processes management
. Paranoia in marketing
. Proactiveness in customer orientation
. Partnerships with deep leverage
. Perspective with maximum adaptivity based on insight, foresight.

For our kick-off yesterday of our 2009 sales activities, we had invited external speakers, CIOs. It was a refreshing experience! A customer or potential customer telling you in plain language what they expect from companies like us. Much to many people's amazement, their recommendation was simple. In one word: LISTEN. It definitely fits the list above. If many of the P's are in place, listening is a second nature. The discussion we had that day, centered a lot around many, if not all, of these Ps. Unknowingly. It tells me that we are on a good track as an organisation.

Enjoy the week-end,

Chris

Yes, it's very clear: capability to listen is really what our customers expect from us. This is totally in line with our focus on customer satisfaction.

Quality is exactly satisfying customers, no more, no less. Satisfied customers will bring us new orders and new customers. And then we will grow, afterwards. And then we will be able to satisfy more customer. This is the virtuous circle of quality.

Capability to listen, with a really open mind, is the golden key.

So, if anybody (else than Mieke, I mean ;-) ) is listening to this blog, I propose to launch the discussion about the following sentence, stated by Chris in a recent brochure: "We consider profitability to be the best marketing tool!".

Talk! I'm listening!
Daniel

A guru is a person who is regarded as having great knowledge, wisdom and authority in a certain area, and who uses it to guide others (Wikipedia).

When man began to analyze and combine numbers, he developed other interesting symbols. He took the perfect world number 4 and added to it the perfect divine number 3, and got 7, the most sacred number to the Hebrews. It was earth crowned with heaven - the 4-square earth plus the divine completeness of God. It denotes Completeness or Perfection (Biblical Mathematics by Ed F. Vallowe).

7 Ps that make all the difference… It should be devilish to add another P.

Leaving the level of Perfection (another P?),
looking to it from an holistic view,
I see all Ps working together,
in a united team.
It’s amazing what I see,
I see only one P,
PASSION for IT.

Mieke