Browsing by Author "Lee-Davies, Linda"

Now showing 1 - 4 of 4
  • Thumbnail Image
    ItemOpen Access
    1% for 10%: Executive Strategies for Customer Care
    (John Wiley & Sons, Ltd, 2006-03-01T00:00:00Z) Kakabadse, Andrew P.; Savery, Lawson; Kakabadse, Nada K.; Lee-Davies, Linda
    This paper avoids the linear route to establishing where the biggest impact on customer service lies and instead examines the influences on the quality of the customer experience from all angles in an organization. From the culture and policies of the organization itself, to the front-line individuals and their managers, it is evident that customer satisfaction is influenced at many levels and this directly affects organizational success and competitive standing. The Cranfield Top Executive Leadership studies, across 12 countries, examine senior managers' commitment to customer focus. The sample's division, into three distinct groups according to their customer focus commitment levels, highlights a range of arguments about individual, management and corporate dedication to levels of customer satisfaction with hints at where these may conflict with each other. By taking a rounded look at the customer focus process from all its pivots within an organization, potential bottlenecks in the process are also highlighted. Most interestingly, it is concluded that there is actually little difference between the groups in pure quantitative terms, but it is that small difference indeed which makes all the difference to a substantial increase in positive customer experience.
  • Thumbnail Image
    ItemOpen Access
    Deliberative inquiry: Integrated ways of working in children services
    (Springer Science Business Media, 2011-02-28T00:00:00Z) Kakabadse, Nada K.; Kakabadse, Andrew P.; Lee-Davies, Linda; Johnson, Nick
    Abstract In striving for greater integration of children services across a number of government and non government agencies, this paper examines the effect of drawing on deliberative inquiry as the lever for realising greater alignment across agencies. The paper discusses the need for improvement in UK local government children's services and then offers a review of the dialogue based inquiry approaches. In so doing, the paper highlights the Socratic mode of inquiry, emphasising the dual strategies of penetrative questioning, elenchus, and the process of founding new knowledge through working through confusion, aporia. This paper then reports how a London borough realised sustained change through the adoption of deliberative inquiry. The study achieved successful integration through the penetrating and contextually sensitive dialogue the inquiry participants generated, allowing them to develop the capability for realising effective organisational change. The paper concludes that deliberative inquiry facilitates individuals to speak their concerns in a manner that prompts ‘consensually accepted beliefs' to emerge through paying equal attention to the motivation of the inquiry participants, as well as to the reality of the contextual demands they need to confron
  • Thumbnail Image
    ItemOpen Access
    Three temptations of leaders
    (Emerald Group Publishing Limited, 2007) Kakabadse, Andrew P.; Kakabadse, Nada K.; Lee-Davies, Linda
    Despite the challenge of precisely defining the nature of temptation, this paper seeks to collect contrasting perspectives of this less attractive side of leadership and sets out to find a cure, or rather prevention, for falling into its grasp.
  • Thumbnail Image
    ItemOpen Access
    Visioning the pathway: a leadership process model
    (Elsevier, 2005-04) Kakabadse, Nada K.; Kakabadse, Andrew P.; Lee-Davies, Linda
    This paper sets out to develop a visioning process management model and clarify the visionary/visioning leadership portfolio of skills. By defining and examining visioning from a wide range of current and classic texts a series of key themes emerge. These are incorporated in, and indeed help make up, the Visioning Process Model, which not only outlines the make up of the positive Visioning Process, but also clearly shows the effect and pathway of its opposite - the Divisioning effect. The two vertical pathways meet at the point of the leader's choice and it is demonstrated how this choice has a number of knock-on effects and creates residual causal loops of either a virtuous or vicious nature depending on the direction taken.