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In the name of God, the Most Gracious, the Most Merciful. Praise be to God, the Most Gracious, and peace and blessings be upon the honour of the Prophets and the Messengers. Muhammad, the Messenger of Godﷺ, and upon his family and companions, is a very, very good person.
My friends, teaching and studying and learning has always been a primary interest of mine. And I get the maximum thrill from learning things. I have among my teachers people who are my age, people who are decades younger, people who are much older. And my time with them is the time that I enjoy the most, when I’m learning something. So schools have always been a great interest of mine. And as many of you know, who I have had the privilege of advising on education, that I have a deep and abiding interest in education.
So let me share some thoughts with you. Think of a school like a factory. So if I tell you I have a factory, you will ask me, “What’s the factory for? What’s the product?” Everything in that factory depends on that single definition: what is the product? What do you want to produce?
Now, how many of us ask this question before we talk about curriculum, syllabus, teachers, or anything else? Many people come to me and they say, “We are starting a school,” or, “We have bought a school. What curriculum should we—do advise advise us to implement.” Now, that’s a question, according to me, which is impossible to answer until you first define: what is this school supposed to produce? What is this school for?
So it’s like saying, “I want to start a factory, what machinery should I buy?” How would you answer that question? You cannot answer the question until you say what you are going to produce in this factory. Is it a chair factory? Is it a motor car factory? Is it a factory that is designed to produce rocket engines? What is it for? The machinery would depend on that.
So I want you to ask: what’s the goal? What is the goal? What does the final product look like? This child who graduates from your school, what does he or she look like? What must he or she be able to do?
Do you have this defined for your school? And by defined, I mean defined so clearly and that definition is so well understood and so well distributed that if I visit your school and I just stop anyone in that school and say, “What does the final product of the school look like?” they should be able to answer that question.
Now, that’s why I say, if you have defined it, who knows this?
Many times, this happens in organizations as well, and I’ve seen it in my organization consulting practice. People have core values. They say, “Core values of our organization.” And I’ve actually had this quite surreal experience of talking to the head of human resources of a large company. And I said, “Well, what are these core values?” And he literally scratches his head and he says, “Oh, I think it is integrity. And anyway, anyway, we have framed them and they are on the chairman’s office wall.” Now, this is—I’m not exaggerating—this actually happened. Now, if that is the case, then those core values are not worth the paper they are written on.
So the question is, have you defined this final product of yours? And is it so well known and ingrained and believed in by everyone who is associated with your school or not? That’s the biggest question to answer.
And if that is the case and you say, “Yes, we have this definition. This is what it is. I know it, everyone else knows it,” then my next question would be: how do you monitor results? How do you monitor results? What are your metrics?
In the words of the guy who invented Six Sigma quality standard planet, he said, “If you want to see what people value, see what they measure. If you want to see what people value, see what they measure.” So what are your metrics? What are you measuring? How do you know that you are achieving this goal that you set out to do? Because what you don’t measure, you don’t know. What you don’t measure, you cannot improve. What you don’t know, you cannot control or guarantee.
Because if you are—that’s the reason why in golf a hole-in-one is a hole-in-one because it’s a hole-in-one, meaning that the golfer does not have control over that. It just happens, and that’s why everyone is so delighted when it happens to them. But if, for example, you are a golfer and you could actually hit a hole-in-one every time you teed off, then it would no longer have any value, and you will probably be suspected of malpractice or something. So the whole thing is the opposite of that, which is: how can you always hit a hole-in-one when it comes to producing the quality product, which is the students who come to your school?
For that, you must have metrics, because without measurement, you don’t know. And as I said, at the risk of repeating, what you don’t know, you cannot control or guarantee, which means you cannot improve it.
And that’s why I quoted Mikel Harry, Motorola’s Six Sigma quality standard, where he said, “If you want to see, if you want to see what someone values, see what they measure.”
I remind myself and you that any business has two players: sellers and buyers, suppliers and consumers, providers and beneficiaries. So who are your consumers? Who are your beneficiaries? Who are your buyers? That’s very important to define.
On a side note, in customer service, we say, or I say, that the quality of your customer service depends on what you have defined as your point of sale. When has the sale happened?
Now, there are several stages in any buying interaction. A sale can be said to have happened when a customer buys the product in your shop, or if they are doing it online, when the person hits the buy button. You can say, “Well, the sale is over, I’m done.” Or you can say, “Well, the sale depends on—my sale will be over when the product is delivered to the person at their address within the specific period of time.” So if you have guaranteed 24 hours delivery within 24 hours, then within 24 hours, this product has reached the address of the person who bought it. So now you have moved your point of sale further forward. Point of sale, according to you, does not happen when the person buys the product, but it happens when the product is delivered to that person satisfactorily within that time frame.
You might go a step further and you might say, “No, point of sale happens when that person opens the packet, uses the product, and is happy with the product.” So now you’ve moved it even further. So point of sale is not happening when the person simply hits the buy button. It’s not happening even when the product is delivered to them. You will consider the point of sale as the person has used the product and they are happy with it. Now your customer service will depend—the quality of your customer service will depend on where you define this point of sale.
So, similarly, in this case, we’re talking about schools here. My question to you was: who are your consumers? Who are the beneficiaries? Who are the buyers? The success of the business depends on how well the beneficiaries like the service or product. Successful businesses constantly seek consumer or customer satisfaction reports, and they constantly seek consumers’—[unclear].
GE used to have a system called VOC, Voice of Customer. And what would happen there was periodically, usually once in a quarter, the business concerned, whether it was medical systems, whether it was aero engines, whatever it was, appliances, they would invite customers. They would have one evening an open house, coffee and whatever snack, and they would invite customers to just walk in and talk to our people, talk to GE people about their experience of using the product. People would come in, and some would be very happy with it, some would have some questions, some would be unhappy.
And the job of the listeners, the job of the GE people listening to them, was very clearly defined. It was defined first by what you’re not supposed to do, and what you’re not supposed to do is to justify. So if somebody says, “Well, you know, I have this fridge and it’s not cooling properly,” or something, whatever, you say, “No, no, no, it is because this—” No, you just note it down. You listen to the customer, you then take notes, and then you schedule a visit to see on-site what is going on. And this might be done directly, or if it’s a product which is connected to you remotely, then you do it remotely. But whichever, meaning that your person, your technician, will go and take a look at that product and ensure that the customer is satisfied.
So this was done and produced brilliant results. And of course, you also had many customers who came very satisfied with the product, and so on and so forth. The whole point of this being that you wanted to make sure that your customers stayed with you, and that when they wanted to repeat, when they wanted to do the same thing again, then this was possible. You would get repeat purchases; you will get repeat business.
Now, my question is: do you do this in your school? Do you talk to your consumers, your beneficiaries, your buyers? That’s the reason I said you must define who they are.
In many cases, you will say the parents of the children. Now, I would strongly disagree with that because, in my view, the real consumer, the real beneficiary, the real buyer of your product of education is the child himself or herself. It’s not the parent. The parent is only paying the fees of the child and bringing the child to your school. The person who is benefiting from your input is the child himself.
So do you have this conversation with this child? “Are you happy with the school? Are you happy with your class? Are you happy with your teachers? Are you happy with how you’re learning? Do you have any problems? What are the problems? How can we solve them?” In an atmosphere which is hugely supporting, totally non-threatening, totally non-judgmental, and have an atmosphere of collaboration, an atmosphere where you are genuinely open to changing everything you do in order to fulfill the need of the child.
Now, that is very important. We’re not talking about a random conversation where you really have no intention of doing anything. You just are filling the blank to say, “Did you talk to the child? Yes,” you ticked the box. No, I’m saying genuine interest. Genuine interest to say, “Yes, we want to change. We are willing to change. We are happy to change, no matter what it is, no matter how difficult it is, because our purpose is to educate the child.”
And if whatever we are doing, no matter how inspired we think we are, if that is not happening, if the child is not getting educated, if the child does not feel happy or safe or invigorated or inspired in the school, then that is something that we need to correct.
Do you have this attitude? So do you do this? Who do you talk to? When did you do it last? What did they say? Did you record it? Then what changes did you make? What was the result of all those changes?
All of this must be measured. All of this must be documented, right? Because what you don’t measure, you don’t know. What you don’t measure, you cannot improve. What you don’t know, you cannot control or guarantee.