The Ice Cream Maker, An inspiring tale about making quality the key ingredient in everything you do by Subir Chowdhury.
The book contains some essential lessons on achieving excellence and instilling quality. Chowdhury believes that America is strong when it comes to creative drive and innovation, but weak when it comes carrying through producing higher quality versions quickly and cheaply. The story is told by the plant manager of a small ice cream manufacturer, Dairy Cream, about to go out of business, taking and applying advice from a large national food chain, Natural Foods.
Throughout the book, there are several references to basic business practices and advice. The first one I came across happened to hit home with an incident that upset me earlier that same day; advice that I wish more “top level managers” would heed.
“Every company has two kinds of customers, those outside the company and those inside the company. And your first customers are your internal ones – your employees or coworkers. If you don’t take care of your employees, you can’t expect them to take care of your customers outside the company.”
There are several instances of specific situations – Vegas being used as a premier customer service example. When in Vegas you never have to wait in line for a slot machine; they never require a customer who wants to spend money to wait in line. This made me think of some local large discount stores who actually have clerks standing in front of their registers waving you to their line as if they want to help you save time.
Chowdhury uses many cliches; one I hear companies use a lot being “let’s not reinvent the wheel.” This book, however, says that you need to constantly evaluate and ‘reinvent’ the wheel, if that’s what it takes to do something better. There were several others, but one that I feel strongly about is ‘how character is defined by how you handle the low points and difficult situations, as opposed to how you handle positive ones.’ How you handle a bad day may have more of an impact on more people than your behavior on a good day.
The underlying point Chowdhury reiterates is that quality is defined by the customer, not you. The book has basic business principals that you can apply to your personal relationships as well. It was a quick read and I enjoyed it.
This one of the books given to me by Doug Castle, Sergeant Major, USMC (Ret.) and will be part of our new ‘pay it forward’ plan. Let me know if you’d like a copy.
