This was the first time Vanguard worked with Peter Edwards. We continued to work with him in every organisation he transformed until he retired. Peter taught us speed: service organisations can change very quickly if they have hands-on leadership. Honeywell’s distribution organisation went from being the bane of salesmen’s lives to outstanding performance in only three months. The following year we helped Peter change an engineering services organisation, with 1000 engineers, in less than a year.
In those days we knew that service is all about moments of truth what happens at each and every transaction a service organisation has with its customers.
What did Peter do in Honeywell’s Distribution Division? Simple; he ensured that the people who dealt with customers had the wherewithal to handle all customer demand. To emphasise the importance of this focus, when he returned from the Berystead event, he locked the managers’ office doors! His point was simple: we can only achieve this objective if we, the managers, work on the front line to make it happen.