Through business classics like THE ONE MINUTE MANAGER®, RAVING FANS®, and GUNG HO!®, bestselling author Ken Blanchard presents new approaches to management, leadership, customer service and more. In ZAP THE GAPS! Target Higher Performance and Achieve It! an informative and entertaining business parable, Blanchard and his co-authors, Dana Robinson and Jim Robinson, tackle the important issue of problem solving with the GAPS! approach.
Managers at all levels often see a problem and jump to a solution, quickly deciding that the problems with their departments can be solved with more money, a larger staff, new equipment, or they quickly blame it all on Human Resources. Many times the "solution" does nothing to solve the problem. Typically it creates an even more tangled web than before! Every manager has found themselves ensnared in such a manner, and often the only thing left to do is throw one's hands in the air in despair and ask, "Why can't I resolve these issues?" The answer is remarkably simple the manager has not uncovered the root causes of the problem, but rather tried to smooth over the top. But as we all know if a cake is baked improperly we can not simply put frosting on it to fix the first mistake, the cake may look better from the outside, and may at first taste better but at the core it will still be inedible. ZAP THE GAPS! addresses this very problem, and most importantly provides a real solution!
ZAP THE GAPS!is a parable, which chronicles the woe of Bill Ambers, the Director of Customer Service in a high tech firm, who has encountered a big business problem: He must turn around the numbers in his call center, or he will lose his job. By chance he meets Michael St. Vincent a man with a successful landscaping company, and as Ambers learns this is not because of fate. St. Vincent's success is due to a carefully crafted business strategy. With the help of St. Vincent, Ambers works through the problem and discovers the GAPS approach to performance improvement; GAPS! is an acronym for the four steps involved:
- G = Go for the SHOULD (what must be accomplished)
- A = Analyze the IS (what currently exists)
- P = Pin down the CAUSES (what is causing the gap between the SHOULD and the IS)
- S = Select the Right SOLUTIONS (what actions are needed to address root causes)
