Readers – As some of you know, my phone got taken from me over the weekend. I was deeply attached to that piece of machinery. Wisdom from the wise tells me that I should not be attached to material possessions. But that phone was more than piece of plastic and metal to me. I miss it. In fact, I miss it a lot. I miss the sound of those little alerts I received, whenever I was sent a text, Whatsapp or Google Talk message. I miss all those times typing replies on that tiny little on screen keyboard, almost always making a typo, in spite of trying to type with the very tips of my fingers. I miss watching YouTube videos on the move, anything from a music video to a TED talk. I miss those Angry Birds, with their trajectories and their angry noises. Their celebrations as they destroyed all the happy piggies, and moved onto the next level.
Readers – I apologize for drowning you in this deluge of sorrow. I have tried to hold it in for the past 4 days, trying to deal with this setback in an emotionally intelligent manner. But as I put this in writing, I cannot help but lose control and share my pain and sorrow with the world. If only those four or five evil men had not jumped into our “matatu” (A matatu is a standard Toyota minivan, the main mode of public transport in Nairobi and around Kenya. It is usually overcrowded, just like other minivans in other parts of the developing world. What does distinguish them, however, is that they often play great African music, and have some entertaining stickers or quotes plastered on them). If only I had the presence of mind to remember stories from friends and friends of friends, about similar sketchy characters, using seatbelts as a diversion to swipe pockets on matatus.
Perhaps this is my contribution to Nairobi. A tax-like payment I have to make for the right to acquire valuable life experience out here (with the benefit of avoiding all the annoying paperwork, which I would have to complete in other tax jurisdictions, with better “law and order”). Or perhaps those sketchy guys deserve my phone more than me for outsmarting me (so self-absorbed – yet so satisfying). But no! None of this makes any sense! As those Angry Birds have taught me, I must not try to rationalize this heinous crime. I must seek revenge. My emotions need to be channeled from sorrow to anger. I must focus.
Which is why, I have been running around the offices of the Police, the Crime Investigation Department (hereon referred to as “CID”) and Safaricom (the incumbent mobile operator in Kenya, with whom I hold or rather held my cellular connection). It’s quite a bit like Angry Birds Level 2, but the main characters are myself and Benson (the famous taxi company owner and part-time hero from my very first post). As technology has advanced over the years, these phones have become easy to track. Each call made in Kenya is logged, with an IMEI number, a unique serial number identifying each phone, and the SIM registration details, mapped onto a Kenyan National ID or an International Passport. If the Police, CID or Safaricom want, they can help track this phone down, and identify anyone who has been using it. If someone has received it as a gift or bought it second hand, they can help trace where they got it from. There’s a decent chance that this crime CAN be solved.
Except that there is a good chance it WON’T be solved. Public services out here in Kenya are broken or dysfunctional, just like they seem to be in most developing or even developed countries. I sound like an enormously cynical, pessimistic and jaded young man. I am a complete basket case for someone who is only 24 years of age, with only 4 years of professional experience. I am supposed to be the fresh young one who brings all that optimism and idealism into every situation. But few people will have the moral imagination or plain guts to tell me to be an idealist or an optimist in this situation. In all my personal and professional experiences, I have witnessed so much “dysfunctionalism”, that I must break it down and entertain and educate you with some examples. In what I have seen, it is driven by three core issues at the level of the individual, which then often work their way into institutions and their culture, often eventually bringing down the entire system:
I) Apathy
II) Lack of integrity
III) Lack of competence
It’s not just public services which are broken. Private services are also broken. Statistically, perhaps not as much, but nevertheless, more than they should be or rather are perceived to be. “Dysfuntionalism” is ubiquitous. It’s a disease that afflicts virtually every part of the service sector. The morning my phone was taken from me, a kind man on the street advised that I visit the Safaricom office and report the incident immediately, so that I can get some quick help in tracking it. The Safaricom service center was only 2 blocks away, and I had some very understanding friends, who agreed to wait for me at the bus stop, while I went off to make this service request. I arrived in front of the Safaricom service center at 8:55 a.m. The plaque on the wall listed the working hours as 9 a.m. to 6 p.m. I was in luck. The office was set to open in 5 minutes. The only issue, however, was that there was a long queue literally going all the way around the building. There were at least 500 customers in that queue. If I had joined the end of the queue, I would not have been served for several hours. So I went to the start of the queue and shared my sad story with the gentlemen standing there. They were kind people, who sympathized with me, and offered that I cut in front of them.
Great! The service center was set to open in 5 minutes, and I was the first one in line. Anticipation heightened as the clock struck nine. The Safaricom employees were inside. Some of them were preparing for the work day, sorting through paperwork, some of them were having breakfast, some of them were on the phone, and some of them were just sitting idle. The store was not open though. Its multiple doors were locked, reinforced with multiple security bars. The clock turned five past nine. Nothing changed. The Safaricom employees were still making calls inside, having a nice chit chat, clearly generating a lot of business for Safaricom. Left pocket, right pocket, and back to left pocket, as I like to say. The Safaricom customers outside, however, were starting to lose patience, which was clearly not good for business from Safaricom’s perspective. The clock turned ten past nine. This little adventure had already taken a bit longer than expected. I was now constantly thinking about how my friends might be worried about me, or worse not be happy with me for making them wait so long (Remember – I had kept them waiting at the bus stop? Please reread previous paragraph). I started snapping my fingers as the tension and impatience set in. The clock turned fifteen past nine. Nothing changed. I signaled to folks inside with a polite smile, pointing to my watch, that it was time to open up. They signaled back asking me to wait and be patient.
The clock turned twenty past nine. Nothing changed. I put my puppy dog eyes on and started staring down the folks inside, trying to induce some kind of care or consideration. This worked on the security guard, who came over and unlocked one of the security bars. They might finally be opening up, I thought to myself. But after removing the lock he went right back to his chair, and opened up a newspaper, blocking any direct eye contact with me. Five minutes later he came back and unlocked another security bar. A slow ten minute “striptease” started, where he slowly and as leisurely as possible, unlocked lock after lock, removed shutter after shutter and finally opened the last door. What happened after this makes for the greatest anti-climax. The lady who served me listened to my story, and simply asked me to go to the Police Station and obtain a Police Abstract before she could help me obtain a replacement SIM. The Police Station was another adventure in itself, and which I experienced this afternoon. The Police is clearly not the only institution in Kenya suffering from “dysnfunctionalism”. Safaricom, the most respected company in Kenya, has a service operations unit, which is suffering from some serious apathy. This is a private company which generates ginormous profits in a competitive sector. I have never seen any other company in a competitive sector which does not open on time, and on top of that does not care at all about 500 customers queued up outside its premises. It’s seriously dysfunctional.
This afternoon at the Kilimani Police Station, the issue was not just apathy, but a combination of apathy and lack of integrity. There were three gentlemen sitting in the Abstract Records section, with no clear hierarchy. They kept redirecting me to one another, around the room. When one finally decided to settle down and write the abstract for me, he stated very clearly that: “I don’t feel like doing it. I am very tired.” He asked me a bunch of questions about my background, and about my story in a rude and skeptical tone. As some of it unfolded, he got excited and tried to arrest me (again! – please read my very first post if you haven’t already) for being in Kenya for 3 months, and working. I told him in a bit of a flippant tone that I wasn’t working, and that I was just a consultant with a valid special pass until November. He let it go and I finally received my abstract.
My all-time favorite customer service experiences have taken place at the Serena Hotel in Islamabad. It’s an absolutely gorgeous hotel, built in traditional style and set in several acres of lush landscaped gardens between the Rawal Lake and the Margalla Hills. One couldn’t ask for a more perfect setting. I have had the pleasure of staying there several times on my consulting assignments. The only issue is that one has to set the correct service expectations, against the backdrop of this “physical” quality or rather sheer beauty which the hotel possesses. One can order tea in the breakfast buffet, but one would have to be a really self-entitled prick to expect that they will actually bring it. I was sitting in the business center once, and asked one of the waiters to bring me some coffee. He went and instructed another waiter to bring me some coffee. An argument soon ensued over who should go and fetch the coffee, right in front of me. The arguments were as compelling as: “I did it last time – it’s your turn to do it now”, versus: “It’s your job not mine”. It got really loud and there was clear deadlock, so I had to step in, telling them that I would rather walk to the coffee shop and fetch it myself.
But my all-time favorite Serena story is that of one of my teams chilling on the top floor of the Nazara Lounge, sometime around mid-night on a quite weeknight. We were enjoying a few drinks and sipping some sheesha. The place is very nicely decked out, and provides great night time views of the city. It’s a great place to get some late night work done, or to create some lifelong team bonds, or do both. One of the Partners on the team was quite relaxed and had his feet up on the table. The security guard, who was walking around on patrol saw this, and came around to us. He instructed the Partner in these exact same three words: “You – Sit properly”. Partner was in shock, and could not do anything else but oblige. This has to be one of the most surreal service experiences of my life. I have many more stories from the Serena, which in the interest of space and reader interest, I will not be sharing in this tiny blog. The point I am trying to make is that the Serena has some very serious service issues.
Now, I don’t think that the service staff at Islamabad Serena are apathetic or lacking integrity. It is after all a very expensive hotel, and part of the “Leading Hotels of the World”. One wonders why then they have these service issues. If I were to just scratch the surface and state a symptom rather than a root cause, I would tell you that they are plain and simple incompetent. They are clueless. They just don’t get it. But if we dig deeper, and try to find the root causes, there can be a few explanations, some of which are controversial. These employees haven’t been screened properly (proper interviewing and psycho-metric testing is often overlooked, especially in these crucial “moment of truth” service jobs), haven’t been trained properly, and are not held accountable for their actions. The accountability part does not just have to do with having a good system of complaint logging and follow-up, or positive re-enforcement e.g. through having a positive feedback channel and an “Employee of the month” type of scheme. If anything, I think the Serena has exactly the same such systems as any other good hotel.
My rather controversial hypothesis has to do with the fact that the Serena, which is owned by the Agha Khan Development Network, which in turn in is owned by Prince Karim Agha Khan, the spiritual leader of the Shia Ismaili Muslims, gives employment preference to Ismailis. Many of these Ismailis are from very poor and disadvantaged families in Chitral, a deep rural town in Northern Pakistan. These individuals are not at all exposed to foreigners or international standards of service excellence. They don’t do a good job of, or any sort of job at all, in screening their staff not only because they are selecting from a tiny pool, but also because they are not looking to look for the right people. Also, they shudder to hold them accountable or fire them, because these individuals come from such poor and disadvantaged backgrounds, and are part of the Ismaili community. How does an institution like the Agha Khan Development Network balance a social mission with a profit or service excellence motive?
But the root cause for incompetence does not always have a structural cause, with a clear top-down management remedy, as I have outlined for the Islamabad Serena or the Agha Khan Development Network. A friend of mine recently went to a nice small restaurant in Nairobi where “the customer is never right”. She ordered a glass of dry white wine. What she received tasted sweet, so she asked the waiter to take it back, and bring her what she had actually ordered. Instead of bringing out a fresh glass of dry white wine, the owner came out with a bunch of wine bottles, in person and started giving my friend a lesson in wine tasting. Realizing that the owner was not willing to budge, my friend had to accept that she was wrong and settle for her glass of sweet wine. Now, one does not expect a small family run restaurant to suffer from “dysfunctionalism”. It’s the most perfect example of actions and personal outcomes being in such perfect alignment, it makes the sun, moon and earth look misaligned in a perfect solar eclipse. Apathy or lack of integrity cannot even enter the hypothesis tree in such a setting. Clearly the owner lady was incompetent, driven by a dose of craziness. No other explanation needed. Just plain cluelessness. I was in Uganda a couple of weekends back, and we were never served a meal at any restaurant in less than two hours. And these were some of the best restaurants in the second largest town in the country. Clearly they were suffering from nothing else but pure incompetence.
This brings me to my final question. Who actually gets it? This is an important question, because the world, especially the emerging world, is moving more and more into the service side of things, away from agriculture and manufacturing. In the developed world, service jobs are becoming increasingly difficult to protect, as “The world becomes flat”. Technology is making borders irrelevant (please await a future post where I tear apart the Nation State – I might also touch upon immigration and labor protectionism). This is potentially the great big leapfrog in cross country convergence, and we are already seeing countries like India, Vietnam and Egypt taking advantage of it. I can try to answer the question with a couple of examples.
The ultimate example of service excellence comes from the “Geisha”. Yes, the female Japanese companions and entertainers, who are highly skilled at everything from dancing to making deep meaningful conversation. In fact, they are so good, that some of my consulting colleagues, who were part of the Service Operations Practice, were actually flown to Japan for a training, to learn directly from them. I wasn’t one of these lucky individuals, but I think the answers are simple. Service excellence is deeply institutionalized. A geisha knows her destiny from a young age, and is learning everything she needs to know (e.g. using conversational bridges to move a conversation into greater depth), and also developing the right mindsets and values (e.g. it is not cool to be apathetic), within the institution of the trade. This of course is buttressed by strong top-down structures, a combination of Japanese hierarchy, and plain matriarchy.
The sub-continental equivalent of the Geisha is the “tawaif”. Wikipedia defines a tawaif as: “A courtesan who catered to the nobility of the Mughal Empire.” The tawaif was portrayed in the epic Bollywood movie “Devdas”, a plot involving a crazy young alcoholic man, who couldn’t deal maturely with the pain of love, and ended up committing suicide. That movie did not capture the full essence of the tawaif, her pride and joy in doing what she does so well. It just highlighted deep rooted social stereotypes against them. From what I know, the tawaif is an extremely important cultural institution in the old sub-continent. In the Mughal times, every teenage boy from a well off family was sent to a tawaif, and learnt “tameez” and “tehzeeb”, literally translated to “respect” and “culture”.
I wish I had the good fortune of having been sent to a tawaif. Not only would I not struggle to read and understand Urdu poetry, as I do day after day, but I would have also learnt the fine art of making extremely eloquent conversation. If she had the patience to work with me, she could have also taught me to write my own poetry or ghazals, which could have been potentially transcendent. It would have been both educational and entertaining (just as my blog already tries to do for its readers, but in prose). Over the years, however, the British arrived in the sub-continent and uprooted old cultural practices, in particular those from the Mughal era. The tawaif eventually morphed into the ugly western transactional version, focused on just one goal, where service excellence holds absolutely no place, let alone an institutional or cultural foundation. Like any good blog post, social science book or academic thesis, I will conclude this one blaming colonialism for our troubles.
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