Business Coaching for the Professions

Objectivity and Passion

2011-03-15T18:25:00.002Z

Words: 163
Reading time: 33 secs

Martin Johnson would be a great coach for the England rugby team if he was less passionate and more objective. Objectivity allows us to stand back, coolly weigh up the facts presented to us and then make a value-free assessment of the situation before us.

Martin Johnson would also be a great rugby coach if he was less objective and more passionate. Objectivity is all very well, but to convince and inspire others you need to truly care about the team, their performance and their place in the world. Without passion all the objectivity in the world lacks the necessary spark of desire.

Both of these statements hold a kernel of truth. We have to care enough to use our time and our talents to improve the results we are getting and our efforts to improve will be better informed by a degree of objectivity.

Balancing detachment and commitment is the key to leadership enhancing any endeavour whether it be either rugby or business.

Small Acorns

2011-03-07T19:55:00.004Z

Words: 423
Reading time: 1 min 25 secs

The small business that begins with one individual using a particular technical skill, be it plumbing, printing, legal, web design, or any one of a host of other talents will eventually reach a sales and profit plateau unless something changes.

What may not be obvious is that if potential new customers are not signing up they are telling you they are unhappy and it means that the business needs to do something about it. That’s a valuable lesson, because it will probably apply equally to your existing customers who have refrained from complaining with typical British reticence. You, as the astute small business owner, need to pick up on the language of silence.

Before launching into an expensive (and possibly fruitless) campaign to find fresh fields to harvest, have a look at the ground you are already ploughing.

Your current customers provide your current revenue and they need to be cared for first. And your best customers should receive most of your attention. If you want your customers to stay with you then they are deserving of some special treatment even if it results in being slightly unfair to newer, smaller customers.

This may seem obvious but many businesses just take their present customers for granted. A moment’s reflection will probably reveal that your relationship with your customers is the often only thing stopping them switching to another firm. Such relationships need worked to keep them fresh and constantly renewed. That need not be particularly expensive, or time consuming – but it is invaluable.

Being a great plumber is only part of making a living in a plumbing business. Marketing and sales skills are also needed, as are finance and self-motivation. Without those skills being appropriately exercised customers will neither be recruited, nor will they stay and the technical skill, whatever it is, will be destined to waste away from lack of use.

If you have had the nerve and the self-belief to set out in business for yourself the need to learn more about how that is done successfully will come as no surprise. These are not natural, instinctive skills and few of us have the time or the money to make all the mistakes required to learn by trial and error.
It is demonstrably easier and cheaper to learn from those who already have the proven skills and are willing to share them through seminars, like those provided by H&H Business, to add the missing ingredients of success. They are a shortcut to early success and save an awful lot of time.

Business Fundamentals

2011-02-16T16:31:00.004Z

Words: 420

Reading Time: 1 min 24 secs

The vast majority of businesses begin small. Most begin with one individual using a particular technical skill, be it plumbing, printing, legal, web design, or any one of a host of other talents. Sometimes the enterprise is helped by the offer of work from a former employer, but when that dries up the business must compete in the marketplace with everyone else.

It is at this point that the single-skill approach suffers. Being a great plumber is only part of making a living in a plumbing business. Some of the other skills needed include marketing, sales, finance and self-motivation. Without those skills being appropriately exercised customers will not come and the technical skill, whatever it is, is destined to waste away from lack of use.

Now, being a great plumber, printer, solicitor or whatever is no guarantee that you will be equally talented where marketing, sales, finance and self-motivation are concerned. Some dabbling may yield partial results, but those will necessarily be limited and the enterprise will quickly hit a ceiling. Indeed, it is almost guaranteed that all or most of this skill set will not be available to you, because you have not had the opportunity to acquire and practice the necessary techniques.

However, all is not lost. Having a particular technical skill proves you have the ability to learn and master certain methods and systems in one area that can be mapped across into other functions. We all have multiple abilities that seemed tough to learn at the outset, but we now take for granted, like walking, talking, swimming and driving in most cases.

If you have the nerve and the self-belief to set out in business for yourself the need to learn more about how that is done successfully will come as no surprise. These are not natural, instinctive skills, but they can be learned by trial and error. Yet few of us have the time or the money to make all the mistakes required for such a long and wasteful study.

Despite that fact, judging by the number of businesses that are struggling at any one time, many still take that route even though it is demonstrably easier and cheaper to learn from those who already have the proven skills and are willing to share them.

More savvy members of the business community make use of workshops and seminars, like those provided by H&H Business, to add the missing ingredients of success. They are a shortcut to early success and save an awful lot of time.

Simple management

2010-07-02T11:05:00.004+01:00

Words: 425
Reading Time: 1 min. 25 sec.s

What actions yield the best financial results when dealing with an economic downturn?

That’s something we would all like to know – always assuming that an economic downturn calls for actions different to those at any other time.

Bruce Tulgan of RainmakerThinking, Inc.® reports finding that cost cutting, innovation and increased supervision were the three strategies that yielded the strongest financial results in 2009.

Well, that’s wonderful! If that’s all we have to do to get great financial results then all our problems are solved. Or are they?

Bruce’s results are drawn from a survey of more than 1,000 managers selected from participants in RainmakerThinking, Inc.’s ® intensive two-day management seminars.

Managers that implemented these actions were found to be the most likely to report that their bottom line financial results (at the level closest to the manager’s control) in 2009 were “good,” “very good,” “better than expected,” or “much better than expected.”

There seems to be a number of weaknesses here:
1) The survey was only of managers, not of workers or financial analysts;
2) All those managers had been trained by RainmakerThinking, Inc.®;
3) Other actions taken by managers who were not participants in RainmakerThinking were not examined;
4) The assessments of financial results were entirely subjective; none were quantified;
5) Corporate benefits or detriments other than financial ones were not looked at;
6) The organization conducting the survey had a direct interest in its outcome.

Besides which, cost cutting and innovation should be high priorities in any company, irrespective of the state of the economy. Had these managers helped create the crisis in their companies by their lack of effectiveness when times were better?

And managers reported that it was their supervision that made a difference – not actions and dedication by a neglected workforce concerned about continued employment that would have happened anyway, without the managers.

No surprises there then. It’s the usual error – we always think we have had a disproportionate effect (hubris) when it’s everybody else that has made the major difference. The higher the individual is in the organization or social grouping, the more marked is this effect as a general rule.

Business suggestions:
1) Start from a position of scepticism;
2) Beware of too much simplification;
3) Ask, “Who says?”;
4) How much interest has the researcher in the outcome of the research;
5) Check for what’s missing;
6) What else could have caused this?
7) Look for a control group comparison;
8) Everything should be as simple as possible, but not simpler (Einstein);
9) Nobody has all the answers;

10) Bosses need the workers; the reverse is not always true.

The truth about teams

2010-06-30T15:37:00.006+01:00

Words: 447
Reading Time: 1 min. 29 sec.s

There is a lot of confused thinking about getting the best from teams. A good case in point is Duncan Brodie (http://goalsandachievements.com) who says:

“To get the best from a team you clearly have to bring out the best in each individual and get them all playing to their strengths.”

Only to say, just a few lines further on:

“The truth is that team success is largely down to a group of people who are committed to a common purpose and are willing to work collectively and support each other to get the result they desire.”

Setting aside whether you agree with either of these points, both cannot be true at the same time.

Bringing out the best in each individual is just a likely to give you a group of individuals, each pulling in a different direction, rather than a team.

Having a group of people committed to a common purpose and willing to work collectively to get the result they desire will give you a team, but will not necessarily bring out the best in each individual; that may need to be sacrificed to the common good.

Superior teams are most likely when the members share a common aspiration for the team rather than themselves and the team makes use of each individual’s strengths. That does not mean having the best individuals, since they may not place the team above themselves. It does involve each team member identifying moment to moment how the team as a whole can best deliver.

Sport is often chosen as an analogy for business, but business is rarely like that. Business is not about delivering at your peak for 48 minutes, 90 minutes, 20 overs or 5 days. It is about effective, appropriate effort delivered under all circumstances for months and years.

Business suggestions:
1) Be clear about the outcomes;
2) Be clear about how you will know if and when you have them;
3) Get buy-in from all members of the team;
4) No stigma should attach to not buying-in and being properly excluded;
5) No-one fails in a team, everyone takes responsibility;
6) Teams do not work automatically, they need work themselves;
7) Changing team members changes the whole team, earlier phases will need revisiting;
8) Ball-carriers and supporters change over time; make sure everyone knows who is who;
9) You need both ball-carriers and supports to succeed;
10) You cannot lead a team; either you are part of it, or you are not. Who leads at any one time will change with where the team has got to;
11) When the job is done celebrate the success and disband the team;
12) Different jobs need different teams.

Ability before age

2010-06-25T16:27:00.006+01:00

Words: 418
Reading Time: 1 min. 24 sec.s

The whole idea of retirement is a recent by-product of the factory-led economy.

In societies before the industrial age there was no set age at which folk ceased to seen as productive. Only illness and infirmity might mean someone was supported by the community. Even then, their experience and wisdom was valued, so most individuals continued to contribute to the community in some way.

With the dawn of the factory age came the debilitating demand that everyone work at the same relentless pace. It was man as part of the machine. Anybody not able to match that pace was inevitably seen in the same way as a component that could no longer meet the burden place on it. At that point the component person was scrapped.

The idea of retirement has been largely sold and accepted as the just reward for years of toil at a thankless task. Of course, it is no such thing. To industry retirement is simply preventive maintenance – get rid of the component as it approaches its MTBF (Mean Time Before Failure).

The fact that ageism persists in the workplace, even when the task is not physically demanding and would benefit from long experience, just shows how deeply engrained this paradigm has become. Few even think about it anymore; it's received wisdom.

65 years old? Finished - get an apprentice in for a fraction of the cost.

Fortunately, for those of us running our own businesses, there is no fixed point at which we absolutely must stop enjoying ourselves and go sit in an armchair. This is one of the many points where small business will always triumph over big business. We can favour ourselves and our customers, rather than favouring the insentient corporation.

If business in general could learn to recognize ability instead of age, ability instead of favouritism, ability instead of appearance, ability combined with attitude, it would gain immeasurably. And that applies at both ends of a working life; but I’m not holding my breath.

For those who are listening, there are a number of things you could do.

Business suggestions:
1) Scrap any fixed age for retirement;
2) Reward contribution rather than length of service;
3) Recognize the value experience has;
4) Make sure experience does not hinder innovation;
5) Reconnect with the talent you’ve scrapped;
6) Check that people enjoy, rather than endure, what you ask them to do;
7) A business is only as good as the people who are part of it;8) There is no functioning business without people.

Close encounters of the third kind

2010-06-24T12:25:00.004+01:00

Words: 311
Reading Time: 1 minute 2 seconds

What is it that brings out the volunteer in us?

There are 10 million openings for volunteers in what is known as the third sector. And the number of voluntary organizations in the UK is staggering. Such organizations are found across the spectrum from healthcare to book clubs, sports to crisis support.

Whatever help you need there is almost certainly a voluntary group out there somewhere that can help you. I even came across one that helped third sector organization tender for funding.

There are even clubs for particular makes of car peopled by enthusiasts, like the MG Owners Club.

Specific software – such as accounting packages – will often have users groups, some supported by the vendor, to provide mutual assistance and lobby for changes and improvements.

How cool is that; people getting together in organized groups to help you do a better job of marketing your product. It has to be a gathering of Raving Fans, or they would have already voted with their wallets and gone elsewhere.

When people get together in support of a cause they are expressing passion. They can also leave themselves open to accusations of merely serving their own ends, special pleading, nimbyism and being obsessed.

Well, sometimes that’s what it takes to change things and change starts with just one person being ready to step forward and be counted. That’s an energy and commitment that can be used in all aspects of life and business.

Business suggestions:
1) Encourage complaints – it shows people care;
2) Publish both good and back feedback on your website – it shows openness;
3) Form and support a user group – and then listen;
4) Don’t survey customers, it’s cold and impersonal – talk to them;
5) If there are voluntary groups around your industry, then join them and contribute to the energy;
6) If there are no voluntary groups, then start one.

Elephants traps ahead

2010-06-19T19:24:00.004+01:00

Words: 362
Reading Time: 1 minute 12 seconds

What do a British oil company, an American bank and a Japanese car maker all have in common? Rob Cox on Reuters’ Breakingviews.com believes there is no link. I disagree.

BP, Goldman Sachs and Toyota are linked by a common failure of corporate governance. They did the saving-cost-at-all-costs thing instead of doing-the-right-thing-no-matter-what-the-cost thing.

Johnson & Johnson’s handling of the Tylenol recall in 1982 is a good case study for how to minimize damage to brand and reputation.

The painkiller was recalled when seven people died in Chicago after taking capsules of Tylenol laced with cyanide. At the time it was thought the brand would not recover from the sabotage. However, an extensive product recall followed by a media campaign and the introduction of tamper-proof packaging saw Tylenol return to the market within two months.

Johnson & Johnson handled it so well they were able to enhance their reputation.

BP, Goldman Sachs and Toyota have all made themselves look even more guilty by blaming others, denying any culpability and doing too little, too late.

Any company facing irate members of the public, customers or the press has got to speak openly, candidly and forthrightly to its customers and the wider public about what has happened and what they intend to do to put it right. And a genuine apology is the first place to start.

People recognize that mistakes are made and that CEOs cannot be everywhere all the time. They appreciate being kept in the loop about what’s happening and when things will return to normal. This isn’t the time for corporate deception; it’s the time for common decency.

It is also time to wonder how we have produced a generation of so-called business leaders who seem to have no moral standards and a generation of workers who go along with things they know to be wrong.

The fact that business schools see fit to include modules on ethics as part of MBA courses is probably symptomatic. Some MBA students are even being asked to take “ethics oaths”. But if anybody can reach 21+ years of age and still not know right from wrong, then a classroom course is unlikely to help.

The power of other people

2010-06-18T12:35:00.002+01:00

Words: 399
Reading Time: 1 minute 20 seconds

Out of the blue I was recommended and signed up 25% of the people present as a result.

I was one of a small group of people – all looking to sell their services, all looking to make connections with other businesses. The organizer commended my 60 seconds of introduction and suggested that, if others had problems with speaking, then I was the person to talk to. I was part of the international speaking group, Toastmasters, and I could certainly help.

When the meeting broke up I was handed business cards by people requesting details of when and where the next meeting of Toastmasters would be and enquiring about how it all worked.

I mention this as a concrete example of the selling power of 3rd party testimonials. This one was unsolicited, but solicited or unsolicited they are astonishing in their persuasive powers. And when the 3rd party knows and trusts the person offering the endorsement, it is even more effective in promoting patronage.

So often it is not just who you know, but who is known by the people you know.

Earlier in the week I had the pleasure of talking to an Event Organizer. She had noticed that the money she spent on press advertising and direct mail was returning very little. She said her main route to market was recommendations from satisfied clients.

I asked how she went about encouraging such recommendations. She looked puzzled.

Well, did she provide commission payments where appropriate; did she buy them a case of wine, a bottle of decent champagne, or a large bouquet; did she at least send a thank you note?

Er…no.

I left her with the thought that some of that unproductive advertising spend could usefully be diverted towards a form of marketing that was actually working for her.

Will she make the change? I don’t know, but the seed has been planted.

Business suggestions:
1) When marketing, discover which channels work;
2) Divert money from non-productive to productive channels;
3) Explore other, new and different channels with the rest of the money;
4) Recognize and reward – where appropriate – recommendations that generate business;
5) Your best customers are your best (payment-by-results) sales force;
6) Ask for testimonials at every opportunity; they are rarely refused;
7) Make sure that the testimonials are heard and seen by as many other people as possible;
8) Endorsements are good for the ego.

Inconvenient dialogues

2010-06-17T21:33:00.005+01:00

Words: 421
Reading Time: 1 minute 24 seconds

An appointment is an arrangement to meet at a specific time and place.

Now, to my way of thinking, that involves two or more people agreeing to a date, a time and a rendezvous. However, certain parts of our wonderful NHS continue to send out letters claiming that an appointment has been made without first talking with the person involved.

They then post large and irritating notices in their clinics and waiting rooms that announce how many appointments patients have failed to keep in the last month, or the last year.

There is no breakdown detailing how many such broken “appointments” were unilaterally decreed by the NHS.

If I was running a restaurant and sent you an “appointment” for coffee and croissants at 8.30 a.m. on the 25th without your agreement I could hardly blame you if you decided not to come.

Why does the NHS think it is so different?

Perhaps the NHS believes our health would naturally be our primary concern. Indeed, in a recent poll it was placed first, ahead of wealth and happiness. However, on a day-to-day basis it often ranks lower than that.

If someone close to us is unwell we may postpone seeking treatment for a minor ailment of our own. Some people put off seeing the doctor, fearing the possible diagnosis. Others struggle into work despite being ill. So, clearly, health does not rank No.1 in all circumstances.

Those “broken” appointments may have been sent to someone who is out of the country, unable to read, otherwise incapacitated, or dead. How would the NHS know without trying to speak with the person in order to agree – rather than decree – an appointment?

Having a dialogue before setting a date and time would probably cost less in time and money than the all the subsequent rescheduling and the unused resources resulting from non-attendance.

Of course, the NHS is not alone in taking a cavalier and high-handed attitude. Too often businesses blame unreasonable and uncooperative prospects and clients instead of looking for the root cause of discrimination and displeasure. Too often the approach is ‘don’t bother me with the facts, I prefer my prejudices.’

Everybody loses, but it doesn’t have to be that way.

Business suggestions
1) Talk to your prospects and your clients;
2) Don’t blame the customer when things go wrong;
3) Uncover the facts instead of making assumptions;
4) Seek feedback from those who are not your customers as well as folks who are;
5) Ask ‘how do I?’ rather than ‘why?’ – it’s forward looking and much more productive.

The future is not the past

2010-06-15T07:09:00.004+01:00

Words: 314
Reading Time: 1 minute 3 seconds

The Japanese have just returned a deep space probe to Earth carrying asteroid dust. They hope it will indicate something more about the origins of the universe.

It’s fascinating stuff. As humans we seem to have an abiding interest in origins. Most young children eventually ask, “Where did I come from?” In biological terms that can be difficult enough for a parent to answer; in philosophical terms it’s extremely profound.

However, too often origins are felt to be deterministic – not only by us, but also by others. If we were born among plumbers and electricians, then we think we cannot be an academic. If a person was born in a deprived area, or of rich parents, then they are characterized in a certain way.

In business this type of think is widespread, but extremely restrictive.

Those that start out as employees rarely see themselves as entrepreneurs – until redundancy forces them into a rethink.

Businesses that start out as caterers can find it difficult to branch out into computer software. Their competence is doubted since this is not seen as their “core” business.

Why is it, that what we start with is always considered “core” rather than convenient, or circumstantial?

Even in ecological and environmental terms we know that the future of planet Earth is not the past endlessly replayed. We are no different except that, as self-determined individuals, we can decide in which direction we wish to change and do it much faster.

But we need to get out of our own way.

Business suggestions:
1) Re-examine what you do – is that what really interests you?
2) Re-examine the way that you do it – is that the best you have to offer?
3) Re-examine those you work with – what else are they capable of?
4) Re-examine those you do not work with – what are you missing?

As Richard Bandler once said: “Why be yourself when you can be someone so much better?”

The value of a free gift

2010-06-13T10:43:00.005+01:00

Words: 295
Reading Time: 0 minute 59 seconds

To be of value a free gift need not cost you very much, or anything at all, but it must have some value to the recipient. If it does not have this quality then it will be seen as worthless – or worse – whatever it may have cost you.

A very knight of this soft and sea-girt isle is seeking to develop some land close to where I live. As part of the “planning gain” he is obliged to offer he proposes donating land to the local primary school. However, the amount of extra land the school gets will still leave it below the minimum area deemed necessary for a school of that size.

From the school’s viewpoint the offer is seen as minimalist and mean-spirited. Moreover, it undermines their case with the local education authority for greater facilities, because their shortfall would be marginally less. If they accepted the gift they would actually be worse off.

This is clearly a case where the giver of the gift has completely failed to see it from the other side of the table. The gift is a poisoned chalice. It neither recognizes, nor solves the school’s problem.

And the giver has also damaged his own image instead of enhancing it. Rather than painting a picture of someone generous, open-handed and willing to contribute to village life, he comes across as a typical Scrooge; self-interested and miserly.

It’s marketing myopia all over again.

Business suggestions, for him as well as others:
1) Find out what the recipients value, do not just assume;
2) Connect the dots by showing how it feeds their dreams;
3) Make it freely available; do not impose pre-conditions;
4) The gift will change the relationship, make sure it’s to your benefit;
5) Go the extra mile; it’s not that far.

Tomorrow is another country

2010-06-12T19:11:00.006+01:00

Words: 217
Reading Time: 0 minute 43 seconds

All around me are preparations for the first England match in the World Cup. Whatever you may think of football – or of the England team - enormous enthusiasm is being exhibited nationwide. When we consider the record of the England team delivering against such expectations, I begin to wonder why such raving fans exist.

I believe the most likely explanation is that – once again – they have been sold, not the reality of past results, but the dream of future glory. This is not the past all-over-again; this is new territory, the dynamics are different; the possibility exists. It is hope-against-hope time and an excuse, among some, for a party.

And then there is the loyal cognoscenti who would enthuse whatever the circumstances – either for football in general, or for the England team in particular – although they are probably a minority.

What are the implications for business?

I would suggest the following lessons:
1) Don’t ignore your loyal fan base, they will keep you going through tough times;
2) Find out why your prospective supporters should care;
3) Sell the future for your customers, not the products' past;
4) Dreams overpower reality.

If business recognized and realized the way their potential supporters think, they would have many more enthusiastic aficionados and a very different tomorrow. Computer firm Apple is the classic example.

Making a change

2010-06-11T15:50:00.007+01:00

Words: 329
Reading Time: 1 minute 5 seconds

Today I came across a solution to an issue that has been facing me for a while, but has been unresolved until now.

Some while ago I made a decision to write a book on business in conjunction with a business partner. Both of us made a start, both of us are well-intentioned, but neither of us has consistently put in the work needed. Consequently, the timetable has slipped and continues to slip.

I took on yet another suggestion, just this week, which involves simultaneously writing a second book. This one will be a simple guide to finding material for speeches, writing and delivering them.

I am anticipating both books being stalled in the starting gate. I know I can write at the office. I also know I do not write at the office.

Sometimes these things are about the person; sometimes they are about the situation. Whichever it is, something – often just one thing – has to change to make a difference. For me it was the offer of a very economical hot-desk at a close and convenient location.

There I have a bare desk, bare walls, fast internet access if I want it and free tea and coffee. Here I can go with just one mission: to write. This will be my writing space. I will do nothing else there. And if it is not the solution that I think it is I will have lost very little.

If I sound pleased with myself, it’s because I am.

As I a business coach I have clients that also recognize the need for a change, but fail to find it. I will now have a story to tell that they can work with to move on and develop their own version of my hot desk.

Suggestions:
1) If what you are doing isn’t working, then stop;
2) Make a change, any change;
3) Test to see if the change has brought an improvement;
4) If not, return to 1).

Are we receiving you?

2010-06-10T07:58:00.005+01:00

Words: 300
Reading Time: 1 minute 00 seconds

What message is conveyed by your advertising?

It sounds almost a banal question. Obviously we just read the text, look at the images and voilà we all understand exactly what you mean and we all relate to what you are saying.

If only it were that simple.

There is a large Wells and Young’s warehouse on the A421 that I pass quite often. I noticed yesterday morning that it had several large banners on the outside of the building proclaiming that it was “Pubco of the Year!”

I thought Wells and Young’s were a brewing company. If you go to their website you will find them described as the largest private brewing company in the UK with some of the UK's most loved cask beers and specialty lager brands.

Pubco.s are organizations that are really only interested in the property side of things, are widely condemned for their thoughtlessness and ruthless attitude to their exploited tenants and who have closed down more pubs in recent years in pursuit of a quick buck than anything attributed to the smoking ban.

So why would a brewer want to be associated with such an image – even in passing?

Are Wells and Young’s a respected brewer of fine beers, or just a landlord with their main focus on redevelopment?

Clearly, I’m confused. It's the usual error - thinking others know what we know and therefore what we mean. Unfortunately, the implication is that ALL their marketing spend has gone to waste where I am concerned. How many more are there like me?

Suggestions for all marketeers:
1) Decide on the message;
2) Keep it consistent across all platforms and media;
3) Walk the talk;
4) Check that the message you think you are sending is the one being heard by your audience;
5) Be ready to change what isn’t working.

Look before you leap

2010-06-09T06:19:00.004+01:00

Words: 350
Reading Time: 1 minute 10 seconds

Imposing financial penalties if patients are readmitted as an emergency within 30 days of being discharged is the latest wheeze from new Health Secretary Andrew Lansley, part of a Government anxious to impress.

His heart might be in the right place, but his head is reported missing.

That’s the problem when we are driven to do things that we think look good, without taking the time to examine the possible consequences from all sides. In my view there is an obligation on all novices to learn a little about their new role before changing anything – at least three months.

Not doing so can so easily lead on to unintended consequences. In this case:

Planned Outcome: no patients will be discharged until they are fully ready.

Likely Outcome: hospitals will find every conceivable reason not readmit until day 31, resulting in more patients suffering and a decline in timely, responsive treatment.

Nice one, Andrew!

To be charitable to Mr. Lansley: what brainless cretin from Central Office came up with this one?

In any walk of life you will deter the actions you penalize effectively. Those working in the NHS are as self-interested as any of us. Indeed, parts of the NHS are still run more in the interests of staff than of patients – witness the issue of ‘appointment’ times without consultation.

How can it be an appointment if only one party has taken part in the decision? But I digress.

The reverse of the penalization medal is that you encourage all actions – however deleterious – that you do not punish. It’s this aspect that opens the gates to the Law of Unintended Consequences.

A few suggestions for businesses:
1) Penalties only dictate what NOT to do, rather than promoting the specific actions you want. Start with the end in mind.
2) Start earlier in the chain of causation – like shortening in-patient time to speed up admissions – before attempting to stem the outcomes.
3) Just because your mate has jumped off a cliff (this policy originates with the Obama administration) does not mean you have to follow either his lead, or that of the crowd, blindly.

Imitate the animals

2010-06-08T06:50:00.004+01:00

Words: 172
Reading Time: 0 minute 35 seconds

Combining boundless joy, unconfined enthusiasm and sheer joie de vivre seems to be a full time occupation for my two Labradors as I watch them race away on their morning run. If some of my clients could only harness a fraction of that energy and go-for-it mentality in their businesses they would be a lot further ahead than they are now.

That’s true not only of my select clients, but of business in general.

And such cheerful exuberance about life in general and business in particular is infectious.

What if you greeted each day in this way?

What if you greeted each client this way?

And if you think your particular business, or your particular situation, is too serious to be viewed in this way – what are you saying? That your heart is not in it? That it no longer fires you up each morning? That prospects no longer engage you and clients are no longer like respected friends?

Then what are you doing here?

Live a lot – live like a Labrador.

Marketing aspects of the grocery hunt

2010-06-07T06:16:00.005+01:00

Words: 445
Reading Time: 1 minute 29 seconds

Suddenly you can’t find your favoured brand of breakfast muesli? Of course not; it’s deliberately been moved to confuse you. The conventional wisdom used by the non-thinkers that run supermarkets is that moving products around to confuse customers has a tendency to increase sales.

Thus it is that eventually I found cling film with the pet food this week; kitchen towels in the “seasonal” aisle and chilled puff pastry next to the butter. Where else?

The trouble with the way this rule has evolved is that there is no effective control group. It is impossible to have two stores on the same site at the same time, one relocating goods, the other not, to give any true comparison.

So sales go up on the confusingly located product, or the one that took its place – would they have done so anyway? There is no way of knowing. And what about related products sales; how have they been affected? Brainless in marketing has no idea because what constitutes a related product is peculiar to each shopper.

This received dogma, this unexamined conformance to an out-of-date rule ignores some basic commonsense contrary indicators:
1) If this rule is so great at increasing sales, why are all the soup tins together? Why not put some with the cereals, some with the cakes and some with the soap powders? Why not simply throw all the products onto the shelves in a totally random and haphazard manner? That would really bump up the volumes – not.
2) Familiarity increases spending. I personally spend more in stores where I feel more comfortable and less threatened by the child-level psychology in use and for which, I suppose, the retailer pays handsomely.
3) Confused customers become frustrated customers. They will take out their aggression on your staff, leading to higher staff turnover. Confused customers will also give up the hunt, even abandoning goods they have already put into the trolley, and go elsewhere. Total sales go down.

Sometimes stuff has to be moved around for good reasons of space and changes in product mix. We know that. In which case:
1) Provided handy, current, printed store guides at the entrances, so that we can still find stuff;
2) Make the aisle signs reflect what is on the shelves – or simply take them down;
3) Place a bright, eye-catching (you know how to do that) re-direct label on the shelf-edge at the old location, directing us to the new location.

Isn’t it about time our retailers stopped treating us – their customers – as dim-witted cattle and accorded us a little respect?

It would certainly improve their image among the general population.

What would that do for sales?

Packaging should be a pushover

2010-06-06T12:31:00.005+01:00

Words: 420
Reading Time: 1 minute 24 seconds

Blister packaging, particularly around small products like pills, is a frequently recurring source of exasperation to me. I am glad to find I am not alone.

According to a British study, over 60,000 people receive hospital treatment each year due to injuries from opening food packaging. When you add in similar injuries from opening packages on products other than food – including medicines themselves – then the cost to the British taxpayer is staggering.

In 2003 the Daily Telegraph coined the term “wrap rage” for this ingredient of consumer anger and disgust, but the march to encase everything on the planet in plastic seems relentless.

Sometimes regulations dictate that some OTC drugs have tamper resistance to deter people opening them in the shop; other regulations are aimed at child-resistance as an adjunct to health and safety. But these are a minority of cases.

Frequently packages are intentionally made difficult to open to reduce pilfering and shoplifting. Hard plastic clamshell packs also protect products while they are being shipped. This is more about saving the retailer and the manufacturer money. There is no element of either healthy and safety, or consumer interest.

There are many possible solutions to allow easy access to package contents and many products that simply do not warrant blister packs. Pills where there is no place for day-labelling is a good example. If vitamins can come in a single, tamper-proof pot, why not these too?

However, this relies entirely on the goodwill and commercial interests of manufacturers and retailers. I cannot recall a single instance of a product moving from blister packaging to some other form of container.

And how many service companies also make product-access equally difficult in less obvious, but equally deleterious ways? Unanswered calls, limited availability, poor tenders, untailored offerings – the list goes on.

In many cases use of blister packs is a result of a we’re-here-because-we’re-here-because-we’re here mentality. Everybody does it in this industry. It’s standard practice.

The sound of minds clanging shut is deafening.

Why change? Here are three good reasons:
1) The first in any product field to break ranks and make life easier for consumers will clean the plates of their competitors;
2) An increasing percentage of the population is among those who have great purchasing power, but suffer disproportionately from this problem – the grey vote;
3) Not removing an adverse experience at the point of consumption, when there is ample opportunity and advantage in doing so, is simply bad for business – and you are supposed to be in business, aren’t you?

Judging by appearances

2010-06-05T07:14:00.004+01:00

Words: 373 Reading Time: 1 minute 14 seconds

Seeing the sun and feeling the warmth of early summer – finally – is very welcome. And being this early in the season means both men and women are wearing clothes that expose more, but before developing that attractive, but all-too-brief tan. This is the period of product enhancement.

If you are searching for a mate, now is the time to judge appearance.

While appearance is only one factor in a relationship, it is often where a relationship starts. That’s true whether the ‘relationship’ in question is with a product, or a person. That’s why the car industry spends a shed load of money on design, why companies like Apple obsess about it and why fake spray-on tans sell a bundle.

So why judge now?

Because now is when you get to see what will only be temporarily enhanced later with the benefit of tanning. Now you can judge the basic, underlying qualities of the pallid ‘product offering’ without being seduced by the shallow surface sheen.

Businesses could make a useful change to the way they operate in just the same fashion:
- By engaging with new companies as they begin to grow you can influence the way they develop and the level of service you receive;
- By engaging early on with new products you can help determine the features and benefits of the finished item to your own advantage;
- By taking on young employees, not only do you invite fresh thinking and enthusiasm untrammelled by unfortunate experiences elsewhere, you are also in a prime position to train them the way you would prefer.

Early adoption has its risks – but they are demonstrably no greater than those inherent in the typical wait-and-see strategy that misses boats and has expensive catch-up consequences, or the head-in-the-sand posture so tempting to all your competitors.

Early exposure also works for new companies, new products and new employees. The sooner you can get external feedback and outside input, the sooner the rough corners are smoothed out and the true value recognized. Waiting for ‘just the right time’, or ‘one more improvement’, or ‘the perfect opportunity’ risks being still stuck in the starting blocks when the race is already over.

Plough a new furrow. In business you do not even have to wait for the sun.

Getting better & better – not

2010-06-04T08:29:00.005+01:00

Words: 449 Reading Time: 1 minute 30 seconds

My nearest Sainsbury’s has a number of large, temporary signs outside proudly declaring that “We are improving your car park”. Let me disabuse them.

It is true that various pieces of construction and earth-moving equipment are trundling about, making an uncommon mess and changing the car park’s configuration. But it is not my car park. It is their car park and they would not be “improving” it if they did not expect solid payback as a result.

Of all the things I would have changed about this Sainsbury’s, it would not have been the car park.

1. The store is quite small, so I would have made it larger.

2. I have yet to see all checkouts staffed all at the same time – even the busiest of times – so I would have changed that.

3. And they are routinely out of routine items, so I would have worked on “improving” that.

None of this has been done.

I am a regular shopper at this site. Was I ever asked what I would like “improved”; even once?

Umm, no.

This is Sainsbury’s idea, so naturally the improvement is angled towards their priorities, rather than mine. It does not seem to have occurred to them that by addressing what the customers want their expected return might be even bigger that the one they have calculated.

Sadly, Sainsbury’s are not alone in this propensity by the big battalions to portray their selfish decisions as being in “our” interests by deliberately false or misleading statements.

1. The repeated message put out by the BBC (taxpayers’ money!) that DAB is wonderful and will make life better for everyone has long been discredited, but they continue to pump out the propaganda at everyone else’s expense.

2. ‘Because you’re worth it’ – which, if the company really believed its own publicity, would result in them giving you the product without charge.

3. And ‘Delays Possible’ before major motorway works that run for miles without a sign of any activity by man or machine. The arbitrarily imposed lower speed limit means that delays are not just possible, they are inevitable, because whatever hour of the day or night I pass through I cannot drive at the speed customary for that stretch of road.

The less sceptical among us may be drawn in by these blatant falsehoods; the rest of us grow weary as our delicious language is hijacked in the service of mammon.

With our words we tell our stories and through our stories we sell ourselves and what we offer. How are we to do that if the words no longer say what they mean? We cannot mangle the moving parts and still expect a functioning mechanism.

Change & Uncertainty

2010-06-03T06:04:00.005+01:00

Words: 288 Reading Time: 0 minutes 57 seconds

The old saying used to be that only two things were certain in this life – death and taxes. Over recent years a third element has been added – that of change. Indeed, change is now so often trumpeted as a constant that it has become a mere cliché.

However, I am not so sure.

Einstein, in proposing the General Theory of Relativity, reflexively dropped into his equations something called the cosmological constant, which arbitrarily offset the effects of gravity. He later called it “the biggest blunder of my life”.

Are we about to make a similar error where change is concerned?

When assessing the nature of change we quickly recognize that while change may always be with us, it is no constant. Change happens at different speeds, in different directions, at different times, in different places and in different ways. In fact, the one thing about change is uncertainty. In which case, how can we pretend that it is a constant?

Unless we accept the unknown nature of change we may find ourselves expecting a large shift in circumstances, say, economic recovery, that actually unfolds only slowly. We may anticipate a fast payback on an advertising campaign that turns out to be a slow-burn. We may bet the balance sheet on our latest product going unremarked by the competition, when the opposite proves to be true.

In no way does change appear to have the same degree of certainty as death and taxes where the end results are well known and totally predictable (death and less disposable income).

Mind you, the advent of dark matter and dark energy may mean Einstein was right after all. So we may not understand as much about change as we think we do.

Rules and Reality

2010-06-02T10:18:00.004+01:00

Words: 404 Reading time: 1 min 21 sec

This morning I made the mistake of stopping for fuel, southbound on the A1, at Astwick. Clearly, it was simply not convenient for the staff on duty at the time. Having replenished the tank I went to make my payment. I was the only customer. And I had to wait.

It was much more important that the surplus cash in the till be counted while I stood and watched. It was very important that the notes all be the same way round, that notes of the same denomination be kept together and that they all be rolled tightly into a small sheaf and secured with an elastic band. Then they had to be securely stored.

If you are losing the will to live at this point, so was I. But there I was, pinned in place by my obligation to pay for the fuel I had put into my tank, while any obligation they had to serve their customers was blithely ignored.

There was a second person behind the counter. It was apparently paramount that she restock the shelves for possible future customers, rather than serve those already present. I can see the short-term logic. I had already committed myself to my purchase. There was no practical way to avoid paying. Perhaps, in her mind, potential future revenue was more important than past revenue.

Next time an Area Manager drops by he or she will see a tidy, well-stocked, well-organized filling station. In all probability the folks behind the counter will get a pat on the back for a job well done – for following rules and regulations about what makes for a well-run site. What the Area Manager will not see is a forecourt crammed with raving fans. The sadness here is that those fans will not be missed, because the measures are all wrong.

Here we have an organization almost completely inner-focused. It has decided for itself what is good, what is acceptable, what people should want and it has put in all the procedures to deliver just that. Wonderful; meanwhile the world outside goes on.

It will come as no surprise to learn that the company in question is BP. The same BP that hired Transworld to do the drilling and still believes that is sufficient to excuse them from the disaster in the Gulf of Mexico.

BOB FERGUSON DTM - Masterclass

2010-05-24T01:42:00.002+01:00

7.30 pm Thursday 27th May 2010

Bedford Speakers are pleased and proud to announce that we have persuaded Bob Ferguson to give us a whole evening of his time dedicated to helping all those of us that still have so much to learn about speaking and presenting in public.

To make the most of this rare treat we have asked Bob to speak on his proven strengths:

1) How on earth do I write a humorous speech?
2) Why should I bother entering a speech contest?

Bob is the current UK & Ireland Humorous Speaking Champion and past UK & Ireland International Speech Champion in 2002 and Speech Evaluation Champion in 2005.

His personality, presence and passion about public speaking will capture your attention as he educates, enthrals and entertains you.

YOU WILL NOT WANT TO MISS WHAT BOB HAS TO SAY, NOR HOW HE SAYS IT

Refreshments will be available during the evening – hence the modest charge – but where else can you get insights and instruction of this calibre for only £3?

Spaces are limited so please book you seat early and ensure that you can come along to:

The Fox & Hounds, 178 Goldington Road, Bedford MK40 3EB.

Please contatct me for further details

Misplacing your management skills

2010-02-23T20:40:00.006Z

Words: 677 Reading Time: 2 minutes 15 seconds

As a speaker I recently delivered a 10 minute coaching slot at the beginning of a network meeting. I selected a topic apparently much loved by those aspiring to coach – Time Management. When I entered the phrase into Google I got:

* 64.4 million listings for time management skills;
* 258 million listings for time management tools; and
* 140 million listings for time management training sessions.

Clearly, I was on the right track.

Regretfully, those so intent on learning about time management are doomed to a degree of disappointment. While purveyors of advice on time management may be as tightly packed as snake oil sellers at a health-food convention there are some inherent attributes of time that ought to be pointed out first.

1) Time just happens. If I kick off a stopwatch and then ask someone to ‘manage’ the time as I talk I am not quite sure how they would do that. Note that I am asking that they manage the time and only the time, not my talk. With so many courses and techniques I am sure there must be a way to make time stop, start, increase, diminish, reverse, multiple and turn left at the traffic lights; I just haven’t come across it yet.

2) The predictability of time - 24 hours in a day; 7 days in a week; 52 weeks in a year – should probably make managing it easier. But that predictability is an illusion. There’s really 24hrs and 59 seconds in a day – hence the Leap Year. In 1751 there was no January, February or March in England and Wales. Under Napoleon there were 10 days in a week (a decade) and each month had 3 decades. The year ended (on the old Sept 17th) with 5 supplementary days to bring it back to 365 days in a year, or 6 supplementary days in a Leap Year.

3) Besides messing about with the calendar it is possible genuinely to bend the space/time continuum under an intense gravitational field; time will run at different speeds and in different directions.

4) The theory of relativity tells us that the faster you travel through space, the slower you travel through time. If one of a pair of twins rockets off through space for a period of time, he would return younger than his sibling.

Probably time is a much more slippery subject than it at first appears.

One of the things that may prompt us to attempt to ‘manage’ time is that we view it as scarce, but there is actually loads of it. About 14 billion years have elapsed since the “Big Bang” and – as far as we can tell – time stretches for an infinite distance into the future. Whatever else may be scarce, it isn’t time.

And time is a bit like air - we have all the time that there is. We all have 24 hours and 59 seconds in a day. Nobody goes short, or is in any way deprived. There is no more to be had.

Perhaps the most helpful change we can make is to stop thinking of time as a resource, like water, minerals or money. Time is not a resource, it’s a dimension like height, width and depth and like those other dimensions its gradations are just human inventions.

Time is not susceptible to management.

That leaves us with the one component in any situation that we are best placed to manage – ourselves.

Unless we are managing our own thoughts and feelings (and nobody else can) any organizational method that is superimposed will be fatally undermined. On the myriad of courses listed by Google you can learn about diaries, schedules, systems, tidying, delegating and dumping, but without first being in control of ourselves (to some degree) all the clever plans and procedures will be like dandelions parachutes in a windstorm.

There are two very simple (not easy) elements to managing ourselves:

* Clarity – knowing exactly what outcome we want.

* Desire – an overwhelming connection with that outcome.

With those two successfully addressed we can make the most of ourselves – whatever amount of time we think we may have.

What comes first - seeing or believing?

2010-02-16T07:47:00.008Z

Words: 349 Reading Time: 1 minutes 10 seconds

Relatively few businesses seek any form of outside consultancy or coaching.

In 2009, according to the Office for National Statistics, the UK economy was made up of 525,000 sole proprietors, with another 1,382,000 enterprises employing between 2 and 10 people and another 20,000 enterprises with between 11 and 49 employees.

Of all businesses (2.15 million) 348,000 were under two years old and a further 316,000 were between two and four years old.

Clearly, with so many small businesses and so many new businesses there is benefit to be had from seeking professional help, especially as approximately one in fifty six businesses will have failed in the same year. So why is this assistance ignored?

Aside from issues of ignorance and concerns about cost I believe the main reason is belief.

For any personal or corporate change to take place, first there must be a change in belief. If any part of the old Henry Ford adage is true, it’s the second part, “you can’t if you think you can’t”, because if companies are convinced of their own inadequacy they are unlikely to attempt any change.

In the unlikely event that they do make an attempt, they are unlikely to persist, taking any early lack of success as proof positive of their initial doubts rather than recognizing this as almost inevitable during the first stumbling steps on the road.

Shifting belief takes work, which probably acts to deter most people. When our beliefs change, so will some of our values. And that tends to scare people. What they more easily embrace is surface pattern change rather than deeper belief work. It has the attraction of seeming to yield early results.

But, perhaps unsurprisingly, the pattern change rarely sticks. Why would it when it is unsupported by underpinning beliefs? Unfortunately this probably leaves the enterprise worse off than before.

To break through this debilitating condition what people and businesses require is a meta-shift – a shift in their belief about belief and the role it plays in their success or failure.

However, I am sure none of that applies to my readers.

Acting from a single purpose

2010-02-09T18:37:00.003Z

Words: 277 Reading Time: 0 minutes 55 seconds

Recently I was surprised to see an experienced NLP Trainer remark on a lady that spent her time at a dancing class actually talking instead of listening to the music and practising.

He was struck by the fact that even though this lady had been told repeatedly that she should not talk during practice the first thing she did was talk about the not talking instruction!

And when he thought about how this lady behaved in class, he realised she seemed to be talking most of the time.

Well, of course!

The evident mistake is to assume that two people doing the same thing, at the same time, in the same place will have the same motive. That doesn’t follow at all. In fact it is highly improbable given the diversity among people.

Those running businesses often fall into the same mode of thinking.

Owners are puzzled that their waged employees do not share their dedication and whole-hearted commitment to the enterprise.

Directors are astonished that the carefully designed, highly remunerative, shiny new incentive package has not had the motivational effect they expected.

And managers are surprised that the disciplinary code ensuring that clerical staff put everything in writing has not cut the error rate one iota.

Blanket policies and uniform procedures are the bluntest of tools. To improve the probability of connecting with an individual we need to know why they are here and what interests them. Only with that information can we hope to tap into their motivationally wellsprings.

I don’t know the talkative lady at the dancing class, but there’s a good chance she was there mainly for the company, not the La Caida.

Brain Training

2010-01-05T12:39:00.004Z

Words: 198 Reading time: 0 minutes 40 seconds

Just thinking about our business, either as it is at the moment, or how we intend it to be, can prompt us to conceive a whole catalogue of problems. Some of those problems may be real; others are merely imagined, or even manufactured by us. And, with those obstacles in mind, we allow ourselves to be deterred.

However, obstacles are opportunities to grow, not indications of failure.

If the obstacles have been fabricated by ourselves, or are simply the result of our fertile imagination, such manifestations give us the opportunity to see them for what they are and thereby grow beyond them. If we are creating our own confines, making our own monsters, it would be sheer relief to stop, wouldn’t it?

Even if the obstacle is genuine, all is not lost. After all, obstacles are a feature of the path chosen, not a divine judgment on the eventual destination. So, meeting obstacles can certainly be seen as a welcome event, both as a temporary diversion and as a challenge to our creativity.

And the time we spend working through our business obstacles can go towards reducing the time we spend unnecessarily “Brain Training” on our Nintendo DS.

Who else has bad habits?

2009-12-24T19:29:00.009Z

Words: 99 Reading time: 0 minutes 30 seconds

Every bad habit leads us away from what we want, but which are ‘bad’ and can we change them?

Where habits are concerned there are no absolutes. The same habit can be judged ‘good’ at one particular time and ‘bad’ at another. A cold shower in the morning can be seen as physically invigorating, but it would be of questionable benefit if you were suffering from pneumonia.

Fortunately, we are the ones that make certain actions routine simply by repeating them. That puts us in an ideal position to do something else consistently instead. Voilà, a new habit.

Who else would decide to wait?

2009-12-17T16:33:00.004Z

Words: 211 Reading time: 0 minutes 42 seconds

At Christmas 1914 soldiers from both sides climbed out of their trenches and played football in No Man’s Land. For just a brief time those engaged in killing each other realised that war was not what they wanted and that there was probably a better way.

This spontaneous act at a human level was somewhat frowned on by those in higher command and next day they all went back to a prolonged and bitter conflict.

On a personal level, with much less dire consequences, we repeat this self-destructive cycle. We realize that what we are doing is not yielding the results we want, we know there is a better way, we may even try it for a short while, but in the end we revert back to what we were doing previously, because that’s what’s expected and it doesn’t disrupt the pattern of received wisdom.

By 1918, four years later, the protagonists eventually got round a table and arrived at a settlement. The cost would have been much less four years earlier, whatever they may have agreed at that stage.

The simple lesson learnt at such cost to everyone is: if you need to change something, do it sooner rather than later; it will be so much better for all concerned.

What is everyone else doing?

2009-12-15T19:27:00.006Z

Words = 104 Reading Time = 0 minutes 21 seconds

If you spend your time looking over the fence at your neighbour's garden do not be surprised if your own is full of weeds.

That is not the same as saying that your neighbour’s garden should be ignored. By all means take a look, see what lessons are to be learned and perhaps pick up new methods or fresh ideas.

However, if you spend all your time worrying about what the neighbours are up to, if you stand open-mouthed in awe at their goings-on, then your own backyard will – perforce – be ignored and your flowers, fruit and vegetables will wither for want of attention.

Voices in the void

2009-12-07T17:42:00.005Z

Words: 80 Reading time: 0 minutes 16 seconds

Many of us need the echoes of others to confirm our belief in ourselves. Perhaps it is this that lies behind the undeniable success of sites like Facebook and Twitter, the provision of feedback on blogs and the value ascribed to them.

That evokes even more admiration for those who plough the lonely furrow of an inner conviction, which society does not share, until they are eventually proved correct.

Are you a modern day Galileo?

How do you know?

Learning from our mistakes

2009-12-04T13:04:00.004Z

Words: 78 Reading time: 16 seconds

We spend needless time worrying about mistakes, mainly because we have been programmed during our formative years to concentrate on correcting our errors, rather than maximising our successes. What we have rarely been taught – but what we must quickly learn for ourselves in business – is that mistakes are the inevitable corollary of success. Unless we are making mistakes we are missing opportunities; we are not trying hard enough and we are forgoing huge, valuable and irreplaceable learning.

When learning doesn’t help

2009-11-25T18:12:00.003Z

Words: 575 Reading time: 1 minutes 55 seconds

It doesn’t matter much who you marry because they will turn out to be someone different anyway – or so they say. Business is just the same. Whatever you thought you were getting into will turn out to be something different in reality. And whatever your business is like today, next week, next month or next year it will have changed.

That’s life, but instead of successfully taking ourselves through it, we often sabotage ourselves by using three rules we learned at school. And these three false rules are at the heart of people feeling isolation, something I meet so often in clients.

The first rule is: there is only one right answer. This rule has everyone chasing the golden key that will unlock the secret of success. That the next book, course, or seminar will contain the Holy Grail and they will receive that great big tick of approval they have been seeking ever since attending nursery.

Unfortunately, in the power politics of the classroom, what is denied to virtually all pupils is the hypothetical nature of knowledge. Even 1+1=2 is an hypothesis and true only under certain conditions, as far as we know. The square root of 4 is either +2, or -2, or some other answer that we don’t know, but may exist.

The second rule is: focus on your weaknesses. Do you remember taking test and getting a mark of 18 out of 20? Pretty good! But what the teacher had you focus on was the two answers she thought you had wrong – not the eighteen answers you had correct. We can spend our whole lives looking in the wrong direction, trying to address minor faults instead of maximising our talents by doing even better the things we can already do well.

All those lives wasted and wrecked as a result cannot be counted. Imagine a Paula Radcliffe, or a Michael Johnson, or a Carl Lewis being told that, while they were quite good at running, they needed to address their weaknesses in the shot putt, or English composition, or historical dates. Would they have then developed into the outstanding athletes they subsequently became? Of course not! They would have been mediocre at whatever they did instead.

The third rule is: no cheating! Everyone must find the answer for themselves. The testing and examination regime placed constraints on leaning across to see what your neighbour had written on her answer paper. Inevitably, that has carried across into our working lives.
* Who has not worked extra, unpaid hours rather than ask colleagues to help?
* We have all sat through that awful, boring, stammered presentation by the HR Director when everyone knows that his deputy would have done it twice as well in half the time.
* And we men have all struggled to lift things that were really too heavy for us, but we refused to wimp-out and ask for a hand. Some of us have even injured our backs as a result.
*In business we sit in isolation, struggling with a situation beyond our immediate area of expertise, rather than pick up the phone and ask someone who knows.

So, day-by-day, week-by-week these well-learned axioms stand in our way, simply because we let them. Our parents, our teachers, our peers and our role models may have initially introduced us to these rules, but it is us that perpetuates them even though we are now fully grown and cognitive adults.

Yes, sometimes learning is over-rated.

Customer care is a dog’s life

2009-11-17T08:41:00.004Z

Words: 444 Reading time: 1 minute 29 seconds

A dog is our best friend, because he wags his tail instead of his tongue – or so it is said. If you are engaged in customer service, as we all are in one way or another, there may be a lesson to be learned here.

Looking at the way that we, our colleagues or our company greet our customers – which end of the dog are we?

Companies that greet their customers with genuine energy and enthusiasm are as rare as the Kihansi spray toad – a species now extinct in the wild.

Companies persist in making so few people available to deal with their customers that, perpetually, “All our operatives are busy at the moment.”

And we then expect us to hold on a premium rate 0871 number.

Read that again, it’s not a typo.

People like us run companies and people like us are customers. It’s bizarre that as we pass from one side of the divide to the other we consistent elect to mistreat our alter egos in ways that we ourselves object to.

My heart-sinking phone call for help is declared “important” but that apparent recognition is not matched by any perceptible effort to make someone available to receive it.

Cashier positions are unattended at lunchtimes when a flush of peak demand can be expected.

Show me a supermarket on a busy Saturday morning and I will show you unattended tills.

And why are petrol and diesel pumps now so routinely unattended that we fill our own tanks without a second thought, despite high levels of unemployment among the anxious, but aspiring young and the keen, but chronically low-waged?

There seems little doubt which end of the dog currently greets our customers. While it’s true that some companies spend time and money dreaming up schemes to encourage and build customer loyalty (the dreaded ‘card’), the very same companies – and a host of others besides – spend even more time and effort “saving” dollars by doing the opposite.

A senior buyer from a major UK brewer told me recently that his company had worked out that a cost saving of £1,000 was equivalent to an increase in sales of £39,000 and such savings were seen as easier to accomplish – hence the focus on cost-cutting.

He failed to explain what the impact would be if, in saving £1,000, he also lost £39,000 or more of sales as a consequence of poorer quality in either product or service.

Of course not, with the way we train people in narrow skills and structure companies in tight little boxes that’s hardly his problem.

The great thing about the dog is that the tail and the tongue are connected. It’s a model we would do well to imitate in business and in life.

What Was Your Message?

2009-09-24T09:41:00.010+01:00

Words: 1,374 Reading time: 4 minutes 35 seconds

When Lee, the Operations Director, announced the pending plant closures she had been working on it for weeks. The problems with the firm had been clear for a while, but answers had been elusive. This was her solution.

When Simon, the Warehouse Foreman, heard the proposals he wondered what had taken them so long. He would have told them what needed to be done months ago, only they never asked.

In organizations, when things don’t go as planned, or as hoped, or as well as we would have liked, there is one culprit certain to be nominated – lack of communication.

Common Culprit
Rey in her book “Secrets of the Body Broker” says that in her consulting practice, communication—or lack of it—is the leading cause of workplace dissatisfaction, and that the problem encompasses communication between employee and boss, between departments and between senior management and management staff.

So, not only does communication feature in the roll call of why things went wrong, it also stands in the dock when the charge is lack of satisfaction. Communication is conceived as being something not only outside of the individual, but also beyond their scope. It is a darkness, always there and into which no light of our own can shine. All of us await the harsh magnesium luminosity of some rescuer’s flare before we can steer our way to knowing.

Apparently, leaders, managers and workers are each shipwrecked on their own desert island of ignorance, playing their eight records and waiting for the fates to send them a ship.

We may not wish to admit it, but it doesn’t actually happen like this.

* Some of us are ignorant because we choose to be; it’s less of a problem that way.
* Some of us think we know it all anyway; anything else would be inconsequential.
* Some of don’t know what we don’t know; we are within the realms of what’s possible.
* Some of us don’t care what we don’t know; that’s somebody else’s problem.
* And some of us don’t want others to know; it’s just none of their business.

If we knew more, we’d do better
Organizational theory has it that communication in the workplace will provide employees with a clear understanding of what is demanded from them and give them knowledge of what to do and what to expect. It is said that communication creates effective performance by the staff, and, consequently, increases customer loyalty and profit.

The reverse of the coin says that lack of communication may lead to:

§ Misunderstandings
§ Lack of information
§ Decrease in employees’ performance
§ Decrease in company’s turnover

In this model the inability of leaders and managers to clearly express their thoughts, ideas and demands leads to employees' inability to work well.

This strikes me as way too simplistic and naïve.

Few companies, if any, run a single agenda and some items on the agenda are usually unstated. There are always conflicting demands between agenda items and which gets precedence can change rapidly, or be different in different parts of the organization at the same time. On top of that, each employee has their own agenda which – amazingly – is highly unlikely to be the same as that of the company.

What emerges from any company is the result of a complex of agenda trade-offs at every level. More and indiscriminate communication between those levels is likely to lead to greater confusion, not less; to reduced rather than improved results.

No news is good news
Some people believe they are managing by exception. This causes them to have their antennae tuned to hear only bad news. For those operating with such a mindset, no news is, indeed, good news.

However, there might be things, like political issues and conflicts of interest, which prevent others from bringing issues to surface. As a manager you will hear no news, but there will be hidden things that may go from bad to worse. Waiting until things get so awful that they can no longer be kept off your radar is a good way to be sure you will always be late to the scene of a fire and that fire will be out of control when you arrive.

If it’s an ‘internal’ customer not giving you feedback about a project you have completed, perhaps she’s not happy with it. If her preferred style is to avoid confrontation your future prospects may already be blighted, you just don’t know it yet. By the time you do it will be too late to repair the damage.

No news can also mean they didn’t hear what you thought you said, or they attach less weight to it than you do. Sometimes people just decided to put the issue on the back burner and let it simmer a while – if it’s that important, they expect you’ll mention it again – but they don't bother to let you know.

Mixed messages
If you continue to drive a large, expensive car while the firm is going through a rough patch, is that confidence or arrogance?

Critical non-essentials – like receiving flowers from the contractor after all your carpets have been cleaned – are a nice treat when everything else is fine, but something of an insult when the basics fail to come up to the mark. As a ‘thank you’ they are misplaced and as an apology they are inadequate.

If the functional area you manage is about to be downsized and you do not say anything to your staff, is that because you don’t know, or because you don’t want others to know, or because you can’t face it? In either case the end result could be an erosion of trust.

Even communication of success, the fact that things are going really well, can result in confusion. Is this reassurance that you are offering? Are you boasting just to look good? Or are the congratulations premature?

Leadership
Lack of communication is a lack of leadership. Leadership needs candour and honesty. Leadership is the communication of emotions. Lack of management experience is a primary reason why communication is such a problem in the workplace.

According to Rey, every day thousands of employees receive promotions into management positions for the first time, and the majority have little or no experience managing and motivating employees. She says it's no surprise they don't know how to effectively communicate to their staff what is expected of them. Exactly the same is true of businesses – of all sizes – hiring people.

However, if this is a lack, then it isn’t confined to business. Someone who is a good communicator does not suddenly cease to be so when she arrives at work. All of us communicate all of the time. However, the depth and breadth of communication, as well as the fact of communication itself, may be more critical where certain elements of business are concerned.

What we say and what is heard are not necessarily the same thing. What we want to say and what we ought to say can be different, both from our own perspective and that of the other person.

We Cannot Not Communicate
As Paul Watzlawick has made clear, and as some of the situations mentioned imply, you can not communicate, however you can always miscommunicate. Whether you say something, or not, others will interpret your words or your silence in their own way, structured by their own map of the world. Sometimes, by chance, the message sent and the message received are sufficiently similar to allow both parties to proceed along a common path. However, given that we are different people with different reality filters, there is every chance of some misunderstanding arising and our paths diverging.

Conclusion
In the annals of human tragedy Simon and Lee are just bit-part players in what amounts to a cast of thousands who are playing out similar disasters all the time. Simon and Lee are the Californian and the Titanic all over again; the Californian stops transmitting because its message isn’t being heard and the Titanic is transmitting when it really should be listening.

There is communication, it’s undeniable, but there’s no clarity of meaning.

Then, as now, we need to reach the Captain on the bridge, not the wireless operator in the radio room.

Knowing What You Want

2009-09-14T11:07:00.004+01:00

Words: 1,061 Reading time: 3 minutes 32 seconds

Kelly was like a lot of teenagers; poised on the threshold of her future, she couldn’t decide. With so many opportunities open to her, how was she to know which one was the right one? Some of her teachers advised her to seek out more information. It didn’t help her. It multiplied her options without suggesting what her direction might be. Where was she to go from here?

You might expect me to recommend using a coach at this point, but where Kelly was concerned, I hesitated. When it comes to goal-setting most coaches conduct a mental version of the three-card trick. And their sleight of hand starts with the very first words out of their mouths – decide on your goal.

They have used that “D” word - decide. Kelly could now wait with baited breathe for all to be revealed. Alas, she would wait in vain. Nothing more is ever said about deciding. That particular stumbling block is deftly avoided as they move on to explaining how the decision should be worded to best effect; securing necessary resources; identifying obstacles; systemizing effort and … whoa!

The Starting Point
Let’s go back. Tell us about the start. How do we decide? What is it that tells us when we know what we want? Isn’t this is the key to the whole exercise?

If what we decide is decided very well, then the rest is merely mechanism for the most part. If we can decide powerfully, then the force will be with us…to coin a phrase.

When we are asked to name what we want, given a few minutes, most of us can come up with a list. Some of the items will be banal, some wild, some wonderful, some small and personal, some immense and municipal. If given more time we could even extend the list. But, out of all the things listed, how do we decide?

The Should-y Life
Part of the difficulty we face may be because, if we think about it, we rarely ask for what we want. Instead we live a life based on “should” and the “should” is bequeathed to us by others – I should exercise more, I should get a qualification, I should own a bigger house, I should get a better job, I should work fewer hours.

Getting from our shoulds to our authentic wants can be a problem. Recognizing that to be happy, we must live the life that we truly want to live, and that we are the only one who can truly determine what is right, doesn’t really help. How do we know what that is?

Even with an extensive list we may still not know what we want. Perhaps we don’t know all the options and what implications each might hold. Selecting just one want may exclude the possibility of fulfilling some other want, since they could be mutually exclusive.

Like buses, our wants often come in fleets. A person having just a single want is rare. Such a person may not exist at all. So, if we end up with conflicting wants – as seems likely – the question of how we know which one to pick stays with us.

What About Values?
One hypothesis is that values have great strength in determining human goal direction. Through our values we perceive important truths about life. These ideals are then reinforced by our emotions and feelings, and those sentiments create a vital passion that we hope to realize in our lives.

Some great human values include things like tolerance, openness, respect for the individual, and teamwork, which derive in part from some of the higher spiritual values like love, beauty, and truth. At certain points, the human and spiritual values come together in concepts such as selflessness, self-givingness, and gratitude

S.H.Schwartz carried out some extensive research and extracted six “universal” moral values, trustworthiness; respect; responsibility; fairness; caring; and citizenship.

However, I am not convinced that this helps people like Kelly a great deal.

A number of our wants may serve the same value – so how do we choose between them?

And any one of our wants may serve one or more of our values – so how does that help us know what we really want?

And should our wants cause some universal values to compete, how are we to rank them?

Hedonism
Steve Pavlina, often a source of inspiration, advises, “Treat goal-setting as a way to enhance your present reality, not as a way to control the future. Stay in the present and consider how this goal can improve the quality of your life right now. Not a year from now. Not five years from now. Not even tomorrow. Right now this very minute. Does it give you hope? Does it inspire you? Does it promise solutions to some current problems?”

As seductive as this might sound at first glance, all Steve has done is shift the timeframe. The questions raised earlier about mutually exclusive wants, conflicting wants and competing wants still remain.

Confession Time
Kelly is a person much like the rest of us. Most of us don’t know what we want. We only know what we don’t want, so we spend all our time moving away. And not knowing which path best fits our appetites, abilities, skills and personality doesn’t matter, because away is in any direction from the point of departure.

Once we are in motion, regardless of the drive, our perspectives will change. Whatever we start out wanting, or not wanting, may appear more or less attractive depending on where our journey has taken us.

Not knowing is OK. Pushing yourself to decide more quickly, more rationally, more firmly will result in beating yourself up to no good purpose.

In our task- and success-driven world, much is written about what people need to do and think, but very little about how they ought to be. To be truly fulfilled Kelly first needs to understand herself. Only when she does will she be able to follow Georgia Anne Geyer advice which is, “Follow what you love. Don’t deign to ask what “they” are looking for out there. Ask what you have inside. Follow not your interests, which change, but what you are and what you love…”

And even when you are sure you know what you want, you will still have no idea of what to cook for dinner.

Who else is feeling isolated?

2009-08-31T09:36:00.009+01:00

Words: 762 Reading time: 2 minutes 32 seconds

Are you feeling isolated? It’s a common emotion. It’s even more common among those of us who take responsibility, or have responsibility thrust upon us.

What is it?
Isolation: it’s a sense of being marooned, of having nobody else you can turn to. The origin of the word – island – gives that same sense of being surrounded by a cold, uncaring and vast expanse of sea.

That’s not to say that we only feel isolated when we are alone; far from it. Feeling isolated on some issues in an otherwise close marriage will be familiar to some of my readers. The same sorts of feelings can arise among the partners or directors in a business. In such situations there’s a strong, shared bond while at the same, at some deeper level, there’s a ‘but’. The ‘but’ is not about the whole relationship, just one particular issue, or one particular area of concern.

If we can feel like this in a close relationship, how much more likely are such feelings when the relationships are not so close – such as a small businessman with a few employees, or a sole practitioner?

Feeling Isolated Is Not Feeling Lonely
Anyone familiar with these feelings will recognize that feeling isolated and feeling lonely are two different things. Feeling lonely is much more generalized. It’s a feeling that spreads through all the areas of our life. Being isolated, in contrast, is confined to one specific aspect, topic or area. To be isolated – by this definition – is not to be universally lonely, although it can be a part of that wider feeling.

What does it feel like?
People who feel isolated will sometimes describe a high wall, built by them, which they cannot see over. It surrounds their area of isolation. There’s a door. Only they can go through. When they feel isolated it means they have gone through, closed it behind them and are left sitting, helpless, surrounded by a featureless plain.

At other times isolation is just a small room, again, it’s featureless. It’s just us and our feelings of nagging uncertainty, disquiet and irresolution.

That nagging uncertainty, disquiet and irresolution is certainly part of feeling isolated, so too is privacy. When going through the wall, or into the room, we close the door. Nobody else can come in – obviously, otherwise it wouldn’t be isolation.

Even when we hold the feeling of isolation internally, we have an empty space within. None of the other areas where we have capacity (ability to do things) can come in. Being isolated is something we guard very closely.

Isolation has sole ownership, an exclusivity. Whatever issue or situation the isolation is built around, the individual feels sole responsibility. Others may be aware of the matter; they may even be addressing it. There could even be a whole team of folk involved. Yet isolated people feel that only they are affected in some special way and the solution – or at least the key part – must come from them.

If I’m Feeling Isolated, Can You Tell?
Spotting the people who are feeling isolated is never easy. There may be signs of strain around the eyes, or at the corners of the mouth, or in a phrase or a gesture. But such faint indicators may have other causes. And until the individual feels ready any question touching on that area is likely to be denied. The privacy condition will kick in, along with the conviction that “it’s up to me; no-one else can help.”

At best theses feelings erode self-confidence and our willingness to decide and our persistence is carrying things through. At worst such feelings can degenerate into depression. As with most things, just recognizing and acknowledging that such feelings exist is half the battle. Knowing that such feelings are so common also makes it much easier to say “me too!”

What Role Can Coaches Play?
Of course, for me to be involved with a client who tells me that they feel isolated will mean I have been invited through their door, or into their room. Already there are cracks appearing in those painfully constructed and lovingly maintained walls. The barriers are already crumbling. Even so, there’s often much work to be done by the client, although their isolated feelings are dissipating already.

Engaging with a Coach, or an NLP Practitioner, who is sensitive to these issues will help immensely, because the Coach is familiar with similar conditions, is not party to the issues and leaves you in charge of the final resolution – which is just what you wanted all along.

Lessons from the Life of Plants

2009-08-27T11:53:00.004+01:00

Words: 830. Reading time 2 minutes 46 seconds

At this time of year most of the plants in my garden are working hard to produce the seeds of future flowers. Nature has them all focused on just one thing – reproduction: leaving enough of themselves to ensure that future generations survive.

And to us thinking, sentient human beings nature appears to be profligate.

The humble dandelion produces between 54 and 172 seeds per head and a single dandelion can produce more than 2000 seeds. Some estimates suggest that annually dandelions produce more than 240 million seeds per acre.

A typical sunflower will have between 260 and 800 seeds per flower head, depending on the growing conditions and a typical geranium will have about 5 seeds per flower and between 40 and 100 flowers per plant.

So, how come we are not knee-deep in dandelions, sunflowers and geraniums? Because seeds are like our ideas, efforts, experiments, trials and initiatives – some are successful; many are not.

If you are not seeing failure, you are not trying hard enough
Obviously a certain proportion of the seeds will not survive the journey from parent plant to place of germination. Many will be broken, burnt, waterlogged, eaten, aged or decayed along the way.

Some seeds may not even be viable (have life in them) to begin with. This is why many plants invest a lot of energy into seed production - to produce many, so multiplying the chances for the few.

And we would do well to recognize that success to failure ratio in Mother Nature and be aware that we could do a lot worse than imitate some of her ways.

Just because we plan, develop a strategy, set SMART goals and visualize our outcomes does not mean that we will always succeed all of the time. As Dwight Eisenhower pointed out: “In preparing for battle I have always found that plans are useless, but planning is indispensable.”

Nature's manual for maximizing outcomes

Nature adopts a variety of strategies to improve the chances of successful germination. How many of these could we adapt to foster our own dreams and desires?

1. Plants have evolved -in most cases- methods of dispersing their seeds. This means transporting them to a place away from their parent, ensuring that some of them will find suitable conditions for growth elsewhere, where there is less chance of competing with their siblings for space (finding new markets).

2. Some seeds and seed-like fruits are carried by ocean currents. Such seeds are of the kind that can float for a long period without absorbing sea water and establish themselves finally in tidal mud or on beaches (waiting for favourable economic conditions to materialize).

3. Animals and birds disperse seeds, too. We often see them in late summer and early autumn with numerous seed-like fruits adhering to their hides or feathers (using a surrogate sales force and word-of-mouth marketing).

4. A variable proportion of seeds of many kinds of plants resist prompt germination. One example is the uneven ripening and shedding of the fruits of some grasses, such as the giant foxtail (test new ideas in series, rather than in parallel).

5. Many legumes, such as the clovers, produce a variable proportion of seeds with impermeable seed coats, which may resist germination for long periods (give ideas time to mature and develop, rather than getting carried away, releasing them before they are fully worked out).

6. Some species produce pods in which one segment remains indehiscent—closed—and the seed within it remains dormant for a long time, as in cocklebur (Xanthium), for example (where an idea has scope for variations and enhancements, start with the basic model instead of diluting the market and, possibly, increasing start-up costs).

Gardeners and nurserymen also give nature a hand by selecting for certain characteristics and using only seeds from plants that are seen to be disease and virus free. They also save only from straight varieties, in other words not from any hybrid varieties that have been crossed with other material.

The initiates we elect to trial should be similarly selected.

The story of Brython the Bean

The great thing about cultivating your own seed (ideas) is that you can actually improve your selection with a little bit of thought to what you are doing. The late Brython Stenner from Glamorgan, South Wales, even though only a keen amateur, quickly became a legend in his own life time. His thinking was that you should select only the strongest, healthiest plants, those that consistently produced the longest and most filled pods along the row. Does that sound obvious? It does now.

Because of one amateur’s dedication, the 'Stenner Strain’ bean is the only bean that is consistently winning on the show benches today. They not only look good, they taste good as well.

So, even with careful preparation and nurturing, be prepared for less than 100% germination with all your schemes.

Do not be hugely surprised if some things take longer to come to fruition than others.

And, as Robert Louis Stevenson remarked, “Don't judge each day by the harvest you reap but by the seeds that you plant.”

How are you choosing to travel?

2009-08-24T14:53:00.004+01:00

Words: 588 Reading time: 1 minute 58 seconds

I watched as a pedal cyclist rode along the pavement, used a Pedestrian Crossing and then swung right, resuming his journey as part of the road traffic. I put my car into gear and drove on, reflecting on the transition the cyclist had just made.

Using the same vehicle he had moved from being a hazard to pedestrians to take his place as one more risk that drivers have to negotiate. That’s the sort of transition we often make in life.

Changing our transport
On any given day some of us will commute from being a forceful manager in the workplace to being the more regretful half of a failing marriage; a move from being a relatively fast-moving, potentially threatening person to being a much more vulnerable individual.

Our pedal cyclist decided to stay on his bike as he moved from the pedestrian environment into the traffic. In business and in life there are different choices, although equally significant.

As an employee, what kind and what size of company do we aim to work for, and in what position? As a business owner / director do we stay in our comfortable little puddle, or go out and compete against the big boys?

In our relationships, what kind of vehicle are we? Are we a caring parent, or an over-protective pain? Do we own our own problems, or expect somebody else to take care of us? Are we an old-fashioned romantic, or just a semi-permanent fixture?

Our Mode of Transport
And what kind of vehicle would we be if we decided to consciously manage our relationships, make them the best they could be and take care to promote the common good?

A bus: everybody on board and heading in the same direction, with frequent opportunities for people to either join or leave the vehicle.

A plane: a fast, efficient, self-contained vehicle that can get you to your destination by the shortest route possible, but needing lots of infrastructure to support it and somewhat ignorant of the lives of those not on board.

An ambulance: a simple rescue vehicle, always on call, but only for those already in serious trouble, only for the few and only having one destination in mind.

A dust-cart: a highly useful vehicle specially designed to clear away the damage and detritus from everyday living, but offering no real solutions. They’ll be round again next week.

Or a muck-spreader: smelly, often despised, but essential for providing a rich and fertile soil in which other things can grow and flourish, given that other environmental conditions are right. Used too much it can “burn” the plants it’s supposed to be helping.

And I wonder if the Inland Revenue is the Combined Harvester of life? All-encompassing, mechanistic, and unable to distinguish wheat from rye, it waits until someone else has put in all the hard work and grown a worthwhile crop. It then comes along and strips the field bare, leaving little or nothing for the rest of society. Consequently gleaning, after the crop is gathered in, is never seen today.

And who are the tractors – slowing everyone down to a crawl and getting in the way, but ultimately necessary? Is this health and safety?

Harnessing the horsepower
What sort of vehicle do you need to be to realise your life’s ambitions?

And what sort of vehicle do you need me to be, and when?

The pedal cyclist that started all this is now gone. But you can see what disturbance even one may cause, not just to fellow road users, but also to trains – of thought.

Who cares if you're stressed?

2009-08-04T21:13:00.005+01:00

Words: 708 Reading time: 2 minutes 22 seconds

The Health & Safety Executive have published figures showing that 6.7 million working days are lost each year due to the effects of stress. The cost to society is estimated to be in the region of £3.8 billion.

Stress is believed to be responsible for up to 40 per cent of all absences from work and can reduce employee performance by up to 70 per cent.

Now we have more labour-saving devices than at any time since the world began, why is it that?

When I ask ‘What is stress?’ I get different answers.

One set of answers is a list of symptoms, some of which are emotional, such as feeling irritable, frustration at having to wait for something, barely suppressed anger, generally feeling upset, lack of sense of humour, etc.

Other symptoms listed are physical, such as muscle tension, neck or shoulder pain, stomach upsets, 'pounding' or 'racing' heart, sweaty palms, 'butterflies', insomnia or excessive sleep, shortness of breath, etc.

Another set of answers list what people see as possible causes, such as job insecurity, heavy workload, infrequent rest breaks, poor communication in the organization, crowding, noise, insufficient leisure time, etc.

A third set of answers merely uses synonyms for stress, such as anxiety, hassle, pressure, strain, tension, worry.

But none of these actually tells me what stress is.

Aching joints and a runny nose might tell me I have influenza, but it is not influenza itself. Getting soaked in a downpour might make me susceptible to influenza, but it does not cause influenza. As we all now know, the true cause is viral.

So, what single root cause covers all of the above factors and manifestations of stress? What is the equivalent of the viral or bacterial agent where stress is concerned?

My suggestion is that stress only occurs when the situation, as we perceive it, demands more resources than we believe we have available at present to resolve it

Situation > Resources

As far as I can see that definition covers all cases and it helps by providing four different avenues of escape:

The situation can be avoid, vacated or mitigated.

Our perception of the situation can be revised, or reframed.

The resources required can be augmented, assembled, bought or borrowed.

Our beliefs about our resources can be challenged, replaced or adapted.

The other important point about this definition is that underlines the part played by perceptions and beliefs in the whole subject of stress. That is not to dismiss or denigrate the trauma reported by those experiencing stress, it merely points up the fact that we cannot isolate this stuff called stress and hold it in our hands. We cannot isolate it from the person directly concerned and measure it separately.

Because stress is not an objective reality, it is not equally experienced. Two individuals can be seated side by side in the same work environment, doing the same tasks and with the same demands place on them, in the same way, yet one individual will experience greater stress than the other.

This tells us that one other precondition is needed for someone to experience stress – the person concerned must actually care about the outcome. This is crucial, because unless you really care there will be no anxiety on your part about what may or may not transpire.

At the end of the football season, as various teams face demotion from one league to another, some fans become genuinely anguished. However, for those who do not follow football in general, or that team in particular, there is no concern one way or the other. Indeed, the whole organizational structure surrounding the sport could collapse and non-fans would be totally unaffected.

Stress is an internal phenomenon. We manufacture it ourselves. Sometimes we manufacture it inappropriately by caring about inconsequentials, or by caring too much about the wrong things. So when we are stress it is extremely useful to ask ourselves what is it that we care about so much, and is that sensible.

Who cares if you’re stressed?

You do!

As a parting thought, is it therefore nonsensical to blame employers for causing stress? And if stress arises because people care, how wise is it to work on increasing employee engagement? Isn’t this ultimately self-defeating?

Being SMART - S is for...

2009-07-28T18:03:00.005+01:00

Words: 1,000 Reading time: 3 minutes 20 seconds

The SMART acronym is past its sell-by date and highly ineffective, but still heavily in use by unthinking project managers, unimaginative trainers and uninspiring coaches.

Acronyms and abbreviations are supposed to add colour and texture to the written and spoken word and to life in general. Their purpose is to assist in memory retention and learning.

They lose all of that whenever they become trite, confusing or uncertain. SMART has managed all three.

Those that are still trotting out this tired old carthorse claim that the goal, task or project must meet these criteria to be effective. But just what are the criteria?

There is zero agreement on what SMART is supposed to stand for. That’s why it’s such a useless tool. Just take the ‘S’ of SMART. A very quick search on the internet yields us the following alternatives for use in formulating our objectives:

Self-controlled; self-managed; self-owned; sensible; significant; simple; specific; strategic; stretching; straightforward; succinct; synergistic; systematic

This list is by no means exhaustive, but how helpful are even these few candidates as possible progenitors of ‘S’?

Self-controlled and self-managed are very close in meaning. Neither adds very much to the process of formulating the goal. If the path to the objective is not in our control, then it’s likely to be someone else’s objective rather than ours. It’s the same with self-owned. As possible roots for our ‘S’ they are little better than tautological.

Sensible? Some of the most awesome and inspiring goals were and are anything but sensible: climbing Everest; deep-sea exploration; curing AIDS; world peace.

Significant or strategic might seem acceptable after that last list, but many goals we set ourselves are neither of these in the great scheme of things. Will every single one of our goals be really significant or strategic – even to us? They may well be worthy, useful and desirable; but hugely significant and / or strategically imperative? I think not.

To be effective our goal must be simple or straightforward. Really? So a goal that is not simple or straightforward is not effective? Well, that’s it for mankind, isn’t it?

Actually, no. Many of the goals we set ourselves are complex, yet we follow them and achieve them despite the doomsayers of SMART. The Large Hadron Collider was built under the Swiss countryside. I have no idea what it does, how it does it or why anyone who does know might want to, but that highly complex objective was achieved.

Specific is a favourite candidate for the ‘S’. The case is that the goal needs to be concrete, detailed, precise, explicit, focused and action-oriented with a well-defined result.

Lovely, but I can think of many huge goals, all achieved, that had none of those characteristics. Churchill’s stated objective in 1940 was to win the war. It was as vague as that. He had no idea exactly how that could be done, when it would be achieved, or what form the victory might take. The rest is history.

When John Kennedy committed the USA to putting a man on the moon and bringing him safely back again there were neither vehicles to do it, nor the guidance systems to get them there. Less than 10 years later I watched it all on TV and cheered with relief.

So much for being specific.

Stretching goals are those that promote some form of discernable personal growth. Yet there are serious, important goals that do not necessarily deliver on that front at all.

Getting our frail and ageing parent into a good social care environment might occupy all our efforts for a considerable period, although it is unlikely that we will feel we are better people at the end of it. Often, we will feel worse because of lingering guilt. Nevertheless it is clearly identifiable as a goal.

Succinct: if we are going to tick all those boxes – being concrete, detailed, precise, explicit, focused and action-oriented with a well-defined result – is succinct even possible?

If it is, then is it necessary? Sometimes a longer, fuller description paints a more colourful, seductive picture making it easier for us to visualize the outcome, to commit ourselves to its pursuit and helps us keep the whole project vibrant and alive.

If all our goals had to be synergistic (2+2=5) then there would far fewer goals. Of course, single-point goals will usually have spin-offs, but those are by-products or unintended consequences. Imposing genuine intended synergy as the prerequisite of good goal-setting sounds like severely over-egging all puddings. Nice if we can do it, but hardly necessary.

Finally, finally, systematic: I suspect this one came with one foot in the project manager’s camp. Again, it’s not an absolute, indispensable requirement for our common or garden goals. Someone like Benjamin Franklin was highly systematic and got great results. But goals are often reached despite the system used to search for them, rather than because of it.

The biggest problem with penicillin was producing enough of it. Florey and another researcher travelled from Britain to the U.S. to talk to chemical manufacturers. Corn (maize) was tried as the nutrient base and it yielded almost 500 times as much as it had before. That helped, but more vigorous and productive strains of the mould were also needed, and one of the best came from a rotting cantaloupe in the market at Peoria, Illinois.

Systematic (the maize) helped, but serendipity (the cantaloupe) was also necessary.

Serendipity helps more often than SMART protagonists care to admit. The amazing story of post-it notes are another case in point.

There are other, possibly undiscovered, ‘S’s:

How about saleable – so that we can get others on board?

How about seaworthy – so we know that the goal will float?

How about sanguineous – so that we’re always full-bloodied about our objectives?

With so many stars to steer our ship by, how on earth is the ‘S’ from SMART going to help us?

SMART and its ‘S’ are touted as necessary and sufficient for all goals. Clearly, they are not.

Lessons in Staying Positive – #10

2009-07-20T19:06:00.003+01:00

Words: 375. Reading time: 1 minute 15 seconds.

Feeling positive, when others feel anything but, often invokes a degree of fear or guilt in the positive individual. This can stem from a number of sources:

~ We assume it is wrong to be positive when so many others are not;
~ We take responsibility inappropriately for the feelings of others;
~ We feel others will reject us because we are now different to them.

Well, each of us has our own version of the world and we have no right to steal another’s responsibility for their own thoughts and feelings.

Despite appearances to the contrary a can-do / positive attitude is a natural state for all of us. Psychologists confirm that we are born with only two basic startle reflexes – sudden loud noises and falling. Other fears and phobias may develop along the way, but children have one innate quality that drives most limitations away – curiosity.

It’s only “adults” that have trained us to curb our natural curiosity for fear of nameless consequences. More often that not these consequences are by no means certain; they are not even likely; but they may hover on the edge of vague possibility. Yet we allow such uninformed trepidation to limit our journeys, halt our exploratory missions and curtail any investigations.

A young child would have no such qualms – as most parents will testify!

When we set out we were positive people – and I hope we still are.

a) How many of us gave up trying to walk before we were 3 years old?
b) How many of us believed that we could not learn a foreign language – which our native tongue was at the time, as were all languages?
c) Who remembers as a kid saying “let me, let me, let me”? I know I did.

That’s who we really are – so stop acting your age – this is our chance to be more childlike and authentic.

Let’s turn up our curiosity!

Negativity is when we only think we know; it doesn’t mix well with curiosity.

As Mary Kay Ash said: “There are three types of people in this world: those who make things happen, those who watch things happen and those who wonder what happened.”

The question is: in which group are you going to be?

Average or Amazing?

2009-07-13T15:33:00.013+01:00

Words: 971 Reading time: 3 minutes 14 seconds

Under the heading ‘Ordinary or Awesome’ I expressed the view that what is awesome and what is OK is firstly conveyed and then established partly by the customer. If we want awesome and we keep getting ordinary, then customers have to accept part of the blame.

But only part of the blame, because there are at least two parties to every transaction. In one context we are customers; in another context we are the providers. And in the many cases where we are providers, whether that is in a commercial setting or not, we too are in a position to be average or amazing. As someone wrote many centuries ago, “by their fruits you will know them”.

Few people set out to do a deliberately bad job. Even the apocryphal husband, who deliberately drops dishes as a ploy to escape doing the washing-up, is doing the best he can with the resources available to him – his vision of how the world should be.

In the context of employment many workers are made to feel they can go “only so far” in the job that they do. The organisational view is that the value of the transaction in question – or just the implicit gain to the company – allows for only so much resource, no more.

This can be traced back to management taking a short-term, transaction-by-transaction, view. In the face of a complaint and taking the short-term view, management weighs up the margin on that particular transaction and uses it as the limiting factor in determining how much more they are prepared to do to meet what the customer wants.

That would be fine if the transaction was totally divorced from all subsequent transactions, but it’s not. It’s either one of a stream of potential transactions stretching into the future – the so-called life-time value of the customer, or it contains the advocacy potential of a “raving fan” gained through amazing products and astounding service, even if it’s a one-time deal.

Management that ignores the wider setting of any transaction runs the risk of making the insignificant hugely significant by throwing away a large amount of future business for the sake of “a few dollars more” in the very short-run.

Either that or, they are on a personal ego trip with an unknowable cost.

Amazing helps deliver the future, because ordinary – and certainly less than ordinary – is no longer good enough.

Authors like Jeffrey Gitomer make the point that mere satisfaction is hardly going to light up someone’s life and get them talking about you. Satisfaction is when it’s just OK. Amazing is when it’s in a totally different league.

Do not measure customer satisfaction; it’s taking you in entirely the wrong direction.

And good doesn’t cut the mustard either. As Michael Bungay Stanier points out, many organizations are focused on delivering ‘good’’. And they want to sustain the way things are, so that there's minimum interruption to that ‘good’’.

But good gets in the way of GREAT. To stop at just good misses everything that flows from amazing and it short-changes both parties to the transaction. As Jim Collins found, great is a matter of conscious choice. It’s no coincidence that Good To Great companies first got the right people on the bus and the wrong people off.

If organisations wish to thrive then Presidents, Vice Presidents, Chairmen, Directors and Executives need to recognize that amazing products and astounding service are only delivered by people who are encouraged to exercise the necessary attitude.

Anyone can do it, given the right mindset and appropriate encouragement. As businesses we need to build a sense of pride and place the magnificent ahead of the merely measurable, because measurable places a huge roadblock in the way of being amazing.

This is why.

We are told that we get what we measure. And the unfortunate inference is that we get only what we measure. So, to get something we always have to be able to measure it. Right?

We know that isn’t true. Great art, of whatever hue, cannot be measured; yet it is still produced. Compassion cannot be quantified, yet it is poured out in huge abundance around the world. Not always, but more often and to a greater degree than one would suppose for something that no one has attempted to gauge.

Humour, ambition, grief – all these human qualities are not susceptible to measurement, but still they come forth. And so do their opposites like oppression, cruelty and neglect.

Being amazing, whether in production, in customer service or in life does not mean making a vast and overwhelming effort every minute of every day. Good grief, most of the averages we get are so poor that being even just 1% more remarkable will put you into the area of amazing.

To be amazing is not a call to abandon everything that you do and everything that you are. On the contrary, it a call to deliver your full potential, to be everything you can be, rather than what someone else would keep you from being or doing.

What can you do more of that makes a difference, shifts the balance, has an impact, moves minds, adds beauty, changes the status quo, creates something that’s worth creating, improves life, shows love, moves things forward, stops waste, starts a dialogue and engages people?

Jump right in. There are opportunities all around you and any one of these suggestions will start transforming the average ending into an amazing outcome.

Of course, from time to time the desire to be truly amazing, to settle for nothing less, will go against the flow. But where the broad river of humanity is going is not what we should be aiming at.

“The best work is not what is most difficult for you; it is what you do best.” ~ Jean-Paul Sartre

Shoes from a Sweet Shop

2009-07-09T06:27:00.005+01:00

Words: 736 Reading time: 2 minutes 27 seconds

“Why can’t we just give the customer what he wants and needs and stop worrying about our own systems and processes?”

You may be familiar with this recent gripe I heard from a business trainer. It’s not uncommon from people who engage directly with clients when their own grand schemes seem to be going awry. And it does seem to pick up on common themes of listening and customer service.

How well does it work in practice?

At the risk of stating the blindingly obvious, just giving the customer what he wants and needs is a process in itself, if that is how the business decides to operate.

A process is “a sequence of interdependent and linked procedures which, at every stage, consume one or more resources (employee time, energy, machines, money) to convert inputs (data, material, parts, etc.) into outputs. These outputs then serve as inputs for the next stage until a known goal or end result is reached.” [businessdictionary.com]

Whereas a system consists of elements which continually influence one another (directly or indirectly) in order to achieve the common purpose the 'goal' of the system. All systems have (a) inputs, outputs, and feedback mechanisms. Systems underlie every phenomenon, and are everywhere one looks for them. [businessdictionary.com]

So, really, the call is not to abandon systems and processes, merely to operate different ones that are seen as better serving this advocate; whether such a change would better serve the business as a whole is an entirely different question.

One of the extreme models of customer service, and a very successful one, is Nordstrom. For those that don’t know, Nordstrom’s is a chain of department stores in the USA. At the end of 2000 they had 77 full-line stores and 24 clearance stores in 25 states, generated annual sales of almost $5 billion and boasted a sales-per-square-foot of $400, which is almost double the industry average.

A central plank in the service ethic that underpins Nordstrom is the single rule governing all employee actions:

“Use your good judgment in all situations. There will be no additional rules.”

That’s interesting. All it calls for is good judgment, not an unconditional abdication to whatever the customer demands. For example, in the early 1990s the residents of Santa Clarita, Los Angeles expressed a strong desire to have a Nordstrom store in their community, because of the improvement it would bring. At the time of writing, as far as I can tell, they are still waiting.

Even Nordstrom sets boundaries.

Ryanair can be seen as being at the other end of the spectrum, yet it's a highly successful business. It got that way by deciding exactly what it wanted to do and sticking to it.

Ryanair aims to be a low cost airline, so it flies to low-cost airports which are in out-the-way places. If a Ryanair flight is diverted, perhaps due to bad weather, there will be no coach laid on at the alternate destination. Ryanair is a low-cost airline. Coaches are not part of the package.

Michael O'Leary, the Irish airline's boss, now wants to abolish the luggage check-in. He proposes that people carry their suitcases to the boarding steps, where staff will stick them in the hold. This would be unacceptable at BA. At Ryanair it’s expected.

On opening up new routes Michael O'Leary has said, “I don't give a toss where people want to go. I'm in the business of creating a market for people to go where they have never heard of.”

Ryanair – we do what we do.

So, just giving the customer what he wants and needs misunderstands what customer service is about. Certainly, one must listen to customers, but one must also learn. And part of that learning may be that what this particular person wants is not what this particular business does.

Others may do what they want a lot better. In that context good service would consist of steering the person in that direction. They were never your customer in the first place, because a customer is someone who pays you for what you do.

And as a business trainer my complainant should have understood this.

“Why can’t we just give the customer what he wants and needs and stop worrying about our own systems and processes?”

Let’s be charitable and put it down to frustration. The simple fact is, you can’t buy shoes from a sweet shop.

Don't Get SMART

2009-06-30T23:38:00.005+01:00

Words: 662 Reading time: 2 minutes 12 seconds

Read anything on setting goals these days and, sooner or later, you’ll be told that all goals need to be “SMART”. If not, then there is no hope for you. The goal is not well set and you have little chance of achieving it.

Here, at random, are some of those promoting that view:

‘Setting goals…means creating a written plan that includes reasonable and measurable long-term and short-term objectives. It means setting SMART goals.’ Annette Richmond

‘The SMART acronym is used to describe what experts consider to be "good" goal statements’ Rodger Constandse

‘A key determinant of an individual's success or failure in meeting a goal can be summed up with one small word (or, more accurately, acronym): S.M.A.R.T.’ Christina Morfeld

Baloney!

A big problem with being SMART is finding any agreement on what the acronym stands for. Here are a handful of alternatives for each letter:

S - specific, significant, stretching, systematic, synergistic, simple, self-owned

M - measurable, meaningful, motivational, methodical, memorable, maintainable

A - agreed upon, attainable, achievable, acceptable, action-oriented, ambitious

R - realistic, relevant, reasonable, rewarding, results-oriented, resonating, responsible, reliable, remarkable

T - time-based, timely, tangible, trackable, thoughtful

If my maths is correct that gives 5 x 5 x 5 x 5 x 5 = 3,125 possible combinations. Good luck!

I will look at each of these pompous precepts in a series of later blogs, but for now, let’s look at one example where SMART – whatever its constituent parts – offers no help at all. Indeed, it’ll probably get in the way.

Nic Rixon tells the story of a restaurant owner who was shot twice in the course of a robbery. As he enters A&E the restaurateur can see in the eyes of the staff that they don’t think he will make it. He is asked, over and over again by the medical team, if he is allergic to anything. But he can’t speak due to the trauma. As they wheel him into the Operating Theatre they ask him one last time and he gathers all his strength and yells, “Bullets!!!”

At that point everyone looks round and immediately everything speeds up. In that moment everyone’s belief changed from “he’s gonna die” to “we have a fighter”. The man survived.

Now that man had a goal. His whole existence turned on that one outcome. He did not have to get SMART about it – the goal was too important for that. He had neither the time, nor the inclination to work it all out, write it all down, set milestones and measure progress. Had he done so, he would probably be dead.

None of that was necessary. And, outside of sheer physical and surgical limitations, there was no doubt about the desired outcome.

For me that says a lot about goals, whether we have any hope of achieving them and what that may take.

When nothing else matters in the world other than your goal, then SMART is irrelevant. SMART is unnecessary. SMART may even delay you and make the goal less likely, rather than more likely.

The secret of reaching your goal is picking one that really matters that much to you.

More time would be better spent on finding a goal that, for you, is an all-consuming passion, instead of figuring out how to make some second-rate, minor league, lesser goal come about by using a version of being SMART.

The people who come to mind as being both memorable and remarkable do so because they devoted their life and their spirit towards achieving what we now regard as exceptional. And often, they are only inspirational looking back. At the time they did not plan and did not expect to arrive where they did. They were not SMART.

Some examples include Albert Schweitzer and Mother Theresa, the Beatles and Beethoven, Alexander the Great and Boudicca, Galileo and Leonardo da Vinci, Dante and Darwin.

It's the weight of our feelings that lets us know how important something is. We just have to be smart enough to recognize them.

Ordinary or Awesome?

2009-06-13T08:52:00.003+01:00

Words: 596 Reading time: 2 minutes 0 seconds

Have you ever wondered how much influence we have over the experiences we enjoy? For example, in your daily interactions with people, what level of response do you get – ordinary or awesome?

Of course, in theory, we would all choose awesome. Reality is sometimes different. While awesome would be…well, awesome…it could take a little longer to deliver. Are we prepared to wait? Is ordinary all we wish to spare the time for, so we grab that and run?

If awesome means stating our demands and creating a bit of a fuss – a very unBritish thing to do – are we predisposed to avoid making a scene? In how many cases do we opt for a quietly dissatisfied existence?

A picture of what is awesome and what is OK is firstly conveyed and then established partly by the customer – you and me. Do we encourage better than average and a tendency to awesome by the praise, thanks and recognition we bestow? Or do we grunt and go when the goods and services obtained for our hard-earned money reach a barely acceptable level?

The service and attention given to customers in major retail outlets provides a useful case study. The move to pre-packaged and self-service has been inexorable ever since I was lad growing up in London.

Now, we can shop in most major chains without ever having to react face-to-face with any of their staff. Not only do we search out the items on the shelves, we even take the goods through an automatic checkout, pay through a slot-machine arrangement, bag all our purchases and take them to the car ourselves.

Oh, and please put the trolley back where you found it, our employees are too busy to be bothered with serving our customers. And our customers are so dazed and distracted by the mindless, windowless warehouses they now shop in, that don’t hardly complain.

A quick aside: have you ever noticed a clock in a supermarket? Thought not. Would you like to guess why?

How did it ever come to this?

If we want awesome and we keep getting ordinary we have to accept part of the blame. We have allowed conditioning and habituation to establish mediocrity as somehow normal. It doesn’t have to be, but nothing will change unless we do so first. If we keep allowing what we’ve always allowed, delight will decline as it’s always declined.

We can actively consent to being offered something more. And companies prepared to offer more will be well placed to capture the market. We observed this phenomenon with the advent of The Japanese TV. The TVs being made here and in the USA at the time were prone to breakdown. That was normal. A whole industry was founded on the need to repair them.

Then the famed reliability and quality of the Japanese offering became available. People voted with their wallets. They wanted awesome as soon as it became available. The TV repair industry was all but wiped out.

The same happened with motorcycles. Much the same has happened with cars.

If we know that accepting awesome is so much better than ordinary, then we need to expand the paradigm to other areas of our lives. Every interaction is an opportunity. The chance for change is never gone; we can begin whenever we wish.

We have a huge influence over the experiences we enjoy – often much more than we realise. Give someone else the opportunity, the room and the permission to be awesome. You may be surprised by the result.

And we can choose to be awesome too.

Lessons in Staying Positive – #9

2009-05-25T12:29:00.002+01:00

Words: 702. Reading time: 2 minutes 21 seconds.

Tough times are regulated neither by the state of the economy, nor by the state of society. For an individual, tough times can occur on a much more personal level, such as injury, illness or lay-off, irrespective of the wider context. And while not actively sought by most, tough times can still be turned to advantage when they do show up – as an opportunity to recalibrate.

It strikes me that in tough times we need to separate the essentials from the clutter in our lives. In this setting clutter includes doing too many things, doing things for insufficient reasons and doing less productive things while more productive ways of investing our time are neglected; that’s besides the physical clutter of too much stuff we don’t need and stuff we do need being buried beneath a mess of other stuff.

Tough times give us the chance to be more resourceful, even though we often have fewer resources. We can learn to “live” off less - use fewer resources to live an even richer life.

Exactly what makes for a richer life turn on our beliefs and values. Getting clear on those is at the forefront of making the shift necessary under tough times. What really matters to us? What qualities do we want to have? By what principles would we be happy to live our lives? Who do we love? What do we love doing? The answer will be different for each of us, but that is no reason not to ask the questions.

If we want to make real change then there is a tough question for tough times: “What am I willing to change right now?” This is not another wish list, it’s an action point. It’s not something that might be nice to do in the future; it’s absolutely essential to the process of changing the present and it’s something that we can start work on this minute.

For the transformation to fully take hold might take a while. As the saying goes “Rome was not built in a day”. But it was built, which means that someone had to start by laying one brick on top of another.

We may not even know what the final edifice will look like. It is unlikely that the Roman builders started with a master plan. And even if they did, it is doubtful that what eventually emerged conformed to the initial set of drawings. But they did being and they adapted as they went along. And as any schoolboy will tell you, the rest is history – literally.

To help us get started we can begin talking frankly about the dangers and challenges we see facing us. We can start an honest dialogue that involves authentic give and take about tough topics, rather than engaging solely in social gossip that keeps real issues safely at arm's length.

We can seek greater clarity by asking people to explain what they mean, rather than just assuming we know. We can ask what sources they're using to get their information, check those for ourselves and compare them to others we learn about.

Once people get a taste of honest, good-natured, substantive discussion that doesn't come with an agenda, they tend to find it addictive especially when you don't do all the talking and none of the listening. Good listening leads to good ideas, especially when they come from those who are doing the heavy lifting.

When our world appears to be unravelling the healthiest and most restorative response is an open mind, honest curiosity and bold action. Embrace the unknown. That way, we can make permanent uncertainty a sustainable way of life.

From the dialogue a decision will emerge. That’s the whole point. And once a decision is made, we commit and go for it. If we never commit, all we will ever do is change course. Continual second guess is not allowed.

In time, if we have to change course, then we have to change course. Yet, the secret rule is that when the time for a decision arrives, then we decide quickly and, once the decision is made, we change our mind slowly – not the other way round. That just adds to the uncertainty.

Negotiation is normal

2009-05-17T20:31:00.004+01:00

Words: 932 Reading time: 3 minutes 6 seconds

It’s most odd. Life calls for negotiation, but some advise that our first tactic should be to avoid it altogether if possible. Well, it’s neither possible, nor desirable – ever. And here are a few reasons why.

Negotiation is everywhere and everyday. It isn’t confined to the realms of industrial disputes and international discord. It is also about the mundane — who does the washing up.

One lady I was discussing this with thought she had avoided any negotiating over the washing up by buying a dishwasher. She had not registered the negotiating it had taken to reach that decision in the first place and the subsequent negotiating over who filled it and who emptied it. Those jobs still needed doing. Negotiation could not be avoided.

Negotiation is not a one-time event. It goes on even when most people think they have finished.

Just imagine that you buy a cabbage from the market. The stallholder was happy with the price, you were happy with the cabbage. That is, until you got it home, cut into it and discovered that some bug had eaten away the inside. At this point you may decide to return to the market and recommence negotiating.

Alternatively, should the cabbage look wholesome you will cook and eat it. Is that the end of the negotiation? Not if you are subsequently violently ill as a result. That would almost certainly affect your negotiating stance.

But suppose, instead, that you really enjoyed your cabbage. You decide to buy another next week. Now a negotiation that was ‘finished’ is affecting future actions. And the enjoyment of your cabbage will affect the price you are likely to pay when next dealing with that vendor. Negotiation over? I don’t think so.

With that in mind, it should come as no surprise that negotiating over things like pay and conditions is a continuous process; even when no union is involved. Every day that you go to work you are asking yourself, sub-consciously, if the reward is worth the effort.

We negotiate with ourselves. The examples given so far involve another party. That is always the second step. Before we reach it we will have already negotiated with ourselves. Some people appear to be good at this; they are tagged as ‘self-disciplined’. Others appear to be not so good; they are tagged ‘weak-willed’.

As the working presupposition is that every behaviour is motivated by a positive intent how one classifies the eventual outcome from this is unclear. Steve McDermott puts it this way, “if you set out to fail and you succeed, what have you done?”

Practice makes perfect or, as Vince Lombardi had it: “Practice does not make perfect. Only perfect practice makes perfect.” If we accept that negotiations occur over and over in our lives in an endless stream, then we will get a better outcome each time if we work on improving our performance. That means getting into the water, not sitting on the side.

We get a better result when we do. Although it takes two to create a relationship, it takes only one to change its quality. Could you influence the quality of your relationships and improve the results you get by negotiating? Absolutely; in the right conditions (negotiation) we get better results when we work with other people (negotiation) than when we work against them or when we work alone.

Good negotiation isn’t about winning and losing. If the negotiation is handled well, then both sides come away with more than they started out. If you don’t satisfy the other person’s needs as well as your own, it’s not a good agreement. As former US President Jimmy Carter put it, “Unless both sides win, no agreement can be permanent.”

As bizarre as it may sound, that means that all parties to a negotiation have to be aware of the wants and needs of the other party and work as hard to satisfy those as they work to satisfy their own. Good negotiation is about sitting together on the same side of the table and tackling the problem together. Adversarial negotiation is a poor second cousin by comparison.

Advice that runs “if you give away a concession without asking for something in return, the other side will carry on asking for concessions until you say no...” takes a depressing view of humanity and its relationships.

Would you rather have 10 pence given willingly, or 50 pence given begrudgingly? I thought so. And the same is true of everyone. If you paint your negotiating partner as ruthless and without scruples, then guess what you are going to get?

This goes to the heart of good negotiation and, perhaps, one of the biggest fallacies that so many in the field choose to perpetuate: negotiation is about compromise. It isn’t.

Compromise is the dirtiest word in negotiation, because in negotiation compromise isn’t the goal. It’s the fallback if nothing better can be achieved.

When you start with compromise, you’re tacitly inviting everyone to give up something important in order to reach an agreement. That’s no place to begin, because there are other highly effective ways to approach negotiating that have little to do with compromise.

If you define personal and business negotiating primarily in terms of compromise, you create a pattern that’s all about giving up and horse-trading. That’s not the greatest foundation on which to build any long-term relationship.

So, what is my key tip for negotiating? It comes from Tammy Lenski: “To resolve an argument someone has to be the adult. And if it’s not the other person, it had better be you.”

People buy from people? Give me a break.

2009-05-07T05:54:00.001+01:00

Words: 654 Reading time: 2 minutes 11 seconds

You may feel the same as me. When I find the tired, foot-sore and weary still being dragged from the back of some damped, dark cupboard, dusted off and pressed yet again into unconsidered service I have one of two reactions. Either I feel resigned (not again), or I feel exasperated (good grief).

As my previous posting was on the tired, foot-sore and weary idea of people staying in their comfort zones this posting will look at the equally drained, drawn and discredited idea that “people buy from people”.

Do they? Do they really? What, all the time? Every time? I don’t think so.

Let’s look at an entirely fictional, yet believable week for you and me.

On a Monday morning we leap out of bed at the first peep of the alarm clock ready and raring to go. Freeze frame…

That bed; do you know the people that constructed it? And your alarm clock; that was your local watchmaker, wasn’t it? What about the building you’re standing in; any idea who…?

Moving on, after your shower using the water provided by that nice man from the local reservoir, you tuck into your breakfast. Of course, you’re not really sure who made the bread for your toast and the cereal in your bowl, but hey, you’re only eating them after all; there’s nothing really important about buying from people here.

Then you get dressed (your personal tailor at M&S is so good) and head off safely in your car at 70 m.p.h. (built by Joe, the guy at the motor works on the corner) using the road constructed by the boys you always hang out with in the bar of The Pick & Shovel. You may smell the flowers in your front garden as you pass, the seeds all lovingly harvested and grown by Betty at the nursery in the next village.

At the office it’s lucky Mr Dell has already delivered your computer, together with a little note offering to meet you for coffee, because you can’t wait to log onto the internet provided for you by…well, you can’t quite remember them all. There were so many at the Christmas party last year; but nice people.

Are they nicer than the people who made the pen in your hand, or the paper you’re about to write on? You can’t quite decide as you take an aspirin, a drug made by people in Malaya who you have never met, are never likely to meet, and a drug the strength and constituent parts of which you haven’t checked and don’t know who might have done so on your behalf.

Let’s stop. It isn’t even ten o’clock on a Monday; how many people have you bought from that you actually know?

People buy from people? Give me a break.

People buy from supermarkets, from Amazon and EBay, from slot machines and petrol station forecourts, from serve-yourself tills and McDonald’s. Most people buy anonymously. They buy as much as they can, as often as they can, without having to interact with anybody. People scare them. A soap on the TV is about as close to real people as they want to be.

So, what is it people are buying, if it isn’t from other people?

People are buying minimum inconvenience and as much certainty as they can with as little precious cash as they can spare.

Now as a person you can supply some of that certainty by building empathy and giving reassurance. If you can convince the other party that you are a nice person, that you want to help them and are not trying to rip them off, then you might make some progress.

People only buy from people when they actually help to increase certainty. Thinking that people buy from people is like being fooled by a three-card trick. You’ve missed the essence of the transaction by concentrating too closely on the players involved.

Giving Up Our Comfort Zones

2009-05-06T04:24:00.001+01:00

I was listening to James Knight yesterday. He was giving a brief talk on colour styles - an entertaining variation on personality types - and he mentioned comfort zones. That is a familiar concept, but how well does it represent what is going on?

The idea is that where we are now is comfortable; where we want to move to involves effort; so we tend to stay where we are, rather than go through that struggle. Effort = distress.

Well, that's not right.

If we have habits we enjoy, that's great. If we have habits we barely notice, they are not a problem. But if we have habits we actively want to change - that's your discomfort zone (DZ). At that point the habit you wish to acquire represents your new comfort zone (CZ). And the hurdle of effort between where you are and where you want to be is your effort zone (EZ).

To represent the desired state as somehow scary seems wide of the mark. That is where we want to be, for goodness sake!

Moreover, telling someone they are in their "comfort zone" with a habit they are struggling to break will certainly detract from the effort needed to move away from it. The old "comfort zone" concept is no help at all! Little wonder that those fed such a disabling mental diet are often sabotaged by the very ideas that are supposed to help them.

Even the suggestion that effort equals distress is not a universal truth. Some folks enjoy the process of change - like the person that soaks up knowledge like a sponge on their journey to academic excellence, or in the process of acquiring a particular skill.

For some people in some situations effort is distress. They stay in their Discomfort Zone when the distress in making the effort exceeds the discomfort of staying where they are - the dog laying on a nail syndrome. They reach their Comfort Zone when the distress of the Effort Zone is less than the discomfort of staying where they are.

Thanks James, your talk got me thinking.

So, shall we tip the old notion of comfort zones on its head? Or shall we preserve some of our current income stream and leave our clients struggling to make the changes they want?

Lessons in Staying Positive – #8

2009-04-06T11:54:00.012+01:00

Words: 959. Reading time: 3 minutes 12 seconds.

Our feelings are contagious. For example, if you are feeling down and disappointed then that feeling is likely to be transmitted subconsciously to those who interact with you.

Some individuals may believe that if they speak in a bright, cheery voice and act in an upbeat manner then that will effectively conceal what else is going on. It rarely does.

Even if the person concerned exactly modulates her voice to the precise pitch and timbre she uses normally when she is actually feeling bright and cheerful, her true inner feelings are almost certain to “leak” into some of the other ways we express ourselves.

These will include facial expressions, verbal dexterity and variety, breathing patterns, eye accessing cues, blink rate, gestures and body language. And it is likely to be the motions of the person’s further extremities, such as feet and fingers that give the game away.

The multiple ways we humans use simultaneously to express ourselves makes whole-body, consistent make-believe a daunting task.

And the longer, deeper and more frequent the interaction, the more likely it is that subconscious transmission will take place. Put simply, the longer pretence is maintained, the more effort it takes.

By the same token, if you are truly feeling buoyant and optimistic then the people you are communicating with will pick up on it. If you have a really good state people will think “I like this person” and be drawn to you.

We are more comfortable with people we like and it is easier to like someone who is happy, just as a warm, sunny day in May is more elevating than a cold, wet Wednesday in November.

We are also more comfortable with people who we think are like us, or who we would like to be like. Given a choice, most people would elect to be happy and most would hesitate to describe themselves as sad, miserable or cheerless. That’s not going to win them any friends.

That happiness is catching is confirmed by a study that followed a whole community of people for 20 years. The study, published in the British Medical Journal, followed more than 4,700 people living in Framingham, Massachusetts from 1983 to 2003. Researchers found that the effect of one happy person could ripple through three degrees of separation. The researchers liken the pattern of happiness transmission to the spread of a virus: those with the most number of happy contacts are the mostly likely to catch the happy bug.

“Happiness is like a stampede,” said [co-author] Nicholas Christakis… “Whether you’re happy depends not just on your own actions and behaviours and thoughts, but on those of people you don’t even know”

In this study certain social relationships were more effective at spreading happiness; the good mood of a next-door neighbour was more contagious than that of a live-in spouse. Friends of the same gender were the most likely source of good cheer.

A temporal element was also detected: the effects of a happy encounter could linger for as long as a year before fading.

One important dimension of such “contagion” has been rightly emphasised by Shigehiro Oishi, a University of Virginia psychologist who studies the causes and consequences well-being. He has said:

"Although we are connected with friends and family members who live far away via cell-phone and the Internet, these results indicate that there is nothing like a face-to-face interaction. We are told to get connected by cell-phone companies, but in order to get connected you really have to live close by and interact face to face.”

Technology is evolving a lot faster than the human animal.

But how can something like happiness be contagious? Some researchers think one of the most likely mechanisms is empathetic mimicry. Psychologists have shown that people unconsciously copy the facial expressions, manner of speech, posture, body language and other behaviours of those around them.

Through a kind of neural feedback, they experience the emotions associated with the particular behaviour they are mimicking.

Barbara Wild and colleagues at the University of Tubingen, Germany, found that the stronger the facial expression, the stronger the emotion experienced by the observer. She believes this process is hardwired, since it acts so rapidly and automatically.

Others suggest it works through the action of mirror neurons, a type of brain cell thought to fire both when we perform an action and when we watch someone else doing it, though it is not clear whether the mimicking would cause the neurons to fire or whether their firing would trigger the mimicry.

What is clear is that unconscious imitation allows people to "feel a pale reflection of their companions' actual emotions" and even "feel themselves into the emotional lives of others", says Elaine Hatfield, of the University of Hawaii.

There is plenty of evidence for emotional contagion outside the lab. In 2000, Peter Totterdell at the University of Sheffield found a significant association between the happiness of professional cricketers during a match and the average happiness of their teammates, regardless of other factors such as whether the match was going in the team's favour.

Other studies have found that waiters who offer service with a smile are rewarded with bigger tips.

In NLP this is called being in uptime. Make sure your head, your heart and your happiness are all on the same plain before launching into any key activity, particularly where it involves face-to-face contact. If not, then postponing to a better time - or making a phone call instead - might be the better strategy.

In business giving your clients, the people you are communicating with, the sense of having your “unconditional positive regard”; that you are there for them and with them; that they have your undivided attention, is the foundation on which good rapport is based.

Imparting happiness with the deal is a big bonus worth having.

What’s Your Barometer Reading?

2009-04-02T05:46:00.004+01:00

Words: 489 Reading time: 1 minute 36 seconds

When we are sailing along smoothly on an even keel the chances are that one of two things is true:

a) Either things could be a lot better, but we are not pushing the envelope, or
b) Things could be on the verge of getting a lot worse, because we are forgetting to notice the potential threats.

In the current economic climate, which is more likely to be true for you?

In recent weeks I have had three different businesses approach me with essentially the same problem – getting the right amount of money out of clients on a timely basis. The problem manifested itself in three different ways:

~ Collection of debt
~ Terms of business
~ Pricing

The common factor between these three was forgetting to make clear to the clients concerned what the expectations were surrounding payment. The reason for such forgetfulness is common to us all. So common, in fact, that Pace and Kyeli Smith have coined a term to cover it: “The Usual Error”.

The Usual Error in this case was the belief by the business owners concerned that their clients viewed the need to make adequate payment in a timely manner in the same way that they did themselves. Big mistake.

Paul Watzlawick’s theory on communication is relevant here. One of his axioms says that you cannot not communicate, because every behaviour is a kind of communication. Any perceivable behaviour, including the absence of action, has the potential to be interpreted by other people as having some meaning.

These businesses had – probably inadvertently – let their clients know that low, unsecured or delayed payment was not an issue. In fact it was and is in every case, proving that while you cannot not communicate, you can not communicate accurately.

The tale I usually use in these circumstances is of the couple on their first date. The boy is waiting at the appointed time and place, but the girl arrives 20 minutes late.

If the boy complains on that occasion and on any subsequent occasions the girl will get the message that timekeeping is important to him. However, if says nothing about lateness, then he is opening the door to constant lateness on future dates.

Whatever he does, or does not do, sends a very specific message.

If you are in a hole, as these businesses were, the only way out is to first know that you are there. Knowing you have a problem puts you well on way fixing it. And knowing that you can fix it helps your mood, your attitude and strengthens your inclination to take action.

Watching your business barometer will let you know if the wind direction is about to shift, if you face storms, or if you are about to become becalmed.

Having some warning of what is just round the corner is really useful, even though it is but the first step on the path to a better outcome.

Lessons in Staying Positive – #7

2009-04-01T02:07:00.003+01:00

Words: 526. Reading time: 1 minute 46 seconds.

By and large we all start out as resilient individuals. It is that attribute in the very young – the ability and willingness to bounce back – that takes us all through the many and varied hazards of growing up.

As youngsters we are typically curious and persistent. In learning to walk we fall many times, but it seems to make little difference. A few minutes later we are trying again. The same goes for climbing, talking, eating, dressing and a host of other skills we master as we grow.

We even shrug off our parents’ ire at being pestered and plagued into doing what they repeatedly tell us they are not going to do until our corrosive beleaguering causes them to give in to our demands, just to buy a little peace.

But, as we get older, we often lose that perseverance, even when it is in our own interests to maintain it. We give more weight to opinions that are not our own. We become more timid, self-effacing and deprecating. We pass it off as being considerate, even well-mannered, when in truth it is self-sabotaging and self-denying.

But did you know that resilience is a skill that can be re-learned?

I mean really re-learned, in life-or-death situations, not just as a soft and easy exercise in the comfort of a classroom or as part of a course.

Survivors re-learn from other survivors the resilience skills those people possess. This is true of people who have survived in a concentration camp, successfully recovered against the odds from a terminal illness or survived some other major life event or situation.

Although such 'survivors' are all different, it has been found that they all have certain traits and skills in common. These include objectivity, humour and persistence.

And you can redevelop these skills too.

Survivor traits have a fascinating irony about them.

Although you might think that to be a survivor is 100% positive, the very traits that make an individual a survivor are those that are most often criticised by others.

For example, survivors are often labelled as 'pessimists' because they anticipate problems.

However, the difference between a standard pessimist and a survivor is that survivors are 'optimistically pessimistic' – they anticipate challenges, act on them and know that whatever happens they will not only survive - but thrive.

Many survivors have also been labelled as having a 'warped' sense of humour, or of 'not fitting in' or 'not playing by the rules'.

And to survive that is sometimes what it takes. When everyone else is giving up and becoming resigned to their fate because “it is happening to everybody; it’s a world problem” you will be inevitably marked out as different if you refuse to conform to the norm and accept your fate.

There is no such thing as a “world problem”. The world has no problems, only us humans.

And you can become part of that problem, or you can build your resilience and find a solution.

As Virginia Satir put it so well, “Life is not what it’s supposed to be. It’s what it is. The way you cope with it is what makes the difference.”

Where’s Your Trumpet?

2009-03-27T09:22:00.004Z

Words: 569 Reading time: 1 minute 54 seconds

I recently came across an aphorism of John Maxwell's (Attitude 101 from Nelson Business) who said “life is about 10% of what happens to you and 90% of how you react.”

One obvious implication is that if we choose to react less we will create more room for those things that happen to us. By choosing the events we want to notice we can respond in a considered manner with an outcome in mind, rather than being pulled hither and thither by our emotions in an uncontrolled way affected by random occurrences.

So far so good, but we also need to recognize that our life is often taken up with more than what happens. How much of life is worrying about things that will never happen? John Maxwell seems to have left that out of his reckoning.

Bob Proctor offers the following as an educated guess about the things that worry people:

Things that never happen – 40%;
Things past that can’t be changed by all the worry in the world – 30%;
Needless worries about our health – 12%;
Petty miscellaneous worries – 10%;
Real, legitimate worries – 8%.

And Sir Winston Churchill reminded us of the old man who said on his deathbed that he’d had a lot of trouble in his life, most of which never happened.

Evolution has favoured those people that accentuate the negative. Individuals who vividly recall their previous unhappy experience – or more likely someone else’s – with poisonous toadstools, or an angry grizzly bear is more likely to survive and reproduce successfully.

Consequently, ask anyone to recall the events of the day and they will more easily and more frequently recall the bad happenings than the good. The traffic jam, the delayed train, the stressful meeting, the missed lunch, the extra workload, the broken promises will all figure more prominently and with greater precedence than the safe arrival, the word of appreciation, the delicious dinner and the expectations fulfilled.

Similarly, when asked to list their notable traits most people will denigrate themselves rather than risk blowing their own trumpet. We have been trained to focus much more on our shortcomings than on our virtues.

Evolution is not the only culprit. Home and, in particular, schooling has played a large part. We will probably all recall (there it goes again) the “must try harder” on our report card, what subject it was and who taught that class.

I believe schools could learn much from the adult world, if only they would let themselves learn.

When Andy Murray is practising he is not directed to another sport where his talents are less evident. Steve Gerard is not asked to “try harder” with his goal-keeping. Vanessa-Mae is not admonished to brush up her trombone playing.

When working with my clients we both seek ways to capitalize on their manifest abilities and morph that success into equally promising areas. We do not seek to change a tap washer if the boat is holed below the waterline.

In cataloguing our own qualities it would pay greater dividends, more often, by investing where the returns are already shown to be good, than in wasting time, effort and money reinforcing failure.

We all have different talents and different levels of talent. Maximize your personal returns and give others the scope to maximize theirs by delegating what you are not so good at, or do not enjoy as much.

In international trade it’s known as comparative advantage.

Lessons in Staying Positive – #6

2009-03-20T12:28:00.003Z

Words: 455. Reading time: 1 minute 31 seconds.

The great thing about creative thinking is that apart from a little time and effort it is also free. Coming up with new ideas is essential for any business as it takes them forward and helps them keep ahead of their competition.

The down side of creative thinking is that it can feel scary because it is all about new ideas that have not been tested, where as you could be spending your time working on what you already know and do.

But please remember these two things:

1) What you know may not be working because of the change in circumstances we are already experiencing, or may start to fail at some point.

2) Any new ideas you have will continue to be free up to the point where you consider them good enough to start taking action.

This economic climate could be the time your company makes a massive leap forward, but it will all depend on your willingness to look.

The sixth lesson is: thinking creatively is as valuable in tough times as it is in the good times.

There are always far more options than people think they are; just give yourself permission to explore for a bit.

Creative thinking is essential for a company's development

The best way to do this is to throw all the known rules out of the window for a while and begin exploring the possibilities. For this initial phase accept every idea, however ridiculous it appears. This is not the time for criticism and exclusion. This is the time to get a little wild. Most people get hampered by thinking about what can't be done and who they are not, rather than what they could do and what they could become.

Once you have made the time to look seriously how each idea could be implemented and what that might mean, then you can permit those rational judgements back in to test for practical viability. Oh, and you can get back all the known rules that you threw out of the window for a while, but only if they are really still appropriate.

Strange as it may seem, many more businesses suffer from a lack of imagination than suffer from a lack of cash. Too much capital and it tends to replace creativity. Companies without money must dream, imagine, co-operate and improvise. Companies awash with money try to buy solutions from outside consultants – often with very poor results.

It was as recently as August 2008 that Woolworths revealed they had been working with strategy consultants LEK – after already having spent a small fortune with consultants over the last 5 years on their supply-chain logistics. And they were still outperformed by Wilkinsons, with the inevitable results.

How Many Pages to Go?

2009-03-17T21:20:00.002Z

Words: 379 Reading time: 1 minute 16 seconds

There is a well-known anecdote that tells of Mark Twain travelling across America and receiving a telegram from his editor. The telegram says “Need 2 page story in 2 days”. Mark Twain is alleged to have responded “2 page story need 30 days. 2 days can do 30 page story”.

Those of you with some experience of writing will recognize the reason for the apparent paradox immediately.

Thirty pages gives room for rambling paragraphs, non sequiturs and unrelated blind alleys.

To distil a tale into just two pages requires review, reconsideration, revision, redrafting and endless editing if the final result is to retain the essence and carry the narrative.

I see the same pattern with my clients, whether the issues are business or purely personal.

When I first ask them to describe their situation as they see, inevitably I elicit the thirty page story.

That story is confused, with overlapping issues, unfocused worries, inconsequential asides and unsupported assertions. People often describe themselves as being in a gigantic morass, about to be sucked under and drowned by all the circumstances sapping their usual ability to cope.

This is not surprising. Few people feel they have a partner who will just sit and listen – without passing comment, or judgement, or suggesting instant solutions.

And those that do have such a partner rarely take the time necessary to articulate what is going on in their lives. They are too busy struggling to “fix” it without necessarily being fully aware of what it is that needs fixing.

In some ways my role begins by encouraging the client to edit down those thirty pages to something tighter, more focused and much less confused.

Among the more useful questions that direct the client towards the process of paring away the lianas entangling them are:

“So, what is it exactly that you are working on?”

“What would have to happen for you get the outcome you want?”

“What one change would make the biggest difference to you right now?”

“And what one thing could you do to bring that one change into effect?”

The questions are simple, even stark. The answers usually throw up a lot more anguish and take a lot more work to bring into effect.

Hence Twain’s thirty days for a two page story.

Lessons in Staying Positive – #5

2009-01-25T16:56:00.003Z

Words: 595. Reading time: 1 minute 59 seconds.

So many people read book after book on better management, leadership, engagement, marketing, even surviving the recession. Some will admit they are searching for the newest technique. Few recognize their hunt as a quest for the Holy Grail of enterprise.

They attend workshops and seminars and briefings believing that one day, if they attend enough, or just attend the right one, then all those things they struggle with will disappear – they’ll know all the answers.

Perhaps this fifth lesson will provide that answer: you will always have issues to solve. The fact is they signify that the business is in a rapid learning phase. And the more issues you have the more rapid the learning needs to be.

Faced with uncertainty your possible responses go beyond the simple alternatives of flight or fight. Psychologists now also recognize freeze (extreme vigilance while immobile), fright (“playing dead”) and faint. In business there is usually a sixth reaction – flap.

And flap is what we see and hear most. It emanates from people in both business and Government. It’s most avid propagators reside in the media where any event is expressed in whatever superlatives comes most readily to hand: biggest/lowest/deepest/highest…since…the war/the 1930s/this century/this year.

It’s interesting to note the more sober and considered findings from some times of previous panic.

A study conducted by McGraw-Hill of the relationship between marketing and sales in 143 companies during the severe 1974-75 downturn found that those companies that did not cut their marketing in either of the negative growth years had the highest growth in net income during both the recessionary years as well as in the two subsequent years.

And in a study of the 1981-82 recession McGraw-Hill found that companies that cut their marketing increased sales by only 19% between 1980 and 1985. However, those companies that continued their marketing during the downturn enjoyed a 275% sales increase over the same period.

So-called difficulties, like complaints, are a gift.

So-called difficulties will have some folks running for cover, unwilling to face their own fears and failings – always forgetting that failure is a sign we are growing.

But difficulties, once faced, are seldom as bad or overpowering as they first seem.

A story, adapted from Aesop, tells of a soldier on the way home alone from a glorious battle who meets a small, puny looking monster. Proud of his martial prowess the soldier beats the monster about the head. Soon the monster lies in a heap on the ground and the soldier strolls on.

Within minutes the monster is in front of him again, but now he looks somewhat bigger and somewhat less puny. Once more he batters the monster to the ground, but this time it takes a great deal more toil and trouble.

Finally victorious the soldier wearily continues along the path, only to find himself facing the monster for a third time. This time the monster is so much bigger and so much stronger that it is the soldier who is defeated and he runs away, back the way he came.

Meeting an old comrade the soldier urges him to help him defeat the monster. As they approach the place where the soldier first met the monster he sees it has returned to its small and puny size. His friend laughs and says:

“If you pick a quarrel with something unpleasant when you don’t really have to, then it simply grows more unpleasant. Let’s just leave the feeble little thing where it is.”

So they did. They simply brushed past it. And the monster never bothered them again.

Changing the Past

2009-01-22T14:58:00.003Z

Words: 657 Reading time: 2 minute 12 seconds

It is a common piece of folklore that you cannot change the past. The result is that some people feel regret, sorrow, depressed and even traumatised by past events. Day after day they live with the past. It is constantly in their thoughts.

Other people feel committed or constrained by something either said or done many years ago. They feel that occasion etched in stone exactly who they are, what they can aspire to and how they live their lives. These people live in the past. They believe they cannot move beyond it.

For both of these groups the folklore is true. For them the past is unchanging. They preserve it, often at great personal cost, like some religious icon, or pagan totem. It’s a constant touchstone, a firm, dependable datum from which everything and everyone else is measured.

For everyone else it is perfectly possible to change the past, and we do so regularly.

Who of us has not “forgotten” some episode from our youth that we are reminded of uncomfortably, perhaps at a large family gathering?

Who can remember each moment of every day for just the last twelve months, never mind ten or twenty years back?

The events of those days may have happened, or they may have been imagined, but for us they are lost forever. For us there is no difference between our acting as if they didn’t take place and the event never happening at all. The result is the same.

The reverse of the medal is the creation of “false memories”. If a person comes to believe absolutely that certain things happened to them, then they begin to exhibit the same symptoms as those who actually experienced similar events – usually highly traumatic. The acquired “false memory” is as real as any other – the past has been changed.

Wartime, in particular, is replete with propaganda that deletes whole incidents, or creates a baseless reality.

The Katyn Forest massacre was written out of history for decades until it was finally confirmed in April 1990. Whether that confirmation will later be modified we cannot know.

The idea that eating carrots significantly improves night vision persists to this day. However, the tale was originally dreamed up by British propagandists to explain away the success of allied night fighters against German bombers that, in reality, depended on radar.

Re-interpretation also changes our past.

What we “know” of Roman Britain was written by the Romans. Modern archaeology is beginning to uncover finds that suggest things may not have been quite as the Romans depicted them. The past is changing.

In the past artists have been hailed for their great creativity and daring innovations. While not questioning their talents the sources of some of their idiosyncrasies are now being thrown into doubt.

Was El Greco's oblique elongation of his characters due to astigmatism?

Was Constable a colour-defective?

Was the Impressionist style of painting due to the myopia and cataracts of its leading components?

Are van Gogh's yellow and haloed paintings due to the ocular side effects of digitalis toxicity?

We are rewriting the story of how these things came into being. We are changing the past.

Religion is another area rich with alternative versions of the past. In the thirteenth century, in Christian areas of the world, the infallibility of the Pope was unquestioned. Today few believe those ancient pontiffs were without flaws.

If you are hooked into the idea that the past does not change and cannot now be changed, then perhaps it is time to think again. Even how we feel about events in the past can be changed by reframing the experiences in question:

* Re-cast failure as learning.

* See loss of a loved one as just the end of one chapter.

* Re-colour illness as a fork in the road.

The scope for changing the past is limited only by your own imagination. And the past says nothing about who you are today and the person you will become tomorrow.

Lessons in Staying Positive – #4

2009-01-04T13:25:00.006Z

Words: 421. Reading time: 1 minute 24 seconds.

When people choose to feel stressed most also become very black-or-white in their thinking.

Things become either wholly one thing, or completely the opposite and, if people are feeling stress in a negative mind frame, they tend to focus much more on what may go wrong or what they might lose.

However, the standard response of rushing from pillar to post in an effort to cover all the bases, cramming more and more into every available minute, is unlikely to prove effective.

Is hurrying, accompanied by a constant sense of urgency, really the outcome we desire?

Apparently, engaging in these “roadrunner days” can lead to an increase in the cortisol levels in our blood. And because cortisol shuts down learning it is just about the least effective reaction we can have when faced with change and uncertainty.

The ability to learn and learn fast is exactly what we need to retain when confronting challenges.

The fourth lesson is: slow down to get there faster. In particular:

1. No hurrying through conversations. The most important conversations in our lives deserve our attention. You won’t know how important any conversation is unless you take the time to stop and listen (see Aural Communication).

2. Slowing down means not missing the treasures in life that we don’t notice when we’re hurrying. This may be the delight of a child, birdsong in the morning, or the awkward, halting, but heartfelt gratitude of someone we’ve helped.

3. We can slow down without necessarily dawdling. Instead we can now do the right things, at the right time, in the right way, at the right pace. The time needed will come from eliminating all the effort previously spent in looking busy and harassed, while being largely unproductive. Who’s benefit did that truly serve other than our own?

There’s a lovely little story on just this point.

A farmer had a wagon full of apples. He stopped a man on the side of the road and asked how far it was to market.

The man replied, “If you go slowly it’s about 3 hours away.”

However, the farmer was in a hurry. He didn’t want to spend 3 hours getting to market, so he decided to go much faster and thus arrive sooner.

But the road was filled with ruts, potholes and pebbles. The faster he went the more of his apples bounced out of the wagon.

By going faster he made sure that the journey lasted all day, because he had to keep stopping to pick up his apples.

Aural Communication

2009-01-03T17:22:00.001Z

Words: 478 Reading time: 1 minute 36 seconds

Being listened to is a fantastic experience; merely being heard pales in comparison.

Even young children know the difference, hence the familiar cry, “Mummy, you’re not listening!” and the hasty reassurance “I am dear, I am” as she continues multi-tasking. Rarely is the infant completely mollified and the whole exchange ends as less than satisfactory to both parties.

It’s small wonder that an estimated 75% of oral communication is ignored, misunderstood, or quickly forgotten.

How often do you ask someone to repeat what they said, not because it was inaudible, but because you failed to catch their message the first time?

How often are you asked, “Why don’t you listen?” particularly by your partner or your children?

Our ability to listen builds trust, credibility and understanding. By listening we develop and maintain strong business links, healthy family relationships, and an active social network.

To listen properly we need to:

1. Be aware of the speaker’s mood and react accordingly. Often much of the message is conveyed by intonation, pitch, volume and body language. To listen properly we also need to see what they mean.

2. Allow silence to build, giving room for our companion to clarify or reflect on their point. We need to hear the whole story before we can respond effectively. The whole story includes not only what is said, but also what is not said.

3. Summarise to ensure understanding. In doing so, use the very same words that your companion used, as far as possible. For you the words “job” and “occupation” may mean the same thing. However, that may not be the case where they are concerned.

4. Never make assumptions about what the topic means to the speaker and how if affects them. You may be hearing a traumatic tale being told as a humorous interlude. Your interlocutor does so simply because that’s the only way they can deal with it. But how can you tell?

5. Suspend judgement (this can be difficult to master but is powerful and rewarding). That means not forming your opinion before listening to everything, getting clarification and having taken time to reflect. Seconds into a conversation some people think they already know the answer and interrupt the speaker in order to deliver it.

Although it's counterintuitive to many people skilful listening is often more valuable than talking. And listening is a much higher quality experience than hearing. Accept no substitutes when the outcome really matters.

One might suppose that in conversation people take turns talking and listening. For most exchanges it would be more accurate to say that while one person is speaking, the other is reloading. To avoid this trap refrain from mentally disagreeing, criticising or arguing.

Some dire consequences can follow from neglecting this critical skill: confusion, hurt feelings, incomplete instructions, embarrassment, and dissatisfaction. All of which can be alleviated by practicing proper listening techniques.

Lessons in Staying Positive – #3

2009-01-03T00:45:00.005Z

Words: 388. Reading time: 1 minute 18 seconds.

We all tell stories. We construct them from the events we pick out of our moment-to-moment existence. However, the events that I choose to notice and those that loom large for you will often be different – even when the whole experience would appear to be the same.

Have you ever been present at the same meeting with a colleague, but come away with a different version of what took place?

Or to the theatre with a friend who noticed aspects of the drama that completely escaped you?

Or seen an accident after which your witness statement differed from that of another honest observer?

Of all the stories in the world the most compelling are those we tell about ourselves to ourselves. Our story is our life; it is our version of reality. Our stories impose order and meaning on the chaos; they give us structure and direction.

Recently I asked a business acquaintance what her story was. She jumped right in with her first job and then told me about each job she has had since.

That’s interesting; what happened to her childhood? What happened to the rest of her life?

What does it say about her? And what story is she telling herself?

As life unfolds for you:
(a) what will you choose to focus on?
(b) how will you interpret what you focus on?
(c) what will you do and (a) and (b)?

If we see the thorn and not the rose, the past and not the possibility, the lesson and not the learning then we will tend to awfulize.

Awfulizing keeps us stuck in the past exclusively viewing the worst of the world. It then extrapolates from that very selective stance to a future ever and always more dire.

The third lesson is to glamorize rather than awfulize.

If you notice yourself awfulizing, neutralize your runaway thoughts with these two questions.

- How is being attached to this awfulized story influencing my reaction?
- How would I be different in this situation if I were not attached to that story?

It’s a rare situation that goes as badly as the scenarios you make up in your mind beforehand.

So what is the worse that can happen? And what is the best that can happen?

Which would you choose to focus on to maximize its chances?

Knowing Is Not Enough

2009-01-02T01:48:00.004Z

Words: 561 Reading time: 1 minute 52 seconds

It isn’t what we know that determines the outcome; it’s what we do with what we know.

Example 1
Prior to “Operation Market Garden” in September 1944 the senior Allied commanders knew that the 9th and 10th SS Panzer Divisions were located on the corridor that the Allies planned to use for their narrow-front thrust. This made achieving the objective highly unlikely.

More than 16,800 Allied troops were killed, wounded or captured in a fruitless effort that was essentially targeted at assuaging a bruised ego.

Example 2
In December of the same year the Germans launched a tactically brilliant offensive through the Ardennes, inflicting heavy losses on inexperienced Allied troops.

Just like Market Garden 'It was not intelligence (evaluated information of the enemy) that failed. The failure was the commanders and certain G-2's, who did not act on the intelligence they had,' according to one of Patton's subordinates.

Although both of these failures to listen came close together, they are by no means unique. Similar failures had preceded them in earlier times and others have followed in later times.

Example 3
The North Vietnamese Easter Offensive of 1972 was similar and as one author has pointed out "Though the location, numbers and types of forces were not the same, the command assumptions, the weather and the use and misuse of intelligence had almost the same catastrophic effects in both clashes.... "

Example 4
Ten years later, in the South Atlantic, the Falklands war may have been avoidable. In any event it was undoubtedly made more costly and riskier by the intelligence failure that preceded it. British officials were unresponsive to warnings that diplomacy had failed and invasion was imminent.

Example 5
In 2003 it was Iraq. As the White House has acknowledged, intelligence on Iraqi weapons programs did not drive its decision to go to war.

The intelligence on Iraq was there. It did not get things wrong and thereby mislead policymakers. Once again the leaders were insensitive to information that suggested that the course of action on which they were embarked was likely to lead to disaster.

These examples are drawn from the military sphere simply because mistakes there tend to more visible and better documented than failures in business. But similar failures in business abound. Failures where the enterprise does not give sufficient weight either to facts within its purview, or relevant facts easily revealed.

Many people, let alone businesses, are uneasy acknowledging that many of the conventions and principles they operate on are unwritten, unspoken and unconscious. Psychologists estimate that 95% of the things we say and do each day are done on “autopilot”, that is automatically, unthinkingly and routinely.

And the very familiarity of such actions mean they go unrecognised and unquestioned long after they cease to be either safe or appropriate. Thus it is that we wake up one day to find ourselves in an awful mess without realising quite how we got there.

The tragedy is that working with either a business coach, or an NLP Practitioner for even a short period of time will begin to raise awareness of the subconscious paradigms we are running and what the implications might be.

Make just one New Year’s Resolution – start working on raising your awareness of yourself and your business so that you can improve your chances of recognising the warning signs before it is too late.

Lessons in Staying Positive – #2

2008-12-31T18:14:00.002Z

Words: 276. Reading time: 1 minute 4 seconds.

If you think businesses are struggling, take a look at Tesco: Group sales grew by 11.7% in the 13 weeks to 22nd November.

If you think Tesco’s is alone take a look at Primark: total sales grew by 21% in the year to Sept 13 and profits grew by 17%.

Not bad for an economy that is supposedly suffering badly and a sector that is said to be suffering more than most.

The argument that they have prospered because they are both at the ‘economy’ end of the spectrum is belied by the demise of Woolworth’s. Clearly, piling it high and selling it cheap is no guarantee of survival.

In a similar vein the media, even Governments, would have you believe that banks all over the world are in dire straits and that none of it is due to a gross neglect of duty by the regulators.

Take a look at the Lebanese banks. They are stronger than ever. That’s partly due to the way they conduct business, partly due to strict regulation. Well now, if they can do it, where were the UK Treasury and the US Securities Commission?

And that’s the second lesson: particularise rather than generalise. Generalising is marked by sweeping expressions that allow for no exceptions, such as:

· Everyone & No one
· Everywhere & Nowhere
· Everything & Nothing
· Always & Never
· Best & Worst

Who thinks they have heard reports recently that the FTSE 100 had its worst day ever? And who is aware that the FTSE 100 only started in 1984? Less than 25 years of comparatives doesn’t tell you very much, does it?

Even the FT30 index, which is the oldest continuous index in the UK and one of the oldest in the world, only began on July 1 1935.

Life survived and flourished even though a cataclysmic event wiped out the dinosaurs. The same is true today. Events that are wholly positive or wholly negative are rare events indeed.

Being First

2008-12-30T11:12:00.003Z

Words: 467. Reading time: 1 min 34 secs.

The story is a familiar one. Some lost and weary traveller asks a friendly yokel the way to some distant location and is advised that it would be better if he did not start from here.

As we weigh up what resolutions we could make for 2009 I would offer the same wise counsel as that helpful country bumpkin – don’t start from here.

Typically, when we imagine doing something different, we start with some preconditions. We say, “When I have the resources, then I could do X and be Y”. For example, we say “If I had a diet that worked, then I could slim down and be a size 10”, or “If I had the time, then I could start writing and be a poet.”

These preconditions not only provide us with a handy excuse if we fail, they also start us off in exactly the wrong place – where we are now.

By following the ‘have – do – be’ route they focus on what we lack; the hard bit.

Only when that’s in place is there implied permission to look at behaviour [do].

Only when behaviour has changed can we tackle beliefs [be].

While this approach can and does work for some people, it is the more difficult approach to change. It looks to sheer willpower to put the first two elements in place before tackling the major roadblock to such actions – our beliefs.

Willpower has its uses, but it is a product of the conscious mind. It calls for considerable effort and is essentially a short-lived, power surge. If the conscious mind does not find resonance in the subconscious mind, then it’s no contest. The subconscious prevails every time.

Therefore, to put long-term changes in place, be they minor or major, we would be better advised to start with our beliefs about what we are being. If your desire is to be a poet then take on the mantle of a poet, think and act like a poet, live as if you are a poet.

In being a poet you will do those things that poets do.

In being a size 10 you will do those things that size 10 people do.

And in the being and the doing you will create those things you have to have.

The poet will stop watching TV, get up earlier and work throughout the weekends on producing verse.

The size 10 will experiment with the food and exercise combinations needed to fit into that dress size.

Use the power surge of your willpower to modify the environment in which your changed persona will operate – the food in the cupboards, the social calendar for the size 10, the alarm clock and the study layout for the poet.

From there the change, driven from the inside, will naturally feel at home.

Lessons in Staying Positive – #1

2008-12-29T12:25:00.003Z

I was recently asked to deliver a talk entitled “Staying Positive In Difficult Times”. I accepted the invitation, but I changed the title.

The words we use are important. They reflect our thinking just as much as our thinking reflects our words. If times were difficult I would not want to stay in them, positive or otherwise. Nor would I want to stay positive under them, about them or while they last, although I might choose to stay positive through them.

I am equally twitchy at airports and railway stations where I am invited get on the train, or on the plane. No thanks! I’d much rather get in than get on!

And why would I wish to stay positive only in difficult times? Wouldn’t staying positive serve me just as well, whatever way “so-called” times turn out? If your outlook truly serves you well, it should do so whatever the circumstances. And if times were difficult would I want to stay?

The fact is the phrase “staying positive in difficult times” is a complete oxymoron and that’s lesson one: watch your language and do away with labels.

For someone who is positive times are neither difficult nor easy; times are neither happy nor sad; times are neither good nor bad. Times just are; they have no innate character that is true for everybody, everywhere, every when.

Times are what you make of them. It is quite possible for times to be both good and bad at the same time. Don’t take my word for it. Dickens said it most famously in the very first sentence of A Tale of Two Cities:

“It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair, we had everything before us, we had nothing before us, we were all going direct to heaven, we were all going direct the other way in short, the period was so far like the present period, that some of its noisiest authorities insisted on its being received, for good or for evil, in the superlative degree of comparison only.”

Isn’t that just like now?

10.5 Routes to Innovation

2008-12-26T14:42:00.002Z

I listened recently to an interesting presentation with the title: "Soft Landings: Don't hunker down in a recession - differentiate yourself". It was delivered by someone with the title ‘Innovation Director’ and the basic message was to set your business apart from the crowd by coming up with an innovative product or service.

While I gained the distinct impression of good management skills in relation to the processes that follow the original idea, there was little on offer about how to come up with the original idea in the first place. The two main suggestions were

a) brainstorming among fellow workers and colleagues, and
b) talking to people outside the business, e.g. customers, suppliers, universities.

Both sound perfectly valid options for a business already of some size, but small and micro businesses are rarely able to make available either the time, or the resources needed.

The sole entrepreneur, faced with a blank sheet of paper and a demand to “be innovative”, does not know how. In such circumstances “new” and “original” seem beyond them. The path of least resistance is to work harder, faster, cheaper and do more of what they already know.

However, all is not lost. There are ways that a small business can begin to stimulate thought and a fresh approach without spending quantities of time and money they don’t have. And your new ideas will be yours for free until you act on them.

It is very possible that this could be the time you make some kind of shift in a way that enables you to make a massive leap forward starting right now, all dependent on your willingness to look.

It can be much easier than you think to throw all the known rules out of the window for a while. You can get them back later if you choose and when and how you wish. For the time being explore the endless possibilities on many different levels.

Most people get hampered by thinking about what can't be done and who they are not. Rather, as you relax, think of what you could do and what you could become. There are always far more options that you could allow for as you begin to feel good about the future.

Here are some quick and easy ways passed those roadblocks of the conscious mind:

1) Start with what you do – what the client buys – not the label you apply to your job.

2) Without constraints or limitations, suggest other ways it could be done – when, where, how, who and why.

3) Whatever you do – what’s like it a) in the same sector, b) in adjacent sectors c) in unrelated sectors?

4) How could you deliver the same product, or service you do now into different sectors?

5) Go dictionary dipping: close your eyes, open a dictionary, place your finger on the page, take a look. What word did you point to? Pretend it has something to do with your business. How would you apply it?

6) Go Yellow Pages dipping using a similar technique. Whatever trade or service it comes up with – could you do that? How would you diversify into that sector? And how would you integrate your current business?

7) What hobbies do you, your family and friends enjoy. How do they apply to your business? In what ways could you use them to provide something that would differentiate you?

8) How is X like Y? How is accounting like a tree? How are electrical services like the moon? Find as many similarities as you can. Start with ten.

9) Benchmark the competition. What are they already doing that you could copy easily? And think as widely as possible. When it is a question of discretionary spending a package holiday could find itself in competition with a new car for the money.

10) Look at other diversified businesses. What strange combinations are there and in what ways do they work to support each other? Retailers offering insurance is one. Electrical retailers, e.g. Dixons, have offered product insurance on the goods they sell and made huge margins doing so. Tesco offers car insurance and sells it on the strength of its own brand name. What could you do?

10.5) Finally and perhaps most telling, true innovation may not be necessary. In any field of endeavour 80% of the money is earned by 20% of the players. What they do differently is but a tiny improvement on the competition, but the competition is generally so poor anyway that a small difference is all they need.

To help you stay where you are and to mine the “acres of diamonds” that are already there see David Winch’s article ‘Succeeding in spite of yourself’.

Change and Uncertainty

2008-12-25T10:45:00.007Z

It is a common misconception that people fear change. On the contrary, people are change.

People change all the time – from the colour of their hair to the clothes they wear; from the book they are reading to the job they are doing. Even the cells in our bodies change – our blood is completely changed every 30 days.

It is not change that people fear, it is the uncertainty associated with change.

Faced with uncertainty your possible responses go beyond the simple alternatives of flight or fight. Psychologists now also recognise freeze (extreme vigilance while immobile), fright (“playing dead”) and faint. I have observed there’s a fifth – flap – and a sixth – flatulence.

Flap is extremely common in the business world and just as evident in Government. Earlier writers characterised it as “seagull management” based on the tendency of senior personnel to fly in, foul everything up and fly off again – leaving the troops on the ground to clear up the resultant mess as best they can.

Flatulence refers to the long-winded, bombastic, pompous and pretentious displays evinced most often by Ministers in reaction to a crisis. This adds greatly to the public spectacle, but does little to seriously address the root of any problem.

Think of Gordon Brown’s ‘saving the world’ as being equivalent to a local moggie making itself more impressive and threatening by raising its fur and arching its back, thus increasing its apparent size and power.

Mistakenly assigning your feelings of concern or resistance about change to simple fear could cause you to miss more meaningful information – like:
i) your unhappiness with the way the change is happening;
ii) your lack of concrete information about the way the change will affect you; or
iii) your dissatisfaction with a lack of genuine opportunities for your voice to be heard in the change process.

When contemplating the changes you face it’s worth recalling that:

* Change is part of everyday life; it’s part of the endless cycle of birth, growth and demise. You are part of that process, so make the most of it.

* You are not alone. Others will have been in the same boat in the past, some will be in the self-same boat you are and others will join the boat later. Share the problems and form a crew.

* When you know what piece of meaningful information is missing, you’ll know what to do.

* One person’s threat is another person’s opportunity. To quote an old adage – when life serves you lemons, make lemonade.

* The inspiration to live a life you’ll love will carry you long after the adrenaline burst from fearing a life you’ll hate has burned out.

We are often admonished not to be fearful; we should “pull ourselves together” we shouldn’t “be so negative” even though worry, fear, concern and trepidation are really useful signals that something may be happening and we need to pay attention.

If we harbour genuine fears then that is how we feel and that is what we have to work with. “Shoulds” and “shouldn’ts” are simply distractions. Going past the fear itself to the situation that evokes that feeling and finding which elements are important to us there is the best way to capture the value in fear’s early warning system.

That’s putting fear to its best possible use. To do the opposite – becoming exclusively focused on our own preservation, rather than notice what is going on – is to devalue the message.

By way of illustration, there’s a simple story to remind us about the value of focus.

A small plane is flying high over the Scottish mountains, when it develops engine trouble. There are five people on board: the pilot, Steve Redgrave, Gordon Brown, the Dali Lama, and a new-age hippie. The cockpit door opens, and the pilot bursts into the compartment.

"People," he begins, "I have good news and bad news. The bad news is that we're about to crash. The good news is that there are four parachutes, and I have one of them!" With that, the pilot throws open the door and jumps from the plane.

Steve Redgrave is on his feet as quick as flash. "People," he says, "I am the world's greatest athlete. The world needs great athletes. I think the world's greatest athlete should have a parachute!" With these words, he grabs one of the remaining parachutes, and hurtles through the door and into the night.

Gordon Brown rises and says, "People, I am the world's smartest and most serious politician. This is a serious situation and the world needs a smart politician like me. I think the world's smartest politician should have a parachute, too." He grabs a pack, and out he jumps.

The Dali Lama and the hippie look at one another. Finally, the Dali Lama speaks.

"Young lady," he says, "I have lived a satisfying life and have known the bliss of True Enlightenment. You have your life ahead of you; you take a parachute, and I will go down with the plane."

As cool as a cucumber, the hippie smiles slowly and says, "Hey, don't worry, dude. The world's smartest politician just jumped out wearing my rucksack."

The magic is not in the mushrooms, it’s in paying attention to what is going on around you.

"Fears are educated into us and can, if we wish, be educated out." – Karl A. Menninger.

All Change

2008-10-19T14:47:00.003+01:00

You may have come across the phrase “if you always do what you have always done, you’ll always get what you have always got.” Notable speakers who have used it in the past include Penny Phang, Anthony Robbins, Jim Rohn, Chris Widener and Zig Ziglar.

I have even used it myself.

Newsflash from my banking clients: that’s (another) coaching myth.

In the past this little mantra has been used to challenge those clients who were stuck in a rut of working hard in a particular way with little success, but unable to come up with another approach.

In those circumstances pointing out the illogicality of continuing in a fruitless pursuit made sense.

But what of those whose strategy has a history of success, but who face more recent set-backs? Wouldn’t they want to keep doing what they have been doing in order to duplicate previous favourable results?

Certainly they will. However, circumstances have changed. Now they need to change too, in order to match the changed situation.

Once the environment shifts, then so must the approach you use. Doing what you once did will not give the previous outcome.

That much is obvious, so what’s the problem?

Every moment of every day every one of us has to make three choices, whether we are aware of it, or not:

1. We have to choose where to direct our attention;
2. We have to choose how to interpret the event or object that has our attention, and
3. We have to choose what action to take as a result of choices 1 and 2.

The peculiar thing is that many people (not you, of course) do not consciously make those choices, because they do not even realise there is a choice to be made.

The consequence is that such people, instead of consciously selecting an action, merely react instead.

They take no responsibility for what goes on in their heads and the subsequent outcomes. “Other people” are being difficult and “the world” is against them. Their behaviour is entirely derived from habit, conditioning and untested suppositions.

Increasingly, as the world moves on, those habits, that conditioning and their suppositions are no longer appropriate. It follows that the results such people achieve become less and less satisfactory.

The results we get depend on the choices we make we make, either consciously from applied thought, or unthinkingly from the subconscious.

It pays to remain aware of our choices; it maximises our chances of selecting an appropriate action that matches the present circumstances.

At the height of the banking boom a highly successful broker drove his brand new, top the range Ferrari down Wall Street and pulled into the kerb to show it off to his friends. As he opened the door to get out the door was suddenly and completely ripped off by a passing truck.

The broker was outraged. He cursed the trucker. He screamed about the cost of the car. He yelled that the body repairers would never get it to look as good as it did new. He wailed about all the expensive extras that he had had fitted.

A New York cop pulled in behind the Ferrari with his strobe lights flashing. He told the broker to calm down. The car was no more than an expensive toy. And did the broker even realise that the truck had torn off half his arm when it passed? At that moment he was bleeding profusely over the sidewalk.

“My God!” the broker shrieked, “My Rolex!”

Sitting Pretty

2008-10-09T05:19:00.007+01:00

Additional long-term capital would be welcome. It would surely act as a ready buffer against future shocks and yet more trying times.

But some clients are beginning to feel left out of the party as the rate of economic growth slows. As the total of taxpayers’ money being gifted to banks and financial institutions grows day by day they are tempted to cast an envious eye in that direction.

While I can appreciate the sentiment I regard the prospect as a siren song leading to potential tragedy.

Once such a comfortable cushion is in place it is all too easy to regard that as the solution: nothing more need be done. The company can now sit safely on the, albeit diminishing, cushion and watch as events pass by.

Nothing could be further from the truth.

Either the cushion will continue to diminish until it disappears completely, leaving the company worse off than before.

Or the crisis will end and your competitors will be stronger and better prepared than you, having benefited from the hard lessons imbibed while weathering the storm.

Liners may carry lifeboats, but your chances are improved by learning to swim.

Depending on the benevolence of others for your own survival is never a good idea. Those that ride to the rescue today will, unlike the good Samaritan, impose their own conditions tomorrow – as the bankers will shortly learn.

Any coaching I give is directed towards each client learning the rules of the changing markets conditions, as they apply to him or her, and then working out his or her own solution, whatever that may be.

That may not sound easy, but this is not economic Armageddon, despite what the newshounds will tell you.

There is still plenty of business out there – at least as much as there was 2-3 years ago.

If you were in business then, you were probably doing nicely.

You still can be.

Once upon a time a wise King, concerned about the unrest and discontent among his people, invited them all to bring their burdens to him. He promised to listen and to help, if he could.

They came from near and far, each carrying his own burden, which they laid at the feet of the King. Then one after the other, each rose and told his story.

When the tales of woe were finished, the King spoke: “You have heard your neighbour’s story. If anyone wishes he may now exchange his burden for another’s.”

Silently his subjects looked around, then silently picked up his own particular burden and quietly walked away.

Everyone nods

2008-09-20T18:55:00.005+01:00

Everybody nods.

In the years leading up to the collapse of the South Sea Company in 1720 there was an increased potential for foreign trade. Consumerism was on the rise. Wealth and luxury were no longer reserved exclusively for the aristocracy.

The company was promised a monopoly of all trade to the South American Spanish colonies.

Everyone agreed that the future was set fair. Everyone nodded.

But through a web of deceit, corruption, and bribery that included both company and government officials it was grossly oversold. The trading concessions barely materialized; the company had a very shaky commercial basis.

The company’s share price fell from a peak of £1050 at the end of June to £175 by September 1720, devastating institutions and individuals alike.

The bursting of the bubble, which coincided with the similar collapse of the Mississippi Scheme in France, ended – temporarily – the prevalent belief that prosperity could be achieved through unlimited expansion of credit.

In the later 1990s the new internet sector and related fields were the place to make your fortune. Everyone nodded.

A combination of rapidly increasing share prices, individual stock market speculation and widely available venture capital created an environment in which many of the internet based companies dismissed standard business models. They focused on increasing market share without regard to the bottom line. That would take care of itself.

These companies expected that they could build enough brand awareness to charge profitable rates for their services later. The motto "get big fast" reflected this strategy.

But the bottom line didn’t and the companies couldn’t. The dot-com model was inherently flawed.

Even if the plan was sound, there could only be, at most, one network-effects winner in each sector. Yet there were a vast number of companies all with the same business plan for the same respective sector. Therefore most companies with this business plan faced inevitable failure. In fact, many sectors could not support even one company powered entirely by network effects.

The dot-com bubble crash wiped out $5 trillion in market value of technology companies from March 2000 to October 2002. Add to this the write-downs by the venture capital community which, to name but three, include at least $280 million for kozmo.com, $160 million for boo.com and $65 million for MVP.com.

And so we come to recent times. The bankers announce they have found a way of lending the same money many times over and, even if it is lent where there is a high risk of default, it’s still safe. And everyone nodded.

However, these events and those like them down the years are merely the tip of the iceberg. These are just instances of high–profile, bizarre and reckless conduct. There is just as much perverse, incomprehensible and destructive business behaviour to be found in everyday dealings.

For example, a recent, cash-strapped client who offered 90-day credit to his customers because, “that’s what this industry does.” Everyone nods.

For example, a business acquaintance who cut back on his sales and marketing expenditure in anticipation of a fall in customer volumes (everyone nods) happily reporting that’s what actually happened.

For example, a company, anxious to have its employees engaged with the business (everyone nods), commissions a consultant to conduct a survey in order to discover what its people think.

For example, the business that is doing things in the same way as its competitors (everyone nods), yet expects a result that will show them as being exceptional.

The human animal is tribal. That is not the same as having a herd instinct. We can think independently if we chose; we are more likely to succeed if we do.

In 1841 Charles Mackay published his book "Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds", often cited as the best book ever written about market psychology.

In May 2004 James Surowiecki published The Wisdom of Crowds.

In the light of subsequent events, perhaps Mackay had it right after all.

Coach or Consultant?

2008-09-19T18:28:00.003+01:00

I was asked recently about the difference between an adviser/consultant and a coach.

It’s a valid question and, while I answered it after a fashion, I have been mildly annoyed ever since that my response was not better.

This is my second try.

Someone who is looking for a consultant or an adviser is a person who expects to be told the answer. It is a childlike, submissive approach; one where the power has been passed to another by someone who believes they lack sufficient resource themselves.

Someone who seeks a coach is a person who wants to find the answer and do the work themselves. They accept the responsibility, assume control and are determined to shape their own destiny. However, they are adult enough to recognise that sometimes they need the independence and questioning skills of an outsider to help them make the best of themselves.

To adapt from The Prophet by Kahlill Gibran:

Advisers/consultants bid you enter the house of their wisdom;

Coaches lead you to the threshold of your own mind.

Believing Is Seeing

2008-09-06T19:49:00.003+01:00

We are so lucky. As consumers we are blessed with so many offers of help and assistance – so many that it’s difficult to choose between them.

· You can’t get better than a Kwik Fit fitter – they’re the ones to trust.

· Halifax will pay you 60 times more than the others could.

· L'Oreal – because you’re worth it.

…and, if all else fails, there’s always the DFS sale.

Aren’t these companies good to us?

In business we are equally fortunate. Wherever you turn there is someone offering to do it cheaper…or faster…or bigger…or easier. Just about anything you might – just possibly – regard as a problem can be instantly fixed by picking up the phone and inviting the Merlins of the market into your business.

Whether it’s finding more clients, getting your invoices paid, dealing with your staff, or optimising the internet there are a plethora of individuals, partnerships and companies ready and waiting with sure-fire panaceas.

How could you go wrong?

Likewise, if it’s your business itself that’s the problem, then never fear. There are any number of know-it-alls prepared to tell you how you should run it. Hell, for the right amount of money paid in advance, they’ll even do it for you.

In the quiet of the wee, small hours I sometimes wonder how we mortals so often get it wrong when gold-plated success is so easy to come by. Were we out of the room when they handed out all of the answers?

I doubt it.

Before those outside our business can even hope to make a contribution two things have to happen:

We have to believe that the suggestion they have to offer will actually work for us, and

We have to believe that particular firm or individual is the right one to work with us.

Whatever the ‘fix’ is, we have to buy into it ourselves, mentally and financially, before opening the door. Unless we first experience that mind-shift the ‘fix’ is likely to be doomed before the project even begins. Hesitancy in accepting the proposed solution is probably behind most of the failed consultancy projects. And most consultancy projects fail.

There is a threat to any business from someone who thinks they know better than you how to run it. Maybe they do know better, but it is still your business. However good their ‘fix’ is on paper, you will modify, undermine, sabotage and destroy it – perhaps subconsciously – if your pattern of beliefs do not shift accordingly.

So crucial are your beliefs and associated values that it would make most sense to start with those first, before you call the Merlins. At the end of the day you will probably find you can do without the outsiders, because you will have much better ideas yourself.

Migrating Your Business

2008-08-27T16:26:00.004+01:00

Faced with the plans, goals, targets and objectives necessary to migrate our business, from where it is to where we want it to be, it is easy to become overwhelmed. Indeed, it is so easy to become overwhelmed that some people actually end up doing nothing at all, paralysed by those daunting challenges.

Of course, such people are not totally inactive, far from it. They give the appearance of being the busiest people in the office as they collect mounds of data and reams of analysis about all the challenges they face.

However, there is no outcome, for they never reach a conclusion. All that activity is merely a smokescreen, a security blanket, a substitute for the action they should be taking, but never get round to.

When faced with overwhelm one remedy is to take a lesson from the animal kingdom. Since autumn is approaching the goose sense used during their annual migrations is a lesson as powerful as horse sense.

When you see a flock of geese heading south for the winter, you will notice they fly in a characteristic "V" formation. That way, as each bird flaps its wings, it creates uplift for the bird immediately following. The "V" formation adds at least 71 percent greater flying range, for the flock as a whole, than if each bird flew alone.

Who else do you know that is heading in the same general direction as you? What opportunities exist to draw on their experience and leadership? How can you and your firm use their “slipstream” to help ease the hard work sometimes needed in order to make any headway? Would you really like at least 71 percent greater flying range?

However, do not expect such assistance to be entirely altruistic.

When the lead goose gets tired you can expect it to rotate back into the following flock while another goose flies point. Depending on circumstances, resources and the skills required sometimes that goose will be you. That’s because it makes sense to take turns doing demanding jobs.

You will also hear the geese behind honking to encourage those up front. Note that the honking is there for encouragement, not criticism. When you honk from behind – figuratively speaking – what is your intent? And is that intention realised?

Finally, when a goose gets sick or is wounded by gunshot, and falls out of the formation, two other geese fall out with the injured bird and follow it down to lend help and protection. They stay with the fallen goose until it is able to fly again, or until it dies; and only then do they launch out on their own, or with another formation to catch up with their own group.

How many businesses have the corporate sense to offer mutual support in the face of economic ills, market malaise and the continual sniping from Government and financial institutions? And is yours one of them?

Perhaps the humble goose is not quite so silly after all.

Business in Progress

2008-07-31T20:04:00.009+01:00

Recently a leading think-tank, the Ernst & Young Item Club, said that the economic outlook for Britain is like a "horror movie".

In my opinion that is a contrived exaggeration designed to catch the attention of the media.

One wonders what metaphor they would possibly have substituted if they had been commenting in 1926. However, there are so many doom merchants plying their trade at the moment that trying to go one better might be expected.

So, just how bad is the economic outlook as seen by the Item Club? What constitutes a “horror movie” these days?

Growth in UK GDP during 2007 was 3.1%. The Item Club expects growth of 1.5% in 2008 and growth of 1.0% in 2009 before it returns to 2.5% in 2010.

Growth????

Oh, yes! Ernst & Young are not forecasting a recession … far from it. They are expecting that the UK economy will continue to grow.

This is about as close to a horror movie as Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory.

Even if things turn out worse than Ernst & Young’s choice of prose, professional firms need to get a sense of proportion. In the US Great Depression 1930-33 the reduction in the level of GDP from peak to trough was a fall of some 30 per cent.

That means that some 70% of output was maintained, although the exact figures will have varied from sector to sector and firm to firm. Nevertheless the point is well made that business continued to happen. Some people even did remarkably well out of it.

Therefore, what you can be sure of is that, no matter how poor the economy gets, substantial amounts of business will still get done.

The only question you need to answer is whether you will be among those doing that business.

There is a recognised 3-step process that will help you towards a positive answer:

1. Raise your standards. Increase the levels of service that you provide and the attention that clients receive. Satisfactory is not good enough, either to win new business, or retain existing accounts.

2. Change your beliefs. Who your prospects are, where they can be found, what they want and your capacity to meet those expectations all need rewriting. The world has moved on; you need to keep pace or you will be left behind.

3. Revise your strategies. Whatever game plan you have been following is now familiar to all your staff and most of your competitors. It’s predictable. “A skilled commander seeks victory from the situation and does not demand it of his subordinates” ~ Sun Tzu.

For the outlook to be perceived as bad is nothing new.

Recently, Sam meets his friend Joe in the Arndale Centre and greeted him warmly.

"Hi Joe, I haven’t seen you for some months. So how is the company doing that you set up with Maurice last year?"

"Well,” said Joe, “As I told you then, I put in all the money and Maurice put in all his business experience. But things have changed a bit since then."

"What do you mean?" Sam asks.

"Now Maurice has all the money and I have all the business experience."

The wisdom of making mistakes

2008-07-22T10:59:00.004+01:00

We all make mistakes. And fear of making mistakes too often keeps us frozen in indecision and inaction. However, it is rarely the mistake itself that is the real problem. More often it is the consequence we expect, the outcome from the mistake that blocks our moving forward.

That fear is misplaced for four main reasons:

Our fears may be groundless or, at least, exaggerated. Fear is only felt in relation to potential future events. Nobody fears the past since it is already known and experienced. However, potential events are not real events. They may never happen as we anticipate and we cannot know how they will happen until we take action. How often has some dreaded eventuality turned out to be not so bad after all?

Mistakes may be more apparent than real. What we judge to be a mistake in the short term can eventually emerge as a breakthrough. History is replete with such events. Artificial sweeteners, X-rays, microwave ovens and vulcanized rubber are just a few of the inventions that owe their existence to chance.

We learn from our mistakes. It has been said that success teaches us very little, whereas failure carries valuable lessons. Our failures cause us to pause, take stock, work out what went awry and then modify our approach. Success is often taken for granted. We pat ourselves on the back, congratulate ourselves for being so smart and move on. We rarely stop to work out what elements came together to deliver such a great result.

Indecision and inaction is itself a decision – hence the expression ‘damned if you do, and damned if you don’t’. With a decision made and action take you have intention and a degree of control. With indecision and inaction one is subject to the variable winds of fate and fortune, and the decisions and actions of others, never know where one is likely to end up.

Then there are those mistakes that only appear to be foolish, but conceal a deeper wisdom:

One day a beggar appeared in the marketplace. Whenever people showed him both a large note and a smaller note he always chose the small one.

Eventually, a generous man who was tired of seeing everyone laugh at the beggar quietly went over to him and explained that when people offered him two notes, he should choose the larger one. Then he would have more money, and people would not think him a fool.

"You are surely right", replied the beggar. "But if I always choose the larger note, people would stop offering me money, in order to prove that I am a greater fool than they are. And then I would no longer receive enough for my food. There is nothing wrong with appearing to be a fool, if what you are doing is in fact intelligent."

Take a Reality Check

2008-07-06T18:07:00.000+01:00

I don’t know exactly how your business is going, but there is one thing of which I can be certain: it could do be doing a whole lot better. And, when you finally pause for a moment of quiet reflection, you will realise the same thing. It should come as no surprise. It applies to all of us.

What stops us improving our performance? Quite simply, we know too much.

We are the experts in our business. We spend most of our waking hours either working in it, working on it, or thinking about it.

We may even spend our sleeping hours dreaming about it.

The consequence is that when we need to get unstuck; when we need more options to choose from; when we need to stay on track, knowing so much means we either recite all the reasons why not, or we end up being overly complex and abstract.

When we want to clarify our thinking, identify the real issues and reach a better solution an external reality check is always useful. Working on the immediate issues with someone who is not so closely involve, who can take a more utilitarian approach, can do wonders.

They can usefully cut through all the moonshine and ask the sort of intensely rational, down-to-earth questions that clears the fog of self-obsession, like: “Yes, but what are you actually going to do and when?

A young engineering graduate fresh out of Cambridge was being interviewed recently. As the end of the job interview approached, the HR Director asked, "And what starting salary were you looking for?"

The engineer said, "In the neighbourhood of £140,000 a year - but depending on the benefits package."

The HR Director said, "Well, what would you say to a package of 6 weeks paid holidays, full medical and dental cover, a two-thirds final salary pension scheme and a FX company car renewed every 2 years starting with…say…a red sports Mercedes?"

The Engineer sat up straight and said, "Wow! Are you kidding?"

And the Director replied, "Yeah, but you started it."

Make Room for Change

2008-07-03T19:52:00.000+01:00

Change is both needed and constant. Our bodies undergo change as cells are renewed. The composition of society changes as births and deaths occur. The weather changes and so do the seasons. People, businesses and economies change.

Change permeates the entire universe in one form or another.

If you are going to change something, do something new, it will have to displace something old. Any new initiative, habit or practice, any new article, structure or possession will displace some custom or thing that went before.

It is impossible for it to be “as well as”. Nature abhors vacuum.

If you are about to adopt a new behaviour it may replace a rest period, or mere idleness rather than a present activity or routine.

If you are about to acquire either an object or a building it may occupy a previously uncluttered space or an unused field rather than be a substitute for a current possession or an existing edifice.

Either way, something has to go. You have no empty corners, although there may be some non-productive ones.

This means you have to make room for change. That’s true whether the change is one you make on your own initiative, or one that stems from actions by some third party.

However, even when the trigger event is not of your making, the decision to make the resulting change is still yours. None of us can escape that responsibility, even though we may wish so at times.

Whatever the circumstances and whatever our wishes other people may not welcome the change. As Joni Mitchell wrote in her song Both Sides Now: “now old friends are acting strange, they shake their heads, they say I’ve changed”.

Also, it may not be possible, or advisable, to put boundaries around change. Change in area 1 may knock on to area 2. Sometimes this gets labelled as ‘unintended consequences’ or, more prosaically, as ‘collateral damage.’

Just as the responsibility for making the change is ours, so how others view the change is theirs. We cannot make that choice for them, nor accept either praise or blame for their feelings. For some people change is always a pig with a straw in his mouth.

It is a fact that we cannot ‘make’ people happy or sad, angry or unruffled. Each of us is accountable for how we decide to represent particular events to ourselves. “It is neither good nor bad, but thinking makes it so.” ~ Shakespeare.

And as Joni Mitchell also recognises in her song it’s not necessarily all bad: “something’s lost, but something’s gained in living every day”.

On occasion resistance to change may be the right thing to do. Only you can judge, but if you call it wrong it may mean you get run over in the headlong flight to the future.

If you see the change in question as beneficial, or inevitable, then welcome it rather than joining the carpers and cavillers. Don’t live a midget existence. Helping to steer an otherwise wayward vessel may mean the eventual landfall will be a harbour more to your liking.

Preparation

2008-06-07T08:14:00.005+01:00

"It is better to be prepared for an opportunity and not have one than to have an opportunity and not be prepared" (Whitney Moore Young Jr.). As the economy shifts under us, moving from one phase to the next, some preparation for what might be ahead will promote our chances of capturing the opportunities that will be there for the taking.

We may be sure that opportunities will exist, whatever the circumstances.

If house prices continue to fall there will be bargains available to those willing and able to take advantage of them.

If oil prices continue to rise then oil reserves, previously uneconomic, will become worth drilling and refining.

If food shortages spread, then more land will be brought into cultivation, farmers will prosper and agricultural land values will increase.

It’s an open secret: in good time and in bad opportunity consists of looking at the same thing as everyone else and thinking something different. Preparation consists of dreaming what might be and devising contingencies to deal with that situation should it arise.

Most situations will not actually occur. Those that do will not be exactly as we planned. Nevertheless, the fact that we have been thinking ahead makes us better prepared, sooner than those that have just waited to see what turns up before they react, if they ever do.

In business we often find ourselves wrestling with current demands and misadventures. Our days are spent fire fighting, leaving no time to worry about tomorrow. However, this approach, while apparently sensible and seductive, will mean we continue to fight those fires day after day. Being busy will be no protection when the roof caves in.

With the future in mind it is often easier to spot opportunities as they arise. Without that mental preparation the chance goes unremarked. We are familiar with this phenomenon from our own experience. Having bought a new car we immediately notice how many other similar cars there are on the road. Before making the purchase we were totally unaware.

By way of illustration:

Sarah has just left the house after a blazing row with her husband. She was taking a quiet walk to calm down when she notices an unusual funeral procession coming along the road towards her. At the front is a large black hearse and 20 yards behind this is a second black hearse. A solitary woman is walking behind the second hearse with a large, well-groomed Rottweiler dog on a lead. Behind the woman are 50 other women walking single file.

Sarah is very curious and goes over to the woman with the dog and says, “I’m sorry about your loss.”

“Thank you,” says the woman, “you’re very kind.”

“I know it’s a bad time to ask,” says Sarah, “but whose funeral is this?”

“It’s my husband's funeral,” replies the woman.

“So what happened to him?” asks Sarah.

The woman replies, “My dog attacked and killed him.”

“And who is in the second hearse?” asks Sarah.

The woman answers, “My mother-in-law. She was trying to help my husband when the dog turned on her.”

A poignant and thoughtful moment of silence passes between the two women.

“Can I borrow the dog?” asks Sarah.

“Go to the back of the line,” replies the woman.

Creative Marketing

2008-06-01T16:35:00.004+01:00

As professionals we know we need to market ourselves and our businesses. However, for some of us marketing is, like Churchill’s Russia: a riddle, wrapped in a mystery, inside an enigma.

One simple definition of marketing might be “the techniques used to attract and persuade prospective clients”.

A more far reaching definition might be “the management process that anticipates and identifies customer requirements and devises an appropriate offering efficiently and profitably”.

Yet, whatever way one defines it, the whole process seems fraught with uncertainty while taking the spectral form of a bottomless pit for money and resources.

But, on second thoughts, does the gloom in this picture owe a large measure of its murkiness to the artificial separation of marketing’s black art from everything else we do?

Is marketing truly some arcane, ritualistic necromancy wholly divorced from the daily round?

Do its witches and warlocks have to conduct their cabalistic practices in dank and dingy corners for it to be fully effective?

Or can we bring some of its brighter, more benevolent aspects to our every day dealings?

In delivering services to our clients it is obviously impossible to separate us as a person from the product we provide. Thus the way that we interact with prospects, patrons and the public at large carries a marketing message.

Either we are smart and courteous, or shabby and slipshod.

Either we are calm and concerned, or we are distracted and dismissive.

Whatever our attitude it conveys a clear message, whether we wish it to, or not.

Since we are unavoidably committed, cross-examined and condemned to some form of marketing then it can only be beneficial to pay attention to the messages we send, lest by inattention we send the wrong ones.

It also gives us scope for inventiveness and having harmless fun while doing so. And, as Peter Drucker pointed out: "Because its purpose is to create a customer, the business has two basic functions: marketing and innovation” so we can legitimately and judiciously combine them.

Here is a simple story illustrating one woman’s lateral thinking when marketing her business:

Bernie was in New York on business. On his 3rd night, he went back to his hotel room feeling quite miserable. Although the trip was going well, business-wise, he was feeling very lonely and missing his wife Sarah.

He casually picked up the Gideon bible from his bedside table and opened it. On the first page, he read: -

"If you’re sick, read Psalm 18."

"If you’re troubled, read Psalm 45."

"If you’re lonely, read Psalm 92."

That’s it! He stopped there, immediately turned to Psalm 92 and started to read. How surprised he was, then, when he got to the end of the Psalm, to see someone has written: -

"If you’re still lonely, why don’t you call Fifi on 202-123-7659."

Well…"if you're not in business for fun or profit, what the hell are you doing here?" (Robert Townsend).

Mining Facts and Missing the Point

2008-05-27T18:10:00.004+01:00

Despite appearances bad decisions are rarely made because people don’t have all the facts. In the political sphere the Treasury will have been fully aware of the impact on taxpayers of abandoning the 10% tax band. The Treasury may even have alerted Ministers. Nevertheless, although the facts were noted, plainly they were not given sufficient weight.

In the run-up to the present ‘Credit Crunch’ the financial institutions were fully aware of what they were doing and, one hopes, so were the regulators. But merely knowing the facts proved insufficient. Clearly, they did not understand the facts and the whole unstable structure was allowed to plough on into the crash barriers.

The Burmese Government will be well informed about the consequences of Cyclone Nargis and how badly their population has been affected. However, here facts are equally useless because they are being ignored.

Business is subject to the same purblindness when it comes to facts. Too often when plans go awry Governments call for Royal Commissions or Parliamentary Committees; business calls for internal audits or additional research. More facts will not help them regain the perspective they have lost.

When facts have failed to register, the continued pursuit of yet more facts painfully echoes Dickens’ Thomas Gradgrind in ‘Hard Times’. Gradgrind worships facts and figures. He puts his faith in abstract theories rather than direct observation of real people and real needs. The asymmetrical approach to human life of early industrial England, the denial of some of the basic needs of human beings, is being repeated in what some are pleased to call our post-industrial age. The structure of the economy may have changed. Too many of the attitudes live on. The cost in human happiness is great.

In Dickens’ Coketown, the needs of the factories dominate everything else. The factory hands work long hours in oppressive conditions, and they live in cramped houses. Their lives are monotonous; every day is exactly like every other day, just as all the houses and streets look alike. In Coketown, there is a strict uniformity in everything. The workers have little time off to relax and enjoy themselves. Does that sound familiar?

Employees and those running their own businesses will recognise the close parallels. Today we still struggle with long hours, astronomic housing costs, poor diets and an existence where evenings and weekends are nothing more than the exercise yard of our own imprisonment.

Each business, each day, has the opportunity to step back and take a clear-eyed view of the workplace we have built for ourselves. If it is not as we would wish it, then we can change. If you think it isn’t as easy as that then you will be setting yourself up to fail as a self-fulfilling outcome. Give real change a try. Take action. You may surprise yourself.

Why Me?

2008-05-13T15:32:00.003+01:00

Once upon a distant time in the here and now a seeker journeyed through the furthest regions of the earth to find a teacher rumoured to know the secrets to happiness, success, and well-being. When the seeker arrived at the teacher's mountain-top retreat, he eagerly awaited his audience with the reclusive teacher. Finally, his moment came.

"Why have you come?" the teacher asked.

The seeker proceeded to list problem after problem he was facing in his life. After listening patiently, the teacher sighed.

"I am afraid I cannot help you with your problems."

"Why not?" asked the puzzled and disappointed seeker.

"Because the gods have decreed that we all carry fifty-one problems with us at all times. Even if I could help you solve the problems you tell me of, they would only be replaced with fifty-one more."

The teacher paused to allow the full significance of the idea to sink in.

"I may, however," the teacher continued, "be able to help you with your 52nd problem."

"What's that?" asked the seeker.

"Your 52nd problem," replied the teacher, "Is that you think you should not have the first 51 problems."

The 52nd problem is not confined to our fabled seeker. I think most people in business would welcome fewer problems. Many would go further and wish there were no problems. Wouldn’t that be beautiful?

Probably not: man is a solution seeking animal and when problems become too few, or of insufficient size, then he (or she) will manufacture some challenge to fill the vacuum. If not, then the market will do it for him. If your sector was problem-free and life truly was a cushy number, then other firms would push their way in seeking this Sylvania for themselves. The problems would multiply and the natural balance would be restored.

Problems are essentially opportunities in disguise. How well you cope with them will determine how well you do in business and in life. Problems are not something from which we should flee. Rather they are things we should embrace.

A leader faced with an almighty challenge is afforded reward and recognition when that challenge is eventually overcome. A leader handed an easy life reaps no honour; success is expected. For him there is only the yawning chasm represented by muffing an easy shot and failing to capture what everyone else saw as a gift.

It is an entirely different proposition to have a sufficiency of problems, yet be tempted into making even more for yourself. This is particularly attractive when the problems you do have are chronic and familiar. In such circumstances either the problem fades into the background and is hardly noticed, or there is seen to be little kudos in dealing it. If collecting cash has always taken 90 days at your firm there may be little enthusiasm for reducing it to 30 days. There may even be some opposition to disturbing the status quo and ‘upsetting’ certain clients.

Whatever you circumstances where problems are concerned – too few, enough, or too many – the basic approach is the same: rather than engaging in the self-pity of “Why me?” pick the one problem whose solution, or easement, would have the biggest impact on your business. When that one is solved, or temporarily stalled, work on the problem with the next biggest impact. Have no more than six problems, ranked in order of impact, on your list at any one time.

This is not a new idea. It was first put into practice by Charles Schwab, President of Bethlehem Steel in the 1900’s. The idea is simple, but don’t let that deceive you. There are still plenty of opportunities for distractions. The real achievement is in recognising the potential diversions and resolutely refusing to get sidetracked.

It Takes Two to Tango

2008-04-28T17:32:00.003+01:00

Employee engagement, in various guises, is among the new buzzwords of recent years. To be more accurate, it’s a repackaging of old ideas by the consulting industry. Under a shiny “NEW” label the consultants have found yet another way of exploiting corporate insecurity and thereby picking its pockets.

There appears to be only circular definitions of what constitutes an engaged employee. The CIPD defines employee engagement as “a combination of commitment to the organisation and its values plus a willingness to help out colleagues (organisational citizenship). It goes beyond job satisfaction and is not simply motivation. Engagement is something the employee has to offer: it cannot be ‘required’ as part of the employment contract.”

In short, an engaged employee is any employee who is engaged. It’s a matter of attitude.

Today’s employers are encouraged to recruit for attitude; train for skill when searching for new employees. That approach saves the job of instilling an attitude seen as ‘right’ by the employer in question, but it only goes so far. Whatever attitude is exhibited during the recruitment process it will only be retain if the employee’s circumstances are conducive.

To a large extent that depends on the employer, but it can equally be affected either by changes in the employee’s private life, or by shifts in their personal beliefs and values. Over the employee’s private life and over beliefs and values the employer has little or no control. And rightly so. An employment contract is an exchange of time and skills for money and associated benefits. It is not entry into a closed religious order.

Most of the literature on this subject talks about measuring employee attitudes and conducting regular employee attitude surveys. Any organisation that needs to do that has to raise an immediate red flag in its own mind. If concern for the attitude and mindset of employees is not part of the daily interaction in the company, if senior management has actually lost touch with how employees think and feel, then there is an immediate problem.

Organisations that have a high proportion of employees who are unengaged or disengaged are offered various approaches to reverse that situation. These include:
• giving the opportunity to feed views and opinions upwards
• keeping employees informed about what is going on
• seeing that managers are committed
• having fair and just management processes for dealing with problems.

Perhaps more telling – and rarely mentioned – is the sobering process of the organisation examining its own value as expressed in its formal and informal manner of doing things. What message is the organisation really giving to its employees (and its customers)? Can people be reasonably expected to sign up enthusiastically to such a message?

This search for paragons of virtue among employees has an interesting parallel in the education sector. In England, when a pupil truants from school, we ask what is wrong with the child. In France, they ask what is wrong with the school. If you are an employer looking for greater engagement then be prepared. If it is absent then the cause may lay uncomfortably close to home.

Clinging to the Wreckage

2008-04-23T19:27:00.010+01:00

UBS, Switzerland's largest banking group, has just written off $37bn (£18.7bn) of its sub-prime investments.

Following an internal investigation demanded by the Swiss Federal Banking Commission, the Swiss version of our own dear FSA, it admitted a series of mistakes including inadequate supervision, poor risk management and a failure to react quickly enough when the sub-prime market started crumbling.

UBS was so focused on racking up ever larger profits that it “forgot” every silver lining has a cloud.

This is its first full-year loss (Sfr4.38bn for 2007) since its came into being 10 years ago following the merger of Swiss Banking Corporation and Union Bank of Switzerland. Planned job cuts are rumoured to run to more than 3,000 people.

As one might expect of the Swiss, those in charge have shouldered their full share of the responsibility and suffered the inevitable consequences. The Chief Executive, Peter Wuffli, was ousted in July last year, followed by the CFO, Clive Standish and the Head of Investment Banking Huw Jenkins. This month it was announced that the Chairman, Marcel Ospel, would not seek re-election.

Meanwhile, here in the UK, RBS came up with a further £5.9bn of write-offs on bad debts yesterday having already declared a £1.7bn write-down of sub-prime investments in December. However, you would search in vain for any admissions of abject personal failure by top management, let alone a principled resignation. In any industrial company the chairman and chief executive would both have been fired and forgotten by now. Not so with RBS.

Apparently RBS's has two excuses: (1) things have changed, and (2) it didn't foresee quite how bad things would become. Well, isn’t that what leaders are paid to do? Doesn’t leadership imply vision – the ability to see and foresee, rather than stumbling over the truth, picking themselves up and hurrying off as if nothing had happened (Churchill). And if they fail to uphold their end of the contract should that contract not be properly terminated?

According to Sir Tom McKillop, the RBS chairman, the board is unanimous: the current team is the one to take the bank forward. On what logical basis should that be the case? Those that have engineered dramatic expansion are rarely adept at managing either a holding operation, or retrenchment. Those call for very different skills. Endangering the ship when it’s in stormy seas, based solely on your capacity in calm waters, constitutes reckless conduct in anybody’s book.

Marianne Jennings, Professor of Legal & Ethical Studies at Arizona State University has identified the belief by management that they are so brilliant and innovative that the mundane rules of accounting, corporate governance and even basic economics do not apply to them as one of the seven signs of ethical collapse. RBS fits the bill.

Of the five leadership traits identified by Kouzes and Posner’s research that was done for the book ‘The Leadership Challenge’ namely:

~ Honesty
~ Forward-Looking
~ Competency
~ Inspirational
~ Intelligence

RBS seems to fall short on the first three.

If the Swiss banking fraternity have the principled leadership qualities needed to do the right thing then those privileged individuals on this side of the Channel should exhibit the same qualities.