Simple management

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.

Misplacing your management skills

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.

Acting from a single purpose

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.

What Was Your Message?

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.

Change and Uncertainty

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.

Mining Facts and Missing the Point

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.

It Takes Two to Tango

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

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.

Valuing People

What species of thinking produces an expression like ‘Human Capital Management & Measurement’ and then holds a conference that devotes a whole day to the subject? To me such terminology displays arrogance in those that use it and portrays disdain for those about whom it is used.

As professionals let us be clear: 'capital' is the money or other assets owned by a company. Judicious use of such assets helps to keep it in business. 'Capital Assets' are the plant and machinery owned by the company and used in producing goods. As much as some directors and senior managers may like to think otherwise a company does not own the people who choose to work for it.

In no sense can people be counted as capital!!

Some companies, perhaps the same companies, do have the habit of referring to people as ‘assets’ or ‘resources’. Again, assets are property; people are not. The staff may have certain qualities which yield benefits to the firm (why else would they be employed? Duh!), but the qualities belong to the people, not the firm. I await the day - not holding my breathe - when a firm says, “the people who work for us did a great job last year, but there is no guarantee they will stay with us and no certainty they will remain as capable when circumstances change.”

And where ‘Human…Management’ is concerned, the best response is Steven Covey's: “You cannot manage people - you can only manage tasks. People must be led.” Inevitably, I can only doubt the capacity to lead of anyone who refers to the people on whom they depend in terms more suited to inanimate, unfeeling objects.

The same conference boasted of "developing both a talent management strategy and… effective measures of [an] organisation's human talent." Good grief.

Even if talent could be measured (how talented was Mozart? Was that an 8.7 or a 9.3?) just what particular talent - note the singular - will your business need most tomorrow? Or in 12 months time?

Do two people with the same talent double your talent score, or leave it unchanged?

Is a talented pianist worth two talented footballers, or can I swap six talented accountants for one talented plumber? And, as Network Rail struggle to complete their west coast mainline engineering works, what price talented engineers? Several million pounds I would judge, based on the £2.4 million it had to pay in 2007 for failing to complete work on a project in Portsmouth on time.

The terms we use to refer to others shape our attitudes and influence our thinking. Words are not neutral. As a professional I hope I do not treat those I work with in such a callous and cavalier fashion. People respond better and feel more motivated when they are acknowledged and recognised for the all qualities they have, rather than being taken for granted, sucked dry and then carelessly discarded when no longer of use.

If we wish to get the most from our people we must treat them as people. On the other hand, should you happen to work for an organisation that subscribes to this stack ’em, rack ’em and sack ’em approach, please put on a pair of trainers…and run like hell.