Ability before age

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.

Packaging should be a pushover

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?

What comes first - seeing or believing?

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.

Average or Amazing?

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

Ordinary or Awesome?

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.

Negotiation is normal

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.”

Changing the Past

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 – #1

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?

All Change

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!”

Coach or Consultant?

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

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.