Business Fundamentals

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.

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.

Knowing What You Want

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.

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.

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.