Archives for the month of: September, 2018
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Community

September 28, 2018 //
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It is the sense of community, with a small c, that makes and binds a Community with a big C, I think. The idea that the sum of all of us, its constituent elements, is greater than the whole, the place we live or work in.

One of the paradoxes of modern life for me is that at a macro level communities, towns, cities and councils seem to get in their own way, in a one step forward, two steps back fashion, whereas at a micro, person-to-person level, the opposite happens. Sorry, that’s a long sentence, a bit tortuous, but I didn’t want a full stop to break the flow.

I’m frequently reminded of this in provincial Ireland where the community is always helping itself out in tiny ways. I had a an email dialogue with someone the other day, and I needed to get an envelope containing important information to her sooner rather than later. ‘That’s OK, she said, you don’t need to drop it out to me, just leave it at the local shop and I’ll pick it up on my way from work.’ Genius. I left it behind the counter with the chap, and it seemed the most natural thing to do.

One company I work with needs parcels to be collected and sent out on a regular basis. If the local courier can’t get to them before the end of the day on a Friday, we leave them at the local petrol station and he picks them up from there on the Saturday morning.

We may get frustrated and befuddled by the bureaucracy and process of big business and big government, but we make up for it with the small kindnesses of community.

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Categories Customers, General, Marketing

Reverse Entropy

September 26, 2018 //
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Entropy is a fascinating concept. It seems to be one of those underlying laws of the universe that works for work and life too.

From what I understand, the ever-expanding universe is subject to it, the tendency for things to naturally descend into a state of disorder, randomness and chaos. If you apply this principle to work and non-work, to put it crudely, it means that eventually everything goes to sh*t. Not in the literal sense of human effluent, but in the American sense of rubbishness, poorness, brokenness.

For me it rings true. On the one hand people say if it ain’t broke don’t fix, but on the other, if you don’t keep improving something and leave it to do its own thing, it will eventually break down and not work.

It also seems to me that in our work and our lives we should be engaged in a constant state of what I call ‘reverse entropy’, trying to create things, build things and fine-tune things, raging against the dying of the light, to borrow from a well-known Welsh poet.

Reverse entropy is our conscious, active way of bringing order, quality, skills and artifice to the world and what we do, from which we derive pleasure, money and nourishment.

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Categories General, Marketing, Sales

Negativity

September 24, 2018 //
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Sometimes, when we’re having a bad day, at work or outside of work, we can’t help but see the bad in things. We get into a funk and it all gets a little bit emotional.

I hate it when I hate stuff. I know that nothing is perfect, but I know that it affects my mental health the longer I get stuck in a rut of negativity, seeing the bad in things that on the whole are good.

If we’re not careful, this negativity can radiate out and affect those around us. We don’t want to do that to them, it’s not fair. Also, we don’t want to be labelled by them the Good Vibe Vortex, and avoided.

I have a simple trick to flip myself out of this mindset. It comes down to this, as do many things for me: negativity is so damned unproductive. Want to get something done, or get better at something? Amp up the positivity and focus on something good.

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Categories Communication, Customers, General

Making Your Kids Laugh

September 21, 2018 //
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Is there anything more rewarding than making your kids laugh?

It’s easy to make your kids laugh when they’re babies, toddlers or small. You are the centre of their universe, they think you’re the greatest, that you can do anything.

As they get older, into their teenage years, it’s harder to make them laugh. Where once was unbridled hilarity is now a rapidly developing mind and far too much other stuff going on. They used to think you were superhuman, now you’re just human, pretty clueless actually.

That’s why it’s so rewarding to see them break out in full, no holds barred laughing at something you said, humour you alone created. It doesn’t happen as often as I’d like, and I need to improve my skills, but when it does there’s no better feeling.

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Categories Communication, General

Preparing for a Big Presentation

September 19, 2018 //
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I’m no different to anyone else when it comes to delivering ‘the big presentation’. I get nervous before I have to speak in front of a large audience. Who doesn’t? They used to say that if you weren’t nervous you didn’t care, and I think that adage still applies.

I’m not talking about the content of a big presentation in this post. I’m talking about getting into the right mindset so you do the best job you’re capable of.

I approach the psychology of a big presentation this way. I acknowledge that I’m nervous, and then I ask myself, ‘what’s the worst thing that could happen?’ However serious the ramifications are of a presentation not going well, they pale in comparison with, let’s say, our health and the health of our nearest and dearest. We sometimes fear in advance that things could go spectacularly wrong, but we always recover from these bumps in the road.

Once I’ve reminded myself that the worst that could happen is not that bad at all, I tell myself that I don’t care how the presentation goes, to take the pressure off. I’m now starting from a position of an empty box, a box empty of nervousness, and then I proceed to fill it with positive thoughts. I’m getting in the right frame of mind to deliver the best job I can. I’m getting my head in the game.

I mentally run through the order of the first few things I’m going to say, safe in the knowledge that once I get going everything will flow. I want to open with a bang, perhaps a surprise, earn the respect of the audience, and then relax knowing that I have them with me.

Sometimes someone introduces me, sometimes I’m the one speaking first, it doesn’t matter. I smile, and begin talking.

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Categories Communication, Customers, Marketing, Sales

Start Over

September 17, 2018 //
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It seems odd to me that we European English speakers diverge from our US counterparts in our use of the words over and again.

When we on the eastern side of the Atlantic have to repeat something we start again. Sometimes we might have to do it over again. In the US and perhaps Canada they simply start over, never starting again or over again.

It’s a bit like the John Lennon song, no doubt crafted for an American audience while he was living over there with Yoko Ono, I think, called Starting Over. Perhaps he too was hedging his bets when he said It’s like Starting Over, with the ‘like’ seeming to soften the statement somewhat, as if he wasn’t sure.

Speaking of idiom, I was talking with an Iranian friend of my mother’s the other day. He said, after almost a lifetime of living here, “I can’t understand why you English people say ‘Would you like to come in for a nice cup of tea?’ Whoever would ask for a horrible cup of tea?”

Good point, well made. I was careful to ask for a horrible cup of tea the next time I was visiting.

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Categories Communication, General, Language

Dublin is Full

September 14, 2018 //
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As I write this post it’s 10 years to the week since the great financial crash of 2008, followed by years of turmoil and hardship, certainly in Ireland at any rate, before the provinces – by which I mean, in the English sense, the areas outside of the capital – started to recover, slowly and not so surely.

Not so Dublin, which probably recovered 5 years ago and is once again in the throes of a giddy period of boom. I’ve blogged before about the amount of construction going on in the city. The hotels are full – and I don’t mean some of them, I mean the city’s hotel capacity is maxed out – during the summer; you can’t get a room for anything reasonable. The roads are gorged with traffic all year round. You can’t get anywhere quickly, except by a fast walking.

I’m regularly in Dublin, but on my last visit I couldn’t help but marvel at the divide between the capital and the provinces, some of which are only just getting back on their feet. After fighting through town in a taxi – yes, even the bus lane was a car park – to make my train, I saw that, as usual, the train for Galway was departing from the group of 3 platforms that are two hundred-plus yardss further than the rest of the platforms. Not only that, but the train sits beyond an empty redundant train at the very top of the platform, a hundred and fifty yards further.

It brought it home to me, as provincial people in any country probably feel, that there’s Dublin, and then there’s outside Dublin, which doesn’t really matter much.

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Categories Customers, General, Strategy

I Believe In You

September 12, 2018 //
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I’ve blogged before about how a preposition can make an enormous amount of difference. None more so, I don’t think, than in this example.

‘I believe you’ seeks to assure someone that you think they’re telling the truth. It’s almost like letting them off the hook if their story or defence is flimsy and they’re clutching at straws. It’s hardly a glowing endorsement.

Contrast this with ‘I believe in you.’ This has an altogether more committed, almost spiritual tone of endorsement about it. You’re placing your trust and faith in another person, and perhaps this is the greatest compliment or statement of togetherness that you can pay  them.

It changes the verb, the sentence structure and the meaning completely.

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Categories Communication, General, Language

This is Paul

September 10, 2018 //
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When my brothers and I were kids, our parents were teachers and we had a special way of answering the  house phone and dealing with phone calls.

We’d say hello. We’d never say ‘hello this is London 123456’, giving away our number, and we’d never say our name. If someone said is this 123456, we’d either say, no it’s not, what number were you looking for, or else we’d ask who they were looking for. If someone asked to speak to a person in the house, we’d ask their name before we checked if our parents or our brothers were in.

As teachers, my parent’s were ex-directory, that is to say that they chose not to list their phone number in the big book. We would occasionally get crank or abusive calls and this escalation protocol was a useful process for getting rid of them.

Nowadays, people just say hello, which is fine of course, but in business it’s not particularly helpful. This is because it forces many callers to say ‘is this Paul?’ to which we would have to say yes before the call had even started.

I used to date an American girl a long time ago. When she was at work she wouldn’t answer with hello, she’d say ‘this is Susan’. Susan wasn’t actually her name, but you get the point. I liked it. It was helpful, personal and sounded more customer focused. I adopted it immediately.

So don’t be surprised if you call me on business and I say ‘this is Paul’, or it’s even friendlier version ‘hello, this is Paul’.

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Categories Communication, Customers, General, Marketing, Sales

Road Time

September 7, 2018 //
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Despite the advent of all things digital and web, a lot of us still do a lot of travelling, to physical meetings or events. We still spend a lot of time out of the office. That makes it hard for people to get hold of us but also hard for us to get stuff done while we’re travelling.

If we’re driving to meetings, much more so than if we’re travelling by rail or air, then this can be dead time, because the act of driving occupies so many of our faculties on a constant basis. After all, we might be guiding a one-and-a-half ton killing machine through fast motorways, narrow, winding roads roads and populated areas.

This is road time. In the car is the best time for people to reach us and for us to hold calls and get them out. The one thing we can do when we’re driving is talk. And think, it least to some degree.

If I want to do a long call or an interview with someone, I’ll ask them when they’re travelling. They’re a captive audience during their road time, they’re happy to get the call out of the way – it’s a good use of their time – and they generally have privacy, which you can’t say for train journeys.

Road time can be productive, for both the driver and the person trying to reach them.

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Categories Communication, Customers, Sales
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