Archives for category: Communication
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What’s the Worst That Could Happen?

December 25, 2015 //
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Life would be much better without stress, without those mini- or major panic attacks that I have to assume consume us all from time to time.

Whether it’s our work commitments or other aspects, they can prompt some fairly unhealthy moods. After all, it’s hard to stay positive all the time.

Sometimes I feel myself getting pulled into the eddy of such a situation, and it’s easy to forget that there are tricks to get yourself out of them. Well, they work for this writer at any rate. I find that the best way to confront a panic attack is to rationalise it, put it in context with something else.

‘What’s the worst that could happen?’ is the question I ask myself. Really, when you think about it this way, the worst that could happen – unless it’s one of those few-in-a-life-time occurrences where you you need help and a much more profound approach – is generally not much at all. You might miss a deadline, or a bus, or a plane. So what? You still have your health, your family, your friends. When you look back at this situation, it’s going to barely register as a blip, if you’re even concerned about it now.

Stepping outside of your own thoughts for a moment and comparing your current lot to potentially the worst version of it – which will almost never happen – is the reality shift you need to get out of neutral, shake off the paralysing inertia and get moving again.

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Categories Communication, General, Strategy

Stay Positive

December 23, 2015 //
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In business and in life it’s important to listen to sporting leaders. Those at the top of their game tend to have a whole support system to help them be the best they can be, among which is usually the professional psychologist.

That’s why you always hear them saying things like ‘we’re taking it one game – or shot – at a time, we’re not getting ahead of ourselves, we’re staying in the moment, we’re staying positive.’ Being positive is a conscious, current thing.

These people understand the power of the human mind, and the things it can do when it’s harnessed in the right way. Why risk unleashing its negative forces when you can benefit from the positive forces, forces that affect in you in a good way?

Fear and safety have a lot to do with the negative side of the human spirit. All the more reason, then, to stay positive, look on the bright side, consider the upside and banish fear and comfortable mediocrity.

Stay positive. Hope for the best, plan for the worst.

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Categories Communication, Customers, General, Marketing

Filofaxes and Books

December 7, 2015 //
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I was on the phone the other day to a friend of mine that I hadn’t seen for a long time. We were organising a group meet-up a few months hence. She said, ‘hold on a minute, I’ll just get my filofax.’

I hadn’t heard that word in about 18 years. Yet, they were the must have item in the mid-to-late 80’s before the first personal organisers came on the scene. And yes, I mean personal organisers as devices, not people, as opposed to the classic posh joke: where’s the toaster? It’s his day off…

While we live in an increasingly digital and automated world, it’s perfectly OK for some people to embrace that world while still preferring the tactile comfort of leather and paper.

You could say the same thing about books of course. Even I, Luddite that I am, have a reader device these days, but when I go to second hand book sales about twice a year I stock up on half a dozen musty tomes for a buck each. They smell great and it’s still great to leaf through a novel, knowing exactly where you are in the book. Your reader tells you you’re 60% through, but you never know how much marketing stuff is crammed in at the end. You can easily navigate to other parts of the physical book in a couple of ticks, something that is a drag on a device, even if they have menu and bookmark functionality.

Filofaxes and books have a place in today’s world, along with calendars, day books, post-it notes and cards. When was the last time you sent someone a card that wasn’t for Christmas or birthdays?

 

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Categories Communication, General

Write What You Know

November 16, 2015 //
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Here’s a pretty obvious thought for you: write about what you know.

It’s the advice that would be novelists always receive, and in fact it applies to anyone in the creative space.

Once in a while you get insights from the really good writers into how this applies to them. I remember Ricky Gervais giving the perfect illustration of this from when he was a budding writer at school, and clearly it has served him well from that moment on.

I recently finished reading an early crime thriller by American author Michael Connelly. It was his first book featuring the detective Harry Bosch. The Bosch series is now at about 20-plus and growing. At the end of the book, Connelly explained how his eponymous character came about, and it was essentially the melding of 3 or 4 important influences on him when he was growing up. As simple as that.

It’s the same for business of course. Write about you know. Otherwise, you’ll be found out. If you don’t know, find out and get the facts, so you do know what you’re talking about.

I find that when I’m researching something that’s new to me, so that I can write compellingly about it, the more people I speak to the better, up to a point. It’s like a reverse onion. With every new person you talk to, you get a new layer, a fresh perspective, a different angle on what you thought you knew, until you have as full a picture as you’re going to get without the decreasing marginal returns of going to more people.

Then you can write, because you know.

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Categories Communication, Customers, Language, Marketing, Strategy

Feeding Back on New Software

November 4, 2015 //
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When you download a new operating system, or a major upgrade to software, or even a minor update, do you ever participate in feedback? Do you ever send the coding report back to the software originators when one of your applications crashes?

Who has time to do this?

Software gets released. It has bugs in it. You, as a software originator, can’t legislate for every combination of systems and applications running together with your code on every piece of hardware. You’d be testing until Domesday.

So you either upgrade early and put up with the glitches, going onto Google to search a problem and download a patch. Or, you wait a while until the major problems have been patched and you take the release late, or a skip it and take a later point release. You’ve relied on a bunch of people who’ve had the time and inclination to contribute their feedback to make a new piece of software better for everyone.

But who has the time to do this?

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Categories Communication, Customers, Marketing

All or Nothing

November 2, 2015 //
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If you’re going to do something, you have to give it 100% or your investment won’t get the benefit you hope for.

Sport is a good example of this in many ways. If you’re going to tackle someone, commit to the tackle otherwise you’ll end up not committing and getting yourself hurt.

Compromising, hedging your bets, trying it and seeing what happens. These are really ways of avoiding a decision. They are succumbing to the fear, uncertainty and dread, rather than making the effort, doing the homework and studying the research. And then committing.

I was reminded of this recently while on holiday. There was a ‘bouncy island’ as a guest attraction in the hotel pool. Think of a bouncy castle, but with bouncy palm trees and bouncy treasure chests. The kids and some of the parents were getting stuck in, pushing each other off the island into the pool and generally having great fun. I was happy to read and enjoy it as a spectator sport.

Finally, after about 2 hours of being encouraged to join in, I gave it a try. After about 60 seconds of being Mr Nice Guy, a child – with sharp nails, it transpired – got pushed into me in the kerfuffle and scratched off the top of my nose.

My own fault. I was patched up and got stuck in after that. It was great fun.

One footnote to add: there’s always an exception to every blog post rule. One of the dads decided it would be great fun to dive off the top of the slide at the end of the island, rather than sliding down the slide – which is why, he now realises, it’s called a slide – and cracked his head open on the floor of the shallower-than-thought pool. Off to hospital he went for 5 stitches, but it could have been a lot worse.

The commitment was there, but not the planning.

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Categories Communication, General, Marketing, Planning, Sales, Strategy

Take a Blog Post Miss Dilger

October 26, 2015 //
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Do you remember, back in the days before computers and any kind of automation, managers used to say to their secretaries ‘take a letter Miss Dilger’?

How times have changed. Now we do our own letters and our secretaries are personal assistants helping us with our own productivity.

I was reminded of this recently when I downloaded the latest Macintosh operating system for my laptop. Usually, I ignore these downloads and proceed with my daily work in the normal way. They don’t affect me. Imagine my surprise, therefore, when the latest release of the operating system downloaded some dictation software for my machine. I had to have a play immediately.

As you probably know, dictation software has been around for quite some time, but it has been notoriously unreliable. Either it completely misunderstood the dictated words or needed a vast amounts of corrections afterwards. Well, I have to say that the current dictation software which I am using to create this blog post is nothing short of a revelation. It is unbelievably accurate, easy to use and time saving. It has probably saved me half the time it normally takes to create a blog post. A couple of changes are all I need to make before I publish the post. In fact, the only mistake it really made was to spell my surname Dillinger and that really is no bad thing.

It is a strange feeling when the creative process becomes one of dictating verbally rather than imagining in your head and then typing in your computer. It reminds me of the differences between spoken language and written language. That said, however, to say that this is a somewhat seismic day for me as a writer and blogger is possibly the understatement of the year. Full stop.

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Categories Communication, Technology

How I Write a Blog Post

October 16, 2015 //
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If you’re a regular reader of this blog you’ll know that my blog posts are Monday, Wednesday, Friday things, relatively short and designed to be read in a couple of minutes.

I thought it would be useful to let you know how I write them. I use WordPress as my blog engine by the way.

First, the idea. I either come up with a series of posts based around an involved topic or I get a specific thought which prompts a standalone post. Then I pen the title and scribble some notes in the body. Then I click save draft. About 1 per cent of the time, I click publish by mistake, and since the default time is set to publish immediately, this results in a largely blank post being sent through social media and emailed to be subscribers :-(. Then I have to remove it. But let’s stay with the 99%.

My next task is to schedule the publication for a time in the future. I always set my time window between 7:30 and 8:30 in the morning Irish time, since for Irish and UK readers that’s a good time for them to be checking their social media. I then set the categories for the blog post and think about the tags that are relevant for this post. Then I click save draft.

Now I’m ready to write the post. I compose the post, staying on topic so I don’t mismanage the expectations of the reader and for SEO purposes, though I don’t use sub-headings since my posts are so short. I click save periodically, especially if I’m on the move and my wifi is flaky. I also insert outside links and links to other posts where I think they enhance the post, never for their own sake.

When I’m finished writing, I save the draft, then re-read the post carefully for spelling mistakes, typos, sentences that don’t make sense or that could be improved. I iterate, clicking save draft which each iteration. Then I click Schedule, before reviewing how the post will look to you the reader. I might further refine the post and then follow the same process.

Then I’m done! For a post that runs smoothly, it’s 15 to 20 minutes from start to finish. For a longer post or one that doesn’t flow as it might, it could be an hour. But that’s not an onerous responsibility for 3 times a week, at least in my view.

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Categories Communication, Customers

Writing a Book

October 14, 2015 //
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I’ve decided that writing a book is hard, really hard.

I’ve been working on one for a good while. For a couple of months when I didn’t have too many commitments I made some excellent progress and got at least half of it done. Then I took on more work and also significantly expanded my portfolio of voluntary activities and the book started to gather the electronic equivalent of dust.

It’s not a question of discipline or commitment. I take a disciplined approach to my blogging, but it comes easy because I write about what I see and a lot of it is stream of consciousness. I’m committed to almost everything I do, otherwise there seems little point doing it. With a book, though, you need a plan and you need to write to that plan, and that takes more time. Time to research, time to create.

Time is what I don’t have. Certainly, I could spend less time with the family, I could do without some of the 8 hours sleep I know my body needs on a regular basis, or I could drop some of the other things I’m doing. But I don’t want to do that, because I’m naturally drawn to the portfolio career and a diversity of activities.

Writing a book is essentially a selfish, specialist activity in order to get it done. You need to put yourself first, and sacrifice things that are important to other people, things that they’re relying on you to help with. Generalists find this tough.

That’s why writing is book is hard, really hard.

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Categories Communication, General, Planning

Metal Staircases

October 7, 2015 //
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Metal staircases create a rotten first impression. They tell you that either they can’t be bothered to properly dress this part of a building, or that they can’t be bothered to create a good first impression with you.

I was staying at a hotel the other day. It was nearly impossible to find the stairs, which would be a worry if a fire alert precluded use of the abundant lifts. We had to ask a member of the cleaning staff to show us where they were. And they were horrid, as if the hotel wouldn’t dream of their valued guests ever wanting or needing to take the stairs.

Then there’s London Gatwick airport. When you come in from Ireland off the plane they take you through a different terminal entrance. I think the purpose of this is that you avoid having to show your passport, which is a useful micro-efficiency, but to get there you go through two flights of hideous metal staircases that wouldn’t look out of place in the staff stair well of a 1970’s hospital. It’s not a great first impression or airport welcome.

To my mind it’s really important you plan the literal journey your customer is going take to your home, office, town, or country. Do you want to make a good impression or a poor one? Do you care either way? Actually, you don’t have to tell us, because we’ll know.

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Categories Communication, Customers, General
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