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Too Much Safety is Bad for You

November 23, 2015 //
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I’m all for proceeding cautiously, in business or in life. Some of us are more circumspect than others. It’s question of degree.

Too much caution, however, too much safety is bad for you, and can kill you. You can only take so many precautions, otherwise you’re wracked by indecision, the opportunity is gone, and you’re too late.

How many times have our children – or we see children – spend an afternoon plucking up the courage to do something like dive or jump off something high, only to lose their bottle and spend the journey home lamenting the fact that they didn’t do it.

I was reminded of too much safety in a rather humorous way the other day. I arrived at the local pool to pick up my daughter and her friend from swimming and there was a young boy having the time of his life. He had found the pool’s stash of arm bands and had put 3 on each arm and 4 on each leg. He was a mini orange Michelin Man.

As as the pool attendant saw him waddling around on the pool side, however, she told him sternly that no arm bands were allowed on the legs, it was dangerous. I guess if you had them on your legs and not your arms they might tip you up, but the irony of the situation wasn’t lost on me.

Too much safety young man! A lesson for all of us, for all our lives.

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Categories Customers, General, Marketing, Sales, Strategy

The Discipline of the Regular Event

November 20, 2015 //
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Most of us love routine. It grounds us, makes us feel comfortable and better able to handle what life throws at us.

I’ve written before about the discipline I enjoy from writing this blog. The quantity of my audience is of secondary importance, though I hope the small number that do subscribe or come across it feel the quality.

Some time ago, my wife turned 39. I had pondered long and hard about how to commemorate this event. For my 40th, my good lady had bought me 40 – yes 40 – presents. Now some of them were very small, but they were all extremely well chosen. My wife is not a big fan of shopping, but she is of Olympic standard when it comes to buying gifts for others.

With the bar set so high, then, I wanted to get it right. My answer was a concept that I called ’40 for 40’, an unwitting homage to the fabulous ESPN sports documentaries with a similar name. I decided that every week, for 40 weeks before my wife hit the 5th decade, I would present her with a gift and a card extolling one of her many virtues. Cute, huh? It was actually pretty tough finding 40 different and appropriate presents to reflect the topic of my card. The weekly discipline became a challenge I enjoyed. Sometimes I was a few weeks ahead of the game, and other times I was sweating it the day before.

I don’t remember ever missing the weekly deadline, and at the end of the 40 weeks I presented her with a book I had printed that collated the sentiments from the previous 40 weeks.

There’s interesting postscript to this example: whilst my good lady was very appreciative of the gifts and the thoughtfulness, the one thing she didn’t like was the weekly reminder, 9 months in, that she was ending one decade and starting another…

Still, you can’t win them all. I enjoyed the process :-).

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Categories Customers, 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

In Praise of Arthur Ashe

November 6, 2015 //
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The late, great Arthur Ashe was by all accounts a legend, having overcome a heap of disadvantages to reach the peak of global tennis, only to succumb a couple of decades later to a demise as a result of the cruellest luck.

He is still a role model for many people, and as a native of Richmond, VA in the USA, where I spent a few great months in 2001, he is for me an important figurehead.

He is famous for many things, not least of which are a few quotations which I think apply to work as well as they do to sport. Here are two of my favourites:

“You are never really playing an opponent. You are playing yourself, and when you reach your limits, that is real joy.”

This for me is especially true in the cut and thrust of competitive business. If we can do the best we can for our company, and not worry too much about what the competition are doing, then we can do no more. This, of course, is linked to how well we execute.

“The ideal attitude is to be physically loose and mentally tight.”

Have there ever been better words of advice for how to conduct yourself in an organisation?

 

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Categories Customers, Marketing, Sales

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

The Double Edged Sword of Holidays

October 28, 2015 //
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Holidays are great. There’s the chance to unwind, spend some quality time with family and generally not think too much about work.

These days, however, we often can’t rely on somebody to cover for us while we’re on holiday and do the work that we would do if we were not on holiday. So what we sometimes find ourselves doing is working ourselves to a frazzle in order to clear the desk for the holiday, and then returning, somewhat refreshed, to face a backlog and the mountain of work to be done simply to get back up to speed.

When you add the fact that it sometimes takes two or three days to unwind, and two or three days to gear ourselves up for the return to work, it sometimes feels like a week’s holiday is simply not worth the time or investment. Perhaps you’re one of these people who can instantly slip out of work mode and leave all your troubles behind you. If so, you are a lucky person indeed.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m all for work hard and play hard. I need to work harder, however, to enjoy my holidays and make sure that the seams between the work hard and play hard periods are shorter so that they almost end up being seamless.

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Categories Customers, General

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

The Benefit Corporation

October 9, 2015 //
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Did you know that the crowd-funding site Kickstarter is now a benefit corporation? I didn’t either, until I got an email explaining what one was and why they decided to become one.

You see, Kickstarter found that being a for-profit corporation went against the ethos of what they were trying to do, namely be a force for social change. They go on to say:

“Companies that believe there are more important goals than maximizing shareholder value have been at odds with the expectation that for-profit companies must exist ultimately for profit above all.

“Benefit Corporations are different. Benefit Corporations are for-profit companies that are obligated to consider the impact of their decisions on society, not only shareholders. Radically, positive impact on society becomes part of a Benefit Corporation’s legally defined goals.”

What a fantastic concept, and an equally noble one at that. Sadly, only 0.01% of US organisations are currently benefit corporations, a statistic I feel will rapidly change.

If you’d like to read more, here’s Kickstarter’s benefit corporation charter. Fair play to them, as the Irish would say.

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Categories Customers, Strategy

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

Making the Departure the Destination

September 30, 2015 //
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The other day I was celebrating a long weekend with my good lady, and we were in the process of using up our last day before an evening departure from the airport to get back home. We went to a cinema to see a film before driving back to the airport, filling up the hire car with fuel, returning it, and getting our flight home.

I realised after buying the tickets that the film was long, half an hour longer than I had planned. We had an hour’s journey back to the airport, in no traffic at normal speeds, except that this was going to be rush hour, in the driving rain, and on the London orbital motorway which is a complete lottery most times of the day. I like to check in for flights in good time. My wife likes to leave things to the last minute, I don’t know why. Hence the ensuing conflict. We got a refund for our tickets and got to the airport with loads of time to spare and no inclination to spend it in airy conversation.

For the record, I don’t think we would have made the flight if we’d stayed for the film. We might have, but it would have been an unpleasant journey for the guts of 2 hours. If we’d missed the flight, our kids would have had to stay another night with different families, and we would have had to take a hotel room and new flights for the following day, which were working days for us both.

Anyway, this is a recurrent marital theme that I don’t mean to bore you with, but out of this conflict emerged the following thought: why don’t airports make themselves a destination even when they’re a departure? Why don’t they market that we make a day of our departure? Why recommend we get there 2 hours before a flight when we could get their 6 hours before, take in a movie at the airport, or some bowling, or a water park, safe in the knowledge we’re already there, the car is jettisoned, the bags are checked, and we can have the holiday experience?

It’s OK to have a few shops at an airport, but surely a cinema or two or a gym wouldn’t hurt.

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Categories Customers, Marketing
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