Archives for category: General
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Why is the News All Bad?

October 24, 2016 //
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Why is the news all bad? Why do the media, 90 per cent of the time, lead with war, murders, attacks, death, political wranglings and nastiness, accidents or missing people? The more dramatic the better? Why do they save the good news and the good vibe stories for the end, positioning them as afterthoughts or here’s-something-quirky-fluffy-or-engaging-to-pay-lip-service-to-the-idea-of-balance pieces?

What is it about the media that confirms and prolongs the notion that bad news is good news? And what is it about us that we legitimise and condone it by continuing to buy the newspapers and tune in to the air time? For us, in our everyday lives and loves, no news is often good news. For them, no news is worse than good news. It means they have nothing to say, nothing to fill the void with.

It beats me. I try not to be saddled with the bad news. I avoid getting sucked into a good vibe vortex. I don’t watch the news on television, news that is pushed to me – whether I like it or not – in the old broadcasting style. I select the news I want to read on the web. OK, so it’s still controlled and prioritised by the same organisations, but I feel like I’m pulling the stories that I’m interested in, in the order I prefer.

In all of journalism has there ever been an editor who has decided to achieve a genuine balance of good and bad, and even lead with the good stuff, to lift his or her readership and ultimately the region out of this misery funk? Is it even possible to start a movement that becomes seismic this way? Probably not an example who has lasted, since circulation and ratings would have tanked in the short term, and the powers that be would never have stayed the course.

Perhaps it simply feeds our constant need for affirmation that there’s always someone less well off than us, because they’ve been killed, orphaned, injured, marginalised, threatened, beaten, ripped off or otherwise suffered at the hands of others or from the fickle hand of fate.

So perhaps we’re the problem, or is there no chance for us to change?

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Categories Communication, Customers, General

Fear and Greed Revisited

October 19, 2016 //
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Some time ago, quite a long time go, I wrote about fear and greed.

It was my Dad’s basic premise that much of human behaviour can be distilled into the explanation that it’s driven by these two forces.

If you look around what’s happening in the world and in your country today, or at least the stories that are being selected and channeled to us by the media, an uncomfortably large number of them are still confirming this basic hypothesis. It’s all a bit depressing if you spend too much time on it.

Then again, the vast majority of attention is hogged by leaders in their field: world leaders and politicians, army generals, captains of industry, entertainment a-listers, terrorists and arch criminals all make the news. Maybe it’s the people who have got to the very top of their group are the ones exhibiting these base characteristics. Maybe they’ve had to.

When I look around at my fellow human beings that make up the 99% of us, I don’t see the fear and greed so much.

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Categories Communication, General

Industrial Inaction

October 14, 2016 //
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I was on the receiving end of a transport strike the other day. Or, industrial action, as it’s rather euphemistically called, as I attempted to get into the UK nation’s capital.

Industrial action. It should be called industrial inaction. It’s people who are providing a service – sometimes a single point of failure service – deciding not to provide that service, to do nothing.

Who suffers in this protracted battle of wills between the employer and the union? Other employees of supporting businesses who have to try and take the strain, but mainly the end customer, who funds – partly, I suppose – the service that’s supposed to be delivered but is being withheld.

A hundred thousand working people delayed, inconvenienced, frustrated and stressed. Wedged into late, irregular trains of a skeleton service like passengers on a Japanese commuter train, but with none of the punctuality. Hundreds of thousands of hours in lost productivity, lost contributions to national GDP, per day.

I’m not sure what the answer is, but it can’t lie in the antediluvian practices of outdated bodies, chaos, and meaningless apologies.

 

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Categories Customers, General

Slender Footprint

October 12, 2016 //
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A recurrent theme in this blog is personal productivity. Sometimes it also takes in with it environmental productivity, by which I mean a judicious use of the finite resources at our disposal to get around our place in the world.

This is something we can all do pretty well in the city, where the infrastructure is there to help us. It’s much harder to pull it off in those more sparsely populated areas.

A friend of mine that I work with from time to time has what I would call a slender footprint – in the sense of his carbon footprint rather than the mark his shoe leaves.

He lives in a city, in the nicest part in his city. Most of what he needs on the weekends is within a few minutes’ walk. When he’s working in the office, he has a 5-minute walk to the bus, a 20-minute bus ride into the centre, and a 5-minute walk to the office. A door-to-door commute of 30 minutes, where he can work for 20 of them, is just about perfect.

When he has to travel internationally for work, he can take the train or else a very affordable taxi to the airport. He has a car, but reckons he does no more than 1,000 miles a year in it, taken up by the occasional trip to the golf course or a trip to see the folks.

That’s what I call a slender footprint. Personal and environmental productivity at its finest.

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Categories General

Rough, Cough, Dough, Plough

October 10, 2016 //
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I wrote recently about how the most simple, innocuous, 2-letter words can cause palpitations in non-English native speakers.

I was reminded of this recently when I was complaining to my son – who is a fluent Irish speaker, schooled through the Gaelic tongue – about how hard it is to pronounce Irish words.

‘It’s much harder than English,’ I said.

To which my son replied, ‘Oh yeah, Dad, like Rough, Cough, Dough and Plough…’ He has a fair point; 4 words spelled with the same last 3 letters, all pronounced differently – uff, off, oh and ow.

Rough indeed. Regardless of our native language, we take its idiosyncracies and querks for granted.

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Categories General

When the time begins with a 4

October 7, 2016 //
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If you’re a regular reader of this blog you’ll know that I’m all about productivity. Sometimes our productivity can be stretched over a long working day, and sometimes a shorter one.

If I’ve got a ton of work on or I have to travel a long distance to get to a meeting, I’m fine with getting up early, sometimes really early, and cranking out a very long day. I can’t do it every day, but I can when I need to.

Except when the time begins with a 4, as in 4-something am. 5am onwards is not a problem. There’s something barbaric about setting the alarm and having to get up when the time begins with a 4. It has a crushing effect on my productivity and staying power.

This doesn’t seem to apply when I’m heading off on holidays. Getting up at 2 or 3am for a a 6am flight to the sun, sea or slopes doesn’t seem so bad.

But when the getting up time begins wth a 4, and the effort is for work, then the mental tiredness and productivity plummet – rather than the physical tiredness necessarily – kicks in way earlier than leaving it until after 5.

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Categories General

People and Culture Don’t Change

October 5, 2016 //
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It’s really hard to change the culture iof an organisation. It’s even harder to do it quickly.

This is because culture is made up of people, who themselves find it particularly hard to change their engrained behaviour, as you might expect. You’re expecting people to change who they are. Not gonna happen, at least not without a ton of effort, time and patience.

I remember working with a company in the last 2o years where we worked hard on establishing the mission and values of the organisation, those important things we stood for. The difference, however, between what was on paper and what was exhibited by people, from the CEO down, was considerable. The value statements looked great on paper, but that was not how the company behaved.

This is why culture eats strategy for lunch, and why it’s so important that, once you’ve genuinely established the culture of your organisation, you hire people who are true to that culture. It’s easier said than done.

People and culture don’t change. Sometimes people join a company and find the culture is different to their experiences of it before they joined. Other times people join a company thinking – or more likely hoping – that the prevailing culture there is a good fit for them. In either situation, if you find yourself in a business either where the corporate culture is not your culture, it’s a good idea to consider trying to find a company where there is a fit, preferably as soon as possible.

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Categories Customers, General, Marketing, Sales, Strategy, Technology

UK M6

September 16, 2016 //
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Whenever I come back to the UK from Ireland for work I suffer a mild form of culture shock. Perhaps cultural adjustment is a more appropriate term.

I know you’ve read it before on this blog. The sheer volume of traffic is a problem.

This time I found myself on the M6. Not the Irish M6, that glorious, blissful, never-packed stretch of motorway that speeds folk between the midlands and Galway. No, the UK M6, the 50-year-old main artery from the middle organs to the upper left ventricle in England’s complex circulation system.

How do the Brits get anything done? The traffic was nose to tail, with warnings of 45 minute delays further up the track. I took a diversion, got back on the motorway and discovered the ball of congestion had simply moved further up the road, to where I was heading.

Add to that is the fact that you are in roadworks situations and lane closures for mile upon mile, and even after you turn off and thread your way into Manchester, jewel of the North, the roadworks keep coming.

Of course, the signs had not caught up to the fact that there was a broken down coach in one of the available lanes, which we spent time crawling past.

There are people that spend every day in this. What happens to the national productivity as a result of the cumulative loss of productivity of thousands of individuals? Nothing happens, because the rich and powerful have people come to them or they’re working from a yacht with an impossibly gorgeous view, or else, like the heads of government, they’re being driven around the place so they can get stuff done as they go.

The person that suffers is the rank and file, the regular Joe and Jo who form the labour backbone and who have their commute times lengthened and their free time with their families compressed, all in the name of progress.

Sometimes, I’m glad I can do some of my work at home and on the phone. It keeps the wheels of productivity greased, in case of the occasional roadblock.

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Categories Customers, General, Marketing

Start-up, Upstart

September 14, 2016 //
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I was walking past a sign the other day. It said ‘Stressed is desserts backwards.’

Have there ever been truer words, in more than one sense?

It got me thinking about other types of palindrome-type anagrams. A start-up is the reverse of upstart, if you’ll allow me the license of a rogue hyphen. Yet, strangely enough, this is exactly what a start-up needs to be in order to taste lasting success.

A start-up has to do things differently, approach the market in a different way, and offer a new way of doing things. It has to disrupt the status quo, the accepted, established way of doing things, and become the new accepted, established way of doing things. it’s the new kid on the block. In short, it has to be the upstart.

I guess this is why you sometimes hear start-ups referred to as upstarts.

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Categories Customers, General, Marketing, Planning, Technology

IMKO

September 9, 2016 //
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I’m all for brevity in chat conversation. It’s the one area where it’s OK to use jargon as a shortcut, and if you can abbreviate or use initials, then so much the better.

I’m all for humility too. We should all try to remain humble and avoid getting too big for our boots. Hubris and arrogance are at best an annoyance, and at worst, well, they’re pretty offensive.

When someone asks me my opinion on something, however, and it’s a subject I’ve got a lot of experience in, I’m sometimes loathe to write IMHO – in my humble opinion. I think we should be able to write IMKO – in my knowledgeable opinion.

I think you can still be knowledgeable with humility, you don’t have to lord your experience over people. After all, they’ve deferred to you for a view.

Positioning your opinion as humble, on the other hand, lessens its importance, making it feel less authoritative.

So I prefer to use IMO on its own when I’m asked my opinion on something I know something about. But I still like IMKO.

 

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Categories Communication, General
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