Archives for category: General
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Belfast-Belslow

May 20, 2016 //
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I had occasion to visit the city of Belfast recently. Despite living within the same landmass for about a dozen years out of the last 17, I had only gone through Belfast on the train and never stopped in it.

It’s a nice, compact city, with a thriving centre and rolling countryside a few minutes away in every direction. Some of the regenerated city centre areas are very swanky and everything seems simply a stone’s throw away.

The folk are very friendly, the food and drink is good and accommodation likewise – at least in my very limited experience.

Unfortunately, like a lot of city centres, the traffic is truly awful. I left – or tried to leave – the centre at about 5pm on a weekday. Admittedly this is the heart of the rush hour, but with the spur onto the motorway a few hundred metres from downtown, I was confident I could get away in a reasonable time.

How wrong I was. Belfast was Belslow. It took me 40 minutes to go 200 metres, the principal culprit being 2 complex junctions within 10 metres of each other which operated on the same traffic light rotation. The result: gridlock, with no-one able to advance everywhere. The pedestrians simply scooted between the cars, blissfully free of the large metallic impediments that I and my fellow drivers were saddled with.

So a great visit to the capital was somewhat soured by the appalling traffic, not helped by the fact that once I got onto the motorway I had another three and a half hours to go.

Once cities sort their private transport challenges out, then they’ll really be motoring.

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Categories General

The Dietary Peril of Flat Bowls

May 18, 2016 //
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My mother has rectangular dessert bowls that she uses for cereals, and, well, desserts.

They’re deceptively capacious. You cover the bottom of them with your cereal and barely dress them with some milk, and it feels like you’ve hardly got anything in there.

Nothing could be further from the truth. It got me thinking about unconventional approaches to things and how they can often take you by surprise. This can work in both good ways and bad.

In the case of flat bowls, you feel like you’re not eating much, when you’re probably eating more, a true double whammy and definitely the bad side.

That’s dietary peril for you. I’m sticking to small crockery from now on.

 

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Categories Communication, General

Hate Waste

May 16, 2016 //
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I hate waste. Not using all of something where you have put in time and money to create it makes no sense to me. It’s all about striving for the 100% use of assets.

This is why I reheat tea and coffee I’ve been too busy to drink. Sometimes twice. Why not? It’s all about the efficient use of materials.

In my home we throw out a very small proportion of the things we consume. We’re lucky we live in a country where you can recycle many materials, and we compost both our fresh food and our cooked food (separately, of course). You’re working with the circle of life that way, not against it.

Where I’m most precious about waste, though, is with time, that most precious of commodities. I try to not to waste the time of others either. This is why I make my posts the length they are. I shoud be able to get my point over within a few short paragraphs. Many more would be a waste, and – who knows – you may hate waste too.

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Categories Customers, General

The United Queendom

May 4, 2016 //
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If I’m not mistaken, we’ve had a ruling monarch for the last 60-some years who is of the female persuasion. As a consequence the national anthem can slip effortlessly and with no loss of metrical harmony from God Save our Gracious King, to the queenly version and back again, depending on the gender of the current occupier of the throne. With me so far?

We’re also living through a period of unprecedented equalising – I will not say equality, because women have not achieved parity in a whole bunch of areas although the direction of change remains positive – in the relative position of women and their associated rights.

At the same time, there is in some quarters – such as the USA for example – a definite traction for using traditionally male nomenclature for certain professions. You hear ‘actor’ not ‘actress’, ‘waiter’ not ‘waitress’ a lot in the new world, for example. It seems strange that words like doctress for female doctor never caught on in the UK, whereas we wouldn’t use master when we meant mistress…but I digress.

It seems odd to me, therefore, that they don’t adapt the UK to the UQ, namely the United Queendom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland. Since UK folk have had a queen for more than half a century, would it not make sense to refer to the nation as a Queendom, in deference to Her Majesty’s gender?

You would have expected the most strident of feminists to have called for a renaming of the nation. Perhaps they have, in which case I’ve missed it. Alternatively, since we have actors of both sexes, can we not have Kings that way as well?

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Categories General

10 Years

May 2, 2016 //
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I’m quite pleased with myself. Today marks the point where I’ve gone 10 years without missing a working day due to sickness.

The last time I got sick was a rather nasty dose of viral meningitis. As luck would have it, it was over a bank holiday so I was only absent for work for 2 days. I can’t remember the last time I was sick before then. Alright, so I might have left work twice at around 4pm with a migraine, but not even a half-day ‘sickie’ has blemished my work attendance record for the last decade.

I’m not breaking any kind of health record here, and I’m not saying I’m the healthiest person that has ever lived either. What it boils down to is – yes – being fairly healthy, but more importantly it’s about culture and work ethic.

I’ve not had to suffer working in a large or public sector organisation where people play the system and take a sickie as if it’s their fortnightly right. These people are not invested in their organisation and those kinds of places would drive me mad. And as for the ‘oh, I’m staying at home, I don’t want to pass it on through the office,’ puh-lease. Those folks – and the colleagues and bosses that encourage them to do that – well, let’s just say it’s a different culture. The kind of culture that doesn’t think it’s their problem when billions of dollars of national productivity are lost annually through sickness. Plus, it’s no accident that incidence rates of sickness are far lower among the self-employed.

Many’s the time I’ve had a bit of ‘man flu’ or have poorly rebounded from a night of moderate imbibition, but you go in, you suck it up, take your meds and get on with it. If it’s a genuine illness – and I think meningitis scores quite well against that criterion – then, fair enough, stay away and get better. But if it’s not, then come on, gone are the days when organisations had the buffer to cover for a sick person. We’re all busy, we’re all maxed. Work is a team game and your colleagues are relying on you.

So I’m raising a glass to another 10 years of sickness-free work. Only the one glass though. It’s a school night and I don’t want to have to take a sickie tomorrow…

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Categories Customers, General

Culture Eats Strategy for Lunch

April 25, 2016 //
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‘Culture eats strategy for lunch.’ I love this phrase!

I hadn’t heard it in a while and was reminded of it recently in a meeting. It makes me laugh out loud when I hear it. It’s both pithy and witty. I don’t know if Peter Drucker did first coin the phase, but I think the sentiment rings true.

But why does culture eat strategy for lunch? My view on this is as follows: if all of your staff behave in the same way, and have the same attitude, and these behaviours are consistent with corporate culture, then whatever they execute is going to be done consistently too. They’re all pulling in the same direction, for the same things.

Strategy is only as good as the success, consistency and constancy with which it’s applied. When the culture’s not right, you don’t have everyone buying into the way things are done. It’s half-assed execution.

Culture is a bit like the goodwill you get from a brand. It’s hard to quantify but you know it’s important, you know it has immense value, and you want it for yourself or your business.

And that’s why culture never goes hungry.

 

 

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Categories Customers, General, Language, Marketing, Sales, Strategy

Insurance

April 22, 2016 //
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Where are you on the risk aversion spectrum? Super safe, insuring everything, or cavalier and blasé about your belongings and family? Somewhere in the middle?

It’s a tough one. Some insurances – like car or mortgage protection – you have to get. Others, clearly, you don’t. Some people seem to view insurance as something they’re entitled to get a payout for, after a few years of claim-free premiums. ‘Yes, I could do with a new living room carpet; time to engineer some spillage..’

For those of us who are more honest, however, either you view insurance as a necessary evil or an unnecessary ‘nice to have’. I used to belong fairly and squarely in the former camp. These days, though, I’m not so sure.

Firstly, there’s the financial argument. If you never pay for metered parking, one day you’re going to get caught and your fine might equate to all the fees you should have paid. That’s fair enough, and not really an insurance example, more a general risk and return argument.

I hire a car quite a lot, and I always take out excess insurance, so that I’m properly covered in the event of any incident. I have friend who doesn’t take it out, figuring out that if he does eventually have a prang, then the cost of picking up the tab will be off-set by all the times he never paid for the extra insurance.

The other dimension, though, is the success rate for a real claim. These days the small print seems to exclude almost every eventuality for which you’re taking out insurance in the first place. I have mobile phone insurance, but if I leave it in my car, it’s only covered against theft if it’s in the glove compartment and the compartment is locked. Who does that?

I used to work for a guy who never insured any of his contents. He simply didn’t bother; it wasn’t worth it to him. His reasoning was ‘Who’s going to steal a bed anyway?’ Well, presumably a bunch of organised thieves who know you’re away for a weekend and stage a fake house-moving heist. This chap would simply go ahead and buy replacement stuff if it ever happened. He could afford to.

But the question remains. As insurance companies are often in similar financial straits to lending organisations, and with premiums sky-rocketing, there is a huge incentive to make the claiming process as rigorous and parsimonious as possible. They’ll wriggle out of a payment if they can.

 

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Categories Customers, General

Precipitation

April 20, 2016 //
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I always thought that SAD syndrome – where you’re down in winter and up in summer – was related to dark, short days in the beginning and the end of the year for us northern hemisphere folk.

I think for me it’s more a nagging, low-level frustration than sadness. As I write this we’re emerging from my ninth consecutive winter in the west of Ireland. It’s been a very damp, windy, mild winter. This morning – April – it snowed. Anyone who knows about global warming will tell you that it doesn’t necessarily manifest in simply a warmer climate. It also increases the extremes of weather.

It rains a lot in the west of Ireland. While we’ve had our share of storms this last winter, you might be surprised to know that in terms of annual rainfall the figure here is half of the Seattle figure. We tend to get what the locals call ‘soft’ rain; drizzly, filmy, misty rain, falling out of predominantly light grey skies. In fact, it probably rains at some point during the day – perhaps some days a couple of drops, other days perhaps a dozen quick showers – 300 days of the year.

It never absolutely clatters down and then clears up, like in Florida during certain seasons. Precipitation here is an almost constant, gentle friend, with a slight smirk on its face. The kind of smirk you want to wipe away.

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Categories Communication, General

Damning the Critics

April 15, 2016 //
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It’s important to be able to receive constructive feedback. If you value other people’s opinion that is. If it’s destructive criticism, or you don’t respect the opinion of the person who’s volunteering it, why bother listening to it?

Staying with constructive feedback, the really important thing is to make a decision on that feedback. Do they make a valid point? Is incorporating their feedback going to improve what you’re doing? If it is, great, you have a better product or service.

If it isn’t, then damn the critics and go. Have the courage of your convictions. You’ll either win or your learn from your loss.

And, sustaining you on your journey are stories like the Beatles, whom record company Decca turned down, or Fred Astaire, who was told ‘can’t act, can’t sing, can dance a little,’ or JK Rowling, turned down by innumerable publishers and now the first female billionaire author.

Yes, damning the critics and doing it anyway. Feels good, doesn’t it?

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Categories General, Marketing, Sales

Macs Make You Lazy

April 11, 2016 //
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I’ve come to the following conclusion rather late in life. Using a Mac makes you lazy.

Well, perhaps not lazy, it’s more that a Mac allows you to be less disciplined in the use of your computer. It tolerates your bad behaviours.

I use a MacBook Air. It’s about 3 years old. I can’t remember the last time I shut it down or even restarted it. It’s at least a month.

I can have dozens of tabs open in my browser, dozens of documents open in my office productivity suite, social media engines whirring away in the background, music running, a dozen emails open from my inbox, and it still chunters along just fine, despite the fact that these days it’s getting pretty hammered storage- and processor-wise.

In contrast to the 2 or 3 monitors you see people using at modern workstations, I have the single 13-inch diameter screen of my laptop. I simply toggle between all the different apps and docs as I go. This makes mobile working and ‘soft desking’ in various offices an absolute breeze.

Open the lid, close the lid; it’s like opening the door of the fridge. You’re straight into the good stuff, no delays at all. No pinwheel of death, no ‘have you tried switching off and on again?’, no reinstalling the operating system every 6 months.

But, boy does it make you complacent and then impatient when it comes to using something that’s not iOS. A former boss of mine asked me once, ‘You’re not one of those mac bigots are you?’

Guess I must be.

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Categories General, Technology
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