Archives for category: General
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The Blink of an Eye

January 29, 2016 //
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We all know that life is a terribly slender thread and things like a mis-timed jay-walk can change a life irrevocably.

So it is with business I think. It’s not as final but in a split-second it can turn things on their head for quite a while.

I was at a sales kick-off conference more than 10 years ago, and there were about 15 to 20 of us around a U-shaped arrangement of desks, with our laptops already in use, stealing a few moments before the sessions – and in between them no doubt – to get some day-to-day business done before knuckling down to the meeting.

The walkway between the delegates and the wall was a sea of cables. Walking back to my seat, I tripped on a power cable that was curving up from the floor, yanking off the laptop in the process. The laptop belonged to to a rep, a lady who was a super person and whom I respected a lot. The laptop landed on the floor edge-first. Inevitably it broke. The screen went completely blank.

If you’ve been in this situation you’ll know that if you can’t see what’s on screen, you can’t save your work, power down, restart, interrogate the machine, anything. So imagine you’re this person. You’ve a mountain of things to do, let alone the time you’re giving up for the SKO. You’re a thousand miles from home, with a pre-smartphone-era phone.

I was understandably extremely apologetic and the lady in question was obviously pretty distraught but took it in good spirit as the genuine accident that it was. But in the blink of an eye, I’d turned her day from a good one, to an awful few days.

So how can you legislate for these sudden bumps in the road? It’s the standard answer: you plan for them as far as is economical for you to do, and you hope for the best. The hotel venue could have been configured so that sockets, cables and plugs ran from the centre of the room or from under the tables. Everyone could, I suppose, carry 2 laptops around with them, both synched, which is a touch overkill for an eventuality that might occur once in your lifetime. Or you simply hope that the split-second slip-up won’t get you and simply get on with it if it does.

 

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Categories General, Strategy

Minds

January 20, 2016 //
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The next time you find yourself gossiping about someone, or getting sucked into a reality television program, or letting destructive thoughts about that so-and-so invade your good humour, remember these words from Eleanor Roosevelt.

“Great minds discuss ideas, average minds discuss events, small minds discuss people.”

Rise above it all. The air’s nicer up there. Easier said than done of course, but you gotta keep trying, keep pushing.

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Categories Communication, General

Short Term – erm – Memory

January 18, 2016 //
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Short term memory. Lots of people complain that they have short term memory, fear that they’re losing their marbles.

Nothing of the sort. I forget things I heard in the recent past, but it’s not because I have short term memory issues. It’s because I haven’t engaged my brain properly.

There are plenty of self-help books to improve people’s recollection of names, people, events. The key thing to do is to listen – actively. There is of course a difference between hearing someone and listening to them, between seeing someone and looking at them, watching them. When you actively listen, when you put something small on the line that makes you establish a connection and fire a few more synapses than normal, you remember something, for a long time.

I can remember the names of attractive women I might have met only briefly at a party three decades ago. I can do the same with telephone numbers and car registration plates. Why? Because I had an interest in making the connection, so it elevated the information to a different part of my mental filing system.

So, if you want to get better at retaining information, concentrate more. Concentrate on actively listening and watching and making the right connection.

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Categories Communication, Customers, General, Sales

The Day Book

January 15, 2016 //
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I use a day book for work and play. It’s full of my appalling scrawl, which only I can read, occasionally. I like to take notes; it helps me commit things to memory.

Some people prefer to abandon paperwork altogether, preferring to keep their notes digital. I like to have my book with me and scribble away, unless I’m taking meeting minutes, in which case I will go digital too to save on time and avoid duplication.

Writing, or at least holding a pen, helps me think, and helps the thoughts flow and find meaning through meaningful connections.

My day book is my bible. It would be almost as bad for me to lose my day book as it would my laptop. I don’t like other people writing on it. I was once in a meeting with someone senior who I had only met that day, and who wanted to answer my question with an illustration. In a weak moment, I said he could use my notepad. He turned the page to the next double spread and scrawled away in the middle of it, a small two-by-two matrix he could have easily verbalised for me. In later days I ‘fenced off’ his scrawl and wrote notes from later meetings around it.

Here are some of the things I do to make my day book as useful as possible.

  • I use an A4-size lined note pad, with bound pages that can’t be easily ripped out or fall out. I find the smaller ones mean I don’t take enough notes
  • I always write the date down for each day I use the day book. This helps me retrieve historical notes if I need to refer back to them
  • From a self-preservation point of view, it’s sometimes useful to take records of important conversations, in case you have to say ‘no, actually you said this and we agreed this then’
  • When I scribble down an important point, I put an asterisk next to it. Then, when I’m gathering together my thoughts or action lists, I can quickly scan through my notes and harvest the important bits
  • If I have an unrelated thought of something I need to do, perhaps something personal like pay an important bill or phone someone about an important matter, I write it at the top of the page, above where the lines start
  • When I have a completed an action, I cross it out. If I’m updating a to do list, I cross out the previous one and add the outstanding actions to the latest list. That way I don’t have random actions that I may overlook littering my day book
  • I make all my notes bullet points, using either a further indented bullet or a curly arrow for a sub-point or the causal effect of my previous point. This has the effect of increasing white space around my notes and stops the text looking impenetrable
  • In the inside front cover of the day book is my email and address and mobile phone number, for the kindly soul who finds it to contact me so I can get it back
  • When I finish a day book, I carry the old book and the new one around together for a ‘transition’ week. I then store the old day book on a home office shelf, next to the previous old one, and keep them for a number of years, as if they were financial or legal records

Day books are great. They’re your indispensable companion for the weeks, months and years.

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Categories Communication, General

Enough to be Dangerous

January 13, 2016 //
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Ah, it’s a terribly fine line sometimes. A coin toss if you will. A little knowledge can be all you need to get you started, get some forward momentum and learn as you go. Sometimes it’s all the time you have, otherwise you miss the boat.

Then again, it’s not coincidental that we use the phrase ‘enough to be dangerous’.

A couple of decades ago, a friend of a friend of mine went to live with a Spanish-speaking family to improve his basic language skills. In his first week there, they went out to dinner together. The daughter was 17. During the course of the conversation something was said to make her blush. He wanted to ask her if she was embarrassed.

Unfortunately, he didn’t know the Spanish for embarrassed so took a guess. Worse still, his effort – embarazada – means pregnant. Not good. The father went apoplectic and he had to leave the family shortly thereafter.

Knowing enough cuts both ways. Ask yourself this, do you feel lucky? 🙂

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Categories Communication, Customers, General, Language, Marketing, Planning, Sales, Strategy, Technology

Team Ethos

January 11, 2016 //
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A well organised, well prepared team will always beat a disorganised, unprepared team with a few stellar players. We’ve all seen it, from amateur teams all the way through to the elite professional levels. The world-beating teams are there because of their painstaking approach to preparation, strategy and execution, and having stellar players doesn’t hurt.

I was recently watching the BBC annual sports love-in called Sports Personality of the Year. It’s not really about personality as such, although you do get the odd winner with personality, like cyclist Bradley Wiggins a few years ago. Last year’s winner was tennis player Andy Murray, who freely admits he’s a touch short-changed on the charisma front and who gets tagged a lot with the d-words: dogged, dour, determined.

Except that Andy Murray beat out the other 11 finalists – who were all world champions and world number ones – to take the crown.  Andy is at the time of writing world number 2 but won no grand slams or the end of year bash last year. He won it principally because Great Britain won the Davis Cup for the first time in about a thousand years. As a side note, thank goodness it’s a Britain thing, because England would be in the bottom tier if the 3 nations competed separately.

The Great Britain team also won the team award as well.

A good team trumps good individuals. It’s the same in business, and especially in sales and marketing. All the more reason for us to stay focused on preparation, strategy and execution.

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Categories General, Marketing, Sales

Workflow – Work Slow

January 6, 2016 //
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Sometimes, when you’re too busy to see the work for the trees, it’s difficult to take a step back from what you’re doing and analyse if you could be doing it better.

Process is so important to what we’re doing. You have to get the right steps in place and then make sure you’re doing the steps in the right order.

When I was much younger I was staying in my Uncle’s pub for a while and I was washing his car. After a few minutes he came out and said, ‘what are you doing?’ ‘I’m washing the wheels,’ I replied. You see, the wheels are the fiddly filthy bits that I wanted to get out of the way first.

‘Yes,’ he said, ‘but now the water’s filthy for washing everything else. Start with the windows and glass first, then go from the top of the car down to the bottom. And start again with clean water.’

Process. You have to get the order right, and you have to do the right things too.

Workflow, as the name suggests, is about the flow of work, the process you go through. If you don’t get the workflow as good as it can be, you work slow, or you work poorly.

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Categories Communication, Customers, General, Marketing, Sales, Strategy

The Demotion of Emotion

December 30, 2015 //
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When you’re in a discussion about something, and in descends into an argument, it inevitably becomes emotional. This is especially true and unhelpful in business.

In these situations you tend to get a lot of ‘heat’ and not much ‘light’. In other words, there’s too much emotion and not enough inspiration.

I have a short temper and I find it’s easy for me to let a discussion descend into something unhealthy. There should be no room for emotion when you’re trying to fix or improve something, yet we find it very hard not to give it a seat at the table.

I find it much easier to do in business, but you have to demote emotion and recognise it for what it is, an instinctive response to change, stress, and a loss of control. The better you can remove emotion from the equation, the easier it is to get the right answer, to get the sums to add up.

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Categories Communication, Customers, General, Sales, Strategy

The Tradeoff Between Environment and Expediency

December 28, 2015 //
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Living and working consciously for the good of others and society as a whole takes effort. Being environmentally aware and thoughtful is an attitude in thought and followed through into deed, which is why many people don’t do it. They can’t be bothered, they have themselves and their own situation to worry about.

It can be a difficult trade-off. A few years ago we needed to paint a fair amount of the inside of our house. My good lady – who, incidentally is better and more aware than I am in this area – wanted to avoid using traditional, cheaper lead-free paint, for the health and well-being of its occupants and the greater good of the environment. So we decided to do that.

Except that, as it turned out in the subsequent weeks and months, the lead free, environmental stuff is not as ‘good’ as the regular stuff. We live in a cool, damp and windy climate, and the newly painted walls were quick to show the discolouring signs of damp. This situation led to a few painstaking hours every few months where we would have to wipe down the walls and clean them. We also had to leave the window open in the most used shower room, which was good for ventilation but less good for our heating bills and ultimately our old friend the environment.

Recently we decided we had to get the inside of the house repainted. We used traditional paint. We’ve not had a problem with the walls since. This is one example. I’m sure you can think of loads of others in work and in day-to-day play.

You see, tradeoffs are hard. They’re not straightforward or simple. Otherwise, if we didn’t have tradeoffs, we’d have infinite resources and time. And how dull would that be?

 

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Categories General

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
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