Archives for category: General
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Hindsight Schmindsight

November 30, 2015 //
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Hindsight is a wonderful thing, or so they say. What seemed so unfathomable before it happened is the blindingly obvious conclusion now that it’s happened. And don’t we just love it when people say ‘well I could have told you that would happen.’?

Here’s my take on this. When we look at what happened with the benefit of hindsight, we see a linear connection of causal events. It’s a straight line going backwards.

When we’re faced with what’s about to happen, it’s not linear. It’s multi-linear. It can go a number of ways, and it’s unclear which way will turn out best for us. Maybe all of them will, maybe some, maybe even none. The multiplicity of choices we face with every passing second is the constant. We’re lucky we have the freedom and the intelligence to make them.

We’ll always have hindsight, and sometimes we feel like we have insight and even a bit of foresight. But you can’t turn time back and give it another go. With every fresh project you have to keep moving forward. Consider the information, make your best decision, and go.

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Categories Customers, General, Marketing, Planning, Sales, Strategy

Playing the Numbers

November 27, 2015 //
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Have you ever seen a poor bookmaker? No, I didn’t think so. They understand the mathematics and they play the numbers. The numbers are their business. The business of probability, taken to the nth degree.

We should play by the numbers in work and life too. It makes total sense to manage things by the probabilities. What are the chances of this happening? What seems the best option? What’s the worst that could happen and how likely is that?

OK, so we might get tripped up every so often, but we can never legislate for the 1-in-a-million thing happening so why worry about it?

Air travel is still far and away the safest form of travel. While ‘what’s the worst that could happen’ is pretty unthinkable, it’s still the safest form of travel.

You have to live your life, otherwise you’d never leave your bed, swallowed up by fear, uncertainly and dread.

Playing the numbers is about understanding risk and what the risk is for a given situation.

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Categories General

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

Beware the GVV

November 18, 2015 //
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There is a certain type of person, a certain type of character, that it’s unhealthy to be around for too long. I call this person the Good Vibe Vortex, or GVV for short.

The GVV is not a positive person. Stuff happens to the GVV. Sometimes it’s of their own making, sometimes it isn’t. Sometimes they don’t even know they are a GVV, sometimes they do.

The GVV is hard work, they’re painful company. They suck away your positivity like a hoover, and you can feel your good vibes, your good energy, the great mood you were in, ebbing away. They are depleting your life force. It’s not simply what they say, there’s something about their whole aura that spells ‘d-o-w-n-e-r’.

This person is not always as obvious as the blue character in the film Inside Out but you get a feeling pretty quickly that they are someone who sees only – and therefore gets bogged down by – the sad, the hurdles, the difficulty. And lo and behold, the self-fulfilling prophecy occurs and stuff happens to them again, taking you with it if you’re not careful.

Yes, beware the GVV. Beware the invasion of the good vibe-snatchers…

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Categories General

The 80-20 Rule of Volunteering

November 13, 2015 //
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The 80-20 rule, or Pareto principle, is a useful mechanism for understanding how things in the world of work – or play – play out.

When it comes to volunteering, I see this rule operating pretty accurately. I use the term of volunteering in the broadest sense possible. In my hometown, there are a number of voluntary bodies and helpers working for the community and its subsets. The thing is, you tend to see a lot of the same faces cropping up in a lot of these groups.

I suspect that 20% of the available people are doing 80% of the voluntary work that a given community needs fulfilling for it to operate satisfactorily. The remaining 20% is the 20% that does not get done. It’s the 20% that is owed to the community by the other 80%.

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Categories General

Delegating to Busy People

November 11, 2015 //
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In the olden days, by which I mean in the last century when I was learning my managerial trade, the received wisdom amongst managers was that if you wanted to get something done, you gave it to the person who was the busiest.

The theory goes, I suppose, that the person with more on their plate who is better at getting things done will have more chance of completing the additional task. This assumes, of course, that busy is directly proportional to productive. It also sends a signal to the less able or less committed member of staff that by appearing to be doing less they will continue to see other people’s workload increase to a greater extent than theirs.

It is a short-term approach that has the medium-to-long term effect of alienating and burning out the very people who you want to keep in the business if at all possible. It also does not address the problem of the less able or less committed, who are clearly in need of more training, coaching, and dialogue to help them improve.

As someone who prides himself on getting things done, on executing a high volume of important projects, I can see both sides to the argument. But, as I argued earlier, it is a question of time, that most precious of commodities. Short-term gain, at the expense of long term benefit, is simply a case of robbing Peter to pay Paul. It’s not sustainable. It’s not good management either.

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Categories General, Marketing, Planning, Sales

Parkinson’s Law and Cock-up Theory

November 9, 2015 //
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Those of you who subscribe to my posts and who have a good memory – already that feels like a tiny subset of our sentient race – will know that I’m a big fan of Parkinson’s Law, which states that works expands to fill the time available.

There’s also the uniquely British cock-up theory, which generally attributes things going wrong to a combination of happenstance and plain old human error. My good friend Gaz is a firm believer in the theory and indeed you can argue that some major – not to say seismic – events are the result of what might more euphemistically be called Hanlon’s Razor, or as the Americans would say, “stuff happens.”

This leads me on to suggest that there might perhaps be a variant or additional tenet to Parkinson’s Law, which goes as follows.

“The closer one gets to a deadline for the completion of work, the higher the probability of something going wrong.”

This I believe to be an inescapable truth. As we approach the finishing line for a piece of work, the chance of something going askew – the printer not working, the Internet connection dropping, the mobile signal flaking, the application crashing, a key person we need to reach urgently to confirm or approve something being unavailable – seems to increase exponentially.

What is it, that that causes this phenomenon? Is it simply the case that, as we approach the end of something, and attempt to bring all of the disparate elements or threads together, those threads get caught up in knots?

Greater people than I have wrestled with this problem, I’m sure, and come up with much more convincing explanations than I ever could. Nevertheless, I think it has real validity for us all.

 

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Categories General

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

Work and Time

October 30, 2015 //
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Of all the laws and sayings that govern the world of work and play, I think it’s Parkinson’s Law that resonates the most with me.

‘Work expands to fill the time available for its completion,’ or words to that effect. It occurs to me that it also contracts to fit the time available for completion as well.

I was reminded of this recently when a project that had been running for months and had a deadline of 11:59pm on a Friday used up literally all its available time, and a few minutes the other side of the watershed too. We were in good shape mid-week, then a few extra review rounds got wedged in, and before you knew it we were under the gun.

The key thing is this: nothing’s perfect, ever. You can always find another tweak, something that constitutes a micro-improvement. This is especially true of a long, detailed document. The possibilities for a typo, a punctuation error or a stylistic inconsistency are limitless.

Which is why we have deadlines, why we impose limits.

You always have to do your best work, nor settle for mediocre. But, you gotta stop at some point.

 

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Categories General, Planning, Strategy
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