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What If is Always Better than If Only

November 5, 2014 //
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You can’t change the past. You can only affect the future and enjoy the present. Is there any other way to work and live than to remember that every day of your life is not a dress rehearsal?

‘What if?’ looks forward. You have freedom, flexibility, options. Above all you have control.

‘If only’ looks back. If only I’d done that, we’d tried that, and so on. It’s in the past tense. It’s done. You can’t change it. You can’t control it. Sure, you can learn from it, but it’s unhealthy to dwell on it. Otherwise, you become bitter with the failures, and complacent with the successes.

In business, as in life, we should be make sure we’re dealing with the ‘what ifs’ and not the ‘if onlys’.

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Categories General

The Small Beauty of Efficiency Gains

October 22, 2014 //
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When you’re looking to improve what you do, the temptation is to go for far-reaching change, massive innovation, that kind of thing.

It’s far better in the long run to look for the small efficiencies, and to look for them all the time.

When you visit the R&D facilities of a Formula 1 racing team, you see people striving to shave thousands of seconds off racing times with the most miniscule adjustment to things like aerodynamics. A few thousandths of a second is a few metres at top speed. A bunch of a few thousandths of a second is a commanding advantage.

Compare the touch-typing keyboardist with the one who has learned their own way, maybe using half their available digits and crossing hands across the workspace as they type. Imagine over a working life the enormous time savings formed from the collection of a vast number of infinitesimally smaller micro-movements by typing properly. Could you retire a year earlier if you were more productive over a 3-decade career in front of a computer, in a business where your productivity correlated to your profitability? Probably.

I’m not saying you shouldn’t look to change the game, out-think the competition, or disrupt the business model. Not at all. But you need to do it against a background of continuous improvement. The little things add up to much more than constantly battling the big things.

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Categories General, Strategy

Urgent vs Important

September 17, 2014 //
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One of the first business lessons I learnt was about prioritising between urgent and important.

In a busy business there are 10 important things you should do every day, and yet you will only properly address 3 of them. Something has to give.

Of all the things you need to do, what are the important ones? What are the urgent ones? Are any both? Are any neither? If they’re neither, well that’s obvious. If the thing you need to do is urgent, but not important, you shouldn’t do it. You should delegate it or discount it altogether, but communicate to the would-be beneficiary the reason for your decision as early as you can so they’re not left in the lurch.

So that leaves you with the important things, and let’s assume for now you have all the important things on your list, including the things you’re avoiding, afraid of, or don’t want to do. While it makes loads of sense to break big things into smaller pieces in order to make progress, the temptation is to do the small important things first, to get them out of the way, because you know that you have to do the big important thing anyway so it will get done come hell or high water.

This approach puts you under unnecessary pressure, affects the quality of your work and turns your long day into an even longer one, which you can sustain for only so long. So how to rank the important things, some of which might be urgent? Some ‘managing up’ is required here, because your boss might be leaning on you for the output that she or he feels is the must important and pressing. What should drive the ranking is the only criterion that really matters, namely the value to your customers. You need to communicate early and often with your boss and make them aware of what is driving the order of the things you need to do.

And what if you can’t separate that handful of things that are all of equal weight and all help your customers be more successful? Well, then you need to get help or suck it up, safe in the knowledge that you are driving up your value as you drive up the value of the people who are the reason you’re in business.

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Categories Customers, General, Strategy

Business Skills in Schools

September 17, 2014 //
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As we speak, my son is sampling a range of optional subjects for his new secondary level school. They’re all great subjects, but because of the small size of the school and the teaching abilities of the staff, he will have to make 4 ‘either or’ choices.

One of the either / or choices is business or art. Unfortunately it’s not art in the general sense that we should all strive to be artists, but it’s the painting and drawing variety.

I didn’t have the chance to study business at school. The closest I could get was economics at A level, and I eschewed that unknown quantity for languages, which I liked and was relatively good at. As a consequence I wasn’t exposed to business in any great degree until I got my first job as a college graduate. Of course, some people never brush shoulders with business their entire lives, preferring a life devoted to many of the industries in the pubic sector, like teaching, healthcare, academia and the like.

I think business is a really good idea for kids at school, and why not in primary school as well as secondary? For better or worse our lives are pretty well governed by money, so the sooner kids get their heads around the concepts of money, value, the effect of time on both and managing cash and priorities, the better. It also introduces them to the world of entrepreneurs and being enterprising, which – rather than big business – is the future of work for many of us and gives us control, flexibility and choice, which are all vital to a good quality of life.

Richard Branson has written very recently about the benefits of learning about business in schools and Seth Godin has some very well thought out views on what schools should be getting kids to do. So we’re in pretty good company then. It’s my son’s choice what he takes, and of course I and Mrs D will have some influence, but I hope he chooses business, and does it with artistry.

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Categories General, Marketing, Sales

Turning a Book into Bucks

September 15, 2014 //
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When we read a business or self-help book, it’s generally because we want to improve the way we do things and profit from this investment of our time and money.

The hope is that as you get towards the end of the book, you have a good feeling about it and you consider it to be one of the business books that was worth your time and contained some ideas you could definitely use. You can soon relax, reflect on what you learned or what you were reminded of, and consign it to the shelf with the others. And forget it.

We’ve all read books that knocked us for 6 (the cricketing equivalent of hitting a home run in baseball), and really changed our view of the world. Maybe that feeling lasted a couple days, or a week, but pretty soon all but a handful of nuggets is forgotten and we’re back to the way we were before, pulled back to the status quo by the constant drag of daily duties.

It’s somewhat like knocking over the first in a line of dominoes, but the second domino lies beyond the length of the first. The process stops, and there’s no chain reaction, no momentum, and all the potential of the remaining dominoes is still just that, potential.

Why is that? Well, you didn’t do anything! You read a book. You accomplished an event. You didn’t effect a change, you didn’t initiate a process, you didn’t sustain any new behaviour.

We need to recognise that success is a function of learning the new best way of working, adopting it, applying it, coaching to it, and sustaining it. This comes from figuring out what is important to success and knowing how to do it.

We also need to understand that for us to really change for good the way we do things, we have to put into actual practice what we read, or get help to do it. Otherwise, dear reader, all of the power of the book will stay within its covers and won’t be turned into improvement and profit.

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Categories General, Strategy

The Wonder of Airline Food

September 8, 2014 //
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As regular readers of this blog will know, I’m a big fan of packaging, compactness and travel (here and here). The secret to good business travel lies in a combination of these 3 concepts. By good, I mean efficient, effective, optimised travel.

I’ve never really bought into the long haul travel idea of taking a pill and sleeping through the journey, especially the west to east flights which tend to be overnight. For me, even though you might be shattered, you miss one of the main joys of the trip.

Airline meals on long haul flights are a wonder. Compact and bijou, they are breathtakingly well designed pieces of real estate. Everything is compartmentalised, allowing the cabin crew to offer even those of us in cattle class options for our main course and to slot in a heated meal accordingly. The output is tasty, well thought out food combinations, hygienic and with the minimum of packaging, most of which can be recycled.

Aircrafts are all about the trade offs between space, weight and power, and so you can fit maybe 40 meals into a chilled cabinet on wheels that can’t measure much more than 30cm x 100cm x 75cm. Amazing.

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Categories Customers, General

Travel Light, Arrive Light

September 5, 2014 //
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Maybe you’ve seen the film Up in the Air starring the inimitable Mr George Clooney. There’s a scene where his character extolls the virtues of moving effortlessly through travel hubs and getting through security with the minimum of fuss.

I’m not quite that extreme, and I don’t travel nearly as much, but I am an advocate of ‘travel light, arrive light’, especially on those short pesky business trips for 1-5 days. I have a business friend who even for an overnight stay will always check in a bag and for whom the the thought of travelling light brings him out in a rash.

Far from cutting down your options, however, it helps you focus on exactly what you need for the trip, during the day and the evening-into-morning time. More importantly, it makes you learn to respect space, organisation, minimalism and a lack of clutter. This lack of clutter and lack of baggage – the physical seems to transfer to the psychological too – allows you to exit quickly with a skip in your step and whisk yourself away to your destination.

The low cost airlines help you take this approach by charging you for checked in bags and allowing you a regular cabin bag and a smaller bag. The long haul airlines will also let you bring on 2 regular cabin bags. You save money and effort and you get to make better choices with scarce resources. So what if you have to wear the suit jacket on the journey? It makes keeping your vital travel documents secure even easier.

True, you don’t have a contingency plan with this approach, but when was the last time you needed one?

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Categories General

When I am One

September 1, 2014 //
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First Birthday Card

First Birthday Card

This is my 154th post, dear reader. More importantly, it’s exactly a year ago that I started the Monday, Wednesday, Friday episodes of the Paul Dilger blog.

I hope you’ve enjoyed reading it from time to time. I’ve certainly enjoyed writing it. I never did it for the viewing figures or the influence, rather for the discipline and enjoyment behind writing. If I’ve imparted anything useful on the way, then that’s a bonus.

As Eric Morecambe used to say: what do you think of it so far? Rubbish!

I know it’s been an eclectic bag of stuff to date, which is why when I very first started writing it, the byeline ‘Musings on stuff I come into contact with’ seemed appropriate. It still does I think.

I will, however, be giving some thought to whether the topics – and therefore the blog itself – should be more focused and consistent, or remain the rag-bag of ramblings that it has come to be.

As always, dear reader, your views are welcomed.

Talk to you in the second year.

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Categories Communication, General, Language

Simplicity Brings Power

August 29, 2014 //
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As human beings, we have a tendency to overcomplicate things. Sometimes it’s not of our own doing, it’s the way things grow organically when time, people and variables conspire to turn things into a mess.

The last thing you want to do in life or work is create your own Gordian Knot. Simplicity is your guide. If you can distill things into the simple, most important thing, then you get clarity, you can make decisions, and you can execute.

Try these things to bring simplicity and create power and forward motion:

– Get people to explain things to you in terms a 10-year-old would understand, with no jargon or fancy words

– When faced with a large problem or project, break it up into smaller pieces and fix those pieces one at a time. Then you can celebrate the small victories towards the large end goal

– Prioritise or rank the factors you’re dealing with. You want to focus on the major priorities. All the other less important factors floating around are a distraction that stops you seeing the wood for the trees

– When unsure of what to do next, break the process down into a series of steps to get you where you need to be. Then take that next step

– Be continuously aware of your own or external complicating forces. They are the enemies of progress and the thieves of time

Simple is strong and powerful. Complicated is sapping and fearful.

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Categories General, Language, Strategy

What If We Started at 200 Years?

August 22, 2014 //
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Here’s a question for you. What if we were all born with an allotment of, say, 200 years? This was our total allowable credit at the beginning of life. The genetic hand of cards we had been dealt would immediately reduce the credit, as would our geography, socio-economic conditions and so on.

Then, what if every social occurrence reduced it further by a set amount? Smoking a cigarette, 7 minutes off. Passively smoking a cigarette, 1 minute. Having an alcoholic drink, 3 minutes. A sugary snack, 1 minute. Inhaling the fumes from another car, 4 minutes. And on and on.

Obviously, fatal accidents reduce the credit to zero balance almost immediately, and incurable diseases and other unplanned for calamities seriously eat into your allocation. Somewhat ironically and seductively, oxygen, which we rely on to survive also contributes to cell ageing and therefore ultimately kills us, so we might need to factor in something for exercise or other activities that cause us to draw in more breath than during normal breathing.

I don’t mean this to be a religious question. I think it’s an academic discussion anyway, as believers will argue that the Maker could be behind such a plan, and non-believers will probably think it paints a pretty dystopian picture of 100% scientific and medical transparency.

So here’s the question: if this situation existed, would you live your life any differently? Would you be as generous and act for the betterment of others, knowing exactly the sacrifice in personal time you were making and the added time you were bestowing on your beneficiaries? Or would it descend into a Lord of the Flies thing where we deliberately inflicted time reductions on others, small, petty reductions or big ones?

Personally, I think that even thinking about the concept makes us strive to do our best with each thing that we do.

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Categories General
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