Archives for category: General
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The Trouble with Travel

October 25, 2013 //
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The connected economy makes it increasingly easier for us to be productive from the comfort of our laptop or smart device. You still can’t beat a face-to-face, though, and for that you need to travel.

I had occasion to travel yesterday, for a meeting in London, in and out from Ireland in the space of a few hours. Three events reminded me of how travel is still not the experience it should be, and it boils down – like most things, to how you treat customers and your peers, or in this case, fellow travellers, and how you plan.

Firstly, boarding the plane. It always amazes me how people will be oblivious to their fellow passengers as they block the aisles, take ages loading up their bags or taking things out of their bags before they sit down. And this is despite the gentle encouragement of the airline to find your seat as quickly as possible.  Is it so hard to plan out in your head as you look for your seat: ‘now what do I need out of my bag before I sit down and where is it? It’s like those people who queue in a shop to pay for something and then when it’s their turn they don’t have their money ready, as if the last thing they expected in the world was for them to be expected to pay for their item. Sheesh.

Secondly, near monopolies are always a problem from a service point of view. Take the much touted London Heathrow Express. I can’t think of a more expensive train journey on a per mile basis. I opted to go straight through Terminal 1 on arrival to use the bathroom on the train. Guess what? There was only 1 toilet on the train and it was out of order. I also have data roaming switched off when I travel overseas, so I wanted to use the wireless. Guess what? No wireless. ‘Oh dear, no toilet and no wireless,’ mused the conductor almost wistfully. Oh dear indeed. It’s 2013, you need to provide a better service for a 15-minute, £20 journey.

Thirdly, sometimes airports just don’t help themselves. The competition for your patronage among airports is really fierce, yet Shannon Airport must have taken the news about new Ryanair Routes coming to Shannon as a chance to take the day off. As we were coming into land, we started ascending, increasing in speed and circling. It turned out the Airport’s landing system and radar had become unserviceable (unserviceable – hello?!) and we were diverted to Dublin, where we refuelled and waited for them to fix things. As I waited in Dublin, I noticed on the airport website that the Ryanair flight (I was flying Aer Lingus) from Manchester had landed anyway. Maybe it’s true they don’t cary excess fuel and were landing come hell or high water. The fact that there either is no back-up system, or the back-up failed is amazing to me in an industry where ‘5 nines’ uptime is the sine qua non of being in the business. This meant I arrived 2 and half hours later than planned, and I went to enquire whether the airport would be prepared to pay for the extra parking. The airport in turn blamed Aer Lingus and the Irish Aviation Authority. I went to pay for my parking and found that by 9 minutes I had tripped over into the 12-24 hour rate, which was a staggering €19.50. When you drive into the parking the signage recommends you stay short term for under 24 hours, which is a serious disservice to those coming in and out in one day.

When we did land, we had the most labyrinthine route you can imagine to get out of the building, despite the fact that we were the only passengers left in the place.  It was as long as it takes to get out of Terminal 1, which is 10 times the size.

This kind of experience leads you to voice your frustration on the social media and online review channels, which in the connected economy comes back to bite the service provider. It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to figure out that if you provide a good service, it creates a virtuous cycle, not a vicious one, to borrow from Michael D Watkins terminology.

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Categories Customers, General

More on the Word ‘Just’

October 21, 2013 //
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Just a few more words on the word ‘just’, dear reader. I was recently talking about the much maligned (and rightly so) adverb, not the deeply important adjectival version which is worth a post or two in its own right. In fact, it’s worth dwelling on the panoply of meanings that accrue to this 4-letter word. I’m struggling to think of another that works so hard for our beloved language.

It seems there are other people who have issues with the word. Only today, the highly esteemed (and rightly so) Seth Godin posted his concerns. In Seth’s post, the context of ‘just’ as a throwaway is what rankles with him.

What it boils down to is this. You’ve got to know your context, and use ‘just’ when it positively qualifies what you’re trying to say. Don’t use it if it obfuscates or reduces what you’re trying to say. You need to know the ‘mot juste’ for just. And rightly so.

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Categories Communication, General, Language

The Indivisibility of Time

October 18, 2013 //
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In a recent post, I talked about the fact that time is the one resource that proves the most valuable and most elusive.

It’s amazing to think how much our lives are governed by time.  Work, transport departure times, classes, meetings; they’re all governed by this ever-present dimension.  It’s not always been that way, and we take for granted now how difficult it has been to measure time accurately.

But here’s something to ‘wreck your head’, as the Irish may say.  There was a chap two-and-a-half thousand years ago who reasoned that time was infinitely divisible, which effectively makes it indivisible.

His name was Zeno, and his ‘Achilles and tortoise’ (for which these days read hare and tortoise) paradox is perhaps his most famous.  Achilles is faster than the tortoise of course, but he never gets past the tortoise.  He never gets past the tortoise because in that second he has moved, the tortoise has also moved a small distance, which he still has to recover.  Take the measurement down further to a split second, a nanosecond, or even a picosecond, and in that minutest of time, the tortoise has still moved a fraction further that Achilles still has to cover.

Confused?  There’s perhaps a better explanation here, but what this paradox points to in my view is how, in an effort to control time and not let it control us, we divide it up into smaller and smaller pieces, only for it still to exert the same pull on us.

And what I’m most conscious of is this.  The time it took you to read this post – you’ll never get it back.  I hope you found it a good investment.

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Categories General

Making Someone’s Day is the Best

October 14, 2013 //
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It’s so much better to give than receive, isn’t it?  That feeling of satisfaction when you improve the lot of someone else and level the playing field somewhat.  It’s sensible business practice as well, as what goes around will come around, which is the golden premise of social media.  You give, while expecting nothing else in return, unless or until you’ve earned it, and only your customer decides that.

Big or small, it’s the thought that counts.  A compliment to someone who’s served you a great meal; a thank you to someone who’s not used to getting them; a repayment of a favour with a bigger favour.  It doesn’t cost anything to be thoughtful.

Here’s a thought: we’re used to receiving gifts from our suppliers, but when was the last time we gave them a gift?  How many awards do you see organised for suppliers by their customers?

Make someone’s day, pay it forward and you’ll never know what you might start.

Categories Customers, General

Time is a Killer

October 11, 2013 //
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Time – we measure so many things by it.  Miles or kilometres per hour, revolutions per minute, dollars per day.  Time governs so much of what we do and it’s the one resource we can’t ever stop expending.  The march of time continues regardless.

In business, it’s rarely money that presents us with the biggest barrier to success, it’s time.  Time is the killer resource.  We need that software release, that big deal, that important new senior hire to start as quickly as humanly possible.  It’s never soon enough.  And what happens, to make things even worse?  Things always take longer to come to fruition than we hoped: pipeline is sluggish, deals slip, development is delayed.  These are complex things we do in business, with many variables.  Throw in the human element and you have a recipe for stuff not turning out as you planned.

To combat the ravages of time on your precious schedule, I offer these two seemingly contradictory pieces of advice.  Firstly, wherever you can, build slack into your planning, so you have room to manoeuvre and still be on time.  Secondly, don’t let work or what your doing simply fill the time available (much easier said than done).

It’s a fine balance, but isn’t everything that’s worth doing well?

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Categories General, Planning

The True Professional

October 9, 2013 //
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It’s interesting to me what we understand by the word ‘professional’ these days.

To ‘profess’ comes from the latin words ‘pro’ – in front – and ‘fateor’ – to confess openly – and can be echoed closely in the phrase you often hear in the business world these days: ‘I’m just putting it out there.”

From profess we can see how the words professor and profession come to be.  While a profession comes to mean an occupation, however, these days when we use the term ‘professional’ we don’t just mean someone who does their job.  We also mean someone who does it well.

In the main the term has been appropriated for the white collar jobs.  A sales professional sounds better than a sales woman or sales man.  The exception to this is in sports like soccer, where you hear people refer to someone as a ‘true’ or ‘real’ professional, which says more about the immense majority who are not.

So my ask of you is this: what is people’s view of you?  Are you fulfilling your profession, doing your job, or are you a professional?  Which one has more chance of being considered indispensable?

 

 

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Categories General

Are You Even Listening to Me?

October 4, 2013 //
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The latest argument with Mrs D – or, as I like to call it, a robust discussion – reminded me of how important it is in both our personal and business lives to communicate well.  Have you ever been in a group dynamic (dinner party, dialogue for 2, meeting) and noticed how often people interrupt each other?  How often somebody asks a question and the next person chooses not to answer it, and asks their own question or makes a statement pushing their own view or agenda?  Annoying, isn’t it?

I’m no saint, and it’s something I have to work on all the time, but I try to respect the other person and wait til they’ve finished talking, and then either answer their question or further the topic in some way.  It’s about respecting the person and what they have to say, and contributing something that gets you both nearer to where you need to be.  It’s basic marketing isn’t it?  Listen-absorb-consider-contribute.

OK, so sometimes people will ramble, have nothing of worth to say, or love the sound of their own voice, and you need to work with them a little.  But generally speaking (pun intended), it’s a case of ‘I know you’re hearing me, but are you listening?’

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Categories Communication, General, Marketing

Meetings 101 – How to Survive and Actually Get Something Out of Them

October 2, 2013 //
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Meetings – I must say I tend to loathe them unless they’re well managed, which they often aren’t.  They seem to be an excuse to put off a decision, waste some time, and avoid executing on something.  They can be really counter-productive when not done well.

My first job out of college was a management trainee role, where the company went to proper lengths to train us in the basics.  How to communicate, how to manage your time, how to manage people, how to run meetings.  25 years on, I can still see in my head the old video on ‘Meetings, Bloody Meetings’ from John Cleese‘s training company.

There’s nothing worse than a badly run, badly chaired meeting.  So, with that in mind, here are 7 top of mind thoughts on how to instantly improve your own meetings.

– Have a start time and an end time

– Stick rigidly to both

– Produce an agenda, the shorter the better

– Ideally, allocate times for each item on the agenda to fill the total time available

– Publish this in advance so that people know what prep they need to do

– If you’re managing the meeting, control it, bringing off-topic discussions back on track, and agreeing actions and ownership of those actions.  If you don’t get resolution on an item in the time available, park it and move on.  If it’s not your meeting, and it’s a shambles, send the person this blog post

– If conversations get heated, take 2 short comments on either side of the argument and move on

A good meeting energises people, making them feel confident, informed and part of the team.  A bad meeting does the opposite, simple as that.

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Categories Communication, General

Skype Calling Etiquette

September 30, 2013 //
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Skype is great.  It helps bring families and friends closer together and helps keep communication costs down for businesses.  It’s also pretty damn robust for freeware, in my experience anyway.

A skype call is not a phone call, though.  It’s not like a call with landlines or mobile/cell phones.  It’s a call between computers, when you’re doing other things like chat, working on things, watching something else, composing an email, and so on.

Even though you may have a scheduled call for 11am, the other party might just be finishing up another call, or another piece of work.  And there’s something different about an unexpected call coming through your computer, laptop, or tablet.

Skype calls go so much better when you follow this type of etiquette:

– ‘Hi’

– ‘Hi there’

– ‘Ready for our call?’ or ‘Can I call you real quick?’

– ‘Sure’ or ‘Yep, but give me 2 mins to get my headphones on/put my ear piece in/get a coffee/grab a pit stop’ [followed by] ‘OK, ready, fire away’

– ‘OK, calling you now’

Easy, eh?  A tiny bit of extra effort, but an altogether better experience for both of you.

 

 

 

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Categories Communication, General

Written Language and Spoken Language

September 27, 2013 //
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Swiss linguist Ferdinand de Saussure was a clever bloke.  He distinguished between 2 languages: langue, the language, and parole, the spoken language.  We speak one, and we read and write the other.  They can be quite different.

So it seems a bit odd to me that we write to be read, rather than to be heard, especially in the stripped down, dumbed down, sound-bite-driven world that we inhabit these days.  The blog seems to me to be a classic example of this.   You can certainly get quicker through those posts that are written closer to the language of conversation.

Re-read the sentences from this post.  Could you see yourself saying them, exactly as written?  Some of them maybe, others not?  Odd, isn’t it?   Perish the thought you do a spell check and Word tells you your sentence is not a sentence, but a fragment.  Shocking.  🙂

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Categories Communication, General, Language
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