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Forgotten English – Part I

April 8, 2019 //
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This week my three posts will be my favourite examples from a 2019 page-a-day calendar, a rather nice gift that I received for Christmas. I have a soft spot for linguistics and language, so this daily nugget is right up my street.

Jeff Kacirk’s Forgotten English is a delightful daily combination of a defined ‘olde’ word or phrase and a short celebration of something or someone notable. The word and the celebration are often connected.

Here’s my first choice:

For All Waters

This feeds right into my generalist leanings. If you’re for all waters it means that you can turn yourself to any job, rather like one of those fish that can thrive in either the sea or rivers, lakes and ponds. Apparently it’s from Bill Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night, which is nice.

I’m going to try and fit into conversation without sounding pompous.

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Categories Communication, General, Language

To Be Loved

April 1, 2019 //
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This is not an April Fools’ post. This is a serious post.

What are we doing anything for? Ultimately, it’s to be loved, right? To be loved trumps everything. Not as a destination – I’m doing it so people will love me – but as a journey – I’m doing this because I am loved.

To be loved, properly loved, and to know you are loved, by your family, your friends, your fans, your customers, your partners, or your suppliers, is as good as it gets.

When someone loves you, they haven’t necessarily given you money, or even their time. They’ve given you their everything. They’ve made a total sacrifice to you, a total commitment. They are emotionally invested in you, and this transcends the financial, physical or material aspects of things. They’re being as generous as it is within their power to be. They are saying, “you are so worth it.”

To be loved is the ultimate status. To be loved is to be able to put everything else in perspective. It is true luxury.

The opposite, not to be loved? Well, for a human being, it doesn’t bear thinking about.

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Categories Communication, Customers, General, Marketing

Stuff Comes Through

March 29, 2019 //
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We all go through lean periods. From a sales perspective, a winning perspective, business, pleasure, whatever. You have to have downs for there to be ups, so you can appreciate the ups.

Sometimes, when you’re in that trough, or on that plateau, it’s hard to see your way out or over, respectively. The one thing that keeps me going, however, is this.

Stuff comes through for you. It always does. If you keep working, making the effort, doing the right things, eventually stuff drops your way. It works out for you.

As Gary Player is thought to have said: “The more I practice, the luckier I get.” Luck is one thing, but working hard, working well, and working with your eyes wide open reaps its rewards.

It’s no more, and no less, than you deserve. Your just deserts.

 

 

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Categories Customers, General, Marketing, Sales

UKExit

March 8, 2019 //
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I don’t know what all this Brexit fuss is about…I’m kidding! It’s hard to imagine a topic that’s more pressing and more invasive for people, businesses and countries right now.

So it’s about time I jumped on the bandwagon. It’s not Brexit, or it shouldn’t be at any rate. Britain, or Great Britain to use its full moniker, is comprised of England, Scotland and Wales, in descending order of population.

Unfortunately, however, Britain isn’t scheduled to leave the EU on 29th March 2019. The United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland is leaving. Northern Ireland is heading away too. That’s an extra country and about 1.8m more people. I wonder how the people of Northern Ireland feel about the term. Their opinion may well boil down to their upbringing.

So it’s not Brexit, it’s UKExit, technically. Should we say U-K-Exit, or Ukexit? Not as snappy and rollable-off-the-tongue, but more accurate nonetheless. Perhaps we could shorten it to NUKE – Non-UK Europe?

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Categories Communication, General, Strategy

Voices and Faces

March 6, 2019 //
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When you’re getting introductions to people over social media platforms like LinkedIn, it always helps to see a picture of the person. It helps you put a personality to the person.

When it’s the other way round – in other words when you speak to someone over the phone before you actually meet them, and you don’t know what they look like – you have to speculate on what the owner of that voice will look like.

Voices and faces are strange bedfellows in my experience. I often imagine what someone looks like and acts like from their voice, as it helps me make the connection in my head. I almost always get it completely wrong.

When you meet them, the face never seems to fit the voice you’ve listened to. Or, put another way, the face we put to the voice is not the face that belong with that voice.

Try doing it with a radio DJ, whose picture you’re not familiar with, obviously. If you don’t know what they look like, and ten people take a guess, I’m sure the guesses will vary wildly. Is that guess based on our own unique experiences? Probably.

It always reminds me how much can be wrong with the assumptions we make about people.

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Categories Communication, General

Drive Thru

March 1, 2019 //
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When I lived in the US I loved the drive thru. One of the benefits of living in a country which is relatively new and whose growth exploded at the same time as the growth of the motor car, is that places are geared to arrival and departure with the combustion engine. The US can be a very convenient way to do drive thru business.

Drive thru fast food, banking, liquor stores, car washes, and even drive thru mail boxes which are a fantastic thing; there are so many ways to get what you need done on the move.

Drive thrus never caught on as much in the UK and Ireland, probably because of the infrastructural thing I alluded to. Fast food stores like McDonalds abound in Ireland, but that’s about the only sector that has embraced it. I can think of one cash machine drive thru in south Dublin, that’s it.

Did I mention how convenient a drive-thru mailbox is? The alternatives for someone in a car faced with an inner city or inner town post box is to park and walk and post and walk and drive off, or else block the traffic and send a passenger or yourself to the post box for a few seconds which are agonisingly long for both you the driver and the vehicles behind you.

Of course, we’re being discouraged to drive less, walk or ride for a short trip, and generally take better care of ourselves and the planet, which I’m totally on board – rather than bored – with. Often, though, we bundle our errands and things to do into a single time-saving, efficient trip on the way to somewhere in the car, and for that the drive thru is invaluable.

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Categories Customers, General

Post Boxes

February 27, 2019 //
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Ah, the red UK post box. An iconic, timeless image, replicated thousands and thousands of times across the length and breadth of the country. Barely a few hundred yards apart, a part of the community, a true local service.

I don’t live in the UK, I live in Ireland, and the post boxes here are green. One thing I’ve noticed about living in Ireland, and I find it one of the very few irksome things because I’m used to the UK set-up, is that post boxes are few and far between. In fact, in the country they’re almost as rare as hen’s teeth.

Obviously there’s a huge cost attached to serving an infrastructure of thousands of drop points for post, and I’m sure the UK has ‘streamlined’ its own network of them over the last couple of decades. That said, a local post box is a huge community service and makes it so much easier for getting your letter or parcel from A to B. It’s the inverse of the last mile, and in sales the last mile can be very expensive to serve. In Ireland, they have post boxes at the post office, but you’d be hard pressed to find them anywhere else in small towns or decent sized villages.

The post box is a dinosaur, I know. Sometimes, though, when you can’t get near the post office – or it’s located in a place that’s impossible to stop near if you’re doing a drive by, it’s a big headache getting your package away.

A handy post box is something I never take for granted, and always try to memorise in towns I often go to.

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Categories Customers, General, Marketing

Shorty

February 25, 2019 //
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Perhaps it’s being short of stature that leads to a sensitive radar on my part to terms that are used at the expense of people who are lacking in height.

When I hear the word shorty in hip hop songs, it’s usually used with regard to the male singer’s girlfriend or women in general. Yes, as a woman she’s typically shorter than her typically taller male counterpart, so is that a simple observation of height difference among the genders, or is it a term of control and marginalisation on the part of a certain group of society not known for its sense of equal rights?

I’ve no idea. There are plenty of women who are way taller than many men. I guess you have to ask the woman being called shorty, how she feels. I’ve been called ‘half pint’ or such terms before and while I’m sure in some cases the intent was to bully or intimidate I’m not in the least cowed by it. It is what it is. I’m shorter than the average adult male, whatever average is.

Incidentally, it transpires – clicking on the following link will take you a gif you may not want your grandma or 7-year-old to see – that in Hip Hop the term shorty has more meanings than girlfriend. It can also refer to a girl, boy or other kinds of ingenue. Smaller, more vulnerable people in other words.

Just sayin’.

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Categories Communication, General

Please

February 11, 2019 //
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Often a simple ‘thank you’ is all people need for the acknowledgement of their work. Someone remembering or taking time out to tell them that their efforts are appreciated.

So it is with ‘please’, the mannerly corollary to thank you. Simple, thoughtful manners go a long way to getting what we need, and sometimes what we want too. It makes the person we’re asking feel better about donating their time too. I always try to say please when I’m asking for something, no matter how insignificant the ask is. It’s a basic human courtesy.

In my view, we should be demanding that voice activation technologies like Siri and Alexa be reprogrammed to only comply with our commands when we say please. ‘Alexa, can you play Ten Story Love Song by the Stone Roses on Spotify, please?’ How hard is that?

Much more importantly, especially with youngsters, what great behaviours would those engrained manners encourage for interacting with other human beings?

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Categories Communication, Customers, General

In Praise of Luciano Pavarotti

February 8, 2019 //
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I write this blog post as very much a non-connoisseur of the operatic genre. In fact, I’m not really a connoisseur of any musical genre. I like pretty much all types, with a tendency towards the mainstream, non-fringe, anodyne even.

Like most people in their mid-twenties when the Italia ’90 World Cup was on, I had never heard Nessun Dorma. My Dad was fluent in Italian, lived there, and would occasionally regale us with the first couple of lines from Verdi’s La Donna è Mobile. That was about the extent of my exposure to opera, except for a couple of very long evenings in the company of the English or Welsh National Opera for performances without a single song of note or recall.

The BBC chose Nessun Dorma as their theme tune for the event and catapulted Mr Pavarotti from serious fame to truly global renown. It may have helped the rise to prominence of the The Three Tenors, and countless other countries’ versions, but I’m not sure of the causality of that. Every time I come across his version of Puccini’s masterpiece on youtube or social media, I know that I will lose an ill-defined number of minutes watching various different recordings, all of them still spine-tinglingly good.

Other opera stars have sung this top 5 all-time favourite song of mine, but even to my untutored ear they don’t come close to the richness and depth of Signor Pav. You feel yourself lift off the chair as he moves to the massive tidal wave crescendo of Vincerò! So much charisma, so much presence, so memorable, even down to the obligatory white towel.

Don’t take my word for it, here’s one of the better recordings of the great man at work. I feel sure it will lift your spirits, at least for a while.

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Categories General
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