Housed For Their Own Welfare

May 1, 2017 //
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I like to buy free range chickens and eggs if I can. Both the meat and the eggs seem to taste better. It must be all that fresh air and a chance to stretch the legs and wings.

It goes without saying that free range produce comes at a premium price compared to the budget alternatives that have been in confined spaces all their lives.

The other day I bought a whole chicken, and a few days later I bought a packet of filleted chicken breasts. On both occasions an amateurish sticker had been added, almost as an afterthought: Poultry housed for their own welfare.

Poultry housed for their own welfare? That raises more questions than it answers. Housed to protect them from what? From each other? How is housing them good for their welfare? Am I entitled to a discount because for a portion of their lives they’ve not been free range? Aren’t they either free range or not? You can’t get mostly organic produce after all. Yes, the carrots were mostly organic, apart from that few minutes when we blasted them with insecticide…

Clearly the producers have to come clean when their hens have to be taken indoors, but I can’t help feeling a sense of confusion and mystery as to the circumstances.

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Categories Communication, Customers

A Cutting Edge

April 28, 2017 //
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The other day I posted on Facebook a sentence lifted from a BBC sports report into a match featuring the professional soccer team I follow. The post went like this:

‘Story of the season, in fact story of most teams I’ve followed, ever: “Wolves were competitive throughout but lacked a cutting edge.”

A cutting edge is a wonderfully graphic phrase which has been so over-borrowed over the last decade that it now risks becoming a sporting cliche, along with ‘we’re taking it one game at a time,’ and many, many others.

It occurred to me at the time, and it still resonates with me now, which is why I’m telling you about it, that having a cutting edge is a vital requirement in so much of our working lives, especially in business. It’s no use being competitive if we lack a cutting edge. In other words, if we’re not executing on our plan, if we’re not getting it done.

I’m not talking about the kind of cutting edge or leading/bleeding edge you hear trotted out with technology companies. We’re on the cutting edge of nanotechnology. Purlease. Indeed, in that context it’s another phrase so well-worm as to be threadbare.

Lacking a cutting edge in sports and business means we’re not sharp, we’re blunt, unsophisticated, ham-fisted even.

So what gives you a cutting edge? Focus, practice, skill, anticipation, commitment and timing. These factors combine to allow you to capitalise, not capitulate, on opportunities.

 

 

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Categories Customers, Marketing, Sales, Strategy

Summoned and Summonsed

April 26, 2017 //
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What a difference one tiny letter makes. There are cartoon strips devoted to plays on words that involve the slip of a letter. I’m sure we all have our stories of disaster from a typo that precipitated a completely unforeseen and opposing chain of events to the one intended.

Take the words summoned and summonsed for example. Summoned means that someone has requested your presence. There’s a degree of politeness involved, and there’s the implication of choice in there as well.

Summonsed, on the other hand, with the addition of an innocuous ‘s’ in the middle of the word, kind of means the same thing but doesn’t at all. It carries legal weight, you’re being forced, against your will, to attend. Choice doesn’t come into it.

One letter difference, a big difference in meaning. I’m sure there are myriad others, but that one stuck me quote forcefully the other day.

Categories Language

Watching the Recycling

April 24, 2017 //
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You’re familiar with the phrase ‘who’s policing the police?’. One thing that has recently taxed my brain is this: who’s watching the recycling?

As a nation, Ireland is pretty decent at recycling household waste. Better than the Brits and way better than the Americans, not as good as our Teutonic friends.

Our actual waste wheelie bin is dwarfed in weight by our recycling bin, which goes out every fortnight full to the brim, if bins have brims. We’re very good, as a family I think, at reducing, reusing and recycling.

But, just because we recycle well as a family, that don’t mean a thing once our bin’s contents are upended into the recycling waste truck. What happens then?

I sure as heck don’t know. For all I know, they might be throwing the recycling into landfill. Maybe people aren’t as judicious with their recycling and are adding items that can’t be recycled. How are the waste companies sorting the different types of recycled material? Are they removing non-recyclable stuff? Again, I don’t know. We’re trusting in a process that we have no visibility of whatsoever.

We’re pleased with ourselves at how good we are at recycling, yet we’re not actually recycling. We’re starting the recycling process but we’ve no idea how it ends, or in fact how much of it ends.

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Categories Communication, General

Sick Bed

April 21, 2017 //
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I got sick the other day. Quite sick actually, and I needed a sick bed. About once a year I get a migraine, and about once every other year I get a bad migraine. I have learned to notice signs one is coming on. I have also learned the factors that precipitate one, though it’s usually too late for me to adjust my lifestyle.

Usually I get a migraine in the late afternoon or evening, and I can go straight to bed and shut the word away until I re-emerge on the other side. When I get a bad one the symptoms kick in during the morning.

The other day, I noticed the signs of temporary oblivion around 8am as I was driving into the office where I work for about a week every month. The office is about an hour’s drive from where I stay, in another country from where I live.

After about 2 hours of taking meds and fighting the inevitable, I informed the office manager in halting English – I can’t string a sentence together when I have a migraine, and forget the names of common objects and people I know well – that I needed to lie down in the building’s sick room.

There was no sick room, and no sick bed serving the 5 floors of office space housing the handful of companies. All the rooms have lights on that came on automatically. So, here I was, stuck an hour’s drive from where I was staying and not capable of much more beyond curling up in a ball. Eventually, I found a large bean bag, and the building manager opened up a disused room in the basement with nothing in it, not even a light.

After spending 2 hours in there, I felt well enough to drive to where I was staying, at which point I went straight to bed for 5 hours, until I had slept off the horrendousness of food poisoning-like symptoms and felt semi-human again.

You would have thought a large office building would have a sick bay though, wouldn’t you?

As a footnote to this sorry story, I had to take my first sick day in ten years. I had a suspicion when I wrote that post that it might come back to haunt me…

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Categories General

The Lost Productivity of Negligible Roadworks

April 19, 2017 //
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When I’m in the UK, one of my colleagues and I travel to the office from different ends of a major motorway. I go north, he goes south, and then we reverse our journeys to go home at the end of the day.

His journey is invariably more snarled up than mine. A daily commute that regularly turns sour is a major source of mental ill-being in my opinion.

The other day I was returning to the office from an event and using the length of motorway my colleague uses, which is unusual for me. There was a stretch of roadworks on the motorway. It was about 20 miles in length and had a restricted speed limit of 50 miles an hour, with narrowed driving lanes and more traffic cones than you get grains of sand on a mile-wide beach.

The total amount of ‘road work’ activity on this 20-mile stretch, in mid-afternoon on a mid-week day? None. Not a single vehicle or worker. Zero activity.

This is the lost productivity of negligible roadworks. It’s the cumulative time lost for thousands of travellers, not to mention the increase in annoyance and frustration – increased enough for me to pen this blog 2 weeks after the fact – coming from having to drive at reduced speed for the guts of half an hour.

Who suffers? As usual, the individual. The private citizen, who is a customer of the infrastructure by virtue of having paid their road tax, and a bunch of other taxes besides.

 

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Categories Customers, General, Planning

Deloading

April 17, 2017 //
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I came across a new word the other day, courtesy of a link from a friend of mine that I also am lucky to work with occasionally. It’s called deloading. It’s taking proper down-time to recharge the batteries and ensure that when you get back on the horse you’re still super-productive.

The link is here. It’s written by a chap called Tim Ferriss, who many of you will know as the author of the 4-Hour Work Week, and other books on a similar theme. I thought he was a good bit older than he is. Not that he looks older, but that he seems to have packed an annoyingly large amount of stuff into his CV already.

You might know from my own blog that I’ve been an advocate of deloading for a long time, although I can honestly say I’ve never referred to it by that term. I guess I’ve always been practising the exercise of taking regular breaks, but not time-wasting breaks, from more run-of-the-mill activities like writing, work or study.

I guess you could boil it down to the time-honoured phrase that a change is as good as a rest. There is so much to be said for the productivity benefits of taking regular time out. It seems counter-intuitive that you can get more done in less and with less. Perhaps that’s the reason why many employers and managers are keen to get as much work time from their people as possible. But’s never been about the hours you put into work, it’s about the work you put into the hours.

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Categories General, Marketing, Sales, Strategy

Finish!

April 14, 2017 //
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How many new things, initiatives, projects, behaviours have you started and abandoned? How many worthy departures without a destination?

All of us have things we started and didn’t get finished. We left it and it went to waste, or it became overgrown or out of date and we couldn’t re-use, regenerate or recycle it.

We might have learned something, and that’s good, but we’ve lost something too. Time, for sure, our nerve maybe, something else.

There’s a cure for this. Finish! Finish something! Get it done! Start small, with a small project you know you can complete if you re-prioritise and apply yourself. Then finish something else small, then something else after that.

Get that finishing feeling. Be a finisher, a closer.

Winners don’t always finish first, but they do finish.

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Categories Communication, Customers, Marketing, Planning, Sales

Overselling vs Underselling

April 12, 2017 //
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Are you an overseller or an underseller? Is your default position overselling or underselling? I’m talking about either in a sales or a non-sales environment.

I’m generalising now, but I find that business-to-consumer (B2C) interactions are generally overselling.

‘Your table will be ready in a few minutes.’

‘I’ll have that fixed for you in a couple of moments.’

‘She should be back to you in a day or 2.’

It’s vague, intimate, approximate, and unreliable. The stakes aren’t too high, that’s why.

Business-to-business (B2B), however, is different, or should be. You want to under-promise, and undersell, so that you can overdeliver, and delight, your much-higher-stakes customer.

You find people are oversellers and undersellers too. Me, I’m always trying to be underselling. I try not to overpromise. I try to deliver early. I try to deliver more. Other people are not undersellers:

‘I’ll be back to the car in a couple of minutes.’

‘I’ll meet you there at midday.’

I’ll have it for you tomorrow.’

If you sell the dream, and the dream doesn’t appear when it should, you create disappointment, a phantom version of what you promised. When you let someone down, even in a microscopically small way, you create a microscopically small phantom.

The question is: do you care?

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Categories Communication, Customers, Marketing, Planning, Sales

Timings

April 10, 2017 //
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We often get asked to do a quick job for someone. It won’t take us long. We can ether do it right away, or not do it, or put it off.

One question I always try to ask on a quick job: what are the timings on this?

It’s a small job, I know, I can see that. When do you need it by? You see, it might not be that urgent, and our lives are all about constantly judging a tray of priorities. The priority list is moving all the time, in work or play, with every new thing we do or are asked to do, no matter how small. Time is finite and we can’t do everything. If time was infinite we probably wouldn’t need to prioritise.

So does that person really need it doing right now? The good ones should be able to give you a fair response in terms of its urgency, even if they’re building in some buffer for themselves.

I’m not suggesting you ask about timings every time someone asks you to pass the salt – although makes for interesting dialogue if you refuse to pass it – but if it takes you out of the middle of something time-bound, you can’t re-prioritise without asking about timings. How often have you bust a gut to get something done quickly for someone, and they didn’t need it for ages?

Ask the question.

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Categories Communication, Customers, Marketing
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