More Birthdays

April 7, 2017 //
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I had a birthday the other day. I try not to work on my birthday – at least not a full day and certainly not more than a couple of hours in the home office.

What a great day it was. My mother was over and we pottered around, did a bit of shopping, had a leisurely lunch and then visited a few families and friends to shake hands and kiss babies – literally.

What a great day it was. How quickly it was over, though, and how long to wait until the next one, or even ’til Christmas when, to me at least, it feels like it’s everyone’s birthday at the same time.

So I’ve fixed this. I’m having more birthdays. Yup, more frequent birthdays is the way to go. I think somewhere between one a quarter and one a month is reasonable. I know the Queen has two birthdays a year, her natural one and her official one, but even that feel like nowhere near enough.

I don’t need you to send me a present for every one of my new birthdays, or even any of them. Simply send me happy birthday vibes, and that will suffice. I want that birthday buzz more often, and more birthdays is the way to get it.

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Categories General

Another View

April 5, 2017 //
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If you’re in an industry where you’re creating, writing or building something yourself, and it’s pretty much a lone pursuit, then you can be super productive and get through a lot. No interruptions, no challenges of collaboration around communication, preferences, priorities and preferred ways of working.

Then again, there’s one thing that will benefit your output.

Another view.

No matter how good you think something else is, it will always benefit from another view. If it’s someone whom you respect and whose opinion and experience you value, then they’re bound to bring up something you hadn’t considered. It’s someone whose opinion you don’t respect, then it’s still valuable. You can choose to ignore it.

Of course, this works well when you’re showing something in a fairly developed stage and your second opinion is not having to make too much of a logical or creative leap to see where you’re going with it.

The view of another gives you a different perspective on what you’re trying to do. And getting your head away from your own perspective and towards the perspective of your customer, client, audience or dearly beloved is always a good thing.

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Categories Communication, Marketing, Planning

Get Into It

April 3, 2017 //
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Most of us procrastinate to some degree. Whether it’s a big work project, a domestic chore or a niggling thing we need to get done, we find reasons to put it off.

We’ll start it at the top of the hour, we tell ourselves, or maybe the next day, because we won’t get it done today, even though we often don’t know how long it will take. That new fitness, diet or health regime, we’ll get that rolling Monday, or perhaps the first of the month. You know, make a clean start and all that.

And then that imposed deadline comes and goes and the tiny little switch that blocks out the feeling of serenity kicks in.

I think I know the antidote to procrastination. Get into it. Just get into it!

Once you get into it, you’re fine. You’re always fine. It’s usually not as bad or as time-consuming as you imagined it would be. Thinking about the thing grew in your head until it was bigger than the thing itself.

Make a start. Get into it. Dip in and see what’s involved, see what bits you can break off and get done. And then you’re away.

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Categories Communication, Customers, Marketing, Planning, Sales, Strategy

Semi State Stuffiness

March 31, 2017 //
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Try as it might, the public sector struggles to shrug off that kind of stuffiness, that misplaced and outmoded sense of entitlement and dogma that pervades the administration of the local and national body politic.

Even those sections of the public sector, the NGOs and the semi states as they call them in Ireland, which are more enterprise- and business-oriented than the others, stand out for the wrong reasons. Despite their remit to be business- and entrepreneur-focused, they’re still tied to their bureaucracy and exude a sort of semi state stuffiness that masquerades as public accountability but which is really a difficulty with change.

Take emails for instance. Trivial and everyday though they are, emails have replaced much of our daily communications and interactions and so they’re critically important for establishing rapport and sending the right messages – literally or figuratively – and picking up on the right cues.

The vast majority of emails come into your inbox from ‘first name’ or first name second name’, because that’s who they are and that’s the way the IT admin or the people themselves have set them up. Yet I frequently get emails from public sector bodies and people in the format ‘Second name comma first name.’

What kind of a name is Smith, John? Its nobody’s name. I doubt John Smith has ever been referred to as Smith, John, except in his public sector work email.

That’s the way it was set up, and that’s the way it comes across. Formal, bureaucratic, out of date, stuffy. It sends out the wrong signals.

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Categories Communication, Customers, Marketing, Sales

A Day Off

March 29, 2017 //
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I took a day off the other day. What I would describe as a proper day off. It wasn’t a holiday, and I wasn’t going on holiday. It wasn’t a weekend. I simply didn’t work that day.

I had a bunch of fiddly things to get done, and some errands to run. The kinds of things that I would normally try to wedge into the cracks of a normal working day. Stolen minutes at lunchtime or on a break, going a at breakneck speed to check a couple of pesky items off the list.

What a joyful day it was. I had forgotten what it was like to enjoy your spare time. Ambling around like I had all the time in the world to get my stuff done. No more cursing my bad luck at the traffic or at other people conspiring to to delay me in my rush to get from A to B.

I’ve always been a bit precious about taking the odd day off. This is probably a throw-back to my time as an employee when I had a finite amount of holidays to take and I didn’t want to waste any on needless frippery.

But there’s something to be said for simply taking a day off to slip into the slower part of the stream for a while, to enjoy the journey, rather than the destination.

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Categories General

Check!

March 27, 2017 //
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Check! That’s the one thing I advise you to make part of your life and work DNA, if at all possible.

In this crazy busy, speed-of-now world in which we inhabit, many of us are publishing things the moment we’ve created them. we’re getting things out the door almost as fast as they’re coming into us. In this chaotic, hectic environment it’s easy to forget about the detail.

But consider all the possible instances in your work and home lives when attention to the small things matter:

  • That typo you asked the designer to change in the final proof before you go to print
  • That email someone offered to draft for you to go out to your customer
  • The final touches to the room your painter-decorator promised to do
  • The locking wheel-nut your mechanics said they would put back under the spare tyre in the boot of your car
  • The read-through of your blog post to check for mistakes, before someone else finds them
  • Any work you’re paying for

You’re not micro-managing people when you do this. You’re professionally closing the loop on something you’ve asked to be done, or something you’re doing yourself. No sense in messing up the landing when you’ve flown all this way.

Always check if you can. A second spent now will save you minutes or even hours and money later.

Check!

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Categories Customers

Work Back

March 24, 2017 //
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You’re busy. Super busy. We get that, we all are, or most of us anyway. You work in a business large enough where there are teams, cross-department projects, interdependencies, contingencies, the usual array of complex, human interactions.

You have a full plate of things to do, stuff is coming at coming at you from all sides, and is continuing to do so. Some of it can’t be both urgent and important. You simply can’t get to it all, can you?

Although it’s tempting to put the blinkers on and focus on one thing at a time, you can’t let people down and you can’t leave everything until the last minute, or it won’t get done. So what do you do?

2 things. First, you need to quickly triage every project in which you have a part to play, or where you need something to happen, or where people are relying on you for something. Second, you need to work back.

Yes, work back. Think about the end point, then figure out how long it’s going to take to get to the end point, then work back and figure out when you need to start something, or ask someone to start something. It’s no use putting off the creation of an important piece of collateral for an event until 2 days before the event. It probably takes a week to produce this kind of thing, so delegate it out and brief somebody now, so that they’ve the time to get it done for you. Failing to work back means that you have to ask someone to do the impossible, to pull something out of the fire for you because you didn’t triage – or quick plan – properly.

Get into the knack of working back. It will help you go forward.

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Categories Communication, General, Planning

Frostbite

March 22, 2017 //
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On a Monday evening, if I’m in my hometown, I like to play some 5-a-side footie with my fellow middle-aged men, sans lycra of course.

Recently, I went out for a game. I had a sore calf – again – so I didn’t want to let the lads down and decided I’d play in goal. It was unseasonably cold, snowing and sleeting in fact, and I had a very thin, porous set of gloves on. They got wet very early on, and so did my hands.

An hour later, the pain was unrelenting. I can’t remember having colder hands. So much so that I went grey and felt nauseous. I made it home, but my fingers were so cold they felt solid. I had to gradually warm them up, in agony, for about half an hour before I realised I was, in fact, not going to have a heart attack, stroke, or die.

I probably wasn’t that close to having frostbite, and my fingers were 90% fine the next day. I can’t begin to imagine, however, what it must be like to be genuinely very cold indeed for a long period of time. I think the body and organs must shut down and you must literally want to crawl into a ball and die.

I also know now why scaling Everest or Arctic trekking isn’t on my bucket list. Sawing off frost-bitten fingers is not on my top-1000 list of things I’d like to do.

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Categories General

Selling Ciggies

March 20, 2017 //
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I don’t know too much about business-to-consumer products sales and marketing, except as a lifelong consumer of them myself. I’ve also never smoked. I took a look at a cigarette box the other day, as I hadn’t seen one up close for a while.

It’s an odd existence marketing and selling cigarettes isn’t it? Even if you smoke them yourself. Working for a cigarette manufacturer must  feel like being a social pariah.

The packaging on fast-moving consumer goods is one of the traditional 4 P’s of marketing, along with product, price and promotion. Yet when you look at cigarette packaging, everything on there is advising you not to buy it. The cigarettes are also behind the shop counter hidden in a cupboard where you can’t even peruse the packaging.

You can’t advertise them through most media, thanks to the regulations of elected government officials, a good proportion of whom must be smokers too. If you work for a cigarette manufacturer you can’t get life insurance benefits or an occupational pension, so the manufacturer has to provide its own.

It’s flippin’ expensive too, at least if you pay your country’s duty on them.

Against all of this, people still buy a lot of cigarettes. Why is that? For one thing, cigarette smoking is still portrayed as being cool in TV and film, almost something to be aspired to.

Front and centre, of course, is the obvious physiological pull of the nicotine, as well as the behavioural comfort that comes with smoking too.

Without those addictive and behavioural factors, I wonder how successfully other things would sell if this amount of sales and marketing restraints were placed on it.

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Categories Communication, Customers, Marketing, Sales

Fake News

March 17, 2017 //
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Fake news has to be the word – or words, if you’re pedantic – of 2017 so far. You have your ‘proper’ news, and then you have your fake news. It’s either true, or fake, isn’t it?

Well, not really. News is really the current form of history. And history is not the truth, it’s simply someone’s account of what happened. A lot of that depends on your perspective. After all, one man’s terrorist is another man’s freedom fighter, right?

News is not black or white, true or fake. There are degrees of it, all the shades in between black and white. It’s one account over another. Or, in today’s world, it’s one person’s edit over another’s. Even in real-time streaming or television it’s one person’s camera angle over another, what they choose to frame in the shot, rather than what another does. Even if you’re in the thick of news or history being made, your view on what’s happening depends on where you are, and your perspective, both literal and otherwise.

The key thing here is that if there are enough people – or people with power – promulgating a certain view of the news, then it becomes harder to analyse fairly, examine and resist that view. That in itself is a very solid form of control that has served governments well since the invention of, well, governments.

 

 

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Categories General, Marketing
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