Generosity

January 27, 2017 //
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My son is a talented musician. He doesn’t get it from me, unless you count singing in the shower.

He’s just started busking in our local city to raise a few bucks to defray the costs of a summer school he goes to at a University in Dublin. It’s a pretty nerve-wracking experience for a young teenager to plant themselves on a busy shopping street and put themselves out there. He gets a little anxious before it, and worries about what people will think or say, but he gets it done. And he gets a bit of cash.

Quite a bit of cash actually. The other day I kept a distant eye on him for an hour, holed up in a nearby coffee shop. I was able to people watch as well, a favourite pastime of mine.

People are so generous. Their generosity amazes me. People of all ages and types gave him money. While he was playing, in between songs, even before he had started and was setting up. Maybe it’s because he looks younger than he is, or because he’s playing a relatively unusual instrument for busking with, I don’t know.

I know one thing though. We’re lucky that we live near a city which is well known for its friendliness, its arts culture and its generosity. I was blown away by how generous people are.

It restores your faith in humanity, for a while at least :-).

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Categories Communication, General

Client or Customer

January 25, 2017 //
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Client or customer? Which term do you use? I must confess I’m not keen on the word client, at least in business.

I remember having this conversation about a decade ago with a software VP. ‘Which term do you prefer,’ I asked. ‘Oh, I don’t like the word client. Hookers have clients…’ was her reply.

Well, yes, I suppose they do. Yet, so do social services organisations, charities, artists, business agencies and probably a good few professional services companies too.

In business, everything revolves around the customer. But it’s still a partnership between you and your customers, a fair exchange of outcomes between you and them. Usually, they pay money and you deliver products and / or services, but not always. It’s a business relationship built on a series of mutually beneficial transactions over time.

Calling them clients in business – internally within your business or externally with your various stakeholders – puts them on a pedestal and makes for an uneven relationship that’s open to abuse, or at best unnecessary leverage.

Client equals master-slave, whereas customer equals business relationship.

 

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Categories Communication, Customers, Language, Marketing, Sales

Hindsight, Foresight, Insight

January 23, 2017 //
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This post is kind of a Time Part 3, since I already wrestled with the concepts of time here and here.

I’m not a big fan of hindsight. Looking back in time serves no real purpose for me, except if it helps to guide us as to what might happen in the future.

As the financial service companies are forever telling us – while they forever cover themselves – past performance is no guarantee of future performance. It’s no indicator either. It’s a pattern that may or may not repeat itself.

Of course, what we really want is foresight, the ability to look ahead. We often use the word in a phrase beginning something like ‘she had the foresight too…’ when we really mean ‘she had the good sense to’. Anticipating something and playing the probabilities is wise but is still not the same as looking ahead, because we can’t do that. That’s messing with time.

The really powerful form of sight that is definitely within our grasp is insight. Insight comes from high quality and time-sensitive information, and gives us an idea why the concepts of big data, artificial intelligence and augmented intelligence hold so much promise and are maddeningly close to our grasp.

Insight is what we should strive for, because it’s more useful than hindsight and more real than foresight. It’s important not to forget that, because to do so would be an oversight…

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Categories General

Time – Part 2

January 20, 2017 //
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In Time – Part 1 I  wondered out loud what it would do to the notion and fabric of time if we could either see into the future or travel back in time and therefore know everything that would happen between the point in the past we’d arrived at and the point at which we left.

Or maybe our act of moving back in time meant that we could actually re-shape the past and create an alternative future? That’s been the basic premise of more than a handful of books and films over the previous few centuries.

Many scientist are quick to point out why physically it’s not possible for us to time travel, and I spent Time – Part 1 arguing that existentially it’s not possible either.

So where does that leave us? In our working lives and in our family and leisure lives? If we can’t manipulate time, then we have to make the most of it. Which means we have to make the most productive use of it that we can, because, as I’ve said over many posts, it is the most precious resource we possess. We shouldn’t waste any of it. When we run out of it, we run out of everything else.

So, live in the present and give it your best shot, with the best knowledge and resources you have. Time to go.

Categories General

Time – Part 1

January 18, 2017 //
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Ah, time, the fourth dimension, besides width, depth and length. By far the most interesting dimension I think. The one dimension we can’t do anything about. We can’t control it, slow it down or speed it up. It simply marches on.

Wouldn’t it change a few things if you could see into the future, if you knew what would happen? Or, if you woke up one day and it was 6 months ago, and you could relive the next 6 months knowing exactly how things would play out? We’d make millions within a few days.

But if we all could do it, then it would destroy the 4th dimension. It would destroy the gambling industry, but that’s the merest tip of the iceberg. It would destroy risk, probability, choice, and it would destroy freedom. Our paths would be utterly determined.

So, if we solved the riddle of the 4th dimension, we would change everything, immediately and for ever. In fact, immediacy and foreverness would cease to be concepts.

This post is quite deep I suppose. Which, as we just discussed, is another dimension entirely :-).

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Categories General

Palate, Palette, Pallet

January 16, 2017 //
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English is rough. Really rough sometimes, and not just on people who speak it as a second or third language. For us native speakers too.

Take palate, palette and pallet for instances. One is in your mouth, the second is a board for your paints or a family of colours for your product or company identity, and the third is a useful device for stacking, lifting and moving a bunch of items.

All of them sound exactly the same, at least in my accent, to the ear. Yet, they all originate in different root words and consequently are all spelled differently.

I must confess I spelled the second version wrongly the other day. I thought it was double ‘l’ as well as double ‘t’. Thank goodness for autocorrect. And thank goodness too that it wasn’t a fourth spelling variant, at least not to my knowledge.

This kind of thing never fails to remind me of the two different languages we use; the written one and the spoken one.  While you might think that the written one is harder, try explaining to a non-native speaker heteronyms like ‘tear’, words that are spelled the same but mean different things and are pronounced differently. I think I’ll stop there…

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Categories Communication, General, Language

That Not Back To Work Feeling

January 13, 2017 //
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Unfortunately, many people who have to work for a living get ‘that back to work feeling’ after a break. Sometimes it can feel like the break is not quite worth all the effort clearing the workload before the break and the back to work feeling after it.

Unless you work for yourself, or you have your own business. Then you experience a different kind of feeling.

That feeling is ‘that not back to work feeling’.

That not back to work feeling is when you should be back from a break and you should be working, but you’re not working, because you don’t have any work. And when you’re not working, you’re not earning.

So if you’re employed and you’ve got that back to work feeling, rejoice, because you’re being paid for feeling gloomy. You could have that not back to work feeling, in which case you are both unpaid and gloomy.

Disclosure: I have borrowed this phrase from one of my brothers, who used it this morning…

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Categories General

Normal

January 11, 2017 //
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Why do so many of us strive to be normal, to fit in? Is it our natural herding instinct, the safety in numbers? We don’t want to stand out too much, do we?

But what is normal?

Is it a basket of behaviours that can be grouped into a standard, a category or a stereotype? To me, normal is rather like ‘average’. Calculating an average number, or an average person can be a useful yard stick for grouping people or things, if it’s interpreted correctly.

But who is average? Who wants to be average? No-one is average. Average is a mathematical nicety describing a group, not an individual. It’s like when someone says ‘well most people would do that.’ Well, I’m not most people. Besides, how could I be?

So who wants to be ‘normal’? What is normal? Can one person really be normal?

I don’t want to be normal. I don’t want to be thought of as normal either.

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Categories General, Planning, Strategy

Primary, Secondary

January 9, 2017 //
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Almost everything we do is secondary. Not secondary in importance, you understand. Secondary as in it’s been done before, said before, heard before, tried before.

We spend 99% of our entire school and college lives learning stuff that has already been figured out. We’re getting it second hand and not doing the primary work, the genuinely ground-breaking stuff. Remember that odd time when you stuck your neck out in school or college and wrote what you felt was something new, a product of your independent thought? I bet it was marked wrong, right? You’re treading where thousands of people have gone before, so your new thing is not thought to be right – thought being the operative word.

So much of what we do is secondary. Our working lives are about replicating processes, re-working, recycling, renewing what’s been done before. So little of it is actually new, never done before.

There is a very small number of people doing the primary stuff. Making the law, setting the precedent, inventing a financial mechanism, product, sport, piece of technology, process, creating something new and valuable. The rest of us are studying it, reading it, criticising it, adopting it, using it, benefitting from it, and sometimes improving it.

In the world of doing primary stuff there is failure, mistakes, false dawns, incorrect conclusions, disappointment and a huge amount of wasted time. But also, by an order of magnitude greater, there is fame, fortune, progress, history, satisfaction, gratitude and humility.

What primary stuff are you doing, or trying to do?

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

Really Viral

January 6, 2017 //
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There’s nothing like the physical world to give us a powerful corollary of how it works in the cyber world.

I’m always reminded of this in late December when families and friends get together at the end of a few months of solid graft and a winter vomiting bug or two runs riot, moving through areas like wildfire.

That’s really viral, genuinely viral. You can see why the term virus was coined in the cyber world. A physical virus is an amazing thing, replicating itself, producing different strains and moving quickly through people in different cycles and timeframes.

Millions can be affected within the space of a couple of weeks, brought on by the combination of people being at a low ebb and slightly more vulnerable to infection after a sustained period of work, proximity to others, and mobility within family groups and circles of friends.

I’m always fascinated by how terms like desktop, folder, cloud, virus and so on are borrowed from the physical world for their digital equivalent. They always seem so apt.

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Categories Communication, Customers, General, Language, Marketing, Planning, Sales, Strategy, Technology
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