Productivity and Ageism

June 8, 2016 //
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It sometimes seems to me that personal productivity is a rather elegant bell curve, with age on the ‘x’ axis and effectiveness on the ‘y’.

When we’re young, we’re learning how to do stuff. It takes us an age, the stuff that we take for granted and do on autopilot when we’ve got a couple of decades at it under our belt. Then, as we get older, we seem to lose some of our faculties and get slower. We can compensate for the lack of mobility and strength with experience and an agile mind, but as we get much older the routine stuff – involving major and minor motor skills – is like that of a pre-adolescent.

While I realise the concept of the circle of life is nothing new, it nonetheless amazes me how much we can get through between the ages of 16 and 60, compared to the relative plodding progress either side of that range. We have experience, expertise and energy. I for one, given the financial turmoil of the last decade, hope that my productivity doesn’t dip until I’m well past retirement age. Either that or I need to have found an income source that requires cerebral heavy lifting rather than the literal variety. This seems much more scalable, since if it’s something like books or software I’m producing, I can sell additional units at next to no extra cost.

Perhaps we’re missing a societal trick with this ageism lark. Maybe, as our energy levels decline but our marbles remain intact, we should simply move to a different type of work and productivity, rather than simply succumb to the stigma of the three score years and ten. This move would need to be at a community level, not an individual one. After all, the generation retiring now is literate, and probably computer literate at that.

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Categories General

A Firm Handshake

June 6, 2016 //
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What is it with a limp handshake? When someone greets you with a wet fish for a handshake, it’s sometimes hard to shake off the first impression that someone is weak, diffident or not interested in you.

A firm handshake costs you nothing and sets off that first-time greeting or regular hello on an equal footing, no pun intended.

Notice that I’ve titled this post ‘a firm handshake’, not ‘the firm handshake’. I’ve written before about my love for the definite article, but here its sister the indefinite article is better. There is no single firm handshake, unless, I guess, you’re a practising member of a quasi-secret society.

Any kind of firm handshake will do. It doesn’t have to be a bone-crusher. Go into the greeting with something in the mid-rage of grip solidity and adjust according to the grip you’re given.

Incidentally, if you do come across one of those people – male or female – who has to grab you like a vice every time, or you simply have smaller hands, then I find that slightly pointing the index finger takes the knuckles on your hand out of alignment and alleviates the pressure. Then you can eyeball them with your favourite ‘I’m onto you matey’ look.

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Categories Communication, Customers, General, Sales

From 0 to 10

June 3, 2016 //
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They say that getting to $10m in revenues is the hardest stage for a B2B company. Why is that?

Well, it’s a combination of factors. In the early days you’re still tinkering with your business model. You’re still figuring out product-market fit. You’re not sure what to concentrate on, to whom, and where. You can’t reap the benefits of scale.

Perhaps most importantly, though, you’re in a real life situation, and subject to the normal pressures of working with other people, both in your company and outside your company. You’re trying to develop something that’s going to have the right appeal to a sufficiently large enough market, yet you probably have a small number of customers who exercise a disproportionately large influence on you, in terms of how they want you to develop your products and services.

You’re torn between giving the paying customers what they want, which is essentially something that’s customised to their requirements, and developing something that does the job for the maximum part of your addressable market, but which doesn’t immediately translate into positive cash-flow. This is especially true in software.

Any company can sell an idea and get funding, possibly running into the millions. Any company that can get from 0 to 10 million – in revenues – and beyond is a different proposition, an animal that has risen above 90% of the other animals and proven itself. It will still have challenges, but it’s done what many have tried and failed to do. It’s a player.

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Categories Customers, Planning, Strategy

The Wrong Way Round

June 1, 2016 //
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It’s easy to be self-absorbed, and to think that everything revolves around us, and is geared to us. After all, the human race has been doing it for centuries, believing that the earth was the centre of the solar system. We still do it.

Aren’t we lucky that the earth is revolving at thousands of miles an hour and we don’t fall off, or over?

Aren’t we lucky that we can eat so much that naturally grows around us?

Aren’t we lucky that the composition of the air around us is OK for breathing?

Isn’t it great that we’re naturally suited to a planet with nice ambient temperatures in the -50 to +50 range?

Er, no to all of that…

We have it the wrong way round of course. We forget that we are the product of millions of years of evolution, that we have gradually chiselled ourselves to fit the environment, not the other way round.

The man-made world is geared around our bodies, the position of the sensory organs within our frame, our dimensions, and what makes us exist. As Mark Twain once said – and I’m paraphrasing here – isn’t it great that my glasses fit perfectly round my ears? You can make the same argument for bikes, cars, keyboards, everything.

I’m sure we wouldn’t devote as much priority to bedrooms in our houses if we didn’t spend a third of our lives in them. We sleep on average 8 hours a night. Aren’t we lucky we have comfy beds and nice bedrooms with calming, tranquil decor?

Looking at things the right way round – not the wrong way round – and putting what’s important at the centre of our thinking, rather than ourselves, helps us be better people, better marketers, better business people, better politicians.

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Categories General

The the

May 30, 2016 //
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I love the definite article, otherwise known as ‘the’. This is not a post about the ’80’s electronic band of the same name as the blog post title, it’s about the importance of the word the.

Some languages do without a definite article, like Russian. What an awful waste of possibilities! Like having one hand tied behind your back.

When I was in my mid-teens and studying ancient Greek, I remember disagreeing with a writer on Greek tragedies. He argued that the ‘the’ was a small, unnecessary word that didn’t deserve to grace some of the greatest plays of all time, like Agamemnon or Persai. They deserved to stand on their own, he said. It’s one of the earliest times I can remember where I displayed to myself a developing critical faculty, that I didn’t simply believe everything I was told or read from learned people.

For me the the was grand, majestic even. ‘The Agamemnon’ sounded so much more substantial than leaving it to its own devices, naked without its accompanying defining word. Agamemnon, meh!

You’ve probably noticed, if you’ve read a few of my posts, that many of them have titles starting with the the. It’s not called a definite article for nothing. ‘The’ defines what you’re talking about, gives it focus. It’s not a something, it’s the something.

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Categories Communication, Language

Schadenfreude

May 27, 2016 //
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Someone’s misfortune is almost always someone else’s fortune.

You get offered a great job or contract, someone else loses out. Someone gets pulled over for speeding, you escape punishment. You find a wallet, someone loses theirs, and the contents, giving them a truly frustrating day cancelling cards, and ruing lost money and irreplaceable keepsakes.

What do you do in these situations? Do you indulge in a bit of schadenfreude and have a laugh at their expense, being secretly relieved that it didn’t happen to you?

Do you return the wallet you found, or do you pocket the contents? Do you take a perverse pleasure in someone else’s reversal, or do you help out, knowing that at some point you’re going to hit a downer and hope to meet someone who can lift you up?

It’s karma baby, you do with the situation as you see fit, and everything will, in all probability, level out over a lifetime. But make sure you’re in credit, in case you need to make a withdrawal…

Categories Language

Just A Few Thoughts…

May 25, 2016 //
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I used to work for a CEO who would give his considered feedback thus, ‘So Paul, just a few thoughts…’

I’ve expressed my dislike of the word ‘just’ before, but in this case it is well used. Coming from your CEO, ‘just a few thoughts’ could be translated into one of two ways. First, it’s ‘here are a few things you need to do to this version before I’m happy with it.’ The second is ‘here’s my feedback, your call on what you do to improve the document.’

How you interpret those few thoughts depends, of course, on you, your boss, and your working relationship. Do you have genuine autonomy, and work for someone who’s leadership style is the right blend of genuine delegation and guidance? Or do you work for someone who prefers to sign everything off and in effect has a more micro-managing style? If either is the case, what do you need to stop doing, start doing or continue doing to progress?

Over time we learn the style of the people we report into it and we become finely attuned to how they operate, what their values are, and what’s important to them. When we work successfully with them we’re effectively selling to them. I used to work with another CEO who would repeatedly say ‘yes’ at breaks in the flow while I was pitching an idea or a project to him. I used to call it the ‘yes that means no’. I knew that he was not with me and I needed to re-approach differently or pick another battle.

When you ask your CEO for feedback on a second version, and you get the ‘just a few more thoughts,’ well, then you’re probably running out of time…

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Categories Communication

Ignoring Your Customers

May 23, 2016 //
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Have you heard the joke about the lady who gets a sneak preview of heaven, gets showed around, loves it, and then when she dies and goes to heaven, finds it to be a wretched place? When she asked what happened to the place, she was told, ‘Ah, well, before you were a prospect, now you’re a customer.’

I thought this practice of ‘offer only available to new customers’ – ie up yours to current customers – was dying out. If it is, no-one has told the internet-based car hire aggregator I’ve used every month for the last 15 months or so. They were happy to email me regularly with special offers that weren’t all that special, but at no time did they invite me to register with them for additional discounts. You would have thought that after booking with them – giving my email address – that they would want to further bind me in with genuinely good offers, but no.

Their reservation process failed me recently, so I went online to use the help and chat areas, and also to search for my reservation, of which there was no record. It was then that I saw I could actually register with them to manage my bookings. Once done, I discovered that I could have earned significant discounts after a certain number of reservations that I had passed months ago.

You can’t tell me that it escaped their notice that I had made a bunch of bookings and would appreciate a reward for my loyalty, thereby further endearing me to them.

They didn’t, I would have, so now I’ll try someone else. They’ve had their one chance.

 

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Categories Customers, Marketing, Sales

Belfast-Belslow

May 20, 2016 //
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I had occasion to visit the city of Belfast recently. Despite living within the same landmass for about a dozen years out of the last 17, I had only gone through Belfast on the train and never stopped in it.

It’s a nice, compact city, with a thriving centre and rolling countryside a few minutes away in every direction. Some of the regenerated city centre areas are very swanky and everything seems simply a stone’s throw away.

The folk are very friendly, the food and drink is good and accommodation likewise – at least in my very limited experience.

Unfortunately, like a lot of city centres, the traffic is truly awful. I left – or tried to leave – the centre at about 5pm on a weekday. Admittedly this is the heart of the rush hour, but with the spur onto the motorway a few hundred metres from downtown, I was confident I could get away in a reasonable time.

How wrong I was. Belfast was Belslow. It took me 40 minutes to go 200 metres, the principal culprit being 2 complex junctions within 10 metres of each other which operated on the same traffic light rotation. The result: gridlock, with no-one able to advance everywhere. The pedestrians simply scooted between the cars, blissfully free of the large metallic impediments that I and my fellow drivers were saddled with.

So a great visit to the capital was somewhat soured by the appalling traffic, not helped by the fact that once I got onto the motorway I had another three and a half hours to go.

Once cities sort their private transport challenges out, then they’ll really be motoring.

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Categories General

The Dietary Peril of Flat Bowls

May 18, 2016 //
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My mother has rectangular dessert bowls that she uses for cereals, and, well, desserts.

They’re deceptively capacious. You cover the bottom of them with your cereal and barely dress them with some milk, and it feels like you’ve hardly got anything in there.

Nothing could be further from the truth. It got me thinking about unconventional approaches to things and how they can often take you by surprise. This can work in both good ways and bad.

In the case of flat bowls, you feel like you’re not eating much, when you’re probably eating more, a true double whammy and definitely the bad side.

That’s dietary peril for you. I’m sticking to small crockery from now on.

 

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Categories Communication, General
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