In Praise of The Guide Runner

December 4, 2015 //
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Is there a more noble and altruistic profession than the guide runner? This is the person who trains and races with a visually impaired athlete, tethered to them and driving, encouraging and helping them stay on the straight and narrow, locked together.

I put them on a par with other selfless members of the caring professions. The guide runner has to be a faster runner than the athlete, but subjugates his or her own ambitions for the good of his or her ‘customer’. Sure, they get to bask in the shared glory of a podium finish, but the sharing isn’t even, nor should it be.

This smacks to me of true dedication. I think – although I don’t know – that the guide runner is much more to the athlete than simply a guide runner. The nature of the job demands much more aspects to the relationship.

And then, as quickly as you can say ‘knife’ – as my father used to say, a phrase which always struck me as somewhat arcane – your customer can drop you, in search of a new partner, some new chemistry.

You must feel like a football manager at times, never more than a couple of poor results away from the professional guillotine.

 

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Categories Customers, General

What is 8 Hours Sleep?

December 2, 2015 //
2

What is 8 hours of sleep exactly?

I love my sleep, and I need it too. I can’t get way with much less for more than a couple of days before I’m rotten company. The thing is, though, how do you count 8 hours’ sleep?

I go for 8 hours a night if I can, mainly because that’s the received medical wisdom and also because I can’t get the things done I need to get done during the week if there’s less than 16 waking hours left. I sleep more on non-busy weekends, partly to catch up if I’m in debit, and partly because I would sleep more if I could.

But I count my sleep from the moment I close my eyes, until the moment the alarm goes off. It doesn’t matter if it takes me a bunch of minutes to fall asleep – unusual – or if I wake up before my alarm – also unusual unless I’ve something important to wake up for and then the body clock helps out. If my eyes are closed, or I’m dozing, that’s rest and therefore good enough for me.

Perhaps it’s impossible to know how long you’re sleeping, unless you have a partner who spends a month measuring the exact time it takes you to fall asleep so that you can compute an average time to factor into your calculations of ‘true’ sleeping time. This also assumes you don’t have moments – or hours if you suffer this way – of wakefulness in between.

So for me, I keep it simple. From eyes closed til getting out of bed is the sleep I get, no more, no less. A third of the day recovering and filling the tank for the best two-thirds I can manage.

 

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Categories General

Hindsight Schmindsight

November 30, 2015 //
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Hindsight is a wonderful thing, or so they say. What seemed so unfathomable before it happened is the blindingly obvious conclusion now that it’s happened. And don’t we just love it when people say ‘well I could have told you that would happen.’?

Here’s my take on this. When we look at what happened with the benefit of hindsight, we see a linear connection of causal events. It’s a straight line going backwards.

When we’re faced with what’s about to happen, it’s not linear. It’s multi-linear. It can go a number of ways, and it’s unclear which way will turn out best for us. Maybe all of them will, maybe some, maybe even none. The multiplicity of choices we face with every passing second is the constant. We’re lucky we have the freedom and the intelligence to make them.

We’ll always have hindsight, and sometimes we feel like we have insight and even a bit of foresight. But you can’t turn time back and give it another go. With every fresh project you have to keep moving forward. Consider the information, make your best decision, and go.

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Categories Customers, General, Marketing, Planning, Sales, Strategy

Playing the Numbers

November 27, 2015 //
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Have you ever seen a poor bookmaker? No, I didn’t think so. They understand the mathematics and they play the numbers. The numbers are their business. The business of probability, taken to the nth degree.

We should play by the numbers in work and life too. It makes total sense to manage things by the probabilities. What are the chances of this happening? What seems the best option? What’s the worst that could happen and how likely is that?

OK, so we might get tripped up every so often, but we can never legislate for the 1-in-a-million thing happening so why worry about it?

Air travel is still far and away the safest form of travel. While ‘what’s the worst that could happen’ is pretty unthinkable, it’s still the safest form of travel.

You have to live your life, otherwise you’d never leave your bed, swallowed up by fear, uncertainly and dread.

Playing the numbers is about understanding risk and what the risk is for a given situation.

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Categories General

Warts and All

November 25, 2015 //
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No company is perfect. When you work for an organisation you know about – or tend to hear about – its issues, problems, flaws and so on. You know what it’s really like under the hood.

All organisations are plagued with a lack of resources necessary to do a perfect job, which is why the perfect job doesn’t exist. The more resources you hire, the more you need.

It’s easy for us to get consumed by the things that our product doesn’t do well, or at all. We know the full story in most cases. It’s us who have to deal with the internal horror shows, and patch things up behind the scenes.

I used to know a lady whose husband worked for an aircraft manufacturers. He wouldn’t fly on the planes his team had built. He had seen the compromises, the short cuts they had made.

It’s our perspective on the warts and all, after all, because we have to work on the warts. We don’t see the full picture. We don’t appreciate the checks and balances being performed in other parts of the business.

Our customers certainly don’t see the warts, until they buy and start to use the product. And even then they might not see them, because they may only use part of the product. No product is perfect, but if your product does all the key things well, then that’s what makes your product successful.

You see, warts and all ain’t so bad. Only from your perspective.

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Categories Customers, Marketing, Planning, Sales, Strategy

Too Much Safety is Bad for You

November 23, 2015 //
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I’m all for proceeding cautiously, in business or in life. Some of us are more circumspect than others. It’s question of degree.

Too much caution, however, too much safety is bad for you, and can kill you. You can only take so many precautions, otherwise you’re wracked by indecision, the opportunity is gone, and you’re too late.

How many times have our children – or we see children – spend an afternoon plucking up the courage to do something like dive or jump off something high, only to lose their bottle and spend the journey home lamenting the fact that they didn’t do it.

I was reminded of too much safety in a rather humorous way the other day. I arrived at the local pool to pick up my daughter and her friend from swimming and there was a young boy having the time of his life. He had found the pool’s stash of arm bands and had put 3 on each arm and 4 on each leg. He was a mini orange Michelin Man.

As as the pool attendant saw him waddling around on the pool side, however, she told him sternly that no arm bands were allowed on the legs, it was dangerous. I guess if you had them on your legs and not your arms they might tip you up, but the irony of the situation wasn’t lost on me.

Too much safety young man! A lesson for all of us, for all our lives.

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Categories Customers, General, Marketing, Sales, Strategy

The Discipline of the Regular Event

November 20, 2015 //
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Most of us love routine. It grounds us, makes us feel comfortable and better able to handle what life throws at us.

I’ve written before about the discipline I enjoy from writing this blog. The quantity of my audience is of secondary importance, though I hope the small number that do subscribe or come across it feel the quality.

Some time ago, my wife turned 39. I had pondered long and hard about how to commemorate this event. For my 40th, my good lady had bought me 40 – yes 40 – presents. Now some of them were very small, but they were all extremely well chosen. My wife is not a big fan of shopping, but she is of Olympic standard when it comes to buying gifts for others.

With the bar set so high, then, I wanted to get it right. My answer was a concept that I called ’40 for 40’, an unwitting homage to the fabulous ESPN sports documentaries with a similar name. I decided that every week, for 40 weeks before my wife hit the 5th decade, I would present her with a gift and a card extolling one of her many virtues. Cute, huh? It was actually pretty tough finding 40 different and appropriate presents to reflect the topic of my card. The weekly discipline became a challenge I enjoyed. Sometimes I was a few weeks ahead of the game, and other times I was sweating it the day before.

I don’t remember ever missing the weekly deadline, and at the end of the 40 weeks I presented her with a book I had printed that collated the sentiments from the previous 40 weeks.

There’s interesting postscript to this example: whilst my good lady was very appreciative of the gifts and the thoughtfulness, the one thing she didn’t like was the weekly reminder, 9 months in, that she was ending one decade and starting another…

Still, you can’t win them all. I enjoyed the process :-).

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Categories Customers, General

Beware the GVV

November 18, 2015 //
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There is a certain type of person, a certain type of character, that it’s unhealthy to be around for too long. I call this person the Good Vibe Vortex, or GVV for short.

The GVV is not a positive person. Stuff happens to the GVV. Sometimes it’s of their own making, sometimes it isn’t. Sometimes they don’t even know they are a GVV, sometimes they do.

The GVV is hard work, they’re painful company. They suck away your positivity like a hoover, and you can feel your good vibes, your good energy, the great mood you were in, ebbing away. They are depleting your life force. It’s not simply what they say, there’s something about their whole aura that spells ‘d-o-w-n-e-r’.

This person is not always as obvious as the blue character in the film Inside Out but you get a feeling pretty quickly that they are someone who sees only – and therefore gets bogged down by – the sad, the hurdles, the difficulty. And lo and behold, the self-fulfilling prophecy occurs and stuff happens to them again, taking you with it if you’re not careful.

Yes, beware the GVV. Beware the invasion of the good vibe-snatchers…

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Categories General

Write What You Know

November 16, 2015 //
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Here’s a pretty obvious thought for you: write about what you know.

It’s the advice that would be novelists always receive, and in fact it applies to anyone in the creative space.

Once in a while you get insights from the really good writers into how this applies to them. I remember Ricky Gervais giving the perfect illustration of this from when he was a budding writer at school, and clearly it has served him well from that moment on.

I recently finished reading an early crime thriller by American author Michael Connelly. It was his first book featuring the detective Harry Bosch. The Bosch series is now at about 20-plus and growing. At the end of the book, Connelly explained how his eponymous character came about, and it was essentially the melding of 3 or 4 important influences on him when he was growing up. As simple as that.

It’s the same for business of course. Write about you know. Otherwise, you’ll be found out. If you don’t know, find out and get the facts, so you do know what you’re talking about.

I find that when I’m researching something that’s new to me, so that I can write compellingly about it, the more people I speak to the better, up to a point. It’s like a reverse onion. With every new person you talk to, you get a new layer, a fresh perspective, a different angle on what you thought you knew, until you have as full a picture as you’re going to get without the decreasing marginal returns of going to more people.

Then you can write, because you know.

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Categories Communication, Customers, Language, Marketing, Strategy

The 80-20 Rule of Volunteering

November 13, 2015 //
2

The 80-20 rule, or Pareto principle, is a useful mechanism for understanding how things in the world of work – or play – play out.

When it comes to volunteering, I see this rule operating pretty accurately. I use the term of volunteering in the broadest sense possible. In my hometown, there are a number of voluntary bodies and helpers working for the community and its subsets. The thing is, you tend to see a lot of the same faces cropping up in a lot of these groups.

I suspect that 20% of the available people are doing 80% of the voluntary work that a given community needs fulfilling for it to operate satisfactorily. The remaining 20% is the 20% that does not get done. It’s the 20% that is owed to the community by the other 80%.

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Categories General
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