Delegating to Busy People

November 11, 2015 //
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In the olden days, by which I mean in the last century when I was learning my managerial trade, the received wisdom amongst managers was that if you wanted to get something done, you gave it to the person who was the busiest.

The theory goes, I suppose, that the person with more on their plate who is better at getting things done will have more chance of completing the additional task. This assumes, of course, that busy is directly proportional to productive. It also sends a signal to the less able or less committed member of staff that by appearing to be doing less they will continue to see other people’s workload increase to a greater extent than theirs.

It is a short-term approach that has the medium-to-long term effect of alienating and burning out the very people who you want to keep in the business if at all possible. It also does not address the problem of the less able or less committed, who are clearly in need of more training, coaching, and dialogue to help them improve.

As someone who prides himself on getting things done, on executing a high volume of important projects, I can see both sides to the argument. But, as I argued earlier, it is a question of time, that most precious of commodities. Short-term gain, at the expense of long term benefit, is simply a case of robbing Peter to pay Paul. It’s not sustainable. It’s not good management either.

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Categories General, Marketing, Planning, Sales

Parkinson’s Law and Cock-up Theory

November 9, 2015 //
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Those of you who subscribe to my posts and who have a good memory – already that feels like a tiny subset of our sentient race – will know that I’m a big fan of Parkinson’s Law, which states that works expands to fill the time available.

There’s also the uniquely British cock-up theory, which generally attributes things going wrong to a combination of happenstance and plain old human error. My good friend Gaz is a firm believer in the theory and indeed you can argue that some major – not to say seismic – events are the result of what might more euphemistically be called Hanlon’s Razor, or as the Americans would say, “stuff happens.”

This leads me on to suggest that there might perhaps be a variant or additional tenet to Parkinson’s Law, which goes as follows.

“The closer one gets to a deadline for the completion of work, the higher the probability of something going wrong.”

This I believe to be an inescapable truth. As we approach the finishing line for a piece of work, the chance of something going askew – the printer not working, the Internet connection dropping, the mobile signal flaking, the application crashing, a key person we need to reach urgently to confirm or approve something being unavailable – seems to increase exponentially.

What is it, that that causes this phenomenon? Is it simply the case that, as we approach the end of something, and attempt to bring all of the disparate elements or threads together, those threads get caught up in knots?

Greater people than I have wrestled with this problem, I’m sure, and come up with much more convincing explanations than I ever could. Nevertheless, I think it has real validity for us all.

 

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Categories General

In Praise of Arthur Ashe

November 6, 2015 //
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The late, great Arthur Ashe was by all accounts a legend, having overcome a heap of disadvantages to reach the peak of global tennis, only to succumb a couple of decades later to a demise as a result of the cruellest luck.

He is still a role model for many people, and as a native of Richmond, VA in the USA, where I spent a few great months in 2001, he is for me an important figurehead.

He is famous for many things, not least of which are a few quotations which I think apply to work as well as they do to sport. Here are two of my favourites:

“You are never really playing an opponent. You are playing yourself, and when you reach your limits, that is real joy.”

This for me is especially true in the cut and thrust of competitive business. If we can do the best we can for our company, and not worry too much about what the competition are doing, then we can do no more. This, of course, is linked to how well we execute.

“The ideal attitude is to be physically loose and mentally tight.”

Have there ever been better words of advice for how to conduct yourself in an organisation?

 

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Categories Customers, Marketing, Sales

Feeding Back on New Software

November 4, 2015 //
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When you download a new operating system, or a major upgrade to software, or even a minor update, do you ever participate in feedback? Do you ever send the coding report back to the software originators when one of your applications crashes?

Who has time to do this?

Software gets released. It has bugs in it. You, as a software originator, can’t legislate for every combination of systems and applications running together with your code on every piece of hardware. You’d be testing until Domesday.

So you either upgrade early and put up with the glitches, going onto Google to search a problem and download a patch. Or, you wait a while until the major problems have been patched and you take the release late, or a skip it and take a later point release. You’ve relied on a bunch of people who’ve had the time and inclination to contribute their feedback to make a new piece of software better for everyone.

But who has the time to do this?

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Categories Communication, Customers, Marketing

All or Nothing

November 2, 2015 //
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If you’re going to do something, you have to give it 100% or your investment won’t get the benefit you hope for.

Sport is a good example of this in many ways. If you’re going to tackle someone, commit to the tackle otherwise you’ll end up not committing and getting yourself hurt.

Compromising, hedging your bets, trying it and seeing what happens. These are really ways of avoiding a decision. They are succumbing to the fear, uncertainty and dread, rather than making the effort, doing the homework and studying the research. And then committing.

I was reminded of this recently while on holiday. There was a ‘bouncy island’ as a guest attraction in the hotel pool. Think of a bouncy castle, but with bouncy palm trees and bouncy treasure chests. The kids and some of the parents were getting stuck in, pushing each other off the island into the pool and generally having great fun. I was happy to read and enjoy it as a spectator sport.

Finally, after about 2 hours of being encouraged to join in, I gave it a try. After about 60 seconds of being Mr Nice Guy, a child – with sharp nails, it transpired – got pushed into me in the kerfuffle and scratched off the top of my nose.

My own fault. I was patched up and got stuck in after that. It was great fun.

One footnote to add: there’s always an exception to every blog post rule. One of the dads decided it would be great fun to dive off the top of the slide at the end of the island, rather than sliding down the slide – which is why, he now realises, it’s called a slide – and cracked his head open on the floor of the shallower-than-thought pool. Off to hospital he went for 5 stitches, but it could have been a lot worse.

The commitment was there, but not the planning.

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Categories Communication, General, Marketing, Planning, Sales, Strategy

Work and Time

October 30, 2015 //
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Of all the laws and sayings that govern the world of work and play, I think it’s Parkinson’s Law that resonates the most with me.

‘Work expands to fill the time available for its completion,’ or words to that effect. It occurs to me that it also contracts to fit the time available for completion as well.

I was reminded of this recently when a project that had been running for months and had a deadline of 11:59pm on a Friday used up literally all its available time, and a few minutes the other side of the watershed too. We were in good shape mid-week, then a few extra review rounds got wedged in, and before you knew it we were under the gun.

The key thing is this: nothing’s perfect, ever. You can always find another tweak, something that constitutes a micro-improvement. This is especially true of a long, detailed document. The possibilities for a typo, a punctuation error or a stylistic inconsistency are limitless.

Which is why we have deadlines, why we impose limits.

You always have to do your best work, nor settle for mediocre. But, you gotta stop at some point.

 

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Categories General, Planning, Strategy

The Double Edged Sword of Holidays

October 28, 2015 //
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Holidays are great. There’s the chance to unwind, spend some quality time with family and generally not think too much about work.

These days, however, we often can’t rely on somebody to cover for us while we’re on holiday and do the work that we would do if we were not on holiday. So what we sometimes find ourselves doing is working ourselves to a frazzle in order to clear the desk for the holiday, and then returning, somewhat refreshed, to face a backlog and the mountain of work to be done simply to get back up to speed.

When you add the fact that it sometimes takes two or three days to unwind, and two or three days to gear ourselves up for the return to work, it sometimes feels like a week’s holiday is simply not worth the time or investment. Perhaps you’re one of these people who can instantly slip out of work mode and leave all your troubles behind you. If so, you are a lucky person indeed.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m all for work hard and play hard. I need to work harder, however, to enjoy my holidays and make sure that the seams between the work hard and play hard periods are shorter so that they almost end up being seamless.

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Categories Customers, General

Take a Blog Post Miss Dilger

October 26, 2015 //
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Do you remember, back in the days before computers and any kind of automation, managers used to say to their secretaries ‘take a letter Miss Dilger’?

How times have changed. Now we do our own letters and our secretaries are personal assistants helping us with our own productivity.

I was reminded of this recently when I downloaded the latest Macintosh operating system for my laptop. Usually, I ignore these downloads and proceed with my daily work in the normal way. They don’t affect me. Imagine my surprise, therefore, when the latest release of the operating system downloaded some dictation software for my machine. I had to have a play immediately.

As you probably know, dictation software has been around for quite some time, but it has been notoriously unreliable. Either it completely misunderstood the dictated words or needed a vast amounts of corrections afterwards. Well, I have to say that the current dictation software which I am using to create this blog post is nothing short of a revelation. It is unbelievably accurate, easy to use and time saving. It has probably saved me half the time it normally takes to create a blog post. A couple of changes are all I need to make before I publish the post. In fact, the only mistake it really made was to spell my surname Dillinger and that really is no bad thing.

It is a strange feeling when the creative process becomes one of dictating verbally rather than imagining in your head and then typing in your computer. It reminds me of the differences between spoken language and written language. That said, however, to say that this is a somewhat seismic day for me as a writer and blogger is possibly the understatement of the year. Full stop.

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Categories Communication, Technology

Escaping the Blackness

October 23, 2015 //
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About once a year – and I know I’m really lucky and grateful it’s only once a year – I have one of those dark days when I’m really down in the dumps, as we Brits would say, upset even. The feeling of blackness when you’re staring into the abyss. Note that I’m not talking about the phenomenon known as the booze blues here, where you feel a bit paranoid and / or sorry for yourself, through no fault of anyone’s except your own.

Note that I’m not talking about manic depressive psychosis or bipolar disorder here, proper illnesses where the crushing depression, feelings of hopelessness and inner demons must be unimaginably unbearable.

On these days I find it really hard to struggle through a working day. What I try to do on these days is attempt to do a sideways reality shift, in order to escape the blackness. I have a word with myself and I consider how lucky I am and compare my current situation to another that could be a lot worse. I have my health, a roof over my head, and my family are healthy. So how bad is my current situation, really? What’s the worst that could happen to me because of this mindset I have allowed myself to slip into?

This forced comparison of perspective is generally all that’s needed to get me out of that funk. The issue is how long I’m down in the dumps for before I can remember to have a word myself.

I find from both a personal and corporate social responsibility standpoint that a day like this is enough to remind me of the charitable efforts I should be making to those who suffer these feeling or circumstances much, much more often than I do.

 

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Categories General

Music While You Work

October 21, 2015 //
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When I was a school and college student, I never had music to accompany me when I was working. I preferred complete silence so that I could concentrate. As I’ve got older, I occasionally let music intrude, but it’s still pretty rare and it depends on the kind of work I’m doing.

If I have to concentrate really hard on something, maybe a tricky spreadsheet or comparing red-lined documents, no music for me, silence is better. I realise of course that there are many people who couldn’t imagine working – even the concentration-heavy stuff – without music. The contrary works pretty well for them.

There’s the good and bad of music. On the good side, it lifts the spirits and provides diversion from manual or repetitive jobs – or when you’re plain ticked off. Have you ever noticed how hard it is to pick up an accent when someone sings? It’s always fascinated me how that works, something to do with the vocal chords resonating in a different, unifying way when we sing, perhaps.

Time flies when you listen to music, and sometimes that’s a good thing.

On the negative side, music can provide too much of a distraction, damage productivity and sometimes – when you hear a song that calls to mind a certain period or event – can make you plain cross or upset. It’s unbelievably evocative, and that’s its charm and its menace.

Music while you work – good or bad? It depends, of course.

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Categories General
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