Archives for posts with tag: time
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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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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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One Hour

December 9, 2016 //
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I’ll keep this post uncharacteristically short. I’m going to put it out there. It applies for work and play.

No meeting, session, presentation and so on should be longer than an hour. Anything more is too much, unfair to the audience, not a good use of anyone’s time. It’s a productivity and attention thing.

Do we really need longer than an hour? If we do, we should split it up into sessions, with breaks. Look at the educational system, which should be focused on learning, absorbing, retaining and using information. Classes are less than an hour, and double classes should have a complete break.

The exception to this is if you, the customer, the audience member, have paid for the privilege. A film, a show, or an evening with someone. Other than that, it should be an hour, max. It’s all you should need.

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Categories Communication, Customers, General, Marketing, Sales

Umbrella Gridlock

December 7, 2016 //
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A while ago I talked about umbrella wars in London. Lots of jousting and potential for losing an eye in the daily commute.

Interestingly, though, you only see the wars when pedestrian traffic is moving in more than one direction. The other day I was walking from London Bridge train station into the City at rush hour in the rain. Massive swathes of people all heading into work. All heading the same direction.

We crossed north over London Bridge, about 8-abreast. You can’t actually move in the opposing direction, unless you want to jostle with the buses and taxis on the road. The rest of us are in a moving umbrella gridlock, sucked along at one universal speed. You can’t overtake anyone, you can’t slow down. You can only exit from the edge of the river of people. Diagonal or sideways moves, fuggedaboudit.

Everyone moves as one, a huge, multi-umbrellaed beast, a giant tank of black plastic pointiness. It’s a bit of an odd feeling actually, especially if you like to plough your own furrow, metaphorically. When you can’t do it physically, it seems to impinge the metaphorical side. Moving umbrella gridlock.

 

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Categories Communication, General

Get it Out There

November 11, 2016 //
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When is a product ready? When is a project done? When is the document finished?

It never is of course. Nothing’s perfect in the B2B world. It can always be improved upon. It can always receive another iteration. We can always go round again.

Back in the heady dot com days of the late 1990’s, it was all about ‘ready, fire, aim.’ Look where that got us. In many cases it generated false hopes, over-inflated intentions and a lot of failed businesses.

But there’s still an important philosophical argument to be waged between the ‘it’s ready enough, get it out there and see how it goes’ and the ‘no, it needs more work, let’s put the brakes on and get it out late but better’. This inevitably creates tensions within the business.

The younger and more junior you tend to be in an organisation, the more you favour the former camp. Customers will tell us what they think. It’s time to ask them and then we can iterate accordingly, or so runs the argument. ‘Pick a point and go,’ as I’ve said before. The older and more senior you are, with more at stake, and more experience to back it up, the more you side with the latter camp. It’s not going out like this. I’m not happy. We can do better and we should wait, get it right, and offer customers a better experience, you might say.

Hmm, get it right, versus get it out there. When is a product right?

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

Industrial Inaction

October 14, 2016 //
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I was on the receiving end of a transport strike the other day. Or, industrial action, as it’s rather euphemistically called, as I attempted to get into the UK nation’s capital.

Industrial action. It should be called industrial inaction. It’s people who are providing a service – sometimes a single point of failure service – deciding not to provide that service, to do nothing.

Who suffers in this protracted battle of wills between the employer and the union? Other employees of supporting businesses who have to try and take the strain, but mainly the end customer, who funds – partly, I suppose – the service that’s supposed to be delivered but is being withheld.

A hundred thousand working people delayed, inconvenienced, frustrated and stressed. Wedged into late, irregular trains of a skeleton service like passengers on a Japanese commuter train, but with none of the punctuality. Hundreds of thousands of hours in lost productivity, lost contributions to national GDP, per day.

I’m not sure what the answer is, but it can’t lie in the antediluvian practices of outdated bodies, chaos, and meaningless apologies.

 

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Categories Customers, General

Slender Footprint

October 12, 2016 //
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A recurrent theme in this blog is personal productivity. Sometimes it also takes in with it environmental productivity, by which I mean a judicious use of the finite resources at our disposal to get around our place in the world.

This is something we can all do pretty well in the city, where the infrastructure is there to help us. It’s much harder to pull it off in those more sparsely populated areas.

A friend of mine that I work with from time to time has what I would call a slender footprint – in the sense of his carbon footprint rather than the mark his shoe leaves.

He lives in a city, in the nicest part in his city. Most of what he needs on the weekends is within a few minutes’ walk. When he’s working in the office, he has a 5-minute walk to the bus, a 20-minute bus ride into the centre, and a 5-minute walk to the office. A door-to-door commute of 30 minutes, where he can work for 20 of them, is just about perfect.

When he has to travel internationally for work, he can take the train or else a very affordable taxi to the airport. He has a car, but reckons he does no more than 1,000 miles a year in it, taken up by the occasional trip to the golf course or a trip to see the folks.

That’s what I call a slender footprint. Personal and environmental productivity at its finest.

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Rough, Cough, Dough, Plough

October 10, 2016 //
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I wrote recently about how the most simple, innocuous, 2-letter words can cause palpitations in non-English native speakers.

I was reminded of this recently when I was complaining to my son – who is a fluent Irish speaker, schooled through the Gaelic tongue – about how hard it is to pronounce Irish words.

‘It’s much harder than English,’ I said.

To which my son replied, ‘Oh yeah, Dad, like Rough, Cough, Dough and Plough…’ He has a fair point; 4 words spelled with the same last 3 letters, all pronounced differently – uff, off, oh and ow.

Rough indeed. Regardless of our native language, we take its idiosyncracies and querks for granted.

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Three Times a Day

July 6, 2016 //
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Whenever we want to improve at something, or fix something, we devise a plan – or an expert helps us do so. Then we have to commit to the plan. This is true for almost any change management exercise in business, which is another way of saying anything worth doing in business. Change is a constant after all.

This also applies to diet, exercise and health of course. It I want to get fitter, stronger or faster, I get a training program. If I’ve had an injury, an operation or an illness, I get a rehabilitation or recovery programme.

Let’s say you have a bad back, and you want to strengthen the lumbar region, improve your posture, or avoid slouching in your seat. You get some exercises.

But what’s the point of exercises that advise you to do them three times a day? We’re busy people and unless we do this stuff for a living it’s hard enough making time to do them once a day. Three times a day is too much of an ask.

I’ve had a few calf strains the last few years, and I’m advised to do sets of balancing and hopping exercises, three times a day. I’m usually good the first day or two, then I settle at one a day, then 3 times a week when I remember, for a few weeks until I decide I have recovered. Then I reoffend. My point is, I could probably spare 40-60 mins first thing in the morning and get it all over with in one go, but I can’t spare 20-30 mins spread over 3 instances in a 24-hour period. As George Herbert Walker Bush used to say, not gonna do it.

I know, if I was more organised, and maybe set my phone to remind me several times during the day, that I might increase my chances of success. I also know that there is a purpose to doing the exercises a few hours apart on a regular basis. What I don’t know is how you stay with the regime in a non-life threatening situation when you’re a busy person with demands on your time.

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Categories Communication, Customers, General

Prime Now, Prime Not

July 1, 2016 //
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I did a stupid thing the other day.

I packed for a trip to the UK from Ireland, and forgot the power pack for my MacBook Air. Realising the error of my ways, and with an hour’s juice left, I went online to see if I could get one delivered to me the same day. I had heard that with Amazon Prime Now you can get stuff delivered in big cities like London within the hour, which was perfect.

I couldn’t see any Prime Now offers for the charger I needed. Then someone told me that Prime Now was a mobile thing, so I needed to download the app. I couldn’t find the app, which was when that same someone told me I probably couldn’t see the app because I lived in Ireland where Prime Now was not available. No problem, I’ll change my country to the UK in my Amazon settings. Except that it’s not straightforward and you have to jump through a lot of hoops to do it.

No problem said that same someone, I’ll order it for you with my Prime Now app and get it delivered here to the office. Great, except that the app wouldn’t allow him to change the delivery address from his home to the office. Not a good first impression…

We gave up. I walked 3 minutes to a local electrical store, they had the power pack I needed, which I bought, and I was back in the office in 15 minutes.

You see, when your ecommerce technology fails your customers, they leave you and go back to good old bricks and mortar.

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Categories Customers, Sales, Technology
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