A Lesson In Embracing Change

We often hear people don’t have a natural ability to deal with change, and that’s cited as an obstacle to implementing organisational change.
But I know someone who’s recently embraced radical organisational change with no fear or complaint.
He went from being a part-time member of a 15-person team to being in a team of 30 within an organisation of several hundred.
His hours have been extended significantly; he now has to leave the house much earlier and gets home much later.
He’s mixing with a totally new bunch of people, and has a lot of names to remember.
He’s now using technology every day, whereas before he didn’t have that much experience.
He has a new culture to embrace with its rules, quirks and requirements.
Apart from the fact that he’s knackered every day, he’s never complained once about this big change in his life. In fact, he loves it!
Have you guessed who it is? 
It’s my five year old son. He’s embraced the shift to full time education with no fear or grumbles. 
If only executives and workers could get in touch with their five year old selves, change might be a hell of a lot easier.

You might do R&D, but are you making time for E&D (Exploration and Discovery)?

We’re familiar with the notion of R&D departments in organisations, where products are innovated and developed. It’s a critical investment that gives businesses their edge. But how about an investment in personal discovery? Increasingly we’re locked down in demanding roles and projects, with no time to just stand back and reflect, free of an agenda. Some organisations have introduced initiatives to liberate staff from this kind of working culture. Google allows staff to spend 20% of time on their own projects as a way of developing talent. A small business I’m working with goes one stage further and encourages staff to develop their own ideas extra curricularly with hobby businesses. Another business I know is visionary in advocating that team member sit back and reflect from time to time, rather than be confined to head-down mode all day.

As well as nurturing talent, taking time to explore and discover can be the source of great ideas, adding value to projects and clients in ways that might otherwise have been missed. It’s in those moments of research or reflection that I get my own inspiration flashes. This month I’m aiming to create more E&D time, whether on train rides, in coffee shop thinking, even spending 15 minutes each morning reading the ‘papers. Whilst the tendency is to say ‘I’m too busy to read the newspapers’, these moments have actually been really valuable in spotting ideas and I’ve identified some tangible client opportunities in this way.
So invest in E&D time in your organisation: it could give your business that competitive edge or be the catalyst for a game-changing idea. Don’t say you’re too busy.

So what happened to ‘Thank You’?

Just because we can connect with people in the blink of an eye doesn’t mean we should forget the basics.

I got an approach from someone who was interested in hiring my services. I replied to him. I never heard back (okay, so maybe he changed my mind, maybe I was too expensive, but I'll never know).

A reader emailed me agonising over a decision and asking for career advice. I gave her what I felt was valuable advice. And never heard back (even an email, saying my advice was crap would be better than nothing).

A business owner said he was seeking new people to work with and invited emails to him. I contacted him but never heard back.

I gave some career advice to a student over a coffee. And never got a follow-up 'thanks for your time'.

Sounds familiar?

Sure, we get busy. We change our minds. We don’t need that project, that advice, that supplier. Or we get swamped with feedback when we ask for it. But what happened to those two words -‘thank you’ ?

In this connected world the risk is that people fire off so many tweets, DMs and emails that they become undervalued and meaningless. Not just for individuals but also for brands and businesses. We forget the basics. And there really are no excuses. In our BlackBerry/ iPhone/ iPad ever-connected world, surely there’s 3 seconds for that ‘thank you’, even it’s a ‘thanks but no thanks’?

Don't Over-Engineer It!

What is about an organisation that complicates what should be simple? Why when a small group of people grows to an organisation, do they become blind to simplicity? Why over-engineer problems and introduce unwieldy systems and operating procedures?

So I was in a restaurant in a hotel recently when I discovered the chicken I’d been served was undercooked. I called the waitress over and the meal was taken away. Then nothing much happened. So I called over the Maitre D’ and expressed my disappointment that what I thought was a decent establishment had a poor attitude to food safety. A few feet away from my table was the open-plan counter of a kitchen where the food was prepared. Somewhere around the corner was a chef. I felt like going off to find him or her to get answers to my question, it seemed so simple. The Maitre D’s response? “I’m very sorry sir. You can be sure I’ll be sending lots of emails tomorrow morning to sort this out”.

What the …?

All three people in the equation were there, just feet away. The chef. The customer. The manager.

Emails? A conversation would be a good start.

I figured that if I’d been in a small family or owner-run business it would have been sorted out quickly - and there’d have been no emails in sight.

So at all costs: if the problem is in the kitchen (or the sales office, or wherever), don’t send emails. Just walk in there and sort it out.

Don’t complicate something when it's really quite simple.

Giving Your Small Business An Edge

I’ve just started writing some posts for BNET, ‘the go to place for management’. So if you like my blog posts here you might enjoy the series for BNET with advice to give small business an edge in fast changing markets. My first post ‘Rip Up Your Five Year Plan’ has just gone live.

Do you have a ‘WYT?’ person in your business or work life?

Many of us are working more autonomous than ever as one-person businesses, consultants, freelancers, work-at-homers. There is a whole new generation of workers used to being self sufficient in everything; juggling a sales role with doing the accounts. But however talented you are, and however well-tuned your instinct is, it’s essential to have someone else to bounce ideas off, to provide a reality check, or just to look over a proposal or important document.

I call them my ‘WYT?’-  ‘What d’You Think?’ - people. And I have a few of them: people who have good ideas, others who will provide a fresh perspective on a problem, my wife to be really honest with me about whether something is good enough or not. I have a WYT relationship with my friend/ associate Richard – he calls it a buddy system (and blogged about it here). But whatever you call it, make sure you identify people in your life who you can call upon as mentors, sounding boards or just a fresh pair of eyes and ears.

You may be adept at being multi-dimensional, but you can still benefit from a completely fresh perspective.

David Hieatt's "The Things The Last Ten Years Have Taught Me"

Until last year David Hieatt* was CEO of howies, the outdoor clothing retailer he founded. If you’re a howies customer, you’ll be familiar with some of the touches that make the brand so distinctive. From signs in stores to the catalogue, this is a brand with an attitude and purpose. And it’s refreshingly different.


In their Carnaby Street store in London, I snapped this photograph of the changing room wall. Written by David, it’s “The Things The Last Ten Years Have Taught Me”.

I’ll let it speak for itself (click on the image to enlarge):

* if you’re interested in finding out more about David, check out my post about him on my ‘Unplan Your Business’ website here.

“She was good at serving coffee”: Hiring On Attitude

I asked a client where he’d found his latest recruit.

“She was good at serving coffee”.

He’d met her working part time in a coffee shop and had liked her attitude. Once they got talking and discovered she was looking for a new role, he snapped her up. It wasn’t about her skills, it was her attitude.

And a reminder of the importance of hiring on attitude/culture. Because you can teach skills, but (usually) you can’t teach attitude. Last year I sat in on some interviews where my client was recruiting for a customer-facing role. Every candidate had the right skills and experience, but not everyone had that culture fit.

When I was a manager in my 20s I sometimes took company culture for granted, assuming most candidates could soak it in. I was wrong; I made a couple of hires where the person didn’t fit and that led to issues over productivity and team dynamics. But one hire stands out: the guy had been working at a casino. He had buckets of passion and enthusiasm, a great personality but zero experience. I hired him and we trained him up. All my clients loved him.

Creating Rapid Opportunities From Random Ideas

Being enterprising is about creating opportunities, often out of nothing. These are the opportunities that don’t appear on any plan; they’re more likely to arise from a chance mention in a lift or from an idea you had in the shower.

You just need to be tuned in to what your client’s needs are, and good at reacting fast.

I emailed a client congratulating her on an industry award and suggesting an announcement out to their clients. We’d need to be quick. I assembled a copywriter and designers, got a print firm on stand by and a few days later, a special edition newsletter landed in the in-trays of their clients. It was a great success. Then last week another client mentioned – in passing - an upcoming conference where the management team needed to communicate key messages to staff. “Why don’t you do something on video?” I suggested. We came up with some ideas, filmed and edited this week and the results are now sitting on dvd, just 10 days after that notion.

There was no brief for these projects, they were unplanned (and unbudgeted). But if your ideas are good enough and you can be quick at execution, there’s a stack of unforeseen opportunities out there.

It’ll take innovation on your part, flexibility and vision on your client’s - and sweat from everyone. But it’s always satisfying to come up with a random idea and see it come to fruition just days later.

From A Random Email To A Roof Top In London: Meeting Martijn Sjoorda

I know it's only early days, but this year I'm really enjoying extending my network and meeting new people. One of those has been Martijn Sjoorda. Martijn is a smart guy who helps people and businesses change. He’s a Partner in Dialogic Leadership and Fresh Orange in the Netherlands and we ‘met’ in April 2008 via the website of Tim Ferriss’ '4 Hour Work Week' where I saw a comment he’d posted. I got in touch and sent him some propaganda about my own book; I’m not sure what he thought about my unsolicited email, but fortunately he happened to like my website. We started a dialogue. 20 months later - and after one aborted attempt in Amsterdam - we finally met last week. I love random connections coming to fruition like this; too many people try to contrive 'networking', forgetting the importance of serendipity and coincidence.


Martijn's over-riding passion is to make organisations nicer and healthier places to be in; he despairs at people who leave 70% of who they really are at home. Martijn’s got a great take on people and business so I took some time to grab a short interview with him.



 If the video above is not displayed properly, you can see it on YouTube here

The Idea Moment

More and more of us are trading – and competing - on ideas. From ad agencies like Saatchi & Saatchi to one person companies, we’re all in the ideas business.

But of course ideas aren’t an easily-produced commodity; there is no proven production line for churning out genius game-changing thoughts.

You can spend a whole day, a whole week - or even longer -searching for ‘that’ solution, for the clarity of vision on a project. And still, you might get nowhere, sitting frustrated, manacled to your desk, laptop or notepad, scratching your head.

But all it takes is for one single, simple, short moment of clarity to get *it*. Not always a ‘eureka’/ light bulb moment, not always that jaw-dropping but nonetheless you’ll get it. That solution, a wow product idea or instant solution to a problem will suddenly appear with the instant realisation that this can make a significant difference to your business or career.

The Idea Moment is difficult to define. It’s like scanning the screen or searching across a landscape and not seeing anything. And then suddenly… like a silver lining to a cloud, a glimpse of late sunlight on a cloud-filled afternoon, you get ‘it’; that return of investment, that moment of clarity as all becomes clear. Not even a minute, just a split second of the recognition that it’s a good idea, is enough.

If ideas are important in your business, know what currency of ideas-generation gets results. Know what makes a good idea and do whatever it takes to create and sustain more and more of them.

Think about it.

10 Things I Know for 2010

So as we approach the end of the year, the web is full of predictions & tips for the New Year. Me? What I’m offering up below is not full of jaw-dropping revelations. Just a simple Top 10 List of Things I’ve learnt in running my own business and working with businesses in the last 12 months. And these themes will continue to inform how I work with clients in 2010. Whether you are a small business owner, a department head, a solo-entrepreneur, whoever - I hope it resonates.

1. GO FOR IT. Forget over-planning, focus instead on actually delivering your projects, websites and products. Over-analysis can paralyse your business so don’t spend months deciding on your new brand name, or days and days plotting financial projections before launching a venture, often it’s more important to just go for it.

2. HARNESS DIGITAL TOOLS. “Digital tools”, “social media”, I don’t care what you call it but you have to be on top of the tools that work for your sector, for your message, for your audience. They’re pretty much free and they can be harnessed for enormous value. Don’t just use them to pimp your products, use them to build relationship with the marketplace, to listen and engage with people. I’ve made such a great bunch of contacts via Twitter this year, it’s a great way of expanding your network.

3. POINT OF DIFFERENCE. I make no apologies for banging on about this for the last 12 months; this is what marketing is all about. How is your product, brand, idea, offering different from the rest? Then tell the world about your difference.

4. KEEPING PACE WITH CHANGE. So you, your team, your business, your product has changed over the last 12 months. Question: has your marketing, your language of communication and your sales messages kept pace? If not, update them.

5. COMPETE ON SERVICE. Okay so hardly a new one, but it *still* counts. Are your beating the competition on service, on intimacy, on attention to detail? Because that’s where you can win. We like dealing with people who are nice guys and treat us well. That simple.

6. WHAT ARE YOU ACTUALLY SELLING? I still see so many businesses put the emphasis on selling what they make rather than sell the benefits of what they make. Missed opportunity. Sell what your products and services can do for your customer - sell the applications, not the software.

7. COLLABORATE. A personal goal for me for 2010. We have to recognise that however ambitious and talented we are, we often need other people to help achieve our goals. Find partner companies, new teams, like-minded souls to inject fresh passion and talent in to your projects to achieve game-changing results.

8. GROW DIFFERENT. Business growth doesn’t *have* to be about adding more stores, adding more staff, growing bricks and mortar premises, getting a bigger warehouse. There are smarter routes to business growth. Building intellectual property, building brand equity, growing it online. Keeping the operation small, but building your niche, offering more add-ons, charging clients more (and this route can be lower risk too).

9. FACE TO FACE. Communicate externally with clients and internally with your staff/ teams. Don’t let human relationships deteriorate. For the business that’s got “too busy” to talk to its staff, sit down and have that weekly 08.30 meeting; for the company that let clients lapse, come up with some initiatives to keep in touch. And don’t keep relationships virtual; invest the time and train/rail miles to sit down with clients and teams face to face (Twitter just ‘aint the same).

10. BE REACTIONARY. If you suddenly spot an opportunity, be flexible enough to react to it. If your business model is broken, fix it. If your marketing sucks, change it. If your offering is tired, reinvent it. Be open minded about opportunities, don’t get entrenched in rigid plans. Don’t run away from change, embrace it like crazy.

Stamp Out Workplace Apathy!

I walked past a newly opened clothes shop yesterday morning and saw a woman sitting at the counter. She was looking down, deeply engrossed in reading a book (and nothing wrong with reading a book, but there’s a time and a place).

But I couldn’t help thinking - hasn’t she got better things to do? Tidying up the stock. Changing the window display. Writing emails to customers. Coming up with ideas to fill that shop. Something proactive? Even sweeping the floor?

Okay so maybe she has a bad boss or no one to mentor her (or maybe she is the boss). But there’s no excuse, it’s about using your initiative. Wherever you work – and especially in a competitive job market - I can’t believe someone has ‘nothing to do’, there’s always stacks of things that you *could* be doing, whatever level you’re at in an organisation.

Success – and survival - in the workplace in 2009 is about ‘upping your ante’ to be better than the next guy, so whether you’re working in a business or an employer yourself, take the initiative and beat apathy.

Being Direct In Business Relationships

Like any relationship, business ones can get muddied if neither party is clear about what they want or what they are looking for. That can lead to misunderstanding, frustration or conflict.

Being direct upfront about your expectations or requirements can save a lot of grief later on. Whether you’re having an initial meeting with a client or sounding out a supplier, let them know what you’re looking for and/or ask what they want from the relationship.

Tell them what you want:

‘I’m looking for a new supplier’.

‘I’m looking for a new client’.

‘I want to work with you’

‘I’d love a job with you’

Don’t waste time playing games.

It’s like the approach John Chambers, CEO of Cisco takes to meetings:

Meet Mr Chambers in the flesh, and the small talk lasts for about five seconds, until he asks: “What do you expect from this conversation?” (The Economist Aug 29th)

You might think that’s brash. But at least it’s focused. No room for ambiguity.

Playing Where You Play Best: Part 2

I did a blog post last week about the importance of being ruthless in how you manage your time - focusing on what you enjoy & are good at in your job. I got some good comments back on Twitter and a question from @Leggetter, 'how do you persuade people to let you do that?'

He’s right. Focusing on ‘playing where you play best’ might be easy for jugglers like Gary Vaynerchuk and Kevin Roberts who are at the peak of success. But what if you'd love to apply this mantra to your own working life, but don't know where to start? Here are a couple of tips that I've learnt through my own career.

First, it's about communicating your talents to your boss, co-workers or clients. In my 20’s I joined a company at a junior level with aspirations to rise to the management team (a goal I realised a few years later). But I had to be proactive to get noticed. I displayed my appetite for management wherever I could, producing a monthly report, coming up with ideas, being visible and vocal in team meetings. Of course, alongside that I had to deal with all the stuff I didn’t enjoy so much, but it gave me a new focus. Suddenly people realised I had bigger potential and the organisation started to take me more seriously. I was able to get promoted to take on new responsibilities and focus on what I was good at (and what I enjoyed). Then - and only then - I could start to leave some of those other tasks behind. Success didn't happen over night, but by showing what I could achieve I'd got the opportunity top focus on my passions.

Second, it's about knowing what you're not so good at and communicating that too. It's about being honest and saying 'that's not for me, it's not my strength'. That can be tough in a competitive environment where everyone is looking to prove themselves, but success is not about blindly taking on every task, project and responsibility that gets thrown at you. It's about sticking to your strengths and also knowing your limitations. That honesty shows vision – your boss would rather give a task to someone who was passionate about it than someone who was indifferent. And I do the same in my business - you have to know when to delegate or outsource tasks to suppliers or other team members who can do the job better, or when to turn opportunities or clients down because you know you won’t enjoy them that much.

So start by proving your talents, then be honest about what's not your strength, and then you can focus on playing where you play best.

Start Wandering Around

Tom Peters has always advocated ‘Management By Wandering Around’ as one of the most effective management styles. I never had a name for it – it’s what I did in some of my own management roles. But it was something I learnt. When I started doing a management job and got busy, I spent more and more time sitting at my desk dealing with budgets, proposals, staff appraisal forms, board minutes, meeting agendas, forecasts. But I soon realised this wasn’t spending enough time walking around my team or the operation I managed. So I started wandering around, walking the floors, seeing what was going on. Of course, this got me closer to the business, to the staff and to the customers. It meant I did my job better.

I think more people in management need to get up from their desks and start wandering around. This point was brought home in a documentary I heard on Radio 4’s ‘In Business’ programme about the UK’s Timpsons shoe repair firm. John Timpson manages his 550-shop business by dropping in on them all the time to find out what's going on, day by day. He calls it 'upside-down management'. He and his son James spend 3 or 4 days each week on the road visiting their shops, talking to employees and even serving customers because in James’s words:

‘The business isn’t about what happens at head office, business is about what happens where the money’s taken, and that’s where we need to be’

Don't say 'it's not my job'

Seth Godin had a great blog post the other day entitled ‘All I Do Is Work Here’ about how some people don’t take collective responsibility at organisations – they say, ‘oh no, that’s nothing to do with me, all I do is work here’.

It reminds me of a company that I worked with. They had this really great culture where everyone from the CEO down took full and collective responsibility for what happened at the company. Everyone answered the ‘phones; when a courier turned up anyone who happened to be around would sign for a package; people in finance and admin roles stayed close to the core of the business and ‘got’ what the business did, they knew who the customers were, so they could engage with them too. This created a really strong culture that came to be at the heart of the organisation. But as the company grew, it was decided that there needed to be more organisational structure so workers could be more focused on their respective roles. A mantra of ‘that’s not my job’ was encouraged to focus on individual responsibility.

I don’t like the idea of ‘it’s not my job’. Whatever the size of an organisation, if every part of it can be encouraged to live and breathe what it does; rather than be head-down and siloed in their own role or department, that kind of culture will shine through and can really contribute to a company’s success both internally but also externally.

Ditch the rules and do it your way

In life and business we’re thrown loads of rules about how to do stuff. Policies, guidelines, standard operating procedures.

But often in order to succeed you just gotta chuck away the rules and say proudly ‘I'm going to do it my way’.

Do it.

When There's A Delay, The Importance Of Saying Something (Anything…)

My tube journey on Friday morning was a familiar tale. Delays on the circle line, a 20 minute wait for a train at Tower Hill. As passengers got agitated, checking their watches and the indicator boards, we were treated to repeated recorded announcements saying ‘the circle line is running normally’).

There was zero communication, no tannoy announcement saying when the next train was due, so we could consider other options. Nothing. In the circumstances, even an announcement saying ‘Sorry, we have no idea why the delay is, we’re looking into it’ would be better than nothing. It would have been reassuring, and it would have been courteous.

And – of course – the same is true in business. Don’t give your customers a Circle Line communication void when there’s a problem. Tell them what’s going on, tell them you’re looking into it, tell them if you’re anticipating a delay. I've seen too many suppliers guilty of not bothering; they're scared about how to fix the problem so they say nothing. Even small companies – where communication should be easier – fail to get back to you; they don’t know anything their end, so they don’t know what to say to the customer.

The answer is simple. As soon as you spot a problem, a delay or a headache that’s going to impact the customer you jump on it right away. Tell them, ‘we have a small problem, but we’re on the case and we’ll get back to you soon’. Keep them appraised at every stage.

How did I resolve my frustration on my wait for the tube? I marched up to the ticket office, found a member of staff and asked what was going on and why we weren’t being kept in touch. He radio’d control and asked what was going on, and I got my news on when the next train was.

A good move but should’ve done that from the start. I felt like grabbing the tannoy and telling all the passengers myself. Next time maybe I will....

There Is No Briefing

I saw this sign on a building site the other day. Whilst there are some environments where – absolutely - you should be briefed before you start work (building sites, operating theatres, trains, nuclear reactors, you get the drift…) in the ever changing world of work and business, increasingly it’s a case of learning as you go. And in this scrambled up world of work, there is often no briefing.

Most of us were never ‘trained’ in business or whatever we are talented in. I didn’t go on a course on how to write a book. None of us went on a course to learn Twitter or Outlook or the iPhone. I didn’t go to business school either. There are millions of successful executives and entrepreneurs with no formal ‘training’; their training has been doing the job, learning at the coal face.

We are a generation of workers that learns as we go. Having come from an organisation that used Amstrad word processors, I remember using my first PC in 1993, it was the first time I used a mouse. There was no preparation or computer course for that, you just learnt as you went. And that’s the best way to learn, by actually doing it.

So when people say to me they want to be successful in business, should they take a class at business school? Or they say, I’d like to be an author, is there a writing course I recommend, my advice is simple:

JUST DO IT!