You know the story of boiling the frog.  Fill a pan with cold water, immerse your frog, and heat over a low flame.  The hapless frog dozes through the gathering crisis and is eventually boiled alive.

Our little green friend’s death is not in vain, because he provides us with a handy metaphor.  How many of us can boast of a similar immortality?  (The journalist James Fallows, for instance, will only be remembered for complaining – for years and years and years – that the frog-boiling story is not borne out by science. So?)

Businesses regularly boil to death. (No, not literally, James.) Kodak, for example, didn’t just sit in the saucepan; they lit the match by inventing the first digital camera in the 1970s. They had 35 years to climb out of the pan, but they’ve just filed for bankruptcy.

So how can we wake people up to the seriousness of a problem or crisis? Humans don’t pay enough attention to crises because we are homeostatic. We have great faith that things will soon return to normal. We like the warm water, rather too much.

The obvious answer – to shout about the problem – doesn’t seem to work.  It puts you head to head. People get depressed or frightened or disengaged. They hide their heads deeper in the sand. Or they desert what they see as the sinking ship. They don’t like your burning platform. (These are metaphors, James, metaphors.)

I suspect that a better way is to lead people to the problem rather than pushing the problem at them.  What does that mean? Well, take the time to find out what’s important to the people around you. Then find a way to help them achieve what they want to achieve. Be on their side; be by their side. Then point to the problem and figure out the implications together – and come up with solutions together.

A company I was working with had suspected for years that technology was going to make their service redundant. They were reluctant to face up to the problem. The water was simmering and they were drifting off peacefully. The research director called me; together we worked on a wake-up event.

The first instinct was to scare the bejesus out of everyone.  Mercifully we resisted the temptation; I suspect we would have destroyed any energy and so achieved nothing.

Instead we designed a workshop where we got the psychology right. First we explored what the company was achieving for its clients; then we debated the talents and motivations and enthusiasms of the people in the room; and then we faced up to the main issue. We had a series of high-impact presentations from the researcher, a client and a software developer. The mood was positive but determined and serious.

Finally we looked for new ways to perpetuate the company’s good work in a new era. The result was a new surge of ideas for enhancing their service beyond the ability of technology to compete.

“Economists are pessimists: they’ve predicted eight of the last three depressions”
  Barry Asmus     

This explosive document was found in a bin in Westminster. Annotated by an unknown economist at the Office of Budget Responsibility, the scrawled notes blow the lid off the financial forecasts for UK plc.

Actually, that’s not true.  Yes, it summarises the GDP forecasts from the UK’s Office for Budget Responsibility.  However, I nicked the original from the Daily Telegraph website, and added my own jottings about what might have been going through the mind of the analysts who put it together.

Are my additions cynical?  Absolutely! I’ve been through similar exercises myself and I know the pressures.

The numbers are a classic “hockey-stick”. They suggest that the UK will return to a ‘normal’ level of growth in a few years’ time. But can we believe it? The short-term forecasts have been dramatically wrong. Why on earth should we place any trust in the longer-term forecast?

Indeed, what if this – all the change we’ve been through over the last four years – is the new normal?  Low growth – or no growth? Massive unpredictability? Huge capital swings? And the associated sense that there is nothing at the centre – no central economic and political expertise, authority or even influence over events – with all that that implies for our confidence in democracy?

This graph proves that forecasting is a mug’s game. And protesting that “circumstances have changed” just emphasises the point.

But planning is different. It’s still essential. It just has to happen more quickly and more frequently. Maybe the sort of dilemmas we face are more tactical and short-term, but when decisions are difficult, we’re more likely to reach better answers if we keep the big picture in mind, like our direction or our purpose or the many timeless business truths.

The overall vector of GDP looks dreadful right now.  Remember, though, that it’s the average of hundreds and thousands of individual vectors.  Who wants to be average?

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So, in the next few blog posts, I’m going to explore some of the things we can do to put more distance between us and the average. If we have any influence over our own future, there’s no reason to be satisfied with average performance. But we need to be clear about how we’re going to beat the average.

Here’s the first recommendation:

Get crystal clear about why you and/or your business are valuable.

We all know about elevator pitches, but one of the anecdotes about the late great Steve Jobs takes the concept further. It’s said that if you found yourself in a lift with him, you’d better have a compelling reason why you were working for Apple – or you wouldn’t be by the time you arrived at your floor.  (And there are only four floors at their HQ, by the way.)

If your pitch doesn’t work, you’re fired.  Concentrates the mind, doesn’t it?

An elevator pitch is a statement about why your services or products are valuable. It’s really hard to get right. You face two classic marketing challenges: ignoring your own perspective in favour of others’, and throwing away all your ideas except the single most crucial one.

The ideal starting point is “We help these people with this problem to reach this result.”  Once you’re clear about that, then you can refine it to something a bit more elegant, like “melt away the misery of indigestion, fast.”

My own is “I help busy teams hammer out great business strategies”. This only took ten years to formulate (thanks Andy and thanks Jane). I can justify each word, and more importantly I can back it up with plenty of examples. Would I survive the journey with Steve? Hope so.

What would you say? You’ve lost the chance to say it to Steve, but lots of people – investors, bosses, employees, customers – will be demanding answers in 2012. Getting your response crystal clear will give you a big advantage – and real confidence.

Many computer games are divided into levels.  The levels may represent different locations, or chapters in a story, or degrees of difficulty.

At the end of each level is a Boss, a giant enemy. Maybe he’s a Martian zombie mutant, for example.  All those little Martian zombie mutants you’ve been dodging and chasing and shooting through the game so far? They’re insignificant compared to the Boss.  He’s rough and tough and very difficult to kill.

And he’s the only thing standing between you and the next level. If you’re going to keep playing the game, you have to defeat the Boss.

Meet the Boss

What’s standing between your business and the next level of success?  A Boss Problem, that’s what.  All those little problems that have taken up so much of your time are ultimately neither here nor there.  The thing that’s really standing in your way is the Boss Problem.

Trouble is, very few businesses know what their Boss Problem is. I recently worked with a client, a global business.  One subsidiary wasn’t growing while its competitors were surging ahead.  My client explained the background: “we’re not growing fast enough” and the temptation was “we need to inject more people with more expertise”.  Both of those statements may be true.  But they aren’t the Boss Problem.  And my client was smart enough to recognise that and ask for help.

Boss Problems are scary, so it’s easier to hide from them, and pretend that just being busy is enough to get you through.  Here are some typical avoidance strategies:

Be vague. If a problem has a hundred possible responses, then it’s not a Boss.  For example, if you say “our problem is that we’re not growing fast enough” then the responses might be more advertising, or more sales people, or more innovation, or price rises, or price cuts, or better service, or nicer packaging…  Most of these will be little Martian zombie mutants.  The Boss may be among them – or it may not. Either way, you’ve successfully avoided looking into its eyes.

Push the problem down the organisation. For example, if you say “our problem is that we need more expertise”, you can leave the next level of management to answer the question “and what will we do with it”?  The organisation may need more expertise – perhaps in sales or R&D or marketing or production or distribution.  Or it may need the existing people to work together better. Or it may need better leadership – more decisiveness or more freedom or a change in culture. If you just devolve the problem to the next layer of management, then you haven’t had to face your Boss Problem – and by the same token, you’re no nearer a solution.

Make it insoluble. If it’s a problem which you can’t solve, then it’s not your Boss Problem.  For example, if you say “our problem is that our competitors are just too strong” then that implies you have no choice about what to do next. So you can dodge the hard work – and the blame.

By contrast, a true Boss Problem is specific. It’s something you can’t delegate. But it’s something you can start work on. A BP doesn’t just present the challenge clearly. It also contains the seeds of how to go about overcoming it. 

Here’s an example. I worked in the US for a mid-sized manufacturing business. They made replacement carbon brushes for large industrial DC motors. When a motor in a mill or a mineshaft fails for lack of a brush, customers will pay a large premium for a replacement. But there are no standard sizes, so the factory was set up to process thousands of small urgent orders.

There had been a spike in demand at the same time as they reconfigured the factory. The result was more expediting of orders for the customers who shouted loudest. In turn, that rapidly increased work-in-progress, without increasing throughput. Things got worse and worse as they described the problem as ‘bad timing’ or ‘poor customer service’ or ‘inefficiency in the factory’. There was more and more expediting. The factory was in chaos. The situation only got better when we realised that expediting was the wrong answer to the wrong problem. The Boss Problem was the whole of the order backlog. We set about reducing it by putting on weekend shifts during which expediting was banned. And we incentivised the workers by sharing the proceeds of all overdue orders with them.

When you do identify your Boss Problem, the answers begin to present themselves. But until you do, any plan or strategy is bound to fail.  It doesn’t matter how impressive your business plan is – mission, vision, values, goals, objectives, critical success factors, core competencies, scorecards, SWOTs and hockey sticks…  How can they possibly work if you can’t recognise the Boss Problem standing in the gateway?

What does a business need, deep down inside? If you got a company to climb onto the sofa and lay bare its deepest fears, what would it say?

I’ll tell you why I’m asking. I met a boss the other day who said that he wanted to “take his business to the next level”. I asked him what he meant by it and he confessed, with a rueful grin, that he didn’t know.

“Taking it to the next level”. At first I thought, lots of people say that and they all mean different things. Then I thought, what if they really mean the same thing? What if there are only a few levels? And that’s when I thought about Maslow.

We all know about Maslow’s hierarchy of human needs… so what would a company’s hierarchy of needs look like?

Here’s my stab at a company’s psyche.

Five levels of need. The first couple are obvious.

At the most basic level, even to be born in the first place, a business needs opportunity – something to sell and someone to sell it to. So it needs some elementary entrepreneurship, negotiation skills and basic supply skills.

Then, to become accepted and to feel like it belongs, a business needs repeat customers. So it needs named products or services, a certain level of quality, a business model that promises profit and cashflow, and processes to manage the repetition.

Next the company seeks safety and security. It begins to regulate itself with plans and budgets and organisation charts. It runs the risk of turning inward and neglecting the customer and the changes in the marketplace. Companies which were previously successful can plateau at this level.

Once a company feels secure, it will yearn for the esteem of others. It will seek to define itself, and attract loyalty, through a brand. To do this well requires insight into customers and the ability to innovate.

Finally, at the very top level, a company longs to be all it can be – to actualise itself, to play out its destiny, to astonish the world.

But how? How does a company move to the very top level?

The conventional answer? It’s about having a vision or a mission or (better, in my view) a profound purpose.

It’s a great help – to know exactly why you’re in business, and to care about it passionately – but that by itself doesn’t seem to be enough.

My answer is that it’s about massively over-committing to a few big opportunities.

Amazon doesn’t produce the only e-reader. Google doesn’t have the only search engine. Apple doesn’t make the only music player, smart phone or tablet computer. Sky isn’t the only digital broadcaster. Pixar aren’t the only animation company.

But they have seen possibilities, seized opportunities, and set about doing things better and bolder than anyone else.

That is what it takes to become a company of destiny. Watching, waiting, then going in all guns blazing.

It demands all sorts of contradictory and irrational behaviour: flexibility and determination, a narrow focus and wide-open curiosity, muscle and style, ruthless sacrifice and boundless love.

How very human.

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Wherever your company happens to be, my Built for Growth programme is designed to help you move up to the next level.  As a result of the programme, you’ll be able to outsmart your competitors and outperform them in the marketplace.  Click here for details.

Sometimes it’s tough to motivate people to do something, even if it’s a goal they’ve set for themselves. For whatever reason, they’re avoiding it or they’re just tired at the prospect of doing anything about it. If they report to you, or if you’re affected by their inaction, it makes it pretty tough on you too.

Wouldn’t it be great if we could jog them into action with a simple sentence, without having to do lots of cheerleading or nagging?

Here’s a nice little example from a couple of weeks ago. I have to disguise it a bit, since this was part of a confidential management skills course that I was helping to run. But the tale is true.

I asked one of the participants “okay, the course is nearly over. What’s the next step for you? What do you want to work on back in the office?”

It was a bit of a struggle. He made that face you make when you can’t think of a single thing to say but you want to look like you’re trading off various complex ideas in your head.

Eventually he said, without much enthusiasm: “well, I suppose I’d like to get better at asking clients for more background information”.

Now, normally I would have leapt ahead and explored why it was important to ask clients for information. Then I would have gone on to ask why it was difficult, and then we would have brainstormed various ways to get round those difficulties. Obvious stuff.

The trouble is, it would have been me pushing him uphill all the way. I could nag him into exploring lots of ways to address that challenge, but likely as not, he’d forget about it the next day.

So on this occasion I didn’t do that.

Instead I asked him “so you’re not as good as you’d like to be at asking clients for more background information. What’s that costing you?”

A simple question: what’s that costing you? Four words. But believe me, it was like opening a rusty tap. At first, the answers dripped out slowly. Then came the flood.

“Er, well. Sometimes I don’t get all the background I need to do the work properly…

“So, er, I really ought to call back but that would make me look stupid. So it takes me longer to do the work…

“I don’t feel like I can delegate it to anyone because they might ask me a obvious question that I don’t know the answer to. So I do it myself. One time last week, that meant staying at the office and working late into the night. And I still wasn’t sure if I was working on the right problem. Anyhow, I’ll go back to the client – often late – and sometimes it’s okay but another time I’d basically misunderstood something really fundamental, and he was pretty irritated, and it make me feel stupid and depressed…”

Wow, I thought. “So – late nights, feeling stupid, irritated clients, depression… shall we chat about how to ask for some background?”

“You bet” he said.

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The great thing here was that a simple question did all the work for me, and put him in a place where he really wanted to take the next step.

A great question to get someone motivated to change.

I am losing count of the number of times people quote Yoda’s advice: “do, or do not, there is no try”. We are in danger that this unhelpful phrase will come to define our approach to business in this decade.

I will not stoop to ad hominem attacks on Yoda (beyond pointing out that he is FICTIONAL. He’s a PUPPET. Actually, given that he was voiced and operated by Frank Oz, he sort of counts as a MUPPET. And if he’s so smart, how come SPEAK PROPERLY HE CAN’T?)

Instead, I’d like to go to the heart of his statement: there is no try. This is blatant nonsense. Anything worth doing well requires us to try. It’s called practice.

Yoda, my little grey-green friend (and anyone quoting him): may I strongly recommend a book called “Bounce” by Matthew Syed? He elaborates on the theory that real excellence requires ten thousand hours of practice. As a former UK table tennis champion, he knows what he’s writing about.

Syed is a proponent of “purposeful practice”. If you or your organisation want to become good at something, then practice practice practice. This could include all sorts of things – cold calling, delegating, prototyping, negotiating – basically anything non-linear.

The conditions for good purposeful practice are:

• be very clear about what you want to achieve
• break it down into chunks of individual activity
• choose a chunk that stretches you
• try it and see what happens
• adjust and repeat
• adjust and repeat
• adjust and repeat

So an amateur golfer will go round a course, hitting the ball about 80 times, and call it practice.

But a pro will try a specific shot, and try it many times, each time noticing the result (maybe with the help of a caddy or video), and adjusting some of the inputs – club, aim, grip, stance, swing. This is purposeful practice.

I’ve followed this approach myself with a client, with great results. Click here to find out how.

It’s worth trying.

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P.S. It is interesting to note that the Star Wars Databank describes Yoda as being of “a species unknown”. This is Yoda-speak for “an unknown species”. Once you start speaking Yoda, stop you can’t.

Google – the organisation rather than the search engine – has done some interesting work on the behaviours of a good manager. As you’d expect from Google, it’s drawn from a massive database. But in this case, the database is their own HR records.

At first blush, their list of conclusions is obvious, but the interesting thing is that it is ranked, in order of impact. Most new managers worry about number 8 – technical skills. They are labouring under a misapprehension – that they need to understand technical issues better than their team does.  At Google anyway, a manager’s technical skills are far, far less important than many other softer skills, like coaching and empowering the team.

In fact, I still think this is blindingly obvious. But now there’s data to support it.

Here’s the list:

1.) Be a good coach. Provide specific, constructive feedback, balancing the negative and the positive. Have regular one-on-ones, presenting solutions to problems tailored to your employees’ specific strengths.

2.) Empower your team and don’t micromanage. Balance giving freedom to your employees, while still being available for advice. Make “stretch” assignments to help the team tackle big problems.

3.) Express interest in team members’ success and personal well-being. Get to know your employees as people, with lives outside of work. Make new members of your team feel welcome and help ease their transition.

4.) Don’t be a sissy: Be productive and results-oriented. Focus on what employees want the team to achieve and how they can help achieve it. Help the team prioritise work and use seniority to remove roadblocks.

5.) Be a good communicator and listen to your team. Communication is two-way: you both listen and share information. Hold all-hands meetings and be straightforward about the messages and goals of the team. Help the team connect the dots. Encourage open dialogue and listen to the issues and concerns of your employees.

6.) Help your employees with career development.

7.) Have a clear vision and strategy for the team. Even in the midst of turmoil, keep the team focused on goals and strategy. Involve the team in setting and evolving the team’s vision and making progress toward it.

8.) Have key technical skills so you can help advise the team. Roll up your sleeves and conduct work side by side with the team, when needed. Understand the specific challenges of the work.

This list has been re-published widely, by several newspapers, magazines and websites.  Most readers will just glance at it and move on.

But how about taking this list and having a go at ranking it yourself? And then inviting your team to rank it. And comparing the results. What’s true at Google may or may not be true for your team or in your organisation. If you’re brave, you could ask them to score how well you’re doing…

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The other interesting thing is that Google listed three bear-traps for managers. Here they are:

Pitfall 1: failing to make a transition into management. Sometimes, fantastic individual contributors are promoted to managers without the necessary skills [or training, Google!] to lead people. And people hired from outside may fail to appreciate the unique aspects of managing at Google [which may detract from the claimed usefulness of this research!]

Pitfall 2: lacking a consistent approach to performance management and career development. Not helping employees understand how these work, and not coaching them on their options to develop and stretch. Not being pro-active but rather waiting for employees to come to them.

Pitfall 3: spending too little time managing and communicating.

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Once again, this is a pretty obvious list. But the question is not “don’t I know this already?” but “am I actually following these guidelines?” Also, there is a joint responsibility with the wider organisation, who should ensure that managers are trained, and that they have performance management tools and career development pathways in place, and that they genuinely help managers to manage.

I am delighted to learn that robots are to get their own internet. It will probably be a pretty cool place to hang out, certainly more intelligent than large swathes of our own net.  You can’t imagine Marvin the Paranoid Android posting a video of a cat playing the accordion. Nor would C3-PO respond “Awesome LOL!!!1!!11!!”

Even better, it’s probably the end of our apocalyptic fears of the machines rising up against their creators.  The Terminator will be too busy illegally downloading Metallica albums.  The Cylons will be playing the Sims Online. Yul Brynner the robot cowboy will secretly spend all his working hours on Faceplatebook.

And spare a thought for Wall*e, trying for centuries to find an undamaged router cable so that he can finally, finally, log on.

Far from destroying us, the robots will be sucked, like us, into the wonderful infinite time-sink that is the internet.

The business agenda over the last decade has included words such as ‘globalisation’, ‘social media’ and ‘transformation’. If you owned shares in those words, you’d probably have made a very good return.

But if you had to choose one word which dominated the thought processes of business people over the last ten years, it would probably be ‘authenticity’. Businesses were desperate not to be thought of as fake.  They realised that trust was a vital asset. They feared that customers, overwhelmed by choice, would reject anything that they thought was false or hollow. And thus they spent fortunes on re-branding to make themselves more authentic. Sometimes this was done well; other times it was merely a re-positioning exercise. Oh the irony.

What word or idea will dominate the next ten years? I have a couple of candidates, plus a dark horse.

The first is engagement. Businesses have increasingly realised that it’s not enough to attract, retain and motivate employees.  The best employees have an emotional attachment to their organisation and an enthusiasm for their job; employers would love to bottle this.  The challenge is that creating the circumstances for more engagement often needs senior people to change and give up control.

The second is well-being. Economic growth seems to help standard of living but not quality of life. Beyond a basic inflection point, greater GDP doesn’t foster much happiness; it creates nearly as many worries as it solves.  So the lack of well-being is a problem (affecting consumers and employees).  Businesses will look for new ways to cater for that problem.

The dark horse, which I would love to see more of, is candour.  Individuals, teams and organisations need much more in the way of open, honest and direct conversation.  The fear of speaking frankly cripples many relationships.  People are scared of pointing out basic truths.  Some businesses still shoot the messenger or punish whistleblowers.  However, those organisations which make it comfortable to voice uncomfortable truths will learn much faster, and thus have a competitive edge.

What about you? What’s your prediction for the word of the next decade?

One way of getting a competitive edge is to do the little things right. I recently stumbled across a lovely picture-blog called Little Big Details, which is an appreciation of the tiny design features which help users of websites or programs.  Here’s one of my favourites, which more than once has stopped me forgetting to attach a file to an email.

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Little things make a big difference in other arenas too. “Retail is detail” they say. Everything about the shopper experience matters.

How then to explain the continuing existence of W H Smith in the UK? Smiths has been regarded as ‘ultimately doomed’ for many years, because it doesn’t really dominate any particular product segment. But it’s not helping itself.

Below are some pictures of my local branch in West London - from the unwelcoming doorway via the books on the floor to the trolleys and cartons in the kids’ area. This wasn’t a bad day – it’s like this all the time.

Note the broken shutter

On balance, I’d like W H Smith to survive.I love books and newspapers. I have to buy cards occasionally. And I have a nerdy appreciation of stationery (or “stationary” as one of their signs said recently).  But do they deserve to survive?  From the evidence of this branch, they don’t seem to love their products, or retailing – or indeed their customers – enough to make them worth visiting.

Games for kids

Reference section (not in alphabetical order)

I’m writing this in the middle of the night, while watching England destroy Australia in the final test match of the Ashes cricket series. For the past couple of months, the TV has been on into the small hours of the morning. A test match series from the other side of the world plays havoc with your sleep patterns.

But it’s been exhilarating, at least for an England supporter. They’ve won the series 3-1, including two by an innings and one by an innings-and-a-half. That’s a massacre.

So where do Australia go next? Retired leg spinner and all-round bad boy Shane Warne has published a list of 10 ways to reboot Australian cricket. Here’s his list:

“1. International players must play more domestic cricket. If you want to perform at the top then the foundations must be strong.
2. No more resting players. They should want to play every game, creating a toughness of mind and body.
3. No more seven one-dayers against the same team. One-dayers keep everything ticking over financially, but maybe an ODI at each major venue (five in total) and three Twenty20s would better serve our side.
4. Talk more cricket after a day’s play, don’t rush off. Get to know your teammates better.
5. Fewer support staff. Get the coach or manager to organise specific people to come in when required, which leads to more thinking for yourself and not relying too much on others.
6. Bowlers to stop thinking about going for runs and start thinking wickets. Attack the stumps, bowl fuller and risk being driven.
7. Batsmen to work against bowlers not bowling machines. We need proper, hard net sessions with a purpose. Every session must be about learning and improving.
8. Create an environment that is competitive and team-orientated not individual.
9. It’s not a job, it’s fun and enjoyable to be playing cricket and representing Australia. When selecting players, look for spirit and a sense of fun.
10. Cricket basics. As I said earlier, we need to do them better than anyone else in the world.”

Not a bad list, although there’s no mention of finding and nurturing talent, or of selection, or of determination to win. But it’s a good list by virtue of just existing, as a set of topics to argue about.

Why should you care?

Well, here we are in the New Year, a very good time for rebooting. What would a reboot list look like for your business? A rough equivalent of Warne’s list might be:

1. Executives to spend more time in the detail of their departmental functions.
2. Encourage all employees to get (and stay) fit and healthy.
3. Cut down on price promotions. They might be good for revenues; not so good for the health of our brand or business.
4. Talk more business at the end of each day. Get to know your colleagues better.
5. Organise coaching and training as required, close to the coal-face. Internalise the lessons. The emphasis should be on thinking for yourself and cutting your reliance on others.
6. Sales and marketing to stop focusing on activity for its own sake, and go for long-term brand building and category ownership.
7. Everything can be practised: processes, meetings, negotiations, pitches. We need proper, hard training sessions with a purpose. Every session must be about learning and improving.
8. Create an environment that is competitive and team-orientated not individual.
9. It’s not just a job, it’s fun and enjoyable to be in our business. When selecting employees, look for spirit and a sense of fun.
10. The basics. We need to anticipate the demands of our customers better than anyone else in the world.

Your list, for your business, will be different. But right or wrong, if it stimulates some debate, it’s an exercise well worth doing.

Time is money, they say. Perhaps because, eventually, we run out of both.

Until we do, it makes sense to try conserving what we have.

Here are some golden rules of time-management. Despite being no great shakes at it myself, they have all worked for me, at least intermittently:

(1) Keep a single written to-do list. It’s the first step to getting clutter out of your head and under control.

(2) Split your list into contextual headings. For example (a) major projects – and write down the next step, (b) 5-minute tasks, (c) stuff to do at home, (d) stuff to buy. This makes a huge difference. A list of 30 items becomes a small set of projects, a few tasks lasting perhaps an hour in total, and a reminder of things to do when you’re home or shopping.

(3) Plan each day by transferring a manageable number of items from your to-do list into your diary or daily planner. This takes practice, but soon you’ll know what a ‘manageable’ number of items is.

(4) Include one thing every day which would clear your conscience or reduce your clutter. We all have things we’d rather not do. That’s what makes time-management so draining. Get into the habit of facing up to a difficult task each day, and suddenly your to-do list will look less scary.

(5) File paper vertically, not horizontally. The worst possible ‘system’ is the pile of papers in the in-tray. You need to get all your paper into carefully-named files. If a piece of paper needs future action, add it to your to-do list and/or planner.

Getting Deeper: Managing your Relationship with Time

So far, so good. If everyone followed those suggestions all the time, we’d all be better time managers. But there’s a deeper dimension to this, and it’s about our relationship to time. There are various ways in which we relate to time, and they can significantly affect the quality of what we do and what we experience.

So here are five additional suggestions for managing your relationship with time:

(6) Improve the quality of your attention. How? By whispering to yourself: be here now. Say it to yourself whenever your attention wanders. And gently bring your focus back to what you were doing. Repeat as necessary. Deceptively simple. If you have worries, and who doesn’t, set aside a time each day just for worrying. 16:45 to 17:00, for example. Then stop.

(7) Understand whether you’re a lark or an owl (or a vampire). Me, I’m a lark, so I write blog posts early in the morning. If I tried in the evening? Forgeddaboudit, as Al Pacino would say. Run with your rhythms.

(8) Understand whether you’re a P or a J – a Perceiver or a Judge. This is Myers-Briggs speak for people like me who prefer to leave their options open and do things at the last possible minute (Ps) versus people who like to make firm decisions and plan well in advance (Js). Both are fine, but people sometimes beat themselves up because they don’t like their own style. No need.

(9) Respect, or at least tolerate, other people’s relationships with time. Ps and Js, for example, can drive each other crazy, unless they realise that it’s just a matter of personal preference and style.

(10) Make time for a little Kairos amid all the Chronos. Chronos is the formal, linear, objective idea of time; you can order it, chop it up, use it efficiently or squander it. Kairos is a more ancient and authentic form of time: it’s the time that you can feel slowly passing through you when your mind is still.

It’s a few years back. I’m at the rudder of a 72-foot narrow-boat. It’s a gorgeous day; birds are singing; the warm air ruffles what’s left of my hair. Rough pace: 3 miles per hour. I steer the boat under a narrow bridge and through a very sharp left turn, with an inch or two to spare either side. For once, my line is perfect. This is a Kairos moment. Long after most Chronos time is forgotten, it’s still there.

Here’s a terrific guest post by Scott Keyser of Invitation2Tender.com

7 BD lessons from England’s failed World Cup bid

1. Build strong, trusting relationships with all the decision-makers and maintain them throughout the process.

Several FIFA ex-co members promised to vote for the England bid, but patently didn’t do so. The England bid team feels they have been betrayed or ‘stitched-up’; the ex-co members were not as good as their word.

When you make the human and economic investment in a major bid, you need to be able to trust the information that the client decision-makers give you and what they tell you. Having the best technical or even commercial bid counts for nought if you don’t have strong relationships with the decision-makers based on mutual trust and respect.

2. Bringing in the great and the good at the last minute is risky.

Remember the France bid to host the 2012 Olympics? They wheeled in then President Jacques Chirac at the 11th hour. Leaks from inside the French camp claimed that this move undermined at a stroke the esprit de corps that the team had developed over many months. And we all know who’s hosting the 2012 Olympics.

Despite the charm offensive of David Cameron, David Beckham and Prince William in Zurich, it was too late to change members’ minds. Most of them had already decided whom they were going to vote for. Trying to change their minds in the last few days was always going to be an uphill struggle, with the added risk that they would perceive it as last-ditch desperation.

3. If you don’t trust the selection process, think twice about bidding.

The FIFA selection process is subjective, secretive, opaque. Andy Anson, the England bid team CEO, refers to ex-co as ‘a brotherhood’: if you hurt one member, you hurt all. Who knows what deals were struck in FIFA’s corridors, where there is power but no accountability. If you’re not clear about the client’s selection criteria and how they’ll make their decision, you’re exposing yourself to an arbitrary and potentially damaging exercise.

4. Make sure you have the most senior decision-maker’s vote in the bag.

Sepp Blatter, FIFA’s President, allegedly reminded his colleagues of the British media’s adverse coverage of the bidding race, and the day before the vote handed round a cuttings file of the most negative reporting. He wields huge influence in FIFA and may well have instructed his ex-co colleagues how to vote. We shall probably never know. What we do know is that he did not vote for England. If you haven’t secured the MD’s or CEO’s vote, you’re unlikely to win.

5. Get the support of your own senior team or organisation for the bid.

Amid claims of unpatriotic behaviour, the British media pilloried FIFA’s bidding process: three days before the vote the BBC screened Panorama , an investigative programme, which questioned the honesty of the bidding process, while The Sunday Times alleged outright corruption. Whether these allegations caused England’s failure or were a convenient scapegoat for FIFA, certain sections of the media were clearly not behind the bid. Lacking the support of your organisation can wreck your chances of winning.

6. Listen carefully to what the client says about their strategic goals.

If the English FA had heard FIFA say that they wanted to ‘open up new frontiers’ in world football, they could have saved themselves a lot of bother. The self-proclaimed ‘home of football’ is clearly not a new frontier. One of the slides in Russia’s presentation, the eventual winner of the bid, was a map of Europe, with a line separating Russia from western Europe. To the left of the line were all the venues of previous World Cups; to the right, nothing. One simple graphic conveyed Russia’s entire message, which resonated with FIFA’s own strategy. Job done.

7. Present a stable, united front to the client.

Any hint of discord in your camp will worry the client and may give them the excuse they need to disqualify you. The England bid was dogged by in-fighting, recriminations and resignations. In recent years, the FA has been a revolving door. One of the ex-co members commented, ‘If we give you the World Cup, how do we know who we’ll be dealing with in five years’ time, when you change the leadership with such remarkable regularity?’
Clients seek stability, unity and longevity in their partners and suppliers: these things reassure them that your service will be reliable and predictable in its quality.

‘Winner Takes All’ bottom-line

A bid or tender is a competitive influencing campaign. It must be led by the right leader and supported by the right people with a clear message that chimes with the client’s goals. Screw up any one of those elements and you might as well go home.

Scott Keyser of Invitation2Tender.com

To: George W, Tony, Jose Maria

From: Thucydides

Guys, as I mentioned in my book (History of the Peloponnesian War) around 2400 years ago:

“It is a common mistake in going to war to begin at the wrong end, to act first, and wait for disasters to discuss the matter.”

Just a thought before the vote next week.

Thu.

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A flippant use of an interesting quotation, I know. The point is that making war or creating a business plan is a little like building a bridge: it helps to have a good understanding of your intended end-point; and how you get ‘there’ from ‘here’.

In a previous post, I listed four reasons why SMART goals don’t work.

Here’s my list of four ways to make sure that you do achieve your goals. Feel free to add to them or argue abut them.

1. Why not make your goals INSPIRING?

SMART goals are emotion-free. But we are emotional creatures. Sales people have always known that we buy on emotion and post-rationalise our purchases. So it is with goals.

Emotions play a huge part in decision-making. Changing people’s minds often involves changing the way they feel first.

There are two obvious ways to build an emotional component into goals. One is to consider the unpleasant emotional consequences of NOT achieving the goal. These emotions might include tension, confusion, fatigue, annoyance, disconnection, anger, aversion, embarrassment, fear, pain, sadness, vulnerability, disquiet or yearning.

The other is to link your goal to an inspiring destination. Here the positive emotions might include excitement, exhilaration, joy, peace, confidence, engagement, gratitude, hope or rejuvenation.

So take one of your goals and consider: how could you ramp up the emotions involved in achieving it And in NOT achieving it?

2. How about making sure that your goals APPEAL TO YOUR VALUES?

Behaviour is contagious. We look at others to check how we should behave. We also strive to act in accordance with our self-image.

Think about your values (and the real – not stated – values of your organisation, if relevant). How could you re-state your goals to make you feel proud and heroic about achieving them?

3. Are you prepared to MAKE YOUR GOALS PUBLIC?

A gentleman’s agreement isn’t worth the paper it’s written on.

It’s the same with private goals.

Tell the people around you what you want to achieve. Whether they support you actively or passively, the effect will be that you feel more committed to your goal.

4. What about TAKING REGULAR STEPS TO A BIG DESTINATION?

This has three advantages. Firstly, it means breaking big overwhelming goals down into achievable chunks.  Secondly, it encourages good habits. Thirdly, it helps you create momentum.

Big changes are daunting. Small steps are not, and as you make progress, you build confidence.

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There’s one advantage of SMART goals: they have a good acronym.

Can you come up with an improvement to IVBPSSBD (inspiring, values-based, public, small-steps-big-destination) goals?!

And, more importantly, what do you do to set better goals?

What’s so smart about SMART goals?

Every year the performance appraisal comes round and thoughts turn to the year ahead. “You should agree 3-5 goals for the year ahead, and they should be SMART” say the guidelines. Everyone knows what SMART stands for, right?

• “Yes, it’s Specific, Meaningful, Achievable, Relevant, Time-bound…”
• “No, that’s wrong, it’s Stretching, Measurable, Aligned, Realistic, Tangible…”
• “I always thought it was Simple, Manageable, Action-orientated, Results-based, Trackable…”

So there’s problem number one:  No two people on the planet can agree what SMART stands for.

Right, let’s have a look at the second problem.

Here’s a specific example of a SMART goal, recommended by another blogger, as part of a post about why SMART goals are good. (You can track down the source if you wish, but I don’t want to embarrass him.)

• Bad example: “I want to write a book.”
• Good example: “I want to write a book on time management that is at least 200 pages in length and have it done by December 16th.”

Okay, I’d love to write a book, so I’m happy to take this goal on, except I’d like to tweak it a bit, because I’d rather inject mustard in my eyeballs than write 200 pages about time management. So here’s mine, using some of the same, rather odd, terminology:

• I want to write a book about some dude who busts an girl out of prison and rides off into the post-apocalyptic sunset with her.
• At least 350 pages ‘in length’.
• ‘Have it done’ by Easter.
• … And sell 100,000 copies by Summer.
• (Bonus ball: I get to star in the film the following year, with, oh, I don’t know, Winona Ryder. I think that’s what’s called a stretch goal.)

Pretty SMART, right?  And I’d really like to have written a book like that, I really would. But can you guess the problem?

Problem number two. My goal is not gonna happen, and no amount of tweaking the SMART-knobs will make it happen.

What? Do I hear an objection?

My goal is not realistic? Yes, Mr Smart Alec in the maroon sweater, my goal is perfectly realistic. There are plenty of people writing books right now which will go on to sell 100,000 copies.  It’s more than realistic; it would be surprising if it didn’t happen.

What, you still object?

Okay, what if I made it a bit more realistic?  What would you consider to be a more realistic goal?  A book about time management? An article about time management?  Oh, okay, a blog-post about time management, by Easter. By the end of next year, okay.

Well, my be-sweatered friend, I think we have arrived at

Problem number three: Insisting on R for Realism sucks all the dreams and ambitions out of your goals.

And then we are left with a paradox. It concerns those few inspired people, typing away in their sheds, who are writing future bestsellers. You can bet your bottom dollar that the one thing they’ve never typed is… a SMART goal.  They’ve typed synopses and character sketches and six versions of chapter one; maybe they even started with the publishers’ blurb.  But a SMART goal? Never.

And that’s problem number four. Take a dramatically successful outcome and track backwards from it; you’re highly unlikely to find a SMART goal.

When you think about it, it’s obvious. Anyone who wants to change the world can’t afford to listen to the man in the maroon sweater who insists on realism. So somehow SMART goals are missing the point.

Maybe goals help things to come true, maybe they don’t. But SMART goals are self-limiting.

They do serve a purpose, but it’s not an honourable one. They just give Mr Snopes some ammunition for beating you up at next year’s appraisal.

That’s why SMART goals don’t work. What would? That’s for next time…

I’ve just been listening to a fascinating podcast on an unpromising topic: Apple’s Q4 2010 conference call with financial analysts.

Very unusually, Steve Jobs, Apple’s CEO, joins the call. And it’s fascinating because he thinks in such a different way from the analysts.  They are interested in sales forecasts and reasons for declines in margin. That’s their job, after all. But for him, the numbers are way upstream or downstream of his area of concern. He’s interested in dominating markets and niches. And specifically, he’s interested in “building the best devices in the world.”

A pertinent quote: “Nokia makes $50 handsets, and we don’t know how to make a great smartphone for $50. We’re not smart enough to have figured that one out yet, but believe me I’ll let you know when we do. And so our goal is to make really breakthrough great products, make the best products in every industry that we compete in, and to drive the cost down while constantly making the products better at the same time. That’s what we did with iPod. We updated our products many times every year with better functionality, often times at same price and sometimes at a lower price. And it was the relentless improvement at in some cases a lower price, that was able to beat our competition and yield the market share that it did.”

Another example, in response to an analyst asking about margins: “You’re looking at it wrong. You’re looking at it as a hardware person in a fragmented world. You’re looking at it as a hardware manufacturer that doesn’t really know much about software, who doesn’t think about an integrated product but assumes the software will somehow take care of itself. And you’re sitting around saying, well, how can we make this cheaper? Well, we can put a smaller screen on it, and a slower processor, and less memory, and you assume that the software will somehow just come alive on this product that you’re dreaming up, but it won’t.”

This goes to the heart of one of the most interesting tensions in business: are you in business to make a profit or are you in business to delight your customers?

A “Type A” company argues:

We are in business to maximise shareholder value. That means making the best possible return on equity. We look for investment opportunities accordingly. We recognise that quality and  customer service are important; we set targets for them, we measure them and we budget for them accordingly.

A “Type B” company argues:

We are in business to provide excellent products or services which delight our customers. We innovate in terms of products, services and processes accordingly. We have to abide by many disciplines including financial disciplines, but some of our investments are acts of faith. The return from those investments may be in the form of excellence or loyalty or quality; the ultimate financial return may be difficult to prove – but it will be there.

If you like, Type A companies are founded on a business model or investment principle, while Type B companies are founded on a promise, a premise, a proposition.

For what it’s worth, I believe that all great, enduring companies are Type B, or at the very least, have a large measure of Type B in their DNA. Sometimes Type A companies become Type B, either because of a passionate leader, or more often because they happen to create a valuable brand which ends up changing the way the company does business.

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The other fascinating thing: the skill with which Steve Jobs plants ideas. Have you seen the movie Inception?  I’m not spoiling anything by telling you that it’s about planting an idea, and planting it so deeply that the other person overcomes all resistance to it.  Jobs is a master at planting ideas, at reframing the world so that you start to see it his way.

Some examples from this podcast:

(1) the battle between Apple’s iPhones and Google’s Android phones is not about “closed systems versus open”; that’s “disingenuous, and clouds the real difference between our two approaches”. It’s about “integrated versus fragmented“.

(2) The seven inch tablet computers which Apple’s competitors are bringing to market are too small to use. They should come with “sandpaper, so that the user can sand down their fingers“. (This despite the 3.5″ screen size of Apple’s most popular tablets: the iPhones and iPod touch.)

(3) The iPad is a new model of computing which “we’ve already got tens of millions of people already trained on with the iPhone.”

Finally, this isn’t from the call, but I just have to share this Jobs quote, which takes us back to Type B:

“We don’t get a chance to do that many things, and every one should be really excellent. Because this is our life.

Life is brief, and then you die, you know?

And we’ve all chosen to do this with our lives. So it better be damn good. It better be worth it.”

I came across an unsettling quotation from our old friend Leon Trotsky the other day:

“You may not be interested in war, but war is interested in you”

Substitute the phrase ‘competition’ for the word ‘war’, and it sums up my argument for having to take the battle to your competitors.

I’m sure you know the old joke about the two explorers in the jungle. They spot a tiger. One explorer immediately takes off his boots and starts putting on a pair of running shoes. `

‘Don’t be stupid,” says the other one, “you’ll never outrun a tiger”.

And the first one replies, “I don’t have to outrun the tiger, I just have to outrun you!”

*

I love that joke. But I’m going to spoil it slightly by turning it into a giant metaphor. I’m going to paint the word “recession” on the side of the tiger, and “company one” and “company two” on the shirts of the explorers.

So we’re companies, in the jungle, facing a recession. (Or at least “turbulent times”, but that wouldn’t fit on the side of the tiger.) How should we react?

Should we emulate the second explorer? Be fatalistic, stay very still and hope the scary tiger goes away?

No, it’s time to get out our running shoes. We need to find out what makes us stronger than our competitors, and exploit it as much as we possibly can.

How can you find out what makes you stronger? Try compiling a SWOT analysis – not just for your own business but for your competitors too. As you probably know, SWOT simply means listing your strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats. It’s a very basic tool, but it really comes to life when you apply it to your competitors.

Those simple lists will help you identify several relative strengths. They’re your running shoes. They might be any features of your business which matter to your customers: smarter packaging;  faster delivery; better follow-up service; anything. This is the time to push those advantages really hard.

This exercise is also just one of the stages in my competitor wargames. If you’re in a highly competitive market, and wrestling with how to grow in a tough economic climate, give me a call.

In the business world, our reputations are shaped in large part by the reports we write and the presentations we deliver.

If our materials are anything less than crystal clear, we’re missing an opportunity and damaging our reputations.

Enter Jon Moon, and his marvellous book How to Make an Impact. I would never have thought that anyone could write an entertaining book about business documents, but this is it. The opening chapter alone, “Words in Tables”, is worth the price of the book.

Business reports often have different arguments and various levels of detail. The traditional way of dealing with this is to use lists and bullet points. But lists are boring and difficult to read. Moon’s “Words in Tables” approach is a way of setting out the same arguments in a clear way.

Here’s a link to an example, in this case a rewritten CV, and there’s more on Moon’s website.

It makes life easier for the reader, but there’s another advantage too. It helps you, the writer, to organise your thoughts and marshal your arguments.

I recommend this book strongly. Share it with your team; get Jon Moon to speak to your business. His methods will unquestionably improve the flow of information around your business.