Brushing off the Small Print

Over the weekend I was informed by a major UK retailer that toothpaste is not a dental product. You may find that as bizarre as I did, but it is true, as far as they are concerned within the limits of the relevant promotion.

Whatever their logic in drawing that line for their promotion may be my view is that it is another symptom of a malaise that we really should have stamped out by now; that of the Small Print. We had started to make real progress a few years ago with having clarity about things, even in those last bastions of the Small Print, the insurance and travel businesses, but it has begun to make a comeback.

Probably one of the drivers has been the budget airlines where, in some ways rightly, they have segmented their product to offer the customer a wider choice. We haven’t quite reached the “Inside or outside seating sir?” level, but, like many, I began to use budget airlines for business travel and was more than happy to just take a briefcase and be able to waft up to Glasgow and back for about a fifth of what it would cost me for a return fare on the train to London. The trains have followed suit with advance bookings and such since and it all helps to keep costs down if you can make the timings work and accept the risk of not making it to the airport or station in time for your booked return. Personally I don’t find that the web sites that you book through are particularly misleading or hard to use; fortunately I still have enough functioning brain cells to understand that being late is too late whether it is one minute or thirty. Either way I’m late and it will cost me regardless of why I’m late.

I’ve read recently that the Government want to introduce legislation to stop such companies  not telling you that there is another 3.5% or similar to pay by credit card until you get to the late stages of the transaction. That’s fair enough I suppose, but in general I’m not hugely in favour of legislation at this sort of level. In fact I’m not in favour of Government interfering in business at all if we can help it, but the problem with some of this is that the people marketing these products view their customers as gullible enough to be drawn in far enough towards the purchasing decision before they clobber them with the real deal. However, this is the dodgy second hand car salesman technique that people of my vintage will be familiar with and sooner or later there will be a backlash.

So much for the B2C world, but we’re not like that in B2B are we? Unfortunately we often are, most often because we haven’t taken the basic steps of being sure about what we are buying and understanding the deal. Like me at the weekend we have rushed into the transaction thinking that we were on to a good deal but not having made sure that it was as good as we thought.

For me the choice was easy enough; pay up or walk away, but what if the deal had been for equipment costing a six figure sum or a three year service contract? That is not the sort of deal that you want to make a mistake on. Take your time to understand what you want and why and always make sure that, Small Print and all, the deal you make will deliver what you need.

 

Leadership lessons from the News of the World & Wayne Rooney?

Over the last week there has been much discussion in and around the media on leadership, primarily concerned with the roles of Messer’s Murdoch pere et fils. Personally I find the sight of politicians haranguing successful business people on the subject of accountability completely risible, but hypocrisy is the hallmark of modern politics and, sadly, we quietly accept it.

One day we might see genuine leadership from those we elect to office, but I doubt that it will happen whilst they all subject themselves to their media advisors; you can lead a committee, but you can’t truly lead by committee.

Where the Murdoch chaps fit into this week’s thoughts is the question of their position relative to what they knew. The whole sorry mess has seen much hysteria, but there is a basic issue at the heart of it as far as leadership goes, and that is that the leader should be setting the tone and that will be promulgated throughout the organisation.

How well that is done is another facet of leadership, but you cannot always guarantee that everyone will do the right thing; there are all sorts of possible failures from people not doing what they should whether that be through innocent or malicious reasons. I well remember a negotiation training course where a good syndicate group would have worked out that, at a critical stage in the deal, they would have to brief their notional team on keeping their powder dry. The boat must not be rocked at any cost, and so the syndicate would go through the role playing of talking the senior management team through what was needed of them. We would then roll the timeline forward and, of course, one of the senior team would have stepped out of line and torpedoed the negotiation. Sure it was cruel, but the syndicate members needed to be able to react to such situations because they do happen.

Now I make no judgement here on whether or not the M team knew what was going on over at NOTW or not, but it is patently obvious that you cannot delegate and be absolutely certain that your standards, policies or instructions will be upheld. You accept the risk and build in appropriate measures to mitigate against such risk, one of which is that a transgressor will lose their job.

To be  conducting the questioning of the Murdoch’s along those lines is to mislead the public at large and is therefore another leadership failure , but let’s not get me back onto politicians, let’s just return to the point of the leader needing to set the tone.

Elsewhere in my newspapers this week I note that a certain Mr Rooney heads the table of footballers whose name is most popular amongst fans buying team shirts. It seems that more people want to have his name on their backs that anyone else which, on the basis that he has followers, makes him a leader of sorts.

I don’t follow professional football much these days; the game has lost its charm for me, but I respect Mr Rooney’s ability and application in his job. What does nothing to earn my respect is his behaviour, and this is what he shares with the NOTW.

The NOTW was successful because people wanted to read what it told them. It too was a leader and generated large amounts of advertising revenue because of its followers. But, like Mr Rooney, there were behavioural aspects that should have been curtailed, and in this the Murdoch’s failed.

Leaders can be good or bad. We need the former.

They call my right hand men Himmler & Hess and want me fired Part 2- more tales of life on the facilities front line

Last week left my team and I somewhat on the back foot. The clients were ganging up demanding my head to head off the changes I wanted to make and, in at least one case, to waste a 6 figure sum. My team’s morale was on the floor and, quite frankly, I just wanted to get back down the M4 before the fog set in as the winter darkness fell, but this was not the time to be walking (OK driving) away.

Things had gone badly wrong in taking this building on and I had made a mess of the politics. These things shouldn’t get in the way of doing what is right, but they often do in an organisation where genuine leadership is a rare quality. So how do you come back from these sorts of depths?

One of the keys to leadership is a belief that the objective can be achieved. Not by you as the focal point, but by your people. Your job is to make them believe in the goal as a thing both worth doing and within their grasp, and then to do whatever you have to do get them across the line.

So there we were on this dank, grey, day with our future seemingly just as bleak; what to do?

Well to a large degree I had got the outcome that I wanted. The building was being run as a collective of fiefdoms and needed sorting out if any progress was going to be made; for 7 years they had been raiding the maintenance budget to fund other projects. The top brass may have been posturing, sore because we had control of the maintenance and operating budgets for the site, but their troops needed a better building and better facilities, and that we knew we could give them.

I had already made costed proposals to the client at board level and had their approval, so I had isolated my local problem from above and knew that I would be backed if that became necessary. We were also tacking the problem from below by enthusing the workers and middle management about what could be done. It was only at local senior management level that there was an issue and the problem had been festering long before we had come on board. I just lanced the boil.

The first job was to follow up with those senior people one on one and give them room to step back from the position that they had taken in the meeting without loss of face. I was privy to their individual business plans so presenting them with ways in which we could help them meet their targets through saving costs and, in most cases, reinvesting some of that saving in new technologies, furniture, ways of working and more gave them a way to move forward in a positive way.

One year on we had the building sorted as far as essential maintenance was concerned, almost all floors had new workstations and better space utilisation, that allowed us to bring in another functional team and sub-let their building. Everyone won in the end and all ended up with operational performance benefits because their people could work in a building that was better. My team got done what they needed to and we took over half a million a year out of the running costs of the site.

Yes we took some flack, and yes the name calling was a shame. We had to be ruthless about sorting the problems, but we did it and made friends in the end.

They call my right hand men Himmler & Hess and want me fired Part 1- more tales of life on the facilities front line

The other Facilities Front Line posts here have been on the dramatic side; gunmen, dodgy parcels and so on. These are rare occurrences although they do make for good copy; most days at the office have some drama, but overflowing toilets, disputes over parking places and rows over catering or meeting room bookings are not the sort of tales to grip the reader. Today’s tale is somewhere in the middle.

It’s around 0800 somewhere in South East England. I’ve been on the road for nearly two hours as the winter fog has made the 55 mile drive somewhat fractious. Visibility has been under 50 yards in places, but I had left early to allow for problems and have got here safely. It will give me some time with my on site team before I head into the tenant’s meeting at 0930.

The site is a corporate HQ outpost, acquired to house a new division that had outgrown central London (I’d been part of it before it moved), and had come here because the big cheese of the time had lived down the road. The site was now too big for their needs in this part of the world, but contained some technical infrastructure that was vital and this was enough for it to be our equivalent of a listed building.

Facilities Management had been self managed by the occupiers, but was now mine as part of another corporate shuffle and my team and I were trying to make sense of what we had inherited and to start to get the building performing. Cans of worms were being opened; the lifts had not been maintained since the building had been taken on for example and this was part of a huge backlog of work that we were tackling.

My meeting there this day was going to be difficult as I was going to have to set out the budget and cost apportionment along with our plans for the next three years. Amongst my audience was one director who blamed the failure of her department to meet its numbers on the feng shui being wrong and wanted her team moved to a different wing and their accommodation upgraded to remedy the defects. We had managed to get her wants reposted to just under £1m, but there was no way that the business would fund it regardless of how loud she shouted. As you will imagine I was not looking forward to my day.

As I walk in from the car park a large car slows alongside me and the driver points to the passenger door. I open it and get in; it is my boss squared from the days when I worked in this division. He tells me that things are brewing against my plans; that my two area managers who are working full time on site putting things right have been labelled Himmler & Hess and that my back needs watching. I thank him and he is also kind enough to been seen to walk in to the building with me.

My site team are despondent. People who were once their colleagues are now their customers and hate them. I spend an hour bolstering and head off to my meeting. I go alone; you don’t take your team into an ambush.

The meeting is a bloodbath. I’m told that they will have me fired, that I am a disgrace, that I am ruining the business and more. My plans and the way that they support the business strategy are rubbished; they will never work.

But they did: Part two next week.

when people come together they can fill a space with their life and energy

I’ve written here before about the alleged demise of the office, but the topic has raised its head again this past week so I’m off again.

We earthlings enjoy a fantastic range of communications devices these days, and we’re a couple of generations away from my early days at work where I would carry change to phone in to the office as and when necessary. Now the science fiction of my youth is a reality and I have a few of these devices at my disposal and am a happy, and fairly prolific, user of them.

The ability to keep in touch and to interact with others remotely has changed the way that we work, but that isn’t new; it’s just the natural process of evolution. The pace may vary, but change is constant.

The office as I have known it is a relatively new thing in terms of human history, and it has changed a lot in my time. At the end of the day it is a tool and we will adapt it as we need to. One of the buildings that I once managed is now an easyOffice and part of Stelios’ new venture. It still exists, which is more that can be said for some of the other flagships of my old 1990s empire; one has been demolished and an apartment complex now stands on the site, another has just been demolished and a third has been gutted and the shell absorbed into an industrial building. My team and I used to look after over 3000 people in those three offices and they were all key parts of the organisations that we worked on behalf of.

But we changed them radically over the time that we ran them and had them in a constant state of flux as the tenant businesses needs changed. There may have been an illusion of permanence, but it was only an illusion. The illusion is in the minds of the people though; the building is just a convenient place. Those of us who have managed big workplaces will know how lonely and dead they are when empty.

When people come together they can fill a space with their life and energy, and those provide a synergy that no amount of remote working or cloud collaboration can replace. The challenge for us within the industry is to provide those spaces, but in what form?

I remember the first Regus office locally and being very interested because they were doing on the open market what I was trying to do for an internal market. There was a time when it looked as though they wouldn’t make it, but the financial model has worked and others have followed, as with easyOffice in our old floors at Palmerston House, and all power to them for that.

Coffee bars, hotel lobbies, supermarket cafeterias and motorway services are all playing their part as alternative places to meet, but the thing that intrigues me is that there is still so much focus on city centres. With all of the moves away from pinning us down to the daily grind of going in to the office, most cities are working towards transport and infrastructure plans that are based on sizeable growth over the next 10-30 years. That implies that we will still have these great hives of activity for a long time to come.

Will we push the market, or will the market pull us? I don’t know that I have the answers right now, but it sure is a fascinating time to be in the industry isn’t it?

 

experience is as to intensity and not as to duration – thomas hardy

Quite rightly experience is valued. When we are recruiting an employee or engaging a contractor we look for relevant experience, and when we look at ourselves we talk about having paid our dues; done the hard yard and so on.

All of this is fine because experience does count for something; it has value as a commodity that has been earned over time and those that have it are fully entitled to trade on it. Our market value may fluctuate, but when combined with a mix of talent and ability to make best use of our experience we have a product that we can market at whatever rate that the market will pay.

When we are considering someone’s experience with a view to engaging them, maybe as an employee or as a supplier, there are metrics around that experience that we will take into account. Perhaps the depth of experience, or specific subject relevance, or possibly how recent the experience. We will test these as part of our decision making process and come to some conclusion.

In doing this we are applying our own experience to help make that decision; experience is all around us and helps us through every day. I can remember events that, because of the location, I can firmly date to when I was 3 so they go back 55 years. All of those early experiences; climbing things led to the realisation that falling off hurts – learn the hard way, who needs risk assessments?

And that brings me to my point on experience. All of us that have any at some point had none. We had to start somewhere. The journey we have taken to learn whatever skill that we hang our experience on we rightly prize. Hey, we’ve paid our dues.

But experience can sometimes blind us. Those lessons that falling out of a tree will probably hurt tend to put you off doing it. All joking aside, experience is about risk assessment and we use that experience as judgement, but it can make you more risk averse. I wrote the other week around a Goethe quote; “One never goes so far as when one doesn’t know where one is going” and took one interpretation of that to be that you can go a lot further when you take the blind leap of faith: Pre-conceived expectations will not limit what is possible for you to achieve.

Pushing the boundaries may be built on an element of experience, but if you’re going somewhere new then you are learning, taking a journey into what, for you, is the unknown and may be the unknown for all of us, at least in terms of a new way of doing things.

When we are putting together teams we look for experience as a key ingredient, but I can recall many teams in a big corporate environment where I have inherited, or been allocated, people rather than being able to choose them. In almost all cases they strengthened the team because of what they brought to it and one of those qualities was a relative naivety. They would question things that we, with our experience, took for granted. They would challenge our thinking and, even if we did not change as a result, we were stronger from having taken that look. And whilst they did not have much experience in common with us they did have their own experience to bring to the party and for us to learn from.

We should be willing to look at alternative experience as strength rather than weakness and take that chance on people.

 

I’m happy to aspire to things, happier still to earn them, but entitlement; no thanks

There once was a schoolboy who wasn’t too sure what he wanted to be when he grew up, but he was quite keen on factories and offices, even if he didn’t understand too much about what went on there. The day came when he had to get a job and, perhaps fittingly for someone who liked buildings, he began to train as a surveyor.

A recession curtailed that career, and he found himself working for an insurance giant in the City, but even the prospect of one day stalking the floor at Lloyd’s placing business with the syndicates was not enough of a draw. No, this youth wanted an office and a secretary. He didn’t know why, nor grasp what he would need to do to get or retain such trappings, but that was what he wanted.

The City was a bore and he drifted into the retail and wholesale trade where his aspirations were refined through visits to many a private office, sometimes to be rewarded but, more often, to be chastised. As he would stand and take his medicine he took in the subtle benefits of the corner office, of mahogany over laminate, of carpet over lino, of the North West corner over the South East and more.

From his early forays into management positions it took almost 10 years before everything came together and he not only realised what he needed to be able to contribute to a business for him to warrant an office of his own, but was able to demonstrate it to the satisfaction of those above him. By then he was with an organisation where such things were carefully prescribed; 11m², carpet, swivel chair (with arms), desk with two pedestals (lockable), visitor’s chair, 4 drawer filing cabinet (lockable) and 3 hook coat stand. His name would be on a plate affixed to the door and his name and telephone number would appear in bold type in the internal telephone directory. To these things he was entitled.

From that first box in the corner of the room to the North West corner office and a secretary (OK, a half share of one) took less than a third of the time it had taken to get to first base, but a dreadful irony cast its shadow on this idyll. For now that our hero had achieved his aspirations and more, he found that he wanted to discard them.

In arriving at the position where the buck for delivering results stopped where he sat, one of the key things he had learned about earning that place was that leaders needed to lead by example. At a time when there was a need for austerity and sacrifice all around, why was he sat in splendid isolation in a space that would take 6 workers in comfort?

So the corner room on the top floor of the office was swapped, firstly for what had been a store room in the warehouse, and then for a desk in the open plan and then for cadging a desk. All of the trappings that he had aspired to for the first half of his three score years and ten were gone within about 4 years of him having achieved them.

Aspiration was one thing, but amongst the myriad things he had learned along the way to that corner office was what it took to earn that position, and being able to do that, to work successfully at that level, was in itself fulfilling. To aspire to something is one thing. To earn it is another, but to be entitled? No thanks.

why do wives put up with it?

Lately I have been back on the train a lot, and have been reminded of a phenomenon I had largely forgotten. One of those strange ritual behaviours between the female and the male of the species that puzzles, even troubles me. So let me set the scene:

Join me on platform one at Swindon as I await an early Paddington train. As an avid people watcher I have plenty of material to work with in such situations; travel provides a fascinating insight into one’s fellow humans. The platform regulars are instantly recognisable, as is their pecking order.

But, just beyond the tracks, is activity in the north car park that has reminded me of a, to me rather sexist, behaviour that really should have died out in these enlightened times. A car will sweep into the car park, pull up near the station entry and from the driver’s side will emerge Mr Businessman, suited and booted for his day at the office. From the passenger side will emerge, well, for the purpose of this story, let’s call her Mrs Businessman, and she is dressed for doing stuff around the house.

Mr B will take his briefcase from the back and depart for his train, and Mrs B drives the car back to the 4 bed, 2 rec, 3.75 bath or whatever.

Now there are variations on the level of human contact in these vignettes, but most are pretty perfunctory at best, but one stands out: The Volvo estate is brought to a stop with some authority. Mr B emerges, takes his briefcase and strides away without a glance at his companion. She walks round the front of the car, seeming to distance herself from him as much as she can, and departs with a decent touch of wheelspin. It is a shame that she had to pause to adjust the driver’s seat and that the car is front wheel drive. If she had been quicker and had had rear wheel drive she could have sprayed him with gravel such was the violence of her leaving the scene.

What domestic strife had preceded this journey? What was the atmosphere in the car along the way? These are the joys of people watching, speculating on events.

But I digress. The point here is that this ritual, something that I have seen for as long as I can remember, still goes on. OK, it is none of my business how other people live their lives, but this behaviour is so alien to me and seems so insulting to the ladies, although they seem quite happy to accept it.

I would never have dreamt of behaving like this with any of the ladies I have shared my life with since I flew the nest over 40 years ago. I know I’m not unique here as the guy who lives opposite is equally as happy to have his wife drive him as he is to drive her, but he and I do seem to be in a very small minority judging by my observations.

Maybe all of this is covered in the Handbook of Inter-Gender Relationships, I don’t know. Perhaps the ladies concerned are quite happy to have things this way. Maybe it means that they don’t have their driving criticised by some chauvinistic oaf. Possibly one of them might read this and enlighten me.

I hope that they do, because I would love to know. Whilst I’ll never find out what the story behind Mr & Mrs Volvo was, my natural curiosity is aroused and do I like to learn something new every day.

One never goes so far as when one doesn’t know where one is going – Goethe

This one is a bit of a double edged sword maybe. You can work with it from a couple of angles as least.

Taking a first look you can see the issue of people who don’t know what they are doing using far too much resource to achieve, if at all, the desired end. I learned about wasted effort way back in the days when I worked on the farm in the school holidays. I doubt that any of the guys had any formal training in O&M (Organisation and Methods as we used to call it) other than what they might have picked up in the forces, but you learned these things through peer group working, common sense and experience. Waste was the enemy because it cost money one way or another and, in an area where there was a lot of manual labour, it took its toll on the individual. As a skinny 13/14 year old I couldn’t heft a hay bale, but I could drive the tractor and trailer as well as anyone and that freed up an able bodied man to do the hefting.

These days we make great play, quite rightly, of making sure that our teams are trained, equipped and well drilled so that we don’t waste time and effort. We dress things up with fancy names, but they are all just refinements of the common sense that we’ve learned down the ages and that have evolved with the leads we have seen in technology. Operational efficiency is the name of the game as we all try to get the most we can our of our assets, and techniques such as six sigma and lean have entered our consciousness and vocabulary, and these have migrated from the manufacturing sector and been adapted for use in other industries.

So knowing where you are going does enable one to get there by the most direct route, but is that what Goethe was talking about in the quotation I have used?

The other possibility is in terms of making progress, and the possibilities that open up when you are experimenting are enormous. We’re all familiar with the old chestnut about thinking outside of the box, and that’s a starting point maybe: If you don’t constrain yourself with conventional thinking and just strike out into the unknown, who knows where you will be able to get to?

The adventurous spirit that has seen us poke our way into various parts of this planet and into space still has a place in the business world. Those who are prepared to try something new or a different way of doing things are pushing the boundaries and taking us all forward. This is how we make real progress in life and in business.

I make no effort to second guess which way Goethe was thinking, but suspect that he was on the latter tack. Is that the right option? I think that we need both. The first approach make things work well, keeps costs down and customers satisfied. It drives quality and consistency in what is offered and these are all fine things. It is good, but it makes small, incremental improvements and there is a danger of stagnation.

But we also need the pioneering approach to make the big differences, push the boundaries and take us down new routes because this keeps the waters moving and avoids that stagnation risk.

My contention is that we need both approaches and a balance between the two, so sometimes it is good to try that leap into the unknown and to accept the risk.

 

 

 

 

feeling lost? there is always an answer, and you can always ask the way

At the time of writing this I know that I am about six and a half miles up in the air and that it is Thursday 12^th May, but otherwise don’t know what time it is or where I am. Well I know that I am in seat 36K on a Boeing 747 registered in the UK as G-VFAB, but I don’t know where the ‘plane is if you see what I mean. Below me is solid cloud and so I have no sight of the ground to help show where I might be.

The last few weeks have been very hectic and fraught. I have had to be here, there and seemingly everywhere at someone else’s beck and call. Pretty much every waking moment has been devoted to doing something that I have had to do to avoid letting someone else down. Not all of it has been a chore, but I have been driven by other people’s needs rather than my own clock. A quiet potter in the garden fiddling with the horticulture when I feel like it is nice and relaxing; having to fit in getting the beans, spuds, tomatoes etc planted now because it has to be done now takes the pleasure away to a large degree.

Today I had to be at the airport in time to check in, and had to be at the gate in time to board, but thereafter I am just sat here for 9 hours, or whatever, whilst a couple of folk up the sharp end take me to another continent and some of their nice colleagues bring me food and drink now and then. All I have to do is to sit here and behave and so I decided that time and space can all be relative until the moment that I have to get off and face the immigration officials.

So last night I turned off the clock display in the toolbar of this laptop and, as I don’t wear a watch these days, I am sat here with no knowledge as to what time it is or where I am.

Well that’s the theory, but in practice I do have some clues. I know that my destination is south west of where I departed from and I know what time the ‘plane was due off the ground. Going the way that I am I am racing the sun across this day and, at this height, can see the sky up here above the cloud below and can see the subtle change in colour. The shadow of the fuselage that was falling across the wing beside me has gone, but I do not have the sun through my window, so we are heading towards that orb.

Knowing the time difference between where I started from and where I am going and I know what time I am due in, so I know where the sun should be in the sky then. Given all of that I would say that we have little more than an hour to go before arrival.

In aviation circles we have an expression “temporarily unsure of position”. It doesn’t mean lost as such, just that you know where you should be, but not exactly where you are.

This is quite often the case in business; we’re not exactly sure of how things are for a whole range of reasons, but there will be information that we can use and clues that we can follow to help make an informed decision on, and you can always make enquiries. You only have to ask for help.