DONT TAKE YOUR LAPTOP WITH YOU!

 

I’ve sat in front of this machine all day and only now feel I’ve got some of the stuff I wanted to do, done.

 

Things are made worse when laptops are taken away on business trips too.  It’s all to easy to get them out at the airport and in-flight to ‘work’ . But I pack mine in the hold as I know NOTHING gets done.

Watching some folk in the airport and on flights this week, here’s three conversations I think should have happened.

 

“Ashok, how are things?”

“Not so good boss. I got out the laptop in the lounge and brought up the PowerPoint.  I fiddled around with a few fonts, changed the background colours a few times, watched a YouTube video of a horse in Tescos and then moved slide 4 to slide position 18 and then back again. I moved that vertical bar on the left of the screen from left to right which made the appearance of all the slides go larger and then smaller and settled on how it was in the default setting. The new animation package on Win 8 is great so I made the first set of bullet points slide in like a skidding car and made all the strategy slides transition like breaking glass. I watched another YouTube video of a monkey riding a pig and then took out all the animations, shut down and boarded the plane”

“no different content then?”

“no”

--

“Simon, good to see you – how are the figures after the weekend”

“same as last time boss. All I really did on the business flight was change fonts in each column for 10mins until my meal came and then had the laptop sit on my drinks tray until the battery ran out. I was watching Batman for most of the flight. I paused it a couple of times and added a few formulas.  Most of the time #REF kept popping up in the menu bar so I gave up. With over 450 rows of numbers I figured I could write the words BATMAN LOVES ROBIN in the cells and no-one would notice. In the end I saved it under another name figures_edit_Sun_flight_01_Jan but nothing really has changed”

--

“Tracey! What news on the comms project?”

“As yes, I got all emails from head office that I had been cc’d on and spent the flight replying to all with either ‘yes’ or ‘fine’ to everything and replying all back. I thought that was a useful and totally productive way of using our IT resources!”

Stop taking your laptops away with you.

It’s wasting your time.

It’s wasting the earth’s energy resources.

And like this blog, only a few people appreciate the effort you made.

 

snow makes decision making simple

 

Another few cms of frosted water lands across the UK and Britain stops. We love a good snow drama and no doubt the papers will produce similar headlines to what they did last year.

No it shouldn’t be a surprise to anyone in the UK that the snow has fallen/is falling. We obsess about the weather here on a daily instance. All conversations start with it and should you want to be a spy for a foreign country, please just strike up a conversation with us about the climate and we’ll suspect nothing.

That all said, the drop in temperature seems to do something to our powers of thinking, analysis, perspective and problem solving. Look no further than the data to draw your own interpretations.

The number of people whose car won’t start and/or get into trouble requiring rescue call out will be in its THOUSANDS.

The number of people who cancel meetings or work from home will be in its THOUSANDS.

Schools will close, shops will shut yet we’ll all have a valid (but irrational reason really) for doing so.

I have a theory that our brains ability to think about the future is high jacked at the mention of snow.  We take the path of least resistance.

We could check the car battery and pull it out of the car and into the house to keep warm and put die-icer in the doors locks to stop them freezing and a blanket on the windscreen to stop the frost. We could email and text everyone at the meeting tomorrow in advance to make sure that we’re all making special effort to get in and manage our travel and physicality so that we arrive on time, in a good mental state, prepared and ready to go; like any other given day. We can also ensure our children have adequate plans to get home without us.

This requires effort, energy and forethought.

Instead we cancel the day and play snowballs.

 

I think there is a great deal of learning in our snow approach if we lifted the DNA of ‘least resistance’ to other aspects of our lives when it comes to solving problems. Does the ppt. need ANOTHER page, do we need to involve yet ANOTHER stakeholder, do we need to ask yet ANOTHER boss and ‘just run things by him just in case’. The answer is no.

It’ll always be no.

And those who disagree are the ones who aren’t having fun right now in the soft blanket of happiness that’s just landed outside....

 

 

There’s an often misquoted saying from Alice in Wonderland that goes “if you don’t know where you’re going, any road will take you there”.

The actual passage for the literature nerds is:

 Would you tell me, please, which way I ought to go from here?”

"That depends a good deal on where you want to get to," said the Cat.

"I don’t much care where--" said Alice.

"Then it doesn’t matter which way you go," said the Cat.

"--so long as I get SOMEWHERE," Alice added as an explanation.

"Oh, you’re sure to do that," said the Cat, "if you only walk long enough.”

 

Neat.

We like this.

 

We’re spending a good part of the year with our clients aligning and exciting them around their visions for the future. It’s often the case we spend a great deal of time explaining that the vision is made up of many parts.  The mission of the business, the meaning the business has in the world, the reason for its existence, the process on how it’ll achieve its strategy and guidance on people behaviour – all this we think make part of the business vision.

How easy to get lost our clients can become.

So I stick to the simple questions that are often the most profound.

What do you want?

How will you get it?

How will you behave during that process?

 

Have these answers as your north star and you’ll always know where you’re going.  Good advice I say for the start of the new year...

No such thing as perfect

Type in ‘perfect Christmas gift’ in a search engine and see what happens.  I got 397,000,000 results…

I also saw a dozen or so ads on the way in to London all claiming to be ‘the perfect gift’. These included the BBC’s Olympic Ceremony DVD (really? the perfect gift?) who’d want to sit through 7 hours+ of people standing around waving flags? And what then, if bought, would I buy next year? Surely I have topped out there!

Made me think that perfect is an overused word. Perfect should be used for the ‘one thing’ that is deserving of the title. With so much perfection on offer, I now can’t distinguish between the good stuff and the not so good – let alone the ‘perfect’.

Perfect is one of those words that have lost its meaning; right up there with professional, rigorous and dependable.

I’ve mentioned this before but on this occasion, my thoughts aren’t about focusing on the ‘perfect’ and asking what makes it so, but on the other material that sets up the context and conditions for perfect to exist.

When it comes to matters of design, transfer, innovation, creative thinking and adult learning – all inheriting rules and disciplines – there is a great deal of material to consider before anything can be said to be perfect.

My advice – ignore perfect. It’s a myth.

Instead, embrace different, better, unusual, anti, shocking, hyper, stimulating or real.

Miles Davis famously spoke of playing the notes that weren’t there. I think there’s a great deal of wisdom in that thinking. If perfect is now available in 390+million forms at Christmas, there must be a great deal of stuff were missing…

Branding is a choice. Why then, if it's so obvious do people still find it hard to do?

I’ve just spent 2 days in Istanbul delivering speeches and workshop sessions on brand storytelling at this year’s Middle East Marketing Conference. A brilliant show and huge kudos to my fellow speakers.

Someone mentioned something to me before I stepped on stage.. [something like] “great shirt, you must be creative”. I thought little of it at the time but I knew there was something in that comment that said so much more about the way we perceive the world and as a result, do business.

Branding is a choice.

A brand is built on a thousand actions.

A brand owns a specific and unique place in our head – nothing else has the authority or authenticity to do so.

Hence you and I will spend more for a jacket with a Nike tick on it over the same top from Tescos. All this we know.

The same is for business.

I had a choice when I started this business. I could call myself ‘Founding Director’ and have printed cards and an email sign off to say so.  But I stand for something far more ambitious and exciting than reassuring professionalism.

We exist to help people solve the worlds problems.

How we do it is combining adult learning and design thinking to make visual workshop experiences.

What we do is facilitate leadership workshops and projects.

There’s a great deal of creative lubrication to make this happen and one way to help build that brand is through what we say, how we say it, what we wear and how we wear it and what we write and how we write it. So my shirt was a conscious choice as every moment I’m consciously building a brand (or at least doing my best to do so).

So thinking back, I guess I’ve heard the ‘colourful shirt = colourful mind’ arguments a lot.

I guess I am part of the crowd who are all building creative brands in the same way as me. We’ve all made choices to do so. Oddly enough, I’ve never known anyone in a colourful shirt to point at a guy in a suit and say the OPPOSITE. I’ve never heard anyone in my line of business say that people who wear suits made little choice to do so. In fact they spend a great of money on some of them as do I my shirts.  Suits are an extension of personal brand. NOT of or for the non-creative, the dull, the boring, the risk averse and the cynical.  Yet folk like that (often ‘branding experts’) are quick to tell me a great deal about how I appear to them.

And in so doing THIER brand is built by THAT action.

It would appear then, something so obvious is sometimes very hard to do.

Even by those who are quick to tell us we have nothing to offer them.

thoughts from Dubai...

We're in Dubai this week.

 I share with you a few thoughts based on a humble parking bay space...

Here is a parking space at Emirates Airlines HQ. It's for the Chairman and Chief of the group; who isn't in.

Now it could be he got helicoptered onto the roof or more likely driven to work in a Lexus for an early meeting, but there is nothing in the environment outside or inside the building to say that such is the case. The environment outside the building however suggests that he isn't about. Given that most people will pass this bay on their way into the main entrance, this has huge implications.

Like many organisations that are large and growing, there is ambition to connect the outside messages and brand to the inside culture and communication.  Folk talk about stitching together and aligning and joining up the parts etc.

For me, programmes like this live or die on the investment given to all employees. If you invest in your employees, they will, unconsciously and often spontaneously arrive at new thinking, creative insight and behaviour that not only benefits all those around them, but also translates to the wider populations of customers and consumers alike. fact.

If culture is 'how we are around here", then that is lead by those at the top. All this is obvious and straightforward; and often forgotten.

Having parking bays, corner offices, separate lifts and so on creates a different set of behaviours within those who make use of them and those who do not. At the hidden level, this undermines any culture change programmes or at the very least creates a set of road blocks in making them happen successfully.

There was once a conscious decision - maybe even a series of long meetings with PowerPoint and flip charts! - to discuss the layout, size and position of the Chairman's car parking space. Eventually, some poor noddy in 40 degree heat had to lay the slabs of stone and cement set a sign that says 'Big Top Dog goes here'. As soon as the concrete set around that sign, so too was the message "you're not as important as this person", along with "in fact, we'll put special attention to this type of person and not you, so you'll have to work out how important you are in the scheme of things".

The trouble with this type of message is that it's hard for a.n.other member of staff to work out his or her place in the fabric of the building. It's clear where the head honcho goes, but what about me? Where is my investment and how will I be recognised for it?

All sitting at an unconscious level, these fears will drive behaviour and action.

Your internal comms can spray and pray as much messaging as they like, but as long as there is a parking space for the boss outside, words land on deaf ears.

Better it would be - I believe, that everyone fought over the same parking spaces. That way I know that amongst all the cars in the staff plot, there might be the boss's. Indeed, it might be the one I've just parked next to.  At the same human level he and I are the same. We went to work along the same road and saw the same world as I did and now we're in the same building facing the same challenges - together as equals.

I get that the leaders need to run a business and they have different pressures, but no pressure is any less or more important that anyone else.

By having an empty space, whether the guy is in the building or not, there will always be those who think they are working alone, without support and in a done to fashion. The trouble with our imagination is what ever is perceived to be true - becomes so in the power of the mind.

A little thing makes a big difference.

Just my opinion. I might be wrong...

Platitude plus points...

A golden rule of marketing one of my ex-bosses taught me was avoid platitudes and clichés in your advertising.  With a warming smile I saw this add currently hanging at Twickenham station.

"we mean business" is a classic platitude and the visual does nothing for the product benefits either.

But it still got me thinking about the positives.

Clichés and platitudes become so as they are used so often right? and....?

Granted I have grown a little tired of seeing images on proposals and documents featuring light bulbs, handshakes and my favourite; plant shoots growing out of cupped hands of soil. But aren't these images used often as they capture the exact metaphor you want to use?  What's the issue? For some this kind of creative is exactly the safe and steady paid of hands (see what I did there) some business need.
I remember being briefed to create 'something new and different' and on returning the feedback was 'oh, but not that new and different'.  Had I opted for a "we mean business" approach, perhaps the outcome would be different.

That's the magic of a creative brief. No idea is any less imaginative to the client than the next submission from the agency.  We'd go along way if we stopped over giving and tweaked just a little of the edges (bugger, done it again!).

Happy analogies and as I was coached once "think about your pitch as the opportunity to create mediocrity and succeed in style."