David’s monthly Random Ramblings

10/07/2009

July 2009

July’s Ramble is mostly by Owen Smith with a bit of help from Heather Noble.

  • No Jerks Allowed
  • If I Had More Time I Would Have Written Less
  • Heather Is A Twit!
  • More On Missed Opportunities
  • Outdoor Life
  • Never Mind The Customer
  • French Reflections
  • Wet Paint
  • Circulation Details
  • And Finally


No Jerks Allowed

“We believe the customer is always right. Except for when they're wrong. Or when they're jerks.”

Wonderful! This is part of the terms & conditions of US email marketing company MailChimp. They give examples of what constitutes being a jerk. Sending spam is number one, followed by being rude and offensive for no good reason. That begs the question as to whether it’s OK to be rude and offensive if you have good reason.

I am sure that we all get thoroughly fed up with Ts&Cs that run to several pages of small print. When I’m in charge there will be a requirement for a minimum font size, say Arial 10pt and a maximum of one page of A4.


If I Had More Time I Would Have Written Less

The title quotation above from Mark Twain is backed up by US president Woodrow Wilson who once said, “If I am to speak ten minutes, I need a week for preparation; if fifteen minutes, three days; if half an hour, two days; if an hour, I am ready now.”

Generally we have far more information than we can, or should, use. Deciding what is relevant can be challenging. Whilst on holiday I re-read Maverick by Ricardo Semler. (By the way, if you employ people you should read Maverick even if it is the only ‘business’ book you ever read.) In Semler’s Semco company, memos are allowed to be one page only. They are written in the manner of a newspaper article with headlines, a summary of the key facts followed by a short explanation. Semler’s view is that anything that can’t be fitted on that one page isn’t of critical importance.

The great thing about Twitter is that messages are limited to 140 characters (not letters, spaces and punctuation count). Arguably it is a more efficient means of communication than email because it prevents rambling.


Heather Is A Twit!

The great Twitter experiment goes on. Maybe I’m following the wrong people but I seem to be finding out a lot about what the weather is doing in different parts of the country, dog walking habits and other vital bits of business information. I was beginning to lose heart. But Heather Noble removed my doubts about its potential effectiveness as a business tool. Heather runs Shropshire based events planning business Salt Solutions (www.salt-solutions.co.uk) and is a fellow Twit (should that be Twitter or Tweeter Heather?). These recent extracts from her blog reveal why we should keep the faith:

“Unless your business has first hand experience of the powers of Twitter you have neither reason to believe that it is a necessity in the modern business world nor a sense of how it can be beneficial whatever your line of business.
So where is the evidence? Well, since joining Twitter in April I have been fortunate to have featured in The Sunday Times Business Section; I have appeared in The Shropshire Star in their 'TwitterTalk' column and on Thursday of this week I will be appearing on local BBC Radio Shropshire ...
All of the above have come about via Twitter. Each of them without any 'cold calling' on my part. Not a single penny has been spent by my business in achieving any of this. But every single item has helped me to raise the profile of my business.”


Never mind the Sunday Times Heather, now you’ve made it into Random Ramblings! By the way, I listened to Heather’s radio broadcast and it was excellent.


More On Missed Opportunities

Last month I wondered how many businesses and organisations miss out on big slices of the potential market. This was prompted by attending concerts in Birmingham, a city where nearly half the population is not white, a city with one of the youngest populations in Europe, and yet the audiences are predominantly white and middle-aged to older.

Afterwards I remembered an article I’d read that suggested that your business team should be made up of people from your target market sector. This seems to make sense. A teenager would be unlikely to buy clothes from a shop staffed by people of my age and vice versa. But it goes beyond the sales team. Everyone in the business needs to be thinking like the customer. So if you are not succeeding in a particular market sector, take a look at the make up of your team. Slightly more difficult if you are a toy manufacturer admittedly! Oh, I don’t know though. You just need lots of men in the team!


Outdoor Life

Last week, despite the risk of thundery showers I decided that it was too nice to be indoors, so adjourned to the outer office. Of course, this brings its own challenges. Glare on laptop screen among them. Owen Smith of BHS has kindly provided me with more items for this month’s Ramble, including a wonderful account of a problem that a council encountered with glare on a computer screen. After six months of reviewing the options they came up with a solution. Move the desk with the PC to a different place in the room. Brilliant! They congratulated themselves on ‘only’ spending £5,000 on the solution. Thank heavens they didn’t bring in a consultant.

One is tempted to say only in the public sector ... but I can’t quite convince myself that similar scenarios aren’t being played out elsewhere.


Never Mind The Customer

When Rover Group moved into its brand new, purpose built engineering headquarters at Gaydon in the 90s there were similar problems with screen glare. The quick fix was café style sun brollies. It made for a colourful office! Why is it that designers, architects and the like seem to overlook the requirements of the users? After the Air France plane crash in the Atlantic one seasoned pilot commented that the latest generation Airbuses were designed by engineers for engineers, not for pilots. And given the significant percentage of the population that dislikes heights (including me), why do architects put glass lifts on the outside of buildings or escalators that ascend through space?

Health check: are you designing for your customers or for yourself?


French Reflections

While on holiday I read several books, one was an autobiography of Dragons’ Den multi-millionaire Theo Phaphitis. Well worth a read if only for his commentary on his time as chairman of Millwall Football Club.

He makes the sort of comment that many multi-millionaires make. Making £100 million is easy. But then goes on to qualify it by saying that making the first £1 million is challenging.

But presumably one can scale it i.e. making £100k is easy once the first £1000 has been achieved. Then from £100k to £1m and so on. I guess it’s all about setting realistic targets.

One particular paragraph of the book caught my eye. Paphitis says, “I firmly believe that most of the answers to problems people have in business are within the organisation itself, and that most of the answers are to be found at a very low level. Head office managers are often far too theoretical and detached from the reality of the business. So a fundamental part of all my businesses is talking to the people who work with the customers.”


Wet Paint

Another contribution from Owen Smith was an item by Simon Barnes in The Times:

“It's a strange thing that can happen to you when you get the dreaded negative instruction. You know that above all, there is one thing that you mustn't do: and so, by a strange quirk in the wiring of the brain, it becomes the one thing that you can't avoid doing.

What strange impulse impelled Ronan O'Gara to make that final, fearful error? His dreadful move - whatever you do, don't concede a penalty - in the final seconds of the international between the Lions and South Africa held the glassy-eyed fascination of the person who double-faults on match-point, who false-starts in the Olympic Final, who handles the ball in the box in the final, who is clean bowled without offering a stroke.”


This links in to an RR item a few months back where I commented on the way the brain fails to register the negative, so a command such as ‘don’t do that’ is subconsciously registered as ‘do that’. As Simon Barnes comments, it is likely that O’Gara ends up with paint on his hands whenever he walks past a sign saying wet paint.

The importance of providing positive encouragement rather than a warning not to fail should be apparent. This applies in all walks of life, not just sport.


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And Finally


One final input from Owen after reading last month’s Ramble:
“Something struck me when reading the piece about Jenson Button ... can it really be a coincidence that 'talent' is an anagram of 'latent'?”

Now if someone would like to write the August edition I could pour a glass of wine, put my feet up in the sun(?) and gaze into space (sometimes passed off as strategic planning).

David