HOW MUCH DO YOU REALLY WANT IT?

Last week I talked to a number of successful and remarkably talented people. They had a few things in common. They were all incredibly busy and were enjoying themselves.  More interestingly all of them were going through a non-stop process of self-examination regarding their strategy for sustaining their success.

Whilst I like the philosophy of Dr Steve Peters the renowned sports coach - “life’s unfair; they keep moving the goalposts; all you can do is try your absolute best” - I’ve always been a sceptic about using sport as a way of counselling people in business. Winning a gold medal, or winning a test match are not the same as succeeding in business. For one thing the measurement of success is more complex. As one of my superstar successes confided to me “business is all about psychology…you are as successful as people think you are.”

Here are four strategies to help achieve that:-

Be different. When Alan Bennett won a scholarship to Oxford he played the game of being a contrarian brilliantly. If you ever saw the History Boys you’ll understand. Be noticed for being radical. The same applies to all success. Being the same as everyone else is a poor strategy.

Be patient. Sam Walton who created Walmart took time to get going, opening his first store in 1945. Not until 1962 did the steamroller that we know today really power forwards. By then he’d made a lot of mistakes and learnt even more. Patience in Sam’s case was a virtue. Something we see little of today.

Know your part. When success happens despite oneself it’s time to throw away the management guide books. Peter O’Toole, a legendary drinker, got plastered and awoke at 530 pm appalled to have missed his matinee performance. He rushed to the theatre abjectly and apologised. They looked puzzled. “But Peter you played the part and were splendid then you shot off saying you felt a bit tired.” Can that really be true? I hope so.

Be like Jack Welch. The legendary powerhouse from GE whom they called “Neutron Jack” for his ruthlessness in eliminating workforces whilst leaving the buildings that had housed them intact. He put it like this. “I want my executives to demonstrate simplicity, speed and self-confidence.”

Keep on asking yourselves hard questions. In a fast-moving and intense world of work do not rely on yesterday’s formula for success. Be prepared to try new approaches and whatever you do keep on introducing new products and ideas; because if you can’t create news you should be prepared to become history.

And there’s one other thing - be shameless about enjoying yourself. If you hate what you do you won’t do it very well. As someone put it so vividly “getting in early and opening the shop is such fun.”

Maybe that sense of opening up your shop is the first step towards having a really positive open mind.

WHEN BIG BEHAVES BIG IT ALWAYS GETS IT WRONG

When you move house or office or anything like that a fair amount of disruption follows. For me the most intriguing thing has been the array of tradesmen who’ve been to call checking a variety of utilities, mending the broken and quoting eye watering sums for the potential beautification of the house.

All of them real craftsmen, impressively knowledgeable and attentive to our needs - including BT when they got here.  My concern about beastly BT is they’ve constructed an unwieldy and commercially crass structure until a real human being, the BT engineer comes to call. He was smart, assiduous and all is well - I’m back on line. But here’s the odd thing, the maddening thing - before he arrives I’m called by BT saying I can set myself up without an engineer (no I can’t and yes I know having an attack of rage so early in the morning can’t be good for me) and then even whilst he’s here I’m being texted to say he won’t be coming now for another two days. I show him this and he says “take no notice” and carries on working.

My dispassionate and utterly serious point to you BT is you cannot afford to carry on wasting time, money and talent doing the little stuff so badly. Please can I tell you how to solve the problem?

Be as big as you wish but behave as though you were small. When your customer interface parades your scale you are doomed. Thus with the banks. I bank with NatWest - I always have. At a branch level (yes I go to branches ever since being told by a banking friend that bankers never bank online - “are you insane?”) the service is brilliant, charming and helpful. Out there however beyond the phone, in the call centres life gets trickier. Thus with the retailers. Tesco suffered in part by seeming so huge. Wherever you went that 1970s logo reminded you that “every little helps”. Pretending to be little when they are really big and beastly. Thus with big government, it doesn’t work. Only small, can-do fix-it-it people can solve things.

It’s time to put human faces back into customer service like B&Q have done employing retirees who are D&Y fanatics and who really know what they are talking about.

And it’s time to break down the myth that big is better when it’s usually confused. In the case of BT left and right hands belong to completely different bodies. Imagine a left hand whom you don’t know and isn’t yours trying to blow your nose. My BT experience has been that bad.

Oh and it isn’t over. They called to say could they fix the TV by sending an engineer? Suspiciously I agreed. Then the paperwork was emailed. They are planning to go where we used to live. The trouble is I can’t get through to them to say don’t go there we’ve moved.

THE CHEF'S GUIDE TO THINKING

This started with me realising that Anthony Bourdain had written the seminal book on management in his “Les Halles Cookbook”. It had things in the introduction like this about cooking:

…“it’s all about transformation, about taking the ordinary and making it extraordinary. That’s magic.”

And that’s what creative thinking does. That’s what the whole concept of “value added” is about. Taking a commodity and making it special and desirable. Welcome indeed to the inner sanctum of marketing. Creating a brand….that’s magic too.

Let’s examine this maestro’s attitude towards cooking. It’s a pleasurable process in its own right and the more you practice the better you get (sound familiar that?) and the outcome is or should undoubtedly be pleasurable. But before you start, it requires deep planning and preparation.

• Be a  fanatic about writing lists - “sorry I forgot to” is not an excuse in the kitchen or the boardroom - have a brilliant countdown timetable
• Reconnaissance - what’s available, what’s good, what’s easy - don’t try to work with bad ingredients.
• “Mise en place” - the belief system - this is the basis on which genius can be based and without which incompetence is likely
• Deep prep. - the chopping, peeling (or in our case the slicing and dicing of data) - putting things into to marinade (letting ideas mature.) 
• Prepare the ingredients - getting everything ready, in the right quantity 
• Assembling everything ready to use - in thinking have all your reference points ready to hand - no more research
• Cook slowly, don’t rush things, stir, let the sauce reduce and relax. 
• Serve, eat, relish and enjoy 

And you know what? Take-away thinking, ready prepared thinking, fast thinking or deep fried thinking just isn’t as good as freshly prepared thinking.

How to solve problems and make brilliant decisions. (Business Thinking Skills that really work) published by Pearson is coming out on November 7th 2014

WE KNOW LIKE NOTHING

That’s what a doctor said recently when I asked him about current knowledge on the human mind. He exaggerated of course. Like he always does when talking about diet and the amount one should safely drink.

Since I’ve started studying the subject prior to writing the book on thinking in business and how to think more effectively, I’ve realised this is true. If we knew as little about the body as we do about the human brain we would regard the heart as a no-go area  and the word bypass would be a term reserved exclusively in Transport circles.

US Journalist, Dan Hurley’s book “Smarter - The New Science of Building Brain Power” describes an attempt to discover whether we can and how we can improve our brain power. Perplexingly despite the number of professors and terribly clever people he talks to it is pretty well a journey into terra incognito.

That’s the bad news but here’s the good news.  It’s the top headline in everything but the tabloids. People are going on “good fats” as they seem to speed up the metabolism and make you smarter. Pundits like Brian Cox reflect there’s more going on in our head than there is in the Universe. Daniel Kahneman, Nobel prize-winning psychologist, at 80 years old bestrides the lecture circuit and does so to sell-out audiences.

Our knowledge about the way we think is improving, indeed compounding daily and people are beginning to realise you can neither judge a book by its cover nor a candidate by their A*s. We are looking for a complexity of intelligence and an ability to think fast, slow, empathetically, decisively, creatively and smartly. Understanding thinking has gone to the top of the business agenda. Get with it.

How to solve problems and make brilliant decisions. (Business Thinking Skills that really work) published by Pearson is coming out on November 7th 2014

THINKING

Over the next few weeks I’ll be writing a daily blog on “thinking” which reflects on some of the content of my new book which will be published in early November. A subject as vast as how we think which also considers how we can improve our thinking skills will inevitably provoke thought. Well, it’s certainly done that to me - hence these thoughts on thinking.

How to solve problems and make brilliant decisions. (Business Thinking Skills that really work) published by Pearson is coming out on November 7th 2014.

I'M AWAY IN VENICE

THINKING

www.colourfulthinkers.com