Legislation Harms Bus Travellers

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Jan 162012
 

Most businesses would say that there is too much legislation relating to employment. I’m sure that unions would say it’s necessary to protect employees’ rights. But does the legislation do more harm than good? For a start small businesses in particular are likely to go down the outsourcing route rather than taking on employees, and who can blame them? However, there’s another point. If you require legislation to keep you in a job, surely it can’t be a happy situation. Wouldn’t you be better off moving somewhere else? Just a day or two ago a headmistress was explaining how she had moved on one in six of her staff and saying that the conversations with them had been helpful to them to see that teaching wasn’t the right career choice for them.

Many years ago I had a guy working for me who just wasn’t cutting the mustard. We were puzzled by this but conversations with him and having him psychometrically tested revealed that he was the proverbial wrong shaped peg for the hole.  We got him moved to a more appropriate role. He was happier, we were happier and the company benefited from him being in a role where he was able to make a full contribution.

In his book, ‘From Good to Great’, Professor Jim Collins reports on very extensive research into how some companies outperformed their competitors over many years. One of the key factors was, as Collins puts it, having the right people on the bus and sitting in the right seats. This is possible only if there is flexibility to move people around or off that particular bus. Once we have a job that is reasonably secure and well paid, I suggest that most of us are reluctant to leave even if we don’t enjoy it. But this is helpful to no one. Allowing businesses to remove easily someone from the bus allows that person the opportunity to find the right employment for them … or gives them a necessary wake up call that they need to work harder in their next employment if that was the reason they’ve been ejected from the bus.

Is it right to deny someone the opportunity to move to a job that is better suited to them – that they will enjoy more? And why is it in anyone’s interest to protect lazy employees? Of course, there is another side to this. If employers communicate fully with their staff and involve them in all that’s going on, employees are more likely to feel committed to a business and what it is trying to achieve. An open and honest conversation in both directions will make it easier to ensure that people are on the right buses and buses have the right people on them.

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300

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Dec 202011
 

I do not believe it! (Victor Meldrew) Since drafting this post, Seth Godin has blogged about the 4,300 items he’s written since starting his blog, originally in email format back in 1991. I think I’ve been trumped! Oh well, for what it’s worth, here’s my offering.

I’m going to bore you with a little history! This is the 300th post since this blog started in its original guise as The Watercooler. Some of the early posts were written by friends before I stopped nagging them and took full responsibility for what appears in print. However, my wandering mind first started dumping its thought in written form on the 26th April 2006 when Random Ramblings first appeared on my original website. Then, with the advent of my second website, RR became a monthly emailed newsletter. With this, my third website iteration, I started the Watercooler blog and for some while ran RR as a separate entity. But it seemed a bit unfair to inflict quite so much waffle on the world and so a few months back I merged the streams so now the monthly emailed Ramble is a collation of what appears in the blog, with a some mild editing.

Anyone who writes as much as I have over the years is either very creative or they nick ideas from elesewhere. I fall into the latter category. One of my key influencers is Seth Godin. I was rather taken with an eclectic list of a dozen pieces of advice Seth published recently. My favourites are:

  1. Borrow money to buy things that go up in value, but never to get something that decays over time. (If only the world had taken note!)
  2. It’s almost never necessary to use a semicolon. (He’s completely wrong on this!!!)
  3. Backup your hard drive. (Well reminded.)
  4. Taking your dog for a walk is usually better than whatever alternative use of your time you were considering. (Hmm, no dog.)

And just to finish off, here are three thoughts I’ve borrowed from elsewhere:

  1. A pessimist is never disappointed. (Eddie Kiely, a work colleague from many years back.)
  2. Smile – it confuses people. (Scott Adams – American humourist.)
  3. Strategies are okayed in boardrooms that even a child would say are bound to fail. The problem is there is never a child in the boardroom. (Victor Palmieri, US corporate turnaround specialist.)

Happy Christmas!

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Henry Ford Was Right!

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Dec 082011
 

“Whether you think you can or that you can’t, you are usually right.” Henry Ford

I was watching some of the Masters tennis from the Royal Albert Hall at the weekend. John McEnroe was playing Henri Leconte. The commentator made the point that they had very similar ability but McEnroe had the belief. He won 17 Grand Slam titles including seven singles. Leconte’s highlights were a doubles title, a runner-up and two singles semi-final places. McEnroe thought that he could and so he did.

An even more dramatic demonstration of mind power is snake bites. Apparently many people who die after being bitten by a snake do so from fear, not snake venom. You see, a snake does not automatically inject venom when it bites, it is a selective process depending on the snake’s intentions.

I believe that the difference between very successful entrepreneurs such as Richard Branson, Alan Sugar and Duncan Bannatyne and the rest of us is that they believed they could. We are more cautious. We fear failure; what people might think. Is it time to think of just ONE thing we’d like to do but have been held back by caution? How about putting fear aside and doing it now? If you like, a sort of Old Year’s Resolution.

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Under Pressure

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Aug 312011
 

No, not a discussion of a Queen song, although it’s a pity I can’t add a sound track of Freddie Mercury. At the moment I have quite a few things that need doing in a short time. I’m under pressure. Or am I? As Seth Godin pointed out in his blog a couple of weeks back, I’m under pressure from myself. Most of the urgent items on my To Do list I have elected to add to it. Sure, if I didn’t do them one or two people might take a dim view but the world wouldn’t end, I doubt it would even make much difference to my life. And those disappointed folk would mostly forget pretty quickly.

Yesterday I was discussing fear of certain situations with Derek Norval, my co-facilitator of our Succesful Speaking workshops for people who are nervous of speaking in public. As Derek pointed out, although there may be deep seated reasons for our fears, we choose to be frightened. We can make a decision not to be. I remember reading a book where the author said that one day she took a decision to be happy. And so she was. In the latter days of my corporate career I would look for the positive in whatever situation presented itself. Sometimes I would make my colleagues laugh at the absurdity of my take on ‘positive’. But there is no doubt that if you look hard enough, there is nearly always that proverbial silver lining in every cloud.

By the way, I chose to write this post. Sure I hadn’t written anything for a while. But I could have let another week or two go by. After all, none of you has been banging on my door asking when I am going to write a new post. You have my full permission not to feel under any pressure to do so in future. And you can give yourself full permission not to do things that aren’t essential. And not to fear the consequences.

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Build A Chicken Shed

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Aug 202011
 

In a post last October on Inspirational Buildings I mentioned the effect that Frank Gehry’s Guggenheim Museum had on transforming the fortunes of Bilbao in northern Spain. Earlier this week I watched a Channel 4 programme that put the case against buildings such as the Guggenheim. It suggested that many post-Guggenheim buildings are more about show (and the architect’s ego?) than functionality for the people who use them. I am a passionate believer that buildings can have a powerful effect on the way we feel, how we work, how creative we can be. But I would readily agree that some creators of modern buildings do not seem to care about the users. An obvious example is the many people who are not comfortable with heights. Despite this, architects put glass lifts up the outsides of buildings and escalators that run up through space. They design buildings that rise to unnatural heights … and then give them glass walls!

The trouble is that many of us get so caught up in what we are doing that we often fail to understand what our customers experience. We may not be asked to design an iconic building but all of us have the opportunity to do something worthwhile, something that can make a positive difference to our business, the organisation for which we work, our community, or just to an individual. All that is required is an understanding of what the end user needs, rather than what we want to give them. Maybe over the weekend we can reflect on one thing we can do next week that will start to change something.  Another eminent architect, Frank Lloyd Wright said, “Regard it as just as desirable to build a chicken house as a cathedral”.

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