Month: August 2007

The New Work Revolution – Balanced Lifestyle

Post author By Ethan Theo
Post date August 28, 2007

Management has always been a fashion horse incorporating the latest ‘new’ inventions. They are dreamt up by business-seeking consultants sweeping away the last lot of expensively-bought solutions. Fortunately, business managers have a good deal of common sense and resist the more outlandish offerings in favour of prudent finance, disciplined control and measured risk-taking.
But management really is changing this time because the people being managed have changed. Their education, aspirations, life expectancy, pension needs and knowledge of the options open to them have all developed dramatically in the last ten years.
The ‘Marketing Era’ of the seventies and eighties gave way to the ‘Balanced Life Style Era’ of the nineties. With the dawn of the new millennium we entered the reality of the long-heralded ‘Global Village Era’. You may applaud it, you may deplore it. It is here to stay.
Impose ‘Global Village’ on ‘Balanced Life Style’ and you get a mighty clash of cultures. In the Global Village we all have to compete as never before for our sales. That means more work. In our Balanced Life Style we want to make work only a part of our lives. We expect family, home, leisure, further education and travel to play their part in creating the ’rounded’ and fulfilled person we all aspire to be. So we want less work. Hence the clash.

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John Bittleston blogs at TerrificMentors.com, a site that provides mentoring for those who wish a change in career or job, wanting to start a business or looking to improve their handling of people (including themselves).

Technology

The New Work Revolution – Global Village

Post author By Ethan Theo
Post date August 28, 2007

The Global Village is driven by technology.
It began with television, telecoms and travel. Gradually, stumblingly we learnt about other people – not just where they were on the map but how they lived, what they thought, what they needed, what they aspired to. At first it was a peek at their quaint, sometimes bizarre, lifestyles, customs and practices. Mother T and Bob Geldorf brought us down to earth. Mother T talked for over fifty years about the poorest of the poor until we began to realise they demanded more than an odd coin in the collector’s tin. Geldorf held The Concert and began a massive, serious movement of giving.
Famine, earthquake, flood – all the natural disasters – became the real on-line drama of life. So did the media-monitored terrorist attacks. We went to look but we also went to help. We rounded on our religious superiors for their patronising, ‘heaven next’ approach. As the final notes of our evening prayers resonated through the great Cathedral, Mosque or Temple we began to feel that to follow them with a slap-up, four course dinner washed down with a good hearty drink was not always the best response to those without shelter, food and medicine.
For business, the Global Village offered markets beyond the wildest dreams of our fathers and grandfathers. We were now selling finished goods to people some of whom were beginning to have enough in their pockets for more than the bare essentials. It seemed as though growth was guaranteed forever. Expansion was the name of the game.
People who achieve a little discretionary spending soon want a little more… and a little more. They are willing to work for it at rates that make the present producers look very expensive. ‘Lowest cost’ drives production – and, increasingly, services (call centres, for example) – to where it can be done most economically, leaving in its wake a trail of redundancies, bankruptcies and capital shortages.
All this will shift unemployment – gradually, at first – from the destitute to the well-off, the very people who are seeking a Balanced Life Style.

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Operations

The Importance of a Company’s Culture

Post author By Ethan Theo
Post date August 27, 2007

We notice other people’s personalities. Usually we come quickly to a view about them. First impressions are important – and seldom wrong. Another’s personality is his or her culture. It reflects their background and character.
When you are thinking of joining a company you do your due diligence, finding out about it from its web site, its published accounts, its press reports and the views of anyone you think knows it well enough to be worth listening to.
How much can you learn about the company from these sources? Quite a lot, actually. But if you stick only to the hard data you will miss the most important consideration in deciding whether to join it – its culture.
Culture is the way a company behaves, the way it treats its customers, staff, suppliers and its other stakeholders. Every company has a culture. It is the only truly Unique Selling Proposition (USP) it has. Every other advantage it claims over competitors will be matched by their claims. Their culture is unrepeatable.
Where does a culture come from? The founder(s) of a company give it its original culture. The current bosses decide today’s culture.
How does a culture manifest itself? It is the sum of everything it does but it can be seen in the smallest individual act. The greeting by the receptionist, the treatment of suppliers who have not been paid promptly, what happens to staff when they resign – all these emanate from the culture of the business. If the faces of the staff are pinched and tired and look like scared rabbits you’ve got a Genghis Khan culture. If the staff smile, appear open with each other, cooperate, know their products, help but don’t hassle, you’ve got a good CEO in charge – and a good culture.
There are many simple ways of testing the culture of a business. One that I employ is to deliberately turn up at the wrong reception area and see how the staff there handle it. I don’t have to tell you the difference between the supermarket where they take you to the shelf of the product you are seeking and the one where they point in a vague direction and let you find it for yourself.
So it is with companies; some are helpful, some are not. A company that doesn’t help its customers or its suppliers won’t help its staff either.
A friend of mine recently resigned from an MNC after a fairly short career with the company. My friend came to the wholly reasonable conclusion that all-night working on the odd occasion was acceptable but when it was regularly four nights in a row, it wasn’t.
If you had been the boss what would you have done in that situation? Not, I hope, what the MNC did.
They harassed, attempted to bribe the person to stay, and finally openly bullied their departing employee – especially when two more employees walked out for much the same reasons.
What did they achieve?
Massive alienation by a significant number of people who will never touch their products again. That’s the sort of PR you don’t need.
What should they have done?
Talked a little, listened a lot. They could have learnt a golden lesson, had a well-disposed ex-employee, achieved good PR. They might even have kept the employee they feared to lose. Most of all, they might have understood the problem they had created.
But their culture didn’t allow them what they saw as a soft approach so they took the only one they knew. Trouble is, blowing out the brains of departing employees isn’t actually a very clever way to keep them – or anyone else – on side.
I wonder if they’ll learn that.

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Operations

Mission Statement

mission%20statement.jpg
Business Oppotunities: Every company should have a mission statement, which encapsulates in one sentence your business’s core aims.
An example of a mission statement is Levi Strauss’s: “We will market the most appealing and widely worn casual clothing in the world. We will clothe the world.” Or Wal-Mart’s: “To give ordinary folk the chance to buy the same thing as rich people.”
Unable to think of any more, I thought I’d see if I can guess a few others.
Subway
For every man, woman and child to never be more than five yards from a Subway sandwich.
Nike
To spend more on advertising than the GDP of several small countries put together.
Wetherspoons
To make a lack of atmosphere a proviso of a cheap pint.
Pizza Express
For new customers to be pleasantly surprised at the standard of décor and food in a restaurant which has ‘Express’ in its name.
Statement of Intent [Business Oppotunities]

Work Life

Riches Begin In The Mind

Post author By Ethan Theo
Post date August 26, 2007

Business Advice Pro: It’s writing down your goals with specific deadlines, writing down your goals like you have already achieved it all. And then rewriting them twice a day, or even if not rewriting them then at least reading them again twice a day with thought.
Why? You’re a 9-5 worker or you’re not doing very well. It’s very hard to imagine and actually start believing that you can earn a million dollars a year. It is, I know. So somehow you need to put that thought to your unconsciousness and that’s why you need this written list and that’s why you need to read it again and again and again and again. Yes, I know, I used to think this was really stupid as well. But it ain’t.
There’s also certain things you need to think of, certain things you need to achieve in order to become successful. You need to have a positive mental attitude, sound physical health, you need to be free from fear or at least be able to use it to your benefit, hope and belief in future achievements, open mind, self-discipline. Riches start with a state of mind.
Keeping your goals in mind [Business Advice Pro]