Weekend Musings on Change
It is a while now since Monday Musings settled into its current format and I would like to make some changes. As yet I’ve not entirely decided what these should be, but what follows is the way that I am thinking.
The 600 words every Monday at 0600 UTC was a challenge that I was happy to meet. Over the years that I have been hitting that target I have written in a variety of styles and on a range of topics. Musings was intended to be a vehicle for serious topics even if I do get them over with a periodic use of humour, but the 600 words once a week has become something of a constraint, or at least from time to time it has.
I will keep the Monday column going though, simply because it is a good discipline and one that I find very useful in terms of business writing. Six hundred words in a standard font and size is a single sheet of A4 paper, and being able to set out an idea on a single side of paper is something that anyone in business should be able to do.
But when I wrote I Don’t Have My Decision Making Trousers On, the old Musings posts that I incorporated into that book all benefitted from being re-written with the freedom of however many words it took. In some cases they were improved by condensing them, but in most cases they came out a little longer. The 600 limit also precludes some of the stories that I have wanted to tell and a few of those drafts that I had stored away found their way into “Trousers”.
So what I have in mind is to keep my 600 word format musings coming through on Mondays, but to be able to bring in anything else that crosses my mind as and when it does. That leads to the second change, and this is also something that I’ve not yet decided on, but I will change the name of the blog. Monday Musings was somewhat un-original; there are many blogs with that title, but so far every alternative that I can come up with is also either in use or too close to someone else’s pride and joy for me to want to muscle in.
The change of name will therefore come when I get that spark of inspiration to find a new name for it; there is no hurry.
So it is business as usual, but with a gradual change over the coming weeks. Thanks to all who read what I write here, and another thanks to those who leave a comment, Tweet the blog or talk to me about things that I have written when we run in to each other.
Can we ever expect those that we elect to act ethically?
It’s a few years ago now that I made an important decision about the way that I would live my life: I decided that I would try hard not to get angry. It is a wasteful emotion and it drains you, and so, taking the view that you have a choice as to whether or not to get angry, I decided that I would choose not to.
Largely this policy has worked for me, but my resolve does get tested from time to time and this last week has seen one of those trials of my resolve. I had started the week off by emailing in my next column for FM World where I have written about business ethics. I won’t pre-empt that here, but by the end of the week we had seen the seemingly scandalous issue of the Welfare to Work case erupt all over our news media. This has echoes of the National Bullying Helpline case that rattled around the UK from its base here in Swindon a year or so back where, again, a conflict of interest was apparently overlooked.
There are two aspects of these sort of cases that threaten to raise my bile levels; the first is that both of these issues are built on milking the hopes of the vulnerable and I find that utterly despicable; those who perpetrate such scandals are beneath even contempt, but it is a fact of life that these low life individuals get to live the high life at the expense of the rest of us.
The second issue is how on earth are they allowed to get the opportunity and then to exploit it? Surely someone should have seen these things and closed them down, but they patently didn’t and allowed it to carry on until the media blew the lid off for them. (Which is why, although I am appalled at how standards in the media have slipped I am still firmly in favour of the right to freedom of speech).
I am a businessman with a lot of experience in supply chains, so I look at these contracts with that experience shaping the way I see things. I work with the Public Procurement Regulations, from both sides, on a regular basis and, in my view, they are nothing but a Supplier’s Charter. In both of the cases that I have referred to above the regulations should have been applied to the letting of those contracts. The regulations are supposed to help deliver value for the public purse, but consistently fail to do so, and although they may not have been the only poor element of these two contracts, they will have played a part in the nonsense that has emerged.
But how on earth were these contracts allowed to go so far before being exposed? That has to be a leadership issue, because a good leader, even just a competent leader, would have seen things going wrong. I can’t believe that no-one saw the problems, so there has to be a chain of command issue whereby the bad news was being suppressed and, in that case, it is doubtful that we, Hoi Polloi, will ever get to know the truth, for just as there was a conflict of interest at the heart of the contracts, there will be a conflict of interest in allowing the truth to come out: Someone will have to take responsibility.
My anger is just about under control here, but can you see any of those happily pointing fingers at business bonuses taking responsibility for the Welfare to Work scandal? I can’t.
Weekend Musings on Ethics
The next Monday Musing will be somewhat harder hitting that some, but the whole issue of ethics in business and public life is something that I think we need to get a grip on, hence some of my blogs and more public writings around now.
When I was younger there was a value in public service and that was still very much in evidence when I first began to meet with government figures in 1983, but it seems that much of that has gone. The people who we elect are there to serve us, or at least the greater good and not themselves. If you look at the code of conduct for even the humblest of clubs or bodies there will be something there about conflicts of interest and the like, but so few seem to even pay this lip service.
And then there is the incompetence factor. We have elected officials from this government and its predecessor who have failed in their duties to the public and yet have the gall to shout and point fingers at business people. Ethics? Honour? Sense of duty? Character? I was brought up to believe that these were fundamentals; where did we lose sight of that?
Facilities Managers must become more businesslike
I wrote a while back about the need for us to see more business acumen amongst the specialist disciplines like purchasing and facilities management, so I was delighted to read my fellow FM World columnist (and fellow consultant) Lionel Prodgers’ article last week talking along similar lines.
When I wrote about this last time my own thoughts on this topic had been prompted by a conversation I’d had with Steve Gladwin as we drove between site visits whilst judging in the BIFM awards. The general thrust was that, if we wanted to advance the FM profession into the boardroom, then FM people needed to understand that corporate jungle and its language.
Like many of my age group I came in to FM from other disciplines; I had an IT and purchasing/supply chain background and, although I had spent two and a half years as a buyer managing that end of M&E contracts, it was only later in life, as Operations Director running a large logistics operation, that I moved from FM customer to FM Provider. Even then it was a small part of my empire and it had only come to me because the Accommodation Team, as they were known, had managed to close down my goods inwards function with an ill thought through project. By the end of that month they had been transferred from Personnel to my team and we got on fine thereafter.
It was only when I merged that operation with another business and did away with my own job that I made the move to FM as a full time interest with a portfolio over more than 30 sites to manage. But I didn’t ever see myself as a facilities manager; more as a businessman who ran a facilities management organisation, and I think that this is a crucial difference in approach.
As a younger man I worked for some years in the wholesale trade where it was important to be able to supply the retail clients with things that they could easily sell on and make their profits from. That requirement to think past the next link in the supply chain to the next one beyond stood me in good stead in FM; what did my clients need to help them run their business? Indeed, to understand what their business was, how it was developing, what their objectives were and so on was a foundation of my approach. If I could understand what their issues were then I could help deliver FM solutions that much better and could contribute to the way that their strategies evolved.
As FM became established as a profession through the 1990s it came together with a wealth of talent from all sorts of backgrounds and it was this that, in many ways, enabled it to establish its own identity. Quite rightly we have tried to get to a point where FM is a profession of choice for younger people and BIFM have done sterling work in evolving a professional qualification framework to enable them to qualify through. These things take time to work through, but it is doing what it was intended to do in bringing people on.
This approach is something that I carry through today into helping people studying for their FM qualifications because, whilst they obviously need to understand FM, as they become more senior they need to become more business minded. When I qualified as a buyer I had to study marketing, accounting and law amongst other subjects to pass out, and it is this breadth that we need to develop in our FM people.
Sustainability; an alternative view
Over the last few years we have seen sustainability appear as a major topic and it has become a word that people like to chuck into conversations and business proposals and to have included in policies. As with most words that get overused it tends to lose its meaning and therefore its power; ironic that, at least in this context, because if you think about what the word really means, I’m saying that it has become unsustainable. Most people today will probably associate sustainability with the environment (another word that has seen its meaning shift through wide usage), but I still like to use it to describe the practice of keeping something going.
I got onto today’s train of thought talking about charity, or more specifically charities and, as these things do, one thought led to another. The first one was around what happens to the benefit; we’re all familiar with the expression “give a man a fish” etc, but how many of these charitable efforts have actually been successful? Or are they just sustaining the problem? Like most businesses, charities have two parts; one that is selling and one that isn’t. In the case of the charity, the selling part, as far as I am describing it here, is the bit bringing in the money: It’s the people that sell the charity to donors. The other part is the one that distributes the benefit.
In the context of the discussion that I was having the issue was just how often charities suffer the same blight as other organisations in that they can grow a large and often unnecessary function in between these two parts. Sight gets lost of what the real objective of the organisation is and the bit in the middle takes on an importance and a life of its own at the expense of its parent. Just as I talked last week about a process becoming a trap if it wasn’t right, many organisations end up with more focus on the process than on doing the job.
In the world of music sustain is about how long you can keep a note going; we talk about sustain with regard, perhaps, to an organ or a guitar and we refer to the time before the note decays. And that use of the word decay is very apt in terms of today’s Musing, for what happens to organisations so often is that a form of decay sets in and spoils the connection between the two halves. The ability of the one to sustain the other begins to rot away.
So my point is that we should be looking to improve the sustainability of our own organisations, be they public, private or third sectors, by removing any areas that will be susceptible to decay or rot and to apply lean principles to sharpen the connection between the two parts. Whether you are selling products, providing services or delivering benefits, whatever your organisation’s reason for existence, the other part of the organisation should be focussed solely on supporting that activity.
Try an internet search for Trireme. You’ll find it is one of those old ships with banks of oars. Forget for a moment what it meant to be chained to one of those oars, but consider how all of those folks could get a ship that size moving at up to 8 knots. That is the power of all rowing in harmony. But if you don’t all pull together you will go nowhere. What we need to see more of is everyone making a sustained effort focused on delivering objectives and results.
Musing on knowledge workers, leaders and managers
I was reading a blog post the other day where someone was trotting out the differences between a manager and a leader and expounding the theory that managers are no longer needed in business as the knowledge workers require leadership not management.
OK, I understand the argument and, to some degree, am happy to support it. For a start I’ve been doing it for more years than I can remember so why would I think otherwise?
My issue with this kind of evangelical stuff is that too often those who are picking up on the message are not getting the full picture, won’t really understand what they need to do about it and it will end up, for them and those that they inflict it on, as another failed initiative; just one more management fad.
Let me be blunt here: Every business needs to have someone in a management role. Sure, it is going to involve a lot of boring stuff; admin type things that the swashbuckling leader, swinging from the chandelier with a knife gripped between their teeth would look on with scorn, but if you don’t have some form of management, then that leader will soon end up as one famous leader did, caught by a river, surrounded by the opposition and getting massacred.
Sir Richard Branson is often held up as a leadership role model, and quite rightly. His group of companies has grown in my lifetime and I have watched with admiration some of the audacious deals that they have pulled off as the man at the top has kept popping up in the headlines in a series of adventures. Not all of the latter have come off of course, but he has entered our hearts as an example of that swashbuckling leadership style I refer to above.
How has he built such a successful brand? It isn’t just about leadership; it’s about being able to blend that entrepreneurial spirit and the visionary leadership with management skills that can sort out the detail of the deals. The devil is in the detail is a very true saying and you need some completer finishers on the team to nail all of that stuff down. Read Sir Richard’s books or any of those written about him, and you’ll see that he works with the right people on all of these deals, buying in expertise when and where he needs it to augment his own people.
If we are talking in hierarchical terms then I would rather see a good leader at the head of a company than a good manager. I think that a good leader will take an organisation to where it needs to go, seeing the opportunities, setting the agenda and the direction and inspiring their people to sign up to the dream. But it will be the managers who ensure that all of the things that need to happen do happen, when and where they need to.
If you follow these thoughts on a regular basis you will be aware that I am passionate about developing leadership. I firmly believe that business leaders will be the ones to take us out of recession, not the politicians. The latter can only recycle money; business can create wealth.
I am even more passionate about people. It is people that make organisations work, and the organisations that treat their people fairly will prevail over those that don’t. Yes, let’s develop the knowledge worker concept, but in doing so let us also recognise that amongst those knowledge workers are the managers. Lose sight of that and you will lose.
How well thought out are your processes?
Having a process is pretty fundamental for any business transaction. Even at a very basic level, say you’ve cleared out your garage and set up stall at a car boot sale, you have to have some sort of process for taking money and giving change. It made seem obvious, but members of my family have managed to forget to take the cash or not put the money away safely. That may not be a big issue for the family holiday fund, but it’s no way to run a business, and so you should have processes in place: You’ll have to have some to meet your statutory obligations anyway.
So having processes is a given, but one of the biggest dangers to your business is not competition, recession or rising prices; it is in your processes.
How do you design your processes? Do you just record what seems like the best way of doing something? Do you think about the steps you need to get to a desired outcome? Do you come up with a series of actions and then eliminate all of the waste? You’re probably doing some of these or a variation of them, but have you actually thought about what the desired outcome is in any detail, because where things can often go wrong is that what you’re doing isn’t delivering what you need and you’re missing out on opportunities to be better.
Recently I was asked to help an on-line retailer with customer complaints. They had a well documented process for their helpdesk operators and good scripts for them to follow, but their complaints were growing at the same rate as their business. There were two problems; the first was that the process was well designed to meet the stated aim; to deal with the customer. The second problem was that the process didn’t do anything else.
Because they had a complaints process, they could tell how much they refunded and how many complaints that they had, but they didn’t know anything else and so it was hard for them to know where to start in eradicating the problems causing the complaints. The solution was to look at the overall problem; instead of stopping when the refund was issued, to add in all of the rest of the activity through the item coming back into the warehouse, being inspected and then disposed of in whatever fashion was appropriate.
All of the activity was being captured on computer, but because the objective hadn’t been fully thought through several aspects were not joined up. With the addition of half a dozen complaint category tick boxes on the helpdesk screen and a slight revision to the script it was possible to analyse the nature of the complaints with a weekly report. By analysing the items concerned against the newly added categories it was easy to see where the main problems were. The system could already tell them where the items had been bought in from, and so a complaints by supplier by item analysis enabled the buyer to tackle the suppliers concerned armed with realistic data. The last step was that it was possible to show how much the returned products had been sold off for so that figure could be deducted from the refund to show a truer loss picture. Apart from about an extra 5 seconds added to the helpdesk task all of the rest of the benefit came with no additional work.
Having a process can be a trap. It will only be a benefit if you have thought it all the way through
Can Facilities Managers learn from the Costa Concordia sinking?
Managing an emergency evacuation is something that every Facilities Manager should have begun to learn about from the start of their career, and continue to learn about for as long as they are in the profession. I say continue to learn because although there is a core element to managing any emergency situation, every one that you handle will have nuances that will add to your repository of solutions. It’s why there should always be a drains up session afterwards to help you understand what went on and why.
Whilst there will be a process in place for emergencies it can be a dangerous trap if you try to be too specific because the reality is that there is so often something that you didn’t expect, one of those nuances, that can see you having to improvise. But the biggest problem with process is that it can be what has led you into the disaster or caused you to misdiagnose the remedy. When something goes wrong it’s no good saying “that couldn’t have happened” because it just has, and it can be easy to lose sight of what you have to do, especially when the nature of the emergency is fast changing. That is where having a well drilled team with a good, proven, communication system comes into its own.
The Costa Concordia disaster that unfolded across our news media last weekend is an interesting case for a FM to consider. Whatever the alleged failings of certain individuals amongst the crew there was enough professionalism from the remainder and the rescue services to get a large amount of people to safety in difficult circumstances once the crucial decision had been made. It is getting the people out and away to safety that takes management. It needs calm authority and clear command to keep those that you are evacuating under control, for panic is something that you should fear. I blogged a few months back about my experience at my local supermarket where the fire alarms went off and employees were pushing through the shoppers shouting “Fire, get out”. There was no sign of any effort by management to ensure a safe evacuation of the store, but fortunately there was no panic amidst the shoppers.
People can behave badly when they think that they are in danger and you are channelling them through the bottle neck of the exit doors. “Women and Children First” is nothing more than a chivalrous gesture and it has no legal standing, so if you are trying to get people out are you going to slow things down by trying to pull men out of the flow? However I might feel about such behaviour my view is that you move people through as quickly as is safe to do so and make sure that you are getting them clear on the outside.
Is there anything that we as FMs can learn from the Concordia sinking? I hope that we can get past the hysterical journalism and think about what we would do; trouble rarely comes at a convenient moment, so how are your routines for assembling your people in the right places, how well do they know what they need to do, how do your lines on communication work, what back up plans do you have? Set some time and get your team together to work through these things. However good you think you are there will be something that you can polish, and don’t gloss over anything that may not be robust. Make it better; you won’t get a second chance when the alarm sounds.
Brushing off the Small Print
Over the weekend I was informed by a major UK retailer that toothpaste is not a dental product. You may find that as bizarre as I did, but it is true, as far as they are concerned within the limits of the relevant promotion.
Whatever their logic in drawing that line for their promotion may be my view is that it is another symptom of a malaise that we really should have stamped out by now; that of the Small Print. We had started to make real progress a few years ago with having clarity about things, even in those last bastions of the Small Print, the insurance and travel businesses, but it has begun to make a comeback.
Probably one of the drivers has been the budget airlines where, in some ways rightly, they have segmented their product to offer the customer a wider choice. We haven’t quite reached the “Inside or outside seating sir?” level, but, like many, I began to use budget airlines for business travel and was more than happy to just take a briefcase and be able to waft up to Glasgow and back for about a fifth of what it would cost me for a return fare on the train to London. The trains have followed suit with advance bookings and such since and it all helps to keep costs down if you can make the timings work and accept the risk of not making it to the airport or station in time for your booked return. Personally I don’t find that the web sites that you book through are particularly misleading or hard to use; fortunately I still have enough functioning brain cells to understand that being late is too late whether it is one minute or thirty. Either way I’m late and it will cost me regardless of why I’m late.
I’ve read recently that the Government want to introduce legislation to stop such companies not telling you that there is another 3.5% or similar to pay by credit card until you get to the late stages of the transaction. That’s fair enough I suppose, but in general I’m not hugely in favour of legislation at this sort of level. In fact I’m not in favour of Government interfering in business at all if we can help it, but the problem with some of this is that the people marketing these products view their customers as gullible enough to be drawn in far enough towards the purchasing decision before they clobber them with the real deal. However, this is the dodgy second hand car salesman technique that people of my vintage will be familiar with and sooner or later there will be a backlash.
So much for the B2C world, but we’re not like that in B2B are we? Unfortunately we often are, most often because we haven’t taken the basic steps of being sure about what we are buying and understanding the deal. Like me at the weekend we have rushed into the transaction thinking that we were on to a good deal but not having made sure that it was as good as we thought.
For me the choice was easy enough; pay up or walk away, but what if the deal had been for equipment costing a six figure sum or a three year service contract? That is not the sort of deal that you want to make a mistake on. Take your time to understand what you want and why and always make sure that, Small Print and all, the deal you make will deliver what you need.
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