Archive
on developing strategy
I see more and more focus on developing strategy through the likes of spreadsheets and data analysis, with even use of AI, not as a tool per se, but allowing it to do the analysis and produce the outline strategy. This gives me cause for concern.
There is far more data available now that at any time in my working life, but what does any of it mean? I see a lot of market research surveys and almost all of them are only ever going to generate gibberish, and some poor sap is not only paying to have that gibberish accumulated, but is also, because they have paid for it, probably going to waste more though acting on it.
The best data is that which is captured as part of doing the job, for example, in a retail environment, scanning product through the till. The basic act of selling product will tell you how many you sell, how much you earned and will drive your stock replenishment systems. This can be extended back into the supplier’s systems if required, so that they can gear production and the purchase of raw materials from that data.
All good stuff, and you can, if your people are clever enough, to factor in seasonal trends and things like that within the algorithms that drive the programme. But, for me, the problem is that here we are still talking about the fact that the computer is doing what we tell it to – we still need human intervention.
Strategy still need to be decided by people. Sure, they can use data provided by the computer, but the end decisions should be made by people who know what they are doing. It is an important skill, it comes from experience and it is one that we can ill afford to lose. Computers will get better as they learn from us, but should they ever take over? Not as far as I am concerned.
Human decisions are not always reliable; we take longer to evaluate information and we do bring emotional aspects into the decision, but we do have the ability to see and feel the environment in which the decisions will be enacted. Strategy needs tactics, and that is where humans are still much better at reacting to the changing circumstances that will always prevail.
Every business, or organisation, should have a strategic plan, but there is still a tendency for departments within the business to have their own strategies. To a degree I can accept these, but all too often the departmental “strategies” seem to have no linkage to the overall one. They should be tactical plans in my view, and non the ego trips that so many look like. I’ve even seen departmental strategies that conflict with the overall aims of the organisation.
Strategies don’t need to be complex. What are you going to do, by when and with what resources is a good starting point. It needs to be clear so that people can understand it, and if it is people that have developed it, then they should have no problems.
on managing, yesterday and today
It is 52 years since I took my first step into management. It was just a small step, I ran an estate agency’s branch office where the only employees were me and a part time typist. I learned about responsibility, but nothing of any significance over the eight or nine months that I was in that job as far as managing people was concerned.
My next outing as a manager was about two years later when, for two weeks, I covered for someone who was on holiday. I knew the job that I had to do, but my team was two pairs of middle aged women, one pair in the mornings and the other in the afternoons. I was clueless in directing them and they ran rings around me. I made such a hash of it that it almost stopped my career progression with that company on its tracks.
I started to watch other managers and began to understand a little. As always there were good managers and bad, but I started to see why and I was on the cusp of being given my own department to run when I upped sticks and left. It was a stupid move and six months later I moved again. In this, latest, job I restarted progress towards becoming a manager.
It took me twelve years from starting work before I finally got into the managerial ranks but, once there, I made rapid progress and had a good run, making it from the shop floor to the boardroom. We had processes, rules and laws to comply with, but decision making and leading your people were fundamental parts of what we did. If you were good enough at those you did well.
Today’s managers seem to lack almost all of the freedom that we enjoyed. Computers don’t guide the modern manager in the way that they began to do for me, now they make many of the decisions; scheduling hours, ordering stock and more. Artificial Intelligence (AI) is taking over and I am aware of systems that drive many of the things that a manager would have been expected to get right.
I wonder what skills I would be looking for if I were asked to assess someone for a management role today. Leadership would be a given, but what else if the machine is making all of the decisions? Almost none of the managerial skills that I might have looked for in terms of being able to assimilate, assess and react to information seem to be applicable in the modern environment. There is one though, and it is ever more applicable in today’s environment, and it is the ability to create a workplace that the team feel comfortable, safe and valued in.
This is not so much in the physical sense, because that should be a given, rather it is in the psychological arena, and the key to it is being able to act as a barrier between the company and your team. Let the good stuff flow through, anything positive, involving praise or general corporate information, but as a wall against anything negative. You may be getting hammered by your boss over some element of performance, but the way that you handle that with your team is important.
The ability to lead people is going to outlive anything that AI can do, and a good leader will still stand out, especially the ones that can create an environment where their team can learn, make mistakes and grow. Such places are happy ones, despite any day to day frustrations that life throws up. Creating them is a skill that we need to cherish.
nice guys don’t come first
I ran into an old colleague last week, not someone that I had worked very closely with, but our paths had crossed a lot over a dozen years or so as we made our respective ways through the labyrinth of a large corporate empire. We took ourselves into a nearby hostelry to escape the rain and have lunch.
As always on these occasions we re-fought a few old battles through rose tinted glasses. We had sometimes been on the same side in these, sometimes not, and when she made that observation I offered the argument that there should not have been sides: surely the objection should always have been to the benefit of the organisation.
That, she said, was where I had wasted my opportunities, and cited two incidents, about five years apart, where I had moved to operation that I was leading into another part of the corporation, but on both occasions I had, personally, lost out. I could have had a much more successful career if I had put myself first and made sure that I was going to do well out of the changes but, instead, I had put the organisation first.
Both organisation changes had seen me shunted sideways rather than moving on up and, whilst there was recognition of my talents, the lack of self-interest and self-promotion was seen as a weakness: I was too nice.
I’m not sure that I can accept the last point, for I don’t think that I was that nice, but overall I can see that she was right, for, once I got into any sort of position of influence, I was primarily interested in doing what I saw as good for the business, and the consequences for me were only ever secondary.
In some ways that was a weakness, in that I should have thought that element of the proposal through, after all, I had worked everything else out, but, for me, that self-interest was somehow distasteful and so I did nothing about it, although I always tried to look after my team in these deals.
Whatever the outcome I was always able to look into the mirror and feel comfortable with the image that I saw. I got through working to my own code, the one that evolved from the way that I was brought up, and, above all, for the most part I enjoyed my time in a suit. I had some fun, and, for me, that is more valuable than having scrambled up another couple of rungs on the ladder.
on women bosses
One of the photos of me in my younger days as a manager sees me in the company of my then boss, Diane Santos. This was back in 1982, so 41 years ago now, and a friend, seeing it amongst my work photo album brought the question, “How did you get on with working for a woman back then?”, the assumption being that it was unusual.
It wasn’t. Diane was one of a long line of women that I had worked for, and she was not the last. Yes, there had been jobs that I had done where management was very much male dominated, but Diane was the third woman boss that I had had from the last four. Despite what people might want you to believe, there were plenty of women in management, or at least there were in my working life. For me a boss was a boss. They were either good or bad, and I learned from them all, but it has never made any difference to me what sex they were.
Back then I didn’t give it a thought. I suppose that I was used to women in authority; most of my schoolteachers were women, and I grew up around powerful women so perhaps I had just got used to taking orders from them. Whatever, I have never had a problem working for women, and still don’t. I do have a problem about working for ignorant or incompetent people but they can come in either sex.
I am an elitist, I believe in a meritocracy, so any move towards quotas I regard as discriminatory. I find such practices abhorrent, and do not believe that they advance the cause that they propose to promote. I have worked with, and for. enough talented women to know that they don’t need preferential treatment (I am married to one too).
Just to make it clear, I am a man. I was born male and have not, so far, had any doubts about my sex or heterosexuality. I may not that macho, although I have had my moments, and still do, but working for a woman has never left me feeling threatened, or in any way diminished my masculinity. I do not understand why there should be an issue.
The sad thing, for me, is that the friend who started this musing off is a lady who is a couple of generations younger than me. What she has been told, or taught, about the world that I lived in before she was born bears little resemblance to my experience of it. I have never had a problem with working for a woman in all of the fifty plus years that I have been at work. And yes, there have been women in charge throughout my working life, so don’t try am tell me that they weren’t.
on decision making
to make a decision you need choices and information and therein lies a problem. We have available to us a vast resource of information that, for the majority, you only need to pull a slim device from your pocket and prod your finger at a few times to access. When I was young our family had an old Webster’s dictionary and a second hand atlas to refer to, but now you can find almost anything out in a matter of seconds.
Of course there is a lot out there that just isn’t true, but what is worse is that so often people just head for these dreadful echo chambers full of people who think the same way. What happened to critical thinking? This slavish belief in things that people have heard and refuse to submit to any sort of challenge or test is going to lead us as a society into all sorts of problems. Forget global warming, society is likely to collapse well before we all start to fry.
In recent years I have watched corporate decision making become dominated by the computer. Data can be modelled and the decision making process has moved more and more towards doing what the machine tells you to do. I have been a big fan of having the computer fed by doing the work rather than data being input manually and I have designed or coded a lot of such programmes. I have reaped their benefits too as an operator.
However, to just slavishly accept what the machine tells you to do puts decision making in jeopardy if you don’t understand where the data that it is using is coming from and what the parameters the algorythms that the computer programme uses to manipulate that data are. A recent example was in fully automating vehicle scheduling where the computer was sending vehicles out anything up to three hours late because of allowing for driver’s statutory rest periods.
Once the problem had been spotted it was relatively easy to reset some of the parameters the programme was using to make it do what was required, but an experienced human would have made different decisions and the problem would not have arisen.
Some systems are genuinely sophisticated. Take the software that controls a modern military aircraft. These are inherently unstable and cannot be flown in a conventional way, but the commuter systems take control inputs from the pilot and make the ‘plane fly accordingly. I am a lot happier with a conventional stick and rudder with some nice cables making things do what I ask, but then the sort of things that I flare not fast jets.
But back in the world of commercial decision making, or even personal decisions, we first need information and then need to know how to interpret it. We need to understand the consequences of our actions. All too often I see younger managers having an idea and going for it with no real critical thinking about whether or not it will work. There seems to be a culture of “I’m going to do this and it will work”.
I’m all for confidence, it’s a fundamental element of leadership, but blind confidence is dangerous. Yes, time for deliberation may not be plentiful, or even available, but a least have a process for decision making mapped out to that you can make the best decision in the time that you have. The more that you apply a decision making process you will, allied with the experience you have gained, get better and better at doing it.
It is also worth having a post mortem, not for apportioning blame, but to understand how closely the outcome matched your expectations. If you were lacking certain information then see what you can do to have it more readily available. If there were resource issues then try to find a way of getting faster access.
I once was asked how I was getting on a few days into a new job and relied that I couldn’t get my head out of the trench for long enough to work out which way the bullets were coming from. I was just fire fighting all day every day, but after a couple of weeks I was beginning to make progress. By improving information flow we started to get away from decision making being purely reactive and began to control our destiny.
Decision making needs to remain a human intervention. Even in a military aircraft the pilot is still making decisions: The software translates those decisions into action. It is a skill that we need to preserve, to take information, examine it critically and act on the choices that we make with a good understanding of what the consequences will be.
on working from home
For me the current passion for working from home worries me and I have enough experience of it, going back as far as the early 1980s, to think that I might have a point.
My first experience of working from home as an employee of a large corporation was back in 1982. I worked in London which was a three hour round trip commute away, and, for six weeks, was assigned to work with a supplier based on stop up the railway line from home. Because of issues of commercial confidentiality the supplier did not want me on site more that necessary and so I worked from home.
It was a nightmare in many ways. My wife felt that my presence meant that she could just talk to me whenever a thought entered her head and the inevitable list of garden and household jobs was right there under my nose; “I’ll just take a break and mow the lawn” type of thing. Yes, I did get all of the work that I was being paid for done, but, in general, I hated it and the one lesson that I did learn was that I could use the opportunity to time shift, that is to take an hour off for some DIY during the day and make time up in the evening for example.
Of course that was pre-internet and mobile ‘phones. Im did have a portable typewriter that I used for some reports, but a lot of my written work was done longhand and forwarded to the typing pool (remember them anyone?) at the office.
Later I became an early adopter for working from home when office space was at a premium and I was working all over the UK. By then I was on my second marriage, there were no children at home and I had a wife who understood that there were times when I needed to be left alone. Again I often did personal stuff during the day and work at night, but y then I was a fully equipped road carrier with cell ‘phone and GPRS equipped laptop.
Around the mid 1990s some of the implications of remote working were coming to the fore as it became more common and a working party was set up to look at the pros and cons as well as to try and draft some good practice notes along with a company policy. One of the key issues that came out of that was the employer’s liability. There is a duty of care and whilst we had all of the necessary workstation and VDU stuff in place for employees in the workplace, how did you cope with people working, unsupervised, from home off the dining table or with the laptop on their lap as they sprawl on the sofa? You can moan all you like about jobsworth H&S people, and I do, but the law is the law and their are people queuing up for big scalps.
The other big issue about working from home, for the employee and employer, is the lack of dynamics that you get when people are collected in one place. There is a lot to be gained from teams being together and the interchanges with others in those water cooler moments. Scatter the buggers all around the country and you have lost that. I don’t know how you measure it, but, over time, you will miss it. As a team leader you get a lot from seeing your people in action, it speaks volumes and helps to pick the real stars from the poseurs. Yes, you can judge on results alone, but, if you do, you will promote the wrong people too often.
Looking at working from home from the customer perspective it is already apparent to me that there are times when it is just not working well enough. This may just be due to policies and procedures combined with technology issues, but it has been a lot harder to get problems solved since lockdown started. Take one of my clients who has three times had the wrong item picked and shipped. Every time the supplier has made exactly the same mistake, but each time customer service have been called the person responding has been working from home and unable to do anything other than to tell my client how to return the item for a credit. At no time have either of us been able to speak to anyone who is actually there to try and resolve the problem. In the end we bought the item direct from the US and they got it right first time.
For some sectors there is no excuse for continuing to allow working from home now. The Civil Service being one; that large chunks of them are apparently working from home still is a scandal. Remote working in various forms is a viable tool in this day and age for the right jobs, sales teams being a classic example, but for much of what used to go on in the office we need to see people back and their desks. Working in a mask is a pain, but I do it as do many others.
We are in a time of great change and need to adapt. It may be that some businesses will feel that they can allow more people to work from home and will come up with policies and practices that work for them. If they can make it work then fine, but I think that, for now, we need to see a lot more bums on their original office seats.
PS: If you are working from home have a search through the old posts here for my top tips for home workers.
on pandemics
Over the thirty or so years that I had some senior management responsibility I have sat through many hours of crisis management, business continuity and disaster recovery sessions looking at strategy and tactics for such events. I have also been involved in many dry runs to test the plans that same from these sessions and a good few incidents where such planning and practice helped, even if the planning was actually flawed.
One topic that came late to these discussions was that of a pandemic. I think that it was towards the end of the nineties that it was first brought up, but we were, at that time, dealing with all sorts of nonsense about what the millennium would bring and that, being imminent, was very much the priority even if we were wasting our time.
The risk of a pandemic took hold as were saw things like bird ‘flu and ebola rampage around the globe, but there was little impact here in the UK and I don’t think that any of us took such threats too seriously. They always seemed a bit science fiction and I don’t think the way that these potential events were presented helped. After all wee were hard bitten operational people who dealt with real life issues; strikes, power cuts, road accidents, weather and such. Yes, there were times when some form of sickness might sweep through the workforce, but such events were rare and when they did happen they were very localised.
It was about ten years ago when I had the last discussion on risk management plans and was, at that time, acting in a consultancy role rather than being the person whom would be left holding the can. By then we had seen a few more viral infections spread around the world and almost all office environments had become open plan on every floor of a building which increased the opportunity to spread infections around a building. The one thing that I remember from that time is the potential scale of a pandemic was beyond everyone’s imagination; it was just too hard to grasp a scenario such as the one that the world has gone through over the last eighteen months.
Whilst appropriate plans were drawn up for mass home working , disruptions to supplies and trade there was little enthusiasm for any of it. How wrong we were and yet we have, largely, come though it fairly well. Business has changed and there have been casualties. We have not seen the last of the latter, but there has been a demonstration of just how adaptable businesses are in the face of a challenge.
I do not advocate ignoring risk nor failing to plan and train for dealing with potential risks, but throughout my career I saw various crises arise that did not fit the planning. The old military adage of no strategy surviving past first contact with the enemy is very true. Business is often derided as is the capitalist system, but it works and any business that is flexible and adaptable will rise to meet significant change in its environment. What planning for a crisis does is it get managers thinking about how they will react and considering where to find resources and how to deploy them. When a challenge arises, whilst it may not resemble anything that has been planned for, the thinking processes are in place and they work.
Thinking time is never wasted. Perhaps the current pandemic might have given us time to ponder on that.
on the ABC principle
I’ve joined a new Facebook group recently and have been sharing memories and catching up with people from a 30 year career. A lot of things have come flooding back including the ABC principle, although that was something that I had learned even earlier.
I’ll take you back to around 1975 and the East End of London. Much of the docklands area was abandoned and near derelict, but it made good space for some transport operators to use and these were amongst my customers as I plied my trade selling commercial vehicle parts and hydraulic fittings. I worked for a franchise operation and was asked to spend a couple of weeks with someone from the parent operation who would advise on credit control and debt management, not that I had much trouble in that direction as most of my customers paid cash and my only concern was to be sure that they were not dud notes I was accepting.
My new partner was ex Royal Navy and ex Kent Police and he looked it. I am not sure how much value our two weeks together were, but I hope that he, being new to this job, got an insight into what really went on at the sharp end rather than what those in the ivory tower thought. For my part I got little from it as his appearance, and the fact that we were running around in his dark blue Morris Marina rather than my usual van, meant that a lot of my customers that that we were the Old Bill when we drove into their yards and my orders plummeted. However, on the last day he gave me a nugget; the ABC principle.
I had taken him the he Waterman’s Arms on the Isle of Dogs, Dan Farsons’ old pub, for lunch and he gave me that bit of advice which he claimed came from his days in CID. ABC: Accept nothing, Believe no-one, Challenge everything.
To me at first it sounded very cynical and, to a large degree, counter-productive for a salesman who was trying to build trust with customers, but as he explained it a degree of sense emerged.
Accept nothing, at least at face value. That isn’t the same as rejecting everything because it is all useful, but don’t trust anything until you can verify it.
Believe no-one. It is not because they are lying, rather that even if they believe what they are saying is true, it may not be. They may also be only telling you what they think that you want to know. If you ask ten eye witnesses what they saw you will get ten different answers, so listen, question, and file it all away until, as with the first point, you can verify it.
Challenge everything. Look at it from every angle that you can think af and then think of some news angles. Test every theory and, you guessed it, verify it.
On that day I took the advice and did not believe it. It all sounded like it had come from an episode of The Sweeney, but I considered it and, in time, tried it. I found that it worked for me. I accept that it is a little extreme, but if you apply the ABC principle with a little common sense it works and will serve you well. For my own part I have applied it very strongly when considering disciplinary matters and accidents at work through to a more casual application pretty much every day when considering something that needs doing. It has kept me out of trouble more often than I can remember.
So don’t take my word here, but do challenge the thinking if you do nothing else. Think about it, work on it and see what you can do with it. You might find that it works for you too.
on projects and slippage
I started a series of projects on home and garden back in January and, when lockdown hit us, these became something of a primary focus for me. I said at that point that I would hit my overall objectives in terms of time and money, but, as so often happens in professional life, things have changed.
Taking my personal goals as a microcosm of business workings I have seen a familiar progression in that now, around seventy percent of the ay through my personal programme, the needs have changed and so what I had planned on in therms of certain specific objectives are no longer necessary.
Part of the problem has been in delays from external suppliers; the new shed is still not here and is now four weeks behind schedule and the new greenhouse is unlikely to arrive before next Spring. Both of these issues are primarily due to Covid-19 firstly because demand for garden products shot up during lockdown and then because the production facilities were not working at capacity having had to deal with the impact of lockdown, social distancing and the like. These things happen.
Then there were the things that were uncovered as work progressed; the bae for the new shed required digging out of some significant root systems and even the had to be raised about 10cm. Clearance of waste was affected by Covid-19 restrictions and instead of a daily trip to the tip I could not go for about a month and then was restricted to two trips a month.
If I were to be sitting with an employer discussing how well I had performed in terms of meeting the objectives set nine months ago I would not be doing too well I suspect, but therein lies another story and one that I have visited here before. The bottom line is that the world changes around us and we need to be able to recognise that.
Looking at where I am now against where I was in January the difference is huge and whilst I have not sone some of what I set out to, because of external forces, we are in a much better place than we were at the start of the year. My main aim of having the deck sorted out so that we could enjoy some of the Summer sitting out has gone because Summer is past. That is a shame, but the bulk of the hard work is done and come next Spring it will al be there for us to enjoy.
In business we often become so focussed on getting to an objective that we miss the fact that we do not need to get to that place any more. Time and money are expended on things that have become obsolete or for which the immediate need has passed. Plans should always be flexible because, to quote the old military adage, no plan survives past first contact with the enemy. Your strategy may still be current, but the tactics have to adapt to what is going on around you.
Hang loose and take advantage of what you can do as long as it helps you prgress
on the joys of shopping
I’m going to look at this from the customer perspective. All management should do this anyway, but many seem to ignore it beyond what they see from market research and I will come on to that too in a moment.
Why do we shop? To buy stuff is the obvious, and correct answer, but how many of us go shopping and come back with more than we went for? The Berkshire Belle and I once worked with a chap who was, fortunately, married to a like minded lady. They went shopping with a list and bough only what was win the list. Things around the house had to fail completely before they were replaced; we remember that their cooker was down to one working ring on the hob before they bought a new one.
Our friends were not common though and most folks are like the double B and I in that shopping is about browsing, about buying things on impulse regardless of whether you need them or have an immediate use for them. You see, you like, you buy is how it works and that process involves not just the eyes, but touch. I will walk along a rack of golf shirts, for example, running my fingers across the fabric. I buy more by what feels nice than the colour or brand. Cutlery, glassware and crockery have all been bought by how they feel in the hand rather than anything else (except maybe how they look).
These pleasures are, if sort of allowed, not practical or desirable at the moment so, like many, we are not doing it. There is no fun anyway in visiting a shopping centre or high street and having to queue at almost every shop that you want to visit. Touching products, other than to put them into your basket or cart, is not something that is a good idea and just wandering around looking at things is not encouraged, or acceptable, when others are queuing to get in. Shopping is becoming more about necessity than a source of pleasure.
This is the dilemma for those in the retail trade and many are fighting for survival. The writing has perhaps been on the wall for a while with the impact of internet shopping and the evolving habits of each new generation, but this current plague has brought matters to a head. How they will get through it I don’t know. It seems unlikely that we will return to a world where we can shop without masks, social distancing or fear any time soon so which businesses will survive that long?
Whilst this is a problem for government in that it impacts on the economy in so many ways it is not a problem that is in their gift to solve. Market research is too often flawed and there is a lot of nonsense out there in terms of customers surveys; just sigh up to do a few of these on-line and you will see what I mean. The questions are often nonsensical and there is no way that meaningful answers can be gleaned from it, certainly not in terms of allowing management to make realistic decisions.
What we get over the next twelve months or so is going to come from innovative thinking, from people who have a vision that they can translate into actions that work and that will generate income for their businesses. As always the ones that can take advantage of the changing environment will be the survivors.
I don’t think that we will see the world that we had sic months ago again. What we emerge into will look and feel different. I don’t know that I will like it, but I will have to lump it if that is all I have.
I support this charity
British Blogs
the Monday Musings column from that consultant bloke 