Archive
midweek musings on menswear at work
Talking to people about formal business wear at work this week, there is no sign of any abandonment of the collar and tie for men. With all of the moves to try and dispose of the tie, why is it still with us? Read more…
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.
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.
Useful Tools – Pareto and the 80:20 Principle
“We couldn’t get our heads out of the trench for long enough to see which way the bullets were coming from”. The speaker was one of the many people I worked with; in my younger days, almost all of my male colleagues had been in the armed services. I thought that the expression was wonderful and much better than not seeing the wood for the trees. Over the years that I have been at work it has been very apt because, so often, people are fire fighting the small stuff so much that they can’t work on the things that would deal with the cause of all that small stuff.
My colleague’s problem would have been solved by what we call in management speak the helicopter view, but it is one of the reasons why the military always like to capture the high ground; they can see what is going on and that makes it so much easier to manage.
In business we have that dreadful expression “If you can’t measure it, you can’t manage it”. I say dreadful, because I’ve heard it parroted so many times by people who want to spend so much time measuring and pondering over the results that they rarely ever get round to managing anything, but the expression is true. The trick in making it work is in what we mean by measuring.
If you are under constant fire you don’t have enough time to do the job properly let alone start producing all sorts of statistics, but measurement doesn’t always have to be so formal. Try this as an example: Walk into one of the working areas at your firm and just stand to one side for two or three minutes. What do you see and hear? Is it quiet and calm, or are people looking harassed with ‘phones ringing and high levels of noise? Is it tidy or is there stuff piled all over the place?
What you have just done is measure with your eyes and ears and you will have formed a pretty accurate assessment of that team. This may well be one that you would not have got from their numbers, because the performance statistics may well show that the chaotic team are hitting their targets, but observation is every bit as powerful a measurement tool as the graphs that come off the computer: There is nothing wrong with measuring by rule of thumb.
If you are a young manager wanting to make things work better then start by using those eyes and ears that you got as standard equipment when you came into the world. Even when you are under terrific pressure there will be information that you can use to help you. You will know where your biggest problem area is, so think a bit about why. Pareto’s 80:20 principle suggests that 80% of your problems come from 20% of what you do, so try putting that to work. Say you are getting 10 calls a day from Finance about invoice queries. If you can put that one thing right that could mean those 10 calls stop, and then you suddenly have that time free to look at another problem. You won’t solve every one, but if you can start to give yourself time to stick your head up and have a look around you are on the way to gaining control.
And if your boss is into formal measurement, just tell them that you are working to the Pareto principle, the 80:20 rule. Pareto is a probability distribution, but also works as a rule of thumb.
It’s about 1150BC, and an FM in darkest Wessex has just taken a call
It’s about 1150BC, and an FM in darkest Wessex has just taken a call from an Egyptian pal he met at the recent FM conference. In the best traditions of the wonderful Bob Newhart, we can only hear one end of the conversation:
Hey Jabari, when did you get back?
Four months? Took me nearly that. Too bad the Romans haven’t started their road building programme yet eh? So how’s that pyramid project going?
Just started. So how big is this thing?
Wow! That’s going to take a lot of labour.
OK, so you can get plenty of people in from overseas? You must have a great benefits, healthcare and welfare package down there to bring them in, right?
Slaves! Can you do that?
You do it all the time? OK, so if that’s how it is. I guess you don’t have a socialist government then? Say, Jabari, how do you do with accidents working with stone?
About 10% of the workforce? How many of those are serious?
That’s just the fatalities! Ouch! Good job liability lawyers haven’t been thought of yet. So, tell me, how do you get involved as an FM while the place is being built?
Trying to head off hand over problems? Yes, we get them too, and FMs do spend a lot of time trying to make new buildings work. Who’s your architect on this one?
No, I wouldn’t know him. How many of these jobs has he done?
This is his first! Why not go for someone with experience?
You kill them at the end of the job? I know I’ve felt like murdering one or two myself, but you must have been pretty dissatisfied right?
Client policy, eh? Rather you than me. I wouldn’t want to be failing my KPIs down your way!
Right. So how long are you going to be using this building when they hand it over?
All eternity? Goodness! Now I’m into future proofing, but this is in a different league. Sooner or later someone will invent stuff we can’t even imagine, so you might want leave some sort of access, and maybe carve some instructions into the stone to say what you’ve done?
OK, well, look: this pyramid shape, it’s not great in terms of user friendliness you know? Over here we’re still strong on the roundhouse for now, but what you need are vertical walls, right? But stick with the pointy roof on top; believe me you do not want to go with a flat roof. So your square shape with walls would give you a great useable space.
Yes, we’re still on open plan, but we have this great new concept; you have interior walls to break up that space, and then you can separate the masters from the animals and the workers.
You already do that? How does that work for you?
OK, so you call them chambers. So how are your occupancy numbers on these pyramids with chambers?
That’s terrible! With that floor plan, even as a pyramid, you need to be getting a lot more people in than that. I know! This some sort of scam to keep the rates down right?
Oh! It’s a tomb for the king! Yes, I get it, so you’re thinking security. We just pile tons on earth on ours so no one can dig through fast enough to not get spotted, but if you’re all sand down there I see why you need so much stone.
Talking about stone buildings, I told you we’re trying to build some over here? Well, I managed to get a couple of big piles of decent stones assembled down in Wessex ready for when we get some demand. Funny thing though, you remember that craze for crop circles we talked about at conference?
That’s right. Well, some crazies got into our storage yards and spread all the stones out into circles and patterns!
No, I’m not joking. They even hoisted some of the damn things up and stood them on top of each other. Goodness knows how, but those Celts are strong lads, especially when they’ve been on the mead.
No, it’ll cost a fortune to tidy it all up again, so I’m going to leave them as they are and just take the odd stone when I need it. Mind you, there’s some religious group want to rent one of the sites for a festival.
Good point! I’ll put a clause in about no sacrifices. They make such a bloody mess.
Your money’s running out? OK Jabari. Good talking to you. Maybe see you again next conference.
great customer service starts from the top
Customer service has been prominent in my thoughts this week, especially as I have experienced some really good service, together with someone trying to put right something that had gone wrong.
Many years ago I came up with something that I called the Ghent Agenda, named in honour of some really good service I had experienced from hotel people first in Brussels and then in Ghent. It was a blueprint for our facilities management team to raise our game, and it did make a difference, but it is how you make these things happen that intrigues me.
It is the leader that sets the tone for the way their team will work, and various old and new adages describe this; setting the tone, leading by example, walking the talk and so on, and these are, like all such sayings, very true. More so than many realise, because the way a leader acts and behaves will have a huge influence on their team (very much in the way that children are influenced by their parents).
It is all very well to try and influence your team towards providing a high level of service, but how do you yourself behave? Is the example that you set one that you would like your team to follow as they deal with your customers? For example, how do you treat people? You may be good with your team, but how about others?
My premise here is that leading by example, or whatever we want to call it, comes from setting a personal standard first. If you truly want to be a role model then you have to become that model and apply the standard. There is a wonderful quote attributed to Sir Laurence Olivier during the making of the 1976 film Marathon Man. Dustin Hoffman’s character had to portray levels of exhaustion commensurate with having being awake for 24 hours or so, and kept himself up to experience the effects. When Olivier asked him what he was doing Hoffman explained his need for accuracy in portrayal, only for the former to suggest “Why not try acting, dear boy, it’s much easier”.
And that is the issue, acting is much easier, but leadership is not acting. If all you are portraying to your team is an act then you will be found out at some point, so you do need to live the role.
If your team here you tell them about the importance of giving good customer service, of treating people with respect, but then see you behave poorly towards others then how can they truly believe in the message when the person delivering it lets them down? And if you do not strive to apply the standards to yourself in everything that you do, are you not applying double standards?
We can’t be perfect. We are, after all, only human, but if we are going to try to achieve the highest standards then we have to raise our game. A record of continuous success does not come without constantly pushing yourself and your team, and that is what the better leaders do, and they push themselves hardest.
If you want to be that great role model for your people then try to apply the highest levels of behaviour in everything that you do; be polite and show respect to others, regardless of who they are. If you treat the ticket collector on the train or the barista in the coffee shop the way you want your people to treat your customers then you are setting the right tone for them. Lead from the front.
future proof your projects; spend now to save later
When we are up against it on funding we look to cut back on project spend. That is a natural course of action and can usually be effective, at least in terms of meeting the short term objective, but therein lays a problem; short term thinking is nearly always costly in the long term.
There is an old saying about never putting off until tomorrow what you should do today, and that is very relevant in the world of facilities maintenance; you run a fine line between fiscal prudence and neglect. I wrote recently about a building that we took over where we had to take two of the three lifts out of service immediately because they had serious problems resulting from cutting back on regular maintenance.
Another area of cutting back is on specifications, where reducing the scope can reduce the cost proportionately, at least for that project, but somewhere down the road things will bite you. Another example from my vault on this one is where we had to renew the ceilings in a building because of asbestos removal. As we started to take the grid down we had a serious collapse; every time there had been a cabling change the wires had been cut at each end and the cable left up there because “it was cheaper”. Cheaper than doing the job properly that is, but we made a few quid on all the scrap mind you.
That particular project got me thinking. It was early in my time of having, what we called at the time, building maintenance under my control. On being told that we had to put in new cabling about every 18 months for some project or other, and knowing that there was a plethora of projects in the pipeline, I asked for additional cable runs and pulls to be installed as we put the new ceiling up. It cost about 10% extra on the original project budget and I had to find that from somewhere, but over the next 8 years that I was involved with that building we added extra cable capacity for a fraction of what it had been costing us and with almost no disruption.
That is a small example of what I came to call future proofing projects, and we applied the principle across everything that we did. What did we have to do and how could we make our lives easier downstream? How much to put in twice the capacity; three times the capacity? Make a judgement call on it. Refurbishing accommodation is always a golden opportunity to look to the future and spend a little more than you need to in order to save money in the coming years.
Where you can save money without too much risk is to reduce demand, or consumption, and this is where you can also contribute to environmental targets as well as cost savings and this is something that you should be doing as routine, but then you need a big number you normally a choice; either you nibble away at everything and take a bit off or you take a deep breath and cancel a project (or two) to give you the right number.
I would always go for that latter option to give me the headroom that I need, but making sure that it included enough cash to do some future proofing. And because future proofing means that some of the things that you be asked to look at next year or the year after can be easily accommodated you can look good when you say “no problem”.
We’ve got a backup for our backup – more things that went bump in the night
Continuing in the run up to Halloween with tales of things that went wrong, this week we turn to a bit of a farce that we enjoyed along with our friends in Information Technology.
One site I inherited when I moved from Logistics to Facilities Management was a multi story office block that was almost wholly occupied by IT people and was one of two main centres for that trade. The building was also one of the main hubs for the company’s data network and, as such, was something of a sacrosanct site.
The FM work there had been part of the IT team, but we had inherited those people along with the site. They knew their job and they knew their building but, until we arrived, they had never had a ring fenced budget and, every year, something had been lopped off to fund IT project overspends.
As we dug deeper into the backlog of maintenance one thing that I had placed on the high priority list was the emergency backup generator system. This was a thing of legend at the site and beyond; “They have a backup generator for their backup generator” people would tell you around the company in terms of some awe. The generator room in the basement had taken on qualities that might have been employed for a shrine, and the full time engineer that they had taken on to maintain the system played the role of high priest to the hilt.
Access to the room was something of a privilege, but my regional maintenance manager and I were reluctantly granted an entrance on the basis that we were now in charge. The room was pretty spotless and the two engines, one a Gardener and the other a Rolls Royce (no less) gleamed on the plinths.
The system was explained patiently to us. In the event of a power failure there was a battery backup that would allow a few minutes of power while the Gardener engine kicked in. If, for any reason that failed to fire up the Rolls Royce would deploy itself and, in the event of a long term power outage, the engines could be run alternately to keep the data flowing.
But it had never been tested. Yes, there was a switch that allowed a simulation power cut to see if these beauties would kick in and that was tried annually, but the overall system had never been tested. So I announced that we would, and requested a date when it would be convenient for us to do so.
The entire IT hierarchy were appalled and the ranks massed to oppose this folly, but in the end we got our way. We put in a bypass power source from the main switch so that the building would not actually lose power and threw the switch on the original circuit to make the generator room think that the mains had gone off.
The battery back didn’t work. It didn’t even have power enough to start the generator let alone support the building. But we had also found when we installed the by-pass that two thirds of the building, including a pair of new computer rooms, were already by-passing the backup system because corners had been cut in funding projects.
We found the money to put things right, but the backup myth died. These things have an importance at their own time, but times move on. We put a lot into that building to prepare it for the 21st century, but it has gone now, replaced by an apartment complex. Happy memories though!
Mum, Dad, I want to be a facilities manager when I leave school
Just what did a boss do? I wasn’t too sure, but had decided that I was going to be a boss when I left school. It wasn’t my first choice, that had proved impractical, and my second choice was vetoed by my parents, but my Mum wanted me to be a City Gent, heading off in pin striped suit with a briefcase and rolled brolly every morning; that seemed to sound like a boss and so that was what I would be.
But, again, what did they do? The people my parents worked for were captains of industry; one a director at Beecham’s (long before Smith & Kline turned up), another had his name, and that of his partner, on many domestic appliances in kitchens around the country and another was the Admiral in charge of the Royal Naval College for example.
Any of those suited me, but to become one surely you had to know what they did? TV and films were not a lot of help, but then along came The ‘Plane Makers and its sequel The Power Game. There Sir John Wilder made fortunes, lost them and remade them, he had the big office, the big car, was married to a smart and pretty wife (and had a smart and pretty mistress) and got involved in all sorts of Machiavellian dealings with rivals and colleagues alike. Sounded good to me; where did I sign up?
The reality of course was somewhat different as I was to find when I got there. I suppose that the first time that I got close to the fictional Sir John’s life (by the way where is my knighthood?) was the time that I was de facto MD of a business unit turning over around £130M pa. I had the office, the car, the smart attractive wife and the Machiavellian stuff and loved pretty much every minute of it, but then, as with Sir John, mergers and takeovers saw me on the move.
And that is how I got, in the real sense, into Facilities Management. I didn’t set out to be in FM, and have joked that I’d been thrown out of everywhere else. Not quite true, but I had worked in finance, operations, sales, purchasing and IT and hold professional qualifications in both of the latter disciplines, so I wasn’t there just marking time. As a buyer I passed exams in accounting, economics and commercial law amongst others
One of the things that I brought to FM was that wide business background because by then I had realised that what I wanted to be was not a boss so much as a general manager; a businessman if you like. That childhood image of the boss was really where I ended up.
In facilities management a lot has been done to raise the profile of the job, and it is great to see so many young professionals amongst our ranks. BIFM have done a great job in moving things forward and maybe we are close to the point where FM can be a clear career choice for school leavers.
I, like many, came into FM as something of a generalist. If the next generation of FMs can be specialists that is great, but we must not lose sight of the need for FMs to have a wide business education, because it is the world of commerce that FM serves. We need to be able to speak their language and to be comfortable in their world, because that is how we can ensure that they trust and respect what we can contribute.
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