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come in number 6, your time is up – when the boatman calls….
I wrote here the other week about how we might be remembered, a thought brought on by having seen a couple of the buildings I used to manage demolished. Time passes; things move on.
This week other incidents have sparked me off along the same lines though. One was being reminded of two 40 something ladies meeting on a road I frequent two or three times a week, and the other was the pictures of the water sweeping in across North Eastern Japan.
Like many of us I watched in awe as the water swept in. I’ve been through three earthquakes in my time, including one in California that I slept through, as well as a couple of hurricanes, so I have some feel for what nature can do and the sheer power that can be unleashed, but to watch helplessly as that tidal wave swept ashore was a humbling experience.
We sometimes forget that the gift of life is a privilege and not a right. It will take a while before we know what the death toll is in Japan, and other parts of the region affected by the earthquake, but it seems like we could be talking about a six figure number. None of those folks knew that this was the day that they would die. They went off in the morning to do whatever it was that they had to do. Some will have had to be in what became the danger zone, other will have been sent there by the law of chance; the maintenance engineer sent there rather that to higher, safer, parts because of a call for help for example. Fate is a fickle mistress.
When your time is up and the boatman calls your number it is all over and your time here is done. The meeting of the two ladies is a case in point. I was 6 miles up over the central Atlantic when they met, but it was a time that I might otherwise have also been on that road at about that point in space and time. Their meeting was no social encounter; each was alone in their respective cars when they both needed the same piece of tarmac. Travelling in opposite directions they met at a closing speed over around 100 mph and neither survived*. Up until four or five seconds before the impact neither would have had any notion that this was their time. Had I not been elsewhere I might have found the finger of fate pointing at me that afternoon, but the Berkshire Belle had booked us to fly on that day rather than the next as planned and I was safely parked in a window seat on a 767 at the time of the crash rather than driving myself home on that road.
In the words of the legendary Sid Collins we are all speeding towards death at the rate of sixty minutes in every hour. We don’t know when the call will come, so what we do with our time here is important. If we can do something positive for the world and the people around us then our time here will not be wasted.
As I say, our time on Earth is a privilege and not a right. We all have a choice of what we do with that time. What are you doing with your time here? Remember, life isn’t fair either, and we may not get as much of it as we would like, so never mind what you’d like to be remembered for; try and make a difference and do it today: You may not get another chance.
* I had been told this by one of the locals, but in 2013 I found that it was not true. In the accident one of the ladies died and the other was severely injured, but later recovered. In one of those awful examples of fate it was the innocent party who died instantly in the collision, but the survivor was the one who caused the accident. Having been observed shortly before the crash driving at high speed and erratically, according to reports, she had over twice the legal limit of alcohol in her system. She fled abroad to escape justice, but was returned to the UK where she received a jail sentence. Her recent appeal against the severity of the sentence was turned down.
The local paper summarised the incident here.
bribery and corruption act – one man’s opinion
I must first stress that what follows is a personal opinion; as they might say, don’t try this at the office. I’m not a lawyer; I have contract law qualifications as part of my professional tickets, and I do have the practical experience of having been in the front line for a long time, allied to a spell where I was involved in investigating fraud, fiddling and other dubious practices. So treat what follows with caution, but hopefully it might get you thinking.
Business in the UK has seen hundreds of new pieces of legislation introduced over the last ten years or more (I shall hold my pen on the politics for once) and most of it has been largely incapable of proper implementation. Personally I am a great fan of precedent over statute; let the courts set the tone. The law may be an ass, but the due process that we have, whilst it might be a lottery sometimes, is generally a decent way to go about conducting our affairs. Having a bunch of idiot politicians, however well meaning, setting out all sorts of daft regulations is a recipe for disaster. The only winners are the lawyers (now what was that bloke at No10’s real job? And what about the one with her hand up his back?).
My feeling is that a lot of this regulation is falling out of the same philosophy that brought us the non competitive business in schools; “we don’t have winners, because that mean we have to have losers”. Hard bloody luck – life is about winners and losers, just ask the Starling that got taken by a Sparrowhawk outside my window this morning. It’s tough out there, but that’s the way that it should be. I know that I can’t win on every deal and I also know that I’ll probably do better as a buyer than as a seller because on any deal there is only one buyer. It is that competition that ensures value for money and healthy commerce, not having to comply with daft rules.
Of course there are fine lines to walk when doing a deal, and the art of getting a deal done is often about steering a course on the edge at times, but regulation is not the answer, especially when it is as ill thought out as the anti bribery nonsense. What is the point of having an offence of failing to prevent a bribe being offered if there is no offense of failing to prevent acceptance?
What we need is what we already have. There are laws to deal with people who stray, so we should just use them and come down like a ton of bricks on anyone caught misbehaving. That is an adequate deterrent if properly applied. Sure you won’t stop everyone, but regulation won’t either.
One of the things I’ve seen managing security over the years is that the more you put in the harder you have to manage it. The more you have the easier it often becomes to breach it because people get complacent. The same applies to many other systems; people trust them, especially if they have paid a lot of money for them. It’s the Emperor’s new clothes syndrome, and that is all that the bribery act will be if it is allowed to come to fruition. We have a new law, so it’s all fine now.
Utter drivel. It will not change anything other than to allow companies to be fined for, allegedly, not having taken proper precaution. Just another stealth tax? Ah, now it suddenly makes sense.
are meetings the bane of your life?
They certainly can be; the difference between a well run one and a poorly run one is like night and day, but what makes the difference?
The person chairing, or leading, the meeting is the key, but chairing the meeting is just one part of the whole deal. For me the issue is that so many people see the meeting as an entity in its own right rather than as an integral part of the process of making things happen.
So often the meeting becomes just an event that gets put in the diary and you get on with life in between the last one and the next one with no real connection. The agenda will turn up, maybe with some additional material, a few days before the meeting date and then you all turn up and go through the motions. More than a few will be ill prepared, not have read the papers or reports before the meeting, and those present will stagger through as best as they can. Where things haven’t gone right or deadlines have been missed there will be a few apocryphal stories trotted out, and everyone will want to chuck in their own version and, if the chair isn’t fully in control, there might be a bit of finger pointing to deflect blame. At best there might be an action to have got it done by the next meeting, but no-one will remember that until the agenda and minutes are circulated just before the next meeting, so it won’t be too much of a problem if people just ignore the whole thing. So you dispose of the coffee and biscuits and vanish until the next one comes round.
I’m being harsh maybe, and certainly cynical, but I’m pretty sure that some of you will recognise roughly that scenario. It is a composite of many that I have had to go through over the years. And they still continue, often even at board level, so goodness knows what meetings at those companies are like lower down the chain.
One factor that causes this problem is that people often don’t know how to make decisions. You may say that that is a daft thing to say, but it is true nonetheless; the ability to make decisions, or at least decent decisions, is sadly lacking in many organisations.
One of the worst excesses I have come across is the monthly review meeting. Everyone submits their departmental report, so all those at the meeting should have read it and be aware of how the others are doing. If there are any problems then they should be prepared to bring them up, but what happens? Everyone goes through their report at the meeting regardless and nothing really gets moved forward.
Meetings are part of moving things along, so they need to be treated as a point where the key people involved come together to resolve issues, so the first thing to be doing is making sure that the meeting is about the issues. What needs to be done, by whom and by when and what resource is needed to accomplish it. If people are armed with facts and not anecdotes they will be able to assess these points, agree on the risks of failure (so that the priorities can be understood) and make an appropriate decision. Job done; next issue, and do the same there.
At a project meeting last week we came prepared. Papers circulated had been read, the issues were discussed and we were agreed on who was doing what and by when and done in 30 minutes.
Put people at the heart of what you are doing
It’s all about the people. Not the first time I’ve covered this, nor will it be the last, but a few things have drawn me back to this subject. First off sorting out a problem for a client where things had bogged down into an email war. This must be the modern equivalent of trench warfare; you dig into your position and hurl stuff at the other party who is equally well dug in on their side. No-one wins. After two weeks of cyber missives flying back and forth the problem was solved in 45 minutes face to face working around the table.
The next day came another example of the power of people. A client has a supplier problem where legal people are involved on both sides, but half an hour on the phone has seen the first progress for about 10 days. Once again you get things moving when people start to talk and work with each other.
Humans are social animals and we like to congregate of our own accord, but we also have the problem in some countries, the UK being one, where we are all thrown together because there are so many of us in a small space and are forced to get along. Making it easy for us to do what we need to do helps remove some of the frustrations that cause problems between people. If the roads are not clogged we don’t get road rage, for example.
And that brings me on to the role of facilities management people. We have our definitions of FM, and they are fair enough, but since I’ve been involved in FM I’ve seen the role as one of facilitation to a large degree. The make it easy for the people in the building to do what they come there for. When you go to work there are lots of little things that can act like a handful of sand in the gearbox; no one grain will break it, but the combined effect will be to wear it out quickly. Problems at work have the same effect. The copier won’t work, the lift is out of order again, the car park is always flooded (see last week’s Musing) and so on.
All of these distract people from doing what they are there to do and make them less productive. Amongst other things FM sorts all of that out. It’s people working with and for each other gives you team work and synergy, the sum of the whole being greater than the sum of the parts.
The buildings and the technology are just tools. If no-one uses them they will just sit there and crumble away eventually, but they are created by people. It’s people that have the great ideas to move things forward and it’s other people that have the skills to translate the ideas into physical reality. So why do we so often forget that it is people that will have to use what we create?
All too often I see projects where there is some glorious aim in mind, but none of it gives much thought to the people that will have to work with or around it. New shiny technology is bought and deployed without any real thought of the people who it will be inflicted on. How many new buildings have I spent the first year on just making them user friendly?
People power is huge (just look at Egypt right now) so make it work. Put human interaction at the heart of what you do and you won’t go too far wrong.
how easy is it to buy from you 2 – sell me the deal
Continuing my theme of last week, let’s look at the stages of a typical B2B purchasing exercise.
The common problem that you encounter in these situations is that the company is trying so hard to sell to you that they frequently miss the point completely. They are so busy telling you how wonderful they are that they make it hard for you to buy from them, and the further you get into the process the worse they get.
At the pre-qualification stage you are seeking information, so case studies and some background on the supplier in terms of their customer base is needed, but you are looking for objective evidence of capability and capacity, not subjective advertising puff. All too often what you’re given is more towards the latter than the former.
When it comes down to the tender you have already narrowed down your possible to the ones that you have identified as capable of doing the job, but you can reckon on getting reams of sales pitch, including repeating most of what you’ve already had, to wade through as you try to find the convincing arguments that this is the bid that you should really be accepting. Why they do this is a mystery, but you can almost guarantee that you’re going to get it. The black humour in this is that, along with this blatant waste of paper, there will almost certainly be something there explaining their green credentials. Now and again you get someone who avoids the sales pitch and just sells you the solution to your problem, but this just isn’t that common.
Next up will be conducting supplier visits, and these will include both the supplier’s premises and one or more of their current customers. The purpose of these visits is to validate the supplier’s ability to service my client. I’m looking for demonstrable evidence that they can do what they say they can, that they are already doing it for someone else and how well it is being done. Now the clever supplier will just let you get on and see whatever you want to, warts and all, and will be prepared to have a sensible discussion on the good and the bad. Mostly though you get the sanitised tour, and that overlooks one of the key things that people want to buy into; honesty.
Then we get to the short listed suppliers presenting. You have, say, forty five minutes to convince you that they should be the chosen one; half an hour to present and fifteen minutes of questions maybe? Now thirty minutes is not long, so what should happen is to focus in on how they will do for you what you have asked for in the tender. Start with a quick intro to the problem, the meat of the session on how they will solve that problem, and a quick sum up of the key points. But all too often the first half of the presentation is made up prom the standard sales slide set and then they rush faster and faster through the rest with all of the slides on your requirements vanishing in a blur.
You are being scored at all of these stages. If you want the deal, then focus on what is going to get points on the board and put all of your efforts there.
Make it easy to buy from you: We put you on the list because we are convinced that you could do the job. What we need from there on is convincing why we should engage you and not the others.
how easy is it to buy from you?
I understand that you need to have a set of processes to enable your company to run, and some of these will be around ordering, pick, pack, despatch and customer enquiries. This is a particular area of my own expertise, but why do you inflict this stuff on the customer?
Buying on line shows up the worst of this for me. Some examples:
• Crude product search engines that give you almost the entire inventory regardless of what you ask for.
• Page links that don’t work.
• Where you view the product, select a quantity to buy, get through a convoluted checkout process and only then get told that it is out of stock.
• Convoluted checkout process.
• Contact Us links that don’t work.
• Drop down lists in the Contact Us section that never seem to cover the query type that I have.
• Comment boxes that only allow too few characters for your query
Some company web sites are great; Amazon for example, but others are dreadful. Amazon relieve me of a lot of my disposable cash because they make it easy for me to spend with them and the overall customer experience is great.
On the other hand there are at least two or three companies a month that fail to extract funds from me because I can’t be bothered to go through all the hassle. Do people at these companies ever consider the customer experience? Do they ever try to buy from themselves? Somehow I doubt it.
And it isn’t just web sites. A lot of face to face experiences are no better. Two big gripes here; firstly the assistant who has to finish talking to their colleague when you’ve obviously arrived, and are waiting, to ask a question, and those places where you can’t enjoy looking without assistant after assistant walking up and asking if you need help.
OK, so all of that is B2C, but what about B2B? Well in many cases that is no better. Web links that don’t work, “Contact Us” buttons that either give you an email address with a promise to get back to you within 2 business days(!) or a phone number to a call centre somewhere that doesn’t even seem sure if the company you’ve called exists, let alone what they do.
Some web sites are so hard to navigate you doubt that you really want to deal with the company; if the web site is so badly organised, what are their other business practices like? For a start make sure that there is a consistent way of navigating around your site. Next, if you are going to engage with people on the web then you need to put something on there that people can play with and find things out. You also need to have something useful behind the contact details so that when someone does get in touch they get prompt responses. We’re using the web for its immediacy, so keep the ball rolling.
The next area that drives me to distraction is how hard some people make it to pay them. In this day and age a bank transfer is quick and easy, as is using a corporate purchasing card, so why are so many people still asking you to put a cheque on the post?
Generally there is room for improvement, so come on people. Get some thinking done on how people can trade with you. Things may be tight currently, but there is some money out there to be spent so make it easy for folks to spend it with you.
will Supplier Relationship Management be the big thing in 2011?
Revenue is one of the key components of profit, and therefore its perceived position as the lifeblood on business is reflected in the amount of money spent on trying to generate it; sales and marketing, and all of their associated costs make a reasonable dent in a company’s expenditure and so does the amount spent on training the people involved. Customer relationship management (CRM) is a big thing.
Now profit, as we all know, is what’s left over from the income when you’ve paid all your bills, but it is cash flow, or rather lack of it, which is the biggest killer of business. So you need profit underpinned by a healthy cash flow to survive, and cash flow is kept healthy by making sure that you’ve got your income in the bank in time to pay your bills.
And yet so many businesses just miss the whole point. They focus fairly lavish attention on bringing money in with little thought as to what is going out beyond the occasional budget cut or belt tightening exercise.
One of the key problems is silo mentality. When I am working with a group of buyers I’ll always ask how they see the sales teams that they have to deal with. The response is usually fairly hostile and rarely complimentary, but when you point out that they also have a sales team it comes over as though you’ve just told them that they have an uncle in gaol for murder.
It isn’t quite as bad talking to sales people about buyers, but both sides miss two important points. Firstly that the business that they work for will have both buyers and sellers that should be joined up and secondly that whilst the one group is trying to apply CRM to the buyers that they deal with, the other group is having CRM applied to them, but usually with little being done to equip them to get the best out of it. (In the reverse direction we call it Supplier Relationship Management or SRM).
You will also find frequent examples of buyers and sellers working against each other. Not deliberately of course, but because there isn’t sufficient recognition of the business drivers nor recognition of each other’s roles. In the service sector I’ve often seen companies that have sold solutions against a set of service levels that their supply contracts can’t sustain. Both sides are getting a pat on the back for the respective deals and nobody sees the conflict until sometime downstream when the end client is getting dissatisfied.
It should come as no surprise that the best examples of companies that balance efforts on what they spend and what they earn are often in the retail sector. Just think Tesco or Wal*Mart for example. They both manage their supply chains very well, and there is a constant and positive dialogue between all the various functions. Everyone is focused on taking revenue and squeezing as much value as they can from the transactions.
So here’s something that you can do this coming year. Buyers and sellers, seek each other out in your business and start having some meaningful dialogue. You will better understand how you can help each other succeed on behalf of your employer, but you can also help each other understand how the other works.
SRM is a very worthwhile area to be investing in. I’ve written here about collaboration being a way to move forward from recessionary times and working together in the supply chain is common sense anyway. I think that SRM could be a big thing in 2011.
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