Enjoy Work

What’s in and what’s out for 2012 – The Top 10

rayrich — Tue, 03 Jan 2012 13:53:25 +0000

‘Doing’ is in, ‘Thinking’ is out
‘Different’ is in, ‘The Same’ is out
‘Leaders’ are out, ‘Leadership’ is in
‘Conscious’ is in, ‘Autopilot’ is out
‘Feeling Good’ is in, ‘Looking Good’ is out
‘Making’ is in, ‘Buying’ is out
‘Fear’ is out, ‘Behavioural Flexibility’ is in
‘Conflcit’ is in, ‘Convention’ is out
‘Wifi’ is out, ‘Nofi’ is in
‘Warts and all’ are in, ‘Secrets’ are out

Conscious Business

rayrich — Fri, 08 Apr 2011 14:26:26 +0000

The economic climate isn’t great for business at the moment but in one very important sense business is getting easier for me and it’s down to my ability to make decisions. Decision-making is getting easier because more and more of the choices I make are the ones I believe in. In the past I spent too much time and energy arguing with myself about the best way of doing something.

Part of me wanted to act in line with the perceived business wisdom. I guess because it required very little thought, to others it looked like it was the right thing to do and maybe if it went wrong I felt I was less to blame. But all too often I thought the perceived wisdom (particularly the bits that involved people) was a load of old bull, it just didn’t feel right and the resulting argument with myself caused me to get rather stressed.

These days I’m much more likely to make decisions I believe in. Sometimes they’re in line with the perceived wisdom and sometimes they’re not. When they’re not in line, I make the decision consciously and if later on, things go ‘pear shaped’, I really want to know why. In other words, I learn.

The alternative would be to go with the perceived business wisdom but there’s a real danger that unconsciously I’ll try and prove myself right by sabotaging the whole process so I can say to myself ‘I told you so’. Even if things don’t go wrong I’d probably convince myself that ‘my way would have been better’.

Whilst the case for listening to one’s self may be strong, putting it into practice isn’t always so easy. To do it well, I believe there are two essential ingredients.

The first is Purpose, a really strong reason for doing what you do as effectively as you can. The second is Values, a set of principles that cannot be broken even if breaking them helps achieve the Purpose.

In the relatively recent past many of us have mistakenly believed that our ‘Purpose’ was to make money. Many of us failed because it was obvious to others that, this, and not ‘fabulous customer service’ or ‘great quality’ was what we were looking to achieve. Another group of us managed to make some money but found out pretty soon after, that it wasn’t our ‘Purpose’ after all.

But I also know people who seem to go out of their way to avoid making money. It’s almost as if their ‘Purpose’ is to go without the nicer things in life.

My advice is to avoid including money as part of one’s ‘Purpose’ and trust that the more progress you make towards your real ‘Purpose’, the less money-related worries you’ll have.

A really strong ‘Purpose’ is something that motivates you, something that gets you out of bed in the morning and something that you’d happily have on your gravestone.

Values are personal, they are a set of principles by which you live your life. They are not a set of principles by which you would like to live your life. Your ‘Values’ are your ‘Behaviours’. The way you behave is the way you are. It doesn’t mean you can’t change your behaviours but it does mean if you cheat, then you value cheating. It means that if you shout at someone you attach value to that shouting. If you help an old lady across the road, you value the help you give.You give someone feedback, you value feedback and so on.

The perfect Conscious Business is the point at which all stakeholders have the right ‘Purpose’ and the right ‘Values’ for them personally and they are aligned. Investors, Customers, Employees, Directors, Suppliers etc all share a common ‘Purpose’ and a common set of ‘Values’

Conflict is the beginning of consciousness. M Esther Harding

Changing our world

rayrich — Wed, 22 Dec 2010 09:29:48 +0000

Over the last few weeks the subject of ‘internal’ and ‘external locus of control’ has popped up in conversation three or four times. Apparantly, there is a general trend towards an ‘external locus of control’ which should, if true, make policy makers sit up and take note. Locus of control considers the extent to which people believe they are in control of their own future. Those of us with an ‘internal’ locus of control believe we can shape what happens to us and those with an ‘external’ locus of control believe life happens to them. If people don’t feel they can influence what happens to them, then surely they’re going to rely much more on the State and on the goodwill of others.

Stephen Covey, in his hugely successful book ‘The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People’ says:

Viral Learning

rayrich — Mon, 02 Aug 2010 14:01:37 +0000

So, how do you make learning ‘go viral’? The answer is you can’t. What you can do is you can reduce the reasons for it not to go viral. Some things we’ve considered in designing our most recent programme are:

Make it useful
Make it look nice but don’t create something where people are looking at the polish instead of the content
Make it time appropriate – the whole programme will take ten minutes but it’s cut into four chunks which can all be consumed independently
Make it device independent – we’re working hard to make sure the programme can be consumed on both desktop and mobile devices
Release Beta versions and make sure people are clear it’s not the finished article
Listen to the feedback from Beta users
Don’t be afraid to ignore the vocal minority when it comes to feedback
Make it easy to share, really easy
Make it really easy for people to use the learning

I’m sure there’s more . . .

Pull Learning

rayrich — Mon, 02 Aug 2010 13:52:52 +0000

It would not be an exaggeration to say that over the last ten years marketing has been through a revolution. Like most revolutions, things started small and gathered pace, so much pace that nothing could stop it. There are numerous ways in which the revolution can be described but the one that resonates with me is the description that talks about the move from push marketing to pull marketing.

The way we used to market our products and services was about pushing information out to people. We tried our best to push information to people we thought would be interested, but sweeping generalisations based on demographic profiling were never going to be as accurate as we or the customer wanted. We wanted them to be accurate because we didn’t want to waste money reaching someone who was never going to be interested in our products or services and the customer didn’t want to receive something that wasted their time.

When search engines arrived marketing changed. Customers had a way of describing in detail what they wanted and search engines suggested websites that might be able to help. Suddenly the customer was pulling informaton in, rather than the suppliers pushing information out. The information had to be appropriate to the customer. If it wasn’t, the search engine wouldn’t be prepared to recommend it to the customer.

If you subscribe to the idea that Marketing is communication and learning is communication then you can start to explore the idea of ‘Pull Learning’ and what that could mean to learning suppliers.

In most organisations time is a precious commodity and even if someone gives you their time it doesn’t mean you have their attention and if you don’t have their attention it’s difficult for them to learn. In a ‘Pull Learning’ environment suppliers produce learning that’s useful to learners and succeeds or fails on it’s merits and not on whether it’s been pushed onto learners by management or not.

We’ve been working on creating a piece of online learning recently and whilst we could have gone down the mandatory route we chose not to. What we’ve created hasn’t been successful yet, it hasn’t been launched yet. But, our confidence was boosted we showed a Beta version to some managers a few days ago who asked if they could show what we’d produced at one of their monthly team meetings. It is the first sign, that people may start to pull down our content rather than being told to show it – it’s what we called empowerment, maybe it’s called something else now.

I appreciate that the team members are having it forced onto them, but it’s a start. Maybe some of the team might recommend it to colleagues in other teams? I hope so. We’re building it in a way that makes it easy to share with others and if people find it useful we hope it will achieve our objective of ‘going viral’

New Learnings 2

rayrich — Mon, 26 Jul 2010 16:06:18 +0000

So, the library has all but disappeared in terms of a useful learning tool and my network has slipped from my first port of call to my second. It’s also fair to say that my network itself has changed enormously. Firstly because I’m older and have met more people along the way and secondly because the people that make up my network are much more experienced than they were. But arguably, the biggest difference is that now it’s so much easier for me to communicate with my network.

Fifteen years ago, if the person I wanted to get hold of had moved jobs, that would be that. They’d have been an ex-member of my network. If they hadn’t become friends I wouldn’t have their home phone number and they might as well have disappeared completely.

Even if they hadn’t moved jobs and I had their phone number. I’d have to of known them reasonably well, if I was going to feel comfortable enough, to ask for their advice.

Then things started to change. Email arrived and I could start popping quick questions to my network without the need for five minutes of polite conversation before asking what I’d really called for. The the mobile phone arrived. Initially I thought I’d have to remortgage the house each time I made a call but after a while I got used to the costs and called my network wherever they were. Text messaging was great because I didn’t even have to worry about my spelling or grammar. When people started getting personal email addresses I could communicate with them even if they’d left their job and anyway, they’d let me know soon enough what their new work email address was.

Then, just as I was beginning to think my technology adoption curve would flatten out. Along came social networking. I could now have my own webpage on sites such as MySpace, Facebook and Linked-In, which eliminated the need for me to inform my network that I’d moved jobs. I simply updated my profile and let the software weave it’s magic.

But the big change, a much bigger change than my new found ability to maintain relationships with people I’d met along the way, was my ability to make contact with people I hadn’t met before. Through forums, discussion boards, blogs etc these people, people I didn’t know from Adam, were helping me fix my tumble dryer, find a hotel in Paris, find Victorian door handles, explain to me how a Loan Note worked and why I should consider an Employee Benefit Trust.

Very quickly it seems, my colleagues had gone from my first port of call to my second. My friend Google is available 24/7, 365 days a year and never complains about being too busy. He rarely knows the answer himself, but his friends frequently do and they seems to work similar hours. Now my network is huge.

Google Friday

rayrich — Fri, 02 Jul 2010 11:24:58 +0000

Google quite famously encourage their staff to set aside their day-to-day work every Friday to explore new ideas, new technologies. I’ve known this for years and always thought what a great way to develop new products it was. Talking to Craig Hanna the other day, what I came to realise was that the biggest plus for Google is not in the form of New Product Development (NPD) but in the learning that takes place. The interesting thing (maybe I’m wrong here – maybe I don’t know enough about Google Friday’s yet) is that it seems to be the employees who choose what to learn i.e. it’s a bottom up approach not top down. To what extent does that happen currently in organisations?

More than we think maybe? If informal learning accounts for 70% of total learning and peer to peer 20% then that only leaves 10% for formal training and that’s quite often bottom up e.g. “I’d like to go to this event boss”. But I still can’t help feeling there’s an opportunity being missed here. Maybe Google’s approach is successful because employees get to work on real problems? Maybe it’s the level of empowerment, the fact that they get to choose the area in which they learn? Maybe it’s the level of collaboration it encourages?

Maybe the job of organisations is not to train their staff but to remove the barriers to learning. If 70% of learning takes place informally, who are we kidding if we think we can control what our employees learn? Our employees network includes pretty much anyone who has an internet connection, so maybe we should focus our effort on using that network to the full and not worrying about it?

As long as our vision, our values, our objectives etc are clear and we have staff that believe in them then surely we should trust them to identify their own learning needs and in an ideal world, share their experiences with their network. It might even save us a few quid in the process.

Business is Personal

rayrich — Mon, 01 Feb 2010 11:57:07 +0000

“Don’t take it personally, it’s just business”. This expression really, really gets my goat.

There simply isn’t a difference between your personal values and your business values. Business is a part of life and the way you act in business is the way you act in life. If you tread on someone at work, you tread on someone, period – no caveats, no excuses.

”Real integrity is doing the right thing, knowing that nobody’s going to know whether you did it or not” Oprah Winfrey

Posted via email from No Hidden Agenda

The End of Greed

rayrich — Mon, 14 Apr 2008 18:13:12 +0000

I have this idea that we can all win, we can all be happier if we make the world a better place. I’m also know through my own experience that you can create a successful business if you do the right thing and an unsuccessful one if you get greedy. This site is a way for me to share and explore these ideas. I hope that in some small way, what people discover here gives them the confidence to behave in line with their values, gives them the confidence to trust their instincts, gives them confidence to do the right thing safe in the knowledge that everything else will follow.

I’m getting it less wrong than I used to. That’s as close as I can get to saying I have the answers. When I say ‘it’, I mean life. Whether I’m getting it less wrong or not is a bit irrelevant, the important thing is that I feel I’m getting it less wrong. I feel more confident than I used to. I’m also much better at accepting I’m going to get it wrong every so often and that in itself is important. It’s important because if I ever get to the point where I feel I’m getting it right, then either I’m not trying anything new or I’ve disappeared up my own orifice. I hope neither ever happens.