On finding a new job

A consultant whom I met last week, has a very topical niche market: individuals who have been retrenched or who will be retrenched soon.

What in a nutshell does this consultant do? He runs workshops and his services are retained by owners of companies who have a sense of responsibility and who foot the transition bill.

Composing e-mails

Many people suffer from e-mails. Consider for a moment how you could alleviate the suffering of the recipients of your e-mails.

Here are 13 tips gleaned from various sources.

Juggling your office and life

Not many of my clients are “solopreneurs” meaning they work on their own and have to juggle the tug between their business and personal obligations. Those few who are often find it difficult as they spend too much time in the office. Or they find working on their own creates a different type of pressure.

The question appears to be, how do we divide our time, become more productive and creative, and create healthy work and life patterns? There are ways to achieve this and they apply by and large whether you work on your own or in a corporate office. 

Personal Learning and Growth

During three discussions recently it again struck me that the core of organisational renewal and growth is personal growth.

Where a client discusses issues, intellectually grasps what needs to be done, totally agrees and nods but does not go over into action, learning has not taken place. Nor will the organisation grow.

Where an owner is eager to learn and applies new learning, things start to happen within that organisation.

Survive and prosper

South Africa’s economy is, for the first time since 1992, in a recession.

Many MDs are not doing much about it. They hope they just need to contain costs and wait for the recession to pass. As was recently pointed out by a visitor, a strategy built on hope has little value and these companies will not emerge stronger and more competitive.

A few clients are proactive. Their leaders think anew about the performance of their companies and about how they run their businesses.

Slow is fast

A good friend of mine, Gerrit, discovered the Slow Movement – which had its origin in 1980s in Milan as the Slow Food Movement. When it started it had a focus on enjoying superb wines and food in the company of great friends.  Savour the moment.  Nowadays the movement covers slow food, slow travel, slow technology, slow parenting and a host of other “slows” including slow work.

My friend, a productivity expert, gives a new twist to what he paradoxically calls “slow productivity”.  At some level he and I say the same things.

A strong performance culture

There is merit in simplicity “the other side of complexity”, to partly quote Oliver Wendell Holmes. Know the big picture intimately, but then focus on the doing a few things right.

I read an interview yesterday which again confirms that approaches followed by large and small companies are the same. The only difference is the size of the company and the people in it. Size adds complexity to the solution. People are part of the solution or of the problem.

Scenario conversations

The business and financial worlds have changed dramatically. The traditional approach to planning in no longer sufficient. We live in turbulent times. For 20 recession-free years, the business environments in most countries were relatively simple. This is no longer the case. A recession and globalisation have changed our business environments.

To match new circumstances we need to use better planning tools such as scenario conversations. This tool has been around for decades but has largely been unused. Has your company ever used a broad scenario conversation as a precursor to developing its strategic and operational plans?

Strategy maps – simple but seemingly complicated

All of my clients know that I enthuse about the simplicity of the Balanced Scorecard (BSC) Strategy Maps and the BSC itself, developed by Kaplan and Norton. Today, in a discussion with a client company’s knowledgeable director, I could again sense that the seemingly complexity of a BSC Strategy Map is so off-putting to some senior staff members working under pressure that the easy way out would be to say “we cannot set aside the time to develop and implement the map.”

Of course, people do not like complexity or change. But as I have observed in a previous post On being a (business) student of 24 August 2008, mastering a few simple planning principles is often only a case of putting aside a few hours. Compare this minute effort to the hours that go into obtaining a degree or the hours which goes into reading a Sunday newspaper (every Sunday).

Important vs. Urgent

A client/consultant and I recently discussed the fact that so many owners and managers are totally reactive. They are forever dealing with urgent matters and are in a crises mode. This could be partly due to the fact that many have not learned to delegate in depth. However, it is possibly equally true that so many are not in the habit of putting time aside for proactively planning, learning and asking “what if” questions aimed at taking preventive action.

Stephen Covey developed a thought-provoking diagramme which depicts four quadrants. In which quadrants are you most of the time?