The Freddie Mercury Legacy
Returning from lunch at a conference recently, Queen’s Bohemian Rhapsody played. It snapped the participants from their ‘food coma’ into a state of readiness for learning. It got me thinking about the legacy Queen’ lead singer Freddie Mercury left behind when he passed away in 1991. The music of Queen has been revived through the blockbuster movie We Will Rock You and the global tour of Queen with US American Idol runner up Adam Lambert as front man. It lives on despite it being twenty years since Freddie’s passing purely because Brian May and Rodger Taylor saw an opportunity to …
Are You Getting Better?
The promise of technology was that it was supposed to make our lives easier and simpler, but reality is it appears to have created more work and is changing at a pace at a speed we never anticipated. When I start work with a new client, we explore the outcomes they want to achieve for themselves or their team. Some want to analyse data faster, some want to create more sophisticated charts, others want to learn to automate common processes. However, these are all activities. What every single client wants for themselves and their teams is more time! One of …
The KISS Principle
Ever read a letter or email, gotten to the end only to say to yourself “I have no idea?” Maybe you have no idea what the writer was trying to tell you, or no idea what the writer wants or expects you to do, or you are just totally confused by its purpose. Too often, particularly in written communication, people “waffle”. If it is something the writer is familiar with, because they either deal with the situation or the language every day, to the receiver it can seem like another language. A bit like internal acronyms in an organisation. When …
Reciprocity
At a recent conference I heard Dr Robert Cialdini, Psychology and Marketing Professor and author of Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion speak about the concept of reciprocity. He spoke about the importance of giving first if we want to receive. When we show effort, people appreciate it more. In the workplace when you help or support a colleague by sharing ideas, insights or wisdom that helps someone’s life or work, the giver tends to feel good and the receiver, who may have not felt good, usually feels better. Whether it is a sounding board for dealing with a challenging client …
The idea of rejection
No one likes being rejected, told no, or that they aren’t good at what they do. We often do everything we can to avoid the possibility of it by not asking for what we want or not saying we don’t know something. At a recent conference I heard Jia Jiang speak. Jia spoke about his fear of rejection and his 100 days of rejection therapy that he undertook to desensitise himself to rejection or hearing No! If you haven’t heard or seen Jia’s story take a look at his Ted talk on the topic, it has over 5.7 million views …
Stop sending, start talking
One of the challenges facing businesses today is the sheer volume of e-mail we send and receive and dealing with it. It’s easy to send an email asking a question to get something off our to do list and into someone else’s, but it does two things. It creates more work for you AND the receiver. They have to deal with your request in some way, even if it’s just reading it, and you have to ‘pick up’ the conversation when you get the reply. It stretches the response time. Unless the other person has their email open waiting for …
What’s your release valve?
Sometimes it feels like we could work 24/7 and still not catch up! Whilst working long hours may be necessary in the short term to meet deadlines, in the long term losing the balance of having life outside of work can be damaging to product as well as our physical and mental health. Having a release valve, an activity that releases stress and frustration is vital to enable you to recharge and bring you back to a productive state. It could be as simple as time with family, walking your dog, or a boxing class. Whatever allows you to get …
What Happens if it Breaks?
I was recently working with a client who had a manual process that their team would go through to produce regular reports in Excel. It wasn’t a high level or challenging process, it was basically do this step, then do that step and so forth until they reached the end and the resultant “report” was created. Whilst this worked a bulk of the time, problems arose when something wasn’t quite right, and they needed to troubleshoot the formulas or they recognised that results were not what they should be. All they had been shown was a process. They never understood …
Do You Know Your Peak Time?
At 5am every day, alarm or no alarm my body tends to wake me up. A sleep in for me is 7am which might occasionally happen on a weekend or public holiday. I love to get up and exercise, then after my first coffee (a freshly ground, single origin from a Fair-Trade roaster) I’m ready to go! I focus on my highest priorities first thing so they can be ticked off my ‘to do’ list and then deal with everything else after that. By about 4pm I’m starting to slow down, and by about 6pm I know I am at …
Sometimes it’s just a NO!
I recently received a call from an organisation wanting me to speak at an upcoming event. They had been referred to me by someone in their organisation who had seen me speak previously and thought they would reach out to check on my availability and fee. We arranged a call to find out a bit more and for me to determine if I felt like I was a “fit”. This is something I do with EVERY potential client. In our conversation we discussed what they wanted as the outcome from the event, which, although it was like my topic, was …
