New Normal
Interesting perspective in this Forbes article. In my twenty plus years as a corporate speaker trainer and educator, I have seen a lot of trends. Companies spending millions of dollars on customised solutions that do not achieve the financial benefits promised in the business cases sold to boards and executives. A colleague of mine, Dave (thanks Dave!) once told me, people want the “ab-cruncher” solution to their problems. In a time poor world, individuals and organisations want the outcome of the ab-cruncher, the six pack wash board stomach, but many aren’t always prepared to make the time, or put in …
Don’t be Scared!
So many of people are afraid…. they are afraid of making mistakes! In business and in life we have long been conditioned not to make mistakes. That making a mistake is bad. But what if we instead of viewing them as mistakes, we viewed them instead as learnings, I know that metaphor has been around for a long time, that’s “there’s no such thing as failure, it’s simply learnings. Thomas Edison when asked about his failed attempts at perfecting the light globes has been said to have answered that he did not fail, that in fact he had merely identified …
Why do we over use technology?
Is it because it’s easy? We tick a metaphorical box and move onto the next thing making actioning or responding to what we’ve just sent now someone else’s problem. The electronic equivalent of ‘passing the buck’ I think it’s time to challenge the way we do things because that’s the way we’ve always done them. We used to fax things now we email them it’s faster, more cost effective and provided the ability to send one to many. But just because we have the technology doesn’t mean we HAVE to use it for everything. When was the last time you …
You’ll always find someone on the phone at parties
In 1978, Jona Lewie released a song called You’ll always find me in the kitchen at parties! I think today, it that song would be You’ll always find people on the phone at parties! I went to a friend’s house recently to connect with someone who was visiting for a couple of weeks from overseas. There were about 15 people there when I arrived, sitting around, chatting, having a few drinks and eating some snacks. During the evening, I was totally surprised by the number of people who, when pings sounded from phones, reached into their handbag or their pocket …
Demand vs Demanding
Sometimes we over complicate things. I see it when I work with clients. They spend hours trying to come up with a complicated formula to complete a calculation when all it needs is a hyperlink to a cell containing the result they need. Sometimes we make things harder than they need to be. A reply all instead of a reply to just the sender. All of this takes time and energy. A quick check of email can end up taking 45 minutes out of a day responding to questions and enquiries that often don’t progress your agenda which can leave …
Don’t over complicate things
A client reached out to me wanting to discuss a formula to feed information from one worksheet to another. It should be “easy” (for me) they said, but they had struggled for two years to find an answer before reaching out. Once I understood what they needed, they really didn’t need a complicated formula, in fact they just needed to combine some copying and pasting techniques to cross check data, something most users of Excel could do if they knew the process. Sometimes we make things harder than they need to be. Next time you think a complicated formula is …
What’s next?
I was recently asked where I think technology is going in the future as it relates to productivity. What’s the next BIG thing? For many, the buzz is around AI (artificial intelligence), my thoughts, however, are closer to home. Rather than adding MORE stuff, in my opinion, the greatest gains are to be made in increasing productivity and efficiency with the things we use every day. When we focus on adding more stuff, all we do is add another layer of complexity. With more to learn, interpret and integrate into our already stretched activities and workload. Adding more without strategy …
Hunger for Connection
On a Monday morning a few months ago (pre COVID-10) whilst sitting in a coffee shop writing, a man came in to get a coffee. What he said made me lift my head up from my writing. He said today he was working from home and whilst he had a coffee machine at home, he said he came in for a ‘coffee and a chat’. Business today is more ‘connected’ than ever. We can work from home, on an airplane, almost anywhere if we have an internet connection! Whilst technology provides the ability to create documentation, analyse information and process …
We’re not wired to be constantly connected.
I recently read the book Digital Minimalism by Cal Newport who’s a Computer Science Professor at Georgetown University in Washington, DC. Professor Newport is a specialist in computer science. One of the things he said in his book that resonated with me was the fact that as human beings we’re not actually wired to be wired. You’re probably thinking, what does that mean? As human beings, over the last fifteen or so years we’ve started to see technology become more ingrained in our day to day operations whilst technology delivers many benefits to streamline our processes and documentation, it has …
Unusual Times
We are in unusual times at the moment globally. A number of my clients are doing things differently in response to the changes and cancellations of face to face conferences and training. Rather than risking bringing staff together for face to face training, many are choosing virtual presentations. We’re experiencing increased demand for our virtual training offering. These types of solutions are a great way of meeting client needs, especially when they are geographically spread out. Limited access to the recording encourages teams to revisit the presentation and the training “lasts” longer than the live event, resulting in a greater …
