Where did all the fun go?

Let's get real for a minute, everyone wants to have fun at work, and everyone wants a cool office. If you are a client you do not want to step into dull boredom when you walk into a building, you want to appreciate life, colour, and have a great time. If you include anything in your business culture make sure that you include fun and honesty. You have a culture by default. Every action, interaction, smile or frown adds to the customer's view of who you are. There is no escaping that fact. Everything you do reflects on your core culture. Think of the opposite of these traits - boring and dishonest. No one wants to be friends with someone who's boring or dishonest let alone do business with them. You remember Jim from the cocktail party, the guy who with the monotone who bored you to tears for half an hour while he described the inner workings of his ant farm, imagine doing business with him, sitting for hours in a boardroom while he drones on about an unimportant technical issue. No one likes boring.

 

These two important aspects of a personal outlook on life work hand in hand.

Separating them would be like taking the fizz out of Coke. Ever been talking to someone and realize they are being dishonest? Even though there might be burst of laughter, lots of free drinks and some extra caviar it destroys trust and the dishonest component destroys the "fun" leaving you with flat Coke. Switch it up. An honest person that never has fun is like going to the moon with a soapstone statue. They weigh you down and when you get there there's no one to share champagne with. There's no enthusiasm in the accomplishment. It's terrible. Add fun and honesty to your corporate culture.

 

Let's talk about the bit fun for now. How to add fun: find the sore and mundane practices and make sure they're no longer mundane.

 

Start with your business card. I have a cool party trick for boring business cards I don't want to keep, I throw them away with a flick of the wrist. If you get it right you can send that card soaring about twenty feet into the dustbin. Business cards can be boring. So mix it up a little, create a job-title for yourself that incorporates humour. Instead of 'Personal Trainer' try 'Torture Specialist', instead of 'Accountant' try 'Number Cruncher'. Get people to have a double take when they glance at it. Use that as the springboard for building a relationship.

 

Think of the process that your clients have to go through. Now liven it up a bit. Take the 'transaction' aspect out of the procedure and get it done with a bit of relationship. Think good quality coffee on entering the building so they have something to drink while they queue, chocolates on leaving. Out of the ordinary quotes like Nando's did with their napkins. Think takeaway coffee cups with smiley faces drawn on them. In fact let us break this down to a simple mundane task of going to the bank to get a withdrawal. It has all the potential for boredom; clinical self-grandiosing décor, queueing for an indeterminate time, bureaucracy, oh yes going to the bank ranks highly on my boredom scale.

 

Imagine going to the bank like this. You enter the bank and the first thing that strikes you is the décor. Yes there are security features tucked away here and there, but for a start the bank is not advertising itself. There are massive wallscapes mounted around the hall for you to admire. As you look closely you realise that they are cartoon comic strips. A fellow client sees you noticing and points out that they change them every fortnight. A smiling barista hands you a fresh cup of coffee. The cup is not plain but has a designer quote on it. You fill in the required form and head over to the teller, there is a quote on the slip to remind you that life is not just about transactions but relationships. Someone got the design right, there are enough tellers on duty to ensure your wait time is minimal. The teller is dressed in collar shirt and jeans, formal yet relaxed. She smiles. Your cash is handed to you in an envelope that says 'Most banks give you cold hard cash. But we are a different bank. And so we are giving you warm, caring cash! Use it wisely!' How different is that. Now I wish I could claim originality for that system but Missouri Bank beat me to it (except the comic strip bit, that was me).

 

I can see some people shaking their heads in disbelief; all that effort, all that extra expense, why should we even bother? Here is why. Competition is real. People will remember you more for the fun service they had than the actual product they got from you. They will keep coming back and they will tell their friends. 'But Zach its hardly professional, people want us to be professional'. I never said it was not. Do not mistake fun for unprofessional. Crude would be unprofessional. But when did being professional become synonymous with boredom?

 

Next excuse please? 'Oh but that was an American example.' We live in a global market, get over it. If you want fun, local, and professional then go have a look at Printworks in Mount Pleasant where the coffee shop is right next to the area you place your order. Or get local company CMedia to do a presentation for you. Local companies, right here that are changing it up.

 

It's to easy to slip into a monotonous, transactional business system where laughter had left the building, and smiles have turned upside down. It is easy to settle for cold, grey, and clinical and be happy with it.

 

It's also easy to slip in a few dishonest comments in today's society. It doesn't last. Broken trust is hardly recoverable. The honesty bit in your culture, do what you say you will. Deliver on time. Keep your word. Fun and honesty promotes trust and gives everyone you interact with positive memory. When becomes your culture you no longer even have to try.

BBC Business

Here are a couple of posts from the BBC business section. It worth keeping your tabs on this section of the news giant.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-23447529

http://www.bbc.com/capital/story/20130729-funny-business-at-the-office

The Real Tale of The Three Little Pigs

Once upon a time there were three little pigs. There names were Albert, Herbert and Fansidor (their father being a progressive man had named the last one after surviving a bout of malaria but the clerk at the births registry had spelt the name of the antimalarial wrong). Their names are not really essential to the story. On being kicked out the pigsty they set out into the big wide world and decided to build themselves houses (please in the efforts of literary creativity suspend reality for a bit, I know pigs don't build houses. Unleash your inner child and just play along). Exploiting loopholes in the local building bylaws the first pig managed to build his house of straw. Seeing how easy it was for his sibling to bypass the regional building inspectorate, but wanting to look a little better, the second pig built his of twigs. The third pig turned his nose up at his brothers' endeavours and spend a lot of hours of sweat and labour building his out of bricks. Some time after this the Big Bad Wolf came along. Mr BBW Esq. knocked on the door of the first pig. Peeking through a crack in the wall the pig saw the wolf and, realising the foolishness of letting a hungry carnivore into his home, told him to go away. Mr Wolf being persistant replied 'Little pig, little pig, let me come in or I will huff and I'll puff and blow your house in.' He then proceeded to blow the straw house down and the first pig became bacon. Moving on down the street the wolf repeated the saga with pig two with the same results, although he turned him into ham instead of bacon. Feeling a little more peckish the wolf launched his speech about huffing and puffing at the door of the third pig. Brick, however, is a bit sturdier than straw, and the wolf soon found himself in the throes of an exercise induced asthma attack and having forgotten his inhaler died of shortness of breath. The third pig realising he was onto something went into construction, pitching his sales to clients while seated on a nice wolf-skin fur rug. Here ends the tale of the three little pigs.

The nursery tale of the three little pigs, like most children's stories, has nothing to do with the superiority of brick as a building material. It addresses the far more fundamental issue of character. You can spend your life cutting corners on deals, pulling fast ones on your clients, padding your expense bill at the expense of the company, but you may not be building a character that will last under pressure. Nor will you be the sort of dependable, honest person people want to trust with their dealings. Think back on the times you have been cheated, lied too and swindled. It was not particularly pleasant was it now. So why do it to others.

Periodically I like to glance through the adverts of health magazines. Most of them are about dubiously priced supplements but I found one the other day that astounded me. It promised instant 'abs'. You could, in one short surgical procedure, have your fat liposuctioned and sculpted in such a way that would leave you looking like you had the 'six-pack' of every man's dream. You would not have to lift a single weight. The only snag is that it would not be real. It would still be fat and have no strength behind it. If someone asked you to lift a weight, your crafted flab would be exposed for the fraud it really was. There would be no substance behind the way you looked.

It is no wonder that many people who win the lottery end up as poor as they were beforehand. They do not have the character to cope with the sudden increase in wealth and squander it, much in the same way they would squander the little they had before their windfall.

There is no quick fix to character flaws, but they can be changed. Listen hard to the things people continually complain to you about, take a look at your life and find the area that needs change. Make yourself accountable to someone for your change, they will not change you but are there to be a sounding board if they see you falling apart again. Then pick the character trait that you want to embrace (usually the opposite of the one you are trying to correct). Now, imagine yourself in a situation later today where you would usually fall, and rework it in your mind so it reflects the new trait. Now go and do it like that. Repeat again and again and again until it becomes natural. It is not enough to stop lying, you have to tell the truth. Being on time is not the opposite of being late, being early is the real 'on-time'. Instead of stealing, give something. Instead of being negative all the time, do not just shut your mouth, rather speak words of affirmation. Redig your foundations and create a house out of brick. It takes time, sacrifice, hard work and effort. But you will withstand the storms of life better in a house with a sure foundation.

Do Degrees Matter (or The Art of Dunking Cookies).

I dunked a biscuit in my coffee today. It is an act that may seem trivial but it is the reason for the act that matters rather than the actual earth shattering news that I placed the end of a cookie into a piping hot beverage. My dunking endeavour was inspired by the glorious description of the experience in the film 'The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel', a wonderful movie depicting the trials of a group of elderly British pensioners in India. The dunking description scene takes place as Evelyn, superbly portrayed by Judi Dench, attempts to get a job at a call centre. It is pointed out to her that the group of young people busy fielding and making calls are all university graduates. That point hit home more than the bit about tea and biscuits. A group of university graduates and the best they can manage is a job answering the phone and making scripted sales calls. Apologies to call centre workers everywhere, but it does not take a degree to answer the phone when all you need is common sense and a good take on the language being spoken.

More people than ever are pursuing a university or college career. More and more places are demanding paper behind your name before they will employ you. More and more people are looking at the letters after your name as a sign of your credibility. But is it really all worth it? Does a university degree set you up for success, especially when there is a glut of university graduates on the market?

There is a very powerful statistic bandied about showing that, as recently as 2009, income levels were strongly correlated with education level in the USA. However, as many analysts are quick to point out, correlation does not equal causation. It could just be that the drive and work ethic required to get a degree is the same work ethic that gets you to a place of success in life. I know a number of recent graduates from college both locally and overseas who cannot obtain a job in today's crunch economy.

People who are quick to promote the 'no-degree' path eagerly point out a long list of successful college dropouts who went on to make it big, including people like Bill Gates. What you may miss is that Bill Gates dropped out with the idea to start a company, he already had the idea and a fair amount of the skills, and was positioned at the right place and time to achieve the success he did. I also know a few people locally who have managed just fine without completing a tertiary education. It has not been easy for them; they still needed a vision, strong work ethic and desire to succeed.

The style of education offered in the USA and UK is so expensive that you can graduate with a massive debt hanging over your head that will take you a lifetime to pay off. Yes your degree may get you earning more, it also has you paying off more to the people who funded your degree. At the end of ten years I am not sure if the person who has a four year start on the working pathway will be any worse off than the post-graduate. Fortunately tertiary education in Zimbabwe is still cheaper than most, for now.

I would like to introduce you to the idea of Full Sail University. Specialising in entertainment industry education (think music, film, computer game design), they operate modular, full-time, online and classroom based education. When I say full-time I mean 24-7 operation with two weeks off for good behaviour over Christmas. You graduate with a degree after 2 years of hard work with eight hours of lectures a day. None of this summer break nonsense for three months, you do not get that in the working world so why get it at University.

The world is in a state of flux. Economies are under strain, the corporate system is under criticism, connections and relationships are coming to the fore. With this change comes great opportunity and a need to adapt. Education styles are shifting (or should be) to compensate for the new ways of obtaining information.

So where does the answer lie? Perhaps the answer lies in more thinktank, mentorship style practical programs akin to the apprentice system. Perhaps universities need to rethink their current options. Ultimately education should teach you how to think, how to obtain and process information, how to problem solve based on first principles. For some there will always be a need for skill acquisition, doctors for example will need to practice surgery somewhere. More than skills though it is the impartation of an attitude that will set you on the path to success. It matters not so much whether you get a degree or not, nor how you get it, but hard work will always be required to obtain success. Hiring for attitude is way more important than hiring for qualification. You can have a nice set of letters after your name, but if you are basically lazy or unwilling to serve clients I am not interested in employing you. If your degree has meant that you have spent the last three years of your life attending four lectures a day and doing little else constructive I may worry, just a little, that you expect the working world to be that easy.

Regardless of your education, if you think that you can set up a company and just walk away without attending to it on a frequent basis then you are either gifted or seriously deluded. Growing a vision into reality, building a reputation, setting up systems, monitoring and correction all take an effort that stems from the right attitude. Sure you can buy a 'kombi' and set it on the street with the demand for a hundred dollars a day from the driver and have it run around without you thinking about it till day end and call it a business. All you have to do is take a ride on the joke of a public transport system we have in Harare to realise the result of an uncontrolled system. All it will take is a well operated, friendly, reliable system that cares about its travellers to be introduced and bang will go the kombi business (of course it is easy to write that, the reality is much harder). Attitude matters.

Learning should be a lifestyle regardless of formal or on-the-job training. Read. Write. Debate. Learn to argue a point. Learn to question the status quo, to explore and come up with alternatives. If the only job you can get with your degree is a call centre operative it better be a stepping stone for you to greater things, not the final destination.

Expand your business by being an access point

Africa is poised to grow at a rate of 5% per year. The World Economic Forum discussed it in great length in Cape-town, where I was honoured to be one of the moderators. “Can Africa live up to it’s promise?’ It’s the question in the room at the moment. What does this boil down to; lots and lots of opportunity needs lots and lots of cooperation and trust. Many times at the WEF the talks were about spring board platforms for talent and new ideas. Such platforms need cooperation and trust. Does politics or economics drive Africa?

In the past Africa has had a reputation of being “difficult.” I’m not just talking about local laws or government policies but the overall supportive culture of BIG ideas.

Are there opportunities in Africa? Yes massive ones and it’s no secret, but the better question is “Where are the access points?”

There are opportunities in China right now that will blow your mind. There are opportunities in Tete, Mozambique, the fastest growing city in the world. There are opportunities in Ethiopia, the Sudan, and Bolivia-and you probably know of a few more. We’ve had the conversations and they go like this… “You know what city is absolutely booming with opportunity…” Then it goes into a long story that you heard from some guy, that CNN picked up and did a short story on and so on. The only problem is you have no idea how to get involved or how to reach there.

We all know there’s opportunity, but not all of us have the access. You might be someone that has an “access point’ and not even know it? Do you have a good reputation in your city, a positive stream of endorsements, and do you trust yourself with people and introductions? Do you relate well with people, are you trustworthy, can you keep a secret if you need? If the answer is yes you could very well be an owner of an “access point.” If you don’t have a good reputation then you might want to start mending the bridges, repaying your debts, and start being this link for people who know there’s opportunity but can’t get to them.

How to be an access point:

People will pay a lot for trust - be honest and trustworthy.

Trust is earned over time. If you are willing to breach contracts, sell out to a higher bidder when you already gave your word, or just blatantly lie, then forget being trusted, and do not expect to be an access point.

Be accessible.

Nothing is worse then having an access point that you can’t access. Answer your phone, answer emails, create a good reputation when it comes to communication.

Connect people up even when you don’t get paid.

It’ll add to your reputation which will in the end lead you to more opportunities. Be a networker of ideas. Think about how you heard about your current mechanic, your current doctor, your accountant, your lawyer. Chances are it was through word of mouth. Someone connected you with them. Now take that concept and expand it beyond the sharing of professional services to connecting people in different spheres, different parts of the world.

Open up your world.

There might not be an immediate opportunity but if you’ve met someone with confidence and high values then finding a connection point might be around the corner. Be attentive to conversation. It will be in the seeming random, non-formal communication that you can pick up people are looking for. Some of the greatest opportunities may lie waiting at the office coffee dispenser. Many times we focus on where we are at and what we’re doing and by default only see opportunities where we are looking. Lift up your head from your desk and look around you. See what is available.

Churchill said 'You make a living by what you get, but you create a life by what you give'.

Being an access point often means being a giver. Connecting people is at its core an act of giving, you are giving away an opportunity that you may not be able to take advantage of on your own. But the result is so much bigger than anything that you could do individually that it is too good not to. Remember the hosepipe, that as it connects the tap to the plants, it too gets wet.

An Inconvenient Truth

'For every dollar you spend, 10c will go to poor starving children somewhere in the world.' 'Shoes, let's give shoes to the poor children in Africa so they can walk to school.' 'Our product comes from sustainably harvested forests where we pour back into local communities every time you buy a bag of our over priced offering.' Corporate social responsibility has invoked some of the biggest load of marketing hogwash ever dreamed up by Wall Street spin doctors. It is another layer of gloss in the facade dreamed up to help you not think that your brand new jersey might just have paid the annual wage for some poor barefoot machinist in a Bangladesh sweatshop. Hey wait a minute, we live in Africa, surely we are immune to the fabrications and machinations of Big Brother capitalist empires. Nah not really. If anything we are to be pitied all the more for allowing ourselves to be made into the unwilling victim in grandiose schemes, created to placate to consciences of the stupid consumer elsewhere.

Now that I have stood on a few toes I can see people perking up and going, 'Wait a minute do not these community schemes work? Are not the recipients of all this aid, welfare, and exchange better off than they were before we got involved in their lives?' Perhaps. But why do you have the need to broadcast your philanthropy to the world? Could you not just do the work, engage in the schemes anyway, and if the occasional discerning patron inquires then you can point out that 'hey we really are doing some good work in the world.'

My problem with corporate social programs is that I wonder if, more often than not, they are motivated by what they can get out of the deal rather than what they can give. That this is not charitable work at all but simply another transaction to be benefited from and marketed to the level of stupidity. Why should we invite the local politician to the opening of a new borehole in a rural community? Is it in the hope of currying favour with his party by giving him a soapbox to stand on? What ever happened to the idea of seeing a need and filling it, without any extra reward, thanks, or gratification, apart from the knowing in your soul that you changed lives today.

I question whether sometimes the 'we give back' slogans are not just a way of tapping into the emotions of a client who gets a little buzz every time he buys the product. That you are selling a convenient form of giving that makes a customer feel better because he no longer has to think about making a real difference in his community because 'I gave to Africa today'. And that 'little buzz' is capitalised on to make him keep buying the product. I question if we have got it all wrong.

That the wrongness stems from the very start of our companies, from the very core of our being. We all have dreams. That is Lesson One from any book on self actualisation that 'You Have a BIG Dream that YOU can Achieve.' Then we spend the next twenty five chapters learning how to make OUR dream become a reality, a reality that benefits US. That our visions for our company, for our lives ignore the real needs of those around us. Because we are so focused on ourselves when a need comes along we immediately view it through the tinted glasses of 'how WE can benefit from our own act of charity'. That the prosperity gospel often comes across as 'Give so YOU can receive'. That the focus of our giving becomes about us and what we can get, not about the recipient, forgetting that in any harvest part of the harvest is sown again to perpetuate the cycle.

Vision is not a bad thing. Dreams are not a bad thing. But they should be tools rather than the real end goal. What point is there in building a great company but failing to build a great nation in the process? At the end of your career how different will the housing that your workers live in be compared to now? What would it take to improve the lives of those that work for you, and in a manner that does not result in them being in indebted servitude to you, but in a way that equips them to get up the rung one extra step? Housing is one example, but there is electricity, sanitation, education, health care. Then there is the non-humanitarian aspect of the planet we live in; our wildlife, flora, and aquatic systems.

Our giving back needs to be part of who we are and what we do. It does not need to be publicised or advertised. It should be done in a manner that allows maximum benefit (think above 90 percent of the proceeds) to reach the intended target, not wasted on advertising, fancy stage hire, or salaries of executives managing the process. It should be well targeted; take care of your own community. Where is the benefit of building a rural education centre if your own staff cannot afford to send their own children to school?

There will always be need. While no one person can solve every problem or give to every need, there is something each of us can do. With pure motives and sucking up the inconvenience of the actions, we can all find a way to quietly and genuinely help with no obvious reward.

Make things better. Not for the pomp and circumstance but because it is the right thing to do.

Time Marches On

DO you hear it? Listen carefully. It is very, very faint and easily drowned out by the louder random noises that clutter your life. There it is the subtle sound of sand running through the hourglass of
your life. It is the invisible, inevitable process of time ticking away never to be regained, never to be reused.
This morning, unless you are one of the unfortunate souls whose time was permanently cut short, you woke to 86 400 seconds of precious time to be spent in any way you see fit.
Here is a nasty experiment, subtract your age from 70. Now take that number, divide it by 0,7. The answer is the average percentage of your life you have left.
If you are on the other side of 35 the answer is a real shocker.
We do not really have a lot of time. So I get rather annoyed when someone tries to waste it.
I spent some time on the doingbusiness.org  website, part of the World Bank Group, after someone suggested I look at it.
If you google “doing business in Zimbabwe” the first search result is our national profile so I would say it is worth having a look.
The results were not very encouraging: 90 days to register a business from scratch, 106 days to get electricity to a new factory, 53 days on exports.
It was a painful read. Ninety days to register a business is only three months, but compared to South Africa’s 19, America’s six, and China’s just over 30, it looks like a living hell.
Did you know that there are 49 taxes and rates to be paid during a business year?
It is all there giving potential investors a snapshot of business in our nation and the burden of bureaucracy that snares us up.
The burden that wastes the little precious time that we all have.
Now you may question the accuracy of the results on the website all you like, but that is what the world sees and reads.
The real question is anyone doing anything about it?
As consumers are we demanding better services from our authorities or are we all blindly fetching the municipal inspector when we have already paid a fee that would cover his transport.
Inefficiency costs us. We can rant at the authorities all we like for the lengthy processes they put us through, but we then proceed to put our clients through the same pain.
Why should we wait for more than 20 minutes at the doctor’s office for a scheduled appointment?
If the meeting is from eight to 10, why does it start at 8.30? We have a culture that tolerates tardiness and excuses late delivery.
How much quicker would you get things done if I deducted 10 percent from your fee for every day you failed to deliver on time?
You cannot manage time. You know this. You cannot speed it up, you cannot slow it down.
You cannot command the sun to set earlier or later, or the seasons to halt their progress from one to the other.
You cannot manage time, but you can manage yourself.
Time management is self-governance.
Plan
Use “spare” time to plan your day. Spare time includes that increasingly long drive to work.
Reschedule your daily programme if it makes you more effective. If getting to work takes you an hour, try leaving earlier to beat the traffic.

Explore different routes to home and work
I take a different route home in the evening to my morning trip simply because it is so much quicker.
Under promise and over deliver. Leave a little margin for error on the end of every shipment, but personally ship within the time-frame.
Do not use your margin as an excuse but use it as a way of showing great service when your product arrives “early”.
Show up early for meetings
Include travel time when planning meetings. Do not set a meeting for 10am when you know that you have one earlier that only ends at that time.
It is so easy to overlook this when staring at your diary that works in one hour long blocks.
Leave a margin for travel if you are not hosting consecutive meetings at the same location (anyone doing business in Johannesburg knows this).
If someone is 15 minutes late for an hour long meeting then they only get 45 minutes of your time.
If you are 15 minutes late and have not had the decency to call or reschedule give them the whole hour, but make sure you call before your next meeting to reschedule.
Listen carefully. Do you hear that? The sand of time is still flowing away in the hourglass, you had better do something with it.