What’s It Worth?
Many will have heard of the “80/20 Rule”.
This states that 20% of something does, yields or influences 80% of something else. The original theory was propounded by Italian Vilfredo Pareto at the University of Lausanne in 1896 who postulated that 80% of the land in Italy was owned by 20% of the population. This rule has now been incorporated into any number of concepts and guidelines. One of my favourites is that 20% of my efforts achieve 80% of my results. Another is that you will get it 80% right first time but risk spending disproportionate additional time in attempting to achieve that final 20% and perfection.
I’ve actually encountered a number of business owners and others who are exactly like that. To be honest, I admire that tenacity in looking for that degree of perfection and going beyond that threshold which, for most of us, is “good enough”.
The problem for these people is that they spend far too much time “sweating the small stuff”. In certain instances this is justified. For example: ensuring that every part of a jet engine will function as it is meant to at altitude. “There are,” as the Head of Aeronautical Engineering at one UK university has put it “no lay-bys at 35,000 feet”. In such cases, if that jet engine is the difference between life and death, it had better function perfectly!
Jetliners however are multi-engined. They can suffer the loss of one engine and make an emergency landing on the other. Extreme cases like the one above apart, we have to decide in our own minds when something’s got to be perfect and when “good enough” will do. Take another example: software releases these days are usually 80% or more “good enough”. The remaining 20% is achieved over the following weeks or months as the “bugs” are identified and resolved by the software programmer. In most cases the “bug” shouldn’t be a fatal coding flaw but rather an omission or a bug that couldn’t have been identified except in the crucible of real-life use. The latter is something many of us find very difficult to emulate to any degree of thoroughness.
My personal view is that, in most cases, “good enough” will do. The additional 20% rarely has to be worth it to spend time that could otherwise be dedicated to launching new projects, motivating one’s team or spending quality time with one’s family or improving oneself.
Of course, the more experienced we become at delivering a product or service, the more “perfect” we should be able to make it!
Every individual needs to decide for themselves based on their circumstances when “good enough” really is “good enough”.
I’ve spent more than half my life delivering change in different world markets from the most developed to “emerging” economies. With a wealth of international experience in international financial services around the world running different operations and lending businesses, I started my own Consultancy to provide solutions for improving performance, productivity and risk management. I work with individuals, small businesses, charities, quoted companies and academic institutions across the world. An international speaker, trainer, author and fund-raiser, I can be contacted by email. My website provides a full picture of my portfolio of services.
Labels: Career, Financial, Leadership, Productivity, Strategy, Teamwork
To Go or Not to Go?
Much of our lives as leaders can be spent in meetings. When a certain financial institution acquired another, the institution that was acquired was known as “much in discussion, little and nothing done”.
Suffice to say though that that little mnemonic or aide-memoir revealed plenty about the attitudes of each organisation to meetings. In the first meetings seemed to be the raison d’être for managers. In the other they were held when necessary.
I meetings are well-run, they can really move things on. More often than not, they aren’t and as a result waste people’s time and provoke resentment. There may or may not be an agenda, someone to take minutes, a designated “chair” and other team members. The next time you attend a meeting, see how many people are surreptitiously checking emails, messages, social media or other channels rather than engaging in the meeting.
If asked to attend a meeting, ask:
What’s the purpose of the meeting (solve a problem, reach a decision, share information)?
What value will I add by attending? (Do I need to attend? Can someone attend in my place? Will it simply suffice for me to receive a copy of the action items that pertain to me, my team or department)?
If I have to attend, is it possible to attend only that part of the meeting for which my presence is required?
Honest answers to those questions quickly reveal whether our presence is mandatory, desirable, or unnecessary.
I appreciate that in some cases, this isn’t possible. Meetings depend on the organisation, its leaders and culture. A productive meeting can be held and concluded within 30 minutes if properly arranged, controlled and minuted. I know some teams that hold their team meetings standing up to discourage relaxing from sitting down and thereby losing concentration!
I’ve attended team meetings where things had become a ritual: boss speaks, team listens, updates each other on what’s going on, the end. These were useful if the team wasn’t regularly in the office. However, where they worked at a “cluster” of desks where everyone could hear everyone else, it was usually obvious what was going on.
In some cases, it may simply be enough to change a weekly meeting to monthly. Imagine, instead of one 1-hour meeting a week, only one is held every month, freeing up 40 hours/year or five working days per person (assuming a working day of eight hours). What could we all achieve with fve extra days?
Be all that as it may, we have to work within the constraints imposed by others. If “the boss” says we shall have one 60-minute meeting a week, we have one… If, however, one can prove to said boss that there’s another, better, way of doing things, there’s hope.
I’ve spent more than half my life delivering change in different world markets from the most developed to “emerging” economies. With a wealth of international experience in international financial services around the world running different operations and lending businesses, I started my own Consultancy to provide solutions for improving performance, productivity and risk management. I work with individuals, small businesses, charities, quoted companies and academic institutions across the world. An international speaker, trainer, author and fund-raiser, I can be contacted by email. My website provides a full picture of my portfolio of services.
Labels: Career, Leadership, Productivity, Teamwork
Email and Etiquette
Call me old-fashioned, but I believe that there’s an art and etiquette to communicating by email.
The problem: none of us have ever been trained in the intricacies of emailing. Some companies have “approved corporate signatures” by which I mean whether the standard sign off is “Best Regards”, “Kind Regards”, “Warm Regards” or similar. However, this is where it ends. One of the best tips I ever received from a former boss was never to write in an email what I wouldn’t want read out in court. Another added to this “… or what you wouldn’t want your mother to read”.
Email has been described as “asynchronous communication”. Like a traditional letter, it isn’t read at the same time that it’s sent (I know this will come as a shock to some).
The point is an email should receive the same degree of care as a handwritten or “official” letter (and goodness knows there are a few enough of those these days!)
To add to the complexity surrounding email are the fields that we all know:
Even these are potential minefields. How many times have we seen emails with multiple recipients in the “To” field asking for action to be taken. If one asks multiple people to do something, everyone expects someone else to do it. Result: nothing gets done.
Equally the “CC” Field is a prime candidate for abuse. People are copied in on emails to add pressure to the recipient to take action or (more maliciously) to show how clever or alert the sender is.
Given all the above, is it surprising that quite often emails are not actioned in the way the sender intended?
To help, here are some general guidelines we can all follow:
The people or (preferably) person in the “To” field are or is the one or ones who are expected to act. It helps if the email starts with “Dear” and the name or names of the individual or individuals concerned.
CC names should only be those who really need to be copied in. Not those whom we would like to show how clever we are (or by default how stupid someone else is). CC parties are those who genuinely need the information or who have asked to be copied in to ensure that the email went out.
The most difficult is the “Subject” Field. What needs to happen here is to understand that, when someone sees an email in their inbox, they often prioritise it based on the subject. If the sender requires something to be done, it wouldn’t be unreasonable for them to start the subject Field with “Action required by” and then give a date by which said action is required. Simply using “Urgent” has little meaning as what is “urgent” to the sender may not be “urgent” to the recipient. I’ve seen cases of people who use “urgent” so often that its only effect is to devalue their messages.
When it comes to the text, it should fit in the space available on the average laptop screen but… nowadays, people read emails on their smartphones. If anyone out there can compose an email that is “smartphone friendly”, good on them. The problem is that, if an email is too long, people reading it on their smartphones will miss important points. Keep it short and simple. If the email is likely to be long, consider adding the details as document attachments rather than lengthy text. In one of the organisations I worked for, the guideline was to compose messages in such a way that it could be read on and approved by a BlackBerry user (that’s dating me a bit).
No one seems sure about the “tone” to adopt in an email. My personal belief is that it should be as professional as the tone of a letter. However others, perhaps in the interests of brevity, tend to adopt what comes across to many as a blunt and aggressive tone. I’ve seen many colleagues “bristle” whilst reading an email because of this.
It’s up to us to set the tone we wish to see in emails coming from our organisation. Some may indeed encourage a “forceful” approach but if you need someone’s cooperation, a more collaborative tone is required. This of course doesn’t apply if one has been collaborative (in one’s mind) and there has been no result. In this case, a more forceful approach is justified.
Just to complicate things even more, our global community sees multiple cultures all using email to communicate with each other. What seems “collaborative” to one culture may seem “forceful” to another.
Whatever the case, we as business leaders are tasked with setting the tone of how our organisations communicate with others. The results will speak for themselves.
I’ve spent more than half my life delivering change in different world markets from the most developed to “emerging” economies. With a wealth of international experience in international financial services around the world running different operations and lending businesses, I started my own Consultancy to provide solutions for improving performance, productivity and risk management. I work with individuals, small businesses, charities, quoted companies and academic institutions across the world. An international speaker, trainer, author and fund-raiser, I can be contacted by email. My website provides a full picture of my portfolio of services.
Labels: Customer Care, Leadership, Productivity, Strategy
