“Foreign Influence”
From time to time I read with great amusement comments by various statesman or other influential people about the need to “purge foreign influences“ or “not succumb to foreign influences“.
At times it may be understandable: people don’t want to lose their national identity. Some comments suggest more these people are living on a different planet. Let’s see: they wake up in the morning thanks to an alarm set on their “foreign” smart phone. If they are still of the type who wish to use an actual alarm clock, it will probably won’t be made in their country.
After getting up, they (one hopes) shower using shower products made in any number of other countries, after which they dry themselves on a towel again made (most likely) in China.
They then dress in clothes made overseas (in India, Bangladesh, China or if they can afford it, Parris, Milan, Savile Row).
They then have a cup of coffee for which they boil the water in their Chinese or Korean kettle. After that, they leave the house and, if they drive themselves to work, most do so in a car made in China, Japan, Korea, Germany, the UK, or the USA.
On arriving at work (at the local subsidiary of, say, an overseas bank) they go to their desk and switch on a computer made in China, Korea, the USA. Their desk and office chair may well have been manufactured in a different country as well.
For lunch, they may well decide with their colleagues to go out for foreign food. After leaving work and driving home in their foreign car, they change and relax in front of their Japanese, Korean or European TV.
Dinner may be a simple affair: a microwaved meal, cooked in their Korean microwave. Afterwards they load the dirty dishes and cutlery into a Korean or German dishwasher. Following a relaxing cold drink from the Korean made fridge, they head upstairs to bed before beginning the whole process the next day again.
The lust to “purge foreign influences” seems characteristic of national populists and those trying to carry favour with a minority of the population.
Unless we go and live in a remote cave, “foreign influences” can no more be purged from our lives than can our hearts or lungs. Like the latter, they are an integral part. Were we to genuinely “purge” them, we’d be left stark naked, with no (or very few) possessions and probably little gainful employment.
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: Leadership, Leisure, Social
When "IT" Goes "OUT"
The July 2024 IT “outage” caused by a flaw in a Content Validator Component sent out by a cyber security company caused a degree of chaos throughout the world.
Businesses in industries ranging from aviation to finance to medical care using Microsoft operating systems were affected. Fixing the problem took time with, apparently, any device affected having to be restarted up to 15 times before it could work.
Flights around the world were cancelled and airports saw chaotic scenes with some passengers being presented handwritten boarding passes. Hospital appointments systems failed to function.
Whilst technology is, in theory, making lives easier, episodes such as this show how heavily reliant we are on interconnected systems. As with the global financial crisis of 2008 - 2012, where interlinked banks had to be bailed out by taxpayers or left to fail, so a wide variety of institutions and organisations were affected by this episode.
Although we’re told that the cause was a “defective update”, no one knows whether this will happen again. Even if security companies improve their processes to ensure that critical updates are “bug-free”, there’s still room for error.
This isn’t the first “once in a blue moon” episode of a defective program being released. We’ve already had plenty of examples of malicious “hacking” of government and industrial systems designed to spread chaos. This case seems to have been due to human error.
I’m lucky. I use a Mac! My business (which uses Microsoft) also wasn’t impacted. But how many of our partners might have been? What of the class action suits and cases for damages that will now be brought? Does the company concerned have a future?
It got me thinking: whilst IT’s designed to benefit us in the long run, there are still plenty of potential hazards that can impact global business. Is there anything we can do to mitigate this? There’s no way we can avoid future occurrences. Not many companies, unless they’re global multinationals, will be in a position to insert penalty clauses into agreements with security software companies which say that, if the client suffers loss as a direct result of errors or omissions by that company, the security company will compensate them. In these cases, security companies would most likely go out of business very fast, leaving the world potentially a more vulnerable place.
What can we as business leaders do to minimise the impact of such an event? We need to examine our processes and determine how many are reliant on functioning IT. Once that’s been done, is there a “manual workaround” that can be used? Can our counterparties, particularly our “vital suppliers” do the same? What would happen if their systems suffered a similar occurrence? Could they still continue to supply us with the goods or services needed for our business?
Each and every business and its leaders will need to develop their own solutions in order to reduce potential impacts the next time (and there will be a next time) this happens.
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: Crisis Management, Customer Care, Leadership, Productivity, Risk, Strategy, Teamwork
Cash - “So Last Century”?
With the proliferation of non-cash payment services, should we be surprised if we start hearing that cash is “so last century”?
Before COVID, we were accustomed to using credit cards for in-store shopping and to pay for goods and services purchased online. COVID accelerated significantly the speed of non-cash service development as people did their best to avoid contact with any surface that might carry germs. I remember vividly the first time I travelled back to the UK as the COVID crisis drew to a close and, on landing, when I offered cash in payment for something, was asked if I had a debit card. Of course, I did and was able to use this, but the surprise was still there.
Not only can we make payments by simply swiping a card close to a card reader, but we can also make them direct from our smart phone or even our watch!
The humble cheque, so beloved of our parents and the “check guarantee card” that went with it (at least in the UK) has completely disappeared with the advent of direct online transfers. It won’t be long before cash becomes a thing of the past in some markets.
For cash to disappear entirely, every store and online merchant will need appropriate systems in place. Inevitably, these cost money. For the small corner store in a remote village in the Himalayas, cash will remain king. If non-cash payments are to truly become the norm, then the cost of processing them for merchants must decline to almost zer0 or at least to the level where it becomes more profitable for them to use cashless payments than cash.
The flipside of this is that, in the same remote village, people paying for goods and services will also need the tools to do so, that is, a debit card (or smartwatch!)
Interestingly, one bank in the UK at least has stopped issuing debit cards on its customers’ accounts. Why they’ve done this, I can only guess, but it appears to be because they don’t wish their accounts to be used for “small” purchases (and, perhaps, because the cost of producing the cards for their target customers compared with the number of times they’re used simply isn’t justified). Their risk is that customers will simply transfer balances kept with that bank to one that still does offer a card.
Added to this, the likes of Apple Pay require users to have at least one credit (if not debit) card to use their service. Whilst cash may disappear or become a rare commodity (no doubt to the delight of central banks and governments worldwide!), cards will now be the rule.
Cards themselves bring other risks. We hear countless anecdotes of cards being “scammed” or “cloned”. There are now scanners that can read the information on one’s credit card from distances under one metre. Cash at least provided some security against this, although not against muggings.
Our payments horizon is changing. Cheques have disappeared, cards are the norm, cash is common still. Frankly, I didn’t see it becoming “last century” any time soon, at least not until the global payments system becomes sufficiently cost effective for even small kiosk-type traders to use.
Our business still doesn’t take payments by debit or credit card - yet, but I suspect it’ll be only a matter of time before we bow to the inevitable.
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, Financial, Strategy
“5-Minute Read”
Has anyone noticed that, nowadays, newsletters to which we subscribe or news articles contain at the top or as part of their heading “three minute read” or “five minute read“?
I’m not sure where this came from, but I would guess that it may be designed to assist recipients of such emails and articles to prioritise their reading by showing them how long it will take them to read that message. The only question I have is, “How did they calculate the time required to read?”
Common sense suggests that this would have been done by somebody reading the article and timing themselves doing so. That’s a perfectly acceptable way of doing things but the problem I have is that one can’t take into account the reading speeds and abilities of every potential reader.
So the question becomes, “Is this an average figure for a representative group of readers or simply for the person who wrote the article?”
In our globalised world, different people read articles at different speeds for any number of reasons:
- The article is not in their first language.
- They may be dyslexic.
- They may naturally be “slow readers”
Although it seems a minor issue, one should take this into account. There are certain newsletters to which I subscribe which I know are written by journalists whose first language is English and who have an extremely extensive vocabulary. The consequence of this is that they use words with which not everyone will be as familiar as they. When I see that an article written by a journalist for this particular newsletter will take “10 minutes”, I know that it’s likely to take longer simply for the “average” reader to absorb the contents, the nuances, and the information contained therein.
I do feel that stating that something is a “three-minute read” helps many. Let’s go back to my example of the newsletter. If I see articles that are “three minutes reads” and “eight minute reads”, I’ll probably prioritise the three minute articles over the eight minute ones as I know that, in a given amount of time, I can read more of the shorter than the longer articles.
The point as ever is metrics. We tend to use metrics that we ourselves understand but risk not making allowances for others. This problem will never go away, but it is perhaps as well to understand, that different things mean different things to different people. And that we need to incorporate this in our dealings with others.
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
The Recruitment Nightmare (For All)
I provide training to students in CV writing and interviewing. Of the common complaints they have is that they don't hear from recruiters after sending in their application. To be fair, recruiters have also complained that candidates “ghost” them at interviews (don’t show up and don’t provide a reason)…
My answer to candidates is twofold:
- Were you making a “speculative” application or
- Were you responding to a job advert?
In the case of speculative applications, my feeling is that, depending on its size, it’s a 50-50 chance as to whether the organisation replies quickly or not at all. After all, this is an unsolicited application. However, when someone is responding to a specific advertisement for a specific job, it should be common courtesy to reply one way or the other. Here’s where the problem starts. Recruiters are becoming overwhelmed with the number of applications received, even for a specific job after posting a specific job advertisement. We may see phrases such as “only successful applicants will be informed”. My suggestion to anyone who does this is to specify a time by which applicants can expect to be informed (and therefore, by extension, the date after which unsuccessful applicants can consider their application “unsuccessful ”).
Even where one is making a speculative application, the recipient should treat it with a degree of professionalism. After all they’re being complimented by someone thinking that they are worth applying to! You also never know, if you “ghost” that applicant today, tomorrow they may be in a position where they can refer business to you and will remember how unprofessionally they were treated when they applied. Fate can be a fickle mistress!
How does your organisation respond to job applications? If, when posting a job advertisement, it states that “only successful applicants will be notified”, does it say by when this will happen?
The third situation I’ve encountered with my trainees is that they make an application and then some three months later are called for interview! It’s at this point that they should seriously be considering whether they shouldn’t have chased their application any earlier. In some markets recruiters may not react, favourably to this kind of “pushing”. Unfortunately each market has its own peculiar culture and each organisation is different.
My conclusions:
Recruiters: if you aren’t going to respond to every applicant, at least give a date by which everyone can expect to have heard one way or the other.
Jobhunters: if no date is given for when you should have received a response, diarise to chase (say) a week after the deadline and, if you hear nothing, a week after that and a week after that. After three chasers, consider your application “unsuccessful” and move on.
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, Selling
The Downside of Modern Communications
When I started school in the UK, with my parents living in the USA at the time, communication was by “aerogramme” which took up to five days. If you wanted to phone abroad, you had to “book” the call.
Now, we can reach out to anyone anywhere in the world by voice or with a video call if they’re using the same technology or app as we are.
This is great for most. Students studying halfway round the world from home can speak to their families (allowing for time differences!) whenever they want. I even know one who used to “join in” the family dinner on a Sunday evening from their student room in the UK. The family in Asia propped an iPad or some such device up on the dining table and the family could be together.
The downside of being able to contact people so quickly is, of course, that no one needs to make a decision anymore. Need to offer a bigger discount to get that business in China? Phone head office in London. Need approval to increase a credit limit for that sale to a German manufacturer? Ring head office in Atlanta.
In the days of colonial Empire, communications from London to its various plenipotentiaries in the colonies could take months to get to them (and another few to receive a response). Those plenipotentiaries therefore had to be people of considerable expertise and ability to take many of the “difficult” decisions on their own. Nowadays, things are vastly different. I remember reading in a book by one novelist that “Even the ambassador’s driver had more power than the ambassador.”
The motto of the Hong Kong and Shanghai Banking Corporation in the 1980s was “Fast decisions worldwide”. It soon changed because clients noticed that they could no longer get “fast decisions”. The reason for those fast decisions was that in pre-email days, local country managers had considerable authority. With a signature, they could approve millions of dollars’ worth of loans on their own. The larger the country they managed, the more they could approve without referring to head office. So, for example, the country manager of Malaysia could approve much more than the country manager for Brunei. Even if the loan was beyond the country manager’s limits, the system was that the proposal went to the regional head office who had a standard turnaround time of 24 to 48 hours. This contrasted with other institutions who were often hamstrung by “credit committees” that met at longer intervals.
From “Fast decisions worldwide”, HSBC went to “Your local global bank”. What its current tagline is I have no idea. The point is that modern communications, whilst a blessing in so many ways, have also deprived figures of authority of much of that authority. Decisions are taken instead by anonymous people in anonymous offices with little idea of the “situation on the ground”. Anyone who has lived abroad and returned to their home country and tried to explain “how things work over there” only to be met with blank stares or cynical laughter will know what I mean.
How else has modern communications technology benefited us? That news travels around the world much faster is one area of improvement (or is it?). Another might be the increase in speed in financial services such as transferring funds. For every downside, I suspect there are more than several upsides. However, to be constantly confronted with “We’ll have to refer that to…” can be tiring at times.
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, Teamwork
"Me-Tubing"?
YouTube must be one of the most popular streaming channels for videos on information on how to do things, where to travel, stuff to buy and a host of other subjects all of which have their fans.
I’m just as guilty as anyone else of going down the YouTube “rabbit hole” for information, stuff to buy, reviews on products and so on. Over the five or so years that I’ve been watching YouTube, it’s become clear that some “YouTubers” (or are they “Vloggers”?) may not appreciate what they’re doing.
An example: I stopped watching a video about “travel electronics” after eight minutes as the presenter still hadn’t come to the point on the products they were showcasing. That’s eight minutes of my life I’ll never get back that were consumed by the presenter displaying their ignorance of events outside the US. This potent combination of mindless chatter and ignorance simply confirmed that this was not a channel worth watching and I marked it as “don’t recommend this channel” in my YouTube account.
They weren’t YouTubing, they were “Me-Tubing”.
People have suggested that I start my own YouTube channel. I haven’t yet for several reasons:
- There are many subjects I could talk on (no "USP").
- I’m aware of my lack of “video presentation expertise”.
- An awful lot of the videos that I’ve watched over the last couple of years all say the same thing. The only differences are usually in the type of tool or product presented or in the experiences being presented.
For example, “Survival” or “Bushcraft” videos all tend to recommend much the same type of equipment. Equally there are plenty of survival videos that show how to make a shelter out of materials available in a forest, out of a tarpaulin or using other materials.
As I’ve said: there are some YouTubers who are great and I watch their videos if it’s a subject that interests me. What I notice is that they all seem to follow a common set of rules:
- Keep it short (5 to 7 minutes is good; if you can’t say what you need to say in that time, you’re wasting other peoples’ time).
- Get to the point – fast. There’s nothing worse than the example I gave above of a 24-minute video where the first eight minutes (or 1/3 of the video) were just the presenter rambling.
- Stick to facts: except to give context or set the scene, don’t speculate, don’t imagine.
For me, if a YouTube video is longer than seven minutes, it must be:
- Either by a presenter who I know to give value OR
- On a subject that really interests to me OR
- Something about which I wish to acquire knowledge.
Of course, travel vlogs are an exception. If anyone can encapsulate the experience, pros and cons of flying business class on Singapore Airlines in seven minutes or less, good luck!
If ever I do start presenting on YouTube, I like to think that I’ll have defined the:
- Target audience.
- Subject or subjects I will present.
- Duration of video (depending on subject of course).
- Important facts that I think audiences will need to know.
What’s your experience of YouTubers or “Vloggers” and how would you approach this activity?
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, Selling
