HYDE PARK — Listen up. Especially if you’re new to consulting, or if you travel a lot on business.

A fellow called Tom Aiken (not the cook) taught me this important life lesson in a restaurant by the river in Philadephia… about 15 years ago.

I have always remembered.

“My wife and I have an agreement,” he said.  “When I am travelling on business and we talk on the phone, I am always ‘in my hotel room having a tuna fish sandwich’.”

“It’s just easier that way.”

With Skywalker-like devotion I have stuck to Tom’s rule.  Through three children and umpteen thousands of miles of travel it has always stood me in good stead.

Imagine the conversation otherwise:

You: “Baby?! You there?! Can you hear me?! Sorry about the noise!  You wouldn’t believe it… I’m, like, in the back of this big stretch limo, we’re going through Times Square… We just had this amazing meal… Robert De Niro was sitting beside us… and…. and in my hotel room, I’ve got a free loofa… it’s amazing!”

“Yea, yea. What’s up with you?”

“You’re… What?  Sorry?  You’re… standing in a flooded basement changing a nappy in the dark?”

“Oh.”

“How’s that going?”

Tuna fish.  Brown bread.  Nothing on the TV.

Trust me.

/df

MARYLEBONE — This year is a big year of change. In technology, in the world economy, the world of sport, even in the way all our countries are run.  There are elections in America, France, India…

What is more significant in a country than a change of government?

And that’s what is promised in India, Malaysia, Taiwan, Serbia,  Kuwait, El Salvador, The Gambia, Armenia, Algeria, Madagascar, Libya, Mongolia, Mexico, Cameroon, Kenya, Sierra Leone, Ghana, Belarus, Ukraine, Ghana, Angola, Bhutan, Guinea, Lesotho, Zimbabwe and Togo.

New presidents in Yemen, Senegal, Mali, Russia, Dominican Republic, Mexico, Albania, France, Kenya, Turkey, the United States of America, Venezuela, Sierra Leone, Egypt, Kosovo and Zimbabwe.  Yes, Zimbabwe.

We know that the United States presidential election of 2012 is to be held on Tuesday, November 6, 2012. It will be the 57th presidential election.  And it will get a lot of attention.

But how about the world’s largest democracy?

Yes.  That’s India.  How about that one?

Or the big red splotch above?  Russia.

That’s important too.

There are other changes coming too.  Some, we seem to know for sure:

• Gold prices will keep going up.  And hit $2,000 and ounce in 2012, they say.
• The Internet is going to change.  A new IP address protocol will mean that companies may start building two sites for a doubled up Internet — the old one, and the new one.
• We’ll all be talking about faster, slimmer smart phones and The Cloud.  If you don’t know about either, now is the time to do some research.
• Plus many more things you may want to share?

This time next year things will be very different.

I promise.

Businesses will fail.  Some will be dominant that you haven’t even heard of.  Yours will merge, divest, make a 90 degree turn, or implement similar significant changes.

So, what are you doing about it?

Well it is a topic that is quite dear to our hearts at Able and How.  We are launching our Able and How Change Index this year.  And our change management work the world over continues at a pace.

We will be keeping an eye on business, political and social trends this year.  And keeping you up to date with the Able and How Change List (look for it soon in our News section).

Change is good.

Get into it with us.

/df

P.S. And, by the way, NASA assures us that the world is not going to end.  After many years of fielding wild calls, they were forced to put up this website.

LONDON — It’s been hard not to think about Korea this week.  But I have different things on my mind.  Not the loss of a dictator.  Not the worry that still has South Korean’s practicing evacuations like WWII Britain and Cold War America.

I am thinking about Korea’s fertile business culture and the country’s uncanny ability to reinvent itself, rebuild and refocus just in time for tremendous success.

See if you can read this bit without stopping in your tracks:

• in 1961 South Korea ranked 117th in the world for arable land per capita (behind Saudi Arabia and Somalia)
• in the last 50 years Korea’s per-capita GDP has grown at 23,000 percent
• today the tiny country (smaller than Iceland) has the world’s 12th largest economy by purchasing power
• unemployment is 3.2 percent
• one of the world’s lowest rates of public debt
• 80% of the 49 million people live in urban areas
• Koreans are four times as likely to have high-speed internet access as Americans and they pay very little for it

A series of seemingly prescient government decisions have constantly shoved the economy in the right direction.  Even through the tough economic times in the late 90s and mid 2000s the countries has seemed to make the right choices.

Today they are pushing — against their own traditions — for more entrepreneurship.  And I wouldn’t bet against them.

In fact, I’d like to be there now. If the chaebols’ would give us a call? Samsung, LG, SK… we’d like a word.

/df

LONDON — I talked to an M&A banker on the weekend.  Made me think of my time at high school dances.  Always standing on the wall, trying to look cool.  But never out on the actual dance floor.

The merger and acquisition market is a bit quiet at the moment.  And amen to that.  We’re busy enough without it.  Businesses are — rightly — taking advantage of the quiet and their own peaceful progress, to transform their operations.

We’re working on big “transformation” programmes on several continents and in a diversity of sectors.  Change management is in high demand.  And that’s good.

But M&A will be back.  My friend should be up frugging, ‘cutting some rug’ and doing The Hustle by Q2 at the latest.

Transformation is the powder room before the ball.

That’s my prediction.

Watch this space.

/df

EARL’S COURT — Not sure how I missed this one.  But The Independent has been running a investigative series on lobbyists.  And they’ve chosen one of the biggest and most respected firms to ‘expose’.

In summary, some journalists pretended to be wealthy potential clients from a large foreign country and they recorded the communications professionals bragging about things they shouldn’t have been bragging about.

It’s pretty white-knuckle stuff.  It doesn’t look good in print.

But…

You can easily see where it comes from on both sides.

NEWSPAPERS – Have been the centre of attention from politicians and communications professionals for months over phone hacking and other unsavoury practices.  They probably feel betrayed.  Some columnists are already revelling in the chance to someone else “dirty” and “seedy”.

LOBBYISTS – See themselves as great facilitators, bringing people and politicians together.  And helping the democratic process. They are well paid and unregulated. But perform and important service.

The impact that journalists and a story like this can have can be frightening.  (Although few would argue that journalists themselves can coordinate and wielded it with any precision.)

Furthermore, yes, the lobbyists in question look pretty silly, and their contacts are knocking each other over to get out of their way.  And even Buckingham Palace has launched a stinging (oh!) rebuke.  But what business conversation wouldn’t look silly on paper?  Would the Boardroom and kitchen discussions of any average Briton not be surprising and alarming to many people who read them?

It makes me think of the amateur sting operations in secondary school that caught Harris admitting he’s stolen someone’s can of Coke.

SELF IMOLATION
However the real sport in this story may be elsewhere.

It’s interesting to see some of the Dons of the communication agency businesses lining up to betray each other.

It’s mild at the moment, questioning the accuracy of the other CEO.  Filing toothless complaints with gummy bodies.  Or suggesting that exaggeration is not healthy.  But some of these fellows are pretty tough.  The backroom brawls of the past — though generally unreported — are legendary.  When communication bosses take each other on, it can get messy.

I recommend standing back.  And maybe getting some popcorn.

/df

It was Christmas Jumpers Day today at Able and How.  Few looked like they were new.  Clearly the back of the closet is not as far away as it would appear.

Earlier this week, festive elves hung socks around our staircase with every employees’ names on them.  So far no surprises.

Happy holiday season.

/df

DOHA, QATAR — We’re working on four different ‘transformation programmes’ at the moment. Combined they are on three continents, in over 30 countries.

You would think that would provide some shocking contrasts.  But it does something quite different. It shows startling similarities.

Everything has superficial differences: language, geography, industry, structure…

Yes, those can seem superficial.

The issues in big business transformation generally fall into two buckets: human and process.

Human
When I worked in the airline industry we used to talk about “human factors in aviation”, and I thought that was very funny.  In that, without humans we would not need commercial aviation at all… so humans were a pretty key ingredient.

Transformations can be seen the same way.  Strategy teams and professional project managers can seem quite content to act as if humans are not involved.

And how many businesses exist without ‘human factors’?

Coordinating, informing, involving, managing, aligning, working with and working around humans is one of the hardest parts of any transformation.

Ask anyone with the scars of a big change programme, successful or not, and they’ll say communication and people are the two most under-appreciated areas.

Process
Businesses need a sense of direction.  Even restaurants must know what is important (filling tables) and what to do to try to fill more.

However most large businesses are more complex than that.  With function, regions, business units and many horizontal layers of people influencing or directing each others’ work.

To create and sustain a sense of direction you need processes.

There is no one set of words or no single way of talking to people.  You cannot expect a data specialist to need the same information as an assembly line worker.

In order to be clear on what you are saying, to create a core of content and to move and support the transformation you need to have a plan… several plans often… and many processes to follow to see that you are consistent, coordinated and coherent across all of your business.

And then you need to sustain that over time.

Easy. Right.

Same, same, not always different.

/df

AT HOME — I’ve been trying to figure out how I ended up with a four-digit dentist’s bill this month, without ever discussing even the procedure, let alone the fees.

And I can’t really make sense of it.

Similarly we have been working with a mid-level legal firm a few years and we keep getting bills through the door with what seems a very random assortment of numbers on them.  When we ask for ‘detail’ we can (twice so far in three years) get a long list of random adjectives and nouns:

 research
 meeting
 discussion
 teleconference
 draft

No time is listed against anything.  No context is provided.  Sometimes the bills don’t even have dates on them.

And we pay them!  I wonder why sometimes…

So let me tell you about how we — as a management consultancy — manage our ‘contracting’.

NO COSTS UNTIL AGREED

We will happily talk to you, meet with you, sometimes even work with you, before we even get to discussions about what kind of work you need, how we’d provide that… and what that would cost.

Those discussions are open and free.  As well as free-flowing.

Sometimes we’ll even tell you that we aren’t the right people to work with you.  Sometimes we’ll say that you need less support than you think.  The conversations are always interesting and we’d always encourage you to have them.

After we have discussed the problem we’ll start to talk about how we’d approach it.  At that point — and only once you’ve asked for it! — we would prepare a Statement of Work.  You would receive that.  Look at it, discuss it… and then hopefully sign it.

Only after all that… we’d start working and you’d start to incur costs.

EXPLANATION OF FEES

Like most consulting firms we charge on a ‘time and expense’ basis.  That means we bill hourly for work.

Some people find that hard to imagine.  So let’s put some parameters around even that to make it clearer. 

We set an estimate of how much the work will cost with you before we start.  (See Statement of Work!)  In that there is a single number that we have agreed.  Our work may come in below that but it cannot come in above it.  In other words, you will know the fees and your job is not to worry about each hour.  Fees shouldn’t really be a concern after we start.

…AND EXPENSES

Then there are the horror stories about expenses.  I’m not sure where they come from.  Probably from the rare occurrences when bankers or big accountancies spend too much at the bar.  Expenses should be part of the contract.  They are with us.  We work out the travel policy with you — if you want us to travel — and frankly, we often just take the Tube.  Expenses are not a big part of it.

What we like about consulting is the opportunity to make a real change and have a positive impact on our client businesses and our client’s careers.  Clearly we’re going to charge fees along the way.  But that shouldn’t keep people away.

If you have a question about it… please just call.

And if anyone is charging you like my dentist does (sorry George), just don’t put up with it.

/df

SOUTH WEST LONDON — They say it’s broken.  But I am not convinced it ever really worked.  The company cascade is like the Lost City of Atlantis… or the missing Beach Boys album.  Many people think it’s out there, but disappointment is the most likely outcome.

Here’s how the theory goes:
• You start at the top with a message.
• You give it to a few people.
• They give it to a few people.
• And soon enough the whole business has heard.

Not only have they heard, but they’ve received a compelling, first-hand account of something important.

It can’t fail.  And what a compelling idea.  So simple, so… unlikely to deliver the results you are seeking.

The problem with cascades is that, in spite of some great theory and massive stores of ‘best practice’, they rarely do what people want them to do.

There are two problems: Expectations and implementation.

The expectations for cascades tend to assume that a message will make it through the business.  And that the message will arrive in one piece.  And that people will know what to do with it.  And — perhaps most wildly optimistic of all — that it will change people’s behaviour.

Those expectations are not bad things.  It would be great to have any system that could do that.  But they are simply unrealistic.

The same often happens with the implementation.  We tend to believe that a compelling bit of prose, or an arresting headline will ensure that a message arrives at its intended location.  An unfortunately that’s unrealistic too.  Cascades tend to focus on reporting facts, to avoid misinterpretation.  And facts, unfortunately, are not what drive people to change their behaviour.  Behaviour is driven by understanding and appreciation of information.

To get that you need to explain information, provide context and ensure understanding.  Few cascades can do that.

It’s a shame really.  Because an employee cascade is a very enticing prospect. 

Unfortunately what we want the cascade to do it simply more than it can.

/df

WEST LONDON — There’s a hording around the big, refurbished church at Hammersmith flyover that says TRANSFORMATIONSPACE.  The hordings in the photo above are at the base of the new Shard of Glass building at London Bridge.

What are they on about?

The words ‘change’ and ‘transformation’ are starting to gain some currency in business circles these days.  Many, many large companies are going through Transformation programmes.  And ‘change management’ is a skill or capability that most industries are finding they need.

Transformation has perhaps just become a watch word for the speed and frequency with which big businesses have had to adapt.

Times change and businesses must too.

Today, of course, pressures are changing daily.  So you must as well.

What is amazing to watch about the business change programmes we are working on — and they include some of the biggest ones happening now — is that they are no less ambitious or transformative than London’s tallest skyscraper, or Hammersmith’s church under the highway.

That is: What was there before is totally transformed.

When you think about the complexities of business that’s an amazing thing: across divisions, functions, offices, regions, through the management line… affecting customers, suppliers, employees and plenty of other stakeholders.

Change can happen in big, complicated organisations.  they can be transformed.  But it is no easy task. 

And without proper change management and the engagement of key audiences it just won’t work.

That has been shown over and over again.

/df