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

SOUTH KEN — The win seems easily in hand.  It will be more of a TKO than a real back-slapping, headline-grabbing, crowd-pleasing victory.  But that’s okay.

And then the player kind of clumsily sits down and then leans forward and back… and falls down.

Suddenly the game is not over yet.

I think I am describing an indescribably painful final 2 minutes of the SuperBowl this past Sunday.

But I could also be describing the twists and turns of the GOP presidential nomination process in the Land of the Free.

It’s not there that the comparisons end either:

• the vast amounts of money spent on the event consistently exceed its real entertainment value.
• the commercials are more fun than the live action.
• the most important players are not on the field.
• the strategists and power-brokers are in no shape themselves to play the game (physically or morally).
• really, really short bursts of activity are followed by endless replays, analysis… and more commercials.
• the average American sees the whole thing as an excuse to drink and eat more… and complain about everything.

Not bad.  As far as analogies go.

And when you think about how much American voters like a quarterback (Kennedy, Reagan) it starts to actually get quite frightening.

And how far is big business removed from this kind of pantomime?  To what extent are companies run as artifice, with rules that are too complicated, by actors who are standing in for the interests of others?

You can start to think of a compelling case, which institutional shareholders taking on a ‘strategists’ role, and unskilled middle managers stumbling around a field doing a job that is unclear to them.

But the comparison doesn’t hold up for long.  Not in most well-run or actively trading businesses anyway.

Executives and managers are still surprisingly powerful.  The decisions they make can have an immediate affect on the organisation.  The enterprise should — and most often does — show results and involve people in a genuinely consuming way.

In fact, if there is a complaint about the work that we do (as white collar workers in the industrialised world) it is that it is too all consuming and too fulfilling.  People complain about working too hard, getting stressed, not taking enough holiday, etc.  None of those behaviours are driven by real coercion.  

Business strategies are usually fairly coherent.  The implementation sometimes needs work.  But you’ll rarely find a business sitting down when the action starts.

/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 — We’re crashing into Christmas. Like everyone else.  Lurking in shop doorways on Dec 24th and thinking “I said I’d never do this again.”

It’s been an odd and uncomfortable week amongst men in the UK though.  The dominant pagan religion of football has seen people talking about “goodwill toward men”, but in reverse.

What qualifies as “lacking goodwill” and what is “just part of a highly emotional, competitive game”?

The answers aren’t making anyone happy.  Teams and players who have been found to have been racially abusing people have been met with police investigations and eight game suspensions.  If you haven’t read about it, I wouldn’t recommend it.

The coverage and fan comments does no one proud.

And ill-prepared TV pundits have weighed in about how much they like ‘coloured people’.  It’s just hard to watch.

None of the people involved have a history of covering themselves in glory.

So it comes back to a question of what we will tolerate in our society and what we won’t.  And although I have heard lots of people say “it’s much better than it was 20 years ago” and “it’s just a bit of fun… you get used to it”, you don’t and you shouldn’t.

In the next few days football fans and football players, reporters, columnists, politicians and you and I have a chance to show some goodwill toward men.  Let’s do it.

Peace on earth in 2012.

I’m in.

/df

SOUTH KENSINGTON — There was a piece in the Independent yesterday about Sir Richard Branson’s “three point plan” to get the UK economy going.

Unfortunately the plan is completely pants.

I wish it weren’t, but it is.

Years ago, when I worked in politics a very worthy husband and wife team approached my cabinet ministers with suggested legislation: A Good Samaritan bill.  The bill was to recognise that restaurants, food stores and food services companies throw out masses of food everyday.  And yet many, many people didn’t have enough food to eat.  The only reason this happened — they said — was because you could be held liable if you gave people food that made them ill.

The Good Samaritan Bill would solve that “by absolving people of all legal responsibility for the food they made available…”

What?!

I was so surprised by how wrong that was that I couldn’t even talk to the proposers.

Today Sir Richard proposes a plan that would:
- make it much easier for businesses to hire and fire young people
- offer small entrepreneurs easier access to small amounts of money and
- reducing time spent at university

And I feel the same kind of confusion.  Why would it be better for businesses to be able to take on more people for shorter periods of time?

Do we believe in the fairness of our laws, or not?  Do we want to protect people from the pure business drivers of companies?  Or are we happy to have them bought and sold, hired and fired, compensated appropriately, or not?

The appeal for business is obvious.  Any business manager could see that.

But for young people?  It’s much harder to rationalise.  I have no doubt one can rationalise it… But should you?

The same unfortunately goes for micro-finance for entrepreneurs.

Yes, small businesses account for much of the job growth in the UK.  Yes, entrepreneurs (like Sir Richard… like me) help bring better competition and innovation to our economy.

But that does not mean that if we could convince more people to to try it we’d get even more jobs and more innovation.

Creating and sustaining a business is the single hardest thing I have ever done in my life.  Without exception.  I am still not sure that God really meant for me to be an entrepreneur.  But we did really do all our due diligence, never borrowed, worked like crazy, fought off dragons, made millions of mistakes and only just scarped through.

Often I think it’s something that I wouldn’t wish on my worst enemy.  Why would we decide that more and more and more people should do it?  How many more open and closed restaurants do we need on our High Streets.

And less time in university.  Really?

There are answers to this economic crisis.  Or certainly things we can do to help fix it.  But I am far from convinced that these are they.

Give me better managers and better trained and supported entrepreneurs… better skills… any day.

But not this.

/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

PICCADILLY — I’ve been scanning the ‘famous birthdays today’ section of the paper for a few weeks.  Looking at the ages of those who make the list.  And — maybe it’s just me — but one decade seems to be noticeably absent.

Mine.

I didn’t want to turn 40.  But that was 5 years ago, so you think I’d be used to it by now.

Maybe I can’t handle change.

Why are so few people my age recognisable?  Those who do make the paper seem to have ‘former’ in front of their profession (footballer, tennis player) or should have ‘former’ in front (pop star, child actor).  While those who have achieved anything through a more traditional path (study, start work, get promoted) are significantly older.

What has happened to those of us who:

• are old enough to think Serena Williams is disgraceful, but McEnroe is cool
• used to be lazy boys but now act more like picky old men
• have enough pride to tell the gym instructor “I used to be in good shape” and expect to be taken seriously
• find Nirvana’s music derivative
• consider “a good year” one in which everyone got a Christmas present AND the tax bill got paid

Ah.  Maybe that’s it. This is the pause between ambition and arrogance.  The grind.

Five more years.

/df