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.

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

PICCADILLY — I am starting to get a little exasperated with people saying that they cannot use consultants because they have been told to save money.

I know that statement only seems logical, but there are so many ways that it is not. If you are running programmes inefficiently then you’re wasting money. And let’s be honest, many, many company programmes are being run for the first time at that particular organisation… whereas there are people (like some consultants) who have run that kind of programme before. They know how to do it effectively and spending less money.

Alternately, a lot of organisations seem to be putting programmes on hold: ‘We’ll save money by not doing anything for a while.’

And that logic I find even harder to manage.

♦ Will you programme be cheaper to run in 18 months?
♦ Is there no real need for it to run now? (And if not then maybe we don’t need it at all!?) If a programme is required then it is required now. Like compounded interest, the savings/ improvements/ efficiencies that it would bring later ought to be even more useful today.

Finally, there’s the whole question of relative costs. “I would do the work for that money,” is one I have heard recently. And it’s really embarrassing to hear that. The sous-text is that you are over-charging and getting very wealthy in the process. But the truth couldn’t be less real.

Organisations that hire consultants avoid all sorts of costs: recruiting, payroll, benefits, training, pensions, management, layoffs, out-placement, etc.

While consultancies have their own costs (above and beyond all those listed in the preceding paragraph). Those include: marketing, sales, brand, administration, downtime, insurance, facilities, etc. Those are all sunk costs too. They’re just the price of admission.

I know I am not the first to suggest this — and I won’t be the last — but it would be great if more organisations could see consultants and consultancies as partners. We are always on call for you… to make your programmes more successful, and, yes, to save you money.

What do you think?

/df

“MySpace today announced its intent to restructure its international operations and refocus personnel around a smaller number of territories, while retaining a robust global consumer presence.”

That’s what News Corporation’s MySpace said in their press release yesterday. According to the Flesch-Kincaid reading ease measures that sentence requires about 15 years of formal education to understand it. The average age of a MySpace user is hard to be entirely sure of (younger users have always needed to sign in as 17 or older and many are listed as 99 years old), but to assume that they all have the education required to make sense of this seems ambitious.

In fact, assuming anyone has the interest to read it, is a stretch.

Along with the people who write policies for insurance companies, brochures for banks, and nutrition information on cereal boxes, MySpace now seems to have joined the brigade of businesses who obfuscate to avoid saying things they don’t want to.

In tennis it would be a penalty for time wasting.

Statements like those written above are most likely written for the business media. Journalists and analysts are in the business of decoding this kind of business-speak. So the headlines said:

Website axes two-thirds of international jobs

MySpace to lay off a further 300 international staff

I think they might have got a better result if they’d made the information simpler. Maybe focused on talking in ways that their users might recognise?

/df

LONDON — The weekend papers are full of stories connected to the loss of life of a senior politician’s handicapped child. This is the second wave of stories. These are in many ways more relevant and more arresting.

In many ways they are just awesome. Inspiring. Loving. Heartbreaking.

And, I have to admit I can’t read them all. But I know many people will. And many people are writing about things that they haven’t written about in the past. Opening up about their lives and their own ability (or not) to deal with love/ loss/ anger/ guilt, etc.

We northern people aren’t very good at this generally. I watches a split-second of anxiety and discomfort on the BBC’s morning news show this morning as a distinguished guest, a past head of the BBC used the wrong word to describe disability. And you know why people worry about talking about these issues. We don’t have the words. We often don’t have the emotional experience to master own own fears.

Clearly there should be more time spent on this. But we don’t want to talk about it.

And… that’s not the point of this blog (which is already running too long.)

It’s the other elephant in the room: the recession.

We’re not talking about that either. There’s lots on the recession. But Google news turns up precious little for recession – unemployment – sadness. We’re just pretending it’s not there. We’re hiding in our houses and offices. We’re hoping it doesn’t linger near our door.

Our sense of community has gone.

There’s recession. There’s unemployment. There’s sadness.

We should talk about it.

/df

LONDON — Last week we sent out a release about how to manage layoffs better.

I think I can attach it here: five-immutable-laws-of-layoffs-0901091.

Let me know if you can’t get it.

Regards

/df

Squatters in Mayfair. Circa now.

LONDON — In many ways it has been a depressing old autumn. In others you think we get ourselves into these messes. And you wonder why we do that.

Earlier this week there was a column in the Times that caught my attention.

Speed of the job cuts is the real surprise
The Times – Martin Waller
What is startling, in comparison with earlier recessions, is the speed at which industry is cutting the workforce. Those US payroll numbers show a demanning programme under way faster than anyone had expected. They are worse than they seem, because the August and September figures were restated upwards to levels not seen for at least a quarter of a century…

Let’s start with language. Demanning? What the heck is that? It’s not in the dictionary. (It’s a bit sexist.) And it’s pretty callous. I think we can all guess what it means, but it’s like its evil cousins: reduction-in-force, downsizing or even rightsizing. They are all words to say that people are being put out of work.

What happened to ‘layoffs’?

The bigger issue though is that organisations seem to be aggressively laying people off in anticipation of tough times. And that is not the same as laying people off as a result of tough times.

Let’s look at some statistics from the weekend papers to put this into perspective:

More than 300 people a day file for bankruptcy. Rising between 8 and 10% over the second quarter of this year. (So says the UK Government’s Insolvency Service.)

That’s not a radical rise. Not if you believe the extent to which credit has been withdrawn in the past months. And what impact has proactive workforce reductions had on that?

What I find discouraging though is that businesses don’t seem to be going out of their way to tell employees what is happening… and what that means for their sector or industry.

If we are indeed facing some of the aweful images that appear on the TV and in the papers… if times are going to be that tough… then maybe it’s time for some business education?

Demand for job cut advice surges
Financial Times – Norma Cohen; Andrew Taylor
Employers are rushing to obtain advice on cutting staff or slashing their hours in a sign that the recession is beginning to bite and that unemployment is set to rise sharply.

This story was on the front of the FT the same day as Barack Obama won the US presidency. What is interesting about the story is that the reports are that calls are up to trade associations and insurance companies!?

They should be calling people like us.

We’ve been helping companies communicate with people in good times and bad for years.

Here are a few other pointers from this week that suggest that we are beginning to view the world differently already.

1. Thrift chic is back! Columnist India Knight has written a book on how to live better for less. My Yorkshire-born granny would approve.

2. We have a new generation of squatters. It’s hard to believe that squatters are back. The folks pictured up top are at 18 Upper Grosvenor Street. I remember living in London and working in a pub in the 1980s where some friends who lived in squats were also employed as squat-busters… Throwing people out and changing locks while they were away.

3. We still can suffer from a lack of perspective. In the USA last month 240,000 people lost their jobs. In the Congo over the last few weeks, 250,000 people had to flee their homes. Which one would you rather be?

Demanned, indeed.

/df