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

SW LONDON — “Is that what the kids are calling it these days?”

That used to be my stock answer to things I didn’t understand. I thought of it as a knowing wink to the way that old people talk. But as my own age has been rising faster recently than East Coast temperatures, it has become less funny and more fact.

And there’s an issue with people in business staying relevant.  I take that bit seriously.  And there’s almost nothing that isn’t relevant.

So this week I set out to work my way entirely through my children’s Harry Potter film collection.  There are 7… plus one in the theatre.  If I can get through them all then I’ll go see number 7.5 in the cinema.

Why?

I’ve never been good at science fiction.  I couldn’t read JRR Tolkien or even CS Lewis.  I wish I could have, but no.

However, in Britain, H. Potter is not only a major export, it has employed all our great actors, boosted boarding school enrolments and driven tourists to run into walls at train stations.

That’s something that cannot be ignored.

Problem is I am three nights in and not yet finished Harry Potter 1.

It could be a long week.

/df

CROMWELL ROAD — There was a little girl with her dad on the bus today.  She cried the whole trip.

“I don’t like the teachers…!  I don’t want to go…!  I want my MOMMY…!!” 

That kind of crying that is so deep and, after a while, so filled with mucus that breathing is affected.

The adults shifted uncomfortably.  Because half of you wanted to shout out:

“For the love of everything, pick her up and take her home! Let her play at home all day!”

And the other half of you thought: Man there are days when I want to cry like that too.

“I don’t want to go to work.  And you can’t make me…”

This morning the Gallup Management Journal published this gem as a way of trying to get you to read more:

“As Egypt and Tunisia have shown, persistent joblessness can contribute to momentous social upheaval. What’s more, Gallup’s global surveys confirm that people who have jobs rate their lives more highly than those who are unemployed.”

For which, I am sure, someone is due a Pulitzer or at least have a spot on Biography.

However, there is an interesting ying and yang in there. (Listen to me go all eastern.)

Even the lucky amongst us who genuinely love our jobs have days where we really don’t want to do it.  And we dream of the day when we can do nothing (which is harder to do than one imagines.)

And those who hate their jobs.  What do they do?  Sobbing on the bus isn’t really socially acceptable.

At the same time, a job is really what we are here for.

(You might argue that you don’t want to work: you want to be a philanthropist, or a famous intellectual, or an underwear model… But all of those are work.)

We do get pleasure and self-expression out of work.  And that’s what part of work has to be about.

So what can we do to make it better?  How can we improve it?

That’s probably what the rest of this blog is about.

/df

BROOK GREEN — It might seem obvious what the case for change is, with revolutions rolling across north Africa and the Middle East.  Self-immolation seems a good reason. 

Desperation and people fed up with the status quo is driving daily headlines in the month of February 2011.  And that is crisis-driven change.

Real, genuine, people-dying-in-the-street change.

That’s compelling.

But it doesn’t happen in business that often.

Then there is business change that is more like a wake-up call.  Thanks, in part, to the uncomfortable, protracted analogy of newbie, Canadian Nokia head Stephen Elop, we are more and more familiar with the idea of a ‘burning platform’.  Businesses often have a burning platform for change.

But we still struggle too often to convince our stakeholders of the need for a more consistent, and persistent, on-going change management.  The kind that supports regular change and also insures you against the need for regular wake-up calls.

Why is that?  We didn’t need to do this so much in the past.  What is different?

CASE 1: We don’t make stuff any more. 

In the western world we are making less and less.  And even where we are we are having to focus more on the people than the production.  So LEAN systems and TQM were built for processes and people are more difficult than that.

CASE 2:  Markets move faster than ever.

Organisations can’t afford to wait for people to adapt.  Customers can be gone from one minute to the next.  Our biggest companies provide services and/or rely on relationships that are constantly under pressure.  If you miss a beat, the music stops.

CASE 3: People are less efficient than machines.

…But inherently more useful.  However you cannot easily turn them up and down.  Or remove steps in the cycle to save time and money.  People are rational and therefore harder to rationalise.  They need to be ‘managed’ rather than recalibrate.

CASE 4: People leave.

You can open almost any annual report and find two key pieces of information: 1) The CEO letter that says “people are our most important asset” and 2) the financial information that shows a massive budget line for ‘people costs’.  Unfortunately this seems to mean VERY LITTLE to most businesses.  Hanging on to your people is an art.  And it’s done by managers who can handle change.

CASE 5: Delivering your strategy.

You can choose your own favourite statistic about the dismal success rates that businesses have with change and strategy delivery.  We believe that most strategies are good strategies.  They just go undelivered.  Because no one knows how to make the change. 

Some professions are disappearing.  Some are changing dramatically.  But few are rising as fast and with such determination and importance as ‘change management’.

Bring it on.

/df

LONDON — I am very pleased that this is National Novel Writing Month. It is, I think, just a ruse for a book publishing website. But for me, it’s working.

My 13-year-old daughter and I started yesterday morning. We get up early and tap away in the kitchen before the sun comes up. On day two she’s on target… churning out thousands of words a day.

Me… not so much.

But I am still at it. And I have published two books already so I am a bit smug.

“How many words have you got daddy?”

“825. You?”

“2,225.”

“Ah, yes, but mine are really *good* words.”

“Yea. Right.”

I look over her shoulder.

“In the first para, ‘bath’ is spelled with a capital B,” I offer helpfully.

“‘Never go back.’ We’re not meant to edit until the end,” she explains, and intuitively I know that I will never be allowed to look over her shoulder again.

So it takes me to thinking about why kids who text and Skype and talk utter rubbish (okay that’s my view) should still be interested in writing long form novels? And the answer is the same as texting, Skyping, Instant Messaging … or for that matter painting, dancing or playing football:

It’s a mode of self-expression, it’s something that we can pass on to others, it’s a longer commitment to communicating… and therefore something else that we people do that separates us from the occupants of the London Zoo.

Our business, Able and How, is a change management consultancy. Okay, it’s THE change management consultancy. We help people plan and communicate change. We work with words. We do it in video, online, face to face and on paper.

It’s exciting and it’s got great value. By writing, talking, planning and publishing we regularly save companies lots and lots of money.

Over time that’s not going to change. The way the words are consumed will. From Kindles to smart phones we’re just finding new and easier ways of reading more and more stuff.

How long has it been since you sat somewhere with nothing to read or do?  We’re reading now on the Tube, on the chair-lift… anywhere that you can find a few minutes.

Words are important and increasingly so.

/df

MY KITCHEN — Nothing like a Saturday morning read of the papers to generate a good old rant. 

This morning I am caught by the Independent’s cover story on women in senior business roles in the UK.  Have a read if you want numbers and even if you just want to read quotes from male executives that will make your blood boil.

There lots of good arguments for why there aren’t more women in senior roles in business.  You can even try to make them compelling.  You can call for new government policy, or new regulations to promote or “positively discriminate” against women.  But that’s not the problem.  The problem is that we spend too much time finding reason why women can’t take senior roles — and not enough time putting them into the jobs.

There is no earthly way that some of the women I have worked with need any support or positive discrimination.  They are on average better consultants and managers than most of the men I have worked with.  They just need to be hired and promoted.

You can grab a piece of paper and start writing reasons why women aren’t being hired and promoted into senior jobs.  But it is irrelevant. 

There are many reasons why we should never have created a pension programme for people.  There are good reasons why we should never have pursued manned air flight.  There are millions of reasons not to get out of bed tomorrow.  But we still did and we still will.

We’re a tiny business and we have senior people off on maternity leave.  We have people on flexible hours.  We’re not making a lot of money. But we strongly feel that we still don’t have enough women in the office.  We’re trying to hire more.

If you have ever worked with people you don’t need to ask what it is that women add to business that men can’t.  You know.  You just have to go sit with a bunch of guys at the pub to know that boys have their limitations.

Let’s stop making excuses and just get more women into senior roles.  Business, the economy, the country and society will definitely be better for it.

/df

HYDE PARK — I watched an episode of Mission: Impossible with my 11-year-old yesterday.  It was 1968 and they had to trick a bad guy into believing it he’d been frozen for 12 years.  So they froze him and he “woke up in 1980″.

It was great to see what 1980 looked like from 1968.  There were rocket cars, flat screen TVs, lots of buttons to push, and no more money. It was all just cards.  But, yea, there was still an attractive woman to take your order and/ or your bedpan.

I often wonder how far short we have fallen of my grandmothers’ sense of what the future would hold? 

Last week a lady came in for a visit,  she’s been laid off while on maternity leave and had been told convincingly by someone that ‘mothers never get their good jobs back’.

That winds me up.

She’ll need flexible hours and maybe short weeks, but she’s ready to work… and yet she’s convinced the world is not ready for her. 

There must be a better way. 

We’ve got the flat screen TVs, the Internet, we’ve even got cars that go like rockets.  But 51% of the population think they can’t work and have a family.

/df

GREEN PARK — The papers today say that we’ve hit a 23 year low for employee sick-days. That’s no small achievement.

If you listened to the average mumblings of commentators, employees are fed up and… work is horrible and… and…

But maybe that’s not true. Maybe work is more interesting than it was. Maybe people are more engaged. Maybe employers are better at responding to people’s needs.

This summer (in the northern hemisphere) may be a good test. There’s a lot to distract you in most good summers:
• school plays
• tennis majors
• big horse meets
• golf championships
• summer music festivals

And then the chance employees might want to play or perform at any of these. Yes, this is a big holiday season, but maybe there’s even more reason to stay away this summer, with the World Cup, and a frankly pretty rubbish two years of economic nightmare to sleep off.

So what can you do about it?

Good question. And that’s one of the motivating factors for the World Cup guidance that we’re about to publish this week. But there’s more to it than that as well.

It’s called treating people like grown-ups.

There could be some of those rare moments of national experience.  People will want to be a part of it.

You may need to find a way of making sure that you’re not the only place that won’t participate.  Because engaging employees in your business is a slow and painstaking process.  Disengaging them can be done much faster.

/df

SPRINGFIELD — I don’t like being told what to do. My wife says that anyway.

But when I am on 2 wheels and fighting my way through London streets, I have that Canadian instinct for accommodation. I won’t put myself or anyone else into any peril. So I am constantly surprised when I get told off. And REALLY amazed that it is ALWAYS by another cyclist.

We are a disparate tribe of censorious, shy, egomaniacs. No two cyclists will be seen talking to each other at a light. One guy started talking to me once, when he saw me walking my bike across the pedestrian crossing in Hyde Park:

“I’ve never seen anyone do that,” he laughed.

Here’s the start on my suggested code:

1. I am not a car. I don’t need to cycle down the middle of the street.

2. I will drive predictably. I am a respectable mode of transport. Give me space. If you hit me I will die. So pay attention.

3. I will wear the right kit. Reflectors, lights, helmet.

4. I will avoid busy roads — if possible. (I still smart over the guy who rides down the A40. It’s a highway where two cars can barely fit and go at 70 mph.)

5. I will occasionally talk to other cyclists.

What do you think?

/df

A&H HQ — This is too much fun. Workers at Carlsberg have gone on strike because they have lost their right to drink free beer ALL DAY.

To be clear, they will still get free beer at lunch.

There is a business policy about not being drunk at work, they explain, etc.

I used to work in a brewery. (Stop me if you’ve heard this before.) I worked on the assembly line, sorting old beer bottles for recycling. It long shift and fairly tedious work. Starting at 6 am. A few months before I joined they had taken away the ‘all you can drink’ policy. Apparently the guys used to come in early for my shift and put a few back.

Imagine polishing off a few ales before 6 am?

That doesn’t seem right.

I don’t want to be too hard on the guys at Carlsberg. It could well be a tobacconist, or a pharma firm. It’s just that the ‘beer’ bit makes it more funny.

However, the question of the day is: “What is it that people have and take for granted?”

My Bradford-born granny always said “waste-not, want-not.” And she spent the last 25 years of her life living in a mobile home park for old people in Florida. She couldn’t have been happier.

This past weekend at a beautiful country house in France I sat with a table of French, British and American people, and someone asked: “If you were to become very rich, what would you do?”

I was thinking, we’re in a country house in France on an Easter break with a house full of spoiled, screaming kids… what do we have to complain about?

And then the first guy said “I’d do nothing differently…” There was a pause.

And everyone else said “Yeah. Yeah, me too.”

The the first guy again: “Well, maybe a car and driver…”

“Yeah, yeah, me too…”

What do we want? How much do we expect from our work, from our lives? And how realistic is that?

I know Friday afternoon is late for existential questions. But maybe you can answer while waiting for the beer trolley to come around.

/df