Does Vince Cable know what “business-like” means?

After the recent elections and referendum, Vince Cable:

has attacked the Lib Dems’ Tory coalition partners as “ruthless, calculating and very tribal” but insisted their alliance would continue

presumably because they had the temerity to campaign, you know, for the results they wanted.

But he also said:

We’ll continue the coalition in a business-like way.

Vince  Cable actually has some business experience, as Chief Economist for Shell (although that was only for a couple of years and it seems the rest of his experience was in politics, but that’s better than a lot of politicians). But it sounds like he has no conception of what “business-like” actually means.

For his information, a business-like relationship tends not to include public attacks on the character of your business partners.

I wonder if he thinks that business-like simply means unfriendly, or worse. Thing is, for the most part that is not how businesses behave. A business can have suppliers, partners, and clients. Suppliers are providing you with goods or services that you require and presumably can’t or won’t provide internally, and these goods/services are presumably critical for your business or you wouldn’t be paying for them. Ditto partners, you are working together for mutual advantage. And clients of course pay your bills, so you need them on side too.

Of course, some businesses are rubbish at these things. Promises are broken, people don’t communicate well. But this usually augurs the end of the business relationship, as the customer decides to stop buying your products or a business lets a supplier go because they are not working well together.

The other kind of business relationship is of course competitors, and here there may be little or no incentive to get on. In practice though, people will tend to know other people in their industry who work for competitors, and there will be industry groups and conferences and so on that serve to keep things cordial.

Perhaps Vince thinks that the LibDems and Conservatives are competitors, and that is the business relationship he is referring to. They usually are, but in the Coalition they are business partners, not competitors.

SpaceX shows the way

Apparently, Elon  Musk decided some time ago that the future was the internet, electric cars, and space travel. So he founded PayPal, developed the Tesla electric car, and launched commercially viable rockets into space.

Right now he’s in the news again having declared that SpaceX:

… plans to pursue a heavy version of the Falcon 9 booster; the numbers attributed to it did come as something of a surprise: 53,000 kilograms to LEO at about $100 million per launch for commercial customers.

In case you are not familiar with launch costs and launch masses:

In short, according to Musk, the Falcon Heavy will offer approximately twice the performance of the Delta IV Heavy [the existing rocket in that niche] at approximately one third the cost; or, as he helpfully added, six times the value.

What’s more:

Given the fact that the SpaceX Falcon rockets are not based on any radical technological breakthrough that lowered their costs, one has to ask just how bad a deal has the taxpayer been getting from the Atlas V and Delta IV, products of the legacy aerospace establishment? Soon to be deprived of the hyper-expensive Space Shuttle as their own point of comparison, the answer would appear to be much worse than we ever imagined.

I take two points from this. First, we’re on our way to the stars baby! Most space nuts seem really optimistic but I’ve been pessimistic for some time that anyone will get off their behind and start aggressively progressing space technology to a point where we can do interesting things again.

Second, costs are slippery. There are a lot of ways of achieving the same outcome, and it is easy to measure progress in inputs (costs) than outputs, and become wedded to the inputs.

Being in charge is scary

Now that I’m redundant and attempting to freelance, or at least be moderately productive until I get another “proper” job, I’m in charge of my days, which is quite scary.

Previously, I had to be in work at regular office hours and that was that. Now, I could stay in bed all day if I wanted. That is not a long-run solution but on any given day it is perfectly possible. It would also send me mad, although that’s another story.

Despite not being a morning person, whenever I have to schedule a meeting or appointment I make it first thing – this forces me to get up and get on with things when otherwise I would be idling away the day.

If you have a normal job and it comes with line management responsibilities, then to some extent you are in charge of other people’s days. But if you have a normal job, are you even in charge of your own day?

Awful CV buzzwords

LinkedIn has kindly rounded up the 10 most overused profile buzzwords in the USA

I’m sure people don’t really want to use these words and phrases, but lots of people end up doing so. This is partly because recruiters put these awful phrases in person specifications so you feel the need to respond in kind, but also it’s a herd mentality. “If all my competitors claim they are results-oriented, will I lose if I don’t claim it too?”

If you work or aspire to work in the kind of industry where LinkedIn profiles might help, who isn’t going to claim implicitly or explicitly that they are innovative, motivated, results-oriented, dynamic, a fast-paced team-playing problem solver? Are there any industries calling for hide-bound, lazy, aimless, static, loners?

“Extensive experience” and “proven track record” at least say something concrete about you – that you have been working in/on/at x for some time.

How do you avoid these awful words? I’ve adopted a “show, don’t tell” approach on the latest version of my cv, so I don’t use empty adjectives about myself (no doubt someone will spot one now).

I haven’t gotten rid of all the awful business-speak words yet though. I keep using the word “undertook” or “undertake” – who says that in real life?

Social networking at work

Work have just started up an internal social network based on MySites.

These are the facts:

• You can create a profile, connect to calleagues (like friending on Facebook, but doesn’t appear to be automatically reciprocal), publish a blog, post documents and files for others to see, and generally tag and comment on things.
• There are about 400 “connectors” whose role is to generally test out the system, evangelise about it, and create content and connections
• After two weeks, only about 40 people have “complete” profiles
• Roll-out to the rest of the company will be around Christmas

There is a lot of work to do. Prior to it being rolled out to everyone else it needs to have generated a solid core of content (blog posts and files) and connections. The start has been very slow but hopefully it will pick up speed. I’ve started blogging and adding colleagues but not enough of the connectors are yet engaging with it.

I’ve talked about this kind of thing before, about how in a large organisation top-down communication isn’t enough. Traditional “water cooler” conversation isn’t enough either in a firm of 15000 people in many different locations. The conversation needs to be company-wide, and social networks are the only way to achieve this. I’ve added the chief exec as a colleague and asked if he will be blogging and generally leading the way. I await his response…

If you sell a commodity, customer service is all you have

The Sceptical Manager, new blogger on the block and a colleague of mine, writes here on customer service:

You are welcome to amend your booking at any time but we will ensure that we make you feel like a criminal for asking; after all you are only the customer. Actually who the hell do you think you are? You pay our wages? Hmmph, I don’t think that matters in the slightest. If you give us a load more money then we will give you what you want. Otherwise, sod off!

James is comparing Timpson (cuts keys, fixes shoes and watches) – good customer service; with Holiday Inn (chain “hotel”) – bad customer service. At least these two companies have a distinctive service/product, irrespective of their differing attempts at treating customers appropriately.

But what about when your product is completely undifferentiated, a commodity, like a utility? If you sell gas or electricity, you aren’t really selling gas or electricity because to the consumer it is exactly the same irrespective of what company you paying for it. Sure there are different price plans but in the long run I reckon price evens out between suppliers – how could it be otherwise? The wholesale price is the wholesale price and that affects all the suppliers.

As far as the customer is concerned, utilities sell customer service because that is what they come up against – not a choice between different styles and colours of electricity. So why are they SO BAD? nPower is messing me around again because they are sending me bills in my former-neighbour’s name. They know this, because I have told them. They have confirmed that for some reason this other person’s name appears on one of the name fields, but mine appears in the other so it is OK. Firstly, why two name fields?! Second, no it isn’t OK. Third, why is it so difficult to fix these things? Why is it broke in the first place?

I have had loads of problems with utilities at this flat, and whoever I speak to is always polite and helpful, and assures me that this time it’s fixed. It isn’t. You want to rage, but you can’t because the person you are speaking to is not usually at fault. Shop around? Forget it, I’ve had problems with all of them. Can’t they just get it right?

Creating a Social Enterprise

On Wednesday I went to a seminar run by i-Social Entrepreneurs in Birmingham, on setting up a social enterprise.  I’m still toying with the idea I described here although my conception of it keeps shifting.  At the seminar I coined the term “volunteer virtual assistants” which seemed to fit nicely with my current take on it.  Basically, if you are a tiny, struggling social enterprise there may be a role that “volunteer virtual assistants” can play for you.  Perhaps you don’t have the time or the skills to sort out that cashflow spreadsheet, do that research, or proof read that proposal.  You might not need a permanent volunteer, just a couple of hours of someone’s time to enable you to get on with pushing the organisation forward, not getting bogged down.  Well connected groups, e.g. those affiliated to churches, wouldn’t need the service because they are already connected to a large community, but many struggling one-man-bands might.

But I digress.  The seminar was fascinating, particularly the preponderance of people who already work in caring professions (social care etc) but can see the writing on the wall vis a vis how public services will be funded and commissioned in the future.  It appears that David Cameron’s “Big Society”, an inspiring but frustratingly vague concept, is already being planned for by those that we will need to take the lead in providing services.

Other observations include: three-quarters of the attendees were women; that Loaf chap (the excellently named Tom Baker) got a mention – he seems to be a bit of a Birmingham celebrity; social enterprise is a very quickly growing sector, and this will almost certainly increase.

All in all, an interesting and inspiring session, albeit one not really aimed at me as it turned out.

UPDATE – see here for a one-page overview of the virtual volunteering thing – others seem to be pursuing similar things according to i-volunteer

How do large companies think?

Dutifully, I filled in the Survey Monkey survey that I received at work.  My department was canvassing our opinions on how they communicate with us.  As is so often the case, I felt I had something to say on the matter but the questions didn’t allow me to do so.  This is (paraphrased) what I wrote in the “any other comments” bit:

Generally I think that the quality of the communications we get is quite good, although there seems to be an excess of titles – perhaps they could get rationalised a bit?

More importantly though, the problem is not communication from “on high” (I don’t say that as a dismissive comment, merely as a description), but communication “on the ground”.  It is SO difficult to find information on the intranet, either via browsing or searching, and so difficult to make connections with other people – this is the problem.  How can we cross-sell when it is so hard to find out what is going on and make connections?

I would characterise the communication as being analogous to good quality magazines and newspapers – good material, but conceptually stuck in the last century.  Communication now is about wikis, blogs and blog comments, and social networks – i.e. connections between end-users, not mediated by a central authority.  I’m not saying we should all start blogs on the intranet, but we need to rethink how we communicate as a company.

Globally, we employ about 15-20,000 people, with a large concentration of people in the UK.  I would think that this should be sufficient to create a “critical mass” of people who could post and edit material on the intranet.  I’ve heard the term “corporate wiki” before and I guess this is what I am envisaging.  If it could work for anyone it could certainly work for a very large interdisciplinary consultancy, although I have no idea how well they work in practice.

One-stop-shop for risk screening values

I’ve just had ANOTHER brilliant thought (quote at 5 mins)!  Well, my colleague did, but she said I was welcome to it, and if I made any money out of it I said I would buy her a drink.  Seems like a good deal to me.

For those of you who are not involved in environmental consultancy and risk assessment, you might assume that by now it would be a simple thing to determine if the level of a contaminant in something (soil, water, food etc) is dangerous or not.  It isn’t.  The problem is that the available screening values (which can be enshrined in legislation, or simply the firm opinion of the relevant agency, which almost amounts to the same thing) are smeared thinly and irregularly across the internet.  If you come across a non-standard contaminant in a non-standard situation, it can be a nightmare even to find out whether there ARE any statutory limits, let alone what they are or if they apply to your particular situation.

There could well be an opportunity for the brave soul(s) who decides to collate ALL of this information into one easily searchable database.  You could charge quite handsomely for access to this, so long as you could guarantee the currency of the information, because for the consultants who need to deal with the figures time is money.  One graduate could spend one day searching for information for one project they are working on, and still not necessarily get the correct information.  That’s £250 right there, gone.  Multiply that by a lot of projects and it could save consultancies serious money, as well as making their services more saleable because they could guarantee they would be using the most up-to-date and relevant information (this is a problem more often than you would think).

Seth Godin and I are obviously thinking along the same lines.

Crowd-sourced Consulting for Charities

A few weeks ago I discussed how you should capture those ideas you get that might just turn out to be good ones.  Needless to say this was prompted by one of those ideas. which I have now written down.

You can find it here.  Let me know what you think.

Requiring the services of consultants can be an expensive barrier for small charities and similar organisations to achieving their goals.

The cost of consulting is largely a factor of the man-hours required to complete a project. Often the bulk of the man-hours are assigned to a graduate or another grade of staff that does not necessarily have a significant level of experience. The “authority” that a consultant report has is often given by the very time-limited input of a senior member of staff. The author’s experience of costing consultancy reports suggests that often less than 20% of the cost of a report is related to this authority.

The remaining work load could be packaged up into a series of discrete chunks with simple instructions that a motivated volunteer with an appropriate skill-level could easily achieve. This would mean that the bulk of the work could be done by volunteers whilst still achieving an outcome of sufficient quality.

It’s interesting how writing things down affects how you look at ideas and concepts.  When an idea first comes to mind you hold it only in your head and it all seems to click, but having to write it down demands that you establish a logical flow of how it all fits together.  Having done this I’m not as convinced as I originally was about it, but there still might be something there.