Do stuff that your customer will be grateful for
Sell the things that your customer will be proud to own
Make things that you can be proud of
Can we look at creative accounting in the same respectable light as creative writing, creative cookery, creative football, creative sheet metalwork or any other area where creativity brings new value? Traditional creative accountancy was the stuff of Enron and Worldcom where imaginative concepts were used to invent new financial mechanisms that behaved like the perpetual motion engines.
It seems that I’m a dreamer (my MBTI is INTP) so I shouldn’t be let loose on running an accounts department but I think I could still appreciate the art of a good and creative accountant in the same way that we can appreciate the difference between the creative footballing talents of George Best and those of a Sunday league player in the local park who plays and enjoys a useful game but doesn’t reach the same heights.
Filed under: Economics
The BBC recently ran a story on cutting out estate agents by using DIY house sale websites. How many house buyers still use the physical offices of the estate agents to go through books of details? I suspect that the majority of people who have enough cash to go buying a house are on-line. If I am selling my house though, can I afford to ignore those who are not online? The trade-off should be fairly simple in that I would lose some potential buyers but I would save the 1-2% fee. The other major change in the economics would be that I would lose the services of an experienced salesman but on the other hand I would not have the man in the middle pressuring me to take a sale that would suit him but may not give me a good price. The way that agents like to write their contracts is that they make a simple percentage of the sale price. This motivates them more to sell at any price rather than to hold out for a better price.
The private websites look good but do they attract the traffic of the majors? My suspicion is that until one of them stumps up for a major ad campaign and accepts ads for free then they won’t have enough stock to hold enough punters for repeat visits. If I haven’t seen a banner ad for The Little House Company or MouseSale then they may not be exposed enough to get to a tipping point. Until then I suspect that they will remain as obscure minority websites that tick over in a corner of the market.
At the same time, the major property websites in the UK seem to have moved against the DIY seller by refusing to accept private sales. It seems to me that this may not be in the public interest and that there is an opportunity for the Office of Fair Trading to stick its nose in.
This book was recommended to me to help my understanding of quality improvement. It is an unusual book for managers in that it is written as a novel. It has a clearly stated theme but, like a good novel, it leads you into unexpected places with a good deal of guile and persuasion. Whether you accept the author’s Theory of Constraints, which I don’t altogether, it clearly demonstrates the necessity for management to get down to the shop floor to understand the business from end to end. The book is also a model for how a consultant’s knowledge can be exploited by an engaged and motivated client. The latter topic is explained in terms of Socrates’ methods for enabling people to arrive at a better view of the world through debate. As a bonus, the author describes how a better understanding of the world leads to a more relaxed, less contentious existence with a better work-life balance. Highly recommended – Go Read!
Filed under: Uncategorized | Tags: Thinking
I am not a natural planner. I do not get on well with project managers. What I do like doing is figuring stuff out, getting to the root of issues and making the solutions stick.
It struck me the other day, whilst figuring stuff out, that I’ve been caught in a trap. What if I stop thinking of Planning with all of the negative associations and instead think of Thinking Ahead? Out go the memories of the project plans that never worked out, because the plans were just mindless paper exercises, and in comes the lateral, out of the box, thinking.
This week has been excellent with the WLB in a good state of repair. The bread machine is ticking away making a granary loaf. Netgear have restored their reputaion in my eyes. Another deal has been completed on eBay to everyone’s satisfaction.
Why do these things matter? Making time to succeed in one’s personal life seems to be important. All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy is the old saying. This time last year the WLB was in a sorry state of deficit. I had a blackberry, I was able to access my work email 24/7 and this allowed no time for reflection, no time for quality thinking and resulted in a work performance that was unappreciated and a private life that was miserable.
The bread machine represents a concrete stand against the intrusion of work into my non-work life. I appreciate being able to set aside a quarter of an hour to gather the ingredients and set the machine up. I appreciate being able to eat fresh bread that I have made myself. I appreciate the smell of freshly baked bread in the house.
Netgear have honoured their psychological contract with me. Technically they had no obligation as the item in question was out of warranty. The WG602 access point that I had bought in 2003 turned out to work well enough for me to browse the internet but not well enough to carry traffic to copy files, perform printing and other tasks which are presumably less fault tolerant than web browsing. This turned into a battle as I struggled to explain the problem to their support guys in India. The difficulty of describing a network topology in brief text messages combined with the fact that they are working in a foreigh language resulted in a level of frustration that had me swearing that I would never buy a piece of their kit again. I expressed this frustration, in a reply to their latest support thread response, with what I thought was my last word on the issue. This invective triggered a recovery process that resulted in the box being replaced with the current hardware version. The replacement box was up and running in 10 minutes, it performs perfectly and the symptoms that I had previously observed have gone. Thank you to Netgear but their reputation suffered a near terminal dip in the weeks when I was dealing with their on-line support crew who, as far as I can see, added no value to the process at all.
This week’s hot topic in the media has been whether the Catholic church should be allowed to continue to discriminate between gay couples and other family structures. The church regards certain homosexual practices as deeply sinful and has decided that practicing homosexual’s do not make the best parents for adoption. The media have of course seized on this item for it’s personal, sexual, religious and political content.
It is a question where there is no scientifically provable right answer. Science has not proven whether gays make better or worse parents than anyone else so it has to come down to a judgement. Many, people including church leaders, hold the opinion that practicing homosexuals should be classified, along with paedophiles, murderers and rapists, as unfit to be entrusted with the moral and physical nurturing of young people.
Many other people regard practicing gays as decent and honourable people who should be entitled to the same freedoms as everybody else.
There are a number of additional considerations such as whether the Catholics should receive state funding and continue to discriminate against the gays. Also, the Catholics have an outstanding success rate with problem children.
One of the distinctive features of British life is tolerance of diversity and an ability to live peacably alongside people with different beliefs and practices. This issue has tested our tolerance to the extremes. It has revealed the churches as having a different set of values to the baseline of civil society. Whether their values are a higher standard, as the churches believe, or incompatible with the law, as the others believe, is a moral judgement.
It would be a shame for these agencies to cease their efforts. One of the benefits of the churches in dealing with wayward adolescents is their provision of order, guidelines and rules within which the children can live. Their lives, before and during the adoption years, are often characterised by parents and society’s inability to lay down guidelines. The children test the boundaries and get out of control. The opposite camp are less keen on rules and more keen on children being free to express themsleves without inhibitions.
At the end of the day the church’s stance does not prevent a gay couple from adopting. “Other agencies are available” as they say. State money can still be spent on assisting with this process. The children concerned seem to get a good service and the state gets a discount as the catholic agencies are assisted with volunteers and charitable donations.
This is an issue where there is insufficient evidence of anyone being harmed that there should be a return to the status quo. Less legislation may be better than bad legislation.
An interesting book! JW ran GE with great success and has written down the things that he thought crucial.
A lot of it lines up with Porter’s ideas on separating yourself from competition by picking your own spot. Welch avoided taking on the Japanese at their own game by exiting businesses where they seemed to be winning. Sun Tzu’s strategy masterpiece Art of War has similar advice, on fighting downhill and avoiding annihilation whenever possible, and predates Jack by a couple of millennia.
He advises continuous improvement (see Kaizen) to keep ahead and lays a huge emphasis on getting the people right. Getting hold of the right people, and getting rid of the wrong people, comes up again and again. Training and development are portrayed as key motivational tools that people appreciate. A motivated and skilled workforce differentiated his businesses from his competitors.
I don’t agree with his distinction between the business world producing wealth and the public sector as overhead. His companies wouldn’t do so well without public services schooling his workers, taking care of their health and preserving the peace in which his companies can operate. The public services are part of the value chain and deserve more respect than he admits.
With the candor that he advocates from the start, he reveals that his career outweighed his family life. Partly he puts this down to the era and his background. He discusses work-life balance and declares it to be a personal choice. With the benefit of experiencing some of the consequences of that era we can now make different choices and try to recognise when we have the balance wrong and when we are encouraging others to make iniquitous choices.
He doesn’t claim that his is a unique formula for success and is very clear about the merit of doing rather than analysing.
Filed under: Uncategorized | Tags: Socks
The lifecycle of a sock is as follows.
1) Pair of socks bought from a shop.
2) The pair is placed in the sock drawer for future use.
3) Pair taken from drawer and worn for a day.
4) Pair removed to laundry basket for washing.
Up to this point the socks are tightly associated with each other.
5) Bundle of washing transferred to washing machine and washed.
6) Washing transferred to line or airer.
7) Socks returned to the sock drawer again.
The question of the moment is whether any attempt should be made to check whether all socks are in pairs at steps 5, 6 or 7.
The recombinant sock theory maintains that this is futile. Pairs that become divided from step 4 to step 7 can remain free as “free socks”. The pair will be naturally recombined when two matching socks are withdrawn from the sock drawer for re-use. Any laggard socks that have crept under the bed or hidden in the dark recesses of the laundry basket will eventually be recovered into the process to rejoin their partner at step 7.
The alternative protocol is to check that each sock is paired throughout the process. Any singleton socks are identified and thorough searching must be instigated to reveal laggard socks. If a pair cannot be formed then the sock should remain in the laundry basket until the laggard sock joins it in the normal course of events. This appears to guarantee that pairs of socks will be present for re-use at step 3 but it becomes possible for a laggard sock to creep past unnoticed and become a leading sock. In this scenario one sock makes it to the sock drawer whilst its partner waits in vain for recombination that will never happen.
Exploiting the natural recombinant process to take place is an exampe of a Poke-Yoke. Mistakes in the checking processes and the consequent leading-laggard sock problem in alternate protocol are avoided by simply removing the checking process altogether. The process becomes mistake proofed by removing the checking (cf QC) processes altogether.
Filed under: Uncategorized | Tags: LinkedIn
I’m on LinkedIn. The jury’s out on how useful it is. LinkedIn, and a similar networking website Ecademy, featured in BBC Radio 4’s “In Business” click here to listen.
