Expert Advice

PUTTING IN THE HARD YARDS

Having spent a lot of time in meetings listening to macho businessmen explaining how we need to ‘put in the hard yards’, or ‘do the heavy lifting’, I feel it’s time to work on some new distance-related phrases to lighten things a bit. So next time your boss is describing what’s required for that last gargantuan push, try some of these.

 

FLEETER METRES

We go faster than the other lot, and we’ve gone metric.

 

SWEET FEET

Even better than hard yards – the whole thing will be a pleasure.

 

CINCH INCHES

Better still. We barely move, and it’s a doddle.

 

SHAKER ACRES

We rush around randomly and cover a large area.

 

SMILE MILES

Deep joy all the way.

 

STYLE MILES

It’s a long way for sure, but we look great as we go.

 

Let me know yours….

 

Tick Achieve App

I am delighted to announce the launch of an app based on my book Tick Achieve: How to get stuff done. It has stacks of information and reminders to help you have a better time of it, and a specific section for businesses.

It's out now for the introductory price of £1.79, and works on iphone, ipad and itouch.

Click the link to have a look, and buy:

http://www.tickachieve.com

It would also help enormously if you wrote a quick review or gave it a decent star rating, but that's your call.

Advice when starting a career

I am often asked for advice about how to approach work, especially at a junior level. Since it's that time of year again when graduates will be looking forward to their jobs, I thought I'd write it down. This is what I think I have learnt in 30 years in business, and what I can remember about starting out.

Get organized. Never be late. Have a system. Make a list. Think ahead. Develop a reputation for being reliable. Never miss a deadline. Deliver early. This quality is incredibly rare in business, and is worth a fortune. Read my book Tick Achieve for more thoughts.

Ask hundreds of questions. At the beginning, you can ask as many as you like. Later on it becomes awkward, like forgetting someone's name. This is particularly true of acronyms and jargon. Always ask what they mean first time. Pay attention to the answers, make notes, and develop your own ideas. Go to as much training as you can, and soak it all up.

Read a lot. Nobody does any more, and you can develop a reputation for being knowledgeable and well read. This would also tally well with being a highly sought-after strategic planner. My Greatest Hits library has over 100 books in it – you could do worse than start there.

Respect authority. They may not always be right but they are in charge. Do what they say. You can always argue when you're older.

Be prepared to adjust your style. Principles are fine but being stubborn is not. Your style is still a work in progress, and often a boss just wants something done. The working reality of many companies is much tougher than the nice image at interview.

Learn how to say no politely. Accepting too much work means you let people down and the blame falls on you. Better to point out that you have too much on at the beginning to avoid disappointment.

If something really can't be done then by all means say so, but always come up with alternatives to make sure you don't come across as a jobsworth. Coming up with initiatives is what gets people noticed, and promoted.

Pay great attention to the names of clients and colleagues, and collect their contact details. These will become your network in the future. Keep in touch with them all because they move around and generate new opportunities.

Keep examples of all the work you do – presentations, films, materials, and so on. These become evidence of why you should be promoted (at your review), or employed (at an interview).

Keep a sensible balance between work and play. Don't work all hours or stay in the office when you don't need to. Equally, don't party all week and wreck your career prospects. Keep an eye on the people you hang around with and make changes if they become a bad influence.

Be honest at all times. If you can't cope, say so and ask for help. If you cock something up, admit it immediately and move on. When you have made enough mistakes they call it experience, and that's when you get promoted.

Be nice to people in supposedly 'junior' positions such as reception, the post room and the kitchen. These people usually do most of the hard work and have great influence on the popular mood. Treat them with as much respect as your bosses. Great leaders are often cited as being good 'from post room to boardroom'.

Get into the habit of volunteering to do things. Being positive and helpful goes a long way, and helps you learn fast. As Picasso said: "I am forever doing things I can't do. That's how I get to do them."

Enjoy it. Never forget you have a choice. If things aren't going as you want, don't just grin and bear it. It could be you, the team, the company, or the entire industry. Work out what's wrong and change something. Life's too short to suffer unnecessarily.

Do all this in the first year and you will be a roaring success. Believe me, I made a lot of mistakes in my time.

 

 

Self-Motivation Idea

Here's a thought for anyone who wants to give themselves a morale boost – go through your email contact list and delete all the people who never reply, or who never get in touch. It's great therapy! Chances are you will remind yourself of how flaky many people are, how many initiatives you have taken that remain unacknowledged, and how abused the email medium is in general.

Although this may sound counterintuitive – you'd have thought it might be a depressing exercise – in truth it is remarkably cathartic. You are more likely to come away from it having re-calibrated your view of some relationships, and reaffirmed your faith in others.

It's perhaps not for the faint-hearted, but sometimes you just have to face facts and move on. Try it!

 

 

PRE-BUDGET COMMENT

The suggestions in the latest pre-budget are mainly bad news for small businesses. The only piece of common sense to prevail is the scrapping of the proposed 1p rise in corporation tax for small firms.

 

The 0.5% increase in National Insurance contributions is a retrograde step, as is the reversion of VAT to 17.5%. VAT remains a thorny problem for small businesses. It should be reduced to 10% or scrapped altogether since it has always been a stealth tax.

 

As for sole traders, having to pay 50% tax upfront each year is a disaster, based as it is on the previous year’s earnings, rather than true income. The revenue should scrap this and collect tax retrospectively when true income is known.

 

By the way, my new book on Small Business Survival is out on January 22^nd (Hodder, £9.99).

 

 

 

TOUGH MEDICINE

Having lived through a number of recessions, I am often asked how to cope in one. It is tough medicine, but for what it is worth, this is my approach:

 

Don’t do gloomy

No one wants to listen to a moaner. The circumstances might be different, but you don’t have to be miserable. If you are, you’ll run out of clients and friends, fast. If possible, do not use the R word.

 

Don’t invoke a higher power

Bad performers love a recession because they can claim it’s nothing to do with their performance – it’s the economy, apparently. Bad people are bad whatever the economy is doing.

 

You only need one girlfriend

Wandering about complaining that there is no work is like saying there are no women in your town. You only need one girlfriend or piece of work, so go and find it.

 

Good companies do the right things all the time

There is no difference between the things you should do in a recession versus what you should be doing in any other circumstances. If you have to ask what to do differently in a recession, then it’s probably too late.

 

Sometimes things go up, and sometimes they go down

So what if the economy is difficult at a particular moment? What do you expect, perpetual good times? Your success is entirely in your own hands.

 

Nip into the gap

You need to be dexterous enough to nip into the gaps that other people miss. Three examples follow.

 

1. If they want to save cost:

Go for a one-off project. Forget retainers and sweep up what’s left. They save money and you gain income.

 

2. If they have fired a lot of people:

Propose a cost-effective shot in the arm. The remaining staff will be low in morale and wondering if they are next. Suggest something that helps them out.

 

3. If their income has plummeted:

Then they need new selling angles, a renewed business effort, and galvanizing of the troops. Propose your versions of these.

 

In short, stop talking about it and get on with something constructive.

 

 

 

Progress not Perfection

Are you just doing it or doing it well? Even those tasks that require an element of quality do not necessarily require perfection, if indeed it can ever be achieved. There are many different scales of quality, for example:

• Awful

• Bad

• Poor

• Average

• Good

• Better

• Best

• Ultimate     

The descriptors don’t really matter. The point is that there is a scale that runs from not very good to superb. Everybody has their own standards. No one will admit to wanting something that is poor, bad or awful, and the same applies when you are trying to get things done, so we are going to ignore the sub-standard classifications for our purposes. All we require is a simple three-point scale of:

 

1. Average

2. Good

3. Brilliant

 

Now we are well on the road to being able to grade tasks by their likelihood of reaching the dream state of perfection. Take one of your task lists and attribute an A, G, or B rating to each task (average, good, or brilliant). The findings can be quite surprising. There are hundreds of routine things for which an average grade is quite sufficient. These are the jobs for which no qualitative measure is relevant. The fact is it doesn’t matter how you do them, they just need doing. Equally, there are plenty of things where a good execution of the task is absolutely fine – you don’t need to achieve top of the range for these either. Which leaves the items to which you have assigned a B. For these, do your very best.

 

But even then, go for progress not perfection.

 

Is your very best perfect? I doubt it. Mine never is. This is the dilemma with striving for perfection. There is nothing wrong with it as a life philosophy, but it simply cannot be applied to everything that needs to be done. There are two fundamental problems with perfection:

 

1. Perfection may not exist

2. Perfection may never quite arrive

 

 

Ploddledygook

In a busy week, I have been on the radio six times, from Newcastle to Jersey, commenting on how the police managed to put a sentence longer than 100 words in a report. Apart from being totally impenetrable, it included such choice morsels as “authentic answerability”, “centrally engineered one size fits all initiatives”, and “the amorphous challenges of managing cross force harms, risks and opportunities.”

 

The best the police could offer by way of response was that they had to phrase it like that because that’s how civil servants speak. To be fair, they are not alone. Last month I was on air commenting on “predictors of beaconicity” and “coterminous stakeholder engagement” in the NHS. They’re all at it.

 

I have been railing against this nonsense for years, and don’t intend to stop. For a cliché and jargon red alert list, have a look at So What? For a guide to spotting waffle, and a rundown on incomprehensible mission statements, look at Tick Achieve. If you just want to laugh your rocks off at the latest bullshit, or hear any of the radio interviews, go to expertadviceonline.com.

 

 

 

NO EXCUSES!

We live in an excuse culture. People have always got a reason why they haven’t done something. This is all very well if people are trying to wriggle out of tight situations or avoid being fired, but it is a poor way to proceed with yourself.

 

Don’t allow yourself to accept your own feeble excuses. If you do, you will never Tick Achieve. This is not supposed to be a heavy subject, but it does involve a good degree of self-discipline.

 

Here is my A-Z of excuses.

 

 

 

 

Alcohol: “I was drunk so either I didn’t mean it or I can’t remember what I said.”

Bullshit: “I am talking in riddles to disguise the fact that I don’t have an opinion.” (see chapter 2)

Celebrity: “I am terribly important, or at least I think I am.”

Drugs: “My cocktail of uppers and downers has left me confused.”

Evasiveness: “Like a politician, I am going to make it sound like I am giving an answer without actually doing so.”

Fear: “I know what to say but am too scared to say it.”

Greed: “I ‘m not going to say that because I will lose out.”

Hubris: “I am too proud and arrogant to get involved in that.”

Ignorance: “I genuinely don’t know what to say or how to say it.”

Jargon: “I am still talking in riddles.” (see B)

Knowledge: “I have no idea.” (see I)

Laziness: “I want the world on a plate.” (see chapter 6)

Materialism: “I only talk about things that make me money.”

Newspapers: “I have read other people giving endless excuses so I am going to do it too.”

One-upmanship: “I suffer from status anxiety and want to appear better than everyone else.”

Politics: “I don’t want to be associated with that or I don’t want the blame if it goes wrong.”

Quacks: “My therapist says I have X syndrome which explains why I never come to the point or get anything done.”

Religion: “It’s nothing to do with me. It’s all down to a divine power.”

Sexuality: “That’s man’s/woman’s work.”

Television: “I have seen people on the TV giving endless excuses so I am going to do it too.” (see N)

Understanding: “I haven’t paid enough attention so I don’t understand what I am talking about.”

Vanity: “This conversation is, quite frankly, beneath me.”

Workshyness: “I am not saying a word otherwise I will be given more work to do.”

Xenophobia: “I am so scared of strangers that I’m not saying a thing.”

Yellow streak: “I am too cowardly to come to the point.”

Zodiac signs: “My horoscope explains why I never say or do anything constructive.”

 

 

Setting up Tripwires - Tick Achieve Podcast

One of my books, Tick Achieve, has proven particularly popular as a training course that helps people to get stuff done. Here is the first of 10 five-minute podcasts which act as a reminder or taster of the most popular themes.

Podcast One - Setting up Tripwires:

Download Tripwires