Sport is full of bad decisions, stupid rules, honest mistakes and broken legs! The last of these is the very worst by a long, long chalk, and if a rule exists to prevent it then that rule needs to be upheld instantly and without recourse to any other opinion.

I think football is governed by idiots who don’t know how to enforce anything properly. For example, if you don’t want a player to take his shirt off when he scores then declare him a non-participant if he is not in his team’s colors and send him off. The practice of taking shirts off and accepting a yellow card would end immediately! I hate the sort of wishy-washy rubbish of low-level deterrence and I love the instant and proper deterrence of a red card for a two-footed leg-breaker!

If you want to stop something that you don’t like then impose a sentence that the offenders will hate, impose it ruthlessly, impose it immediately, and let the stupid whingers whine.

signpost to nowhere

One strange anomaly that still exists, and seems to have come straight from programmer capability to consumer attention, having given marketing a body swerve, is the pre-occupation with banner ads. Can anyone in marketing please explain the function of these things? I never click on banner ads, I know nobody who does, and as far as I can tell they are just annoying. I would have thought that marketers would have demanded that they be abolished in their companies because by and large they break the rules of AIDA – Attention, Interest, Desire, Action; the process of moving a consumer from knowing about you to buying your product.

What would be much better would be to offer the potential consumer some information, a fair exchange for their interest. It would be a significant step forward if a banner took the consumer to a page that contained relevant and unbiased information (though opinion is allowed) in the area in which the product or service featured. Who knows, if over time enough companies started to do this banner ads would come to be regarded as a useful tool to the consumer and they just might start clicking on them.

Time is money

I got my point across and would have left it at that were it not for the ready mixed cement lorry that cut me up on the roundabout six hours later. It had a slogan emblazoned down the side that read “**** Ready Mixed Concrete – For When Time Is Money”.

Morons, I thought, having spent a painful morning lecturing my client on this very topic, it shouldn’t be WHEN time is money, it should be BECAUSE time is money.

“Time is money and nothing takes no time” is a mantra that every human being on the planet who seeks gainful employment should be made to repeat a thousand times for a hundred days so that business can flow much smoother. Conversation between such educated people would then go:

Client: ”Could you?”
Supplier: “Yes, it will cost you…”
Client: “Pay, why? It’s just a small thing.”
Supplier: “Because Time is…” (client get’s it and joins supplier in singing the mantra)

If only life were like that.

The truth of this principle is not dented one iota by the existence of a Fixed Price Contract. Most people think you have three levers to pull on – Features, Time and Budget, where each lever adjusts the other two. If you want more stuff then you have to pay more money and it takes longer. If you want it faster then it might be cheaper but you have to sacrifice features. If you can’t afford it then you have fewer features but you might be able to get it quicker.

This is a lie! There is a fourth lever – quality. If you artificially fix a lever such that you break a basic rule of business, like time is money and nothing takes no time, then guess what happens to quality. How about – you can have more features in less time for the same money but none of them will work?

At least now I have a blog that I can direct my clients to with the challenge that they can point out where I have got it wrong, or they can stop trying to break the rules of business.

“You okay mate? Do you need to sit this one out?”

Even before I got to casualty and learned that I had a full rupture of my Achilles tendon I knew that I was possibly going to be sitting out the rest of my football days. You know you are not going to be playing competitive sport for a while when your doctor summons his junior to observe your sad carcass, because you present the textbook example in a manner that can only mean that up until then all other ruptured tendons were poor imitations of the real thing.

“You see,” evil one said to the young medic, who nodded and smiled in acknowledgement of his benevolence, “when I twitch the calf like this there is absolutely no movement of the foot. The tendon is completely severed.” I lay face down while junior copied his master and did his own twitching of my calf. While I am pleased to have made a contribution to medicine and the progression of junior’s career, I now know what it feels like for a worm being fed to a clutch of fledgling birds.

Lovely!

Richard Dawkins in The Selfish Gene describes human beings as survival machines and this is nowhere more obvious than in a hospital. Trying to get to sleep at 02:30 the sounds of broken machines all around me, cogs whirring ineffectively as the gears failed to click, filled the ward. Survival is a tough business and there is a steep gradient between doing well at it and teetering on the edge. The 90 year-old next to me, who needed his hip screwing back together, suddenly started hollering because his catheter wasn’t working and his bladder was about to burst. In the clanging and bashing that followed as the nurses tried to sort him out, the senile old man in the far corner began to rant about the bad week he’d had at work. Trust me, the last time he worked Queen Victoria was on the throne! All night, beds rolled by as broken survival machines were shuffled between A&E, X-Ray, Orthopaedics and the wards. Somehow it was all made much worse by the fact that it was at night, and at night it becomes patently obvious that human bodies break on a pretty much continuous basis but the repairers are not nocturnal creatures so there is an acute shortage of them in the wee hours.

As if to prove the point about our nocturnal nature, it seemed that only seconds after being woken at 06:00 to have my blood pressure taken I was woken again at 08:00 by a consultant and a whole gaggle of medics, all of whom were clearly far better qualified than anybody I had met the night before! Apparently all the medical minds that had appraised me until that moment had been misguided. I did not need surgery because I had come to hospital so speedily and the nurse who had placed my leg in a cast had done such an excellent job of maneuvering my foot into a position where the ends of the tendon could naturally fuse back together.

You’d have thought I would be pleased by this news, and in truth I was. I couldn’t help thinking however that it had been a hugely frustrating waste of time because my leg had been in this very same cast 10 hours previously, nothing more was now going to happen for a week, and don’t ask me how but I had just known that being admitted, filling in three questionnaires that asked the same things, having my blood pressure and temperature taken four times, being swabbed for MRSA and then being hooked up to a saline drip just because I was not supposed to eat or drink while I slept, would turn out to be a waste of time.

I did learn something though. I learned to be grateful that for the time being my survival machine has only sustained slight damage. Of course it is rusty, slow and not as appealing to look at as it once was, but I resolve to take better care of it from now on.

Perhaps that is why my hapless group made their fundamental mistake. Perhaps one of them was deemed to be an authority figure and the rest took their cue from him. I ceased to care about the specifics of that problem. To be honest I had lost the thread to my original train of thought because the thing that came to mind was the age old adage that “Great minds think alike and fools seldom differ”. It seems our ability to agree with one another, no matter how wrong or stupid that agreement is, is a powerful trait. So beware the group decision, or make sure you take it aside and seek a disconnected individual’s perspective on it. You might just have happened on that paradigm shifting masterpiece that will go viral in a week or you could just be about to get it up the a**e!

Coke Swatika - a powerful symbol

Then I look at the little leather chest on my window sill, its lid deliberately left open, and I reach into it and pull out a random‘target’. It says ‘Complete Distributor Pack’, so I set it down on the table in front of me and I get to work. The strip of paper on which these words are written will sit on my desk until the task that it describes has been completed and the rules of the game are that my contribution to any task drawn from the chest must be completed in a day.

There are about a dozen strips of paper in that chest and every time I think of something that I need to do, which can be parceled into a discreet task, I write it down on a strip of paper and I put it in the chest. My family knows that if there is a single piece of paper in this chest then the lid must be left open and I suspect that it will be many years before I finally close it.

The chest has become the symbol of the inner energy that I need to summon in order that I may do the things that are beyond my normal work boundaries. I used to go to work full of ideas for what I would do and the great things I could achieve. Then, on the train home, I would plan how I would do them in the evening. I would get home, eat supper, watch TV and go to bed. In the morning, I would wake up and the cycle of inaction would begin again.

For years I fooled myself into thinking that what I lacked was time. I didn’t lack time, I had the evening that I had planned to do my work in, I just didn’t use it. What I really lacked was energy. Sometimes, in order to find our inner energy to do that little bit extra, the little thing that we have planned to do for so long but which has always eluded us, we need something to remind us of its purpose and value. The little leather chest on the window sill in my study is my symbol, and because I have found it so effective I thought I should share its existence with you. If you find that you don’t have time, when the reality is that you don’t have the energy to find the time, then perhaps you should look around you and find a symbol that can help.

If you run a project through a spreadsheet and the calculations show you that you can’t make a margin which will keep your kids in shoes this winter then this is rubbish business. If your potential client wants you to deliver goods or services at below the market rates then this too is rubbish business. These examples do not represent bad business, they represent rubbish business. Really bad business is, by definition, a transaction that looks exactly like good business. In many cases, bad business looks better than most of the business that you do!

So how do you tell good business from bad? How do you avoid being sucked into the mire? The answer is simple. If bad business looks just like good business then the difference between the two has to be how long it takes to start. I have been chasing a million dollar contract for months and now I am going to walk away from it. Let it chase me if it will. The project looks like a fantastic opportunity but it isn’t, it is a gravitational drain on my energy and resources. If I value my own time and money then the opportunity cost of pursuing this piece of business is too high.

I used to say back in my days as a dot com CTO that we would have matured as a business when we knew how to turn bad business away. I have grown up since then and now I realise that you are mature as a business if you know when to turn good business away.

In the world of Software Development a lot of these hopes are of innovations and inventions that the whole world could benefit from. The most glittering of these hopes may also bring fame and fortune to their holders. I say holders because most of these hopes are clutched so tight that no amount of intervention can prise them from the grasp of their owners.

If this is even vaguely true of you then I strongly recommend that you stop talking, even to yourself, and start building a prototype. Hopes are dreams and you can’t eat dreams. Nobody can, which is why so few people will buy your dreams off you. If you have one hope for this year then let it be that you will find it in yourself to DO something. Stop worrying, don’t blame anyone, stop dithering. You are what people see, not what you say you are. So if you are to be more than you were last year then you had better start showing us soon.

Cheers!

When organizations try to recycle they tend to make a fatal mistake, they do not revisit the conceptual stage with a wide enough audience. An idea comes from one mind. Sometimes that mind co-operates with a few other minds to flesh out an initiative. In nine times out of ten that is as far as collaborative thinking goes. Ideas cannot be efficiently recycled, only the initiatives that flow from them can. While ideas are best stewed in a small pot, initiatives cook in the cauldron of the enterprise and tend to affect everybody. Therefore the sum total of learning that is derived from the initiative is spread far beyond the reach of the original minds that grew and incubated the idea it came from.

Before you recycle, let the implementers feed back to the idea generators at the start of the process by asking them what went wrong the time before. If you don’t ask what went wrong then very few people will ever tell you, but if you do then you are far more likely to obtain win-win results and a better process. Admitting imperfection and soliciting feedback greatly reduces the nightmare of Passive Blocking. If you have not come across PB then you can read how to recognize this scourge of industry here.

Among other things, if you ever want to know how to get innovation to work in a large, complex organization and are prepared to stop lying about the success of forced initiatives like your ‘innovation portal’, then this is a book for you.

You can download the introductory chapter here.