Habits

Your NOT-To-Do List

Posted on by edreidyork


The children have gone back to school, the nights are drawing in, there’s only a month until the clocks go back. Christmas has appeared on the horizon, you’ve spotted a 2020 diary in the shops…

Which means that for many of us thoughts are already turning towards plans for next year. For what you want to achieve in the year – and, by implication, what you need to do in the first quarter and first month of 2020. 

No question about it, you’ll march confidently into your office on Thursday 2nd January, pull that brand new pad towards you and – knowing exactly what you’re going to achieve – confidently write ‘To Do’ at the top.

But there’s another list you need to write. Not just for 2020, but starting now. And in my view, it’s even more important than your ‘to do’ list. 

Your ‘Not To Do’ list. 

I can still remember the shock I got the first few weeks I used Toggl and realised how much of my time wasn’t being used effectively – and how many things I was doing very definitely belonged on a not to do list. 

Despite the technological advances of modern life virtually all of us are leading busier and busier lives: perhaps because of those advances. How many of us check our e-mails just before we fall asleep? 

Add in family commitments – and for many people reading this blog, taking care of ageing parents is now starting to become a major commitment – and all of us have a seemingly endless to-do list. 

At work you need to delegate: at home you need to decide what’s really important. 

Let’s start in the office. Delegation is one of the hardest skills to learn. It is all too easy to sigh and think, ‘It’s quicker to do it myself.’ But you cannot build a business without delegation. Sometimes ‘done’ is more important than ‘perfect.’ 

And as I have written many times, it is not your job to be the best engineer, coder or salesman. It is your job to lead a team of outstanding engineers, coders and salesmen – and to help them go on improving. 

So as you contemplate your plans and targets for 2020 ask yourself – or get someone else to ask – why should YOU be doing that? And delegate what you can delegate, whether it’s to your own team, or to an outsourced specialist. Even starting a ‘not to do’ list will be a valuable exercise: it will unquestionably challenge some of your long-held assumptions about what your job really is. 

Time to come home – where exactly the same principle applies. Let me give you just one example. One of the best decisions Dav and I ever made was to hire a gardener. Andy comes for three hours a week, he cuts the grass and generally keeps the garden under control. We pay him £60 and it is a superb investment. It gives me three hours – longer, really, as I’m not as good a gardener as Andy – which I can spend with my family or simply de-stressing myself. Or yes, as has recently been pointed out to me, hacking out of the rough…

There is one final, and very important, point about your ‘not to do’ list. It doesn’t just apply to you. 

Take a look around you. Is everyone in your team seriously making the very best use of their time? Or are they doing jobs that really could be delegated, allowing them to do much more important work? 

We were guilty of this at TAB head office. Members of the team were doing admin tasks that they really shouldn’t have been doing. That wasn’t a failing: we’d simply reached one of those moments every business reaches from time to time. We’d expanded, there were new challenges, the team needed to focus their attentions elsewhere. 

So Tracey has joined us, she’s immediately picked up a whole range of admin for us and that has helped the existing members of the team to focus on what’s really important. It’s also given them some time to think – to stand back and look at the business. 

I’ve often talked on the blog about working on your business not in your business. A ‘not to do’ list helps you do that. Equally importantly, making sure all the members of your team have a ‘not to do’ list means they can sometimes work on their part of the business not – as Stephen Covey put it – constantly be ‘in the thick of thin things.’ 

And now, with exactly 13 weeks to go until we all abandon the office for Christmas, time for me to make a list…

A New TAB Member joins TAB York

Posted on by edreidyork


Good morning – and welcome to time travel. Jump aboard the TAB Tardis and travel back in time with me. It’s August 2016 and I have just introduced a new member to one of the TAB York boards…

Ed: So here’s your first chance, Theresa. Outline your problem and let’s see what advice the other members can offer

Theresa: Here’s my problem. I’ve just been made CEO of this big company – GB plc it’s called, you might have heard of it. The shareholders have made a decision: I don’t agree with it but I have to implement it. Or I’m supposed to. That’s what the last CEO promised but he left in a huff. The problem is the board of directors are almost certainly going to be against the decision as well.

Lee: OK, Theresa. Let’s try and quantify the size of the problem. How many shareholders?

Theresa: 17.4 million

David: And how many directors?

Theresa: 650

David: Wow. That’s a big board of directors.

Theresa: I do have this thing called a ‘cabinet.’ Supposed to make executive decisions.

Lee: Did you appoint this ‘cabinet?’

Theresa: Yes

David: Great – so they’re all going to support you?

Theresa: No. 50% of them disagree with me.

Ed: Any more questions, chaps?

Lee: Last one; what’s the timeframe? How long do you have to sort it out? Four weeks? Six weeks?

Theresa: I’m thinking of three years

David: Three years? Well, with respect, Theresa, that’s madness. You can’t take three years to make a decision. No-one in business can take three years to make a decision. I mean, your company is going to be overtaken by events. Ed here is always writing about the pace of change. Taking three years to make a decision would be … well, I can’t even put it into words

Ed: Lee? You’re always incisive on this sort of thing

Lee: Well, one thing’s obvious. And you have to accept it, Theresa. You simply cannot please everyone. If you try and do that then you’ll get nowhere. If there’s one thing everyone round this table has learned it’s that the job of a leader is to lead. And sometimes that means unpopular decisions.

David: Lee’s right. And you have to establish your red lines. Lines you simply cannot cross. And you have to tell the truth. Like Lee says, you’re going to be unpopular but if you tell the truth you will at least be respected. Try and please everyone and it really will take three years… (general laughter around the TAB table at the ludicrous thought of three years)

I suspect the history books will not be kind to Theresa May. Neither will the management theory books. And neither were Wednesday morning’s newspaper headlines as I made a start on this week’s post…

We’re in crisis admits May, as she seeks Brexit delay

Cabinet at war as May begs for Brextra time

And, most damningly the Mail, a paper which has recently swung round to supporting May’s deal, called it 1,000 Wasted Days

Yes, as I write it is exactly 1,000 days since the UK voted to leave the EU and I doubt that anyone would claim that we have made progress. It is simply inconceivable that a business could waste 1,000 days. We all know what the result would be after just 100 days of inaction – ‘It’s March 20th, love. A year today that the receivers walked in.’

I may not wholly agree with Tony Soprano’s wisdom – ‘more is lost by indecision than a wrong decision’ – but what the current situation illustrates is that you cannot kick the can down the road indefinitely.

Getting EUsed to Making Decisions

We are all familiar with the old maxim that if you do something for 21 days it becomes a habit. Apparently new research from the University of London contradicts that: the scientists there say that it takes 66 days for something to become a habit. Whether it is 21 days or 66 days or even a little longer, I think we can all agree that if you have consistently done something for 1,000 days then it isn’t just a habit, it is part of your DNA.

Leaders simply cannot delay decisions. Yes, certain things in business take a long time. From the day it was first mooted that I might take over TAB UK to the day Mags and I completed the deal probably took as long as Brexit has currently taken. But from day one, we knew what we wanted to achieve. Yes, progress was sometimes slow – sometimes it was agonisingly slow – but we always knew what we were trying to do and every decision we took was with that one goal in mind.

Everyone who reads this blog knows that I voted to Remain in the EU. I still think that was the correct decision. But I believe in democracy and I accepted the outcome. What I don’t think anyone in the UK – outside Parliament – can accept is that 1,000 days after the vote we have not the slightest idea how it will turn out, or what we are trying to achieve.

But, as always, there is a lesson to be learned. And that is – as ‘David’ and ‘Lee’ pointed out – decisions have to be taken. And if you’re reading the blog then the chances are that you have to make them. The decision you make may, in the short term, make you unpopular. You may lose some support, you may face criticism.

But as our Prime Minister shows us, it is nothing to the support you will lose and the level of unpopularity you will experience if your only ambition is to kick the can endlessly down the road.

A New TAB Member leaves TAB EUork

Meanwhile, back in York…

Theresa: So we have made a firm commitment that the latest extension my company is seeking will not go beyond June 30th at which point the deal will be done

David: Which deal?

Theresa: Well, I’m not sure. Everyone is still voting against my deal

Lee: And these people you want to do the deal with – what do they say?

Theresa: They say I can only have until May 23rd

David: So you still don’t know what you want? Or when you can achieve it? And that’s taken the best part of three years?

Lee: Well, at least you’ll do the decent thing and accept responsibility. That’s what real leaders do

Theresa: Are you mad? I’ve just made a speech saying it’s everyone’s fault but mine. Don’t you people know anything about running a company?

Ed Reid – MD of TAB UK

Read more of Ed’s Blogs here:

Is it Time to Abandon the Office?

Posted on by edreidyork


Last week found me in Berlin. I was meeting my TAB colleagues from Europe and the two top guys from TAB in the US.

As you can imagine, we occasionally strayed into politics – on both sides of the Atlantic – and it is fair to say there were interesting, and differing, views. But there was also a combined goodwill to make progress and to make things work – which absolutely transcended any differences. We may need to invite a few politicians to some TAB meetings…

We now meet twice a year: we’ve been doing this for three years and the more we get to know each other, the more the dynamic improves. As the group expands, so it takes in more backgrounds and cultures – but it’s fascinating to see how TAB, and the very simple concept of peer support, transcends those cultures.

But as I flew home my overwhelming impressions was of the progress we’d made at meetings that weren’t meetings. The amount of progress we’d made over drinks, dinner and simple conversations as we walked around Berlin was simply amazing. And it is a lesson that we can all use – and benefit from – in our businesses.

It has been a long-running theme of this blog that if you want to think differently you need to be somewhere different: that if you simply sit at your desk you will always think in the same way you’ve always thought. To use the well-worn cliché, thinking outside the box is impossible if you are sitting in the box.

Is that just my personal preference, or is there any evidence for it?

Before I answer that, let me take a step back. How much time do we spend in meetings? According to one article I read when I was researching this post, 11m (yes, million) meetings are held every day in the US. On average, people attend 62 meetings a month, with over 15% of a company’s collective time spent in organisational meetings.

There is no way to verify the accuracy of those figures – except that based on my experience in the corporate world, they feel right.

The figures are quite staggering. How much productive time, or how much of a country’s GDP, is lost to meetings doesn’t bear thinking about it.

But meetings are inevitable – and so we need to get the maximum from them. And that’s why I think you should meet ‘off-site’ as often as you can.

There are any number of tips for making sure that off-site meetings are successful. The key one for me is to be clear about what you are trying the achieve. Yes, obviously visit the venue beforehand (not always a given…) but more importantly than that, know why you are going there.

What is the purpose of our twice a year TAB meetings? To learn from each other, to share ideas that are working, to solve common problems and to look at the business from a different angle. And to ask the questions that we don’t have time to ask in the other 50 weeks of the year.

And as I’ve said above, the more time my colleagues and I spend out of the ‘office’ – or the hotel meeting room – the more productive we are. And that is true for every organisation I have ever worked in.

Why is that?

When people meet off-site – possibly because they have made an effort to get there, possibly because of a different setting – they are more focused. Remember to keep changing the venue though. ‘Off-site’ does not mean the same hotel on the fourth Friday of every month. Familiarity may breed contempt, but it also breeds the same way of thinking and expecting the same result from a meeting.

I’ve already touched on it with my outside/inside the box comment, but there is no question that people are more creative away from the office. The same room, the same chair – after all, we are creatures of habit – and the same view promotes the same way of thinking. A new venue changes all that.

There’s more camaraderie outside the office or a formal meeting venue. It’s not for nothing that team building exercises are held away from the office. By definition when I am meeting my TAB colleagues in Europe I am out of my own office, but the difference between having a meeting in a ‘hotel board room’ and a restaurant or bar – or simply when you are walking to a venue – is almost impossible to measure.

And there’s one final point, which struck me as I drove home from the airport. There’s an interesting parallel here with being a parent. If I want to have an in-depth conversation with Dan or Rory, the best solution is to go for a walk or for a drive. If we’re sitting facing each other, the barriers go up. I’m not saying there are barriers with my TAB colleagues – exactly the opposite – but it is still interesting how different thoughts, ideas and initiatives develop when you’re not face to face.

Which brings me full circle… There are a couple of people meeting in Brussels about now who don’t seem to see eye-to-eye. Perhaps they should go for a walk…

By Ed Reid, TAB UK

Read more of my blogs here:

Failing Your Way to a Trillion Dollars

Posted on by edreidyork


I have not failed 1,000 times. I have successfully discovered 1,000 ways not to make a light bulb.

We’ve all heard the famous quote from Thomas Edison – and whether it was 1,000 times, 5,000 or 10,000 (the quote varies) the message is the same: ‘he ‘failed’ any number of times but learnt from each failure until he successfully invented the light bulb.

Edison was born in Milan, Ohio in 1847. He spent most of his life in New Jersey and his inventions – the phonograph, the motion picture camera, the long lasting light bulb – have hugely influenced life today. But my question is simple: would he have been as successful if he’d been in the UK instead of the US?

Failure is celebrated in the US: it’s seen as a necessary step on the path to eventual success. In the UK, failure is all too often seen as failure. ‘Run your own business? Not working out? See, I told you it was too risky…’

why-we-fail-to-succeed-in-ilfe

I was thinking about that as I flew back from California, prompted by the news that Apple had won the race to be the world’s first trillion dollar company – that’s around £770bn, depending on this morning’s exchange rate

The Apple Computer Company was founded on April Fools’ Day 1976: 40 years later it is worth a trillion dollars. It’s tempting to airbrush the history, to think. ‘Oh yeah, they started with those cute computers and then moved on to Macs and iPhones.’

But along the way, Apple has had some spectacular failures. It’s been perilously close to bankruptcy. In the early 90s the company was in more or less continuous decline, only returning to profitability at the end of the decade. Does anyone remember the Apple Pippin? The Newton? The Macintosh Portable? The Apple Lisa, on sale for $9,995 in 1983 – the equivalent of around $25,000 (£19,200) today?

Apple’s record has not been one of continuous success: exactly the opposite. And as anyone who has seen the Steve Jobs biopic knows, there were a few personality clashes along the way…

What Apple has done so well over the last forty years is learn from failure. Every time something has gone wrong they’ve bounced back. There’s a constant drive to get better, to improve the product. Clearly it has gone wrong a few times: but it has gone right enough times to generate that trillion dollar valuation.

(Interestingly, Apple has achieved that trillion dollar valuation with the  shares selling at 15 times expected profits – that compares to 82 times expected profits for the Amazon shares which have made Jeff Bezos the richest man in the world.)

So what business lessons can we take from the company which – according to the most reliable estimates I can find – has supplied an iPhone to between 1 in 5 and 1 in 6 people in the world?

Clearly there are the obvious ones. Never stop innovating and – as with Jeff Bezos and Amazon – a clear, simple, unforgettable brand.

I was going to add a ruthless focus on delivering what the customer wants but – as Steve Jobs famously said – “People didn’t know what they wanted until I showed it to them.” Maybe the key lesson there is continuous improvement of the company’s core products.

But hidden away in the numbers from Apple’s latest figures are two other lessons we can learn.

First and foremost, the top end of your market is important: don’t be afraid to concentrate your efforts there. The recent rise in the share price came after Apple reported strong demand for its most expensive phones – that sent revenues up sharply, despite just a 1% rise in phones shipped.

Secondly, Apple had a 31% growth in their service business, which includes over 2m apps now available in the App Store. I’m going to cover the ‘subscription model’ for business in a future post, but there’s all the evidence you need. It may only be a pound or a dollar, but if a large number of people are paying it to you regularly, it can add up to something very significant.

By the time you read this I’ll be back in the States, ready for the annual TAB Conference in Denver. So once more I’ll be among people who – like Edison and Apple did – simply see failure as finding another way that doesn’t work.

I love the entrepreneurial, can-do, anything’s-possible enthusiasm in the States and the fact that the general attitude to failure is not schadenfreude but, very often, empathy. ‘Yeah, I was down there once. But I picked myself up, learned from it and look at me now. And if I can do it, so can you…’

Strange Habits…

Posted on by edreidyork


You know how it is… You go online to look at one thing, you see a link, click another link and before you know it you’re reading about men in ice-baths…

I’ve written previously about business pitches delivered from freezing water and how it concentrates the mind. Here’s someone else who says freezing water helps him focus – albeit from the far more gentle climes of Silicon Valley.

Every morning Tim Kendall, President of Pinterest (current valuation £9bn), wanders on to his back deck and climbs into a freezer full of water. “A bath with ice wasn’t quite cold enough,” he says. Famous for wearing a t-shirt with the word ‘focus’ on it – “if you do fewer things you can do those things much better” – Kendall claims that his daily dip in the freezer, “Gives me a lot of energy, wakes me up, and resets my mind and body.”

Having read that – and being in research-useless-things-online mode – I wondered if other successful entrepreneurs had equally strange habits. Was there anything we could usefully import to the UK? (Although anyone who’s been to Wetherby races in January will regard an ice bath as positively tropical…)

We may as well start at the top with the richest man in the world. When Bill Gates started Microsoft he liked to keep a check of who was in the office – so he memorised everyone’s number plate. As Microsoft now employs around 120,000 people we may safely assume he’s abandoned that habit… but apparently Gates still takes to his rocking chair when he needs to focus or when he needs to disconnect – a habit which apparently goes back to his days at Harvard, when he’d do long stretches of coding in a rocking chair.

‘The richest man in the world…’ Unless Amazon’s shares have shot up this morning. Jeff Bezos writes a six page memo before every management meeting: everyone then has to sit in silence for 30 minutes and read the memo. Presumably allowing them to say, “Yup, all good with me, boss,” after 30 minutes and 10 seconds…

Bezos also instigated the two-pizza rule. When he started Amazon he wanted a decentralised company with small teams making the decisions: so the rule was simple – any meeting had to be small enough so that everyone there could be fed with two pizzas. (As you might guess there are now any number of scholarly articles on the ‘two pizza rule…’)

Food takes us very neatly to Steve Jobs. Not only was the former boss of Apple famous for wearing the same clothes – black jeans, black jumper – every day, he also went through obsessive periods with his food, eating nothing but apples or carrots for weeks at a time. Apparently Jobs once ate so many carrots that he turned a vibrant shade of orange.

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And there’s a link we can’t ignore. Speaking of bright orange people Donald Trump has a hatred of shaking hands – he calls it “a barbaric ritual” – and always carries a hand sanitizer with him. You just pressed the nuclear button, Mr President. No £$%*! I thought that was the hand gel dispenser…

Back to eating habits: Henry Ford ate the weeds from his garden, while Mark Zuckerberg had a year when he would only eat meat that he had killed himself. Charles Darwin tried to eat every animal he discovered and the only-just-late Hugh Hefner would only eat food prepared at the Playboy Mansion – even in a restaurant. And Stephen King always eats a slice of cheesecake before he sits down to write, which may explain why the film rights to this blog remain mysteriously unsold…

Meanwhile Novak Djokovic follows a strict gluten-free, vegan diet and has been known to eat grass. After beating Rafa Nadal in 2011 he celebrated by snacking on Wimbledon’s Centre Court.

Finally, proving the old adage that ‘what you can measure you can control’ former Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer wanted to create the perfect cupcake: she bought scores of cookbooks and created a spreadsheet – then did the same with the icing. And just in case you’re ever on bake-off, here’s the link you’ll need…

That’s enough from me for this week: I’m off to buy a car number plate – ED 1 should let them know I’m in the office – and go shopping for black jeans and carrots. Oh, and could I apologise in advance to my golfing partners? If I hack out of the long grass to within six inches of the pin next week I may choose to celebrate in an unusual way…

The Professionals

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Professionalism. Noun. The competence or skill expected of a professional. The practising of an activity, especially a sport, by professional rather than amateur players.

Hang on, just let me read that again. I can’t see any mention of fighting outside a nightclub at 2:30 in the morning. Or driving a lady home who’s not your wife and ending up accused of drink-driving. Or getting into a taxi which unfortunately whacks a lamppost, leaving you with a broken rib.

I refer, of course, to Messrs Stokes, Rooney and Aguero, all of whom might now be in a much happier – and potentially much less costly – place had they looked at their watches and said, “Goodness me, ten o’clock. I’ve an important game in two days; time I was tucked up in bed with a mug of cocoa.”

Ben Stokes and Wayne Rooney are leaders. Stokes is vice-captain of the England cricket team; Rooney, having re-joined Everton with the experience of captaining Manchester United behind him, must surely have been expected to show leadership; to set an example to the younger players in the dressing room.

What price that leadership now? What price their professionalism?

But this is a business blog – so how do I define professionalism in business?

First of all I think it’s about predictability: that’s not someone saying ‘Ed always says the same thing:’ it about people knowing that Ed will always deliver what he promised to deliver. No ifs, no buts, no excuses: professionalism is delivering what you promised to deliver, when you promised to deliver it.

It’s about preparation as well – and yes, I’m aware that I’m almost wandering down the army’s ‘Six P’s’ path here. Whether it is an interview, a client appointment or a speech, the preparation is as important as the performance: in fact the preparation determines the performance. I will tolerate many things, but one thing that used to really annoy me in my corporate days was the time wasted due to lack of proper preparation, even for supposedly ‘make or break’ meetings. For me it was just unforgivable.

And politeness, which includes punctuality. It may well be the courtesy of kings but it’s also fundamental to business: everyone’s time has value, not just yours.

Let me also define professionalism by what it isn’t. It’s not simply being serious: clearly there are professions where being serious is a requirement, but even then not at the expense of demonstrating empathy and personality.

It’s one of the great truisms of life that people buy from people they like. And that still holds good today, even in an age where we are increasingly dealing with people we may have never met. You can still get your personality across with your language and ‘tone of voice’ – even if that voice is only heard through an e-mail.

I remember an early sales manager telling me to watch Michael Parkinson and Terry Wogan on TV. “They would have made great salesmen, Ed. A loss to the steel industry…”

But despite the instruction to watch Parky and Our Tel I probably didn’t smile enough in my early days. You might be doing a thoroughly professional job: but you’re still allowed to smile and laugh while you’re doing it. Let me hold my hand up and say I wasn’t brilliant at this. So thank you to Paul Dickinson, my predecessor as TAB MD, who gently pointed it out to me…

And yes, I’d like to think we’re seen as professional at TAB: not just in that we deliver results but that we’re fun to work with as well. As I’ve written many times, TAB is about enjoying the journey as well as reaching the destination, and I’m absolutely sure we help the members of the TAB family to do that.

LEWIS_COLLINS OBITUARY

One last question: this week’s title references a once-popular TV programme. Do any of you remember it? Just a quick test to see how old you are and if your fashion sense has moved on…

My First 100 Days

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It’s not often I compare myself to Donald Trump – well, not this side of the psychiatrist’s couch – but he’s famously completed 100 days in the White House and I’ve now completed 100 days in my new role as the MD of The Alternative Board in the UK.

I haven’t pulled out of any climate change agreements, sacked anyone or threatened wholesale renegotiation of every trade deal that’s ever been made. Instead I’ve worked with some brilliant people and generally had the privilege of running an organisation that changes people’s lives. So thank you once again to everyone who helped to make it happen, and to everyone who keeps making it happen on a daily basis.

projects-100days

Quite obviously, I’ve had to get used to a few changes. I’m not driving round North Yorkshire anywhere near as much: I see a lot less of Costa Coffee at Clifton Moor…

I’m now in the office at Harrogate for 2½ days a week, working as part of a team of six. I didn’t realise I’d missed the office ‘buzz’ so much. That’s a bonus that I hadn’t anticipated.

…And I’ve discovered another, equally unexpected but far more important bonus. Every month Mags and I are in London, Birmingham, Newcastle and Manchester.

We always go on the train – and it’s a brilliant place to work. (But why, he asked innocently, could I get a mobile signal under Hong Kong harbour ten years ago but still can’t get one on the train between Huddersfield and Stalybridge? I’ll vote for whoever has that in their manifesto…)

As I was saying, a brilliant place to work – and to pick up on a point from last week, it’s a great place to work on the business. By definition you can’t work in the business, so Mags and I have time to discuss strategy, make plans and generally do all the things phones, meetings and the need to pop out for a sandwich stop you doing.

I’ve always liked working on the train. I’ve written before that if you want to think differently you need to be in a different physical location and I get some of my best work done on trains and in cafés, ploughing through as much paperwork between York and King’s Cross as I would in a full day at my desk.

Why is that?

Why do so many of us enjoy working in locations like that, and why are we so productive? And yes, I have been known to play a ‘café soundtrack’ on YouTube when I’m working in the office.

Early studies suggested that it was what’s known as ‘the audience effect:’ that we work better when we have someone to work with and/or compete with – witness the peloton in the Tour de France.

But according to an article in New Scientist, what applies to Team Sky doesn’t – for once – apply to us. The answer, apparently, is that hard work is contagious.

A study was done which involved sitting people doing different tasks next to each other: neither could see what the other was working on. When A’s task was made more difficult B started to work harder as well, as he or she responded to subtle cues like body posture and breathing.

I’ve often talked to TAB members who say their number one criteria for hiring another member of their team is work ethic: now it looks like there’s real evidence to back up that good old gut feeling.

…Except, of course, the evidence also suggests that I shouldn’t be on the train or in the coffee shop. I should be where people are working really hard. So I may hold future meetings in the library at Leeds University – and if it’s still the same as in my undergraduate days, on the same floor as the law students…

If it Ain’t Broke…

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You’re the one who had the idea.

You’re the one who persuaded the bank. Convinced your wife to put your house on the line.

You’re the one who went in early. Stayed late. Made sacrifices.

You’re the one who took the difficult decisions. Sat down with Bill and explained – as gently as you could – that his future wasn’t with the business.

You’re the one whose energy, drive, commitment – and sometimes your sheer force of will – has taken the company to where it is now.

And now, Sir or Madam, I am telling you to do nothing. Play golf. Have another day at York races. Walk the Pilgrim Way.

“What?” you splutter. “That’s ridiculous advice. I need to be there. Hands-on, constantly fine-tuning the business, ever-present.”

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No, you don’t. Let me explain…

Several times over the last few years I’ve had conversations with entrepreneurs along these lines: “I’ve got nothing to do, Ed. Everything’s under control. I could walk out for a day. For a week, a month even. Things would still run smoothly.”

Are the entrepreneurs happy about that? No, they see it as a sign of failure.

But it’s not failure. It’s exactly the opposite: a sign of success.

I’ve written about this before, but if you haven’t built a business you can walk away from then you haven’t built a business. Because one day you’re going to sell the business and if it is entirely dependent on you – if you are the business – then you have nothing to sell.

Entrepreneurs are driven, passionate, committed people. They love working and they love working hard. Secretly, they’re never happier than when they have to set the alarm for 4:30.

But businesses are constantly evolving. No business goes upwards in a straight line. There are always steps and plateaus. And one of those plateaus might suddenly see you with nothing to do. Trust me, it won’t last. Every time an entrepreneur has said, “Ed, I’ve nothing to do,” it’s been followed one, three or six months later by, “Ed, I’ve never been busier.”

In the short term, though, the hiatus can be a real problem for the entrepreneur. They’re conditioned to see doing nothing – not constantly running at 100mph, not being there all the time – as a sign of failure.

They start to feel guilty, start to think they’ve missed something. And sooner or later they start to make changes for the sake of making changes.

Tap ‘entrepreneur doing nothing’ into Google and the search engine doesn’t believe you. By the third listing it has defaulted to the norm: ‘Why nothing less than 100% can ever be enough.’

Once you’ve built your business to a certain size, your job changes. It’s another topic I’ve covered previously – and I’ll be writing about it again next week – but your job is no longer to work in your business, it is to work on your business. Clients and customers still need to see you, but they do not need to see you behind the counter – or whatever you equivalent of a counter is.

Working on your business means a lot more thinking time and a lot less ‘doing’ time. Initially, it can be a difficult transition – but let me repeat: resist the urge to meddle, to look for problems where none exist.

And if you do find yourself with nothing to do, remember it’s not a sign that your business is broken. It is not a reason for you to feel guilty. It’s a sign of success. So enjoy it. Take time off and re-charge your batteries. Spend time with your family. Give something back to your local community. You deserve the break – and don’t worry: you’ll soon be smiling quietly to yourself and re-setting the alarm clock…

What can we learn from Emmanuel Macron?

Posted on by edreidyork


Meet the new boss. Definitely not the same as the old boss…

After a year of campaigning we have a new man in the Elysee Palace: Emmanuel Macron, the new President of France with 66% of the votes cast and the youngest leader of the country since Napoleon.

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Judging by some of the paeans of praise for the new President, all of France’s problems – indeed, all of Europe’s – have been solved. In reality, Macron faces huge problems with French unemployment, domestic security, the creaking French pension system and – not least – Brexit.

There’s also the small matter of his En Marche movement not having any MPs. Macron is due to appoint a Prime Minister next week but it may be a short-lived appointment. If he doesn’t win a majority in next month’s parliamentary elections then he could well be forced to appoint a new PM from the largest – possibly opposition – party.

And then there’s the votes: or lack of them. Yes, he won 66% of the votes cast, but on the lowest turnout since 1969. What’s more, between 10% and 11% of those that did go to the polls spoiled their ballot paper. That’s not someone sitting up in bed, reaching for their smartphone and clicking ‘none of the above.’ That’s someone getting up, getting dressed and making a conscious effort to reject both the candidates.

Many of those people will have been supporters of the far-left candidate Jean-Luc Melenchon, whose high-spending, anti-EU platform had many similarities with Marine Le Pen’s message. Many voters do not see Macron as a ‘brave new dawn.’ To them, he was simply the least-bad of the two candidates on offer, with one poll suggesting 43% of voters supported him purely to thwart Le Pen.

But despite all that, what Macron achieved was remarkable. He launched En Marche (On the move) in his home town of Amiens on 6th April 2016, little more than a year ago. He didn’t announce his bid for the Presidency until November. The rest, as they say, is history…

So are there any lessons we can take from the success of the former Minister for the Economy and Finance and one-time Rothschilds banker? The English speaking, German loving politician that “Europe has been waiting for…”

First and foremost, Macron represents change. Conspiracy theorists may criticise him as a creation of pro-banking, pro-globalisation elites, but the French election was notable for its rejection of the established parties. I think that’s reflective of an attitude to change that’s all around us: look at the way traditional industries and professions – banking, the law, accountancy – are now being shaken up by new technology. If your pitch to your customers is ‘we do it this way because we’ve always done it this way’ you’re going to find people responding with, ‘I’m sorry, I’m bored.’ The old way may still work, but there is an entirely different class of consumer out there, who wants to interact with you in an entirely new way.

Macron, apparently, has always been different. At school, according to one of his former classmates, while other boys watched TV and played football, Macron read classic French literature and wrote a novel about Spanish conquistadors. He had, said the classmate, “Olympic intelligence.”

I’m not sure I know what ‘Olympic intelligence’ means, but I do know that some of the very best operators I have ever worked with were multi-dimensional. They had deep and genuine interests outside work: what Denis Healey famously referred to as ‘hinterland.’ This not only made them fascinating people to work with, it also gave them a sense of perspective, and a different way of looking at business problems.

…And, of course, Macron represents a fresh start: someone without baggage. As a general rule I’m an advocate of promotion from within. Occasionally though, you need to go outside and bring someone in who represents a break with the past, an entirely different way of looking at the problems and the opportunities. Whether Emmanuel Macron can do that remains to be seen: I, for one, will be hoping that his En Marche movement gains enough seats on 11th and 18th June to at least give him a real chance.

In many ways I can see similarities between En Marche and TAB. You can’t call TAB a movement, but can most definitely term it a community. Yes, of course there’s a bottom line to take care of and a cheque to send to HMRC. But we’re driven by ideals, not by profit. It’s about changing lives, not about dividends to shareholders.

Let me finish by returning to those murky conspiracy theories. All conspiracy theorists will have heard of Bilderberg – along with the Illuminati and the Freemasons one of three secret, shadowy organisations that rule the world. Emmanuel Macron was a Bilderberg attendee in 2014, along with one Edward M. Balls.

Unlike the Masons, members of Bilderberg do not have a secret handshake: instead, they reveal themselves to each other with a series of very slight, very subtle ‘moves.’ How unfortunate that these ‘moves’ were leaked so publicly…

The Monday Morning Quarterback

Posted on by edreidyork


It’s just about the perfect description. Instantly, we all know what it means…

So the wide receiver’s wide open. 20 yard throw straight into the end zone. Hell, even my six year old can do that. What’s he do? Tries to run it himself. Gets sacked. Turnover. And it’s game over. Season over. See you in September.

There isn’t an equivalent phrase in the UK, but no office is short of an expert round the watercooler on a Monday morning.

Seriously, he thinks X is a centre back? He needs to buy Y. And no wonder Z didn’t try an inch. My mate’s brother says he’s been tapped up by City.

Whichever side of the Atlantic you’re on, no sports fan gets a decision wrong on a Monday morning. Hindsight is a wonderful thing – and it guarantees you a 100% success rate.

Sadly, the entrepreneur doesn’t have the benefit of hindsight: he has to make decisions every day – and he’ll get plenty of them wrong. As a recent article in the Harvard Business Review put it, ‘The problems entrepreneurs confront every day would overwhelm most managers.’

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…And – just like the QB on a Sunday night – entrepreneurs get plenty of decisions wrong. Any entrepreneur who gets 50% of his decisions right first time is doing remarkably well. Fortunately, TAB members can improve on those numbers. They can bring their problems to the monthly board meetings – and rely on the collective wisdom, experience and insight of their colleagues: the Tuesday/ Wednesday/ Thursday quarterbacks. Once a problem – or an idea – has been run past seven people instead of one, the chances of a correct decision increase exponentially.

But I’m aware that not everyone who reads this blog is a member of TAB York: plenty of readers are just starting their journey as an entrepreneur. So here are three of the most common problems, proposed solutions and – ultimately – mistakes that I’ve seen in my business life. I hope they help – and don’t worry if you tick all three boxes: every successful entrepreneur has done exactly the same.

  • No-one else cares like I care. The only answer is to do it myself

That’s true. It’s your business: no-one will ever care like you care. But you cannot do everything yourself. That way lies fatigue, burn-out and your wife telling you that she needs to talk… Embrace the division of labour: we live in an age where everything can be outsourced online. Your job is to manage the business: let someone else do the tedious stuff that takes away your creativity and your productivity.

  • There’s no more money in the budget. The only solution is to throw more hours at it

Let me refer you to one of my favourite books, Rework, and page 83: ‘throw less at the problem.’ As the authors say, the solution is not more hours, people or money. The solution is almost always to cut back. You cannot do everything and, as I wrote last week, success comes from a focus on your core business – not on trying to please all the people all the time. Besides, more hours simply means a second, more serious, talk with your wife…

  • Fire people: hire people

When you’re starting out you’ll be a small team: that breeds closeness – and loyalty. But not everyone who starts the journey with you is capable of finishing it. Sadly, at some stage you’ll learn just how lonely it can be as an entrepreneur: one day, you’ll accept that Bill’s just not up to it any more. You have to act: if you don’t, you’ll cause resentment among the rest of Bill’s team – and risk losing people who are up to it. And when you hire Bill’s replacement, don’t be afraid to hire someone smarter than you. See above, your job is to manage and lead the company, not to be the expert on every single aspect of it.

 

When I write this weekly post I sometimes ‘let it go cold’ for an hour and then give it a final read through. That’s what I did this week and I need to correct myself. The three mistakes above are mistakes we can make at every stage of our business journey – not just when we’re starting out.

It’s all too easy to slip back into bad habits, to think ‘it’s easier to do it myself’ or ‘If I work through the night I’ll have cracked it.’ We’ve all done it. But at least you won’t make the mistakes for long: those quarterbacks round the TAB table will be watching you…