You get what you measure?
Now that is responsible for a lot of nonsense.
If it were true then my adolescent adventures with a tape measure would have yielded rather more impressive results!
And in management circles, it diverts a lot of attention away from managing.
I know of managers who do nothing much else than measure. And it is a very sterile thing - the last resort of those who can't think of what to do.
Management is about doing stuff and encouraging others to do stuff.
Sure, measure results at the end. But if all you do is measure, then you are playing tennis looking at the scoreboard.
Whoops. There's another backhand slicing past you.
Not so much "you get what you measure".
More measure what you got.
Friday, 26 November 2010
Thursday, 25 November 2010
Tuesday, 23 November 2010
TODAY IN BULLETS
- Neckerchief against the cold
- Noticing trees
- Is being busy a way of avoiding intimacy?
- £150 for a cream? What's it got in it? Gold?
- FTSE down nearly 200 points in 2 days
- A new Korean war?
- a new creative project with my favourite creative partner
- I say what I want, and the Universe sends it to me instantly. Wow!
- I'm of the age of anger now. Watch out. No more Mr. Nice Guy.
- You can't always have what you want. Not if it's predicated on someone else wanting it too.
- I am in tears over a sad email
- The Universe hears my heart felt cries and gives me an answer
- I find myself reading the King James Bible
- ....and talking about the wages of sin
- and building your House on sand
- and wondering about my sanity
Monday, 22 November 2010
FISH OUT OF WATER
Fish?
What's the point?
Some cooks rave about fish. Not me.
To cook fish well, the ideal scenario is: take fish out of habitat, bang on head, cook on fire. Then it's the excitement of being Man the Hunter that adds to the taste experience. That, and a bit of wood smoke.
Everything else you do with fish, bar a squeeze of lemon, fucks it up, or fucks you up. All that filleting, gutting, skinning. You stand an above evens chance of slitting your own wrist unintentionally with a razor sharp knife, or impaling yourself on the creature's evil bones. Then the cooking has got to be ever so exactly just so. Overdo it, you get cardboard. Underdo it and you kill yourself, and all your guests. Leave a bone in; prepare yourself for a fun evening tracheotomy.
And for what? A slimy, white, unimpressive, largely tasteless, second-rate protein.
For years chefs have tried to disguise fish with sauces made of cream, cheese, white wine, Pernod, you name it. Suggestion: drink the sauce. Throw the fish away. Fish in sauce makes me gip anyhow. Slime in slime. Yuck. It just makes something bad worse.
There are, I know, people who eat fish out of a kind of guilt, persuading themselves somehow that the central nervous system of fish means they don't die in agony. Never have these people to dinner or deign to dine with them. Firstly, they are clearly stupid. Secondly, with hangups like that, you'll have a terrible evening. Thirdly, they'll play the liberal, though in fact these food fascists will bully you into eating - guess what - fish, probably with some awful guilt free salad.
Against the assuaging of guilt, a very short story. I once caught a tuna of 110 lbs. Yes, big. As big as quite a big small human. I am fourteen stone and relatively strong, but it took me 55 minutes of sweating and heaving to get this bastard alongside the boat. It took two fully grown men a good ten minutes with evil life threatening gaffs to get it inside the boat. The creature then thrashed about trying to bite anything in sight. One man then attacked the fish with an iron bar with shocking violence. It must have been another three or four minutes of savagery before the creature died. That day I witnessed a murder. And believe me, the victim did not go quietly. I saw absolutely no evidence to persuade me that that fish did not die in absolute agony. Have that with your fucking salad, fish eater! If fish is brain food, how come you haven't got any? If you did, you'd be eating meat.
I'd happily kill a fish if I wanted to eat one. But generally I don't. The honourable exceptions being Fish n Chips from a proper Fish n Chips establishment, and smoked salmon. When I die, skip the velvet on the coffin. Line it with smoked salmon. In case I get peckish. But there again, you could use a good pate, and I'd be equally happy.
Here, then, dear reader, is my simple but heartfelt culinary advice. Don't serve fish. Ever. Unless you run a chippy. Serve meat. Live life. Enjoy it. With blood from a decent steak running down your chin.
What's the point?
Some cooks rave about fish. Not me.
To cook fish well, the ideal scenario is: take fish out of habitat, bang on head, cook on fire. Then it's the excitement of being Man the Hunter that adds to the taste experience. That, and a bit of wood smoke.
Everything else you do with fish, bar a squeeze of lemon, fucks it up, or fucks you up. All that filleting, gutting, skinning. You stand an above evens chance of slitting your own wrist unintentionally with a razor sharp knife, or impaling yourself on the creature's evil bones. Then the cooking has got to be ever so exactly just so. Overdo it, you get cardboard. Underdo it and you kill yourself, and all your guests. Leave a bone in; prepare yourself for a fun evening tracheotomy.
And for what? A slimy, white, unimpressive, largely tasteless, second-rate protein.
For years chefs have tried to disguise fish with sauces made of cream, cheese, white wine, Pernod, you name it. Suggestion: drink the sauce. Throw the fish away. Fish in sauce makes me gip anyhow. Slime in slime. Yuck. It just makes something bad worse.
There are, I know, people who eat fish out of a kind of guilt, persuading themselves somehow that the central nervous system of fish means they don't die in agony. Never have these people to dinner or deign to dine with them. Firstly, they are clearly stupid. Secondly, with hangups like that, you'll have a terrible evening. Thirdly, they'll play the liberal, though in fact these food fascists will bully you into eating - guess what - fish, probably with some awful guilt free salad.
Against the assuaging of guilt, a very short story. I once caught a tuna of 110 lbs. Yes, big. As big as quite a big small human. I am fourteen stone and relatively strong, but it took me 55 minutes of sweating and heaving to get this bastard alongside the boat. It took two fully grown men a good ten minutes with evil life threatening gaffs to get it inside the boat. The creature then thrashed about trying to bite anything in sight. One man then attacked the fish with an iron bar with shocking violence. It must have been another three or four minutes of savagery before the creature died. That day I witnessed a murder. And believe me, the victim did not go quietly. I saw absolutely no evidence to persuade me that that fish did not die in absolute agony. Have that with your fucking salad, fish eater! If fish is brain food, how come you haven't got any? If you did, you'd be eating meat.
I'd happily kill a fish if I wanted to eat one. But generally I don't. The honourable exceptions being Fish n Chips from a proper Fish n Chips establishment, and smoked salmon. When I die, skip the velvet on the coffin. Line it with smoked salmon. In case I get peckish. But there again, you could use a good pate, and I'd be equally happy.
Here, then, dear reader, is my simple but heartfelt culinary advice. Don't serve fish. Ever. Unless you run a chippy. Serve meat. Live life. Enjoy it. With blood from a decent steak running down your chin.
DON'T VOTE IT ONLY ENCOURAGES THE BASTARDS
Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery. Hence, it is good when a higher profile celeb than yours truly picks up on, plagiarizes, copies or otherwise makes use of ideas which originated here. That PJ O Rourke's latest book is entitled Don't Vote It Only Encourages The Bastards was clearly influenced by my blog on the same subject of 24th April.
Good stuff, PJ.
And you heard it here first.
Good stuff, PJ.
And you heard it here first.
Sunday, 21 November 2010
GREED IS GOOD?
Her Indoors is engaged with a Company whose mission is to assist women raise their corporate game and, specifically, aim to and realise ambitions of entering the Boardroom.
Nothing wrong with that, you may say, and on the whole I might readily have agreed with you.
Recent Government proposals, though, have kindled huge debate at Berry Towers over the above, in ways which have surprised me, and shaken my prejudices. The government has suggested (and it is a suggestion only at this point) that there should be quotas placed upon appointing women directors. Whereas, therefore, my prejudice would have been that women in the Boardroom are "a good thing", this positive discrimination has placed a magnifying glass against my former prejudices, and enlarged views I didn't think I held, but find I do.
My first response was "should there be a quota on male midwives?"
The response I got was "I'm not sure I want a man doing that job."
Fair enough, you might say.
But do markets want more women as Directors doing that job?
A while ago, our next door neighbour was one of the few female PLC Directors in the country. And very effective she is. As well as being a very charming person. I feel not the slightest anxiety about her stewardship of a public Company. But she has got there without positive discrimination. She has been determined. She has set her ambitions and realised them. She has made, I know, considerable sacrifices to do so. I don't doubt she has had to compete with the most testosterone- fuelled competition. And she has got there. Against all of that competition.
And at the end of the day that is what markets want. You can make all the arguments you like about female values being of use in creating more supportive, more creative and more people-valuing organizations (and therefore justifying the greater presence of female directors). But markets don't care. When, as I very frequently do, I buy and sell shares, I honestly don't give a toss about the politically correct makeup of the Board. I look at one thing and one thing only - metrics. Markets exist on naked and unstoppable greed. They don't give a damn about anything wetter.
There are a myriad of reasons why more women don't make it to the very top of corporate life. Only someone extremely sexist, or with a deeply ingrained victim mentality would believe that women are less capable. I for one don't. But do most women want that power as much as men? Are they willing to give up the other rewarding aspects of life to get it? Are they as manically driven by the need to gain power over their fellows and rise to the very top of the pile? Are they as fuelled by the extreme levels of ambition, drive and - lets face it - greed, that are needed to get you there in most organizations?
Some are. Good luck to them. Many aren't. Good luck to them.
As an economy, we need in Boardrooms those who are in the positions they can take for themselves. We need to be very wary indeed about offering an artificial leg up to those who naturally couldn't or wouldn't claim their place in the Boardroom anyway. Quotas on this will breed tokenism, and will ultimately undermine individual female confidence in the validity of the posts. And it will thrust into those posts individuals who, regardless of their gender, are ill suited to the markets' raw ambition.
Markets themselves aren't sexist. Markets simply want winners. Male, female, in between. They just don't care.
Nothing wrong with that, you may say, and on the whole I might readily have agreed with you.
Recent Government proposals, though, have kindled huge debate at Berry Towers over the above, in ways which have surprised me, and shaken my prejudices. The government has suggested (and it is a suggestion only at this point) that there should be quotas placed upon appointing women directors. Whereas, therefore, my prejudice would have been that women in the Boardroom are "a good thing", this positive discrimination has placed a magnifying glass against my former prejudices, and enlarged views I didn't think I held, but find I do.
My first response was "should there be a quota on male midwives?"
The response I got was "I'm not sure I want a man doing that job."
Fair enough, you might say.
But do markets want more women as Directors doing that job?
A while ago, our next door neighbour was one of the few female PLC Directors in the country. And very effective she is. As well as being a very charming person. I feel not the slightest anxiety about her stewardship of a public Company. But she has got there without positive discrimination. She has been determined. She has set her ambitions and realised them. She has made, I know, considerable sacrifices to do so. I don't doubt she has had to compete with the most testosterone- fuelled competition. And she has got there. Against all of that competition.
And at the end of the day that is what markets want. You can make all the arguments you like about female values being of use in creating more supportive, more creative and more people-valuing organizations (and therefore justifying the greater presence of female directors). But markets don't care. When, as I very frequently do, I buy and sell shares, I honestly don't give a toss about the politically correct makeup of the Board. I look at one thing and one thing only - metrics. Markets exist on naked and unstoppable greed. They don't give a damn about anything wetter.
There are a myriad of reasons why more women don't make it to the very top of corporate life. Only someone extremely sexist, or with a deeply ingrained victim mentality would believe that women are less capable. I for one don't. But do most women want that power as much as men? Are they willing to give up the other rewarding aspects of life to get it? Are they as manically driven by the need to gain power over their fellows and rise to the very top of the pile? Are they as fuelled by the extreme levels of ambition, drive and - lets face it - greed, that are needed to get you there in most organizations?
Some are. Good luck to them. Many aren't. Good luck to them.
As an economy, we need in Boardrooms those who are in the positions they can take for themselves. We need to be very wary indeed about offering an artificial leg up to those who naturally couldn't or wouldn't claim their place in the Boardroom anyway. Quotas on this will breed tokenism, and will ultimately undermine individual female confidence in the validity of the posts. And it will thrust into those posts individuals who, regardless of their gender, are ill suited to the markets' raw ambition.
Markets themselves aren't sexist. Markets simply want winners. Male, female, in between. They just don't care.
Friday, 19 November 2010
WHATS ON YOUR MIND?
A lot of language is unhelpful to the architecture of mental health.
For example "what's on your mind?" / "What's on my mind is........."
It isn't on your mind.
Your mind is on it.
For example "what's on your mind?" / "What's on my mind is........."
It isn't on your mind.
Your mind is on it.
Wednesday, 22 September 2010
50 WAYS TO IMPROVE YOUR TEAM
1. Sit down with a glass of wine, a pen and paper. Recall the boss you have had who you feel brought out the best in you – the best boss you have ever had. Make a list of the things they did which engendered that feeling in you. Do those things in the team, and get leaders within your team doing them too.
2. Likewise, recall the worst boss you ever had. Make a list of what they did which gave you that impression. Do none of these things. Encourage the leaders in your team to think about these and how to avoid them.
3. Ban criticism. The best teams are overwhelmingly positive places. You can experiment with this for a day, a week etc. And see how it feels.
4. Set up a formal space for praise in regular meetings, at which you ask: “what needs praising this month?”
5. Encourage people to name their feelings in meetings. “I feel sad....” “I feel excited.....” “I feel angry..........” Tap the vast potential database of the team’s emotions.
6. Establish a regular space for ideas. Take a subject on which the team works and allocate a fixed meeting space for ideas. Make it informal and only about ideas. Suspend judgement of all ideas till the end of the session so you get the maximum number of ideas on the table.
7. At the end of an ideas session have a race to find the winning ideas. Lay out all the written up ideas and promote each one place by voting. The winners will go the furthest.
8. Ban tables. Sit openly facing each other. Tables make enmities.
9. Sit in a circle. Also promotes good ideas and harmony.
10. Ban update reporting in a team setting, other than as lessons we can all learn from. If people are honest, most update reporting bores the others to death.
11. Take seriously the notion of job titles in the team, and allocate tasks around these. I’m talking about the informal job titles that reflect individual strengths in the team.
12. Try an experimental period where you talk ONLY about strengths and what is being done well. Build ideas from this to extend best practice.
13. Have a moment or two of calm / silence before team meetings to get yourselves into a mental space that is all about good listening and a nice slow thinking pace to get the most from ideas and decisions. One minute of silence is nothing, yet it can change everything.
14. Be very formal about a decision log. Write all decisions in the log and check for agreement before they are agreed.
15. Promote wishfulness. Rather than talking about “the problem is.............” talk about “I wish it were like this........” or “How could we make it................”
16. Ask “how is everyone...?” and expect really honest full answers
17. Be careful about measurement. When you are measuring you are not actually managing. Be careful about the difference between the two. Try to do much more managing than measuring.
18. Managing is all about asking HOW can we do better at.............. rather than WHY is the result like.................
19. Reduce the number of performance indicators you look at. Decide the two or three that are really key and focus your energies on those.
20. Try to spend a bit of time each time you meet thinking like a consumer. If needs be, appoint someone “consumer of the month” to act as the consumer consciousness, even if it is unpalatable or difficult to hear. Alternatively, invent Arnold. Arnold is the customer. Then you can ask, what does Arnold say about this? He might well speak some sense.
21. Think carefully about your common goal. If it is a number, it is probably wrong. No one really wants to spend their life pursuing a number. We’re just not built to live that way. Connect your goal to what is really important in peoples’ lives – your customers and yours.
22. A good way to do no. 21 above is to think about time. What do we really want our next couple of years at work in this team to be like? What do we want the minutes a customer spends experiencing our brand to be like? How do we engineer both?
23. Promote team members in reading, viewing and experiencing the world widely. Leave management models behind and encourage people in talking about the inspiration they are finding (perhaps from practice, perhaps anew) from other, unrelated areas – arts, philosophy, science, sport, you name it. By asking yourselves “is there anything we can learn from this field?” You will be surprised at how much you can import. Excluding management thinking is important here. Generally that gene pool is depleted. You refresh it best from unlikely sources.
24. Nick ideas. Look at the competition – indirect and direct. What are they doing that is a good idea you can pinch or adapt?
25. Be rigorous about your own experiences of your own brand. Try as far as you can to watch how consumers do experience it. Try and be as much like a consumer as you can in experiencing it yourselves.
26. If you can, bring in unusual people into your meetings, or hold special guest sessions. Get in anyone you think is genuinely interesting. Here I refer not to so called interesting consultants or business people (who often aren’t) but that bloke who has pioneered wheelchairs for Africa, the lady who has got prisoners sewing for a living, the first female Everest conqueror, the chap who lived for months with the tribe in Borneo, the pianist with the unusual background. You get the picture. These are the people who will fire your team’s curiosity. And that is gold. Curiosity is the mother of ideas.
27. Ask yourself where you expect ideas to come from within the organization. If your first answer isn’t YOU, then you may be taking delegation a bit far.
28. Vary where you meet. Most meeting rooms are insufferably dull places. There is no god reason why you can’t meet by going for a walk on a beach, by strolling in a forest, or sitting with your feet hanging in a river. Indeed, it’ll be better if you do.
29. Whenever you feel yourselves behaving professionally, be extremely cautious. These are the moments you are most likely to desert the consumer’s logic, and probably that of your staff also.
30. Include in your meetings a space for people to say “....... what I’ve really appreciated about you Doreen is..........; what I appreciate about you, Derek is..................” (calling each other Derek and Doreen is optional).
31. Allocate some time to meeting without agenda. Just a time to catch up on how you all are. You’ll be amazed at what stuff this can throw up.
32. Allow boasting. “Do you know what, we’ve got really good at............”
33. Party. Good teams do.
34. When you talk about a model, a process, a strategy, a theory, be aware you are not talking the same language as consumers.
35. Likewise, jargon and three letter acronyms.
36. Be careful with mickey taking. Humour is one thing. Allowing internal competition and rivalry is another. The enemy is out there. Not in here.
37. Why are we better than them? Why are we better than them? Why are we better than them? When it comes to your real competition you can safely become quite obsessive about this question. The harder you can answer it, the more the consumer will listen.
38. Simplify goals and tasks. Multiplication of goals eats time – time that can be spent figuring out how to be better than the competition, and acting on it.
39. Laugh. It’s not that serious is it?
40. Oh, and where there is laughter, ideas will quickly follow.
41. If your brand collapses tomorrow, it will make very little real difference to consumers. That’s partly why taking yourselves too seriously is a bad idea.
42. State your intentions and outcomes for each meeting you have. “I intend this meeting to be wow.” “I intend this meeting to be a place full of ideas”. I intend that we decide xyz....”
43. Have shorter meetings standing up. They’ll be shorter.
44. A posture guide: for ideas, sprawl. For discussion and opinion, sit. For decisions, stand.
45. Share on an ongoing basis what people in the team are really interested in, and see how any of that passion can be brought to work.
46. Eat together. If possible, cook together.
47. Don’t just have coffee and biscuits. Try some different forms of refreshment.
48. Start a team blog. Sound off online.
49. When someone has a good idea, tell ‘em. “Nice one Cyril.”
50. Have dedicated sessions asking for, and offering help to each other. No stigma about asking or offering.
2. Likewise, recall the worst boss you ever had. Make a list of what they did which gave you that impression. Do none of these things. Encourage the leaders in your team to think about these and how to avoid them.
3. Ban criticism. The best teams are overwhelmingly positive places. You can experiment with this for a day, a week etc. And see how it feels.
4. Set up a formal space for praise in regular meetings, at which you ask: “what needs praising this month?”
5. Encourage people to name their feelings in meetings. “I feel sad....” “I feel excited.....” “I feel angry..........” Tap the vast potential database of the team’s emotions.
6. Establish a regular space for ideas. Take a subject on which the team works and allocate a fixed meeting space for ideas. Make it informal and only about ideas. Suspend judgement of all ideas till the end of the session so you get the maximum number of ideas on the table.
7. At the end of an ideas session have a race to find the winning ideas. Lay out all the written up ideas and promote each one place by voting. The winners will go the furthest.
8. Ban tables. Sit openly facing each other. Tables make enmities.
9. Sit in a circle. Also promotes good ideas and harmony.
10. Ban update reporting in a team setting, other than as lessons we can all learn from. If people are honest, most update reporting bores the others to death.
11. Take seriously the notion of job titles in the team, and allocate tasks around these. I’m talking about the informal job titles that reflect individual strengths in the team.
12. Try an experimental period where you talk ONLY about strengths and what is being done well. Build ideas from this to extend best practice.
13. Have a moment or two of calm / silence before team meetings to get yourselves into a mental space that is all about good listening and a nice slow thinking pace to get the most from ideas and decisions. One minute of silence is nothing, yet it can change everything.
14. Be very formal about a decision log. Write all decisions in the log and check for agreement before they are agreed.
15. Promote wishfulness. Rather than talking about “the problem is.............” talk about “I wish it were like this........” or “How could we make it................”
16. Ask “how is everyone...?” and expect really honest full answers
17. Be careful about measurement. When you are measuring you are not actually managing. Be careful about the difference between the two. Try to do much more managing than measuring.
18. Managing is all about asking HOW can we do better at.............. rather than WHY is the result like.................
19. Reduce the number of performance indicators you look at. Decide the two or three that are really key and focus your energies on those.
20. Try to spend a bit of time each time you meet thinking like a consumer. If needs be, appoint someone “consumer of the month” to act as the consumer consciousness, even if it is unpalatable or difficult to hear. Alternatively, invent Arnold. Arnold is the customer. Then you can ask, what does Arnold say about this? He might well speak some sense.
21. Think carefully about your common goal. If it is a number, it is probably wrong. No one really wants to spend their life pursuing a number. We’re just not built to live that way. Connect your goal to what is really important in peoples’ lives – your customers and yours.
22. A good way to do no. 21 above is to think about time. What do we really want our next couple of years at work in this team to be like? What do we want the minutes a customer spends experiencing our brand to be like? How do we engineer both?
23. Promote team members in reading, viewing and experiencing the world widely. Leave management models behind and encourage people in talking about the inspiration they are finding (perhaps from practice, perhaps anew) from other, unrelated areas – arts, philosophy, science, sport, you name it. By asking yourselves “is there anything we can learn from this field?” You will be surprised at how much you can import. Excluding management thinking is important here. Generally that gene pool is depleted. You refresh it best from unlikely sources.
24. Nick ideas. Look at the competition – indirect and direct. What are they doing that is a good idea you can pinch or adapt?
25. Be rigorous about your own experiences of your own brand. Try as far as you can to watch how consumers do experience it. Try and be as much like a consumer as you can in experiencing it yourselves.
26. If you can, bring in unusual people into your meetings, or hold special guest sessions. Get in anyone you think is genuinely interesting. Here I refer not to so called interesting consultants or business people (who often aren’t) but that bloke who has pioneered wheelchairs for Africa, the lady who has got prisoners sewing for a living, the first female Everest conqueror, the chap who lived for months with the tribe in Borneo, the pianist with the unusual background. You get the picture. These are the people who will fire your team’s curiosity. And that is gold. Curiosity is the mother of ideas.
27. Ask yourself where you expect ideas to come from within the organization. If your first answer isn’t YOU, then you may be taking delegation a bit far.
28. Vary where you meet. Most meeting rooms are insufferably dull places. There is no god reason why you can’t meet by going for a walk on a beach, by strolling in a forest, or sitting with your feet hanging in a river. Indeed, it’ll be better if you do.
29. Whenever you feel yourselves behaving professionally, be extremely cautious. These are the moments you are most likely to desert the consumer’s logic, and probably that of your staff also.
30. Include in your meetings a space for people to say “....... what I’ve really appreciated about you Doreen is..........; what I appreciate about you, Derek is..................” (calling each other Derek and Doreen is optional).
31. Allocate some time to meeting without agenda. Just a time to catch up on how you all are. You’ll be amazed at what stuff this can throw up.
32. Allow boasting. “Do you know what, we’ve got really good at............”
33. Party. Good teams do.
34. When you talk about a model, a process, a strategy, a theory, be aware you are not talking the same language as consumers.
35. Likewise, jargon and three letter acronyms.
36. Be careful with mickey taking. Humour is one thing. Allowing internal competition and rivalry is another. The enemy is out there. Not in here.
37. Why are we better than them? Why are we better than them? Why are we better than them? When it comes to your real competition you can safely become quite obsessive about this question. The harder you can answer it, the more the consumer will listen.
38. Simplify goals and tasks. Multiplication of goals eats time – time that can be spent figuring out how to be better than the competition, and acting on it.
39. Laugh. It’s not that serious is it?
40. Oh, and where there is laughter, ideas will quickly follow.
41. If your brand collapses tomorrow, it will make very little real difference to consumers. That’s partly why taking yourselves too seriously is a bad idea.
42. State your intentions and outcomes for each meeting you have. “I intend this meeting to be wow.” “I intend this meeting to be a place full of ideas”. I intend that we decide xyz....”
43. Have shorter meetings standing up. They’ll be shorter.
44. A posture guide: for ideas, sprawl. For discussion and opinion, sit. For decisions, stand.
45. Share on an ongoing basis what people in the team are really interested in, and see how any of that passion can be brought to work.
46. Eat together. If possible, cook together.
47. Don’t just have coffee and biscuits. Try some different forms of refreshment.
48. Start a team blog. Sound off online.
49. When someone has a good idea, tell ‘em. “Nice one Cyril.”
50. Have dedicated sessions asking for, and offering help to each other. No stigma about asking or offering.
Saturday, 18 September 2010
THE GOOD HOTEL GUIDE
It is always nice when businesses that one is involved with do well.
I am therefore pleased to publish the following announcement from Wild Man Hotel Group, to whom I am a trusted advisor. It may be of interest to anyone reading this blog and seeking unusual, uniquely characterful places to stay:
"WILD MAN HOTELS are pleased to announce the details of our latest acquisitions:
Quintin and Adrian welcome you to The Sea View, a comfortable and discreet home from home with simply marvellous views of Durdle Door - believed to be one of the oldest rock formations in Britain. At The Sea View, we bend over backwards to make your stay a memorable one. With Quentin at the front of house, and Adrian working away behind the scenes your stay will be pampered, and you'll leave positively purring. In our Pebbleblast restaurant, Adrian works wonders. Why not try his famous Bhopal Spicy Sausage and Beans? They're guaranteed to fill you full of wonder. And it's not just Adrian's cooking that has earned us the maximum number of English Tourist stars. It's the small details that make a difference. Our beachside position and firm but comfortable beds and aromatherapy candles will leave you reeling! From our Fruity porridge breakfast to our star gazing conservatory, from our early morning coffee in bed service to our unique hand crafted cutlery and our night night tuckdown service, every minute at The Sea View is pure delight.
WILD MAN HOTELS is also pleased to announce that it is currently in negotiations for a further acquisition of a unique floating venue. More details to follow.
If anyone is inclined to stay at either of these fine facilities, please do let me know, as Friends and Family rates are available through me.
I am therefore pleased to publish the following announcement from Wild Man Hotel Group, to whom I am a trusted advisor. It may be of interest to anyone reading this blog and seeking unusual, uniquely characterful places to stay:
"WILD MAN HOTELS are pleased to announce the details of our latest acquisitions:
THE AIRY RAMPART, CADOVER BRIDGE, DEVON
THE AIRY RAMPART offers the discerning guest the chance to stay at a unique historic spa retreat situated with one of the finest views of Dartmoor. Its elevated position on an outcrop of the oldest rocks in Britain offers amazing views, peace and solitude, and unrivalled opportunities for watching birds and other wildlife. The Black Slug bar is a cozy place to relax, slug back your favourite tipple and catch up with friends, old and new. The Trangia Bistro is a simply great informal eating place. And the Airy Rampart's coffee and breakfast room has a view which must be experienced to be believed. We serve Rombouts super slow brewed coffee. The area around The Airy Rampart is packed with unusual things to do - all night horse riding, motorcycle scrambling, bird watching (you may even be lucky enough to spot a hen harrier or a raven or two), foraging and woodsmanship courses, hiking, watercress farm visits and many others. Whilst staying at the Airy Rampart, you simply cannot miss the exciting Rainwater Spa, a tonic for mind and body with its famous aromatherapy candle treatments.
THE SEA VIEW GUEST HOUSE, MAN O WAR COVE, DORSET.
Quintin and Adrian welcome you to The Sea View, a comfortable and discreet home from home with simply marvellous views of Durdle Door - believed to be one of the oldest rock formations in Britain. At The Sea View, we bend over backwards to make your stay a memorable one. With Quentin at the front of house, and Adrian working away behind the scenes your stay will be pampered, and you'll leave positively purring. In our Pebbleblast restaurant, Adrian works wonders. Why not try his famous Bhopal Spicy Sausage and Beans? They're guaranteed to fill you full of wonder. And it's not just Adrian's cooking that has earned us the maximum number of English Tourist stars. It's the small details that make a difference. Our beachside position and firm but comfortable beds and aromatherapy candles will leave you reeling! From our Fruity porridge breakfast to our star gazing conservatory, from our early morning coffee in bed service to our unique hand crafted cutlery and our night night tuckdown service, every minute at The Sea View is pure delight.WILD MAN HOTELS is also pleased to announce that it is currently in negotiations for a further acquisition of a unique floating venue. More details to follow.
If anyone is inclined to stay at either of these fine facilities, please do let me know, as Friends and Family rates are available through me.
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