business

What fuels you?

Introducing new ideas is hard and most of us think the best way to win people over is to push harder. Organisations and individuals tend to focus on understanding behaviours in terms of internal forces, things like motivation and intent. Therefore, when attempting to launch a new product, and maybe people aren’t buying, the way the mind understands that is to assume that it is because the appeal or should I say the allure is insufficient. When you want to grow and sell to more customers, you usually say: “I need to improve my product, I’ll give the customers a better deal by way of discounts or market yourself better.” And if that’s the problem you imagine, the way you solve it is by elevating appeal. Organisational psychologist, Loran Nordgren says a more effective approach is to focus on the invisible obstacles to new ideas. 

“People don’t engage with us for our reasons, they engage with us for their reasons.
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— Burrellism

Understand the source

In my experience, most projects that start don’t succeed. Why is that? I think it’s a combination of two things: Empathy, meaning you are building it for yourself and not your audience, and secondly, the persistence and resources to get through the dip - meaning when you hit the hard part when everyone stumbles. The questions you will ask yourself are: Do you have a committed team? Do you have the money in the bank? Do you have the time? This is the moment of truth and what separates the things that get finished and work from the things that get abandoned.

“In a crowded marketplace, fitting in is a failure. In a busy marketplace, not standing out is the same as being invisible.
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— Seth Godin

Always add value

What you want is to be so specific in what you stand for, that people will search for you by name. We should aim to become the type of person, or should I say make the type of contribution that people search for by name. Remember the more specific you are, the more the likelihood that this will happen. In my experience, it’s far easier to love what you do than to do what you love.

 

I’m a business consultant, sales trainer, and keynote speaker and I’m not there to look good, I’m there to make my clients look good, simply put it’s never about me, it’s always about them. This is a new challenge for me to look at myself and ask, where am I being generous so that an organisation or person, I care about has changed for the better. I aim to do this over and over again and I never position price, I always position the value.

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Self reflection

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According to Indeed business leadership refers to how individuals make decisions, set goals, and provide direction in a professional environment. Business leadership can take many different forms, but usually involves a CEO or higher-level employees guiding and inspiring the rest of the team. I have an in-depth knowledge and understanding of the core elements of business leadership and I think the essential business management skills should include:

  • Critical and strategic thinking

  • Communication

  • Problem-solving

  • Organisation

  • Presenting

  • Reporting

  • Leadership

  • Project management

Speakers' corner

Storytelling is an undervalued and underused art in the world of business. I think it’s unfortunate that it’s only in our roles as businesspeople that we avoid using stories. We share the latest organisational gossip with our colleagues, and we tell our friends stories about our personal lives. Speakers' Corner in Hyde Park has been a traditional site for public speeches and debates since the mid 1800's when protests and demonstrations took place there. As a child my parents would take us to Speakers' Corner. 

When was the last time you heard a story used to introduce and discuss a business issue? Do you have high anxiety around public speaking? Contact me via e-mail if you are interested in learning how to share a short story that other people in the room can relate to.

How clear are your questions?

After you ask a question, be silent and listen for their answer. 

⁃ Active listening means you’re concentrating on their response, making direct eye contact, and taking notes.

⁃ Are you paying attention to nonverbal cues?

⁃ What’s not being said is usually more important than what is said.

⁃ Keep it positive and focus on what can be done, not what can’t be done.

The Chocolate War

We live in a society where we spend so much time doing, we fail to take time to celebrate and acknowledge the things that we have done. As you may know, I have spent a great deal of my career in the lifestyle industry, and I think fashion can be a brilliant mirror of the moment.

Last night I attended the world premiere of “The Chocolate Wars” in Copenhagen. The film director, Miki Mistrati is an old friend of mine who currently lives in London and the film highlights the modern-day slave trade issues in the manufacturing of chocolate. The fact of the matter is we live in a society where profit and growth are the key performance indicators, and I have posed this question many times before: Can we have both sustainability (ethical sourcing of materials, paying a fair wage throughout the supply chain, etc.) and economic growth?

Startup thinking

When you start a business there is a method and there are things you need to do in order to build it up. In business you have to set certain goals that you want to achieve and then act towards achieving those goals. Once you have defined your goals and begin to pursue them with your team you will find that obstacles continuously arise as you go towards it.

Whenever you create something new, it’s rarely a smooth progression, you will have to overcome obstacles along the way in the form of people or situations that go wrong. When an obstacle arises, immediately face the obstacle which comes in the form of a situation, something not working, something going wrong or perhaps somebody trying to sabotage you. Never react towards the obstacle as if this should not be happening, face it and see what the way beyond it is. How can I either dissolve it, bypass it, or use it? So, I do not enter a state of reactivity when obstacles appear on your paths.

What is your relationship to difficulties and obstacles that arise as you travel towards your goal? 

The little pause

Unlike other animals, humans spend a lot of time thinking about what isn’t going on around them: contemplating events that happened in the past, might happen in the future, or may never happen at all. Disruption is a down-to-earth method whose objective is to help us think with our rational brains and emotional hearts. It’s not about making things complicated, nor is it an exclusively rational concept but it’s a method whose objective is to release feelings, intuitions, and emotions. I think we should focus on innovation and create results through good conflicts within an innovation culture as nothing teaches us better than our own experiences.

Habits change behaviours

Humans are usually focused on the right here right now, whether it is about what to wear today or what we are going to have for dinner. This does not serve us as businesspeople as we are always looking ahead. Everybody has a little bit of self-doubt whether you want to admit it or not and I like to work with high achieving entrepreneurs who experts in their field. Decide about where you want to be and not about where you are, as more of the same gives more of the same. 

 

“The E-Myth Revisited” is a book by Michael E. Gerber where he states: …the entrepreneurial myth suggests that most people who start small businesses are entrepreneurs, and most entrepreneurs are not entrepreneurs, they are technicians having an entrepreneurial seizure. Controversial or facts? When we are clear about where you want to go then we focus on that without any outside distractions. And then we reverse engineer that, “this is where you want to go” - Let’s put a timeline on that, and because of the timeline (reverse engineering), we can say this is what you need to be doing monthly/weekly/daily or even hourly. Contact me via e-mail and let’s look at where you want to be and then figure out how to get there. 

Fuel vs. Friction

It often takes more than a good idea to make things a success. All around us there are hidden forces which are making it difficult for us to reach our goals, close a sale or convince others to adopt new ideas. There’s a lot of human behaviour that we can explain in terms of two simple forces: friction and fuel. When organisations meet resistance, all too often they focus on adding fuel, for example, building better products, selling harder or marketing better. There is nothing inherently wrong with that, but there is something many organisations fail to do, they don’t subtract friction. Perhaps they could remove the obstacles to allow their audiences, customers, and clients to fully engage with them. 

I think changes in behaviour can occur through changes in fuel and friction, where friction slows you down, and fuel pushes you forward. The job of fuel is to elevate and enhance the appeal of an idea using incentives, using an emotional appeal, giving data or evidence. All of this is designed to demonstrate the values the new idea or initiative. Friction on the other hand is the psychological force or set of forces that resist change. Frictions take different forms; we often don’t see them or talk about them. In essence frictions act and drag on innovations and change. When there are no changes in friction or fuel, you tend to stick to the status quo. 

Driving transformation

One of the first steps in business transformation is communicating purpose, everyone should very clearly understand that “Why?” In uncertain economic times, having a clear north-star objective is what can keep organisations on the right path. It’s what guides leadership decisions, from cost-cutting to entering new markets and creating new products. The North Star in this case means every single person in an organisation should have a very clear sense of understanding the reasons why the organisation does what it does and why the organisation exists.

Nowadays, you've got to listen to the employees you have today, because they are more qualified than anyone else to know what your clients want.
- How are the consumer needs changing? 
- What are the consumers demanding?
This kind of insight into how consumer behaviour is changing will allow organisations to remain relevant and retain their competitive edge in a post-pandemic reality. 

Courage is a choice

Courage is the willingness to act in the face of fear, doubt or uncertainty. It’s a choice to move forward, knowing that come what may, you will do whatever it takes to deal with it. Alternatively, you can retreat and do what has always been done, what you know and keep receiving what you’ve always gotten. Remember courage will bring us to new places, into new relationships and help generate new results.


Here’s a few action points that will allow you to connect with anyone immediately:
·      Smile
·      Make eye contact
·      Use their name
·      Ask questions
·      Listen with interest
·      Pay attention
·      Be present

Trusting your gut means having the courage to not simply go with the majority. A study group asked a group of Californian entrepreneurs, “How do you make your decisions?” These are entrepreneurs who have built businesses from nothing to over $100 million, and they more or less said the same thing - “I am a voracious gatherer of information, I want to see the numbers but if it doesn’t feel right I won’t go ahead with the deal.” The part of the brain that thinks in words has a very rich connection to the gastrointestinal tract to the gut, so this is why we get a gut feeling.
When you are making decisions, do you trust your gut feeling?

Let's talk about it

Which one do you think is best?
I do not give you these answers, my technique is all about self-discovery and taking a deeper dive into the decision-making process by asking alternative questions, for example:
a) Why do you think they did that?
b) How could you have prevented that?
c) What do you think is going to happen next?

 

My procedures revolve around the 4 D’s (Discover, Define, Develop and Deliver). I systematically investigate, analyse, and optimise the points of contact between the customer and the organisation throughout the relationship. It’s not just about knowing the skills; it’s about applying them. Do you have a systematic way of getting better every day?

“Without doubt, there are lots of ways to measure the pulse of a business. But if you have employee engagement, customer satisfaction, and cash flow right, you can be sure your company is healthy and on the way to winning.”
— Jack Welch

Set a goal

I was recently asked whether I was problem conscious, or solution orientated?

My goal is to help as many people as I can, and I think that there is no substitute for strategy and careful planning when you have goals. You will work hard and get things done in the pursuit of achieving or accomplishing goals. Activity creates excitement and you will need to be excited if you are to achieve and accomplish your objectives. Never confuse activity with accomplishment…


When you have a dream, make a list with the following framework:

1. Identify the goal
2. Identify the benefits from reaching the goal
3. List the major obstacles stopping you from reaching the goal
4. Identify the skills or knowledge required to reach the goal
5. Identify the individuals, groups, and organisations to work with on the goal
6. Develop an action plan
7. Set a completion date


This list may help you to reach your goals, as motivation without instruction and education is ultimately frustrating. When you have a target list, you will focus on the goal and what is essential to achieve your objectives. Contact me via e-mail for a goal setting workshop.

“Logic will not change an emotion but action will.”
— Burrellism

Stay alert

c/o Coutts.com

How often do you rush to judge, and does this judgement serve you well or is it a hindrance when trying to reach your goals? 
This question struck me both intellectually and emotionally and I started to consider why our minds are meaning-making machines, constantly making assumptions, judgements, and looking for patterns. This is not bad trait as it has kept humans safe as we evolved for a very long time. However, these internal narratives can be filled with bias, they can be self-destructive, or can also result in hurting someone else. At the end of the day, our judgments can be the lens through which we understand the world and that lens is foggy.

“Be curious, not judgmental.”
— Walt Whitman

What can stand in the way of spotting opportunities?
I think curiosity is what really unlocks the ability to spot opportunities and it is available to every single one of us. All we have to do is ask questions and continue to believe that we can discover and probe and learn more and more every single day. The Achilles heel for many business people is that you believe you are an expert, so anyone who is already believing that they have a certain expertise in any variety of business or any part of life, stops asking questions and that’s a dangerous thing. If you want to spot opportunity and create something new or just keep up to date in a rapidly changing world then curiosity is your friend. Curiosity genuinely doesn’t know, it wants to find out more, whilst judgement already knows enough. Curiosity is a tool and goes by names like listening, appreciation and connection. Stay alert…

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Barriers to risk

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I see organisations today trying to reduce expenses by hiring inexperienced people to pound the phones, e-mails to arrange meetings and rush the sales process without looking into how companies buy. I think that it’s a good idea to look at the company culture and determine how much risk they are willing to take. Are they really involved in innovation or it’s more of a lip service?


The following questions will give you a feeling of what their culture really is like:
1. Do their executives lead by example?
2. How much experimentation is allowed?
3. How much resources (time and money) do they put into new ventures
4. What metrics are they measuring? 
5. And are those metrics connected to new things, for example, new to the market type of products?




Over the past few years, I have studied corporate cultures and change, and what fascinates me is when we speak about change is that we think in terms of “Good vs. Bad.” I don’t think it’s as simple as that, I think corporate complacency is the worst kind of culture. I think the world has become so complexed that we keep more and more ridiculous processes in place. And this results in employees becoming complacent and no longer think that they can affect change, they just give up and hide behind the mentality of “things are just fine!” Contact me via e-mail when you willing to make incremental change in your organisation.

You want an agreement

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There’s nothing that raises your self-confidence faster than to feel that you have been successful in negotiating a contract and that you have got a good deal as a result. On the flip side, there is nothing that lowers your self-confidence faster than to think that you have been out negotiated into a poor deal that you will have to live with. Therefore, negotiating skills are an important part of your personality development and of your sense of personal effectiveness and self-confidence. When you are a good negotiator, your self-confidence is higher, and you feel more positive towards yourself and other in everything that you do.


Very often negotiations depend on setting conditions; what you can offer depends on what the other side can do. It’s a good idea when negotiating to keep things calm and avoid direct criticisms. The skills you need to be a good negotiator are rarely something you learned as part of a formal education. Some people think they are good negotiators, but in reality are not. Contact me via e-mail for negotiation training and workshops.

Improve your outcomes

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Some people are good at negotiating for their own interest and some people are not. Which one of these two types of people do you want to be? One of your main jobs in life, one that will lead to increased levels of self confidence is to become more effective in influencing others by learning great negotiation skills and choosing good questions to ask. I think the best negotiators all have basically the same characteristics and qualities, they are pleasant people, they are warm, friendly, and humble. You have an automatic tendency to trust someone with great negotiation skills and feel what they are asking for is in the best interests of both parties.


Skilled negotiators are usually quite concerned about finding a solution or an agreement that is satisfactory for both parties. They look for “win-win” situations, where both parties are happy with the results of the negotiation. It’s imperative that you choose good questions to ask and try to understand what both parties are trying to achieve from the negotiation. I think that finding good questions to ask about a customer’s needs is the only way you will be able to find out what exactly is important to them in a negotiation. And it is important to show the customer other benefits they are receiving.


Good negotiators are patient, and they concentrate first on getting agreements on all the parts of the contract that the two parties have in common, before they go on seeking for amicable ways to settle the other issues. Good negotiators also take their time to prepare good questions to ask to get clarity and understand each point as they go along to ensure  that there are no confusions later in the negotiations. Remember, price is not always the most important thing in negotiations. Contact me via e-mail for negotiation training and workshops.

What's your take on it?

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Throughout my career, I have been fortunate to have worked with some outstanding people and these opportunities has enabled me to work across businesses and functions, allowing me to understand organisational dynamics through people, process and technology. This has been proven to be invaluable as I engage stakeholders and explore ideas and opportunities in line with business priorities.

“Once the game is over, the king and the pawn go back into the same box.”
— Italian Proverb

I have had the pleasure of working for global companies and have acknowledged that humans and knowledge are the two of the most important resources. There are huge financial incentives that keep the status quo locked in place with the “this is just how it is” attitude. I think that all successful people begin with these two beliefs: 
1. The future can be better than the present, and
2. I have the power to make it so.
Do you agree? I have seen great results and productivity improvements in organisations leveraging this framework. Contact me via e-mail and let’s have a conversation.