It’s been almost 3 years since I started writing this weblog and, like many bloggers before me, I’ve decided to stop.  Not that I haven’t still got things to say, stories to tell, and opinions to expound, no; but I’m finding regular blogging has become a chore - which I don’t need to do.  Also, if I don’t post regularly,  readership will fall, and there’s no point talking to an empty room.  On 28 March 2010, 3 years to the day after it all began, I’ll post my last entry here, revisiting my most-widely-read posts - the popularity of some has surprised me - and of course thanking you, my readers, for your interest and support.

I expect to still appear online occasionally, if more overt business purposes call for it (or as a guest blogger if someone invites me), and no doubt making the odd comment on other people’s blogs, which is what got me into this in the first place.

One of my objectives from blogging was to increase my network, and I have met a fantastic group of people through being online.  Who would have thought that, blogging from little EnZed, I’d be in New York meeting the CEO of a leading US PaaS contender (that’s you, Sinclair) or having lunch in Grenoble with a Caribbean-born financial market commentator (hi, Rawdon) and his lovely French wife.  Now my biggest worry is - will I still be eligible to be a member of the Vista Group of Wellington business bloggers? But there are still 24 days to go, so I can legitimately attend the March lunch and schmooze my continuing participation.

So now the end is near (cue Frank Sinatra), but not quite yet.

The NZ Herald has assembled a montage of recent quotes from Treasury Secretary John Whitehead. He’s a public servant, not a politician, and it’s been many years since I can recall one in this country making such bold utterances, rather than discreet ministerial advice.

John Whitehead himself:

Fiscal sustainability:
“As an erstwhile motorcyclist, I know that when your skull has been saved by your crash helmet, the first thing you should do is replace your helmet.” - speech to Russell McVeagh, Dec 08

Capital gains tax:
“At the risk of being chased down by an angry crowd with pitchforks and flaming torches, yes this should include consideration of moving the boundaries to tax more capital gains - for example on investment property - and shifting more of the tax base towards consumption.” - speech to Institute of Directors, June 09

Being frank:
“We have a Government which by and large welcomes free, frank and imaginative advice: let’s take advantage of that.” - speech to policy leaders, June 09

Seizing the day:
“It is very important … we don’t lose sight of our medium and longer-term goals. As Hillary Clinton has famously said, ‘Don’t waste a good crisis’.” - speech to policy leaders, June 09

Being unpopular:
“We face tough decisions and can’t afford to be sidetracked or avoid decisions, even though some of them will be unpopular and painful.” - NZ Herald column, Aug 09

Being bold:
“The tough spending decisions have not yet been made… and the longer we leave it, the harder it will get. Your support in helping frame the debate and argue the case for bold change will be essential.” - speech to Institute of Directors, Oct 09

And from his department’s papers:

Tax reform:
“We see reform of the variable rates of tax on different incomes/investments, and the reduction of the top personal income tax rate, all to 30 per cent, as having greatest impact.” - Medium Term Tax Policy Challenges, Feb 09Capital gains tax:
“The extension of the income tax base to include capital gains would be a second priority.” - Medium Term Tax Policy Challenges, Feb 09

Government debt:
“No other country in modern times has (yet) seen its NIIP [net international investment position] stabilise with such a high level of reliance on foreign capital.” - Closing the Income Gaps, Aug 09

Government spending:
“The case for earlier and more substantial fiscal consolidation is much stronger than it was earlier this year… Having dealt with that initial situation, some more significant adjustment is now warranted.” - Closing the Income Gaps, Aug 09

Closing the gaps:
“There is nothing in the current projections or set of policies that suggests material progress is likely in reversing the large per capita income gap that exists between Australia and New Zealand and the average of its OECD peers.” - Closing the Income Gaps, Aug 09

Now vs 1987: “The New Zealand shake-out following 1987 was also a painful multi-year period of deleveraging - and the imbalances then were, in most respects, less severe than those New Zealand now faces.”
- Closing the Income Gaps, Aug 09

Balancing the books: “The Budget projections were finalised in April… As things stand today, the prospects for any sort of successful rebalancing seem much less favourable.” - Closing the Income Gaps, Aug 09

Josh Forde asked a good question in his comment on “Setting the tone“.  For those of you who rely on news feeds or Twitter to follow this blog, here it is, with my response:

Question for you Jim : What do you think gave you the authority to do that with other people? We all have situations of seeing behaviour that we disagree with but don’t always feel we can effectively confront it or that we carry the respect to do so. It can’t be just about being the boss, it has to resonate with something larger than that?

Good question, Josh. Actually being the boss does give you positional authority, but you use it carefully, and it only works well if it is backed up by personal authority - being assertive rather than authoritative, having confidence and conviction, and having earned respect for your past actions, knowledge and demonstrated behaviour. That’s something you build over time. Even if you don’t have it yet, it’s never too late to start. Most people recognise valid thinking when they see it, and although you may not persuade them this time, you’re building a personal ethos and reputation which will evolve into personal authority as a formal leader or as an important and respected influencer. And sometimes, all it takes is for you to speak out; you’ll be surprised at how often someone else jumps in to support you - the world is full of good people who want to do the right thing.

Some staff have an unfortunate sense of what’s appropriate.  How you react will set the tone of your organisation.  Your people will watch you closely to pick up that tone.

• A customer mailing list file called “ratbags” (or somesuch).  As soon as I saw it, I insisted the name be changed.  There was some shame-faced bluster about it just being someone’s silly sense of humour, but a glowering look stopped that.  The word went out - always treat customers respectfully.
• Walking past some staff drinking wine at their desks in the middle of the afternoon, I came back. simply said “That’s not appropriate” and walked off.  The wine was gone in a minute and the staff later apologised.
• On hearing that I wanted a more effective approach to late payment for electricity supply rather than simply cutting off customers’ power, the team leader responsible for credit control and payments proclaimed that “they’re all liars, and it’s the only thing that works”.  I said I doubted that, and asked him to produce an analysis of the past year’s late payers and their frequency.  Out of 40,00 customers, approximately 10% had been referred for late payment - most only once, and only 200 were chronic bad payers. He acknowledged he was wrong, but didn’t change his approach.  He didn’t stay long and we made credit control part of a new customer service approach under a team leader who saw her job very differently, looking for ways to help customers not fall behind.
• On hearing a product manager suggest that we make unsubstantiated claims in our product specifications, I respond “We don’t lie to customers.”  On hearing the justification that “everyone else does it,” I reply “I doubt that, and in any case I don’t care.  We don’t lie to customers.”  That product manager didn’t last long either.
• A product development team, given the challenge of designing a new antenna product platform at half the cost of the existing platform, started calling itself the CNA team which, on hearing for the first time, I learnt stood for “Cheap and Nasty Antenna”. My instant reaction: “You will drop that name immediately. I never want to hear it again.  From now on, you are the EYE team - Elegant Yet Economic”.  It not only set a different expectation for the new product platform; that name became a badge of honour and they still called themselves the EYE team years after that particular project had successfully finished.

You don’t always have to be quick on your feet; sometimes, a measured reaction is appropriate. Sometimes you’ll want to take a more consultative approach; asking people to think about the matter and decide what’s appropriate. But an instant reaction sends a very powerful message, as does a direct order, especially if you don’t usually act that way.  Importantly, be consistent. And always remember, who you hire or fire, who you give an important project, who gets promoted, rewarded or praised - these all send important and closely-watched signals. What you do sets the tone.

This weekend, I finally got round to reading Michael Hill’s book “Toughen Up.”  For those who don’t know him (US and UK, I’d guess), Michael Hill is the founder of Michael Hill International,  the publicly-listed mid-market jewellery retailer which grew from a single store in small-town Whangarei to a multinational chain spanning New Zealand, Australia, Canada and (recently) the USA. Hill’s story is an inspiration to those who think they’ve left it too late to strike out on their own.  Hill didn’t do well at school, and he wasn’t talented enough to pursue a career in music or architecture, his early passions. When he was 17, his parents arranged a job in his uncle’s jewellery store where, learning from his salesman father who also worked there, Hill discovered he was good at selling jewellery.  For 23 years, he drifted along, eventually running the store despite his uncle’s disdain and repeated refusals to let Hill buy into the business. Everything changed when Hill’s house burned down.  Watching the flames, he had an epiphany, resolving to buy his uncle’s business. When Uncle Arthur again refused Hill’s very generous price, Hill announced he would set up in competition; he was ordered to clear out there and then.  The rest, as they say, is history.

Michael Hill’s book (co-written with Claire Harvey and already in its third print) is a deceptively simple read.  With a light, self-deprecating and chatty manner, he expounds his business insights through his personal and company history. I found myself nodding vigorously at several points, particularly learning not to fight on too many fronts at the same time, keeping things simple, keeping focused on big goals, and being prepared to make mistakes. Several chapters feel like something I might have written myself when explaining business ideas to staff.

Hill’s narrative is interspersed with adoring short notes from some of his staff; some readers may find that it feels too much like a company indoctrination manual.  Even so, persevere. There are some golden nuggets of business wisdom in there. And the title?  It goes back to Hill’s house fire epiphany at age 40.  Times may be tough now, but there is no better time to start something new.

Seth Godin has a knack for capturing a complex idea in a few words.  With his permission, here’s what he has to say on those banes of progress, the trolls:

Lots of things about work are hard. Dealing with trolls is one of them. Trolls are critics who gain perverse pleasure in relentlessly tearing you and your ideas down. Here’s the thing(s):
1. trolls will always be trolling
2. critics rarely create
3. they live in a tiny echo chamber, ignored by everyone except the trolled and the other trolls
4. professionals (that’s you) get paid to ignore them. It’s part of your job.

“Can’t please everyone,” isn’t just an aphorism, it’s the secret of being remarkable.

That last point is critical.  I’ve said many times that good strategy requires making choices and meaning it.  That includes deciding who you want to please and who not.   As my Vista pal Mark Di Somma says, “make enemies.”  Sure, you want to listen to others - that’s one way to improve - but it’s very easy to get distracted by naysayers, white ants, and stick-in-the-muds who offer little constructive criticism. If you believe in yourself and what you’re doing,  stop being so polite, stop listening to the trolls, stop giving them credence. Do it your way.

How do you solicit customer feedback, how do you track it and manage it, and how do you respond to complaints? Probably, like most companies, it’s a Cinderella business process, conducted out of the spotlight. Some online trading sites (eg. Trade Me) have public buyer and seller ratings.  But what if you’re a “real” business, dealing with hundreds or thousands of customers? I’m quite taken with how London shirt maker Charles Tyrwhitt does it.  I normally buy shirts in-store when I’m in London, but I’ve started using their online shopping site.  Once my order was shipped, I received an email linking me to a online customer feedback service run independently of CT by Feefo.  I could rate each product and service, as well as post a comment.  I could browse all the other (anonymous) customer feedback (overwhelmingly positive by the way), and see CT’s responses to complaints, which within 24 hours typically apologised for any dissatisfaction, explained what had happened, offered no question refunds if required, promised an immediate followup by email/phone to understand more, and so on.

Showing complaints and replies in public, balanced with all the positive feedback, credibly portrays Charles Tyrwhitt  as a concerned and responsive company wanting to look after its customers, and making no bones about it.  You can also see the other companies using Feefo, and I expect this has a community endorsement effect.  I’ve certainly started looking at what those other Feefo clients have to offer.

“Good strategy is making choices and meaning it” is one of my pet phrases. Another is “What you’re not is as important as what you are“.  My Vista Group co-luncher Mark Di Somma puts it more bluntly: “Every brand should look to make enemies“.

Every brand should be actively looking to put distance between itself and its competitors. And since true difference of offer is now one of the hardest things to achieve and maintain, the most effective and cost efficient way to do that is through difference of opinion… Difference of opinion is the fastest way to move from being an option to being an alternative.

You don’t want to be an option. Because options are like-minded decisions. An option is “I could do this, or this, or this, or this”…  Alternatives are different headspace decisions. Alternative is “because I don’t want/like/agree with A (or what I’ve been led to believe A stands for), I’m choosing B”.

Time and time again, businesses try to appease everyone (especially their own people) by fudging what their brand stands for. They try to offer something for everyone, their sales channels try to sell to everyone, and they wonder why they struggle to survive and make a profit. They’ve fallen into the trap of being an option rather than an alternative.  Good brands make it clear what they offer, to whom, and why.  Great brands also make it clear what they don’t offer, who they don’t want as customers, and why not.

Whether or not you agree with his argument, Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth was a masterpiece of communication, galvanizing debate by people and governments; something that scientists and environmentalists struggled to do.  Keeping up the story-telling, this time from the sceptical side, is Australian broadcaster Mike Smith. Irrespective of whether the rationale is correct, I had to admire this explanation of the scale of Australia’s carbon emissions:

Imagine 1 kilometre of atmosphere that we want to rid of human carbon pollution.  We’ll have a walk along it.

The first 770 metres are Nitrogen.
The next 210 metres are Oxygen.
That’s 980 metres of the 1 kilometre.  20 metres to go.
The next 10 metres are water vapour.  10 metres left.
9 metres are argon.  Just 1 more metre.
A few gases make up the first bit of that last metre.

The last 38 centimetres of the kilometre – that’s carbon dioxide.
A bit over one foot.
97% of that is produced by Mother Nature.  It’s natural.

Out of our journey of one kilometre, there are just 12 millimetres left.  About half an inch.  Just over a centimetre.
That’s the amount of carbon dioxide that global human activity puts into the atmosphere.

And of those 12 millimetres Australia puts in .18 of a millimetre.
Less than the thickness of a hair.  Out of a kilometre.
As a hair is to a kilometre – so is Australia’s contribution to what Mr Rudd calls Carbon Pollution.

Imagine Brisbane’s new Gateway Bridge, ready to be officially opened by Mr Rudd.  It’s been polished, painted and scrubbed by an army of workers till its 1 kilometre length is surgically clean.  Except that Mr Rudd says we have a huge problem, the bridge is polluted – there’s a human hair on the roadway.  We’d laugh ourselves silly.

There are plenty of real pollution problems to worry about.  It’s hard to imagine that Australia’s contribution to carbon dioxide in the world’s atmosphere is one of the more pressing ones.  And I can’t believe that a new tax on everything is the only way to blow that pesky hair away.

Perhaps we all need to just take a few deep breaths.

While I admire the use of analogy, Smith’s reasoning can be countered.  As the Arabian parable said, it was the last straw added to the load which broke the camel’s back. Oh hang on, that’s another story with a message.

Reported in the HeraldSun; spotted by WOBF.

Guns don’t kill people; the people who fire them do.  The same is true for Microsoft’s ubiquitous presentation software. PowerPoint is actually a very good tool; but lethal in the hands of bad presenters.  PowerPoint didn’t make them bad presenters.  They’d have found another weapon to kill their audience.  Do you remember those 35mm slide carousels, the flight bags full of overhead slides, and the stacks of flip-charts. I remember a university lecturer we called “Scribbler”; in a one hour lecture, he’d get through a roll of acetate on his overhead projector, writing constantly, reading out what he was writing, eyes glued to the foil and never once engaging with his audience.

The BBC has noted that PowerPoint is 25 years old. PowerPoint doesn’t deserve the opprobrium it receives. It has deserved its 25 years of successful sales.

Poor presenters? Just take them outside and shoot them.

To reinvent yourself, you have to first understand yourself - as you are now, and as you want to be in future. Regular readers will know that one of my persistent strategic messages is having a clear market offer which drives everything you do.

Last December, Harvard Business Review published an article on business model reinvention by Professor Clay Christiansen et al (unfortunately behind a subscription wall).  They produced this neat summary of a business model, which you can use as a guide in your thinking.

I’d add one additional area - Ethos, covering the softer issues of raison d’etre, brand (in the widest sense of the word), culture, organisational style and modus operandi.  I know they’re implicitly covered, but I think they need to be highlighted - changing your ethos can be as business-transforming as changing your value proposition, processes, profit model or resources.

PS. You can watch a short video of Prof. Christiansen at the HBR website  talking about established organisations changing their business models.

Last week I bemoaned buyers who confuse cheapness with value.  As a director, I want to see project proposals based on best value outcomes, which is not the same as lowest input costs.  But, as I also pointed out, it’s my role as a seller to demonstrate value that’s relevant to the buyer.  As Greg remarked in a comment on my earlier post:

“… the problem is more often the sellers inability to convey the value they offer to the buyer. They don’t really understand the customer’s problem and why their product is a unique solution to it. People don’t want to buy an inferior solution, they just don’t want to pay extra for a solution that doesn’t look much different from the cheaper version”.

Let’s put that another way:

• Do you understand the customer’s need? (That needn’t necessarily be what the customer originally said it was).
• Does the customer agree with your perception of that need?
• Does your proposition offer superior value for the customer’s need?
• Can you clearly explain your superior value proposition?
• Does your customer accept that proposition?

If the answer to that last question is no, it can mean one or more things:

• You need to improve your prospecting, qualification and selling process.
• The customer needs to improve their need definition/buying process.
• Your market offer needs to be improved in some way so that it does represent superior value.
• Your basis of superiority is irrelevant to this customer.
• You’re in the wrong business.

Only one of these is a fault on the customer’s part.  The rest are down to you. And remember, unless you are aiming to be a monopoly, you shouldn’t expect to win every opportunity.  But you can choose customers in the same way that customers chose suppliers.    Focus on customers for whom your market offer superiority is relevant, and avoid customers for whom it isn’t. It will save both sides a lot of wasted time, effort and angst.

Let me offer you a word or two of advice. If you want to formally pitch something to me as an investor, as a director, or indeed in almost any capacity, send me some information to read before we meet. Send me a pithy pre-meeting email, document, brochure, proposal outline, webpage link; something which gives me the gist of what you are presenting or proposing. Then I’ll have had time to study it, think about it, perhaps do some background research myself, so that when we do meet, we’ll be able to focus your time and mine on clarification, criticism, suggestion, discussion and, above all, decision. You’d be amazed how often we can save us both time, by quickly saying “Go ahead “or “No, thank you”.

Ask most CEOs and board members, and they’ll tell you the same thing. Senior executives and board directors are usually fast readers and quick decision makers. It’s part of how we got there. So we get very irritated by people who want us to sit through long-winded presentations and discussions on topics where they won’t give us the key information until the meeting.  Especially when the “big reveal” is neither big nor revealing.

Some helpful links:

• Barabara Minto’s “Pyramid Principle” - required reading for anyone constructing business communications.
• Likewise, Patrick Riley’s “The One Page Proposal” (here’s a short video as well).
• Advance notice and agenda-setting from Sean D’Souza.

Here’s a curious thing for you to discuss in the pub after work tonight. Has the Internet shrunk our horizons rather than expanded them?

Last year, in “The Myth of the Telecommuter“, I noted that, despite electronic communication supposedly turning the world into a village, most interactions are between people within walking distance, followed by people within the same city. Prompted by similar findings, a new study of US birth data has looked at the spread of baby names over time.

The Economist reports:

… Dr Goldenberg and Dr Levy speculated that when parents chose a name for a child, they were influenced by their interactions with other new parents, so the spread of the names the babies were given was a proxy for the pattern of those interactions.

… What Dr Goldenberg and Dr Levy found was that the proportion of babies given a certain name in a state where that name was already popular or in a neighbouring state was 20% higher than would otherwise have been expected. This was true from the 1970s to the early 1990s.

From 1995 to 2005, however, the effect became even more pronounced. The proportion of newborns with common names in any given state and its immediate neighbours became 30% higher than would have been expected if there were no geographic effect. Dr Goldenberg and Dr Levy ascribe this rise to the internet. It certainly correlates with the emergence of the web, though whether the correlation reflects causation is unproven. But whatever the reason, it is a curious result.

Karl du Fresne writes “I have in front of me a large newspaper advertisement for a firm called Hudson“.  Du Fresne then proceeds to take apart the language Hudson (a recruitment agency) uses to describe itself and the advertised role - its own public sector service director. It’s not an attack on Hudson per se, but rather on the prevailing fashion for over-blown, pompous and jargon-ridden language.

The ad said: “Hudson Wellington has reviewed how we can best partner with our public sector clients and assist them to achieve key outcomes. We have done this by integrating our three proven service lines to provide full employment life cycle solutions …”

“Key outcomes” is a glib, empty phrase that’s routine in ads for public sector policy analysts, but can anyone outside the jargon-laden HR business hazard a guess as to what “full employment life cycle solutions” are? Or are these terms merely intended to create an impression of a company that has taken the banal process of executive recruitment to some esoteric, previously unimagined new level?

I also dislike the hyperbolic use of “partner” (verb or noun), implying some kind of special, stronger-than-normal arrangement between buyer and seller. Many customer/supplier relationships are indeed very strong, long-lasting and mutually-beneficial, but whenever I see the term used explicitly, my cynical reaction is that the vendor hopes to imply some exclusive service (rarely true) or insider advantage (rarely given or received), and the customer wants to squeeze some extra concessions out of over-keen vendors.

Anyway, back to Du Fresne, who picks up on “solutions” (for products and services) and other in-phrases:

It wasn’t until the last paragraph that I came across the word I’d been waiting for… Ah! There it was: “strategic”. I knew no self-respecting HR firm could get through an ad without mentioning the word at least once. I see it in executive recruitment ads almost every day and have only the vaguest idea of what it’s supposed to mean. But it sounds impressive.

… Does any of this matter? No, not in the way famine in Africa matters, or peace in the Middle East, or global recession, or violent crime. But in a small way it matters.

It matters if you value and respect the English language and don’t like to see it misused and degraded. It matters if you value honest, straightforward words over flim-flam. And it matters if you’re concerned that in both the public sector and in business, too much energy is expended creating smoke and mirrors; constructing flashy facades behind which business is conducted a lot more expensively but no more efficiently than it used to be before people thought of words like “strategic” and “solutions”.

Du Fresne’s invective is a welcome reminder to use clear, plain language. Say what you mean and mean what you say.

I said this three times today:

• Where are you going (what do you want to achieve and why)?
• What will it look like when you get there (your market, your offer, your organisation, etc. and why)?
• How will you get there (what will you do and why)?

Too many so-called strategic plans are full of warm fuzzies and empty of specifics.

The creators of the excellent Alex cartoon strip are always alert to the latest business neurosis. Sigh!

So your marketing people have told you that you should be blogging or twittering.  But you’ve heard that most blogs have an audience of one, and most twitterers have only ever posted one tweet. Why bother?

Blogs per se aren’t a cure-all, but they are very cheap and immediate communications channels to reach large and small audiences.  Technorati - a blog tracking and ranking service - reports that out of 133 million blogs it tracks, only 7.4 million have posted anything in the previous 4 months (<6%), and only 1.5 million in the previous week (~1%).  Hardly a huge activity rate, one might suppose.  But that probably represents a shift in who’s writing blogs and why.  When blogs first started, they were typically personal online diaries, often with a technical or hobbyist bent.  The top public blogs today look more like news feeds, or rather commentary on the news, usually with a particular focus such as politics, economics, technology, sport, hobbies or entertainment. 1.5 million very active blogs is still a very big number. And businesses are increasingly using blogs to inform and connect with target audiences, such as customers or staff (perhaps behind a security screen, and so hidden from Technorati).

Micro-blogging service Twitter is still evolving (not least, it has yet to find a way to pay for itself), but it clearly has several business applications, especially “creating a buzz” around an event, product launch or special promotion. No doubt other business system applications for Twitter will emerge, but I’d hesitate to build Twitter into mainstream business processes until I was certain the Twitter business model is sustainable.

The numbers for Twitter can be deceptive.  The BBC reports that a Harvard study of Twitter users found:

• There are an estimated 10 million Twitter users.
• 10% of Twitter users generate more than 90% of the content.
• More than half of all people using Twitter updated their page less than once every 74 days.
• Most people only ever “tweet” once during their lifetime.

However, you need to bear in mind that to receive Twitter feeds, you sign up to Twitter, whereas most blogs are followed directly using your browser or a generic feed service.  That 10% active user rate is actually quite high, compared to blogs where the readership may be several thousands or tens of thousands every month (or even millions for the big-hitters).

So is blogging or twittering appropriate for your business?  They are only means to an end.  Like any communications, you have to define your audience, what objectives you’re trying to achieve, and for what duration, which may be long or short (for a specific project or event).  Blogs and Twitter are just some of the tools you might use.  On the question of duration, be aware that to be effective over an extended period requires organisational stamina.  Like all those personal blogs, many corporate blogs have withered away after an initial flush of enthusiasm, because the business really had very little new to say over time. Even so, it’s worth experimenting to explore what they can do for you.

Which renowned retailer once had the following mission statement?

“The subversion of the class structure of … England by making available to the working and lower-middle classes, upper-class quality at prices the working and lower-middle classes could well afford.”

Mission statements can be the most dreary and uninspiring committee compromise. Some leaders (and not a few employees) think they are meaningless window-dressing, not worth the effort, insincere, hypocritical and sometimes downright lying.  Others think that their business is too lowly or mundane - a mission statement would be putting lipstick on a pig. However, we all know that people do respond to inspiring leadership rhetoric.

Sometimes mission statements talk about a result: “Achieving the goal, before this decade is out, of landing a man on the moon and returning him safely to earth.” (NASA, hence the term ‘mission statement’). Sometimes they talk of a way of doing things, like Johnson & Johnson’s Credo.  Sometimes they are unabashedly about making money; DuPont considered itself successful “only if we return to our shareholders a long-term financial reward comparable to the better performing large industrial companies”.  Some mission statements spell out what a field a company is in (and what it is not).  Deltec’s was “Helping people to communicate, by taking Teletilt to the world“. Societal good, industry, product field, and global ambition all expressed in ten words.  You’d be amazed at how we could apply them - business processes, design, quality, product range management, people development, culture, shareholder value - you name it, we could use our mission statement to lift our game.

A powerful mission statement  encapsulates the aims and modus operandi of an organisation, lived and breathed by its leaders and staff.  It can be short or long. It needs to avoid compromise, timidity and insincerity. Above all, it must be believable, not only in its aim, but also its execution.

The Economist has  a short web-only article on mission statements (from which I borrowed these ones) and suggestions for further reading. And the retailer? That epitome of the middle class establishment, Britain’s Marks & Spencer!

One of the weakest excuses you’ll ever hear is “Sorry, it was a computer error.”  My initial reaction is almost always derision.  Computers very rarely make errors, whether in reading or writing to a file, or moving data around (internally and over communication links), or in processing.  Computers have inbuilt self-checking so that errors are detected and overcome or at least alerted. None of these should be sufficient to actually cause the incorrect recording and processing of an organisation’s business with you. So let’s look at what really went wrong:

1. An error in understanding what systems and processes that the organisation needed to conduct its business with you.
2. An error in specifying that need.
3. An error in designing a computer system to meet that specification.
4. An error in building and implementing the system.
5. An error in testing the system.
6. An error in the business processes around the system.
7. An error in training people how to use the business processes and the system.
8. An error in entering information into the system.
9. An error in understanding what was said in your encounters with the organisation.
10. An error in understanding what was heard in your encounters with the organisation.

Errors 6-10 are almost always the cause of the problem, followed by error 1. All outside the computer system. And did you notice something else?  Every single one of these 10 errors is a HUMAN error.