Monday, July 27, 2009

If I was a cricketer......

It is so important to know who you are and what makes you tick in business. Self awareness is more crucial than ever in a knowledge world.

I was upstairs watching my wife painting our sixteen year olds bedroom wall. Alistair was spread out on the sofa doing something on his ipod, glancing up occasionally at Sky Sports news on television and texting his friends at the T4 concert. I opened my mouth to ask if it is necessary to be using all this electricity at one time. But I closed it because I had heard the answer many times before.

England had just taken another Australian wicket and then our boy said “If I was a cricketer I would like to be a boundary fielder. You do the odd spectacular catch, you can doze for most of the time and you can chat to the crowd when you feel like it.”

That just about sums up the boy perfectly. Sharon carried on painting, I carried on gardening and Ali, he carried on flicking his ipod, nodding at the TV and texting his mates.

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Sunday, July 19, 2009

The father, the son and the great opportunity


There is absolutely no doubt that a father and son combo in business can be a fabulous formula for success. But just one thing has to happen first.

We were in the living room, father, mother, son and daughter. The business like many in this rural part of the country is a third generation, family, agriculture sector – mainly crops and some stock. Grandfather had been killed in World War Two so dad had been brought up on the farm by an assortment of relatives. He had learned everything the hard way with little in the way of formal education. Yet here we were, 60 years on, wondering what to do with a multi million pound business and two children, in their twenties, that are half in it and half out of it, depending on the day of the week.

Parent relating to Child is the inevitable axis for communication from the very earliest of days. Even if it is “Make sure you look right, and then left, and then right again before you cross the road.”

But one day the pattern has to shift from Parent Child to Adult Adult. There will be a jugular issue that father wants to do one way and son or daughter wants to do the other. And there will be many other little tests on the way to this defining moment that hardly anyone will have noticed, because that is the way it has always been.

The wise father will know when it is time to move over, when it is time for the next generation to move into pole position.

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Thursday, July 02, 2009

In the moment

The vast majority of successful business executives I meet have not the faintest idea about the difference between explicit knowledge that is going down in value, and tacit knowledge that is going up.

I speak for a number of Executive groups both in the UK and overseas. They are all into the idea of developing knowledge in one way or another and one of them came up with the idea of a ‘wisdom bank’. Trouble is that in a world where you can download and digest the entire Encyclopaedia Britannica why does anyone need a ‘wisdom bank’. The answer is that they don’t because banks are full of explicit knowledge – anything that can be read or downloaded or copied. In other words it’s history. And of course history has a value but why pay for it when there are so many other sources of similar knowledge?

I attended a weekend retreat with a very eminent speaker and he was busy preparing a website containing just about everything that any aspiring speaker could wish to know, except of course, tacit knowledge. He said that people would pay for this and I begged to differ. During the workshop I was presenting my keynote when Paul stopped me in full flow. He said “It’s your arm.” I asked what was wrong with my arm. He replied that “When you are depicting the flight path of the Bull’s Eye it goes from bottom left to upper right as you see it, but you have to depict it as your right to their left for the audience.”

Now that is pure tacit knowledge, you wont find it on any website, and you can’t put a price on it.

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Wednesday, July 01, 2009

Cringe

It can be useful to just take a moment. Think of just one word that describes most closely how you remember or feel about the formative first twenty-five years of your life.

We did this with an Executive Group recently. They discussed it in pairs for a few minutes and then fed back on each other’s word. Someone said that ‘contentment’ sprang to mind – her childhood had been happy and relaxed with loving parents and two brothers.

Another said that ‘fear’ was the word. As an immigrant child of the sixties dropped into an inner city area, Rohan said that despite caring parents he reported that there was plenty to be afraid about.

And then someone said ‘fun’ because although Jane had not been brought up by her real parents she described the care and support she received as unconditional love.

One of the delegates took quite some time to find his word and the process seemed to upset him. Nonetheless he offered to share it anyway. The word was ‘cringe’.

It is interesting to speculate on the complex drivers inside each and every one of us. I find that it is so very rarely ‘money’ alone.

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