Freedom after the sharks

I have been engaged in several discussions recently discussing the topic of human to human interaction in relationships and in the workplace.

So many technologies allow us to collaborate “virtually” today. Email, instant messaging, video conferencing, and desktop sharing are common parts of the workday for many people. But regardless of what technologies we use, all of our interactions still rely on a basic element: each other. No matter how many great and easy to use tools we have, we cannot forge ahead and progress without other people.

So the question is “do we need to get back to intimacy?”

We have always learned that people are more engaged when they can interact the way humans have done for thousands of years: face to face. When personal meetings are not possible, there is a tendency to embrace technology.

There are four key points for successful collaboration, and they all rely on human behavior.

·        Build relationships and networks that lead to trust

·        Turn human interactions into results

·        Balance decision-making and consensus building

·        Evolve the culture for productive collaboration

People collaborate to innovate in businesses. This type of collaboration focuses on developing creative solutions or ideas that improve an existing process or product. Through ongoing collaboration, socialisation, and vetting, the idea develops into a viable solution to discuss a new market opportunity, re-engineer a core process, solve a problem, or create business value. Technology can be used as the accelerator for change, transformation, and improvement.

Harvard University has studied this subject for years. They state that the human moment has two prerequisites: people’s physical presence and their emotional and intellectual attention. That’s it. Physical presence alone isn’t enough. You can ride shoulder-to-shoulder with someone for six hours in an airplane and not have a human moment during the entire ride. And attention alone isn’t enough either. You can pay attention to someone over the telephone, for instance, but somehow phone conversations lack the power of true human moments.

Human moments need energy. Often, that’s what makes them so easy to avoid. The human moment may be seen as yet another tax on our overextended lives. But a human moment doesn’t have to be emotionally draining or personally revealing. In fact, the human moment can be brisk, business like, and brief. A five-minute conversation can be a perfectly meaningful human moment. To make the human moment work, you have to set aside what you’re doing, put down the memo you were reading, disengage from your laptop, abandon your daydream, and focus on the person you’re with. Usually when you do that, the other person will feel the energy and respond in kind. Together, you quickly create a force field of exceptional power.

The positive effects of a human moment can last long after the people involved have said goodbye and walked away. People begin to think in new and creative ways; mental activity is stimulated. But like exercise, which also has enduring effects, the benefits of a human moment do not last indefinitely. A ten-mile run on Monday is wonderful—but only if you also swim on Wednesday and play tennis on Saturday. In other words, you must engage in human moments on a regular basis for them to have a meaningful impact on your life. For most people, that’s not a tall order.

I am concerned, however, that human moments are disappearing and that this trend will be accompanied by worrisome and widespread consequences. I say this not as an executive who has seen and lived through the many technological challenges of the last 20 years. As discussed in my earlier post ‘Is human to human communication dying?’ I can tell you without a doubt that almost everyone on the planet is experiencing some deficiency of human contact. The power of Face to Face contact in a relationship need not die however it should be lived and exercised as an important medium across effective technology if we are to accelerate business progress, relationships, and indeed trust.

What does your organisation define as valuable points for successful collaboration? Does it encourage human relationships?

I visited the annual gala for one of the charities that I support recently. The event and evening took its normal schwa ray of greetings and smiles, with exchanges, and my amusement. For the first time, I was not asked for a business card but “could I kindly have sight of your QR code” whilst I held a large grin on face. I could not help but wonder what had happened to the long tradition of exchanging business cards.

To my relief, the next person I met did actually ask me for my business card. I asked myself if this is the end of a lifetime of generations where etiquette was a formality of exchanging a business card.

I remember my time in Japan and China where presenting your card with two hands is a big part of business culture. To these cultures this is the first representation of you. I could not imagine a PA to a director carrying your iPhone, Android, or Blackberry to the person you are about to meet.

Are we now going to be subjected to “can I see your QR code” and the next thing you know you will be zapped in a CRM program for life?

Industries may change and brand names may come and go, but at least one tradition in the business world has remained largely unchanged for hundreds of years. The exchange of cards between two people who are meeting for the first time is a ritual that goes back as far as business itself.

For most of us, the handing over of contact details is an important moment – a clear signal that a connection has been made. But as our lives turn increasingly digital, technology is attempting to offer a range of futuristic alternatives to the old-fashioned card.

Ever since the arrival of electronic communication, people have explored new ways to share information with each other from swapping email addresses to trading mobile phone numbers and, increasingly, connecting through an online social network.

In the majority of cases, I believe business cards matter. The personal and interactive approach vs a CRM listing is what builds trust and the relationship.

Here are some other reasons why:

• How many times have you met someone, spent most of the conversation thinking of what to say so you don’t sound stupid, then, promptly forget their name when it’s all over?
• When you meet a person at a business event and get their business card you can write a note or two on the reverse side of the card to capture the key points of your conversation while they are still fresh in your mind. The bottom line here is to have a physical record of contacts you make so you can follow-up as appropriate in conjunction with your broader job search/career development efforts.
• A business card is a road map to opportunity. It could lead you to a great new job, a great business partnership, or simply help your business make money.
• Business cards put a face to a business. When meeting someone new, handing them your business card will help keep your business in the back of their minds. Though they may not need your product or services today, there may come a time when they do, and hopefully they will be able to pull out your business card and call versus trying to remember your company name and searching the web.
• Your business card is a physical object that potential clients can take with them that keeps you or your brand from just being a name that floats around in the ether.
• Business cards never have downtime. They are always accessible, and never have dead zones or Internet outages. Your business card can be viewed no matter where you are located, and even at times when cell phones and other devices must be turned off, such as on an airplane ride or in a hospital, your business card is always working for you.

Not everyone thinks business cards are essential, and some argue business cards have lost their edge.

Technology, and—more specifically—smartphones have made information sharing easier. These days you can email someone while you’re meeting them with a few quick taps of your thumb. There are even apps out there that can share contact information with someone with barely any effort at all. So why bother with a card when you have all of this other stuff?

Networking is about making meaningful connections, and sometimes technology—or the act of using it—can be impersonal.

What are your thoughts? Will business cards become extinct? Do you still  look at the effectiveness of your card design before you re-order? Did you add a QR code to your cards?

I was invited to an executive finance meeting in London recently, hosted by one of the UK’s top business schools, I was discussing many key topics around business today when we moved to the subject of excellence.

Last week’s blog talked around the Changing World, I was discussing are we having to redefine excellence for today’s world, what is the definition of excellence today and how is excellence measured in the eyes of others?

Over the centuries, great thinkers have described just what excellence is. Excellence is not perfectionism. Rather, excellence is a journey through an ever-changing landscape of new possibilities and methods. It is the best result that can be produced at a particular moment in time.

Therefore, excellence is something that can be achieved. But it can also be quickly lost as well. “Today’s Excellence, Tomorrow’s Mediocrity.” According to Aristotle, “Excellence is not an act, but a habit.”

More recently, John Gardner observed that “Excellence is doing ordinary things extraordinarily well.” While Thomas Peters really nailed it when he observed that “Excellent firms don’t believe in excellence – only in constant improvement and constant change.”

Thirty years ago, Tom Peters published an incredibly influential business book, In Search of Excellence. In this book, he defined eight characteristics of excellent companies:

• a bias for action,
• staying close to the customer,
• autonomy and entrepreneurship,
• productivity through people,
• clear and compelling organizational values,
• focusing on what you do best,
• operating with a lean staff, and
• finding a balance between having enough structure without getting stuck in it.

These principles stay good guides to this day. However, the business world has changed almost beyond recognition over the last 30 years, and the time has come to redefine what excellence means. In today’s world, excellence is more than a set of principles. It’s a set of beliefs, ways of thinking, a matter of discipline, and ways of focusing.

Excellence starts with getting very clear on the end state you wish to achieve (winning) and relentlessly driving towards it every day. Excellence requires knowing when to push on (even when you don’t have all the information or the perfect solution), but doing it well and constantly refining as you forge ahead. Excellence means accepting only the best, and understanding that when it is not given that you, as the leader, are at least partly responsible.

Excellence reveals itself in the language you use, the questions you ask, the people you surround yourself with, and how you interact with others. For example, do you show up on time for meetings? Are you present in the moment? Do you listen actively to employees and direct reports? Are you aware of the biases and creative thoughts you bring to the table? Do you take steps to minimise their impact on your decision-making, or at least explore others as well?

In today’s hyper-fast world, excellence requires building flexible, lean organisations that can quickly adapt to rapidly changing markets without losing sight of their vision of winning. Creating this type of organisation starts with three critical elements.

Clarity

First and foremost, you have to know where you’re going and why. When faced with adversity (or opportunity), having a crystal-clear definition of winning keeps the company from going off in too many directions. It enables clear and consistent decision-making, not only in terms of what you will do as an organisation, but also what you will not do.

Focus

Getting clear on winning represents the starting point for excellence. Keeping your people focused on winning is the engine that will get you there. As the leader, you live and breathe the vision, mission, and strategy every day (or at least you should!). But for the people in the trenches, it’s all too easy to lose sight of the big picture. Excellence requires making winning a daily goal for your people as well.

Connection

People won’t buy into your vision of winning unless they feel connected to the organisation. Connection starts with having a powerful vision people can believe in and feel good about. Keeping it going requires a variety of leadership behaviors that often get overlooked in the rush to get the product out the door.

Clarity, focus, and connection are the status of corporate excellence in the 21st century. What will you do today to create them in your organisation?​

I have had some very interesting discussions recently with economists, futurists, and experts discussing ‘The Changing World’. We are living in a changing world and where once a company may have survived with its original model, now there are no guarantees that the future is going to systematically be the same.

However, with all this said there is tremendous optimism across such areas like social enterprise, it is estimated that there are 68.000 companies in the UK alone contributing about £24 billion to the economy.

Innovation

This word is widely used in business today, I prefer to use the terms ‘creativity or collaboration’ in business since it all involves human intervention. This embraces new ideas, processes, products, and business models specifically geared towards solving gaps in the market

Implementation

In any organisation and in a changing world it is never easy to execute new ideas, products, or transformation. It is about being strategically sustainable to innovate in the next 50 years or even 100 years down the road. Company’s need to engage their stakeholders in decisions that will affect the company’s performance for years to come. One of the answers is for government and company’s to work more integrated to meet a technical solution or the creative new service that is going to revolutionise the next generation.

Leadership

In summary, ‘The changing world’ is being driven by shifts and advances in technology, demography, globalisation, and social values among others. Depending on how much time we have available, we vary how deep a look we can take at these and other drivers of change.

The changing workforce picks up the theme of demographic shifts and values, and looks at how a new generation of employees is arriving in the world of work with a different set of expectations and values at just the same time that the oldest working generation is deciding to extend their stay in the workplace.

A new workforce in a new world are changing how we work, and will continue to put pressure on traditional notions of the workplace. Important themes in the future will continue to be flexibility in workplace conditions, remote and virtual teams, and all forms of contract working, diversity, complexity, speed and creativity.

Three new leadership imperatives for The Changing World:

1. Engagement – the ways in which we engage with each other have changed, driven mainly by technology, but also by all the forces outlined above. Leaders need to learn new approaches to engagement, and shift from a control mindset to influence
2. Agility – Keep growing, keep learning, don’t become rigid. Leaders need to be ready to fail – and learn from it
3. Transparency – we have never had as much openness as we have now, both inside and outside our organisations. This changes the way a leader leads, requiring more openness, more disclosure and greater accountability.

What are your recommendations?

Culture and Diversity in Business: do you have what it takes to understand your customers, partners and employees?

As a member of the PCC (psychology of culture change group) we often discuss key issues around international business and sustainability, diversity and importantly culture.

I have worked in 160 countries around the world, these learning’s are certainly a key to being successful in business internationally and to understand the role of culture in international business.

Whatever sector you are operating in, cultural differences will have a direct impact on your profitability. Improving your level of knowledge of international cultural difference in business can aid in building international competencies as well as enabling you to gain a competitive advantage.

The values and behaviours that contribute to the unique social and psychological environment of an organisation is a key part in the understanding and communication of culture.

Organisational culture includes an organization’s expectations, experiences, philosophy, and values that hold it together, and is expressed in its self-image, inner workings, interactions with the outside world, and future expectations. It is based on shared attitudes, beliefs, customs, and written and unwritten rules that have been developed over time and are considered valid. Also called corporate culture, and has a major bearing on productivity and employee engagement, it can be shown in the following:

• the ways the organisation conducts its business, treats its employees, customers, and the wider community,
• the extent to which freedom is allowed in decision-making, developing new ideas, and personal expression,
• how power and information flow through its hierarchy, and
• how committed employees are towards collective objectives.However, on the one hand where it is important to be aware of cultural differences of different countries, on the other, it is also hard to be aware of every single aspect of each country’s organisational culture. Therefore, you should be aware of the key factors that have a direct impact on business.

These are:

1. Communication is the key to success for any business, whether you are operating nationally or internationally, but when operating internationally it becomes even more important due to language barriers.
2. Being aware of basic customer needs is an important aspect as this will give the advantage of conveying your message. In simple terms, if you are aware of the customer’s cultural background, then you will be able to adopt better and more suitable advertising methods.
3. Body language is another key factor in cultural difference. As different countries have different ways to convey or share their message, for instance in Germany people tend to speak loudly when sharing ideas, whereas in Japan people speak softly, it very important to know what your body language should be doing when interacting with people whether it’s your business partner or an interviewer.

Before launching a marketing campaign, always conduct research to become aware of your target audience since customer demand, decision-making, gender views and ideologies greatly vary in cultures.

Culture affects the way people think about business in their own society. An awareness of cultural attitudes toward business will help you communicate efficiently and effectively when working with people from other cultures. For example, Asian cultures, including Japan and China, promote teamwork and cooperation in business environments while Western businesses promote individual action and responsibility. Understanding these values will help you to create an effective communication strategy with partners from these regions.

All of us global minds have been confronted with cultural differences at some point. They often lead to amusing misunderstandings, but can also have a serious impact on your career if you are not aware.

 Cloud computing, the technology that allows software and data to be shared on the internet, is now being adopted by large companies that say this infrastructure has become their top technology investment this year. So are large companies keen on adoption because of the savings on IT expenditure?

With all the media speculation and reality across cyber-crime, hacking and phishing, is the technology also fraught with challenges and privacy risks?

In a survey of 4,500 high-level IT professionals in 83 countries, ISACA (the Information Systems Audit and Control Association) discovered that organisations fear the risks of using public cloud services.

69% of North American respondents believed that the risks of using the cloud outweigh the benefits. In all regions, data security was the most widely cited risk—with European respondents also being wary of the specific dangers that surround breaches of their customers’ and employees’ privacy.

One of the biggest impediments to public cloud computing adoption is the calculation of additional risk from all the dangers associated with online internet crime.

Analysing all the risks, here’s a list of five risks any business faces as a customer of a public cloud service:

• Shared access
• Virtual exploits
• Authentication, authorisation and access control
• Availability
• Ownership

The mobility of smart phones, netbooks, tablet PCs and other portable devices has fundamentally changed the when, where and how of our computing lives. And with cloud services, the source for data and applications used by these devices can be anywhere, too. The flexibility of cloud to scale bandwidth up or down at will, and its affordability as a pay-as-you-go service, have resulted in an interconnected, intelligent approach to smarter computing.

The benefits of cloud computing are well-recognised. In fact, cloud computing ranks among the most popular new IT initiatives, with 66 percent of midsize companies implementing cloud strategies, according to IBM’s study, “Inside the Midmarket: A 2011 Perspective.” Yet the excitement about leveraging cloud’s economies of scale to lower total IT costs and improve agility is often tempered by concern that this external delivery of services could compromise security.

​Cloud may seem new, but the fact is companies have outsourced services and technology for years. Providers already deliver hosted technology offerings that are located offsite with client access via the Internet. This is a common scenario for services such as remote storage or hosted email and other software as a service (SaaS) solutions. And just because companies may give up some control to the provider when they move to a cloud-based environment (just as they give up some control in any outsourced arrangement), it doesn’t mean they have to compromise on security.

Although there are additional variations, let’s consider the three main types of cloud service and deployment models: software as a service (SaaS), platform as a service (PaaS) and infrastructure as a service (IaaS).

Each version has its own level of control for the provider and the company purchasing services, but all cloud services can help companies increase agility and boost efficiency by removing the burden of managing all of their own IT. This frees up organizations to do more with less and stay focused on their core competencies.

Software as a service (SaaS) puts most of the responsibility for security management with the cloud provider and is commonly used for services such as customer relationship management and accounting. This popular option is considered low-risk because it primarily deals only with software and not hardware or storage. With SaaS, companies are able to control who has access to these cloud services and how the applications are configured. The complexity of software installation, maintenance, upgrades and patches, meanwhile, is automated and handled by the provider.

In a smarter business world—the when, where and how of living and working is more instrumented, data-driven and interconnected than ever before-cloud computing can be a powerful way for companies to be more agile, effective and efficient.

Starting a business from the ground up is an exciting and daunting challenge for both first-time and experienced entrepreneurs.

Running a company is a complex undertaking with many requirements, one of which is building a technology infrastructure that supports both connectivity and flexibility.

Money can be tight in the early stages of business development, so entrepreneurs sometimes have to be creative, especially when it comes to investing in pricey technology.  What many business owners don’t know is that it is possible to build an integrated office, accessible from anywhere, without building a complicated and expensive network.  Using the latest wireless technology, it is easier now more than ever to maximize productivity and speedy access to data with a minimal investment of capital.

Some entrepreneurs are naturally tech-savvy. For the rest of us, technology seems like just one more daunting task to master. Even choosing the right cell phone or PDA, such as a BlackBerry, has become a complex and time-consuming effort. But when you’re running a business, you need to keep up a certain level of professionalism from the start-up, especially when it comes to tech basics like e-mail, websites, and communications. Fortunately, there are countless programs you can tap into for help on tasks ranging from e-mail blasts to telephone conference calling to website add-ons, even with limited technical know-how.

I will share 10 tips for building a connected business:

1. Don’t miss important calls

2. Don’t limit yourself to desktop Internet access

3. Never get lost when handling business

4. Leave e-mail management to the experts

5.  Don’t attempt to be a network administration professional

6. Connect directly with your wireless phone

7. Have a backup plan for your communications system

8. Stay connected to industry news from just about anywhere

9. Save money by making unlimited calls to your office landline number

10. Secure your mobile phone

Of course, these are just a few tips that you can adopt. Communication and technology are fundamental in today’s business world. Fortunately, advances in wireless technology can really help small business owners stay connected and coördinate with clients and employees while simultaneously growing the business to help you communicate via e-mail, the web and the phone with professionalism; even if your company is just one or two employees strong.

Talk to fellow business owners, search the internet, and ask for recommendations when other business requirements arise along the way; chances are there’s a company that will cater to your needs. And remember, perception is everything. Retailers and customers will take you more seriously if you already look like an established, profitable business they can rely on!