Scared of failure!

I’m looking forward to catching up with the amazing tour-de-force that is Mitja Okorn later this week. The first time I met Mitja he talked a lot about the defining moments in his life and career as a film-maker and about how thankful he was for all the ‘disaster moments’ in his life. It was the ‘epic fails’ that usually offered up opportunities, lessons and new paths. And so he is passionate about seeing good in any situation!

We often hear, in the British Council, the mantra that we need to be less scared of failure and, I agree, we do. However, that’s just the beginning for me because being less scared of failure is only a good thing if it leads, ultimately to bigger and more impressive wins.

So, how can we turn failure into success? Well, here’s a few principles that I personally find useful:

1. Fear factor – Ok, I hate failing, not winning, not being the best I can be etc. But I know that I can’t always be on the winning team (a life supporting Swansea City has certainly prepared me well in that respect). So, I have developed a thick skin that helps me live with the discomfort, embarrassment and vulnerability of failing. Without that confidence I would never get out of bed in the morning and would probably play MLB The Show all day on my Playstation Vita (some days I try to do that anyway!)

2. Learning and not repeating – As Mitja knows, there’s learning and opportunity in every disaster. The key, though, is to recognise the learning, apply it and move on without the pain of repeating the same mistakes or experiences.

3. Aim high – We increase the risk of failure if we set our ambition high and that’s a good thing. If we play it safe every day then we may well appear to be in control and to be some kind of smooth-superhuman. However, life is moving at such a pace that small, incremental steps often need to be interspersed with giant, scary, inspirational leaps of faith! We don’t always land on our feet!

4. Move on quickly – I tend to dwell on the failures only long enough to understand and learn and then I move on. In fact, I move on so quickly and so completely that I’m sure most of my failures are buried so deep that most of my brain never even recognises that they happened. It’s that essential thick skin again!

5. Be hurt but not damaged – None of us should like getting bruised and beat up when things don’t go right and it’s that professional hurt that inspires me to learn and be better next time. However, I refuse to carry with me the negative stuff because it will only get in the way.

I remember a speaker at a digital conference a few years back (Bill Thompson?) who said that statistics show that most entrepreneurs who fail at the first hurdle simply go on to fail again. The myth that failure is always good needs exploding!

Smart working

There’s a lot of talk at the British Council, and I’m sure in many other organisations, at the moment about smart working. So I thought I’d blog about what I think smart working is and isn’t all about. The smart working conversation seems to revolve around the drive to reduce office footprint and costs, using technology to make people more mobile and flexible and less reliant on their desk. For sure, it’s dependent on technology but in my view it’s also about a range of other factors that are all about how we behave and organise ourselves.

1. technology – having great access to the hygiene stuff (emails, files, systems etc) – anywhere, anytime, anyplace (clearing emails on the bus or standing in the supermarket queue). Surely no organisation can continue to work on the principle that its employees’ main function is to commute into an office, log on to a dedicated computer, manage their inbox for 8 hours and then go home.

2. focus – spending time on the important stuff and ignoring the rest with a clear conscience. The importance of multitasking is well over-rated. In my view, there’s probably three or four big projects that I need to be spending my time on – the rest is a distraction.

3. speed – getting stuff done with urgency and pace. There’s a great book on this by John P Kotter – download it and read it (today! :0)

4. flexibility – responding to opportunities when they come up. It’s not smart to be so focussed that you don’t look up and around you at the many opportunities that present themselves everyday. The smart thing is knowing which ones to bite on and which ones to pass.

5. quality – never forgetting that the end product or service has to be fantastic quality, inspiring people to buy it, collect it, share it etc.

6. teamwork – working in teams in creative spaces. When I go to work I want to enter an environment that encourages interaction and engagement with my team. The current set up in most organisations (rows of individual work stations) doesn’t do it for me.

7. fun – it’s not smart to spend most of our adult lives doing something that isn’t fun, is it?

New Year’s Resolution

I’ve never had a problem going back to work after a long(ish) break. I’m lucky enough to have a stimulating, challenging job and no two days are ever the same. So, to be honest, I LOVE getting back! However, it IS tricky to get back into the swing of things in January after Christmas and New Year celebrations with friends and family. It feels wrong to be going back to work when the tree is still up and festive and there are still mince pies in the cupboard.

To help I have a few coping strategies and my favourite is all about planning. I had a boss in Damascus between ’97 and ’99 who taught me many things but by far the most important thing was this: always spend your first day back at work in January planning your holidays for the year. Get dates in the diary, think up mad travel adventures and visualise the year ahead in terms of breaks! Ok, on one level, this is all about easing yourself back into work as gently as possible. But on another more important level, it’s about getting your priorities right and ring-fencing time throughout the year for yourself and your family. If you don’t do this, the time will fly and you’ll be playing catch up the whole year. So, pretty sound advice I reckon and job done!

Today is day two back at work for me and it’s a full day ahead mostly looking at our new Customer Relationship Management system – yay! I’m not one for New Year’s Resolutions as I generally make resolutions every day of my life. My personal preoccupation today is all about improving the sound quality of the music I listen to and I’m searching out a new speaker system to stream music from my Mac. I like the look of these B&O speakers but, gulp, they’re pricey. At the moment, I’m having to comfort myself with my trusty Bose headphones that I’ve had for ages and an extraordinary jazz album from Scottish drummer, Tom Bancroft’s Trio Red called First Hello To Last Goodbye. If you need a shot of energy, creativity and inventiveness to start 2013 then look no further! Extraordinary!

Downtime

This is my view for most of this week!

Taking time out to reflect!

I’ve just come back from four days in the wet and cold of an English summer where I was attending a marketing boot camp for British Council directors. We covered, at quite a pace, a whole range of topics under the broad headings of Insight, Planning and Digital Marketing. Was it worth dedicating four days from my busy schedule? Absolutely. Did I feel like cancelling at the last minute and staying in Warsaw to crack on with my busy workload? Oh yes!

So, what stopped me from bailing out? Well, it’s never ease to take time out for personal development, reflection, top-up training etc. but the pay offs are nearly always considerable. This week, I have had the space and time to reflect and review the progress we are making in Poland. Like most busy operations, it’s usually a case of ‘heads down’ and ‘full speed ahead’ serving customers, delivering projects and dealing with the day-to-day issues common to any big business. This week I have helicoptered by detaching myself and looking objectively at how we operate, what we are trying to achieve and what needs to change to be more effective.

If you don’t take time out to reflect then, in high-speed delivery mode, you can easily miss out on an important insight and an opportunity to do things differently. I’ve also really enjoyed, as I always do, the opportunity to learn from the experience of the British Council’s global network of Directors. The challenges we face are rarely unique and much can be gained from listening to the way other people approach things.

Of course, you don’t always need to take a whole week to review and reflect. I try to build this self-reflection into my work week by blocking an hour or two on a Friday afternoon to review the week and assess how I’m doing. I don’t always succeed in actually doing as much reflection in that Friday slot as I would like but at least it stops my calendar overdosing on meetings!

So, I’m back to the office today full of insight, renewed energy and ideas for the coming months. I’m also back to a jam-packed day of meetings, a long backlog of emails and a list of pending tasks. Bring it on!

Last train home

If you have ever tried to get home to your family in South Wales by train from Paddington Station on Christmas Eve, then watch Last Train Home by Lixin Fan. You will never complain about packed trains, expensive buffet cars, lack of seats or drunk Welshmen ever again! In fact, you may never complain about anything in your life ever again!

Last Train Home is a heartbreaking documentary about the Zhangs, a middle aged couple, just two of the estimated 130 million migrant workers in China, who work in Guangzhou to send money back to their family in a small village to ensure their children can get the education they never received. Every year they fight (literally) to board a train at Chinese New Year to make the long journey home. In one part we see them waiting for five days in the pouring rain before they are even allowed onto the train in Guangzhou and then the train weaves its way slowly through the bleak Chinese landscape to Chongqinq. Ferries, buses and a long walk up a mountain, dragging their belongings, ensues before they reach their children and parents and the inevitable family tension and lack of communication and understanding. Gripping and compassionate in equal parts – you can’t help but feel for the Zhangs (even when the father loses it with his 17 year old daughter).

I watched this on the iPad after day two of our marketing boot camp. I had begun to feel a bit down after being reminded of all the sensible marketing techniques and processes that should be part of our day-to-day business life in Poland. The challenges we face in Europe (whether in business or in our personal lives) are, of course, compelling but pale into insignificance when you witness the human struggle of the Zhangs. So, I’m up for day 3 and day 4 of the boot camp with a lighter heart and looking forward to two days of Digital Marketing.

Insight!

This week I’m deep in the heart of Berkshire, UK attending a Marketing ‘boot camp’ for British Council Directors from all over our global network. Yesterday we spent the day talking about ‘Market Insight’ with the passionate and forceful Jean Sutton from the Chartered Institute of Marketing. The day was full of inspiration so here’s a selection of my personal takeaways:

1. What is insight? That ‘aha lightbulb‘ moment when we get new, deeper, inspirational, fresh understanding of customer beliefs, values, habits, motives, emotions or needs that lead to a competitive advantage. Insight is the diamond in the rubble – needs to be searched out and then polished and honed. Insight has resonance and edge.

2. Be specific and systematic – it’s hard to draw new and useful insight when we don’t really define what the business challenge is or what decision we want help with.

3. Look beyond the obvious to get the most out of market research and don’t forget to constantly ask your most important question: ‘So what?’ You won’t get new insight by looking at things in the same way so we constantly need to uncover the unknown. Stand out headlines for me were: “Look where others don’t look, to find what others can’t find!” and “See what everyone else has seen but think what no one else has thought”. I’m a sucker for an inspirational one-liner!

4. Keep it simple! I liked the clarity that Larissa from Bosnia used: “What do our audiences need, what do they need it for and who’s going to pay?”

5. Build insight in creative and innovative ways. We talked, for example, about crowd sourcing games that enabled customers to run their own virtual clothing stores so informing real stores what colours, styles etc to stock. I remembered the great story of how ‘Innocent‘ tested the market for their yoghurt smoothies. They pitched up at a big student event to give away free samples of their new drinks and simply asked people to throw away the empty bottles when they finished into one of two bins labelled either ‘Yes, give up the day job and launch a new company selling these yoghurt drinks’ or ‘No, don’t give up the day job’. By the end of the night the first bin was brimming with bottles and the rest is history.

6. Potpourri of inspiration: stimulating creativity and new ways of thinking through storytelling; JWT Intelligence (for trending); Brainjuicer; the idea of finding like-minded people at events using social-seating; using Pinterest to track trends and capture insight.

A stimulating day one! Tuesday is focussed on Planning, Strategy and Return on Investment.