Cubicle Commandos

This is an interesting little book recently published which will get stacked up on my bedside table. The premise is that for those people who have an entrepreneurial spirit but not the courage or resources to go out and do it alone, there are still strategies for making a difference and influencing change from within a corporation. It is a celebration of, and encouragement for, all those souls that strive to improve a business from the inside.

I can strongly relate to this idea and its under-the-radar practitioners - time and again at seminars and user groups we meet people struggling to do better within their circles of influence. They look for ways to improve what they and others around them do and protect the business from repeatedly falling into holes. Most improvements sought are based around changes in how the people and processes operate in the business, and sooner or later that comes to product (applications) - the 3P holy trinity of business process management.

The challenge for many Cubicle Commandos is that although they're close to the action and know what can be done to improve they frequently are not in senior decision making roles nor do they have discretionary budget to call upon. So they struggle through the bureaucracy and red tape in the business to get some localised improvement over the line. Then they have to go out and do it all over again.

If you are a decision maker and budget holder, take time to seek out your Cubicle Commandos - nurture them - they might make a big difference to your day. Looking beyond the localisation, there may be a way to clean up a process end-to-end rather than edge-to-edge.

Biggles boggled out

The Australia Day Google Maps fly over is long past and I promised a link to the spot where we went so here it is. Clifton Gardens, a nice harbourside beach with small waves, safe for the kiddies to play in.

Unfortunately due to last minute air traffic control restrictions and time challenges the Google Biggles didn't actually fly over us - we saw the plane out over the harbour but it never came in to us - so I'm not in the picture - in fact no-body is, it must have been taken in Winter.

The much more famous and fabulous Bondi Beach and Manly came up a treat though. And a great view of a surf lifesaver carnival at Freshwater.

Death to death by PowerPoint

Part of our Best Employer initiatives is regular communication across the business on what and how we are doing and where we are doing it. We recently had the past quarter company update that is a morning session comprising of about 8 different corporate and divisional presentations, supposedly for an hour but some quarters long past are remembered for their record breaking overruns!

It was not unusual for these sessions to turn into "death by PowerPoint" and you all know what I mean by that. Over the last couple of years a brave group of pioneers started to change the way they built their presentations. Rather than a slide buried in bullet points there would appear a single topic along with a picture. Now when I say "picture" I don't mean a graph or a logo, I mean a genuine photograph or cartoon of people, places or situations that was in some way evocative of the topic in hand. The presenter then talked to the topic whilst ideally drawing in some reference, however obliquely, to the picture. Very novel. Mind you, this was skunk-works, nothing officially mandated.

It had two outcomes, these presentations started to be rated as the "best" in the following online survey, they also tended to stay within their allotted time - no bloat. The message to all? people like pictures. Last week the presentations were riddled with pictures and it only ran marginally late - possibly a record breaker. Purely through exposing everyone to different ways of doing something the mass had adopted the change as a norm.

So strip out all the bullet points in your next presentation, put one key message on the slide and support it with picture that ties your message up in a memorable package. Give it a try, you might find it fun.

Now, where to get the pictures? The Internet dummy! There is a raft of stock photography suppliers online that sell low res images at very affordable rates. I'm not going to favour any one over another by naming them. I have really been delighted with the kind and generous nature of many of the amateur photographers that post on http://www.flickr.com/. There are millions of images here and I have found that generally the owners are delighted for you to use an image of theirs at no cost as long as the source is referenced and the presentation is not something that is being sold as part of a commercial offering. Find one you like and ask the owner - you may be surprised. The world is full of givers just waiting to be asked.

Bank your emotional credits early

I was chastised today for letting my blog entries lapse - time is a precious commodity these days and work, travel, kids, ill family members and handyman jobs have conspired to keep me away from the keyboard last month.

Another whirlwind week of business in London during Feb and another battle with the misery that is Heathrow airport. That place must be terribly demoralising to work in – it seems to suck the smiles out of people as they arrive – international travel has become a tedious and stressful thing since 2001 and it is made even more so by the surly, dismissive attitudes of ground staff.

In contrast some of the clients and business partners I caught up with are just brimming with energy and enthusiasm, ideas and innovations. It is amazing how the power of an individual can be magnified by a positive corporate culture.

I had three recent interesting conversations that led me to today’s post.

We have been providing training to some of our partners recently and one attendee was espousing how much better the experience was with PA than another organisation. Only wanting to beat our chest slightly, we are proud – and I think justifiably so – of our iPOS "boot camp" training, a lot of effort has been put into it by people much smarter than me. The comment was that we gave freely and willingly of information whereas getting things out of the other party was like pulling teeth.

We also have two large, publicly listed organisations using our Consolidations for SunSystems application who recently communicated their joy and delight with its functionality and operations. They both have achieved significant and tangible cost and data integrity benefits from the implementation to the point where they could now not easily function without it. Each of them have also requested enhancements and modifications to make it even better. Always on the lookout for good marketing I asked each if they would provide a "Consolidations from PA is great because ....." statement that we could use as a testimonial.

One turned a brilliant statement around overnight - a giver.

The other came back with a mealy mouthed "when you do what we have asked then we might think about it" - a taker.

In a previous existence I had the pleasure and privilege of having a smart and generous man as the business owner at a client. He called this sort of thing "emotional credit". We did a good job all month every month for his company year-in year-out and he constantly offered his services to us for case study and prospect references. He liked to bank his emotional credits early so that any time he did have a problem he knew there was a deep well of goodwill to draw upon to ensure a best possible resolution. And he was right, if the excrement hit the air movement device we pulled out all stops to deliver for his business.

Bank your emotional credits early. You get a whole lot more out of life.