As good as it gets?

The kids have been sent off to Pau with their mother. I am now sitting on the couch in Biarritz waiting for the finals of my favourite UK TV programmes “Strictly Come Dancing” and “X-Factor” after also having managed to get the bike out for almost two hours this afternoon during their siesta. I’ve just tidied the house and there are bananas, fresh milk and vanilla ice-cream in the fridge. For a cleanliness obsessed 35 year father of a young family, does life get any better than this?

Dance, and bike, before the music starts

I often think that my initial spells in Oxford and Paris might have been more enjoyable if I had been readier to embrace the particularities and inherent character of each place. It’s not just a case of not dancing faster than the music it’s also a case of singing in tune with it. That said, every now and again it is beneficial to stand out from the crowd. Although I personally am, France is definitely not a country of early risers. Hence my delight to be able to get up at the crack of dawn and get a not insignificant part of my Christmas shopping done by 10.30AM this morning without having to fight with a flood of furious festive shoppers. Two hours in the mountains on my new bike in the afternoon added a feeling of virtue to the smug spring in my step. The upshot was that I felt at ease easting copious amounts of chocolate cake at Maxime’s second birthday party today in Biarritz. Round that all off with a healthy dose of X-Factor fun and it’s safe to say that it’s been a good day all round.

Getting back in the saddle

The problem with being passionate about the job that you do and the people in your team is that you leave yourself open to the risk that sometimes it makes you sad. Over the last couple of months the ideas have been coming as ever but the blog postings have not. I’ve been embroiled in a few rather complicated topics which have taken up a lot of mental and emotional energy. The sadness comes from the fact that despite my being personally committed and completely convinced of a plan that I had developed, another route has been chosen by senior management and it is one that is likely to have a human cost. I suppose it’s somewhat ironic then that when I started to write this particular posting, I found an earlier half-finished posting which started by saying, “there are so many different lines of reporting and management that decision making power is all over the place and that people who sit together on a daily basis have much more ability to influence things than people who are travelling remotely, regardless of level of seniority in a company.” As I sit here in my new role as influencer rather than one of the two owners or decision makers who are finalizing their top down 2013 plan, I must make a mental note to be careful for what I wish for.

So that somewhat cryptic explanation aside, what else has been going on since Gaston and Capucine’s second birthday…

I find that we as adult humans tend to try and create generalizations to serve as short cuts in this time starved world. Despite getting better at trying to avoid living life at one million miles an hour, I unfortunately do the same – I’ve recently managed to refine and express my classification of French people into two categories. I believe that all French people are either râleur-moteur, or râleur-casseur. Basically this means all French people like to complain, although half of them complain and then try to make things better (“moteur” or a motor for change) , whereas the other half complain and then do nothing positive (from the verb “casser” which means “to break”). The trick in France is to surround oneself with the first type of person. A real life example is after a French team complained that there were never any social activities for them, I then arranged a series of nights out. Hardly anyone turned up. They only came after I pointed out to them that this was something they had asked for. Vive la France.

At work, I have had a number of key new people join the team in France, the Netherlands and Switzerland. It’s been nice to see the building out of a team in line with the initial analysis and definition of a strategy that was done. Only six weeks after their arrival things are really starting to pan out nicely, and this quarter’s financial results should back that up. I’ve got a couple of new strong operational leads which means I can start thinking about what we need to do a few months down the line. I personally have spent an inordinate amount of time in various internal meetings most notably “quarterly business reviews”. A section of these meetings have always been dedicated to people’s views on 2013. This has been most surreal (and largely a waste of time) because this year’s annual planning process is massively top down (very different to last year’s consensus based approach). Sitting in internal meetings is bad enough, even worse when they talk about topics that you know that you, or they, can’t actually influence. Apart from that I’ve been travelling pretty much as normal taking in the sights of Madrid, Zurich, Paris, Amsterdam and Brussels. I’ve also been down to Lisbon, or Estoril to be more exact. I took it as an opportunity to stay with a friend and meet the latest addition to his little family.

At home we had a change of au pair – we swapped an outgoing Nebraskan for a more reserved Californian. Lauren has been with us for a few weeks now and is getting used to the noise, disorder and general hustle bustle of life in a wet and chilly French town.  I’ve also had a few more horse jumping competitions with some very average results, but I think I might have made a breakthrough (how many times have I found myself writing that over the last two years with this animal?!). We’ve addressed challenges associated with his back legs, when he turns left, when he turns right and now, most recently, with his head…Surely there can’t be much else I need to think about before he’ll jump a clear round for me? Anyway I persevere because Michel is convinced that the end is in sight…

So it’s been a busy two months although there is one thing that stands out for me. After significant personal investment in one particular topic a decision was made contrary to my recommendation. Both of the options being discussed revolved around a significant degree of change. I am now ok with the fact they chose a different option – that can always happen. The irony is that last week we sold a new medium sized contract to a new client, and as an immediate result they threw two months of discussion out of the window and opted to retain the status quo. What I take from it all, is that if you are genuine about wanting to do transformational change, then you need to do something different. Lots of people talk about transformation as a good thing, but there is a much smaller number of people are prepared to embrace a different daily life as a result. This power of inertia has made me more cautious about choosing which problems to try and fix – are people really ready for big solutions?!

Two today!

That's the number of new wrinkles I have on my face in the nose and mouth area today. It is also how old the twins are. Maybe their youthfulness is linked to my ageing. A good day (and indeed birthday weekend) was had by all. They may not completely understand the whole thing, but they are certainly very good at blowing out candles and eating cake. Normal service resumes tomorrow with a 6.40AM flight to Paris. Now there's something that definitely isn't helping the wrinkles!

It's about productivity, stupid

I am enjoying my new role at work. On those days when I am feeling positive, I really like the fact that I'm trying to create new, sustainable jobs. However on some days in some countries the focus is simply trying to get the whole of the existing team busy. This contrast across countries really got me thinking that if we want to be successful over the long term, we've got to do more than just keep people loaded with any type of work we can find. We really need each of them to be more productive. This can be either doing more with less e.g. more of the same type of output in a shorter time period, or, doing different more valuable work in the time available. However this does mean that if everybody is doing more (quantity or quality), then we really need to sell either more of the same, or sell more complex work, to keep these increasingly productive people occupied. That type of reflection was why I found the following article so interesting and worrying at the same time...http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/0/78e883fa-0bef-11e2-8032-00144feabdc0.html#axzz28S9d2U5m

Effective Salesmen

I received these links from a colleague on Friday and I thought it made for interesting reading...

http://blogs.hbr.org/cs/2011/06/the_seven_personality_traits_o.html and http://blogs.hbr.org/cs/2012/09/top_reasons_salespeople_lose_b.html

Sunny Saturday, clouds on the horizon

The sun is shining this afternoon in Pau. I’m enjoying it streaming through my office window. After this week’s edition of the Economist dropped through the letter box this morning I read the following article and it initially served to lift my spirits… http://www.economist.com/node/21562915. The beginning of the end of the Euro crisis…wouldn’t that be nice?!... However this quickly made me think about another article which I read earlier in the week; http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/news/danielhannan/100180151/the-euro-crisis-stand-by-for-years-of-slow-wretched-decline/. This second article muses over what a recession actually looks like. It suggested that the Euro crisis would never manifest itself as, “lines of men in cloth caps queuing at soup kitchens – and somehow doing so in grainy black-and-white footage”. The article went to say on that, “because journalists deal in drama, they like to frame the euro crisis as a choice between ‘a solution’ and a catastrophic breakdown. But surely there is a third option, namely that people carry on getting gradually poorer. Imagine that you lost your main source of income tomorrow. At first, not much would change. You’d still be driving the same car, sleeping in the same bed. Only as things broke, and went unreplaced, would your poverty become visible. Dilapidation would steal upon you progressively.”

So the question I asked myself was whether or not if we have indeed turned a corner, will people notice, will people recognize how close we came to the edge of economic meltdown, or will people just carry on expecting the government to subsidize bread and petrol (as in France)? Will people actually change their behaviour as a result of recent events, or did things just not get bad enough? Clearly many people were affected negatively and this posting is not to diminish their hardship, but were enough people impacted to actually mean more widespread change for the better? This human condition of only acting when things are really bad is actually quite depressing. In sales we even celebrate this type of behaviour – we rejoice when we find that, “the customer has a compelling event!” Why can’t people just do things because common sense dictates that it is the right thing to do? Surely there can’t be that much of a difference between Northern and Southern European common sense – surely everyone must understand the getting things for free can’t last forever? Surely everyone must realize that having someone else who has carefully husbanded their resources (Germany) pay for those who have not (e.g. Greece) is not right? Unfortunately many of my (sensible) Spanish friends suggest that there is indeed a slew of people who don’t share the same version of common sense that I do. Whilst I clearly am not advocating more recession or depression, it is why I worry that the beginning of the end of the Euro crisis won’t actually make any long term difference. I fear that in time history will simply say that what we’ve gone through since 2008 was just another protracted slump in the economic cycle. Right, where are those sunglasses (not bought using credit)…