Mountain Compass

Today was the second day of our annual skiing holiday in the mountains. What I learnt today was that if you want to keep the first photos of Maxime's first ever skiing lesson, then the memory card has to be inserted into the camera properly. I also learnt that just because you're on holiday doesn't stop the world moving on and people ringing you to discuss things which are infinitely more important to them than you. And finally, that the older you get, and the more people you meet, the more people try to judge and pigeon hole you, and that you really need a strong sense of your own values to ensure you don't get sucked down and confused by everything going on around you.

Sport and Art

After having played football at a good level I have always tried to tell people that the technical aspects of playing were necessary but never sufficient, and that it was much more a question of feeling which set average players like me apart from people who were genuinely great. I’m not convinced that I ever really managed to express that idea very eloquently, in English or French. Despite currently sitting in a ski resort in the Pyrenees Mountains, I’m no expert on winter sports at any level. However I was taken with something I heard an Olympic ice skating champion say earlier in the week (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robin_Cousins). He said that his father would always advise him that, “sport is in the training, art is in the execution”. Maybe that’s a much better way of saying what I have tried to say unsuccessfully for the last 20 years.

Leemail at the Tavern

I returned to London from Luxembourg on Thursday afternoon. During the evening on Thursday I went to the last ever meeting of “The Fantastic Tavern”. An extremely charismatic colleague of mine has been running this informal digital user community for the last three years. Thursday’s huge event with a few hundred people was my first and last Tavern. The original intention was for a few friends to go for beers and discuss new ideas and trends in the digital marketplace. The community has grown exponentially and Thursday’s event was a far cry from those humble beginnings. Each Tavern copies the format of well known TV programme e.g. “who wants to be a millionaire” or “Family Fortunes”. On Thursday the Tavern was held in the ultra modern Ravensbourne University (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ravensbourne_(college)) next to the O2 centre in Greenwich in East London. The selected style was Jeremy Clarkson’s Top Gear. Matt had roped in 10 digital, media or architecture and design students plus a smattering of entrepreneurs to each present one trend or product that they thought would be important in 2012. It was wonderful to see such a large group of people sharing ideas in such an informal and enjoyable fashion (the evening was even capped off with music and the DJ called “Jesus” from the well known London club Fabric (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fabric_(club)). Apart from being given a highly memorable guided tour of the university, the idea for 2012 that stuck out for me (and many others), was “Leemail” – a simple idea and an innovative new product that allows you to take back your privacy from the invasive internet… (https://leemail.me/) – I’ll be signing up for one of these I can assure you!

Rigueur of the Germans, Joie de Vivre of the Belgians

The nature of my job means that I travel fairly extensively especially in continental Europe. It is rare for me to go to a country in that region that I’ve never been to before. However on Wednesday this week I made a flying visit to the city state of Luxembourg (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Luxembourg). I was fortunate enough to have a taxi driver on the Thursday morning who was a real Luxembourger (there are only 200,000 of them out of total population of only 500,000). He gave me a number of insights into the place including the fact that he would describe his country as being a mix of Germany and Belgium, and that the people were much more Swiss in nature than French. He said that the Luxembourgers were open to foreigners in most industries although the government of the country was off limits to non natives. Personal income tax was very low – around 10%, but the cost of living was high (poverty existed but it was “not the done thing” to talk about it no less show it). There are huge issues with a lack of accommodation and often young Luxembourgers are forced to leave their country of origin to find work because they can’t afford housing. He also explained how it was only over the last 20 years that the Financial Services industry has been built up thus reminding me of my recent trip to Singapore which is another young Financial Services driven city state. Overall it was a very interesting, albeit brief, visit. The good news is that the client meeting I had there with a major bank also went very well (they are nibbling on the Big Fish 1.0 bait). So with a bit of luck I’ll be going back, and maybe next time for more than 24 hours.

The Beautiful Game

Last week was extremely busy on all fronts. The evening activity on Tuesday was going to an old division four football league match in south west London; Wimbledon versus the mighty Macclesfield Town. Why on earth had I chosen this to be the first live match I had seen since I stopped playing football 10 years ago? Well it turns out a colleague at work is a director of the club, and so he invited me and a few other clients for the evening. It promised to be a great match because Wimbledon, who had been struggling since the start of the season, had recently taken five players on loan from various Premier league clubs and this was the first time that they would all play together in a home match (the new additions to the squad had already inspired two away victories in the previous fortnight). In actual fact it wasn’t the new players that attracted me, it was the old Wimbledon manager, Terry Brown. I actually played for Terry when he was the manager of Hayes in the Nationwide Conference – it was him who gave me my senior debut at national level as a 21 year old. When manager of Hayes he ran the club on a shoe string (my wage packet confirmed that), and he also adopted a rather basic style of biff and bang football which wasn’t really up my cultured “total football rules ok” street. Needless to say, when a player and manager don’t see eye to eye, it’s often the manager who comes out on top. So imagine my sheer disgust when I sat down in the director’s box and proceeded to watch his team play beautiful football throughout the 90 minutes. Their elegant passing and constant movement was punctuated with two wonderful goals giving them a much deserved home win against a side that were above them in the table. At the end of the game I sat in the players’ bar ruing the fact that I had been born too early – how life could have been different if division four football had been like that 15 years ago – I too could have been a real journeyman footballer. The other slight disappointment was that I didn’t get a chance to speak to Terry despite the fact that he normally comes into the bar after the game…that will have to be for next time, now that I’m a confirmed Wimbledon fan.

Directionally correct – the Emperor’s new clothes?

Talking about what is “strategic” compared to what is “tactical” at work is now old hat. It seems that everybody today is talking about seeking greater “business agility”. Recently I have trying to understand what exactly this means in practical terms over and above it being a convenient marketing sound bite. My understanding of the term increased this week when talking with a colleague…

We are doing a lot of work with a major international bank at the minute. During the week I was talking with a colleague who was trying to describe their COO to me. The COO has come into financial services from the telecommunications industry where they are in general much more comfortable with the idea of “build it, release it, fix it” rather than having to have everything perfect before it is shared with customers. My colleague said that this particular individual wants to go quickly, and that he will launch 20 to 30 ideas this year, of which he knowingly accepts that less than 50% will succeed. The COO said that the only way they could release that number of ideas would be if the initial assessment phase was as light as possible – he said that rather than seeking to understand if something is strategic or tactical, he would ask himself if it is directionally correct. He feels that this is sufficient because in today’s world you can’t tell if something is strategic before it is launched because you can’t predict what the market's reaction will be.

So if releasing new products and services quickly and not considering if something is strategic until after it is in the hands of customers underpins business agility, then the three obvious questions that this throws up for me are, one, what is going to be the backlash of this approach i.e. what will be the fallout from all of these half baked ideas and failed products and services, and two, is there not a better way of trying to understand the market and have an accurate idea of what should be strategic before it is released? My final thought I have is whether or not this is the way businesses have always operated and that this isn’t actually anything new. I’ll need to check with some golden oldies for that one.

Nell and Ed

I found a number of articles in last week’s Economist particularly enjoyable including those about magic bullets (http://www.economist.com/node/21542716), India’s new biometric scheme (http://www.economist.com/node/21542814 in which Accenture, Wipro and EMC are involved), budget hotels (http://www.economist.com/node/21542760) and natural disasters (http://www.economist.com/node/21542755).

The Bagehot column (http://www.economist.com/node/21542756) also got me thinking about my Glasgow Gran. I am a firm believer in her old maxim that, “people take you at your own evaluation”. After reading all about Ed Milliband, (who I have to say I am fairly indifferent about), I possibly need to modify that thought slightly to say that, “people take you at your own evaluation so long as you remain within the bounds of credulity”. I suspect the key thing then is people’s ability (no doubt based on their inherent level of self confidence), to understand where that boundary actually lies… I’d love to tell people that I am the most competent astronaut who has yet to walk on the moon, and who knows maybe I actually even believe that, however I suspect even my closest friends and supporters might quibble.