Every day is holiday; every meal is a feast

If you open your eyes in the morning and you are still breathing, then you are alive. Every thing else is a bonus.

Part of my training as an Infantry Officer required me to go to Ranger School, which is suppose to primarily be a leadership school for combat soldiers who want to join the Army’s elite light infantry fighting forces known as the Rangers. It was an unwritten rule that every infantry officer had to earn the coveted Ranger tab or he wasn’t worth his weight in salt as a leader of combat troops.

When I went through Ranger School, it was a 68-day course. There was the Benning Phase, The Mountain Phase, The Desert Phase and the Jungle Phase. Ranger courses run all year long, I drew the unfortunate short straw of having to attend during the winter months. I have never been so cold in my life (well except maybe the time I nearly froze to death in a snow storm when I was 14).

One morning we were huddle together like seals trying to stay warm. We had on our Gortex winter jackets and we were still cold. A Ranger instructor came strutting out of his warm command post, a big smile on his face. “Take the Gortex jackets off men. It ain’t cold out here. It’s 80 degrees out! Cold is a state of mind.” We groaned and shuffled and did as we were told.

The Ranger instructor stood over us and said: “Men when or if you make it through Ranger School, every day will be a holiday and every meal will be a feast.”

I didn’t believe him at the time. In retrospect, I now understand what he meant. And whenever I’m having a bad day, I smile to myself and say, “Every day is holiday; every meal is a feast!”

Place, People, Program

This is a chapter from the book Change Magic

A few years ago, a rather tall man squeezed into a rather small airline seat on an internal flight from Istanbul to Izmir told me something that he had been told whilst at University, serving on a student council. He had built a global business empire upon this premise, and so I thought it worth mentioning.

He said that there are three components to a business; people, place and program.

People means specific people; people who you like, or people who have specific skills that you need for the business.

Place means the working environment.

Program means what it is that you actually do and how you do it.

He asked a simple question: In starting a business, would you focus first on people, place or program?

Stop reading. Think about this question. Where would you start?

I said stop reading and think about it...

I said ‘program’. It seemed to me that first we have to know what we’re doing, what the product or service is and how we deliver it. He said no. Starting with the program means that you become too closely attached to one way of doing business. This makes you inflexible and unable to respond to changes in the market and customer demand. You become restrained by your own products. You become tied to what you do, so you have to do more of it to make more money and it becomes difficult to step back from the doing as the business grows.

I could see some truth in what he said about this. I have certainly seen a lot of people start businesses and then fail because they were too tied up in a certain way of doing things, irrespective of what the market demanded. They were unable to respond to new opportunities because they had too much invested in their own ideas and products.

Well, what about people? He said that if you start a business with people and those people leave, you don’t have a business anymore. Again, I know many people who have started businesses with specific people, relying on their skills or contacts. One friend, an amazing salesman, started a marketing consultancy with a friend of his who was a marketing expert. After my friend had already left his job and set up the new business, his friend decided he would be better off with a nice safe office job, and suddenly, my friend didn’t have a business. So I could see the merit in not depending on specific people. Of course, you need people. Just avoid setting up a business that depends on irreplaceable people.

So that leaves place. Why would the working environment be the place to start? Surely, you just need a place to put people when you have enough people who need putting somewhere? This is what he said:

“If you build the right place, it will attract the right people who will run the right program”

Interesting, isn’t it?

He interpreted ‘place’ literally, so if you go to his offices in Hong Kong or London, they look the same. They have the same furniture. They feel the same. There is a sense of global belonging to his business.

When I first heard this, it really made me think, and for the next three years I tried to figure out how to make it work. My business doesn’t have an office because our team is spread across the UK and we almost exclusively work at our clients’ premises. I tried to apply ‘place’ in a more cultural way, defining what it feels like to work here.

What I found by doing this is that people would call me and say, “Your company looks like a really great place to work, can I come and work there?” I have also found that this has created a definite sense of belonging within our team. The culture has inspired our working values, such as freedom, choice and individuality, and as a result we have people in the team who simply wouldn’t work in any traditional environment. By maintaining our individuality and independence we have a team that no-one else can get because they’re people who would never be tied down in a traditional, stifling working environment.

It’s a typical situation. A company hires someone who they feel is the best in the market, and then the squeeze that person into a job specification. All of the qualities that make that person who they are become lost or subdued because they’re not part of the job description. The person doing the hiring doesn’t realise that the creativity, or the family time, or the charity work are an integral part of that person’s expertise. Therefore, traditionally organised companies hire fantastic people and then turn them into average people, because they either have to fit into the system or get out.

My vision, which you can read more about at the end of this book if you want to, is for the business to be built around the people, not the other way round. And it does seem to work.

This culture has also shed a few people too, who would rather not work in the way that we do. We have lost a few people who thought that someone was going to go out and find work for them and who didn’t want to be a part of the community that we have.

What we have ended up with is a culture, or place, which has attracted the right people, and those people have done amazing things. The program has evolved from the work of the right people because it turned out that those people could do things that I hadn’t even thought of. By enabling everyone to express their individuality, the program has evolved.

Consequently, we have found that being true to ourselves in the way we work together also attracts the right clients too – clients who we can trust and work with in partnership, clients who have their own dreams too.

So bear in mind the words of John Wright:

“If you build the right place, it will attract the right people who will run the right program”

Negotiation Days

Negotiation Days IV was awesome! Fantastically well organised by the AEGEE students again, and we ran 8 workshops out of the 40 that were available.

What was really wonderful was that we had students on our workshops who had heard from last year's students that they were the best! That's always nice to hear, and it's so rewarding to take our innovative approach to such a highly motivated and engaged new audience.

Two of the students from our workshops are joining us as Interns; Ula has already spent a month with us and I'll be posting her report here when I get it, Sabrina is currently working in London and will be joining us during September.

We're organising day placements in a wide range of businesses in and around London, if you'd like to take part, please let us know.

You can see photos from the Negotiation Days IV forum at the photo site.

The Great British Breakfast

There are some interesting books around at the moment for us like minded business gnus (like gurus only hairier).

For example, Patrick Lencioni's Five Dysfunctions of a Team, Freakonomics by those two American geezers, and of course nice blogs like those of Seth Godin and the guy pretending to be Steve Jobs.

You know what the problem is with them though? They're American. There's nothing wrong with being American (apart from spelling words with too few letters). One of my best friends is American (or at least he was until he took British citizenship, now there's no going back). Hey, I've even been to America, and I enjoyed the nachos very much indeed although I couldn't eat a whole one.

American business is similar to, but not the same as, British business. I'm guessing you wouldn't base your strategic decisions on a Chinese business blog, or a Dutch blog, only because their business environments are different.

So, take heart dear reader that we are bringing you the very latest innovations in British business thinking. You already know that the British have a long standing reputation as one of the most innovative countries in the world - remember the 'brain drain?'

Well, it's time to take your brain out of the drain and get hip to the groove. This is where it's at, and we're back, bigger and somewhat uglier than ever.

And remember, the comments button is there for a reason.