One Small Thing You Can do Today to Start a Conversation with Anyone

By Adam Jones Adam63 (Own work) [CC-BY-SA-3.0
(http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0)], via Wikimedia Commons

Every conversation needs to start somehow, but how can we do it in the most effective, simple, and natural way possible?

For some people it is effortless and they just seem to be able to spark a conversation with anyone, upon any occasion, and in any circumstances - if you are one of these people, then you might like to stop at this point and go off and read something else instead. But for the vast majority of us, however, whether at networking events, socially, or during various business occasions, it can be fraught with awkwardness and lead into a minefield of unintended offence or misunderstanding.

Variety is the spice of life, but being able to judge both the occasion and the audience is often the best approach to starting a conversation. Many articles and blog posts are written providing a whole repertoire of useful 'ice breakers' and conversation starters ("10 Ice Breakers" or "20 Conversation Starters"), but you still need to exercise some judgement in terms of delivering them to the right person, at the right time, and in the right place and you also need to remember which to use and when.

The most common conversation starter, by far, is the old favourite: What do you do? In the vast majority of cases this is perfectly acceptable and a natural conversation can be started from this simple question. But, what if the person doesn't like what they do? What if they are embarrassed by what they do? What if they'd rather you hadn't asked that, because now they have to explain it to you and they're not good at doing that? What if they are a home maker and they are worried that you will lose interest, because you'll think that they don't do anything? This seemingly simple question can lead to unease or get the conversation off to a wrong start from the very beginning and close off the chance of a dialogue even developing.

As the title of this post suggests, however, there is one small thing that you can do today to help start a conversation, which is less likely to cause offence, unease or discomfort. And that is to ask someone: Where are you from? Everyone is from somewhere and this is such a broad open conversation starter that they could tell you about their home town, or their company, or where they used to live and where they live now. How they love it here and they may even reciprocate and straight away come back by asking: And where are you from?

So if you want to change one small thing today and start to see a difference in how you spark a conversation in any situation, then start asking people where they are from, rather than what they do, and you may be amazed by the results. It doesn't entirely absolve you from exercising some judgement in how or when to use it, but I find it works more often than not and it's far easier than trying to remember when to use one of those twenty ice breakers you read about.

So, let's get this conversation started ... where are you from?

Will Trevor is the Founder and Training Consultant at Windsor Training. Please click 'Follow' if you would like to hear more from Will in the future. Feel free to also connect via his Linkedin page, or via Twitter and Facebook or email: will.trevor@windsortraining.net

Other recent and popular posts by Will:

4 Ways to Give Effective Criticism at Work

Job Interviews: Don't Take it Personally

10 Reasons Why Psychologists Believe You Make Bad Decisions

Is It Time to Ditch the Elevator Pitch?

5 Things I have Learned from Being a Mentor

The 5 Qualities of Collaborative Leaders

monesBy Adam Jones Adam63 (Own work) [CC-BY-SA-3.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0)], via Wikimedia Commons Adam63 (Own work) [CC-BY-SA-3.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0)], via Wikimedia Commons

TESCO: What Went Wrong?

Few people could have predicted the demise of one of Britain’s leading retailers and fewer still would have dared to imagine it to have been quite so dramatic and as sudden as it was. Recently Tesco shares have plummeted, seeing nearly half their value wiped out on the back of a management admission that it overstated first half yearly earnings by £250 million ($400 million), with pre-tax profits down by 92% and a 56% fall in UK trading profits. Some have pointed to a failure of leadership and management and others have highlighted the role of 'Big Data'. But Tesco’s reversal of fortune has been such that even the billionaire investor and ‘Sage of Omaha’, Warren Buffett, was prompted to admit in a recent NBC interview:

"With Tesco, we definitely made a mistake. I made a mistake on that one more than anybody else made a mistake ... That was a huge mistake by me."

What has gone wrong with the UK’s leading retailer?

There are a number of factors that we can attribute to Tesco’s failure. Michael Schrage of MIT Sloan and HBR, has highlighted several areas, but particularly Tesco’s fabled reliance upon ‘Big Data’, so let's look at four key factors:

#1 - The failure of Fresh and Easy in the USA:

Tesco never quite recovered from the severe dent to its reputation from the high profile failure of its Fresh and Easy convenience stores in the USA. When the company finally pulled out, its plans to have over a 1,000 stores across the country were in tatters and it was nursing over £1.6 billion in losses from its investment.

#2 - The rise of the ‘deep discounters’ and greater price competition:

Tesco and a number of the other leading grocery retailers have failed to get to grips with the fierce price competition from discount chains such as Lidl and Aldi, particularly within Tesco’s home market, the UK. The discounters directly attacked the Tesco strategy of ‘everyday value’ and a recent marketing campaign by Lidl even mocked the well-known Tesco strapline, by substituting their own name, “Ever Lidl helps” (see the picture above).

#3 - Management Succession – the departure of Terry Leahy:

Academic books are probably already being written about the inability to effectively manage the succession from the previous chief executive, Terry Leahy, to the current embattled incumbent, Phil Clarke. Clarke has failed to reach the heights achieved by his predecessor. Tesco may yet become a case study in botched management succession to match the lessons to be learnt from the handover of Sir Alex Ferguson to his ill-fated successor, David Moyes, at Manchester United.

#4 - Big Data Disillusionment?

Tesco virtually wrote the book on using big data to hone its deft marketing with powerful analytics that enabled it to target and segment with the information gleaned from its Clubcard loyalty programme. Other retailers, both in the UK and internationally, viewed with awe the incredible dexterity with which Tesco was able to use its data to gather insights about customer loyalty and behaviour. Increasingly, however, as a recent Telegraph article made clear, consumers may be getting disillusioned by the loyalty cards which are seen as being more advantageous to the retailer than they are for the consumer. The appeal of the discounters, such as Aldi and Lidl, has perhaps come from their simplicity and straightforward approach, maybe offering a slice of how shopping used to be before data and analytics changed the retailing landscape.

Tesco: Corporate Failure or Future Turnaround?

All of this is not to suggest that Tesco is in terminal decline and it may yet regain its mojo, but there is no doubt that the average student’s favourite case study in business success, may be replaced by one of corporate failure. Whether that then morphs into a study in corporate turnaround, remains to be seen, but with recent media attention focusing on an ill-timed purchase of an executive jet, the retailer that could once do nothing wrong, now seems to be getting the attention for being unable to do anything right.

Will Trevor is the Founder and Training Consultant at Windsor Training. Please click 'Follow' if you would like to hear more from Will in the future. Feel free to also connect via his Linkedin page, or via Twitter and Facebook or email: will.trevor@windsortraining.net

Other recent and popular posts by Will:

‘THE NEXT BIG THING’? The Top 10 Emerging Technologies

Job Interviews: Don't take it personally

Steve Jobs: six insights from his leadership style and personal philosophy

Picture Credit: http://www.chipshopawards.com/entries/4133/every-lidl-helps/

So you can lead, but can you follow?

Management and MBA courses place a great deal of emphasis on developing the skills of leadership. Contemporary theory asserts that leadership can be evidenced at all levels of the organization and regardless of title or rank. But we can’t all be leaders, some of us have to be followers. We also can’t have everyone vying for the leadership seat, because nothing will get done. I am going to suggest that to be a good leader, you need to know how to be a good follower first. If you can develop the attitude and qualities of followership, you will not only become a more inspiring leader as a result, you will also put yourself in a position to be marked out as a potential leader as your career progresses. Remember that being a follower is not the same as being a ‘sheep’, these are 5 things that I think make a good follower:

#1 – Show yourself to be supportive and not undermining:

Too often the ambitious younger manager in the early stages of his or her career is keen to make their mark by showing their current boss to be inept, particularly when things go wrong. This is not a tactic that will endear you to your colleagues, or to those above you; you can be ambitious without needing to undermine. As the saying goes, “be careful how you treat others on your way to the top, because you will never know who your are going to meet again on your way back down and you may need their help." If something goes wrong, be the one that proffers a solution.

#2 – Show competence:

You need to be competent at the role assigned to you by the leader. Whilst the onus is also on leaders to ensure that they are giving roles to those who have the requisite skills and abilities to complete the task, but as a follower you need to demonstrate that you have those skills and to keep them updated. Do not pretend that you know something, lest you fear that this might be seen as weakness. Instead complete the task ably and to the best of your ability and if you don’t know how to do something, seek advice from more experienced hands.

#3 – Work hard, but keep a balance:

As a follower you will not perform to your best if you allow the all-important work-life balance to tip the scale too much either side. Don’t work so hard that you are ignoring all of your other vital commitments, personal and family, but also don’t let the outside distractions derail you from completing the task at hand.

#4 – Share the praise with the boss and the team:

If something goes well and you have had a hand in that success, share the praise with your boss and, most importantly, with the rest of your team. If you show a generosity when taking and sharing credit for a job well done, then others will be more willing to incorporate you when other projects succeed. Your boss will also mark you out as someone who is supporting and encouraging the team and you will be underlining your future leadership potential. US General George Marshall one said that there was no limit to the amount of good that people could achieve, providing they didn’t care who got the credit for doing it!

#5 – Show courage without being argumentative:

Too often the ambitious young manager can become frustrated and exhibit that frustration by become argumentative with the boss. Both Steve Jobs and Jeff Bezos are famous for prizing the managers who would argue with them, rather than supinely accept a dressing down. However, remember that leaders will appreciate those who are honest with them and come to them with reasoned and considered criticisms, whether of the leader’s mission or the leader themselves, providing that the follower is not doing so to advance their own agenda. Have courage, but do not be argumentative and certainly not in public.

Remember, don’t be a sheep, be a follower. These are just a few of my reflections on followership. With so much of the emphasis on leadership, this is often not given the attention that it so richly deserves. I believe that you can’t be a good leader until you have been a follower.

You have heard my views, what makes you a good follower?

Written by Will Trevor - Founder and Training Consultant for Windsor Training: will.trevor@windsortraining.net

Picture Credit: By Gerhard66 (Own work) [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons

Mentoring: 5 Things I Have Learned From Being A Mentor

I have mentored for a number of years now. They are mainly accounting professionals working full-time, and often in one of the big four accounting firms, who are upgrading their qualifications to a bachelors degree through Oxford Brookes University. The mentor is there to be someone who can guide them through the maze of requirements and many may be highly experienced and professionally qualified and yet they have never studied at this academic level before. It’s a new experience and having a guide who has trodden the path before can help ease the journey.

The Mentoring Explosion

The use of mentoring has exploded significantly in both corporate life and within a variety of organizations, both big and small. Whether you are being mentored for the first time, or if you have just accepted the role of mentor, I want to give you 5 things that I have learnt about being a mentor during the past few years:

1) Be a Critical Friend:

By ‘critical’ here I do not mean offering negative criticism, instead you need to be aware that you are offering positive comments and guidance. You are not overtly critical, nor are you just there to be their friend and tell them what they want to hear. It may mean that you sometimes tell them something that is difficult for them to take – see the ‘wake up’ call later on – but you are failing in your duties as a mentor if all you do is tell them how well they are doing, if it isn't true.

2) A Sounding Board:

When teaching or training, I always tell my students, “there are no stupid questions, only the ones that go unasked.” A mentor needs to be someone who the mentee feels comfortable running their ideas and questions past, no matter how outlandish they may seem. It is not the role of the mentor to validate or reject those ideas, instead you need to offer probing and guiding questions that will help the mentee to clarify them and then come to their own conclusions as to their validity.

3) The Voice of Experience:

It helps if the mentor has already trodden the path that the mentee is following, not just once but multiple times. However, whilst being the voice of experience, that should not blind you to the fact that the mentee may actually come with a fresh pair of eyes and see something in a new and innovative way. Just because you are looking through the eyes of experience, this should never blind you to the different perspective of your mentee.

4) The 'Wake Up' Call:

Sometimes our motivation fails us. Life takes over and the things that we planned to do get done are submerged by work and family commitments. A mentor does not provide the motivation, this can only come from the mentee themselves, although it is useful for them to know that there is someone out there who is following what they are doing with interest. However, there comes a point when they may not be progressing or they have come to a full stop. As a mentor you then provide the wake up call – take them back to the reasons why they started the project, or whatever it is they are embarked upon, and ask them whether they are still valid and if they are going to complete on the original basis. Perhaps the original objectives need to be changed, but a good mentor helps the mentee to refocus on what is important and encourages them to get their mojo back.

5) Guide DO NOT Lead:

You are not there to say, ‘this is the path to take’, instead you say, ‘these are some of your alternatives’. Some mentors assume the role of leader, by providing too much of the motivation, where they think it is lacking, or by telling the mentee what it is they need to be doing and how they need to do it. If it all goes wrong, then the mentee will rightly blame you and the relationship will sour. This approach also develops a relationship of dependence, rather than encouraging the spirit of independence that sees real growth on the part of the mentee. For mentors that come to the role with a great deal of experience it can be hard, but it is often better to lead from behind and take a step back by being the sounding board and critical friend along the journey.

These are just five of my own personal reflections on being a mentor, you may have others, but I hope that you derive some benefit from them. Have you been mentored, what did you learn from the process? Have you been a mentor, what would you offer other would-be mentors as good advice?

Written by Will Trevor - Founder and Training Consultant for Windsor Training: will.trevor@windsortraining.net

Picture Credit: By BazzaDaRambler (Which way?) [CC-BY-2.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0)], via Wikimedia Commons

"Follow, follow, follow the Yellow Brick Road ..."

Who are our social media followers?

Dorothy assembles her motley crew of
followers along the Yellow Brick Road

Just like Dorothy on her odyssey along the Yellow Brick Road, we all want to have followers, whether it is our Facebook page or our LinkedIn profile.  Social media has spawned the age of the follower and the need for everyone to show that they have a large following in business or personally.  Numerous blog posts and articles loudly proclaim ’10 Ways to increase your Twitter followers’ or ‘How to drastically increase your Twitter followers’, offering tips and techniques to increase your follower numbers. Most of the techniques are valid and usually ethical, but there are 

plenty of sites and Twitter accounts out there that offer to increase your followers through less reputable means (see ‘Fake Followers’ below).

Some of the largest Twitter followings belong to celebrities, such as Katy Perry and Adele, whereas the brands that have some of the highest corporate following are the accounts of Starbucks and Samsung.  Recently I was keen to add to the followers on my Twitter account for Windsor Training, @windsortrain and in the process I started to wonder about who followers are and what might their motivations be? I was intrigued why some people chose to follow me and why others chose not to and I wondered what this tells us about the anatomy of a follower and what we can expect from them as a result.

I chose the individuals and organisations that I wanted to follow, because they already seemed to be interested in business issues that might also suggest a pre-existing interest in the types of topic that I was blogging about and the sort of services that Windsor Training offers, covering a range of business and management subjects. I am talking here from the perspective of the small or medium sized business, rather than the large corporate. I am also going to consider followers to social media in general, rather than to any one service in particular.

From my reflections I came up with a typology, or anatomy, of the social media follower:

Category 1: Friends, family and business acquaintances

These tend to be the most loyal of your follower base – subject, that is, to divorce or the end of a business relationship. They know you personally and they have had some kind of relationship with you, either business, personal, or both.  They follow you because they are genuinely interested in what you have to say and they can usually be relied upon to interact with you on a regular basis. Unless you have a large client base or family, they also tend to be small, so trying to build a large following from amongst Category 1 is unlikely.

Category 2: ‘Fan’ Followers

These are people who follow you because of some engagement they have had with you: perhaps they read a blog post that they agreed with or you responded to a tweet and they liked your comments.  Perhaps they use your products or services and want to know more about what you offer or benefit from your expertise.  These followers are the most valuable, because they have come to you because of some interaction with them, whether through social media or because of other online or offline marketing engagement.

Category 3: ‘Follow-me-back’ Followers

These are followers who are following you in the hope of some reciprocity: they expect that you will follow them back.  They can be fickle and also short-lived.  Some Twitter accounts with multiple thousands of followers can follow you, in the hope that you will follow back, only to rescind their following of you in a few days’ time when they hope you won’t notice.  Building a following from amongst the ranks of the follow-me-back followers is unlikely to enable you to build a following of people who are genuinely interested in your message or the products or services that you offer.  They are more interested in broadcasting their own message to you and with little interest in any interaction or dialogue.

Category 4: Fake Followers

Needless to say this is not the type of followership that you want to develop, although the larger your following, the greater the risk that, unwittingly, some of that number may well be fake.  In 2012, Twitter reported that nearly 83 million accounts, which was roughly 10% of users at that time, were fake.  They are usually created by a program that is intended to create fake identities and it scrapes data from Twitter and beyond, which is why their feed is often full of nonsense and non-sequiters. The only way to avoid them is to vet what your follow has tweeted or run your followers through any number of applications, such as JustUnfollow. There are scores of sites where you can buy these fake followers, but my advice is … don’t.  Fake followers reflect badly upon your business and celebrities and politicians that have tried to buy followers have had scorn heaped upon them.

The object of this post is to consider the types of follower that we encounter on various social media, rather than to prescribe any techniques to increase that following (which is something that I will examine in subsequent articles).  Of the types that I have categorised here, 1 is most likely to relate to the followership you develop when you first start out, because you will reach out to your friends, but in time your client base will increase and so will your followers of this type. 2 relates to followers who you have engaged with and they should be nurtured and interacted with on a regular basis, with interesting and relevant content. Finally, categories 3 and 4 are unavoidable, but basic precautions involving software and vigilance can help identify them.

If you would like to follow me on Twitter, then please do, @windsortrain and if you have any thoughts and comments, even better.

Written by Will Trevor, Founder and Training Consultant at Windsor Training

Email: will.trevor@windsortraining.net

Picture Credit: By CBS Television Network. [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons

“Have a nice day”: three lessons from US-style customer service

“Have a nice day”: three lessons from US-style customer service

Customer service in the USA and the UK compared

Can I help you?

There is an advert that has been running on British TV for a few years now for Enterprise Rent-A-Car and it features two employees, one British and one American.  As you can imagine, the advert amusingly sends up the differences between American-style customer service and its British counterpart: whilst the US employee is enthusiastic and slightly over-the-top, the other is less so, despite being unfailingly polite.

I have witnessed customer service on both sides of the Atlantic and the common belief is that US-style customer service outshines the British version on all counts.  In many respects this is very true and nowhere is this more apparent than in restaurants.  There is usually no waiting around to be acknowledged and also you do not have to go and hunt for your server when you require another drink or you need the bill, or check, at the end of the evening.

With US serving staff there is often more of a rapport and a greater degree of attentiveness and this is often lacking in the UK.  Partly this can be attributed to the fact that a server knows that their tip is directly related to the level of service that they provide – unlike the UK, where tipping is not obligatory, a tip upwards of 10% of the final bill is virtually mandatory. Knowing that a waiter might see a difference of a few hundred Dollars by the end of the evening, certainly helps ensure they are focused on you and your needs.  In the UK you would not normally expect to tip in a pub or bar, although you might be more inclined to tip in a fine dining establishment or a more up-market restaurant.  Some high street pizza restaurants in the UK were exposed for keeping servers tips, whereas others impose a standard ‘service charge’, which is the same whatever the level of service and usually doesn't see its way into the staff members pocket. This makes little incentive to give good service.

I am not suggesting that the cash nexus is the only reason that service in the USA is often better than that witnessed in the UK, partly it is a cultural phenomenon. I am also not suggesting that service in Britain is always bad, because I have experienced plenty of excellent and attentive service, and I have also been the recipient of indifferent and rude service in the USA.  There are also considerable differences between different types of establishment, but, on balance, I would say that customer service 'stateside' can teach us Brits a few lessons.

Firstly, as with the Enterprise employee, there is a greater sense of enthusiasm to US customer service when it is done well. Brits often mistake the ‘have a nice day’ stereotype as being fake, whereas it couldn't be further from the truth and is often symptomatic of a less cynical and genuine approach to giving the customer a good experience.  Enthusiasm helps to make the customer feel that their business of valued and this adds to the overall experience.

Secondly, good customer service is attentive. In the UK I have often found it frustrating that you ask for the bill, only to then sit and wait an interminable age for the waiter to return with the card machine.  Being attentive to a customer and taking charge of their experience goes a long way to giving a good service and anticipating the customer’s needs, as with the card reader, is definitely best practice.  Finally, there is the idea of responsiveness, which links to the previous point.  Have my needs been responded to and has a rapport developed? To British tastes the waiting staff trying to develop a rapport might be considered too intrusive, so this should always been tempered to different cultural sensitivities.

I am sure that there are other points that are needed to deliver good customer service, but from my own experiences, these would seem to be the main ones that strike me as being the hallmark of excellence. I do acknowledge that there is also good and bad service in the USA, just as much as there is good and bad service in the UK, so these are my personal impressions formed mainly from experiences in retail and catering.  I believe that it would not be a bad thing for us Brits to adopt some of the traits of US-style customer service and I have come up with a handy acronym to remember these points by, “EAR”:

E- Enthusiasm

A – Attentiveness

R – Responsiveness

What have your experiences of customer service been on either side of the Atlantic? I would welcome your comments.  And remember …

“Have a nice day.”

Written by Will Trevor, Founder and Training Consultant at Windsor Training

Email: will.trevor@windsortraining.net

Picture Credit: By allen watkin from London, UK (waiter) [CC-BY-SA-2.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0)], via Wikimedia Commons

Business Gurus: The Masters of Management

Peter Drucker: “The man who invented management”

Peter Drucker: The man who invented management

When he died in 2005, the respected Bloomberg Businessweek magazine lauded him as ‘the man who invented management’ – high praise indeed for someone who had devoted his life to the study and improvement of the practice of management[i]. During his lifetime, Peter Drucker wrote over thirty-nine books, which have been translated into a number of different languages and many of the thoughts and ideas contained within them have now passed into accepted business wisdom and practice. His influence was profound on some of the major corporations of his day, together with a number of prominent business and political leaders, which spanned such household names as, IBM, Proctor and Gamble, Intel, and also included the likes of Jack Welch at GE and British Prime Minister, Winston Churchill. His influence is still felt today.

The 'Guru's Guru'

Drucker was one of those rare examples of someone who became a legend in his own lifetime and more than deserving of the epithet, ‘management guru’.  Indeed, he was probably the first management guru of the post-war era. As the Businessweek obituary proclaimed, “[he] was the guru's guru, a sage, kibitzer, doyen, and gadfly of business, all in one. He had moved fluidly among his various roles as journalist, professor, historian, economics commentator, and raconteur. Over his 95 prolific years, he had been a true Renaissance man, a teacher of religion, philosophy, political science, and Asian art, even a novelist. But his most important contribution, clearly, was in business. What John Maynard Keynes is to economics or W. Edwards Deming to quality, Drucker is to management.”[ii]

From Austria to the USA

He had been born in post-war Austria and then moved to the USA after a brief spell in England.  Becoming a US citizen during the Second World War, he taught at a range of colleges across the country, finishing at Claremont College in California, where the Drucker Institute is to be found to this day, which bears his name and continues to keep alive and further his legacy.  Such was the energy of the man that he continued to teach and offer consultancy well into his nineties. He died at the ripe old age of ninety-five, just a few days short of his ninety-sixth birthday.

Front Office/Back Office

Whilst his legacy is significant, the following are just a few of the areas upon which he focused and wrote about in his many books. Firstly, writing in the post-war era of large corporations, Drucker was interested in encouraging businesses to focus on their core activities.  He differentiated between the front office, which dealt with the customer, and the back office, where all the ancillary and support tasks were completed, such as HR and payroll.  Thus he was an early proponent of outsourcing non-core activities, and, as such, he predicted a trend that was to become synonymous with the era of globalization.  He also believed that the large behemoth businesses of the day, such as P&G and GE, needed to decentralize their decision-making, so that they retained their marketing and innovative edge.

The Knowledge Worker

Secondly, in an age when making things was still seen as the cornerstone of a strong economy and the main task of industry, Drucker was ahead of his time in championing the idea of the ‘knowledge worker’ and the corresponding growth of the knowledge economy.  In this respect he foresaw the rise of businesses such as Apple, who do not manufacture the physical product, but derive their profit from their knowledge assets or intellectual property.  Likewise he outlined the type of worker needed to service the growth of this type of industry and the skills required to compete in this new economy.

Leadership is doing things right ...

Finally, it would be remiss of me not to emphasise Drucker’s ideas on leadership and management.  It is Drucker’s words that are often quoted by many students when they are writing an essay on that perennial topic of the distinction between leadership and management: "Management is doing things right; leadership is doing the right things." Whist his views were very much more detailed than this, it does serve to highlight his belief that the employees were the organization’s most important asset and that they needed to be valued and developed. He believed that management was a skill that could be taught and developed and he scorned the idea of charismatic leadership, claiming that it enabled despots like Hitler, Stalin and Mao to mislead people.  Instead he emphasised the importance of good leadership that was centred on a core mission, focused on the customer and delivering quality through innovation and good service.

There is much more that could be said about Drucker, this brief article is intended to give you just a flavour.  I would encourage anyone to dip into his extensive corpus of books to gain more of an idea of the breadth of subjects that he addressed during a long and prolific lifetime.  One of the best places to start is ‘The Essential Drucker’, which is published by Collins Business Essentials and distils some of his key ideas that spanned a writing career of over sixty years. To finish, I thought I would leave you with some of the other more memorable quotes from this truly remarkable man:

“The best way to predict your future is to create it.”

“Innovation is the specific instrument of entrepreneurship...the act that endows resources with a new capacity to create wealth.”

“Leadership is not magnetic personality, that can just as well be a glib tongue. It is not "making friends and influencing people", that is flattery. Leadership is lifting a person's vision to higher sights, the raising of a person's performance to a higher standard, the building of a personality beyond its normal limitations.”

“A manager is responsible for the application and performance of knowledge. ”

“So much of what we call management consists in making it difficult for people to work.”

Written by Will Trevor, Founder and Training Consultant at Windsor Training
Email: will.trevor@windsortraining.net

Picture Credit: By Jeff McNeill [CC-BY-SA-2.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0)], via Wikimedia Commons

---

[i] Byrne, J, & Gerdes, L. “The Man Who Invented Management”, (2005), Online at: http://www.businessweek.com/stories/2005-11-27/the-man-who-invented-management. Accessed July 31, 2014

[ii] Ibid.

We're all in sales now!

We’re all in sales now!

How developing the mindset of a salesman can help a business thrive.

Cockney barrow boy: Alan Sugar is proud of his
roots selling fruit and veg from a barrow.

When I was selling medical insurance to corporates and the self-employed - and before that in sales recruitment - during the early days the phone would never ring with a hot prospect just falling into my lap – I would have considered that manna from Heaven!  I had to go hunting for business.  If someone did ring up ‘out of the blue’, then you can guarantee that I was straight onto it and either a meeting was booked without delay or the information was provided post haste and follow-up calls arranged.

In the competitive worlds of insurance and recruitment, you can’t afford to leave a prospect un-responded, even if it means you are working on your weekend or your holiday, because they will simply go elsewhere. For a salesman, someone who contacts you is a prospect who probably has a desire and interest in making that purchase now – they are certainly someone keen to know more about your product or service and that makes them part-qualified! You don’t delay and you call them straight back, even if it turns out to be fruitless, but you always know that a hot prospect can turn cold very quickly and that you only have a very short window of opportunity in which to respond.

With this in mind, I recently needed some painting done to our house, in preparation for renting out the property.  I usually ring about five professionals, so that I have a choice and also to ensure that if someone doesn’t get back to me, for whatever reason, then I am not left without any options. All of them went straight to an answerphone or voicemail. The painting job was going to be a few days of work and covered much of the interior of the house – it was a good job for someone. Of the five that I called, I received no response, even though I left a message explaining what I was after and also gave them the opportunity of calling or emailing me – but no one returned my call. I even took to Twitter and got various retweets and some recommendations, but again, no one contacted me directly. Eventually, my lettings agent managed to fix me up with a tenant who was also a painter and decorator and he went straight round and did a first class job.

I am not picking on the building trade, because there are plenty of instances in other industries where a similar thing happens, but I am left scratching my head as to why and I am perplexed how any business owner is prepared to ignore potential trade.  Many of those businesses were small or even sole traders, but most had been located from a weekly local advertising magazine that would have cost them money in which to place a regular advert – clearly their advertising was working, because they had a hot prospect calling them directly, but why weren't they responding?

Partly it is symptomatic of some industries, when the business owner has a pipeline of business for the next few weeks, they are then reluctant to take on any further work, because their current resources and manpower are stretched. I understand that. However, not only am I now a lost customer for that piece of work, I am now a lost customer for any future work and any potential referrals that might arise. ‘Walk ins’, as they call them in retail, are worth their weight in gold, precisely because they have come looking for you, rather than you having to go hunting for them.  When times are good, you may feel that you can turn business away, but if a slump in trade is around the corner, then you need all the goodwill that you can muster.

The point of this post is a simple one: even if you are a sole trader without a sales team to back you up, make sure that you follow up and acknowledge potential leads and particularly those that come looking for you because of your marketing efforts or a recommendation.  Unless you speak with them, you may not find out why they are contacting you and the nature of what they want.  As it happened, I could have waited a few weeks, but none of those painters found that out, because none of them bothered to contact me and ask.  Maybe you could give a recommendation to a competitor, who may then return the favour in a period when they are too busy to accept a job. Maybe it’s a prospect that offers you some regular work and sees you through the next recession. You may not see yourself as being in sales, but developing a bit of the mind-set of a salesman and ensuring that you follow up on every lead, might just mean the difference between a business that grows and thrives and one that just becomes another statistic of business failure.

Oh … and it might just mean that I get my house painted too.

Written by Will Trevor, Founder and Training Consultant at Windsor Training
Email: will.trevor@windsortraining.net

Picture Credit: Damien Everett [CC-BY-2.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0)], via Wikimedia Commons

Search Engine Optimisation: impact and visibility (Part 1)

Search Engine Optimization: impact and visibility (Part 1)

Best practice in SEO as part of a search engine marketing strategy

By Koushikchakraborty13 (Own work) [GFDL (http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/fdl.html) or CC-BY-SA-3.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0)], via Wikimedia Commons

Search engine optimization, or SEO, is the process and practice of ensuring that the listing and link to your website is placed in the optimum position within search engine rankings, such that it appears at the top, or near to the top, when a search is made using a specific set of words or key search phrases in Google or Bing, for example.  This is often referred to as ‘natural’ or ‘organic’ search - because it does not require any direct payment to the search engine company in order achieve the ranking - to distinguish it from ‘paid search’,  which is usually classified as any search for which a payment has been made. Examples of paid search include: sponsored links, search engine advertisements, pay per click (PPC), cost per impression (CPM).  The focus of this article is on the principles of successful and legitimate SEO, an approach that is often referred to as ‘white hat’ techniques. That is, techniques that ensure that the main focus of SEO activity is on ensuring that the customer is able to search for what they require and receive search results that provide them with exactly the listings that they need, rather than an approach that seeks to manipulate those results to maximise the possibility that the search engines will rank the page highly, regardless of the relevance of the content to the customer.  The best way to think about this is in terms of a cowboy movie: the good guys usually sport the typical white Stetson, whereas the bad guys are usually in the black ones. Needless to say, in order to achieve the right results, the Stetson on your head should be white!

The basic premise behind SEO is that the more highly a website is ranked in the natural search listings, then the greater the amount of web traffic it receives and the higher the number of visitors accessing the site. In an age where Internet use is ubiquitous and business needs to ensure that it is accessible to its customers online, this obviously has significant consequences for the visibility of an organisation and the corresponding level of business and profit that it is likely to achieve.  Not surprisingly, with such high stakes, a number of websites sought to improve their rankings, not by making the content more relevant to the user, but through the adoption of various techniques that enhanced the sites rankings in the face of the algorithms, or programmes, by which the search engines ranked and listed websites.  These so-called ‘black hat’ techniques included such practices as ‘keyword stuffing’: placing so many key words within sentence, such that they render the words completely unintelligible, but manipulate the search engine into believing that the website is of greater relevance than it really is.

In the first paragraph, I mentioned that SEO is a process, by that I mean that you will not enjoy the benefits of an optimized site if you merely engage in optimization when you first develop the site.  Instead, it should be something that you engage with on a regular and incremental way, with the accumulated impact of a large number of changes delivering an improved user experience to your customers and a payoff in terms of higher rankings within those organic or natural search rankings. By adopting the best 'white hat' techniques, you will be able to develop SEO practices, which will ensure that your website benefits your users and customers.

The common mistake that most people make when they first approach SEO is to believe that the primary target of their activities is in satisfying the rapacious needs of an impersonal and electronic brain called a search engine: this is something that I term the ‘black hat fallacy’. Some of the leading search engines, and particularly Google, have taken pains to reinforce the message that the primary focus needs to be the consumer, or the user of your site, rather than viewing the search engine s the target of your activities. So let us get this straight from the very outset, you are optimising your website for the benefit of your users and not the search engine itself.

SEO may form part of your broader search engine marketing (SEM) strategy, which may itself be an element of your overall marketing strategy.  Whilst you will remember that we are not intending to treat the search engine as the customer of our optimization activities, we do need to have some understanding of how they work and also how people use them to facilitate their searches.  From our market research, we should have a good idea of who the target audience for our product or service is and so we can then develop a clearer picture of the type of search keywords or key-phrases that they are using to find products or services such as ours.  Think for a moment about how you search for something using a search engine, such as Google. How often do you input just a single word (keywords) or how often do you string together a number of words into a set of keyphrases? The next time you search for something, think about what it is that you are looking for and then consider why you selected those specific words. This will help us in the next article when we consider further the practices of SEO.

Written by Will Trevor, Founder and Training Consultant at Windsor Training
Email: will.trevor@windsortraining.net