PriorityBusiness Strategy Coaching : The Busy Fool Blog | Business strategy coaching : The Busy Fool blog

Walking the walk
Posted Mar 2nd, 2011 By Andrew Horder in Business Strategy Coaching, Sales and adding value With | No Comments

Business strategy coaching: do what it says on your tin

In business, particularly if you’re the principal of the business, it’s essential that your clients and prospects see that you do what you preach. It’s all too tempting to fall back on the old “cobblers shoes” argument – you know, the one that says the cobbler’s children always have shoes that are falling apart.

The trouble is, until people have experienced what you offer, they can only judge you based on what they see. So, in the case of our cobbler, a look at his kids’ crumpled footwear will
What have you done today to make you feel proud?
Posted Aug 17th, 2009 By Andrew Horder in Clarity & Focus, Motivation & Management, Time Management With | 1 Comment

I am constantly inspired by the words of Heather Small’s “Proud” – some of the uplifting lyrics in it include:

“Look into the window of my mind
Reflections of the fears I know I’ve left behind”

“I’m on my way
Can’t stop me now
And you can do the same”

“You could be so many people
If you make that break for freedom”

“I step out of the ordinary
I can feel my soul ascending”

“So what have you done today to make you feel proud?”

Each day I ask myself that question, xxx
Portfolio Worker or Busy Fool?
Posted May 28th, 2009 By Andrew Horder in Clarity & Focus, Time Management With | 1 Comment

Keeping the balls in the air

Are you like me, and work for a number of different clients, doing different things for each? I like my work to be varied, and I tend to only take on work that I think I’m going to enjoy. And on the whole, I have a whale of a time – it almost seems wrong to take money for having so much fun (in case any of my clients read this, I said almost – I got over that particular hang-up!).
Who’s at most risk?
Posted Dec 28th, 2008 By Andrew Horder in Business Strategy Coaching With | No Comments

In the current economic climate, I suspect that the old work paradigm is going to fail a lot more people. We already know that the promise of a “job for life” has gone – that’s been the case for a long time now, probably since the 1980’s at least. So any hope of leaving education and settling into a comfortable career that will last you to retirement is long gone.

Who's most at risk …

With specialisation it has become increasingly difficult for experts to find alternative companies that can employ them – because only the largest need somebody full-time doing what they do. So when the downturn pushes vulnerable companies into “rightsizing”, these experts are the hardest to re-deploy – either inside the company, or via outplacement. Of course, there are plenty of smaller companies who need their skills, but they can’t afford to take on a full-timer to provide them. And the paradigm is that the secure way to go on is to have a full-time position.

So at best the experts find themselves in a job where they do their specialism for some of the time and something else (possibly allied, possibly not) for the rest of the working week. I think that’s a bit of a waste – of the expert’s talent, and of their enthusiasm for their specialism.

I’m an expert in (and an enthusiast about) Key Account Management (it’s one application of my core skills: analysis, prioritisation and focus). Since coming out of corporate life, I’ve been offering my skills to smaller companies on a “fractional” basis – they hire me for a proportion of my time, to look after their Key Accounts for them. I’m currently working for two widely different businesses, neither of which is ready for a full-time account manager. And the rest of my time is spent doing consultancy and developing other ways to use my skills – Key Accounts Strategy, opportunity (or portfolio) prioritisation, helping entrepreneurs get focused. So clients are getting the level of expertise they need, and I can stick to what I do well.

And the great thing is, my overall income is actually safer than if I’d been in a corporate job. I can seize opportunities much more easily – in order to take on another client, I don’t have to weigh up their offer against what I’ve already got, I can do both. When I reach capacity, I can replace the lower-earning (or less fun) contracts with new ones as they come up, or bring in associates, and take a margin. And if one of my “employers” does get into difficulty and can’t afford to keep me on, it’s not the end of the world for my bank balance. I might lose maybe 20% of my income, but I won’t lose it all, which is what would happen (has happened to me) if I lost a full-time job.
Where should you focus your efforts for greatest effect?
Posted Dec 23rd, 2008 By admin in Clarity & Focus, Time Management With | No Comments

How not to be a Busy Fool …

Anything we want to achieve will affect other people in some way, so these all become stakeholders in our project. Understanding where to focus our effort with these stakeholders is crucial to success. Some will be affected positively by the project, and therefore likely to support it; others will see outcomes from what we want to achieve that they don’t want – they are probably going to oppose it. OK, so all we need to do is get together loads of supporters so they outnumber our opponents – easy, right?

Yes and no. We also need to take into account how influential each stakeholder (or stakeholder group) is. We can gather as many borrowers in support of a rate cut as we like, but if (eg) the Governor of the Bank of England is opposed to it, it just isn’t going to happen. The Support / Influence Matrix illustrates this nicely:

There are two quadrants in the matrix that are key to success – the obvious one is “Friends in High Places”, i.e. people who support what we are trying to do and who have a lot of influence. It’s unlikely that we’ll get a project off the ground without support at the right level. In the interest rates example, that might include people like large property investors.

The other key quadrant is “Dangerous Enemies”, the people who have enough influence to block our plans. If anything, these are more important to address than the friends in high places. It’s great to have influential backers, and it’s easy to get carried away with enthusiasm, and buoyed up by their support. But we underestimate our influential opponents at our peril. How we deal with them depends very much on understanding the source of their opposition – ideally we’ll be able to persuade them that the project is a good idea, but if we really can’t find any way it could benefit them, then we’ll need to neutralise their objections.

We also need to be very wary of the “Quiet Saboteurs”. They generally know they don’t have a lot of influence, so often stick to mutterings of discontent. Each individual mutterer won’t have that much effect, but if there are a lot of them, the repeated nature of their complaints can attract the attention of decision-makers, and leave them reluctant to ignore the apparent groundswell against the project. Regrettably, the same is not true of the Popular Support – we can have a vast number of cheerleaders in favour of our project, all nodding enthusiastically, but on the whole, decision-makers will go out of their way to avoid criticism by people with no real influence far more than they will to be praised by them. I guess we all like an easy life.

So, build up massive support from Friends in High Places, watch out for Dangerous Enemies, be careful about having too many Quiet Saboteurs – and don’t kid yourself that Popular Support will make all that much difference. This all seems like common sense, but it’s amazing how many people forget to analyse their stakeholders, particularly in terms of their influence.

I have one more theory: the ones at the ends of the support spectrum are not the ones to focus on. If one of our Dangerous Enemies is implacably opposed to a project, there’s not likely to be much we can do to change their mind. And our rampantly supportive Friend in a High Place is about as far from them as it’s possible to get – so they’re more likely to entrench the opposition than convert it. So forget about those two – the Enemy isn’t about to change, nor is the Friend. The ones to concentrate on are the ones closer to the middle.

It’s often said that we tend to like and trust those who are most like us. So our mild opponent (B in the diagram below) actually has more in common with our luke-warm supporter (C) than he has with the rabid enemy (A). This could go either way – C’s understated approval could persuade B to see the benefits of the project, or B’s reasonable concerns might give C pause for thought. Now here’s the rub: because B was closer to A, his moving over to the support side will have a much greater effect on A than any blandishments from our flag-waving champion (D). We may not get A all the way to support, but it could certainly reduce opposition to some extent.

So, for best use of time, effort money and resources, we should concentrate our focus on what I call the Influential Waverers.