Authors: Steve Shipside
The Way to Wealth (2 page)
Despite an overwhelming emphasis on hard work and honest labour Franklin is very clear about the importance of keeping control of your work life. Or, as he puts it,
‘drive thy business, let not that it drive thee.’
As a man who packed half a dozen careers into his life, Franklin well understood the need to manage his tasks so that he remained in control of his work, rather than the other way around.
DEFINING IDEA
…The way we measure productivity is flawed. People checking their BlackBerry over dinner is not the measure of productivity.
~
TIMOTHY FERIS, AUTHOR OF THE 4-HOUR WORK WEEK
Go to different parts of the world and you will find some dramatically different work cultures at play. I once worked for an American technology company who were simultaneously setting up offices in the UK, Germany and France. The New Yorker overseeing this launch based himself mainly in London where he found that his new employees might speak with strange accents but at least he could understand the way they worked; they rapidly adopted his pattern of staying at work until deep into the night and understanding that ‘lunch’ meant a hurriedly-snatched sandwich eaten at the keyboard. The Germans and the French, on the other hand…Well, the French insisted fiercely that lunch was not an intake of calories but rather a venue you went to, and by 5 p.m. the German office only needed a bit of tumbleweed blowing through to be the model for a Wild West ghost town. But neither was any less productive. The French did much of their most important negotiation over lunch and the German approach was that anyone still in the office after 5 p.m. was clearly a poor time manager who couldn’t do their job properly.
In the US there is now a backlash against the idea that a good worker is one who spends all their time in front of their keyboard. One of the bestselling books is
The 4-Hour Work Week
by Timothy Ferriss who realised that his work life in Silicon Valley was unsustainable after his girlfriend left him over his work hours. We can learn from his mistake without sacrificing our love lives.
One of Ferriss’s rules, for instance, is that he only checks his email once a week. That may sound extreme but his point is that because he only replies on a set day, his customers and co-workers have adapted and his business doesn’t fall apart. And he spends a fraction of his time dealing with email.
So remember Franklin and don’t let your business run your life. Stop seeing time spent at work (yours or your employees’) as being automatically good, and start thinking about whether those long hours mean productivity or a failure to empower people. We all know that it’s easier to waste time in front of a computer so take a leaf from the Germans and encourage a culture where long hours, far from being approved of, are instead frowned on as a sure sign of poor time management.
HERE’S AN IDEA FOR YOU
…Set aside a strict time slot in the morning (or morning and evening, if you must) and don’t even look at your email outside of that. Let others know this is your routine and you’ll be surprised how much less time you spend digging your way out of an inbox.
‘Early to bed, and early to rise, makes a man healthy, wealthy and wise.’
Fine words, and ones you’ve probably heard not just from Franklin but from any number of slightly smug older relatives and colleagues.
Yes, it’s good advice, but here’s a modern twist to it. In this day and age, who says that you are the one who has to get up early?
DEFINING IDEA
…Early morning hath gold in its mouth.
~
BENJAMIN FRANKLIN
In the mid-90s the World Wide Web was just finding its feet and sharper businesses were working out how to use it in order to steal a march on their competition. One of the earliest stories to surface and raise eyebrows was the news that some American medical doctors, rather than typing up their notes themselves, were instead taking digital dictation and sending it over the Net to India where it was transcribed overnight and emailed back, all ready, for the start of the next working day. People have long dreamed of waking up to find their work done for them but, given the general shortage of shoemaker’s elves in today’s world, that prospect seemed destined to remain a dream. And then suddenly the ability to export work at the touch of a button made businesses aware that they could not only outsource to save money, but to play the time zone game and steal a day in the process.
Outsourcing has acquired a bit of a bad name in the interim, with associations of job losses and service levels being sacrificed for the sake of cost, but while bad news travels fast and loudly the good news tends to be kept as a trade secret. So it is that knowledge of call centre calamities has become common currency but you rarely hear about the software development teams handing over their work every night to their waking colleagues on the other side of the globe.
Nor is it just multinational corporations who can exploit time zone differences, and you don’t have to hire a truck-load of typists in Trincomalee to get the benefit of other people working around the clock for you. In these days of remote and virtual working, it is even sometimes cost-effective to outsource just an hour or two of work in a day to somebody else, and there is a growing number of flexible workers (often retired people or perhaps downshifters) who can be extremely useful—they are highly qualified, time-rich and interested in taking on piece work at a competitive price. If you have to do something like make routine calls or catch up on your admin at unsociable hours, why not have these sort of comparatively straightforward tasks fielded by outsourced early birds? Particularly if those early birds have chosen to relocate eastwards on retirement and have an hour or two advance on you in any case? Think about that the next time you wake up and swear at your alarm clock.
HERE’S AN IDEA FOR YOU
…Tim Ferriss, author of The 4-Hour Work Week, points out that almost anyone can outsource and even claims to outsource his personal to-do lists and email inbox to a virtual PA in India who organises his life while he sleeps. Do some investigating for yourself.
And you thought that saying was invented in the age of lycra, right? As it happens Benjamin Franklin beat Jane Fonda to it by a couple of hundred years when he pointed out that
‘there are no gains, without pains’.
DEFINING IDEA
…Don’t fear change, embrace it.
~
ANTHONY J. D’NGELO, EDUCATED WRITER
While Franklin’s reaction to spandex-sheathed aerobicisers can only be imagined, the association of ‘no pain, no gain’ with exercise has at least helped clarify his point for a modern audience. You might personally jeer at joggers but you’re almost certainly the idea that out of suffering comes a better body, increased familiar with the idea that out of suffering comes a better body, increased fitness and decreased blubber.
What you may not be doing, however, is applying that same understanding to business. The fitness freak knows that it’s not going to be easy and so accepts, even welcomes, the discomfort and short-term agony of working for the burn. In business, however, we’re often so focused on breathless expansion that we fail to prepare for the pain that will inevitably come as part of the package.
When planning on expansion or change, businesspeople often focus solely on more obvious pains such as increased outgoings and management overheads. More easily overlooked are the personal and cultural pains that accompany almost every business gain, which is where our gym bunnies are so helpful. They focus on the gain and accept the pain as the only means of getting there. Business, on the other hand, often forgets to do so. Here’s an example of what I mean. I can remember when computers made their appearance in business and, as a journalist, I was one of many encouraged to switch over to them. The journalists’ union was up in arms, proposing extra payment for being forced to use this new and daunting technology and leading to a classic management/union stand-off. Nobody attempted to go to the journalists and explain that the real gain was our own individual productivity and employability in the future. Everyone got caught up over whether we should be paid for the sweat; nobody extolled the beauty of the svelte and desirable souls we would become (I’m talking figuratively here—if you’ve ever seen an office full of journalists you’ll know that).
You don’t have to have a large unionised workforce to run into cultural resistance to expansion. Resistance to change usually comes in one of two forms—active and passive. It’s normal to see active resisters as being the enemy. They’re not. Your real problem is the passive resisters who mentally fold their arms and say ‘make me’. Small enterprises are just as susceptible as larger ones, too, though often more subtly so. The classic person to overlook is yourself and your own resistance. With growth comes the need to delegate more and micromanage less, so you may feel a sense of losing your grip on your own company. Fail to deal with that pain and you will never realise the gain, which is one of the key factors why so many sole traders and family businesses never grow any further.
HERE’S AN IDEA FOR YOU
…Don’t stand up and tell people they have to change or it will become personal. Instead start by explaining that the change is best practice learnt from others and find the people most open to that idea. Now make them change stewards/agents and recruit their help instead of going it alone.
‘Diligence is the mother of good luck,’
said Franklin. Gary Player, the extraordinary golfer, put it differently. He was once told he was a ‘lucky’ player. ‘Yes,’ he replied, ‘and the more I practise the luckier I get.’
DEFINING IDEA
…What we call luck is the inner man externalised. We make things happen to us.
~
ROBERTSON DAVIES, CANADIAN WRITER AND NOVELIST
There will always be an element of luck when it comes to human affairs, and business is no exception. That chance meeting that leads to a contract, the stumbling across a new idea, or partner, or supplier—you can call it serendipity, or you can call it plain jammy, but whatever you call it we all think that luck has its part to play. The difference is that the seriously successful believe that luck is something you make by working at it.
The simple soul turns up for a meeting or a deal with the belief that their knowledge of their own company and goals, plus their individual bargaining skills, should be enough to tip the balance in their direction. The more savvy individuals dig a bit further to make some luck by researching the other party, the market, the people involved, the other company’s culture, the other company’s national culture and absolutely anything else that they think could have a bearing on the hidden agenda or the triggers to behaviour. If they then stumble on a shared interest with the other party, one that smoothes the way to an agreement, do you call that luck or good research?
In this day and age, with the availability of search engines, online newspaper archives (both local and national) and social software such as LinkedIn, there is no excuse for not putting in that little bit of extra effort to find out more about someone. You don’t have to be a sad cyberstalker to get the information you need. If your opposite number has a Facebook page which includes a mention of Accrington Stanley Football Club, for instance, you can be fairly sure that they are a fan and will be happy to meet anyone who shares their interest (especially so if they are one of a rare breed such as Accrington Stanley supporters). So do some research into that, too. Find out more before you begin, and then practise how you will turn that to your advantage.
There will always be naturals, it is true, but for every natural there is a natural-seeming businessperson who has ruthlessly rehearsed their social skills, knowledge and delivery until their whole performance is so slick that it seems perfectly spontaneous—not at all like a performance, in fact. A delivery so practised that it passes for one that is completely natural can get you through any number of situations. As the French playwright Jean Giraudoux once put it ‘…the secret of success is sincerity. Once you can fake that you’ve got it made’.
HERE’S AN IDEA FOR YOU
…Think first impressions. Salesmen know about the ‘elevator pitch’ where you lay out your key attributes and goal in three minutes. You should be able to do this. Sit down in front of a mirror with a stopwatch and see how good you sound in that time. Would you recommend you to someone else?