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Opportunity Cost

A couple of months ago I wrote about preparation, and some people’s unwillingness to invest in it. Bizarrely the same people who don’t want to pay for something to be done well, often still expect it to be delivered to a great standard.

On a related matter, I saw this meme on Facebook yesterday which brought a smile to my face. I hope you like it, and this may be the one and only time you see a cat here on the blog. Like a lot of these memes, this one is spreading fast and I know not from where it originated. If anyone knows the source, please tell me so I can credit it.

Client Brief Client Budget

The example I shared previously, had it been accepted by me – would have turned an already tiny fee (sorry but I can’t bring myself to tell you how low the offer was) into something quite microscopic and definitely unprofitable, when spread across the time needed to prepare and deliver the work. If you run your own business, you’ll already have your own measures in place in order to check and test this kind of stuff. You do have those – don’t you…? 

Somewhere in the mix, there is a point below which you not only devalue yourself and your service, but you also cost yourself other, more interesting and useful opportunities. And I think this often gets missed. I know it can be tempting to say, ‘what the hell, I’ll take the fee, it’s money in the bank’, and of course, it’s your choice, but I think that way, impoverishment lies. Working for peanuts can not only set a dangerous precedent for future work, it also starves you of time that you could be using to develop something of greater, and ideally mutual, value.

I guess the important word here is mutual. Ultimately if you’re happy being stiffed (or doing the stiffing), that’s fine. But if you believe your work is about reciprocity, about helping people including you, then the next time you’re offered work that isn’t profitable, don’t just think about the money – think about all the other, useful, productive things you could be doing with that time to build something really fantastic.

Curious to know what others think. Whether you be the buyer or the seller, is there such a thing as a win-win scenario?

Where is the Soul?

A while back I received the email equivalent of a slap in the face with a wet fish, when the good people at McKinsey wrote to me, and doubtless many others, with this note:

Mobilizing your C-suite for big-data analytics.
Leadership-capacity constraints are undermining many companies’ efforts. New management structures, roles, and divisions of labor can all be part of the solution.

I was then encouraged to click ‘more’, yet I could take no more, my own ‘capacity constraint’ having been breached.

I moved on, at least I thought I did. Whilst working in the office recently I came across a card my late Father wrote to me a few years ago. Inside the card are these simple words:

Dear Doug, I am so very pleased that your change in direction job-wise is working out. As a job for life civil servant I wouldn’t have had the balls. You have my utmost regard and admiration. With my love – Dad xx.

What a sharply gentle, wonderful contrast to the hyper convoluted management mumbo jumbo that had so recently burned my eyes and soul. That folks is how you inspire, move and motivate people, not through buzzwords and other corporate flim flam, but through simple love and sincerity. The very next chance you get to interact with other humans, instead of pondering how you might collectively mobilize your C-suite, instead try finding clear, simple ways to appreciate and tell each other about the good stuff happening around you. Be the human in Human Resources.

When did it become OK to check your heart and soul in with security on arrival at work? I don’t think I got that memo.

This post was originally published on HRExaminer in November 2013.

Developing Art For Work’s Sake

The Past

I facilitated another Art for Work’s Sake session in Milton Keynes a few days ago, and it went down a storm. Something that really interested me about the session was how we enabled a mixture of conversation and emergent thinking and action to develop around a framework, albeit a loosely structured one. We also cocreated a safe space in which to talk, work and experiment which certainly helped.

The Present

Here is some of the learning from recent Art for Work’s Sake sessions, pulled together for you in a SlideShare. I hope this stuff is helpful to you, feel free to download and play if you would like.

The Future

I can also confirm that I am off to Chicago again in the Autumn. I will be delivering an Art for Work’s Sake session for the people at the Illinois 2014 Society for Human Resource Management conference, with my co facilitator, Joe Gerstandt. I’m hugely excited about the work itself and about collaborating with Joe. Joe and I have been in touch for a good while now – patiently impatient – looking and waiting for a chance to do something epic. We haven’t rushed it – we’ve kept in touch – we’ve shared the good and bad in the process. And we are now ready to serve. More details on this soon.

And if that wasn’t enough, I received confirmation from Ohio over the weekend that I will be heading their way in September to do likewise. I love the way that the HR community is responding so positively to this creative and artistic way to improve the way we work.

I’ve received a lot of requests to run further sessions. Even though I am London based I’m very happy to travel to help spread the word, I think this work, this use of artistic practice to make work better, is important. So if you’d like me to come to your town or workplace – drop me a line and let’s talk.

And finally, to celebrate the great start to 2014, we are giving away our 2014 tour t shirt, a copy of the very excellent book, 101 Things To Learn In Art School, by Kit White, and a set of Stop Doing Dumb Things cards. We have three sets to give away. To win, all you have to do is leave a comment on the blog and say you’d like to go into the draw. We’ll draw the winners at random in a few weeks and then get in touch to ship your goodies to you.

Prize Draw