Business Consort

Social networking should be used to define your audience, locate your potential customers, build a social relationship with them and promote your brand and website.

Activation of the self-conscious mind occurs most vividly at the beginning of a new, exciting endeavor. This “honeymoon period” generates the most energetic attention and passionate engagement. The conscious awareness focuses on present attitudes and beliefs. When our conscious minds are more in charge, we generate the behaviors and qualities we most aspire to. Buddhist spiritual practice – now affirmed by biology and physics – terms this mindfulness. 

In order for organisations to become more profitable, they need to become more efficient and more effective. There needs to be continuous business improvement – and to improve the business you have to improve the processes within it.

You can’t just impose a system – you have to ensure that the processes that create the system are tried and tested, work for the people using them as well as the organisation’s bottom line and actively contribute to improved, efficiency, effectiveness as well as the safety of both the people involved and the environment.

A typical example of systems being imposed is when two organisations merge – it often appears to be an arbitrary decision as to which of two systems is kept, rather than an intelligent examination of the two systems to find out what works – and why – so that the best of both are retained and you get a 2+2=22 situation!

This is one of the key concepts behind PROPA – which examines critical risks and addresses them as part of the streamlining process. It allows taking a bottom up approach eliminating bad practices, examining good ones and their robustness. It’s focused on discovering what workers do to make life better for themselves – and, where possible, incorporating those paths of least resistance into the process.

RoSPA’s research shows that systems that are imposed on workers without consultation result in the workers ‘doing it their way’ regardless of what the system actually says. It’s far better to get involvement and understand why people find it easier to do things one way instead of another – and use that for the organisation’s benefit – than to force people into a system they will not follow willingly.

Workers ‘adjustments’ may not be safe, effective or profitable for the organisation – whereas proper examination not only ensures good practice, but also allows a reasonable explanation of ‘why it should be done this way’ to aid understanding. Understanding is half the battle to gaining co-operation!

Get the process right, get the workers co-operation – get much better results!

Phillip Khan-Panni, March 2010

 

Two years ago, a City journalist wrote a piece in which he said business may be many things, but boring it ain’t.  Previously he took the job of Sports Editor on a Sunday paper because it was a change.  But he soon regretted it.  He found sports people deadly dull.  On one occasion he took an England Cricketer to lunch but halfway through the soup course he was already overwhelmingly bored, and by the end of the meal he had lost the will to live.

He gave up the job and went back to the City, where he thrived on the thrills and spills of malpractice, malfeasance and magnificent soap operas.  Sadly, the adrenalin rush is missing in swathes of business activities. 

Being boring is the way of life for most businesses.  Most business presentations have had an adrenalin bypass, and you could probably pay the national debt with the wasted costs of failed marketing activity.  Mostly, they are linear descriptions of the company and its offering.  Little or no ‘persuasion’.

 Poor presentations fail

A couple of years ago, a survey was done of senior executives in Florida.  71 per cent of them admitted to drifting off during business presentations.  In this country, that figure may be even higher.

I work as a training consultant in communication skills, and often have to help business leaders with their business presentations.  The overwhelming majority have no chance of achieving their aims.  I’ll come back to that in a little while, but first I’d like to talk about the business of being boring.

Recently I published a Blog on the Ecademy business network forum.  It was called Beware of Being Boring.  It has scored 2,728 views, and 105 comments.  Some of the comments were longer than the original Blog.

I published another Blog, called Ever Been Asked to Get to the Point?  That has attracted 1,276 views with 56 comments. So what I have I learned from these two Blogs?

·         When people are boring, they usually don’t realise it

·         Boring people are focused on themselves

 What is boring? 

It is offering the same old same old.  You may like a prawn sandwich, but if you had it for lunch and for dinner, day after day, how long would it be before you found it boring?

Monologues are boring too.  A man I know attended a networking event in London.  He met someone new and asked him the age-old question, What do you do?  The other person spoke for seven minutes without pause, then said, Sorry, what was your question?  Do you know people like that?

Why do people get bored?  Because they have a very low attention span.  Any idea what the average attention span is among adults in this country?  Seven seconds. Every seven seconds they think of something else.

One very important reason why most business presentations fail is that they ignore the way people listen and receive information, and that is a central plank of my training programmes on communication skills.

Another is about the experience you deliver, when you make a presentation.

 

What experience do you deliver?

We live in an Experience Economy.  Everything is judged by the experience it delivers. What do you deliver?

Do you know anyone who is boring?  Would you buy from them?

Just consider what it is about them that you find boring and see if any of that applies to your own sales pitches or business presentations.  Often, we just need an expert external eye to tell us what we should be doing differently.

There are three essential elements to consider:

1. What is your added value?
2. What can you do for others that no one else can do?
3. How well do you put that across?

You must have a clear understanding of what you bring to the party.  Knowing your personal added value will add energy, conviction and authority to your presentations.  Knowing what you alone can offer (even if it is just the way you relate to people), will give you the edge in competition, and release you from having to compete on price.

Finally, you must be good at putting your case in a persuasive manner.  That usually means getting the help of a professional coach.  Email me and I’ll send you a free Presentation Checklist (phillip@mindassociates.org). It’s worth doing, because Boring Does Not Sell! 

© Phillip Khan-Panni 2010

Recently I was involved in a joint presentation on Risk Assessment at the Institution of Engineering and Technology (IET) along with George Wedgewood, chairman of the IOSH Technical Committee and fellow member of the IET H&S Policy Advisory Group. As one of my core skills is Dynamic Risk Assessment I am concerned that so many people view risk assessment as complex and bureaucratic.

Risk assessment is seen as a barrier to people doing things, preventing them fromtaking any risks at all and viewed as either restrictive or as a huge wad of cotton wool to wrap everyone up with.

Far from being restrictive or over-protective, risk assessment is exactly what it says – it’s for identifying and assessing risks. Risk assessment requires that risks are recognised and that reasonable steps are taken to reduce them, but it isn’t necessary to attempt to remove risk altogether – that is completely unrealistic.

Dynamic Risk Assessment takes it a step further so that work doesn’t have to stop to carry out a risk assessment every time circumstances change. It empowers the worker to assess the situation and make good quality decisions about what action to take to accommodate the risks.

Normal risk assessment is carried out strategically and is generic at that level. At mid-management level it can be more specific – but it doesn’t have any flexibility, it’s a static assessment and workers are rarely involved in the risk assessment process. It’s time they were and Dynamic Risk Assessment is the tool to do it!

Even the phrase ‘Dynamic Risk Assessment’ is misunderstood – managers see it as excuse for allowing people to act on ‘gut-instinct’. However, whilst Dynamic Risk Assessment incorporates an intuitive approach to risk assessment, it still has to be part of a system, with feedback and debriefing.

It allows for the acceptance of mistakes – but also provides for the investigation of those errors so that the system can be improved. In other words, it’s a key element of continuous business improvement!

Attention -  Accountants & Solicitors

CDP Corporate are looking for partners to act as Introducers who can share lucrative fees when clients utilise our specialists tax services.

SDLT - Stamp Duty Land Tax.

Our Stamp Duty Mitigation schemes eliminate total payment of the 4% rate payable on properties purchased, Min £500,000. The fee to produce a scheme is 40% of the savings + vat. Fantastic savings for the client and an attractive fee sharing opportunity for you.

Capital Allowance Tax Depreciation.

Our specialist service helps clients claim fortunes of previously un-identified allowances since the recent change in legislation. We need clients who own Commercial Buildings  with an original purchase value of £150k minimum.
They must be UK tax payers running a profitable business.

Our scheme requires the services of our RIC's Chartered Surveyors to carry out on site full surveys, detailed reports of findings plus confirmation of the HMRC approved allowance values. The report would then require full authorisation and approval of the clients own Accountants.

Please call Paul or James on 01625 590819 to discuss an association
or Email pc@cdpcorporate.co.uk
CDP Corporate - Recovery Solutions

ARE YOU PURCHASING RESIDENTIAL OR COMMERCIAL PROPERTY ?
DO YOU OWN COMMERCIAL PROPERTY  ?

CDP Corporate operate Stamp Duty Mitigation schemes on all property purchases over £500,000  

No Stamp Duty is payable, our tax scheme eliminates the 4% rate totally. The cost to take out a scheme is 40% of the saving + vat

Example - Property purchase say, £1000,000 @ 4% stamp duty £40,000
                      Tax scheme @ 40% of the saving totals £16,000 + vat £18,800
                       SAVINGS OF £21,200

CDP Corporate offer a Capital Allowance Depreciation scheme to all owners of Commercial Property with an original purchase price of £150,000 min
Since the change in legislation we can guarantee identifying a minimum of 25% of the property purchase value to write off against either corporation or personal tax ( if owned privately )

Call Paul or James on 01625 590819 to discuss your circumstances

Every organisation contains knowledge, but how well does your business handle it? Is there a single place of truth where everything that is needed resides - or do you lose information when someone leaves, is away on holiday or sick, or moves up to a higher position?

More to the point - do you KNOW what you’re losing?

• You train people and then they leave - you can’t stop that happening, but how do you retain what they’ve learned?
• You promote someone and they move into a different role - how much do they actually hand over to their replacement? Is that factored into their move?
• People are unexpectedly away from work - perhaps from an accident or off sick, or have to take time off to look after a family member. Does the person who has to cover know where to look to find out what they do - and how?
• In multinational or multi-site organisations, someone gets transferred from one place to another - does their knowledge go with them and leave a gap?

Every organisation needs to have a strategy to handle its knowledge risks. Not only to record systems and processes, but to store information on a wide variety of functions. Ideally, that system also needs to have the flexibility to grow with the organisation, and handle change and improvement too.

There is a cliche ‘Knowledge is power’; but that implies exclusivity of knowledge and in today’s world protecting your personal knowledge doesn’t help the organisation to function effectively - in fact, quite the reverse.

Today’s world is based on sharing openly for the benefit of your environment, whether that’s family, community or employer. Just look at the explosion of social media - all based on sharing information and knowledge.

How does your organisation stand up to the knowledge risks?