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Email Marketing You Can Trust

The loop is created by a “formula” that we’ve been brought up to believe is true, and which we’ve been taught all our lives by our parents, schools, employers, and society.

Even if  we question its veracity, it is so prevalent across the world that it still deeply influences and limits us. It is the subject of countless conversations between friends, colleagues and acquaintances; in newspapers, books and magazines; TV programmes and films.

And it lies at the heart of virtually all marketing and advertising.

The formula is this: If you work hard, then you will become successful, and once you become successful, then you’ll be happy.

The resulting belief system is what most often motivates us in life. How many times have you had thoughts like: “If I can just get that new job, or promotion, or contract, then I’ll be happy.” Or perhaps, “If I can just lose a stone, then I’ll be happy” Or maybe, “Once I’ve got that new house / relationship / car, then I’ll be happy.” Only to find that any resulting happiness is short lived.

According to the accepted formula, success comes first, and happiness second.

However, the problem is that it doesn’t actually work. It is built on a fallacy and creates a fundamental error in our beliefs.

If success causes happiness, then everybody who has ever accomplished anything should be happy. But unfortunately, every time we succeed, another goal appears and happiness is pushed further away again.

But here’s the good news – if you change the elements in the formula around, then it works!

Thousands of psychological and neuroscientific studies over the past 10 years or so have proven that the relationship between success and happiness actually works the other way around. Rather than being the result of success, happiness is the foundation for it. In fact, happiness and optimism actually fuel performance and achievement.

As Harvard psychologist Shawn Achor says in his excellent book, The Happiness Advantage: “Waiting to be happy limits our brain’s potential for success, whereas cultivating positive brains makes us more motivated, efficient, resilient, creative, and productive, which drives performance upward.”

I’ve been doing a lot of work in this area myself, and the outcome is a new programme that I call Power, Success and the Happiness Error. In it you can learn exactly how to reset your belief systems and capitalise on the corrected formula. Please click this link to read more now

Download Now for free – just put your name & email in the box below to get your copy immediately.

Now is a good time to review what you did and achieved during the past year, and invent ways to build on it and make this next year even better.

You could do this at any time, but there are so many associations with renewal at the New Year, that now we naturally look forward to new opportunities.

The New Year Revolution review will allow you to:

1. Remind yourself about all the important things that happened over the last year
2. Get fully present to your achievements
3. Objectively assess what worked well and what there is to learn
4. Design actions to give even better results in the future
5. Start taking those actions and producing outstanding results

In the day to day hurly burly of life and business we rarely take time out to make a clear and objective assessment of what is and isn’t working, and to learn from
our experience.

The New Year Revolution review is a perfect way to do exactly that.

 Enter your details below to download your copy now

Please share your plans for 2012 by adding comments below.
Have a great year!

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One in an ongoing series of videos designed to save you hours in less than 40 seconds!

Come and join us The Creation Factory, our Collaborative Workspace & Community for single person and micro businesses, based in the Old Truman Brewery, Brick Lane, London E1.

On the edge of the City, the Spitalfields and Shoreditch area is one of London’s fastest developing and exciting business districts, and home to many rapidly growing digital and creative businesses. It is at the heart of the new tech district that spreads from Old Street’s “Silicon” Roundabout to the Olympic park.

The Creation Factory provides an environment where you can tap into the knowledge, experience and skills of your peers, in order to support and boost your business success; helping your business grow at the same time as being a fun and fulfilling experience.

You don’t just get a desk here; you get to be part of a community.

A community of like-minded committed business people.

Of course we also provide all the normal office facilities including100 meg broadband, 24/7 access, 2 meeting areas, networked colour laser printer & full function phone system.

And despite our name, we’re definitely not just for “creative” businesses; we’re about Creativity in Business.

That means having a diverse and eclectic range of people and businesses that know they can benefit from interacting, working collaboratively and inspiring each other to produce outstanding results far greater than they can do alone.

Key Features

• Brilliant Brick Lane location
• Community of like minded, successful people
• 100 meg broadband on wi-fi & ethernet
• Meeting areas
• 24/7 access
• Colour laser printer
• “Show & Tell” business development meetings twice a month
• Phone with own number available (at low extra cost)
• Membership options start from just £100 + VAT per month

Cotact Doug on 07973 295775 or email: doug@thecreationfactory.co.uk for more information

I wrote a blog a couple of weeks ago saying that managing strong collaborative business relationships requires 4 key things, and that the first of those is Integrity.

That got me thinking about what I really mean by Integrity, and why it is important.

The Oxford Modern English Dictionary defines it as:

“Integrity, noun. 1. moral uprightness; honesty. 2. wholeness; soundness”

Both these definitions are relevant in a business context, though I consider the second  meaning to be the starting point, because it underlies and gives shape to the first. You could say that without wholeness and soundness, there is no foundation for moral uprightness.

Let me explain what I mean:

In my view, for a person to be in integrity (i.e whole & sound), then their thinking, speaking and actions must all be aligned.

So let’s look at each part individually:

1. Thinking

Is made up of:

• Beliefs – which are built upon your underlying view of the world and the way that you believe it is, or should be. (Important note: Beliefs are not necessarily true beyond the individual who holds them; after all almost every war in history started because of differences in belief – and both sides believed they were right.)
• Values – the important and deeply held principles which are derived from beliefs and which, to a great extent, define who we are.
• Purpose – what one wants to cause or achieve in the world – our reasons for doing what we’re doing.

Although I am describing these elements in relationship to an individual, this applies equally to organisations. The only difference is that organisational beliefs, values and purpose arise by amalgamating individual ones, and the number of individual views involved in defining organisational “thinking” can range from one to thousands.

So, using myself as an example, I believe that in business people should behave with openness, honesty, and respect. I also believe, as my recent blog series said, that people want to do the best job that they can, can be trusted to do it, and that individuals and organisations work best when they work together, rather than against each other.

Built on those beliefs, it’s really no great surprise to find that some of my most important personal, and business, values are Openness, Trust, Opportunity and Partnership.

And  my purpose, and that of my business, is to help others perform at their best, whilst remaining true to their beliefs, values and purpose.

2. Speaking

This part (at least in theory) is pretty easy – To align your speaking, just be certain that what you say derives from your beliefs, values and purpose.

Of course, everybody has to make compromises sometimes, but to maintain integrity, it’s critical to be honest (not just with others but, more importantly, with yourself) about the reasons for the compromise, and clear that it is created within a commitment to fulfil on the purpose.

Politicians could really learn something from this, as they have a strong tendency to fail to acknowledge their compromises or, worse, pretend they don’t exist. Further, far too often they fail to make explicit why and how that compromise has been made in pursuit of the ultimate purpose.

3. And finally, Actions:

This is the part that many people and organisations find difficult to maintain.

You can be clear about your beliefs, values and purpose; you can take care to ensure that you what you say is consistent with what you think; and then real life hits, and all your best intentions to do what you say come unstuck.

Rather than explaining what I mean, the most effective thing is for you to take a few moments to think of examples from your own life. I’m sure you have plenty, I know I do.

Think about some of those times where you’ve failed to do what you said you would, and the excuses you used to justify that to yourself and others.

Think also about the cost and impact of that lack of alignment – both on those around you and yourself. And remember, even if you don’t get “caught” you still know, so there is still a cost, even if it is “only” an emotional one.

That at least starts to scratch the surface of the Whole and Sound aspect of Integrity. Nothing I have said so far actually requires Moral Uprightness. In the next post I’ll begin to explore how that fits into the picture.

This is the first part in a series exploring Integrity in Business.

Individuals and organisations perform at their best when they work together, rather than against each other.

In previous posts I’ve looked at how people want to do the best job they possibly can, and that they can be trusted to do it. In this final part I get into the benefits of collaboration and working together.

So let’s start by looking at the simplest (at least in terms of numbers) level of interaction, between just 2 people.

Take a moment and think about your experience of an intimate relationship, or perhaps watching two children playing together – when do these one to one relationships work best?

• When both people are working together to achieve a common objective?
• Or when they’re arguing, fighting and trying to gain advantage over each other?

Now, expand that idea to a sports team, or a team at work, and ask the same question.
When do those teams perform at their best?

• When they are clear about their common goal and are willing to give up individual self interest to achieve it?
• Or when egos take over and the “superstars” are all trying to outdo each other?

As an example of how working against each other leads to worse overall results, let’s take a quick look at the performance of the England national football (soccer) team.

When you add together the growing number of competing self interests in the game

• The extreme greed and jealousy that can be generated when young men are paid an average £1.5 million a year, with top earners on almost 5 times that at around £7 million, plus product endorsements adding perhaps another £10 – 15 million
  
• Increasingly self centred demands of clubs and their managers and owners
• And, of course, other little incidentals like the Captain having an affair with another player’s partner

Is it really any surprise that England have not won a major trophy since 1966?
Or that their best result in the last 45 years was a semi-final place in the 1996 European Championship?

At the risk of sounding like a cynical “old fart”, I remember a time when it was considered an honour to both player and club to be selected to play for one’s national side. From the behaviour of many players, and the lack of performance by the England team, I wonder if today the only “value” attributed to an England cap is how much extra it will add to income.

It would be interesting to see what an England manager who placed an emphasis on building strong collaborative relationships with clubs, and put integrity and long term performance ahead of short term financial gain, might achieve.

While I’m on this track of the unbridled pursuit of self interest, it might also be worth having a quick look at the Banking industry. Suffice to say, this world involves even more money than football; greed and selfishness at the highest level; and the apparently unfettered pursuit of risk – as long as someone else is going to foot the bill if it goes wrong!

Here too, it would be interesting to see what a senior banker who placed an emphasis on building strong collaborative relationships with customers and put integrity and long term performance ahead of short term financial gain, might achieve.

Quick side thought – Is it just coincidence that the use of Super Injunctions seems to be most popular amongst premiership footballers and senior bankers?

It is a constant disappointment to me that so much of life today is driven by adversarial relationships – politics, the law, business – and that nobody seems to learn that approaches based on pursuing common objectives and mutual self interest actually work very well.

We even have TV programmes like The Apprentice, that are built on the premise that the untempered pursuit of personal self interest is a good thing. And where the degree to which someone is willing to play for the benefit of the team is always moderated by their desire to be the “best” individual.

Don’t get me wrong – I am an ardent supporter of free markets and fair, honest competition; I think that the move in some schools towards games where there are “no winners” is ridiculous; but I am also utterly convinced that the untrammelled pursuit of personal self interest is a disaster at all levels -  individual, societal and global.

So often, it seems, we only take the collaborative option when we are forced to by extreme circumstance – war; dire financial problems; cost greatly exceeding benefit – and yet time and time again, when we do adopt a collaborative approach, it demonstrates that the willingness to give up personal short term self interest for the “greater good” actually results in more long term benefit for all.

When I was running the foundry we held a unique position in our marketplace of architectural cast iron. We were one of only two or three manufacturers who also supplied direct to end users, and many of the generic cast iron street furniture designs were originally manufactured by us. In addition we had an unparalleled history, being able to directly trace our roots back over 400 years.

We also had a reputation for producing extremely high quality products and being innovative in our technical approach. As a result, many of our competitors wanted to buy from us.

We could have tried to shut out our competitors and refused to deal with them, as indeed we did before I became responsible for our commercial strategy. As a result, our competitors simply went and found other suppliers for our products. As we were unable, or perhaps unwilling, to protect our intellectual property, there was absolutely nothing to stop them, and as a result we lost 100s of thousands of pounds worth of business that would have been ours had we taken a more collaborative approach.

As I became more responsible for commercial decisions, I started to reconnect with some of our competitors, recognising that there was value in developing strong business relationships with them. The result was that we built a number of partnerships where a company could literally be a customer on Monday, a supplier on Tuesday, a competitor on Wednesday and a joint venture partner on Thursday. We ALL gained out of the deal.

This approach culminated in the Vauxhall Cross project, where we manufactured and installed all the external metalwork – railings, gates, seating and lighting – for the headquarters of MI6, the UK’s Secret Service. We had 14 other companies working for us, some of whom were competitors of ours, and in some cases even competitors of each other. However, through a commitment to the benefits of collaboration, I was able to manage the relationships powerfully and lead the project to a successful, on time, on budget, and profitable conclusion for all concerned.

Managing those relationships, and the wider multi faceted business relationships with our competitors, really required 4 key things:

1. Integrity
2. Trust
3. A clear awareness of the long term mutual benefits
4. A willingness to give up individual short term gain in order to achieve the long term collective objectives

Once again, it’s not rocket science, and, as I write this now, it occurs to me that it is really just the way that business used to be done back when I first started work in 1976.

This is the final part in a 4 part series:

3 Key Beliefs for High Performance Organisations

People want to do the Best Job they Possibly Can

People can be Trusted

Working Together is Best

“There is one thing that is common to every individual, relationship, team, family, organization,   nation, economy, and civilization throughout the world—one thing which, if removed, will destroy    the most powerful government, the most successful business, the most thriving economy, the   most influential leadership, the greatest friendship, the strongest character, the deepest love.

On the other hand, if developed and leveraged, that one thing has the potential to create    unparalleled success and prosperity in every dimension of life. Yet, it is the least understood,    most neglected, and most underestimated possibility of our time.

That one thing is trust.”

Stephen M R Covey, The Speed of Trust

In the previous post in this series I was talking about how people want to do the best job they possibly can, and today I move on to trusting them to do it – in effect, letting go of control and trusting that the other person will deliver.

Returning again to my days running the foundry, there was one particular guy there, a crane driver named Brian Hill, who I related to for several years as someone who was a major problem.

I don’t mean he was actually doing anything wrong. He did his job very well and he didn’t overtly cause any trouble. It was just that, as far as I was concerned, he was a problem.

The particular behaviour of Brian’s that I had an issue with was that he acted (as I would describe it at the time) as a self-appointed safety representative.

Whenever anything was not perfect from a safety point of view, Brian would come and tell me about it – and then hassle me until I fixed it.

Now it is important to be aware that iron foundries are really dangerous places. I don’t just mean a bit dangerous, like running across a three lane German autobahn with no speed limit. I mean really, seriously dangerous.

For a start there are large quantities (a tonne or more at a time) of molten metal at around 1400° C moving about the place, and even when it’s no longer molten and looks quite cold, a new casting can be way too hot to touch for a long  time – depending on it’s size and weight it might be 12 hours or more, and in some cases, even several days. On top of that, there is a lot of dust, high noise levels and some extremely dangerous equipment and chemicals.

And of course, people do tend to become a bit blasé about the dangers when they’re working in that environment every day.

Add on the fact that all that heat, and highly abrasive and penetrating sand means that virtually all the equipment is, effectively, self destructive and needs a great deal of maintenance, and you have a place with an awful lot of safety issues arising on a daily basis.

And Brian was very active in making sure all those issues were brought to my attention. So, as far as I was concerned, most of the time he was a major pain – it’s not that I didn’t want a safe workplace, but damn it, I had a business to run!

In a way, what made it even more difficult was that I really liked Brian and got on very well with him, but I just wished he’d lighten up and leave me alone sometimes.

Then one day, and 25 years on I really don’t remember where the idea came from, I had what turned out to be a brainwave.

I finally realised that Brian was really committed to ours being a safer workplace, and that I could trust him to be both responsible and accountable for safety.

So I asked him if he would like to become the OFFICIAL safety manager. He willingly accepted and overnight my problem became one of my most powerful allies.

He no longer came to me with issues that he expected me to correct. Now he would report things to me, and at the same time propose solutions, on which he would follow through and carry out the necessary actions.

One particularly significant example was that for years we’d had huge difficulty getting people to consistently use their safety gear. (Take a look at the photo above for an illustration of the bravado that foundrymen tend to exhibit around safety – remember that metal could burn through skin and bone in seconds!)

Within days Brian had it sorted. He was ruthless in ensuring people made full and proper use of the correct equipment and that they looked after it properly.

He took over the role of accompanying Inspectors from the Health & Safety Executive  on their visits, and would argue passionately with them if he felt their suggestions were unnecessarily onerous.

He became one of my right hand people – and he didn’t even want any extra pay for it. He was brilliant!

I trusted him and he repaid that trust a thousand-fold. My only regret is that I didn’t do it sooner.

I promise you trust works. I have trusted people to do a good job over and over again, and the disappointments have been massively outstripped by the successes.

And if you’re not sure if a particular person can be trusted, then try this advice from Ernest Hemingway:

“The best way to find out if you can trust somebody, is to trust them.”

This is the third part in a 4 part series:

3 Key Beliefs for High Performance Organisations

People want to do the Best Job they Possibly Can

People can be Trusted

Working Together is Best

I first started work in my family business when I was 20. It was an iron foundry, employing about 50 people, and I was the 4th generation of my family to work there.

We had a very stable workforce and, with surprising insight for a 20 year old, I quickly realised that whilst I could try and use the power of my position – “I’m the boss’s son, you must do what I tell you” – to get what I wanted, I was likely to to be shown very quickly and effectively that I was not as smart as I thought I was.

Many of the people there had known me my entire life and had watched me grow up. During my childhood, when I spent a lot of time “playing in the sand”, these men I was now responsible for managing had done their best to teach me some of the skills needed to work in a foundry. For instance, as a 12 year old I was taught moulding (the process of making sand moulds into which the molten metal is poured) by Les Clover, who by that time was in his 70s, but who had started his own working life as a 14 year old, employed by my great-grandfather.

So I already knew that they were very good at what they did and and were very proud of their abilities.

As I worked more closely with them, and got to know them better, it became extremely clear to me that they had a genuine desire to do their jobs to the absolute best of their ability, and that the way in which I could do my job most effectively was to tap into their vast bank of knowledge, skills and experience and provide whatever I could to help them do their jobs even better.

That is how I first developed my belief that people want to do the best job they possibly can.

I worked in that business for over 20 years and came across very little evidence that suggested I should change my belief. In fact, the more I stood by it, the more my thinking was corroborated.

As I became responsible for recruitment, I was pleasantly surprised to find that most of the time we attracted people who wanted to do a good job. The few that didn’t showed up very quickly and I was usually told by the others when I had recruited someone who was not pulling their weight. It was also extremely rare to have performance or disciplinary issues to deal with.

Interestingly, this high level of performance apparently had nothing to do with how people were paid, as throughout the period we had no performance related pay system.

The ultimate example of this particular group’s commitment to doing the best job they possibly could came in 1996 when we, like many small engineering companies in the UK at the time, succumbed to the combined pressures of a contracting domestic market and increasing competition from Asian manufacturers, and ceased trading.

The day after we closed, the Receiver told me he literally could not believe what he had seen in the foundry. He told me that invariably when he arrived to wind up a company, the place had been trashed by the employees and everything of value that could be taken away was gone.

At our place, he was utterly amazed to find that absolutely no damage had been done, and all the tools were not only still there, but had been put away and  the work areas cleared and swept up. He told me “It looks just as if they were planning come back to work tomorrow.”

Since soon after that time my job has involved me in helping other organisations get the best out of their people, and I have placed that lesson I learnt in my family business at the heart of my approach.

Despite this story, I do not think that that group was unique in any way. I do know that they were treated with respect by their management (not just by me, but by all three generations that preceded me) and that that behaviour was reciprocated. I also know that they were very proud of the work that they did, and were encouraged to be so.

And I know that I believed passionately, and still do, that they wanted to do the best job they possibly could.

Over 20 years they repeatedly demonstrated to me that if people are treated as if they want to do the best job they possibly can, then they will do everything they are capable of to live up to that expectation.

This is the second part in a 4 part series:

3 Key Beliefs for High Performance Organisations

People want to do the Best Job they Possibly Can

People can be Trusted

Working Together is Best