David Ferrabee’s Blog

Learning how to change

HYDE PARK — We’ve had a few calls recently from companies where the CEO has said: I want my people to know how to manage change… and they don’t now.

The candour appeals to me.

I’d only separate the “change” from “manage” to make a point.

Few of us are really good at managing change. (With Able and How being an obvious exception — what do you think I’m writing this for?) Because managing change has to do with multiple variables, schedules that cannot be confirmed and audiences who cannot be counted on to act a certain, uniform way.

And that’s why people like us get called in to teach change management skills, or indeed to manage change in organisation.

But when it comes to actually changing — we humans are in fact pretty good at it.

Here are my 3 best examples. I am sure you can think of more:

RECESSION: As I suspected, and have written about in the past, we are only starting to hear the real recession stories now. I have travelled through Europe, North America, the Middle East and Asia in the last 18 months and the effects of the global recession were almost imperceptible. And yet, we know they profound. More than even 10 or 20 years ago, people have become more adept at changing their ways to adapt to changes like this. It’s not pretty, but we’re not living in a car under a bridge either.

TYPING: From the macro to the micro. But how much more basic and everyday can you get? I was never taught to type. It wasn’t even an elective at any of my 9 schools. But I can type, because my dad hauled around brilliant great typewriters that I used to bang out prose like other kids assembles Lego. Today my children – and every punter on the bus and Tube – seems to be typing furiously on some machine. There are people I have know for decades whose handwriting I have never seen.

MEDIA SAVVY – It’s interesting in a world where my beloved newspapers are going out of business like chain-smoking pandas. Kids and grown ups alike take bias into account in everything they see and read. We recognise cynicism, we anticipate hyperbole (without knowing what the word means) and we secretly adore a good piece of schadenfreude (ditto), even if it has to be made up for us.

We weren’t born with these skills. We didn’t learn them in school or from public broadcasting. We just adapted. We changed.

And maybe that’s a long-winded way of saying why I don’t like the line: “the only constant in life is change”?

It’s rubbish. It’s a solecism (ditto). Let’s not use it any more.

/df

Bringing brands and company cultures together

KNIGHTSBRIDGE — We have worked on a couple of very prominent instances of this recently. Indeed we’re doing one now. And there’s one single message that has emerged as the most important:

Don’t invent symbolic events. Just look out for them.

Some of us (consultants) will happily tell you that a symbolic event is tremendously important in sealing and unifying a great change. But what we often get wrong is how that event comes about. Let me give you two examples.

THE GOOD – Mandela and the Springboks. I won’t belabour this, as it’s been all over the press with the Clint Eastwood film Invictus. But essentially when the new black President put on the jersey of the traditionally all-white rugby team, the country could see old wounds beginning to heal. It was good enough to turn into a film. But it was a culmination of lots of hard work and it was a natural extension of the characters involved.

THE BAD – “Mission accomplished!” it said on the aircraft carrier where US President George W. Bush landed a fighter plane and swaggered down the runway. And it wasn’t. The mission wasn’t accomplished. He was nowhere near the scene of the mission. He had learned to fly while sitting out the Vietnam War. There was so much about it that smelled wrong that Americans don’t even like to talk about it today.

There is a great deal of work to be done to determine how to bring brands together and how to unify company cultures. And most of that spade work is real hard graft. Planning, studies, system changes, restructurings, communication, coordination, etc.

It is only when all that work is done and starting to take effect, and when real change is happening that events occur and/or opportunities emerge.

Don’t lead with it, don’t invent it, don’t force it. It won’t come that way.

/df

Stress: why it's ruining your business

LONDON — Why does W.H Smith have this new category of books in all it’s bigger stores? (See photo above.) Why are we obsessed with misery?

I was talking to someone who works in occupational health and safety last week. And I was surprised to hear that, even in heavily manufacturing businesses, the big issues are no longer “dead finger” or Legionnaire’s disease. Right around the world the hardest issue businesses have to deal with is: Stress.

Here’s a sampling of the statistics:

In 2008/9 almost 500,000 people in the UK were under so much stress at work that they think it was making them ill,
According to the 2009 Labour Force Survey in 2008/9there were 11.4 million self-reported lost working days in the UK,
Work-related stress costs society about £3.7 billion every year in the UK (at 1995/6 prices),
Workplace stress is costing Australian businesses $10.11 billion a year,
Stress accounts for the highest percentage of health care costs in the USA – $6.2 billion,

These statistics are easy to find. The answers are more troubling to most businesses. Companies spend a lot of time looking for answers, with little success.

I believe there are two reasons why stress is killing your business:

1) People have decided that their lives are true-life tragedies.
Like the W.H. Smith sign says. We are becoming more and more obsessed with living in the middle of our own melodramas. Everything is so dramatic and we are always the victims. I feel it myself. It’s like we adults have never stopped being teenagers. We need to get over ourselves sometimes.

2) Employers increase people’s stress — when they should reduce it

This one worries me the most. Because organisations like yours can do something about it. And if you don’t do something about it, you can be held responsible.

HR often knows that employees are stressed and they’ll introduce “work-life balance programmes” to try to fix it. But they don’t work. They don’t work because they address the effects, not the cause.

So, bringing your dog to work, or meeting for pilates sessions in the lunch room might soothe you on one level (even briefly) but they won’t eliminate the cause of your stress.

The cause of your stress at work might be:

you’ve got too much work
you can’t do what you need to
you’re being bullied or mistreated somehow
you expect to be sacked
and many more

These are all system and process issues within the business. They might be cultural, managerial, or they could be imposed by the market or the economic cimate. But none of those are good enough excuses. If a good day’s work is causing your employees too much stress, then you have to address the root causes.

We know how to do that.

What do you think?

/df

Africa, communications and the future

MAYFIELD — I was in an outdoor restaurant in beautiful downtown Riyadh a few years ago and this lovely guy with a brilliant smile came over with some food. I looked at him and said: “Your from Kenya!”

And indeed he was.

I could tell by his disposition. There’s no faking it. It just is.

For me it [...]

Extreme Business

NEAR CHARLESTON, SOUTH CAROLINA — Yesterday I went kayaking through the salt-water mashes near the sea. The pre-departure briefing, with two of my kids and I, included an explanation of the most dangerous animals in the river: not the alligators, not the sharks… but the oysters and their sharp shells. They’ll “cut you to ribbons.”

So, [...]

The Olympics, Canada and the USA: A study of contradictions

SOUTH CAROLINA — My mom has been calling her American friends: “You guys are being so nice about Canada, thousands of people are going to emigrate…”

The NBC coverage of the Vancouver Olympics has been very complimentary. Long features with Wayne Gretzky. Hymns to Canadian style and bouquets about the natural world we inhabit. Even Stephen [...]

Good business, bad business: John Terry and sex at work

PICCADILLY LINE — Sometimes you have to wonder if they say these things just to wind up the Brits. UEFA and FIFA officials that is.

Sepp Blatter, the president of the Fédération Internationale de Football Association (FIFA) has commented on the England football captain John Terry losing his job. Terry, who is married with twin babies, was [...]

Work/life imbalance: the joke's on us

WATERLOO — Who worked longer hours: 19th century miners or 21st century Londoners? We think we know the answer, don’t we?

It is easy — and essentially correct — to say that the modern worker also has more choices, more disposable income and a longer life expectancy.

However today’s newspapers also explain that most of us will [...]

How the consulting market has changed

FULHAM ROAD — It’s official. For me anyway. I have come to the conclusion that the market has changed. I recognise that it may only be temporary, but it feels longer-term than that.

Where once businesses were interested in concepts and ideas… most now are being far more practical. “I want you to do something that [...]

Honour your father

HOME — I’ve been wearing my dad’s tie all week. It’s a university tie from Bishop’s University outside Montreal. My dad was president of the University earlier this century. He was always quietly dapper without being too flash. [Okay, the man-bag he carried while we lived in Paris was a bit cutting edge.]

There’ve been some [...]