Not another workplace meeting!
- By DID42568
- •
- 06 Sep, 2016
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I hate meetings by Dermot McKinneyI am going to make a big confession… I love meetings. There I said it. Perhaps the only person I know that does like them. They bring out the best and worst in people, people show their true selves in meetings and by their reactions to being invited or gang pressed into attending them. I read someplace that at the Facebook headquarters the meeting-room temperature is a cool 15 degrees (one degree below the legal level), while at Ryanair they like to have meetings standing up. Do what you will to make them move along quickly and to keep people focused but if you need to resort to cowboy tactics then you have lost the plot. Or more correctly, you do not have the in-house leadership qualities to run a meeting. There are a number of attributes to a successful meeting but the pivotal one is the Chair. A manager or leader needs to be able to plan, lead, organise, control, motivate and achieve (p.l.o.c.m.a). These qualities will need to be employed at various times in a day, month and year depending on the circumstances. But a Chair will have to deploy them throughout a meeting, all of them all of the time. So whereas a manager spreads these over a larger time span a Chair does so over the lifetime of a meeting which can be measured in hours not weeks or months . To be honest most managers do not have these abilities and struggle to deploy them in a medium to long-term time scale. The chances of someone being able to chair a meeting and with PLOCMA as the driving force is very low thus our collective hate of meetings. The next time you complain about a meeting remember it is only as good as the Chair and his / her ability to PLOCMA in equal measure during the whole of the meeting … no mean feat and it is a skill few possess. Major companies and corporations lack the in-house skills to chair even a simple meeting that is why they need to keep the temperate down and the seats off limits.
Jeder kann mehr oder weniger gut einen Beitrag in einem Blog über ein Thema schreiben, das ihn interessiert. Jeder hat eine Stimme. Diejenigen mit der besten Stimme werden den Sprung an die Spitze schaffen.
Der Autor verleiht seiner Persönlichkeit Ausdruck:
In Blog-Beiträgen hat der Autor mehr Spielraum als in anderen Formaten, seine eigene Stimme und Persönlichkeit einzubringen.
Blogs bieten eine großartige Möglichkeit zur Massenkommunikation:
Sie können Menschen helfen, neue Dinge lernen, Ihr Publikum unterhalten - die Möglichkeiten sind so unbegrenzt wie aufregend. Blogger erreichen damit ein riesiges Publikum.
Geld verdienen können Sie auch:
Mit dem richtigen Blog können Sie durch Werbung und gesponserte Beiträge gutes Geld verdienen.
Es erweitert den Gedankenhorizont:
Gedankengänge lassen sich besser in gutgeschriebenen Blog-Beiträgen ausdrücken als in beliebigen, unreflektierten Statusmeldungen auf Facebook.
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Als Blogger baut man eine Verbindung zu anderen Menschen auf, mit denen man Interessen teilt. Indem Sie Ihrer Community Ihre Vorstellungen und Meinungen mitteilen, können Sie zum Vordenker werden.
Ihr SEO profitiert davon:
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Es kostet nichts:
Ein Blog-Beitrag kostet nichts, sodass Sie sich nicht zurückhalten müssen, wenn Sie etwas zu sagen haben.
Werden Sie zu einem Vordenker:
In Ihrem Blog können Sie Ihrer Originalität und Individualität freien Lauf lassen. Wenn die Leute Ihre Ideen mögen, können Sie in Ihrer Branche zum Vordenker werden.
Was lieben Sie sonst noch am Bloggen? Sagen Sie es uns!
The business model and women
James Damone worked for Google as an engineer from 2013 until a few weeks ago when he was fired for writing a 10 page memo criticising Google on a number of issues. The main one was that, in his opinion, citing principles of evolutionary psychology argued that women are unsuited to be good engineers because they are more interested in people than ideas.
Couple that with the Facebook and Apple policy of offering to freeze eggs of female employees in an effort to attract more women into the workforce. The idea being that women could put of parenthood until their late 40s and thus have a longer career.Now think about the fact that women are paid, on average, 20% less than their male counterpart. In some instances the gap is way bigger.
None of these lack any business sense but what they do highlight is women have a rough time of it in their career paths.
Why?
Has it got to do with women and wanting babies. No. It has to do with innovation. In business we all learn that innovation and sales equals success. We must innovate to survive and grow. The business graveyard is full up with good companies that failed to understand this or to act.
So, for a business to weather the storm of longevity it must change. Yet the whole business model, the way we do business, the template that we all work to, has not changed in hundreds of years. Some tinkering around the edges has occurred: flexitime, work-sharing, crèches at work etc. but by in large we have failed to innovate the very system that we all work to. Fifty percent of the workforce is female yet the system is still based on the model that men do the work and women work for a few years and then start a family. They get paid less because of the understanding that they will someday leave for parenthood.
The system, as we now have it, does not base women in the centre of our work force.
Women should not have to choose between parenthood and a career, it should be possible to integrate the two. Our business model is outdated and needs a twenty first century response.
Freezing eggs is not innovative, it is a self absorbed , badly thought answer that puts the organisation first and parenthood a poor second.
All this from companies that strive on innovation. Pity they did not have their thinking hats on when they came up with that Orwellian idea.
It is because women are not centre stage that we get the Damone view as mentioned in my first paragraph. It is not up to women to solely come up with the answers. It is up to businesses to innovate here. Imagine a business model where 100% of the workforce is included in the business system. To companies big and small, to communities and organisations it is time to innovate, sell us the idea and thus succeed.
What is leadership?
There are two people in your life that can ruin it.. a bad boss and a
bad spouse. OK, that may sound a bit of a frivolous remark keep it in
mind.
Any fool can try to be a
leader. There are many many leaders out there and many styles of
leadership. I am not going to talk about leaders or styles or how some
become leaders even though they have no talent for it. I want to
concentrate on great leadership. This is sadly lacking in our world
today. Be it business or in politics: business schools churn them put by
the thousands every year. This just goes to prove you can train anyone
to be a leader but to be a great leader you either have it or you
haven’t.
But have what? Again not trying to be frivolous, if I need
to explain it to you, you do not process it. But just for the record
here is my list as to what makes a great leader. These traits must be
present in equal measure but weighed out differently depending on the
circumstances…the great leader will know how and when to apply each one
and in what measure. Greatness in leadership is:
Having Integrity and accountability
Having Vision
Being passionate, conscientious and obsessed
Having empathy
Possessing cold logic
Being able to analysis data impartially
Judging with experience
Inspiring, empowering and trusting others
Being emotional stability
Being a decision maker, courage
Being willing to learn
Being a great listener
Someone who wants to lead but not egocentric
Being able to plan, lead, organise, control motivate and achieve
………..And knows when it is time to leave the stage.
This is not easy and not everyone has all of these characteristics but
that is what sets a leader apart of a great leader… which one are you?
What does it mean to be in business by
Dermot McKinney
Why
are we in business? Is it for the money? It is something to do? Is it
for the customer? Is it for our own ego? There is a lot of rubbish
published about customers and how do we win them...the magic formula is
printed below for you...Yes, you are surprised that A). someone has the
magic formula and B). they are willing it give it way for nothing.
Wrong, you see there is no magic formula,
no magic algorithm ( people are too complex for that)... the true magic is in its simplicity.
(extract below is from part of my business presentation series)
The essence of business.
What is business?
Before we define business we need to know ….
How long we want to be in business...
Is it 5 years
Or
50 years ?
Only by knowing that can we formulate our
Vision, Mission statement ,Policies, Strategies.
Selling a product or service is an art, a science it is analysed with consumer modeling.
Solving complex business problem
performance metrics
sales process
pipeline management tools
marketing messages
sales training manuals.....................
of
SOR,B2B,B2C,B2G,C2C,The 4 P's,The 4 C's,PLC Curve
Customer adoption process,Maslow,PEST.
All we want to know is What makes a customer decide?
We have data streams and people with MBAs telling us what people want.
But what do people really want and how do people really act?
Here is the formula:
People buy from people. People buy from emotion and not from logic. It is the experience.
It is the experience the customer feels that they have had that will draw them back to buy again and to tell others.
So, whereas computers churning out data can give you 20% of the answers
80% will be found by being on the shop floor not in front of a computer
screen...
Consumer science is important but it has its place.
At the end of the day... the bottomline is...
People buy from emotion and not from logic, People buy from people & It's the overall shopping experience.
Is that simplistic?
No, but it is that simple