Despite what we may think, humans need systems and structure. We know groups of people best perform when there is a set of boundaries in place covering expectations, behaviours, beliefs and how things will work. But why do they have to be overbearing, cumbersome and bogged down in irrelevent detail? In their purest form, systems are meant to make life easier when in reality, they tend to double your effort without doubling the rewards.

Systems should demolish barriers, clarify reasoning, promote agility. And, systems must encourage integrity, reputation and calm. A seamless and graceful movement of information, people, money and product. Humanising our systems results in our businesses being centred on the well being of our people.

Take that document you are working on now. Look at it. Can you cut its wording by 30%? Can you cut the number of processes involved without compromising its purpose? Is it a ‘dry’ read, or actually an exciting one? Its the same for the proposal document as it is for the financial procedures. Punch your system in the middle and re design it for the future of your business.

There is a lot of dispiriting going on. There must be something in the air. I’ve made a list:

1. My local Caffe Nero’s not offering free wifi.

2. Companies House making it nigh impossible for you to do business with them, as their website is an entanglement of mush thats completely unusable.

3. The Chelsea Building Society devaluing houses, so on paper you have less equity and they can charge you a higher interest rate. Nice way of promoting customer retention.

4. Biscuits that you used to get in your hotel room, but you don’t now. Cut stuff from behind the scenes, not on the stage!

5. People like lawyers, accountants and public sector workers thinking they have a right to be aloof. Get your parachute chaps, you’re heading for a big fall.

6. People still trying to ’sell’ stuff. Features and benefits is just so yesterday.

7. People using social media to broadcast. In the past we just had companies doing it, now we have thousands of individuals.

8. People who just show up at work, dream all day about doing something else and never get round to it because they didn’t take time out to find their passion and purpose.

Just thought I’d dump that. Ah, feel much better now……..

The world of work has changed dramatically in the last 18 months. Things we did in times of excess will be redundant. Expect sabbaticals to reinvent themselves. In the future these won’t be self indulgent trips to far flung places in the world for a couple of months.

Talented people will still get sabbaticals, but instead they’ll be thrown into a three month project with a supplier, customer, competitor, university or some other collaborative event. Their job to change things, shift the pace, find something interesting, learn and unlearn!

The trouble with online stuff is we forget how powerful offline influencers still are. You can plot this on a continuum. At one end of the scale are the people who aren’t even online yet save email. At the other end are those people who spend most of their lives online. For those of us immersed in online activity, its easy to be consumed by it. Focusing all our efforts around online influencers. And, for us personally to be drawn into influencing online too. Online influencers with significant followers are rarely offline influencers too.

This will of course change. Our offline customers will increasingly participate in online activity and its our job to help them get there. We will all, in the next few years, gain equal status both in the physical and digital worlds. In the meantime we need to take some time out to consider how we help our offline influencers. Some questions to ponder:

1. Who are our offline and online influencers? Name them!

2. What is the real value, not perceived value, of our offline and online influencers?

3. How do we engage on a regular basis with our offline influencers and how do we make it work better?

4. How do we as a business, encourage and practically help offline influencers to start online stuff? This is not an option but an obligation. Its our responsibility.

5. How do we physically meet up with our top 25% of influencers online to cement the relationship?

Its important now to look at converging interactions between the offline and online worlds that are authentic, organic and synergised. Bringing the two sets of influencers together and connecting them could make a whole heap of difference to our businesses.

There is an increasing importance centring on the reputation of individuals within business entities and the need to ‘brand you.’ As I’ve said before people are replacing products and, like our products’ reputation, we will have to do that with our people.

Key executives will need to be known for something, though quite clearly not everything. Our people will have a high visibility offline and just as critical online. It’s one we can’t nor shouldn’t control but influence. There is a significant shift to individual reputation (some traditionalists might call this career management) but its more fundamental than that as it means working even more closely with the business than even before.

Can you see why the war for talent is going to be crucial? A knowledge based company’s reputation will not be dictated by its marketing team’s interpretation of the brands identity but it will be the sum of the reputation of the people involved in the brands evolvement.

Think John Terry and Tiger Woods. That has brought it home. Reputation damaged over night, well perhaps over several nights if the truth were known. This isn’t a bad thing. Its not another headache to contend with. It’s a great development. Transparency increases professionalism doesn’t it? Trust breeds loyalty and commitment doesn’t it? Influence shapes new things doesn’t it?

HR departments need to down tools and stop process managing and go and knock on the doors of their marketing colleagues to start banging heads together about how this is all going to work for the people they recruit and the company they work for.

Word provided by Robert Pickstone - www.robertpickstone.com

The only reason we need to be adaptable is because we are moving to mass innovation. It’s critical because no two clients, projects or people are alike. As change perpetually gains momentum and things happen quicker, we will need business models and people that adapt seamlessly to new environments.

We now as individuals, organisations’ and communities have to display chameleon like qualities. Perhaps we will need to change our attitude to business significantly in order to become more adaptive? Adaptability will demand that we understand how our business is going to transform itself from a current to future state as we try to build specific things under conditions of extreme uncertainty.

It will specifically involve solving problems creatively and adapting to dynamic changing environments. Dealing with uncertain work conditions where people have to adapt to novel situations. From that we must continuously learn so we can keep up with the rapid pace of technological advancement and cultural changes this will bring. We are going to have to attain interpersonal adaptability, being able to produce incredible outcomes in fluid work environments with a project led business. Whether we like it or not cultural adaptability, we live and work in a globalised world. We will become one tribe and we will have to learn how to perform well in different cultures, surrounded by people who do things different to us.

“Adapt or perish, now as ever, is nature’s inexorable imperative. “ HG Wells. Some of us will have to be able to work well in uncomfortable and strange climates. Adaptability is no longer an emphasis on just technology and processes but about people and processes coming together through technology.

Our lives have been invaded by technology, that’s not a bad thing! However, it does present a paradox; we can work anywhere, anytime. Conversely, it means little escape from work. We tweet, blog, email and talk all the time. Next time you go for dinner, count the number of people who pick up during one of the courses!

We live in a world of interruption. First, it was advertising agencies intruding into our homes, now it’s via a little device that’s in our pockets. We must restore order over our time. Time has lost its boundaries which makes it even more excruciating to manage as we have little of it. We have ultimately lost control! It means that we are not often ‘there’ when we have conversations. We concentrate on several tasks at once rather than one or two that we do truly well. We answer our mobiles, become distracted by emails and faff about far too much. We have given technology permission to control our time not the other way round. For some it gives a sense of being important, but all we are doing is ‘biting off more than we can chew.’ It results in us living fast when actually being able to chill is far more appropriate and conducive to results.

We all need to find ways to control our time. Only opening emails three times a day, switching our phones off when we are at a dinner party, focusing on the people we are having a drink with and finding a little balance. You are dodging the issue if you think other people are controlling your time. It’s about learning to say no constructively. Controlling our time is not just about being more effective, it’s actually more about enriching our lives, enhancing our relationships and adding true value to what we do.

Controlling interruption gives us the opportunity to intensely focus on important, meaningful activity not the sheer volume. Time isn’t to be messed with; we let it pass us by far too easily without feeling it and enjoying it. We only get one shot at that moment in time, that day, that meeting, that client, that dinner party. Rushing through it, slightly dictated by interruption doesn’t add anything, it just really takes away.

I’m bemused. Read most of the literature on managing reputation and they talk about defending and protecting. A rather negative stance, dressed in traditional PR and pessimism.

Managing reputation is surely just as much about celebrating as well as protecting. Reputation, after all, is about your integrity and credibility. As we move from a position of reach to reputation, trust, transparency and success are as important as protecting our ass. Lets just get over ourselves for a moment.

There is a simple three step model: (I will be talking more about this here: http://www.eventbrite.com/event/509178968 )

1. Monitor – your brand, products, company and key people. Make connections in the right places. Follow the appropriate people.
2. Optimise – I mean more than SEO. Optimise the relationships and connections you have made. Connect people to other people who may be interested and where is synergy with their products.
3. Engage – contribute in the spaces and places your brand and products are being talked about. Participate in the conversation. This is where prevention is better than cure. Here you have opportunities to push reputation to new levels.

Managing your reputation offline and online is about building trust to encourage a value exchange. Future measurement of influence will be based on your popularity, engagement and value to a network of people who you have a relationship with.

That’s where your reputation strategy should start, not on protecting your back. That just says a lot about your culture and attitude to business.

The second word from the forthcoming eBook “Hang On.”

It’s about taking the conversation beyond price. Conversation is no longer a distraction at work, it is central to its existence and a leader’s job now is to start those conversations and invite people to take part. Conversation initiates new rules, new ways of engaging. They spring up everywhere. We can’t stop someone from being part of the conversation. Our people are talking to customers, our customers are talking to US and most importantly, our customers SHOULD be talking to each other. We can’t beat them so we’ had better find a way of joining them.

David Weinberger in the book ‘The Cluetrain Manifesto’ states “We treasure our conversations most of all because they are ours, the way marketing speak never was.” The conversations we are having right now are so important. They can spread ideas, solve problems, gain agreement, build trust, remove barriers, encourage laughter and promote enjoyment. In the future, the conversations people are having in and around companies will be the essence of success. That means allowing it, encouraging it and facilitating it.

Most managers are terrible at conversation, they are too busy directing, making decisions, controlling budgets and keeping order. If you have ever walked onto the proverbial shop floor and killed the conversation you know what I mean!

Conversations are intimate, they are free, and they are open. They flourish when there is trust and a common commitment. Conversation is equal, it’s diverse, it generates the unexpected, and it’s participative and informal. They are actually quite liberating whilst at the same time conversation gives people a voice.

Conversations though do take control and power away from us control freaks and puts it right back where it precisely belongs with our customers, our community and our people. Charlene Li succinctly puts it this way “Campaigns begin and end, but conversations go on forever.” It’s interesting to sit down for a few moments and reflect on what conversations we are having right now……

We’ve come to accept blandness as the norm not imagination. The basis of imagination is the freedom from constraints, the abolition of conditioning, the space to think and the confidence to push boundaries.

Limitations constrict the ability to break the habit of consistent repetition. As I’ve mentioned before, the tragedy of complacency is eventual failure. Imagination allows for exploration and going places you haven’t been before. Consistent repetition needs to be replaced with consistent imagination, permitting your mind to roam free and play with the existing experience and expertise in your head. Imagination can even sometimes make you believe the impossible.