watch tHe skies

Hopefully the site resembles that which it should now…

Looks like something has gone wrong with my lovely theme. So I’ve gone back to basics until I can fix it. I’m not as html savvy as I used to be, so bear with me. Remember though, just cos it looks a bit naff and generic, means that it fits perfectly with the content!

There are few things in this universe that are absolutely true. Cogito Ergo Sum I hear you say? However I could be imagining that along with everything else. I don’t know everything that is true. But I do know one thing.

Television is rubbish. And having spent far too much time in front of one this week, and watching England come second in every sport that I care about. I have come to the conclusion that the only thing worth watching is Ninja Warrior on Challenge TV. Sasuke, as it is known in Japan, is pretty much the most extreme challenge I’ve ever seen on TV. In it, 100 competitors attempt to complete a 4 stage obstacle course culminating in a gruelling rope climb to press a button high above the course within the time limit.

And this course is tough. I mean most of us wouldn’t last two minutes, and even those that are clearly super-fit, rarely get past the first stage. Since its inception in 1997 only two men have completed the course in the time available, and earnt the crown of Ninja Warrior.

So what is compelling about this programme? Firstly it is the battle of wills between the competitor and the course, which gets more difficult each season. In addition it is the amazing cameraderie between competitors, many of whom compete in every competition and come back time and time again to try and get further than before. It really is amazing to watch the dedication and effort of these athletes, working tirelessly towards their goal.

 Perhaps it’s the individual feats of athleticism I enjoy, or laughing at the muppets falling awkwardly in to muddy water, or perhaps its the way these guys “keep going” and “keep succeeding, one step at a time” that makes me tune in whenever I get a chance.

Ninja Warrior - Challenge TV 6pm weeknights.

Last night I caught Sarah Beeny’s latest show, “How Toxic Are You“, which shined a light on the scary world of beauty products and the violently dangerous chemicals that are shoehorned in to even the most “natural” products such as bubble bath and toothpaste.

During the show, they took two women whose incredible beautification routines must have taken up most of the day, detecting thousands of man made chemicals in their bodies, and put them on a toxin-free regime for a month.

In the meantime we discovered the frightening levels of man-made toxins that are put in to products labelled as “natural” or “simple”, many of which have suspected links to cancer. Frankly I was shocked by what I saw. But it was okay as I’m not in to all of that lip gloss and stuff, although afterwards I glanced at the ingredients on the label of my beloved bubble bath, and the aloe vera cream I use after shaving. Heck even my toothpaste is mostly plastic, and let’s not even get started on the deodorant.

And if I wasn’t worried enough, we then saw an analysis of breast milk, of course to find that most of this crap is being passed on to our infants.

So I wonder, would I trade all these toxins in for being a little bit smellier, and a little less clean? And by clean I mean not having all of my bodily oils stripped by the same chemical used to degrease engine blocks.

It seems that yesterday before I watched this programme, the world was a much nicer place and soap smelled like, well soap.

Thanks to Giles who sent me this link to an interesting article on the BBC asking just that question. He knew that this would get me going on one of my favourite subjects so I thought I’d post it here.

Leadership is a fascinating subject and I can talk about it for hours. For me the question they ask is daft because what they are asking is thus:

Are Leaders (and by that I mean the feelings and behaviours I have anchored to that word) made or born?

I guess at the heart of it Leadership for me is the ability to take someone somewhere. You could use a geographical, experiential, emotional, financial or any other metaphor for this, though the outcome is the same. If you have taken someone from one state to another you have led them. For some people this is done inadvertently (we are led in many directions everyday, and often by inanimate objects; i saw someone canoeing down a river whilst on the train yesterday and that led me to text one of my friends who is an avid canoeist), and for others it is deliberate; your boss, your coach, an opinion expressed on a website.

Leadership to me is a direction away from where you are or a reinforcement to stay in the same spot.

So what is a leader? I think that a leader has a belief in a direction, and the conviction and drive to get there. Motivation to act. And we all have motivation to act; I may not be Richard Branson yet put me in a flaming building and see my motivation. So we all have the capacity to lead others in directions that motivate us. A good leader combines this with the ability to communicate this direction and motivate others to move in the same direction. What motivates me may not motivate you, yet a good leader manages to motivate everyone in the same direction, and that comes down to a combination of empathy, good communication and the ability to gain trust from his followers, and it is this trust that bridges the gap between what motivates the leader and what motivates the followers.

So in answer to the original question. Can leaders be made. Yes we all have the skills necessary to lead, and we do all lead in one way or another. Some people attribute those skills to “classical” leader roles more readily than others. Yet we all have the ability to be leaders in those roles too. Good leaders? I don’t know, it would depend on your intrinsic motivations to be so.

Told you I could go on.

It had been a good day by all accounts. And in that respect it was the same as most of his days in recent memory. The business was doing well, really well, beyond expectations and certainly a lot better than his plan intended. Customers were happy, and happy customers gave him even more business as he took away from them more and more of their worries. Consequently his bank balance was looking very healthy indeed, which meant he was able to treat his wife and children to some fabulous experiences. And everything was good.

Except for one thing. Something was wrong, and it had been wrong for a while, he just didn’t know what to do about it.

Somewhere inside him, he had this feeling that he was doing the wrong thing.

Not on a moral or ethical basis, as far as he could tell. Everything was above board, carbon-neutral and as far as he could reasonably analyse, any bad (because of course every action has side-effects that can be considered harmful from some perspective, he often thought) was far outweighed by the good he and his company did.

It was simply that he was increasingly under the impression that what he was doing with his working time wasn’t really what he should be doing with himself. And this feeling seemed to be growing proportionally with his success. Back when the company was struggling, spending more on marketing and selling than it was making in sales, this wasn’t a problem. But as the order book grew, as the organisation expanded from a couple of people renting desks in an office-for hire in some generic building, to three floors of a modern, glass fronted conversion overlooking the river, this feeling of misalignment grew and grew, until today, where he had just received an order that would double the size of the business within a year and keep his team in work for another five. This uncomfortable feeling originally tucked away at the bottom of his stomach had grown and mutated in to a nauseous feeling of claustrophobia, almost as if he was locked inside someone else, someone he didn’t want to be and didn’t know how to get out.

And he didn’t know who to talk to. To his friends and family, he was busy as always, and everyone knew he was at his happiest when he was busy. So that meant he was happy, right?

And yet somewhere along the line he had got swept away by the growth of the organisation, the money pouring in, the excitement of winning big contracts and making a difference, and now he just wanted to get out and not feel the way he felt, even if it meant losing all of the perks, the money, the holidays, and the respect of his people and his family.

But he had no idea what to do about it. So many people depended upon him.

Way back when, in a former life, I spent nearly a year of it living in Windsor. A very nice place by all accounts except that for that time I was working nightshift. So my days were nights and my nights days, and the only time I got to spend in Windsor was mid-afternoon, where I would go for a walk, grab something for “breakfast” and relax before I started my shift.

One sunny afternoon I noticed that my hair was looking a bit tatty (it was usually hidden under a safety helmet) so I headed to the town centre to look for a barber. No barber to be found with a free spot, I headed in to a posh salon on spec, and was surprised to find they could do me then and there. Even more to my surprise was my hairdresser, a six foot amazonian woman in what could only be described as a belt and boob tube. Marvellous, I thought, as being on nightshift my exposure to pretty woman was mostly limited to whatever papers the contractors had bought that day.

What followed was one of the best hours of my life, as I had my hair washed and head massaged by this lovely lady, who then cut my hair precisely whilst I gawped at her in the mirror. I don’t remember whether the hair cut was any good, though I do remember paying £40 for the priviledge and being satisfied that I did indeed get value for money.

Now that was more than ten years ago, and yet that experience still stays with me, and each and every time I go in to get my hair cut, I base the experience against that memory. Indeed as I walk in, I hope to see my amazonian waiting for me in boob tube and belt, and I’m then hopelessly disappointed when reality doesn’t live up to my ideal, despite the fact that my current hairdresser is indeed very pretty. And of course yesterday I grumbled at the £30 I spent on getting my hair trimmed. Sure the hairdresser was nice to talk to, and I did indeed get a very relaxing head massage, and yet I came away thinking that £30 was expensive. I wonder whether I am setting my sights too high, and indeed whether the story I told you ever really happened like that? Still one day I hope to find another amazonian hairdresser, if indeed there ever was one.

Nightshifts do funny things to reality, you know.

In my new role I’m starting to take over regular operational meetings from my boss. Many of these involve dealing with very senior managers, and of course they are mostly a lot older than me, which is always a challenge. In addition my boss’s management style is far more authoritarian than mine. I prefer to counsel ideas and then make best decision based on available information, hence getting people to do what I need them t do because they understand that it’s the logical thing to do. However my boss isn’t quite so searching for information and makes decisions quickly and expects people to follow his instructions.

So this meeting in particular, a high level financial review, started well, however I soon found myself working hard to prevent the session descending in to a bun fight. I managed to keep the meeting on course until a point where I had to leave it to the accountant because I had another meeting. Later the accountant recounted that the remainder of the meeting had been quite uncomfortable, and he likened it to when a class used to being managed by a very strict teacher had a substitute because the strict teacher was ill. All that was missing was paper aeroplanes and feet up on the table.

And yet these guys are all very senior and well respected managers, so it seems to me that this change in personnel is allowing them to vent some of the frustration that they didn’t and don’t feel comfortable with venting previously. The temptation for me is to react in future meetings with a harder style, and yet that isn’t the way I believe things should be done, so it’s interesting, it seems that these people are used to behaving in a certain way, and when the previously experienced force isn’t exerting, balance is restored by them acting like schoolchildren, resulting in me needing to behave like my boss, hence returning the status quo and allowing those frustrations to once again bubble under the surface. My challenge is hence one of staying true to the way I want to manage things long enough so that they begin to be more open and accepting of the new style, and eventually we start to see high performing, productive meetings.

And I guess I’ll be able to measure progress by how many paper aeroplanes I find on the floor after each meeting.

Who would have thought when I got up this morning, early, to avoid the rush hour traffic on the M6, M42, M5, M4 and M32, eager to test out my fancy satnav in my equally fancy new car, that I would cross paths with Noel Edmunds in his even more fancy car.

Well I certainly did. That’s the great thing about unpredictability, it makes today different to yesterday. Or perhaps that’s just my view of things, perhaps a glass half full kind of thing.

And this reminds me of the other day, I was interviewing for a position and this guy came in who had all of the qualifications and experience that I was looking for. He didn’t get the job because I just didn’t like him. Now, sure, lots of the things I’ve learnt in the last few years have probably made me more sensitive to things because I can’t really put my finger on why I didn’t like him. And when I was discussing this person with my associate, I said something like “it’s really strange, I hardly ever meet someone that annoys me and I take a dislike to, so it seems incredible that he managed to do both in a few seconds.” My associate said “you’re lucky, I meet people I don’t like and who annoy me all of the time.” So I wonder whether I really am just lucky or whether it’s just my outlook on what different means. And today was different for lots of reasons, not least the fact that I got to wave at Noel Edmunds in his Aston Martin.

Another associate once asked me of a guy we hired who was subsequently carefully managed out of the business “why does everyone take an instant dislike to Barry*? Is it just to save time?” I wonder if Barry saw the boot coming when he woke up that morning. Deal or No Deal?

 *Names may have been changed to protect the innocent until proven guilty as charged. My apologies, 7 hours of driving today has clearly affected my word association football.

I’m excitedly looking forward to my new car. It should be here this week. Big and shiny and fast and laden with gadgets, whilst still being quite good carbon footprint-wise, I can’t wait.

This will be my second brand-new car. There is something great about a new car, the smell of it and it being so lovely and clean and knowing that no-one has thrashed the car before you do.

So in preparation I decided to give my current car a bit of a valet at the weekend. You know, get all of the stuff like fire extinguishers out, and hoover it up a bit, so that when I swap keys the recipient gets that new car feel, albeit with a second hand car.

So I spent about an hour hoovering the car out, getting rid of all the parking receipts stuffed in to the pockets, and the assorted ipod accessories from the glove compartment. And when I finished, it felt like a new car, and I have since enjoyed driving it far more, and been in a better mood getting in to a lovely clean car every day. After all, this one is only 3 years old, and is a lovely car, it’s no surprise really.

And it just got me wondering, if I had valeted my old car more often, perhaps I would have gotten that new car feeling I love so much on a more regular basis?