Category Archives: Behaviour

Is “The Right Thing To Do?” the right thing to do?

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Last December we embarked on this blog with little idea where the journey would take us. We just felt that a lot of people of good will were out there with good ideas about how to make our world better. All we had to do was find them. Or, better yet, for them to find us.

And, through a mix of word of mouth and downright cajoling, they delivered their thoughts, based on their life experiences, for us to share with a wider audience. And, for that, we are truly grateful to every one of them. Here they are:

David Tebbutt Felix Dennis Ray Maguire Ben Goldsmith Clive Longbottom
Euan Semple Mark Chillingworth Martin Banks Hussein Dickie Tracey Poulton
Rob Wirszycz Anne Marie McEwan Tarquin Henderson Dr Bill Nichols Andy Redfern
Tari Lang Jason J Drew Ibukun Adebayo Neil Crofts Drew Buddie

As you probably know, this site is non-commercial. Everything is voluntary and the most anyone gets is the opportunity to see their words published and to give themselves a slight exposure to a wider audience. Some benefit from this more than others. No names, no pack drill.

I’d just like to say “Thank you” to every contributor and reader and wish you all seasonal greetings and a happy new year. We’re going to take a bit of a break now. I’ll leave you with a list of the contributions and perhaps you’ll enjoy reading some of those you missed.

Why things will get better - from a Matt Ridley TED talk
Entrepreneur Extraordinaire, Felix Dennis, on Good Fortune
Never mind GDP, what about Gross National Happiness? - from a Chip Conley TED talk
Reconnecting kids with the school curriculum - Ray Maguire
Has the Khan Academy found the right way to educate? - from a Salman Khan TED talk
Why green makes business sense - Ben Goldsmith
Is sustainable growth a myth? - Clive Longbottom
Rag and bone men of the information world - Euan Semple
The power of community Mark Chillingworth
Where’s the ‘social’ in ‘accountancy’? - Martin Banks
Mind the gap - Hussein Dickie
Inhumane HR behaviour - Tracey Poulton
Listen! (To the right people) - David Tebbutt on Cognitive Edge work
Get on the trust trajectory - Rob Wirszycz
Baby, bathwater, beware … - Anne Marie McEwan
Is green the new gold? - Tarquin Henderson
Hunters got us into this mess – will farmers get us out? - Dr. Bill Nichols
Fairtrade, Organic or Me-Me? - Andy Redfern
How sticky are your labels? - David Tebbutt
Reputation is deeds, not words - Tari Lang
Passion + talent = magic - From Sir Ken Robinson’s work
Authenticity vs perception - Dr. Bill Nichols
Could the fly save humanity? - Jason J. Drew
Ignorance and prejudice - Ibukun Adebayo
Superstorm Sandy: what would you have done? - David Tebbutt
Doing the right thing – even when no one is watching - Neil Crofts
Stubbornness – The Nailhouse Principle - Drew Buddie

So, what do you reckon? Is “The Right Thing To Do?” the right thing to do? Do you know anyone who would like to share their learnings from real life for the greater good?

Please point them at me trttd@tebbo.com. Thank you. (PS It could be you too!)

Stubbornness – The Nailhouse Principle

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When Messrs Suggs, McPherson and co. sang Our House, in the Middle of our Street as a generalised description of a stereotypical street in any British town, little could they have realised that those words could have so aptly described the house owned by Luo Baogen and his family in Wenling, China, where quite literally, their house really is in the middle of their street… well, ‘motorway’ to be precise.

Their story, which hit the headlines recently thanks to some incredible photographs, is the latest in a long line of tales of modern derring-do, worthy of the best feats of Robin Hood and which have come to be known as dingzihù, or Nailhouses. (Like stubborn nails that stick out of pieces of wood and can’t be banged in.)

Nailhouse

Image by triplefivedrew in Flickr

Nailhouses have grown very famous in recent years because they stand as a visual metaphor for an unwillingness of the ‘little person’ to be browbeaten by those with more power. The most well-known of all of these is generally held to be the former home of Wu Ping in Chonqing.

Wu Ping owned a home that was slap bang in the middle of what was going to become a modern development. However, dissatisfied with what the family saw as a derisory offer for their property, they refused to move out. This resulted in the remarkable image of a single building, bereft of amenities like power and electricity, standing atop a 10m high mound of earth, like some ancient castle. In order to ascend to his property, the owner, a martial arts expert, had to create a makeshift ladder of nunchakus in order to ascend to his home. Yes, really!

So notorious was this particular case that it spawned one of the most successful computer games in China called The Big Battle: Nail House Versus Demolition Team. But as a stark reminder to real life, the odds were stacked against players. As one player said: “I have already got 70,000 [points] in the game but my house was still demolished. It tells us that the demolition team is not defeatable … The only thing we can do is to wait and die.”

In China this sort of action is possible because ‘the legal private property of citizens cannot be violated’ and there are now many cases that have been documented: one home owner even fashioned a makeshift cannon in order to defend his home from property developers. This behavior is not only confined to China, as seven Japanese farmers who were unwilling to sell their land for what they considered to be a pittance, forced the construction of a runway at Narita airport to deviate around their land in a quite dramatic fashion.

If you are a film lover it is possible that you should be grateful to the “Nailhouse Principle” for the way it has been frequently used as a plot mechanic. “Five ordinary people needed a miracle. Then one night, Faye Riley left the window open,” presaged the drama of the impoverished tenants in Batteries not Included who used extra-terrestrial help to fight unscrupulous property developers. Who can forget the most titanic battle between good and evil ever committed to celluloid: where Miss Steinmetz battles to save her property from the evil Mr Judson with only half a ton of metal to help her in Herbie Rides Again? And last but not least, we are thankful to the glorious tale of Edith Macefield who, unwilling to accept $1 million for her 108 year old farmhouse, held firm as modern offices were built around her. Her story gave rise to one of the most beautiful animated films ever made: Up. As lovely postscript to Edith’s story, she struck up such a rapport with the new building’s construction superintendent that she left her home to him in her will.

So being stubborn can be good. It can bring rewards. It can be the right thing to do. What have you done today that has made you a Nailhouser?

Doing the right thing – even when no one is watching

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One of our contributors – Andy Redfern – linked us to this excellent blog post by Neil Crofts. Our thanks to Neil who has kindly given us permission to republish it.

Doing the right thing even when no one is watching, can, perhaps be taken as a definition of ethics. It is also the basis for sustainable success and happiness.

We arrived at a point of inflection in the 90′s where the invention of the internet (and therefore the inevitability that someone was watching) coincided with a moment where venal, ego driven, greed is good, success at any price appeared to go mainstream. Corruption, which had generally been the preserve of an elite, was “democratised” to a far wider population of politicians, business people, journalists, celebrities, bankers, sports stars and anyone else who had the opportunity than ever before.

Today we are living with the hangover from a get rich quick decade where thousands prospered at the expense of billions – the naughties indeed!

Although there are those who will continue to pretend it is not, the game is most definitely up. Even despots tend to be more inclusive than they used to be (there are exceptions of course).

Just as philanthropy is the new super yacht, ethics are the new CSR. There is a new moral puritanism sweeping the corporate, sporting and (hopefully) political worlds that says that “success at any price – actually is not success”.

There was a generation of athletes, business people and politicos who genuinely believed that if you did not get caught, you did nothing wrong. Cyclists who believed that if you didn’t fail a dope test, you were clean. Bankers who believed that if you got paid the bonus the loan or bet must have been OK and politicians who believed that if you made it to the end of your term, you were home free.

Q: If you die before your transgressions come out – did you get away with it?

In today’s twitterverse comeuppance is swift and inevitable. Skeletons barely make it to the cupboard, carpets have been replaced with polished floors with nothing to sweep things under and elephants tend to already have been posted on YouTube, making them hard to ignore, no matter what size the room is.

The upshot of all of this is that we have to get used to doing what we are proud of – only and avoiding anything that might compromise us in the future.

Of course redesigning a culture to take account of these new realities is a stupendous challenge and yet that is the process we are in. I feel personally privileged to be part of this process. I am awed by the changes wrought in the last ten years. When I started this journey, a little over ten years ago, authentic business and leadership were a pipe dream, a fantasy and yet today they are an emerging new reality.

I have been accused of living, too much, in the future and this may be so, but I firmly see the evidence of this shift and am inspired and reassured by it.

Superstorm Sandy: what would you have done?

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No-one knows the timescale but it’s highly likely the human race is doomed. It could be from the sun – doesn’t matter whether it gets hotter or colder, either way we’ll be snookered. It could be from our own actions – short term, like nuclear war or long term like our attacks on the environment that supports us. The question for all of us is whether we should act en masse and at great expense to head off the human-induced changes or take a more fatalistic view. What will be, will be.

This week’s massive storm in New York City has done a brilliant job of focusing attention on what can happen when an extreme weather event hits. And remember that, by the time it reached New York City, hurricane Sandy had diminished to a ‘tropical storm’. Yet, the surge of sea water was still fourteen feet high. No doubt this was partly due to the funnelling effect of the estuaries and rivers that lead to New York City. But the reasons don’t matter greatly, the City clearly could not cope with such a rise.

Environmental specialists had been warning New Yorkers for many years that sea levels are rising and that storm surges can exacerbate such rises. They warned of the sea level being four foot higher by mid-century and, indeed, measures have been taken by a few organisations to make sure that water ingress is prevented to their properties at that level.

This made not a blind bit of difference this week. And, by the time the sea levels rise, it will make even less difference. The mildest storm could result in something similar to this week’s events.

Let’s look at money. Dr Klaus Jacob predicted that the flooding of the subway tunnels under the Harlem and East Rivers would cause them to be unusable for nearly a month, or longer, at an economic loss of about $55bn. Compare this with the estimated cost of three storm barriers to protect the City – $10bn. The trouble is that the people bearing the cost of the latest storm are different people to those who need to spend the lower cost of prevention of future storms. (Except, of course, they are all citizens of the New York area.)

“What’s all this got to do with me?”, I hear you ask. Well, plenty. Just as the New York storm appeared to come ‘out of the blue’, so other climatic events could hit you out of the blue. The question for you is, “how much effort should go into preventing, adapting to or clearing up after such an event in your area?”

Do you do effectively nothing except talk about it a lot? Do you work on prevention which means reducing the harm we’re doing to the environment? Do you work on adaptation, which means accepting things will happen and creating evacuation plans and the like? Or do you work on clearing up the mess after each event?

What do you think is the right thing to do? And why?

Ignorance and prejudice

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I’ve never been one to cry foul when someone calls me a “‘black’ whatever”; I’m usually more concerned about the ‘whatever’ bit than the fact they’ve confirmed what I’ve known since birth, i.e. that I’m ‘black’.

I once started a job in IT whereby I met with so much resistance in my early days there that I felt like taking up kick-boxing to relieve the stress. I was turned down for kick-boxing lessons because, apparently, my massive feet could have knocked an opponent into a coma.

Eventually, the manager who had led the unwelcoming pack told me one day, “You know you’re the best leader I’ve ever worked with and the only problem I had with you at the beginning is you’re black and you’re a woman, and I’ve never worked for either before”.

Okay, so how did this two-pronged ‘revelation’ affect me, and did it influence my views on the IT industry? It didn’t really. Many people have prejudices and biases, yet very few are as honest as this manager was with his straightforward admission that he was prejudiced against women in IT and that his ignorance about reporting to a black woman was affecting his professional relationship with me.

Things got better after this; and after he’d realised my massive ideas matched my foot size (ten, if you’re interested). While on the subject of my feet, I also take strides of purpose while carrying my team members along with me. Moving to the other end of my body, my unusually large nose means I sniff about and probe and ask my managers the right questions, expecting them to provide answers as I steer my department towards our agreed vision.

In the CIO (Chief Information Officer) community, things do need to be spiced up a bit. Attending CIO conferences (we met at one – ed.) is still a pretty testing experience for me as, despite being born in Balham, I’ve always enjoyed rice – preferably extra-large plates with curry, beef and goat meat – with some nice chilli hot pepper, whereas conference delegates tend to be presented with bland tasting rice, sometimes err… dripping with water, and a few tiny bits of lamb, while, of course the ‘polite’ thing to do is to take about two tablespoons of rice and move on to an equally bland tasting sauce. But, more importantly, you don’t see many female CIOs at these events because there are so few women in ‘C’ positions in IT in the UK. And you see even fewer women there from ethnic minorities.

I don’t believe in quotas, rather in appointing the right person to each role whatever their colour, gender or religious orientation. Sexual orientation shouldn’t even come into the recruitment equation, after-all nobody should care who you get into bed with, as long as you’re personally not being asked to get into bed with anyone other than the love of your personal life.

Managerial life really isn’t that stressful and, because of my baptism of fire into a role where I received affirmation of my race and gender plus of my credentials as a good leader, I’ve learned that leadership means being able to differentiate between prejudice and ignorance. It means being able to deal with any conflict that arises from prejudicial behaviour, and being able to identify development needs where ignorance is the issue. It means ensuring that the ignorant are developed until their ignorance turns into awareness, and always remembering that not all ignorant people are prejudiced, yet all prejudiced people are ignorant.

Authenticity vs perception

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For product marketers, the ‘proof of the pudding’ is key. Truth, they assert, will out. Only once can you sell someone a dodgy motor, shoddy clothing or, yes, a bundle of subprime mortgages. Commit to consistent high quality every time everywhere and it will deliver brand loyalty and positive reputation.
“Ah yes, but”, respond the communicators, “perception is king.” They will argue that it’s what people believe that counts. With the right messages, positioning and narrative, blue can be red, up down and hot cold. You can paint Obama as a rabid socialist, Romney as a 21st-century Gradgrind and shove any mediocre also-ran product into the limelight.
Perception vs. reality: it’s one of the great dynamics of public relations. In the early decades of ‘publicist’ PR, hype ruled. Then post-war, information-based PR was widely taught and practised. Subsequently the spin-doctors restored perception to its throne. But here comes authenticity (a.k.a. reality) again. And here’s why – both technically and strategically.
So long as media was limited (remember four terrestrial channels?), easily isolated and individually addressable by PR folk, it was possible technically to manage and control perception. This approach reached its apogee in the highly effective news management of the early Blair years after 1997.
But the social and online wave has swept this era away. True you can spin a wonderful tale and distribute it globally in seconds. But truth, or at least strident alternatives, may be heard (or tweeted!) equally in seconds. Even the Chinese who can switch off sites, groups and even whole cities and regions struggle with this.
Ultimately new technologies and techniques may reverse the pendulum. Meantime, PR folks must rely on delivering ‘authenticity’ – that is, the carefully cultivated and sustained presentation and approximation of reality. Granted it will be tempting to go with the wave when confronted with the latest focus group finding, negative blog or C-suite scream.
But constantly changing messages communicate only noise. Whereas, over time, authenticity creates trust, dialogue and opportunity.
Early empiric research suggests that online and social authenticity motivates changes of opinion or new purchase. People know it is raw and subjective but real. Once motivated, and pending a decision, they then migrate to more formal collateral.
Here then is a new communications process to master. Here too, perhaps, is the solution to Facebook’s ‘monetisation’ challenge. Pages of hype and perceptual management don’t win ‘friends’ or justify premium rates. Quality authentic news and engagement should. So perhaps FB should market the ‘PR’ opportunity which it can quantify vs. traffic and ‘friends’?
So here’s to authenticity. Challenging certainly. Intimidating often. But for any self-respecting proposition, it’s surely the right thing to do.

Passion + talent = magic

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If you are already familiar with Sir Ken Robinson‘s work, stop reading now. You will already know how much sense he speaks, interspersed with jokes and asides. You’d never know from listening to him that he was born in Liverpool, to a large working-class family. He speaks beautifully and intelligently about the human condition and what we can do to make our lives better.

He rails at how so many of us fail to achieve our potential, largely because of the way we are taught and conditioned. His 2006 TED video on children and creativity is a classic (it has been viewed almost twelve million times). Here’s a quote, “My contention is, all kids have tremendous talents. And we squander them, pretty ruthlessly.”

He views traditional education as an industrial-style narrowing exercise which squeezes out creativity (my paraphrase, not his, by the way). He says, “Our education system has mined our minds in the way that we strip-mine the earth: for a particular commodity. And for the future, it won’t serve us. We have to rethink the fundamental principles on which we’re educating our children.”

The RSA was inspired to get his talk Changing Education Paradigms animated by Andrew Park’s Cognitive Media. That’s been viewed over eight and a half million times. Talk about viral …

And there’s more, much more, on Sir Ken’s website. His most recent work has been around the subject of aligning your passions and your abilities. He contrasts the lives of many who eke out their working lives in anticipation of the weekends and those who are fulfilled in everything they do. Opposite ends of a spectrum of experience, but it’s easy enough to plot where anyone sits on this continuum. His assertion is that we can move. And, indeed, we should move.

In a recent presentation on Passion for the School of Life, he told the story of a book editor who absolutely loved her work yet prior to this she’d been a concert pianist. Her whole life, her education – right up to her PhD – had been centred around music. Yet, she was far more passionate about books than piano recitals. One day, after another successful concert, the conductor suggested that she hadn’t enjoyed it. It was a pivotal moment. She admitted he was right. Soon after, she became a book editor and closed her piano lid for good.

He suggests that if you are doing something you’re good at and that you love, an hour seems like five minutes. To pinch the title of his recent book, written with Lou Aronica, people like this are in their Element.

If you or your colleagues are finding that time drags, then surely that’s a clear signal that you should plan for change. And, if you need inspiration, Sir Ken Robinson can provide it in spades. Providing you’re partial to his jokes.

 

Reputation is deeds, not words

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It’s now 15 years that I’ve been pushing the mantra that “reputation has a financial value”, in my campaign to get reputation on the agenda of the CEO. Back then, reputation was viewed not as a business asset but as a marketing tool to be addressed through PR campaigns. These campaigns tended not to be bound by considerations such as facts, truth or intelligent insight. Siobhan Sharpe, the vacuous proprietor of Perfect Curve in the BBC’s cutting satire Twenty Twelve, embodies just that old style way of dealing with reputation. I cringe watching that programme for the memories of just that type of communicator – just as I cringed all those years ago.

Thankfully we’re all much smarter now. And yet, the banking sector has had to learn the hard way that behaving irresponsibly has destroyed its collective reputation, leading directly to censure, legal recourse and restraint in business practices. Bankers’ remuneration is widely regarded as undeserved and disproportionate.

So I continue to urge my clients to be vigilant about their institutional, corporate and personal behaviour. I try to focus on how leadership teams think and act, not just how they communicate. I examine claims of excellence and talk with clients’ stakeholders to ensure the claims they make can be substantiated. Conversations with clients’ marketing and communications agencies test how responsibly corporate messages are being narrated.

This does make life more complex. But the stakes are higher than ever before. Corporations spend millions on legal defence and counter attack. They spend huge sums on management consulting firms who produce fancy charts to create an organisational structure to replace the last one they created and to demonstrate, of course, that their expensive services continue to be required. Yes, you guessed right, my opinion of big management consultancies is very low. Yet organisations spend only, even now, a relatively small proportion on reputation management and reputation risk assessments.

This piece is not a bid for more work or more money – I’m busy enough, thank you. But there’s a lot of rescuing to be done out there. This needs strategists to raise their game and everything sits on that powerful word: reputation.

How sticky are your labels?

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As editor of “The Right Thing To Do?” I’ve tried to stay in the background but, due to a monumental workload elsewhere in recent weeks, I’ve failed to find a guest writer this week. So you’ve got me. Hope you don’t mind.

As a subject I thought I’d look back at my own life and figure out what the most important lesson has been. And I reckon it’s ‘authenticity’. Whenever I’ve tried to be someone I’m not, I’ve ended up unhappy at best and stressed at worst.

The trouble is that companies quite often force you into these uncomfortable situations. And, without some kind of training – in management skills in my case before I secured my first managerial position – you either busk it and get away with it. Or you do what I did and try to satisfy everyone and end up so stressed my wife had to call a doctor. (I don’t remember, but I was apparently banging my head against a wall at the time.)

Fortunately, I was able to resign fairly amicably and move on, to better things as it happened, but with some lessons learned in a very hard way. After that, instead of pretending I was some kind of superman, I tried to be more open and honest about things.

Sure, we have to pretend a bit. Some years later, when I became editor of a magazine, it was a massive departure for me. I didn’t feel like an ‘editor’. I lacked the authority of many of my writers. But I found that, because I had the label ‘editor’, people treated me like one and it took very little time to grow into the new role. One that was completely compatible with my skills, motivations and values.

Again, I was lucky. A fantastic publisher (Felix Dennis) gave me a wonderful feel for this new profession (I’d had a series of IT management jobs before largely switching to publishing) and, best of all, I was able to be ‘me’.

How many people get that opportunity? How many people are labelled and feel obliged to live out those labels? ‘Nerd’, ‘air head’, ‘superstar’, ‘disabled’, ‘tycoon’, ‘housewife’ and so on.

The only labels you need to conform to are those you choose for yourself. You have only one life and, while it might take courage to break free of the comfort of your label, if your inner self and your label are incompatible, you need to do something about it before the stress gets you.

If you want to hear and see someone who’s learned this lesson in an astonishing and profound way, take a look at this TED video by Caroline Casey. She had two massive ‘change moments’ in her life, at 17 and at 26, the first threatened to bestow an accurate but unwelcome label on her, and her denial of it led to the second which was close to a breakdown. By then accepting what she was and acknowledging what she really wanted, she was able to perform what you and I might regard as miracles.

Enjoy!

Fairtrade, Organic or Me-Me?

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According to my wife, cynicism is neither big nor clever. She feels that cynical remarks and sarcastic comments are the preserve of those who’ve lost their zest and zip for life. Sadly, running an ethical retail site brings me into contact with a lot of cynical people.

“What do you mean by being ethical?”

“How do you know your products are ethical?”

“That ethical tag is just way of making me pay more, it doesn’t prove anything.”

“Now we’re in a double dip recession, you’ve had it. No one can afford to buy ethically anymore”

This final comment was made by someone looking to get a cheap deal. He felt that no one cared about ethics; people only cared about money when the chips were down. He felt that Fairtrade was just a cynical marketing ploy to extract more money from him.

So, have people thrown their ethics out of the window? Do they no longer care about the ethics they claimed to hold dear during the good times?

Well, the picture is mixed. In the world of grocery shopping, the two giants of the ethical labelling world are Fairtrade and Organic. In the UK, certified organic product sales fell by 3.7% in 2011 with a number of supermarkets culling offerings and failing to add new own-label organic items. Fairtrade on the other hand grew by 12% over the same period with giants like Tate and Lyle switching huge quantities of its supplies to Fairtrade sources.

We can draw an interesting conclusion from this apparent difference in the relative ethical tags. I contend that core customers of both labels are unchanged and it’s only at the margins that organic customers have slipped away. When even Nick Clegg and his lawyer wife claim they can’t afford to shop at largely organic Waitrose, there is clearly a perceived high price to pay for ethical items. But I would suggest that it is all about motivation and belief rather than price.

When I first heard of fair trade in 1983, it seemed so obvious a concept to treat developing world suppliers fairly that I expected supermarkets to switch entirely to fair trade within three or four years. 30 years later, with sales of over a £1billion per year, it’s a huge niche market but capturing the hearts and minds of consumers has been a slow process. The ‘problem’ is that many consumers ask, “What’s in it for me?” So Fairtrade has always had an educational element at its core to help people understand why it is the right thing to do.

I believe that this is what makes Fairtrade more recession-proof than organic. There never was a “me” benefit with Fairtrade. People support it because they believe it is right and so, even when money is tight, we tend to stick to our key beliefs. The Organic shopper is more diverse. The dubious “me” benefit of organic being better for you was tough to prove scientifically, so the fad-led consumer has moved on to the next thing to make them feel better.

This is a key lesson in long-term sustainability. People will commit to a brand and its products in the long-term if they believe it is the right thing to do. Fads come and go, but things which support our core beliefs are here to say. Doing the right thing may prove to be the most radical marketing strategy yet.