Category: Business Life

Happy “Niú” Year!


祝您新春快乐，牛年大吉！
Zhù nín xīnchūn kuàilè, niú nián dàjí!

Happy year of the Ox!

Afrikaaner breed grazing in Transkei

I am not a literal believer in horoscopes of any kind, either Western or Eastern ones, taken literally they are a form of the occult and not for Christians or anyone else who desires not to be led astray by them.

I do however recognise that the naming of years, months, days and other parts of life have a pagan origin, also in the West, and that for most of us these are not taken literally. We don’t baulk at the idea that our weekdays are named after planets which in turn are named for pagan deities, so likewise we accept that for Chinese people saying that the year we are now entering by their calendar is the year of the Ox is also part of the culture and to be valued as such, but any auguries made on that basis are to be taken with a pinch of salt.

Nevertheless, I like oxen, and having a year named for them is not a bad thing, really. When you consider all the benefits we have from cattle, in terms of dairy products, meat products, leather, fertiliser and traction. 


The Bible moreover has a great deal to say about oxen. I would like to take one verse of the BIble and make it in a sense a “verse of the year” for this Year of the Ox.

1 Timothy 5v18 says:


“For the scripture saith, Thou shalt not muzzle the ox that treadeth out the corn. And, The labourer is worthy of his reward.” (KJV)

“λέγει γὰρ ἡ γραφή Βοῦν ἀλοῶντα οὐ φιμώσεις καί Ἄξιος ὁ ἐργάτης τοῦ μισθοῦ αὐτοῦ” (TR)

I have a couple of points to draw out of this verse:

  1. the immediate context is that of the people who have as it were offices in the Church, in this case elders or Presbyters, should make a living, and in says in the preceding verse “a double honour”. I take this to mean that the personal income of a faithful minister in the Gospel, if it’s double the average wages of the people in the congregation, isn’t excessive. Note (and this is for Brother Copeland and other rather richer pastors especially those where their own flock is not wealthy) it doesn’t say “quadruple honour” in that preceding verse, or “tenfold honour” but “double”. Those who keep their minister in poverty are mean and niggardly, those who keep him in luxury are fools and they all are poor witnesses.

  2. In a broader context, the Old Testament allowed oxen to eat as they worked. In the modern context we have people working on matters and being allowed no fringe benefits whatsoever from what they work on. OK I get the controls in diamond mines, you cannot go smuggling out small diamonds under your fingernails because you were paid for the work to get them and that’s what you are paid to deliver, where the value is. But the pay must be fair. More broadly, if you work with food all day it’s not fair if you have that food in front of you and cannot at least taste a bit, or have first dibs on the leftovers. Sitting next to a photocopier all day and breathing its ozone, but not being able now and again to use it for something your kid needs for school is also not normal. If we are to treat oxen as having a small share in the value they are creating, then for sure this ought to be a standard for humans also.


    May 2021 be a year where people are more able to have a fair share of the value they co-create than they have been in previous times. I am no socialist, and I don’t wait this imposed on us by Big Government. I would prefer to have owners of businesses think again on their own accord and consider that an equitable, partnerly mindset that seeks to be fair to all the stakeholders, including Bob Cratchett, is the most satisfying and sustainable way of doing business and the only way in which a Christian business owner can give a worthy witness.

    In the Greek original, which I gave above, we see emphasised in orange the word ox as Bos in Greek (Boun is accusative, for your information). In English we have the term Boss with an additional -s as the word for a chief in business, but not only the chief is an ox, everyone in the team is also a Bos and it’s no yoke if they are not muzzled and not treated fairly. He who would be master must be servant of all of his people.

 

What is “gravitas” and how does one develop it?


I think that “gravitas” means really the opposite of being a visibly light-hearted, humorous and happy-go-lucky person. Therefore you have to be able to switch the level of gravitas on and off, that’s the tricky bit. There are people who get noted for being able to make people laugh and sometimes, if they are not carefully, they become regarded as “clowns” who are not really to be taken seriously. On the other hand, too much of the opposite will mean you are seen as someone with gravitas, but maybe not someone with a great sense of humour, which could create distance in situations where you don’t want it.

A certain dignity in not being too open about one’s personal life is probably good – familiarity can breed contempt, and making sure that your use of humour is aimed at quality rather than quantity will do a lot to enable you to come off as someone with gravitas. Other than that it is something which grows with age, experience and the ability to show a certain classic style of speech, choice of language, dress and posture. But you can’t stand on your dignity the whole time. If you make a mistake and people laugh at you, better join in the joke rather than get offended or that will undermine gravitas quicker than anything else.

Certainly a serious demeanour going hand in hand with a genuine reputation for being ethical and having a flawless integrity, these are things which many of us aspire to and should aspire to. For many successful people, this is what they tend to have in common and for many this is what they will sum up as “gravitas”.

A former boss of mine suggested that I increase my level of gravitas in order to get on, he did not say how I should go about it, but I think to a degree I did it anyway. Now I am pleased to say I can still make people laugh, but I can just as easily get them to take an issue seriously. That’s what I wanted to achieve and that’s a target I recommend people to aim for whenever I hear them talking about gravitas.

Plaxo as a personal CRM business tool


In these days of below-the-line marketing, everyone should have a personal social-media CRM independently to whatever CRM they have in their office. This reflects the blurring of the work and play areas of life which is one of the recognised aspects of Generations Y and Z, as well as a very natural result of the interactive technology most of our readers will be native to and working in every day of their lives.

Plaxo (www.plaxo.com) is an address book synchronising and back-up tool which has a number of interesting features such as the ability to access your contacts from the net, to import and export as CSV files, to send greetings cards to check duplicates and synchronise in a limited way with google applications, facebook and other social media.

The interface seems to offer a lot of benefits and certainly the ability to send greetings cards is a useful one. There are, however a whole series of issues and bugs and incomplete aspects to Plaxo which means that it can easily be superseded as the personal CRM of choice by any app maker able to sort out these issues more efficiently.

1) There’s no official Plaxo app on Android phones and so the synchronisation goes via Google Apps and is clunky. Whenever codeword security runs out, it seems to stop synchronising. Also the synchronising doesn’t seem to work well all the time and in my case telephone numbers have been moved from one person to another, which is very troublesome.

2) There are not really enough greetings cards and they are in too few languages.

3) Intelligent updating from the web of what our contacts are doing seems not to be working half the time. Occasionally the robot makes a half-hearted attempt to find and update people, but nowhere near what you’d expect for the annual fee.

4) Above about 3000 contacts and the site works slowly. It is unable to offer you a print out of the whole database at that size.

5) It often loses the pictures it has imported from facebook and doesn’t seem to be able to import any at all from Linked In. It cannot update calendars directly to Android, again only via Google apps.

6) It doesn’t deal properly with any scripts beyond basic Latin script, so it mangles names written even with Polish or Czech letters, leave alone Cyrillics or Chinese names.

7) The folders are a clunky interface, but even when you have done the work of putting contacts into the appropriate folders, they don’t carry through to the greetings cards area, so you cannot, for instance, make a folder of people who would receive, let’s say, and Eidh card or a more/less traditional Hannukah card and then easily access that folder from the greetings card area. Also send outs of more than about 200 cards per time tend to fail and need all that work to be done again.

These are my main Plaxo gripes. I am airing them in the hope that Plaxo will finally get their act together and repair their product before their remaining users find another app on the market among the choice which seems to be growing every day that does all the things that Plaxo is expected to do, but still fails to deliver.

 

 

 

 

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I come to bury mind-mapping, not to praise it.


Mind Mapping
Mind Mapping (Photo credit: sirwiseowl)

Tim Brown recently wrote the following small article on Linked In updates, which I found by clicking a link telling me to stop using words to describe things:

Make it Visual

Some things are hard to describe in words. In fact, many things are hard to describe in words. Try describing in detail the bedroom you spent your childhood in. My guess is that you will have a hard time describing it well enough for someone else to recreate it. The same is true for new ideas. Words may be a start, but they often lack the precision and clarity required to describe a new idea to someone else. Photos, sketches, and data visualizations can make complex ideas easier to understand and share. That’s why portfolios beat résumés, and young designers are still encouraged to carry a sketchbook.

This week, try recording your observations and ideas visually, even if just as a rough sketch in a notebook or a picture on your camera phone. If you think you can’t draw, too bad. Do it anyway.

Mind mapping can be an excellent way to get visual about abstract ideas. For example, check out the design thinking mind map used in Change By Design, which you also can see in my recent post, “Start Designing Your Life.

There were nearly two hundred likes on this and a discussion had kicked off which seemed fairly one-sided, with 42 people all agreeing with this premise in one form or another. Oddly they had all used words to express this agreement and not one picture could be seen.

I had to add the contrary view, and did so as follows:

I respectfully disagree with some of the premises in this article. We think with language – I defy anyone to frame a conceptual thought without it – and human language, at least the ones I know, bases on words.

I have looked at Mind Mapping and some of the other inventions of Tony Buzan, I have read several of his books and remain skeptical as to the practical use of them. As far as mind mapping is concerned, its main use in my opinion is to give people of an artistic bent an excuse for doodling in meetings, and at least some direction to the doodling they’d probably be doing anyway.

A tabular approach wins out every time – the human brain loves tables and rectangular things. That’s why we live in rectangular rooms in rectangular buildings with rectangular furniture. Placing any problem into a table immediately highlights areas which are uncovered, and ensures deeper and more consistent thinking on any topic. Even “out of the box” thinking is only possible if you’ve defined a box. None of this happens with mind-maps, which ensure a very subjective and random summary of any topic.

I thought it was worth taking a contrary position and maybe getting some thought and discussion going, so please don’t be offended at my detraction from your premise, which is certainly not intended in an agressive spirit.

I thought we could find out whether the mind-mapping is actually popular among the people who follow or at least stumble upon this service, so please take part in the following poll:

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The Money Value of Time


The National Audit Office building, built orig...
The National Audit Office building, built originally as the Imperial Airways Empire Terminal. The statue, “Speed Wings over the World” is by Eric Broadbent” (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

According to page 2 of today’s UK Financial Times, a UK National Audit Office report shows over 6.5m people waited more than 10 minutes to get their calls answered by HMRC, adding £33m to customer’s phone bills and wasting £103m of their time last year.

This snippet of information triggered a few things that I wanted to say to you this morning. The first of these is, that, despite the fact that it is obviously pretty dire that people need to wait so long to get their calls answered by the service they are paying taxes to fund in the first place, at least in the UK there is a body which is concerened at the loss of time and places a value, in monetary terms, on that loss of time by the customer.

Anyone who has spent any time either in government offices, or even banks or supermarkets in this part of the world will probably confirm that the idea that the customer’s time is valuable and should be respected is a rather alien concept. Not so long ago it was an utterly alien concept, but even today it is still a concept which they find rather hard to grasp.

Not as bad as China, though, from what I heard and also saw. People being expected to queue all day outside the Chinese consulate for their visa and then at the very moment that the scheduled closing time of the office came the shutters come down like with Kiosk Keith and that was that. The spare time of the employees was utterly sacrosanct, that of the customer not at all. This of course shows an elitist mentality, which can be found in almost all state sector offices to one or another degree anywhere in the world. Expect it and try somehow to deal with it.

Much less acceptable is the wasting of the customer’s time in business. If the customer is paying then they have a right to have their matters expedited and people who keep people waiting ought either to invest in more infrastructure to avoid it or to wonder if they are in the right business. Continue reading “The Money Value of Time” →

UK Trade and Investment Initiatives to support business ventures to and from Poland


logo of UKTI
A message from UKTI

Martin Oxley sent this out for the Foreign and Commonwealth office and we are pleased to assist in its propagation.

Dear Quoracy.com subscribers,

Poland presents an attractive nearshore growth opportunity for Britain Plc. In line with the new UKTI strategy presented to government recently by Lord Green, Minister of State for Trade and Investment we are introducing a step change in the way UKTI supports British business growth.

We are taking a very proactive approach on behalf of government to provide a range of bespoke services to enable British SME’s to significantly enhance exports and also work with large corporations to win major overseas contracts and expedite their growth in market.

With our new Ambassador HMA Robin Barnett and the Embassy team we are engaging to support strong growth oriented business agenda in Poland.

With this in mind I am pleased to attach a brief outline of the services which UKTI has developed to support British business in Poland. I very much look forward to meeting you over the course of the coming weeks to discuss with you how we can assist you with your specific company needs.

I am very happy to visit you or alternatively you would be most welcome to visit us and I will provide you a tour of our excellent event facilities at the Embassy.

Kind regards

Martin Oxley

110715 EVR Expand your Business with UKTI Poland.pdf

Quoracy.com would also like to take this opportunity to congratulate our dear friend Martin Oxley on his recent new appointment to the FCO in Warsaw, and to wish him every success working with Her Majesty’s new Ambassador to Poland, His Excellency Robin Barnett. We wish you and your team many successes and a lot of fun.

Is your business in the “ivy league”?


variegated ivy leaves
'Hedera' of reference?

I was recently reminded of something my old gardener told me about ivy. I had been surprised at how slow some lovely variegated ivy that had been planted by my fence was coming on, and his words were as follows:

With ivy, the first year it is put in, it does nothing, it just sulks at having been put in a new place. The second year is starts to spread out horizontally along the ground by the bottom of the fence, and in the third year it starts to grow upward, like a curtain.

Wise words, from someone who knew his onions. And his ivy. It seems to me that this is a great analogy for many new businesses. Entrepreneurs obviously look for a rapid return on capital employed. They want their profits and the cash back to invest in the next thing. But nature takes its course with some businesses just like it does with the ivy, and you cannot rush it.

The first year, you have set up costs, people are getting used to each other in a new team with a new product, new identity. This is like the ivy “sulking” – just establishing a new root system and adapting to the chemistry of the soil and the direction of the light.

The second year you start to see sales pick up but the prices are not that good yet and also the volumes don’t allow the contribution to cover fixed costs. You get growth but you don’t get the profit. It is like the ivy growing along the ground by the bottom of the fence. It is obviously going somewhere, but you aren’t getting the effect of it yet.

The third year you reach a certain critical mass, you break even you start to nudge into profit, your cash flows turn the corner and you start paying back your seed finance. This is like the ivy making its curtain up the fence.

If the ivy survives at all, it will certainly produce the coverage in time. The same with these new businesses. They simply need to be nurtured and for nature to be allowed to take its course. If the soil is right, the light is there, and the water, the plant healthy, then it will do what it is programmed to do in its own time. Micro-managing it will not help. Restructuring the team which is only starting to gel will not help. it will be like transplanting the ivy at the end of the second year for failing to raise – it will only go through its sulking and creeping years all over again in the new position.

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