This was only one of many choice nuggets of wisdom Lara Morgan shared with us last night.

The occasion was an event we organised together with the Leith Agency, under their “Leithal Thinking” banner. It was the first of a series of stimulating and inspiring talks and events for enterprising and creative people.

“Not being so damned British” has been a key part of Lara’s success. But how does this work? What’s the problem with being British? Well, Lara IS British – and there’s loads of great things about being British. The trick is not to be constrained by it. Be willing to behave and think in ways that aren’t archetypally British, when that archetype would hold you back.

In other words, beware the British obstacles!

Here’s four juicy ones.

1. Modesty
It is to our tremendous cost that we go about our business trying desperately to be discrete. It prevents people knowing about the products and services we offer. It makes us immediately suspicious of things like sales, branding and marketing. We end up relating to what is a key part of any business like it’s dirty and evil.

2. Cordiality
Another pitfall is the endless round of courting potential clients over coffees, lunches, dinners, rugby, etc etc. Do they really have time to keep hanging around you waiting for something to happen? Do what it takes to cut to the chase. If you don’t know what that is, find out. (It has a lot to do with listening, and with commitment to your clients.)

3. Politeness
In particular, the politeness that has us take “No” as “Not ever” rather than “Not now”. Lara won one major client by calling every single day for two years – sometimes three times a day.
This does require balance and the right approach. A telesales person once lost me in an instant by saying “I’m not going to take no for an answer!” (She was trying to be cute. It wasn’t.) It requires authenticity – belief in yourself and what you’re selling. Without these, you’ll be that pest we all so dread being. But with the right stuff, you’re making something cool available to someone.

4. Being serious and circumspect
Being completely straight with people – your clients, your staff, your suppliers – pays dividends. It’s easy to hide behind the fact that it’s one of those things that’s difficult to quantify in terms of ROI. But deep down you know that this advice of Lara’s is pure gold:

(This is her card for her project Company Shortcuts.)

We’re all fannying about somehow, somewhere in our businesses.
Go forth, seek out and eliminate the fannying.

One’s immediate reaction may well be something like “harsh,” “ruthless,” even “uncaring.” Yet, this is really the way to go. Why? Because the alternatives are more painful. For everyone.

Making cuts is a truly painful thing to do, especially if you have to lay people off. So there’s a big pitfall: the death of a thousand cuts. There’s a temptation to cut a little at a time and hope it’ll be enough. It appears to minimise the pain. And after all, you can always do a bit more if you have to, right? The trouble is, this amounts to an ongoing agenda of firefighting. In the long run it causes a much greater amount of pain, for you and for your staff.

So I was curious about what underpins each approach. Even if you know once and deep is best, it can be very hard to grasp the nettle. What could make the difference?

Something that can empower a business leader to make this sort of tough decision is having a clear, compelling future. You can’t realign and resize your workforce decisively if you aren’t clear about and committed to where you’re going. Instead, you’re in a place of confusion and reaction, ruled by external events. (AKA firefighting.)

Let’s put it another way.
If you cut once, deep, you’re thinking of the future you’re working towards. Your actions are concerned with fulfilling that future. The cut’s purpose is to reconfigure things in alignment with it.
If you go for many small, ad hoc cuts, you’re looking backwards. You’re trying to fix something that was designed to fulfill a future you’re no longer heading towards.

So the key to creating a clean realignment in one go, including the appropriate cuts, is being clear about where you’re committed to going. If things change significantly, your first priority has to be to reinvent your future. Transformation, not tweaking. Then, you can make a clean, decisive move to a new situation, rather than firefighting.

A business can only have one primary objective.
Bankers make money; that’s literally the clear and only purpose of their job.
For the rest of us, our businesses are about something else. Money may have several functions in you, but isn’t the end itself.

One really important role money plays is as an indicator.
For example, Lister McDonald are in business to significantly increase prosperity in this country. That’s why we’re doing this, rather than banking, medicine, or running a bike shop. Cash-flow’s an important indicator of how much difference we’re making. If we’re not getting any income, we’re not making a difference. (Maybe we’re getting no work. Maybe our clients can’t afford to pay their bills. Either way, we’re not making anyone more prosperous.)

We all exist, as businesses, to make a particular difference for our clients. Maybe it’s to make their homes warm affordably, or eliminate employment law worries, or serve them great sandwiches. Maybe it’s to refresh them with your lager, or entertain them with your TV programs. Whichever it is for you, money itself is not your business’s purpose. Treat it as a KPI.

Does it seem like I’m splitting hairs here? Why does this matter?

It matters because it has a major impact on how you come across in your business dealings. People know what’s on your mind. If you think of your business as a means to make money, that’s how they’ll hear you when you’re speaking with them. If you think of your business as a means to do something for them, that’s what they’ll hear.

It matters because it has an impact on your products and services. If you care about what it costs you more than what it’s worth to your clients, you’ll cut corners. Then you’re doing less for your clients than you used to, and you’ll lose some of them. So you’ll have to increase spending on getting new clients. And so on round and round. Not a good recipe for an effective and sustainable business.

Oh yeah? So how come big businesses do so well by cutting costs?

The thing is, you can get away with things for a while. We’ve all done it. You don’t get cancer when you smoke your first cigarette. Businesses have been operating for several decades on the short-term-ist idea that they exist to make money. It’s led to them resorting to evermore toxic ingredients and exploitative practices. It worked for a while. Now, when the system’s in trouble and we ask how well it really serves the customers, it looks very fragile. Unsustainable not just for the environment, but for communities, employees, even the shareholders.

That’s why we need businesses and business people who believe in what they’re doing. Because it gives customers businesses they can believe in.

Isn’t that what we all want as business owners?

I’m not generally the biggest fan of inspirational quotations, but I’m always up for making an exception in the case of Shakespeare.
This one came up in a discussion about the challenges leaders face today – certainly a time of extremity. This quotation points to one thing – in uncommon times we need uncommon people. Those who are masters of floating when the seas are rough. So this implies we should get busy cutting away the dead wood, right? This is no time for fair-weather sailors, right?

Wrong.

In fact, it’s more accurate to say we need people to be uncommon. Being or not being extraordinary isn’t something that’s fixed for life. All of us have the capacity to be extraordinary, even if we’ve been hiding it up to now. (Yes, ALL.) What’s needed is the support that enables people to bring out their extraordinariness.

So perhaps that’s the biggest challenge for leaders right now: inspiring and supporting their people to be extraordinary.

Egypt’s facing a time of huge change, and the commentators are having a field day. Regime change and possible democratisation are of course favourite topics for discussion. One key question I’ve heard a lot is this – Is democratisation about more than just holding elections?

It’s clearly a loaded question, and the answer it leans towards is of course “Yes”. That raises the question – what else is it then? Which is a much more slippery and interesting question. It’s one that holds an important lesson for all of us who face change in any area of business or life.

For Egypt, having an election isn’t enough. Everyone needs to think anew about themselves and their role in how Egypt is run. They need to relinquish something fundamental about their Being – about “who they are”. If it’s to become a sustainable democracy that works well, it’ll have to think of itself differently.

And so it is for the rest of us running our businesses. When change seems difficult, you need to shift perspective, rethink how you see yourself in some way. Once you’ve managed that, the Doing part of change becomes clearer.

A mindset that says everyone should stick to what they seem to be good at is at the mercy of how good people think they are at things. That makes an organisation very vulnerable to stuff like lapses of confidence. In a big company, which can afford to have people devoted all the time to very specific tasks and roles, this is less of a problem. But in a smaller one, you need to be more flexible.

I was discussing marketing with a colleague. “I hate it,” she said. “I’m no good at it. Isn’t there someone I could get to do it for me?” It’s a common cry from people with no marketing department. But should you really go down the route of turning all your marketing, lock stock and barrel, over to someone else?

Let’s look at what she – and maybe you – said: “I can’t do it.” The truth is, she can. The physical process and the steps it contains are pretty straightforward. The tough part is actually mental – not being stopped by that critical inner voice that insists that you’ll screw up, or people will think you’re pushy, or whatever.

Getting over that hurdle is the gateway to releasing a whole lot of potential, whether we’re talking about you or other people in your organisation. And the key is to realise that if you think you can or can’t do it, you’ll be right (thanks Henry Ford). Once upon a time you thought you couldn’t ride a bike; and then you discovered you actually could.

It’s a trust issue; trusting yourself, or being trusted by your boss. And remember, if you trust yourself or someone else and something goes wrong, you still have the option of trusting them to learn. Maybe you could help them do so.

Then you’d have an even more talented person.

Some have been portraying him as the voice of an unpalettable truth; yet it isn’t even true. It’s wildly inaccurate. Perfectly simple stats point to the fact that average disposable incomes are down on last year. That’s before you even start to consider that being well-off isn’t just about how high your income is. It’s also about how confident you feel that you’ll still have it in six months time.

So the real issue is – how come so many commentators seemed so willing to say “Well, he’s sort of got a point, in a way”? Even though the Prime Minister had already made his disapproval clear?

I wonder if it might be that a lot of economists and other commentators are just as devoid of connection to the real world as Lord Young. Specifically, that they, like him, don’t get that economics isn’t rational and mechanical – it’s collective human behaviour. Our collective zeitgeist leads our economic behaviour. It got us to where we are now – didn’t we just love cheap credit?

It’ll be the movement of that zeitgeist that gets us to whatever new future we’re going to. Our collective will is what will take us forward. Not a bunch of bewildered economic experts telling us that it’s all fine.

I was walking into work today, listening to my iPod. I had it set to shuffle. Funny, isn’t it, that “shuffle” never really seems to be properly random? The same tunes come up over several weeks, while lots of things go totally unheard. Anyway, as you may have noticed, things are getting distinctly autumnal these days, and this morning’s walk was chilly. The funny thing was, the iPod seemed to know. It kept selecting tunes with a definite wintery feel – Northern Sky by Nick Drake, Dusty Springfield’s In The Winter, Ravel’s Tombeau de Couperin. And when I got indoors where there’s central heating, suddenly it got into some Latin groove. Weird.

I couldn’t help asking myself why this was happening. Of course, I have no answer (nothing I can prove anyway). This could get frustrating. But the fact is, despite our persistent desire to ask “Why?” about everything, we don’t need to know. All I’d get from finding the answer to this iPod thing is a wasted day at the office, if I’m honest. So instead I just accept it (and blog about it).

It’s a very simple example. But it’s a fact that we love to ask “Why?” so much that it often stops us asking much more useful questions. It can also lead to a whole bunch of process that gets under the feet of running our businesses. In this time-poor age, perhaps we can save time by cutting back on asking “Why?” Try asking things like “What?” instead – what can we do this week to get closer to achieving this? What would it take to increase productivity?

Or even “What can I learn from this?” (That’s the one I asked myself over the iPod thing.)

Your business, like the human brain, has loads of unused potential. The only boundary which constrains what your business can do is the limit of what you as its leader hold to be possible. Extend what you think it can do, and you extend what is possible. Then it just becomes a question of doing it.

You may not have all the people, skills, contacts or whatever just yet. But once you get that it’s possible, those resources just become the stuff of to-do lists, things to acquire as part of the process. They’re no longer in the territory of “if only” and “we’re too wee for that.”

What am I talking about? I just moved into a great new office, with its own meeting room and full training facilities too. That’s what’s weird. I’ve stepped up a gear, stepped into the physical space where what’s next will happen. It feels strange.

It’s the slightly uncomfortable, unfamiliar edge that everything has that makes me know this is A Good Thing. New things will happen. I’ll stretch in new directions.

Shaking things up is always good.