Personal business cases – boon or bureaucracy?

Posted on May 11, 2012 by Peter Hall

In theory a business case is what backs a business decision. It should identify the benefits, costs and the best option for achieving them. Business cases can support new services, products and services.

Well that’s the theory, in practice there are other scenarios:

The we don’t do businesses cases environment. This is where whim, instinct, gut feel and of course politics are the determining factors. It might work especially for those with good judgement honed through years of relevant experience. In this setting if the business case is written it will be done to support the decision after it’s been made.
In a bureaucratic setting the business case might be just one of many hurdles designed to put off the faint hearted and persuade the uncommitted into taking no action. This will happen when there is a strong vested interest in the status quo and limited resources to do anything even if there was commitment.

This sheds some light on how we might realistically use the idea in a personal context. You could go through the motions but it’s more important to get to the bottom of why you think a particular course of action benefits you. For example you might as well be honest that the new laptop can’t be justified on a efficiency basis by having better perfromance, after all you could remove all the rubbish and bang some more memory in for a small amount of time and effort. If what you want is a shiny new toy then say so and stop kidding everyone, especially yourself. Openness and increased accountability can be helpful.

Enforced bureaucracy though might be valuable for those who over commit their time and money and need a way to evaluate which opportunities to say yes or no to. Not necessarily for those who don’t want to change.

In practice to do a personal business case can be quick and simple. It could be applied major purchases and career decisions for example. Firstly, define what you expect to get out of what you’re considering – the benefits. These could be increased income (new job), savings (downsizing your car), increased happiness (career change, new hobby). These need to be balanced against the cost (money and time) of following the course of action. Think carefully about the opportunity cost – if you do this then what else won’t you be able to do.

Next make the decision on what to do based on consideration of a set of options. The first option is “do nothing”, against which the rest can be benchmarked. Thinking up options can be hard but worthwhile, standard coaching technique will encourage you to generate more options. Selecting which option should be the one you’re most committed to doing and is likely to meet the most benefits for reasonable costs. Be wary of doing anything which ticks the boxes – just – against something that only hits the one main benefit much more strongly.

Lastly, we’re human so don’t get trapped by the process and come out with a decision that isn’t you. Make sure it accords with your values and personality and is realistic for the resources that you have.

What can we learn from the world of business?

Posted on May 4, 2012 by Peter Hall

There’s been a lot of ink and pixels spilled on the subject of considering yourself as a brand or a start-up but is there more classic business models and ideas that might help us – after all we’re not aiming to emulate Google.

I believe there are things we can adopt from theory and practice that can help us think through our lives in different ways. This could be enough to gain that much needed clarity of thought and take action.

Some possible ideas (I’ll do separate posts on some over the coming weeks):

Develop your own personal strategies for careers, homes, transport and hobbies. This would mean working out your strengths and spotting trends out there that you could take advantage of.
Run your home improvements using project management – having a accurate schedule of work, clear budget and process for deciding on changes.
Develop business cases for all major household purchases. You would have to work out the benefits of each purchase (looking good can count!) and see what options you have and which is the most effective.
Manage the household finances as a profit and loss account with each person as a cost centre. You could see how how much those children who returned after completing studies are really costing or contributing. Make sure you depreciate you car honestly.
Use marketing techniques to get your next job. Simple things like identifying your offering and target audience would be a good start.
Use organisational behaviour models such as Belbin’s team roles to understand better the interactions at family get togethers.

I’m sure there are others. What do you think?

Taking back control – only dead fish go with the flow

Posted on April 29, 2012 by Peter Hall

This week I’ve been tidying up the finances – checking statements and receipts and the like. But look, some of my modest savings are earning nearly no interest at all. What happens is that for some accounts after the initial investment period the introductory rate the bank wooed you with drops (for loans it works the other way). If I sit back and do nothing I lose out. I guess this trickery makes the banks a lot of cash. Alternatively, if I actively keep an eye on my bank accounts and move things at the right time and find the best rates (plenty of advice out there) then for a modest effort I’ll win by getting the most from my financial resources. The more we get from our resources the more choices we have.

This got me thinking, where apart from the household finances does being a little more active, rather than going with the flow, pay off? Some thoughts big and small:

TV. Sitting on the sofa watching our favourite programme. No problem with that but what happens when it finishes? Do we just loll there and watch the next item on the schedule or channel surf? Or do we get up a do something? I know we’re all often tired at the end of the day but you don’t have to do too much. A few small jobs done – sorting some laundry, binning the junk mail, loading the dishwasher – can help prevent these things building up and eroding time at the weekend which might be more valuable. Alternatively, reading or conversation can still be done from the sofa.
The job. Staying in an unsatisfying job can really drain energy from people yet the inertia created by the regular salary into the bank every month, the provision of a work place, the great colleagues, can all feel like too much to give up to try something different. The practicalities of leaving a job are tough not least having a plan of what to do next to put bread on the table. A small start is always possible by, say, commencing a job search or investigating thoroughly the business idea you’ve always wanted to pursue. The point above might help with the time to do this.
Habits. Good habits are fine but even they can cause us to stagnate a little. If we only run the same route, read the same authors or go on holiday to the same resort then we will be missing opportunities to get inspired by something new or different. Sometimes a little creative disruption to the familiar in our lives can reveal possibilities. For little or no effort it’s worth a go.

Remember only dead fish go with the flow. Are there any suggestions you have?

Serendipitous reading

Posted on April 21, 2012 by Peter Hall

If you’re like me you enjoy a good book. Perhaps you have favourite authors or check the review sections of the weekend newspapers for your next read. Friends might also recommend books to you and of course you might pick up a reading tip from a blog. The trouble with selecting books in this way is that you’ll end up reading stuff that reinforces what you already know. You read the newspapers and blogs you share common ground with, friends give you books saying you’ll like this. What if you need something a little different to get some fresh ideas and inspiration?

What you need is serendipitous reading. It’s simple, just try reading books that took you little or no effort to find from places you wouldn’t expect to find something you’d want to read. Ideally from authors you’ve never heard of. That could be books left in holiday cottages you’re staying in, from charity bookstalls you happen to walk past, and car boot sales that you were visiting for other reasons.

Here’s a couple of examples.

I was on the way out of my local DIY/home improvement store. There was some shelves of books with an honesty tin for charity. In among the Wilbur Smiths and Dan Browns I found Eric Brende’s Better Off: Flipping the Switch on Technology. The transaction took 30 seconds and I wasn’t really sure what I’d bought. As it turned out it was a great read about how Eric and his wife spent over year living within and Amish-style community without electricity. Some marvelous observations about having more time as a result of less technology. That left me with the challenge of thinking about how much technology I needed (there are more computers than people in this house!).
Walking along the seafront at my nearest seaside town I got to the lifeboat station which had a box of books outside being sold to raise funds. They had more inside but that would have meant too much effort browsing. In with a stack of Jackie Collins was Bruce Chatwin’s The Songlines. The book is mainly about aboriginal culture in Australia but then there’s a whole pile from his notebooks on nomads and human evolution. The wandering on defined routes, being related to the landscape and much more offered provocation about how much energy we invest in material places and things which we fence off and use to define ourselves when in fact we may have an underlying tendency for the opposite.

Both were books which weren’t on the my list to get but both got me thinking. Anyone else stumbled on a good read?

What do you need to get started?

Posted on April 16, 2012 by Peter Hall

I’ve posted here previously on the idea that getting started can be the hardest thing and that once you get going it’s often much easier (get moving, keep motivated). I thought it would be good to build on why it’s often hard to get going. A popular question to unlock why something isn’t happening for you is “What’s stopping you?“. This can come up with lots of interesting answers, like time and motivation but might cause us to focus on the whole task. This can often prevent us from making any progress.

Take for example the large amount of moss and weeds that I call the the lawns around my home. I’d like some nice lush green grass so what’ stopping me? Well have you seen how big they are and how bad they are? Just to get the moss raked out would take ages. I’d probably have to hire a machine and would I be able to get it round to the back through the narrow gate? Then there’s the other weeds, the need for aeration, reseeding in places, addition of nutrients, leveling some humps and hollows and the list goes on. It’s such a huge job I’m never going to do it without stopping doing other important things.

But if we ask “What do you need to get started?” we might get a different outcome. With the lawns it doesn’t take much reflection to see there’s nothing stopping me from actually getting started apart from making a decision about where to start. And the best advice sometimes is to start with something straight forward that makes an impact and build some positive momentum. For me that could be just ten minutes digging up the biggest weeds nearest the house. After that I might decide to focus on improving the quality of the front lawn – it’s smaller – with a few minutes of raking.

So thinking about getting started without worrying about the whole task is more helpful. Whether we get to the end might not matter as not everything needs to be perfect and finished but if we’ve started then we’re on our way.

What Bill Knows

Posted on April 8, 2012 by Peter Hall

I saw Bill this week. As usual he was pleased to see me and we got talking about growing vegetables. Now, I thought I was doing well having dug over the vegetable plot but Bill, who is 80, was well ahead of me and had already banked up his first earlies (potatoes in case you don’t know) and had some beans doing very nicely.

Bill is a prize winner for his veg – he once gave me an onion he’d grown which was truly magnificent in size, symmetry and its perfectness – so it’s perhaps not wise for me to use him as a benchmark. He’s also passionate about his vegetable gardening, it’s very much part of him. In fact he spent his entire working life farming.

The interesting thing is Bill knows a lot a things that we all should know and he probably has never sat down and thought about it either.

He’s in touch with the seasons and knows what and when to plant things.
He knows what he’s passionate about and it’s been a consistent theme in his life.

So what’s stopping you being like Bill – being expert about what you care about and putting it into practice? Your passion might be so obvious that you don’t need to think about it. So what is stopping you?

Reconnect

Posted on April 1, 2012 by Peter Hall

The word disconnect is used a lot in these wired and wireless times. Often this is in a negative way, such as when information is not available or ideas don’t join-up. There is though a useful sense of the word, disconnecting from that we don’t need in our lives but I want to focus on the opposite – reconnect.

There are many things that we might want to reconnect in our lives and a variety of reasons for doing so. A couple of areas where this can be helpful are as follows:

Old friends we’ve lost touch with. Especially those we trusted to be honest with us and were prepared to walk with us on the difficult parts of our life’s journey. Often economic realities like employment can mean we’re miles from those people and some steps will be needed to reconnect.
Old hobbies and interests. Things that we used to find absorbing that have become squeezed from our busy lives. Rediscovering these can help to put us back in touch with who we truly our by reestablishing some of the values embodied in them. This might be the environmental benefits of cycling more or growing food in your garden or the joy of creating a wonderful picture through painting or photography.

There are though things that we’ve grown-up from that we won’t need to worry about reconnecting to. So what person could you get in touch with or one small activity could you restart that would you help re-establish something important but lost in your life and help you see the true you more clearly?

Digging For Growth

Posted on March 25, 2012 by Peter Hall

I’ve eventually started work on a neglected corner of the garden that had only existed as a place to store logs among the weeds. So it was out with the spade and on with some serious digging. There’s plenty of different approaches to digging and if I’d been feeling really energetic I could have gone for double digging (two spades down) but just went for some straightforward stuff. Even so this was hard work as I unearthed also sorts of debris buried by a previous owner (rubble, tiles, bricks, glass, and bits of old crockery) and tackled an endless web of old roots.

All this graft gave me time to think about the benefits of digging (actually and metaphorically) much like when I posted on pruning. So here’s what’s good about digging:

It beats going to the gym. A free but demanding work out.
The satisfaction of a job well done when you stand back from the plot of nicely turned soil.
It’s real work. There’s an enjoyment to be had in the cutting out of each new spadeful.
Once dug over it’s time to add compost and dig that in to prepare the soil for growing.
As a metaphor it shows us how there’s work to be done to sort parts of our lives out for growth:

We need to clear things – may be there’s stuff left by other people like unhelpful beliefs and ideas;
We must get out the old roots and weeds (bad habits such as watching too much TV) that are no longer useful if we want to make space for new things;
If are lives are compacted by routine then perhaps we need to turn things over a little;
If we want to blossom and be fruitful then we need the fertilization of goods ideas and beliefs cultivated into our lives.

Happy digging!

Mysterious Sparks

Posted on March 18, 2012 by Peter Hall

Mysterious sparks is the title of a chapter within Matthew Syed’s excellent book Bounce: The Myth of Talent and the Power of Practice. It’s one of those standout books that you come across once in a while. Syed points to research and famous individuals, especially in the arena of sports, to demonstrate that it is not that individuals are born with innate talent but that it takes 10,000 hours of purposeful practice to become great at something. Examples include Mozart, Tiger Woods and the Williams sisters.

All this practice requires internal motivation otherwise it won’t just happen. You have to love all that practice otherwise it’s not going to happen. What sets these individuals apart is motivation and a different mindset. This brings us to mysterious sparks. In the chapter Syed talks of transformational moments and motivational jolts – what I’ve described previously as LifeWhacks. These can be something that someone has said or some information you’ve learnt. It could be the example of another individual which causes you to leap from your chair shouting that’s what I’m going to do (though more likely it will be a silent nod of the head and inner resolution).

The other point about mindsets that Syed makes is that they need to be growth mindsets. This is is the idea that you don’t stop at failure but keep trying. This is helped by being encouraged and rewarded for effort not achievement.

So can we still talk of gifts or talents? Perhaps, but it’ll be the gift of motivation or inspiration that we ought to emphasize. The givers will be those people in our lives that gave us a love for whatever we’ve been committed to practice at. Even if we never met them but just felt a jolt from afar by they example and felt compelled to do something.

If not now then when

Posted on March 11, 2012 by Peter Hall

If not now then when is an interesting question for those of us who don’t quite get around to doing things. I’ll leave you to wonder whether I’m quoting Tracy Chapman or Hillel the Elder.

Why is it a good question? My answer to that is it firstly forces us to decide whether to do something or not. Often we have a list of things to do that others have told us would be good to do or that we have thought we ought to do. An example of this is friend of mine who tried to read James Joyce’s Ulysses. For a lot of literary people this is the finest book in the English language and on many’s ought to read list. Eventually my friend, after a couple of failed attempts that didn’t get past about page 50, decided this was something not to do and dispatched the book to his local charity shop.

A second reason is that our lives are finite. If something is important then we ought to decide to do it sooner rather than later. As we don’t know how long our life is then sooner has much more certainty. Endlessly pushing back doesn’t get something done. Taking a first small step does. Whether it’s visiting Paris, writing a novel or applying for a new job then delaying it without good reason won’t make it more likely to happen.

Lastly, now can be a good time to do things. How often don’t we do things now by saying it’s not the right time? A simple way of avoiding taking action. But by challenging this, getting beneath “not the right time” reasoning we may throw up some insight into why we’re for not doing something now. This can be start of finding out a bit more about ourselves and the reasons for not doing things. A big reason can be a fear of failure, something we should balance against the likely regret of never having tried.