Yesterday I gave a guest lecture on feedback to about 200 Stage 3 students at the University of Canterbury. It was good to be back sharing a topic I love, and to a group of people who are at the beginning of their careers – oh the possibilities! They asked some great questions, and they remained awake in a mid afternoon lecture – success.
In 1967, Peter Drucker wrote, “Another common time-waster is malorganization. Its symptom is an excess of meetings.” Personally, I have never met an executive who hasn’t been able to decrease the number of meetings they attend by at least 25% (note the “at least,” as that is conservative). Here is an article I read on the web this morning. Not much has changed.
New Zealand managers think one quarter of the meetings they go to achieve nothing but waste time , a survey by a recruitment company suggests.
From 207 finance, accounting, human resources and executive-level managers surveyed, the Robert Half survey found the main reason for ill-will towards meetings was lack of focus, with people talking about topics other than the issues they had come to discuss.
The global survey collected data from 6100 managers in 20 countries.
The New Zealand managers surveyed often didn’t know what they had been called there for, or felt meetings were being attended by people who didn’t need to be there.
The survey on time-wastefulness was led by Swiss managers, who thought 38.8 percent of their meetings were a waste of time, followed by the Spanish, at 38.4 percent.
Australian managers deemed 34.5 percent of meetings a waste of time, citing the same reason as their New Zealand counterparts — lack of focus.
The lowest percentage of unnecessary meetings was reported in Luxembourg, at 13.7 percent, and Dubai, at 16.9 percent.
All surveys carried out by Robert Half suggested staff were more stressed and under more pressure to achieve more with fewer resources, senior manager Megan Alexander said.
“At some companies, meetings become such a habit that no one stops to ask whether there’s even still a compelling reason to hold them. But now is the perfect time to re-evaluate your meeting schedule and analyse which ones are really necessary, and which are not the most efficient use of resources,” she said.
– NZPA
I was interviewed on RDU on Friday about stickfighting. No, nothing on leadership, changing behaviour or culture, improving safety. I guess stickfighting sounds sexier for morning radio with a predominantly student audience. Anyway, here is the link to the 5-minute interview.
Being in an inner-city apartment, my outside windows get pretty dirty pretty quickly. However, these are cleaned as part of the building maintenance. My inside windows? Well, let’s just say they have needed cleaning for a couple of months. On a weekly basis I have seen different window cleaners cleaning the shop fronts in the street below. On approaching them all (five in total), I have told them my needs (clean inside windows), not asked about price as it was not a critical variable, given them my business card, and told them I would work around their schedule. Each window cleaner stated they would call me. Not one did. No, not one. Here I am as a customer approaching them (no marketing on their part), not concerned about price, and very flexible on timing. Am I the ideal customer or what? How simple was that for them? Apparently not that simple! What simple opportunities are you missing?
My friend Pete wrote the “Letter of the Week” for the Christchurch Press, and won an Akaroa salmon for his troubles. Here is his letter.
The Hitchhikers Guide to the Universe has this to say about New Zealand: “A failed socio-economic post-Victorian experiment.”
It has this to say about Victorian: “A seriously anal-retentive society with a great many adherents to a cannibalistic Mediterranean religion once popular with a group of savages calling themselves Romans.”
Pundits across the galaxy have this to say about anal retentive: “Overly feminised and politically correct behaviour common among the natives of NZ and practised by a hypocritical bunch of bureaucrats.”
Gag Halfront, the social commentator and author of the book Why Jellybeans Attract Lint in Your Pocket, describes New Zealand as “the origin of the All Blacks, a type of jellybean.”
Nine million dollars, being spent in a recession of biblical proportions on a referendum with a question no one seems able to interpret, on a law that makes no difference to our appalling predilection for child abuse?
Now that is really silly.
P A Newsome, Avonhead
When trying to change my printer settings I received a message stating that I needed a username and password for the printer application. Now I knew I was in trouble given that I had never created a username or password for the printer. After spending 40 min of totally unproductive time reading the Brother printer manual and trying everything I could think of, I emailed the online Brother support. To be honest I had extremely low expectations (a) of a prompt reply (five days ago I had phoned Serengeti Eyewear International and am still waiting a reply) and/or (b) of actually solving my problem. Less then six hours after my email I received a reply. Through a series of short email correspondences over the next 30 minutes, my problem (totally unintuitive as I had to key in computer code) was solved. Well done Brother for the prompt reply and actually adding value to my day. Are you responding promptly to your customers, and what value are you adding?
Was in Wellington Friday so popped along to the Formula One: The Great Design Race display at Te Papa. If you have a spare hour (or half hour like me if you get bored easy) then this is well worth a look. Even a lay person like me can appreciate the engineering genius, and there are some interesting facts that you will find out too.
I have been observing Alan Gray, Project Director of the redevelopment of Eden Park, over the last couple of days. Alan is a superb leader and is a dictionary definition of being an exemplar. Here are some photos I took.
Millie and I were very fortunate to be invited by City Care to Cirque du Soleil: Dralion last week in Auckland. Unfortunately you couldn’t take photos – guess the flash might be slightly off putting to someone doing high-risk acrobatics. In most organisations committees rule over teams (the difference being that in a committee a person can win or lose independent of the committee whereas in a team everyone either wins or loses). Cirque du Soleil demonstrated teamwork, where if one individual failed to achieve their result then everyone in that particular performance failed. On the flipside, when everyone did their job to an extremely high level, everybody in the team achieved success to a very high level and the audience was treated to a truly inspirational performance.
To be an architect of a highly successful process, and to add value to a client is very satisfying. However, the client has to own and run with any process in which an external consultant helps set up and maintain. City Care (www.citycare.co.nz) have taken their behaviour-based safety process and made it their own, and in doing so they have improved safety (the important one!) and, as a result, they have also won a national award.
“Increasing Safe Behaviours at City Care,” an entry showcasing City Care’s health and safety system, won the New Zealand Industry Best Practice – People category at the Roading Excellence Awards on Monday 7 September 2009.The Awards, run by Roading New Zealand, recognise excellence in the planning, design and construction of significant roading projects, as well as the development and implementation of best practice and collaboration in the roading industry.
“We are proud of our company-wide commitment to keeping ourselves and our team mates safe at work and we are delighted that the award judges have selected City Care,” says Onno Mulder, City Care’s Chief Executive.
Congratulations City Care!
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