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Created: 18 July 2014

Last Updated: 05 January 2016

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Ireland’s workforce set for era of drones,

carrier nodes and hologram business meetings.

Gary Hopwood general manager Ricoh IrelandAccording to a new study commissioned by Ricoh, workplaces in Ireland could be transformed within the next two decades by technology and processes that do not even exist today. The survey reveals some interesting insights into how employees believe the use of new technologies will enhance and simplify interaction with colleagues and information.

Read more: Ricoh Report Predicts The Future Workplace

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Category: Blogs

Created: 29 November 2013

Last Updated: 05 January 2016

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Whispers - The secret to predicting

the future is to listen for the whisper.

symantec By the time you’ve heard things in a loud, clear voice they have already come true. I’ve been listening to the whispers in 2013 and have a pretty good idea for what we’ll be hearing loud and clear in 2014. Below are my predictions of the top things we’ll hear and what they will mean for us in 2014.

Read more: 2014 Predictions from Symantec

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Created: 22 February 2013

Last Updated: 05 January 2016

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Close to the Bone:

Are you Leading or Surviving?

my lovely horse burgerI’m following the ‘Horsegate’ controversy with more than the usual level of interest. The story brought me back a couple of years…

Butchering Apprenticeship: When I was 16, I started an apprenticeship as a butcher. Over the next five years I worked in retail shops around Dublin and also in abattoirs on the North Circular and Ossary Roads. At that time, the trade of butchering had two distinct elements, retail (preparing and selling meat to customers) and what was known as slaughtering. In more recent years, I’ve taken to ‘slaughtering’ classic hits from the 1970’s after the consumption of three pints of Heineken, but that’s another story.

Junior Manager: Once the apprenticeship was completed, I got a place on a Junior Executive Development Programme in Carysford College. It was a six-month long introduction to management theory. As part of the course, we targeted organizations and made a pitch to conduct an internal consulting project. The real goal was to make ourselves indispensable and secure a job. It made sense to focus on an area where we already had some expertise. So, I came up with the project idea that retail organizations could pre-select high quality carcasses from abattoirs rather than simply accept whatever was delivered (in Ireland, all meat is checked by Vets; quality refers to profitability rather than any issues in relation to human consumption). I contacted Tesco, made a pitch to carry out an initial study and got the green light. Yes!

The Project: This was my first consulting assignment and the premise was simple. Tesco, at that time operated about 80 stores, and they were essentially at the mercy of meat wholesalers. Typically each store ‘accepted’ the meat sent into them by the local wholesalers, provided that the numbers matched i.e. the amount invoiced and the amount received was in sync. No quality checks were in place at that time and very little meat was ever returned by any supermarket to the wholesalers. In practice, it was a major hassle to ‘return’ stuff. Retail butchers work to a pre-determined schedule (making corned beef and boning and rolling all roasting joints in the early part of the week etc.). This schedule was severely disrupted if anything was ‘sent back’. In some smaller retail shops (often owned by the butcher himself), I saw meat returned to the wholesalers if it was not up to standard. But I never witnessed this in any supermarket. Supermarket butchers were ‘employees’ – not owners. As sending stuff back was a hassle, the general consensus was ‘why bother?’

horsemeat burgersContrasting Carcasses: Working in Tesco (Clondalkin branch), I selected 2 beef carcasses from the fridge i.e. the meat had already been accepted by the company. Meat is actually muscle tissue. So I choose the most ‘muscular’ carcass (technically, the one with the best conformation). I also choose the worst (i.e. least muscular) carcass and compared both. Animals are similar to humans in that you have fat, muscular and skinny cows and all of these go into the food chain (wouldn’t you just love to be called a ‘skinny cow’?). While all meat is sold by weight, ‘skinny’ cows (same point applies to sheep and pigs) have a much higher bone: muscle ratio. It follows that these animals are less profitable as there is a smaller % of meat once the bones have been removed. Oh yes, the things you learn from this blog! Bloody brilliant.

The Results: I dissected the carcasses into the component parts, carefully photographed and weighed each piece, then did the math. The difference in return between the well-muscled and the skinny carcass was circa 17 per cent – an enormous variation. About a week later, wearing my best (only) suit, I proudly presented the study at the Tesco HQ in Dun Laoire. I can’t remember the details of what happened, other than the fact that I didn’t secure my dream job – to visit all the abattoirs and pre-select the carcasses that Tesco would buy. I walked away jobless and Tesco didn’t follow up on the central idea of pre-selecting (an absolute no-brainer in terms of increased profit margins).

At that time, Tesco was an incredibly busy environment. Long opening hours, a vast range of products and the logistics of managing thousands of staff across geographically dispersed stores lent itself to a frenetic work pace. Those managers, consumed with their day job, failed to spot an innovation that had enormous potential upside. Even if they didn’t like me (what a silly notion), the central idea was powerful and should have been picked up.

Missed Signal: You might think that ‘missing a signal’ like this was an aberration or perhaps a sign of lazy management? My experience since then points to a different root problem. Most managers become consumed by the ‘organization’. They get sucked into the vortex of today’s crisis, budget construction, internal politics, and preparations for the next board meeting and so on. Consumed by inside issues, managers forget to look at ideas from outside the organization. Overworked managers become exhausted and cranky, often just trying to survive. One senior executive I recently met (banking sector), had punched in 100+ hours each week over a 6-week period. Read that sentence again, it’s not a typo. Over 600 hours in 6 weeks. That’s two-thirds of the annual allowable flight hours for an Aer Lingus Pilot completed in a month and a half. Is it any wonder that executives running on empty miss big ideas? While this is an extreme example, the point about ‘missing signals’ applies to many overworked executives.

Leadership Role: Sometimes consultants play a positive role in this regard, when we offer a conduit for new ideas. But you hardly want to outsource a critical component of managing your organization to an external group. Shouldn’t you be out there yourself, benchmarking (stealing ideas shamelessly), looking for ways to improve what you are doing? In the book ‘Accidential Leadership’ (Liffey Press, 2009), I defined leadership as ‘the ability to bring about positive change’. If you’re solely focused on managing today, then you’re not leading, just surviving.

Just looked at my watch. I can’t believe that it’s lunchtime already. Where did the morning go? God I’m starving. I could eat a horse!

By Paul Mooney (PHD)

Mob: 00353 (0) 872439019

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PS: Another Innovation: “The truth is I have no unbelievably special skills or genius eccentricities.” Excerpt from a job seekers email that went viral on Wall Street and described by one CEO as “The best cover note ever.” With so many people now actually telling lies on their CV, the truth is being classified as unusual?

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Category: Blogs

Created: 08 February 2013

Last Updated: 05 January 2016

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How to Survive Parent Teacher Meetings

As well as other managerial lessons.

Paul MooneyI recently attended a Parent: Teachers meeting. If ever an event was poorly named, this is it. It’s not really a meeting at all, more an assault on your self-worth.

Go Where?

During this bi-annual humiliation, the first thing to be worked out is the schedule. Which teachers do you need to see and in which room are they holding court? In order to do this you have to know (a) what subjects your kid is doing (b) the specific teachers names (c) have an inbuilt GPS which directs you around school corridors painted in identical colours, filled with dishevelled parents who are similarly lost. But, hey, you’re smart and will eventually figure it out.

Queue Talk:

Then you sit ‘on the queue’ and invariably strike up a conversation with the mother/father/guardian beside you. In Clontarf, a suburb of Dublin, these people can be described, as the ‘Educational Taliban’ such is their fundamentalist belief that securing 625 points in the Leaving Certificate (last year exams in Irish Secondary schools) is the gateway to all future happiness. Interestingly, it also doubles as a personal ‘score’ of their parental ability. They tell me stuff like: “Oh, it’s such a dilemma. Clive/Rosheen (delete as appropriate) does not know whether to do Nuclear Physics in Oxford or go straight into medical research in the Mayo Clinic”. I feel like saying: “I had a similar dilemma myself recently. I wasn’t sure whether to bring my kid to Beaumont A&E (ER) to get his stomach pumped after another wild 18th birthday party or take him straight to Lomans’ Mental Hospital for a full Psychiatric assessment. It’s so hard to make those calls, isn’t it?” But politeness stops me from saying anything of the sort. I fake active listening while figuring out how to murder my child without being apprehended by the police or, at the very least, getting the charge downgraded to manslaughter.

Long Chat:

Then you meet couples that both want to talk to every teacher. No ‘divide and conquer’ to lessen the time involved. Oh no. They have zero problem taking a day off work to figure out the minutiae of how their child prodigy performed in the History of Art mock exams and an almost hysterical need to visually inspect every artefact he ever created (“If he concentrated on the grass as well as the Serengeti animals, would that attention to detail be worth additional marks in the Art practical module, section B, sub-section 2.7?”). They don’t give a huge amount of thought to the 38 people waiting patiently behind them as each ‘visit’ with a teacher takes up about a weekend of dialogue. Perhaps it just seems that long when you can predict the ‘script’ for your own kid. Eventually, the top of the queue appears and it’s my turn for ‘feedback’. Jesus, my heart sinks as the parental version of B.O.H.I.C.A. beckons (Bend Over, Here It Comes Again).

Next Year:

Next year I’m going to re-engineer the process. I’m getting a professionally edited DVD with pre-recorded messages: “Smart but lazy”; “Great personality, but doesn’t do a tap”; “Massively underperforming versus his/her potential”. It will feature an über modern background rap sung by the X Factor finalists. Then, when I get to the top of each queue, I’m going to give the teachers the following instruction: “Don’t say a word. Just watch” and hit the return key. A brief nod of acknowledgement as the music fades and I silently walk away. Yes! It should work really well for all concerned. Roll on 2014.

Deep Understanding:

So, why are my kid’s gobshites? Well, personally, I blame their mother (coincidentally, Linda doesn’t read this blog!). And, why have they copied my terrible example in massively underperforming at secondary school? Why can’t they just be…. well brilliant like all those other perfect kids I keep hearing about? Perhaps my laissez-faire stance could be described as the ‘Emily Dickinson’ school of parenting:

‘The props assist the house, until the house is built. And then the props withdraw. And adequate, erect. The house supports itself. And ceases to recollect. The auger and the carpenter’.

Oh the joys of parenting teenagers. Perhaps in western civilization there may be a ‘missing ritual’. Couldn’t I just send them down the country somewhere to kill a Friesian cow or do a bungee jump off the cliffs in Howth? Then they would come back ‘all grown up’ overnight.

How much I careThe Lesson:

Is there a message in all of this angst? Yes, there is. Trying to control every single element of your life sets you up for a lot of disappointment. John C. Maxwell, an expert on leadership, said: “People don’t care how much you know until they know how much you care”. I hope that my kids (and your staff) know how much we actually care about them. Even when everything is not going ‘swimmingly’, it’s our job to be there and support. Sometimes, that’s all that’s needed. In the meantime, I’m clinging to the Jewish philosophy – “this too will pass”. And I’m praying that this tunnel will have a light at the end (and it’s not actually a cave).

See you in the pub!

By Paul Mooney (PHD)

Mob: 00353 (0) 872439019

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