Category: News

Westender’s recent story about Paul Judd recovering his lost super had a twist in the tail. His insurance policy disappeared while when his superannuation was rolled and it took a bit of juggling to get himself properly covered again.

Branch Manager of Yellow Brick Road West End, Suzy Butterworth explained that insurance is one of the most sensitive areas around superannuation. “We’ll often leave an old super account open, and just drip feed it, to maintain a valuable insurance policy,” she said.

The challenge is that people’s circumstances change. As you age you become a greater insurance risk and people with chronic illness often find it difficult to get the policy they need, at a premium they can afford. Superannuation funds can pay for life insurance and income protection insurance among other things. Insurance companies have to honour their policies even when your circumstances change, as long as you maintain the policy.

By rolling your superannuation over, you will generally cancel the insurance policy and be subject to new conditions based on the current insurance market and your age and state of health. This could be a significant disadvantage.

Ms Butterworth said people suddenly wake up to the challenges of superannuation and can react too quickly.

At 41, Paul is beginning to calculate the amount he can save over the years that he will enjoy working.

“I want to retire before seventy,” he said.

His mistake, though, was to respond to an email that offered to consolidate his superannuation money, automatically.

“I was uninsured, I did not know where my super was and I did not have any idea how my money was invested,” said Mr Judd.

Ms Butterworth helped Paul find his super, sort out the insurance and invest more aggressively than the average managed fund, that matched his appetite for risk, to yield a higher return and give him a better lifestyle in his retirement.

“You have to choose between spending less now, spending less later, or working longer,” she said. As we age, the options begin to narrow, so the key is to start early.

“If Paul had come to me ten years ago, he would be in a completely different position,” said Ms Butterworth.

She told Westender that some of the people in the worst position with their super took their money out of managed funds after the Global Financial Crisis, and have missed out on the subsequent bounce. That, though, is a story for another day.

Building on last week’s challenge set by Matthew Snelleksz to delegate tasks, Westender’s Business Voice followed up by looking at some of the challenges we face when delegating. This article from Beyond Philosophy’s Colin Shaw, generated some animated discussion about how to create an environment where staff meet challenges on their own without coming back to the boss all the time.

Change is the only certainty in this world today and the pace of change is ever increasing. We all know that change isn’t easy. Every day that passes we need to deal with an increasing amount of ambiguity. Ambiguity creates complexity and means decision making is difficult. Ambiguity creates uncertainty and stress. However, to be successful in business today you need to be good at dealing with ambiguity. How well do you deal with it?

Are you like me? I have a structured mind. I like things in order. I like things to be black and white. But over the years I have learned that life isn’t like that. I always remember a number of years ago when I was working in the corporate world I was discussing with my boss the latest in a series of reorganizations. I had just been promoted into senior management and I was trying to understand what my responsibilities would be. With my personality, as you can imagine, I wanted it to be clear, black and white… I always remember my boss looking at me and saying “Colin, in a senior position you need to deal with ambiguity”. At the time, the feedback hurt a bit, but as I reflected on this conversation I realised he was 100% right and over the years I have learnt to deal with ambiguity.

I know I am not alone in this struggle as people like certainty. People like a definitive yes or no; right and wrong; many people like to paint by numbers, to have it laid down in front of them…. You need to do A, then B, etc.

Increasingly, though, the business world isn’t like that. Business today is becoming more and more complex. For example, matrix organizations often blur the lines of responsibility and leadership. There are many internal complexities in corporate life and there are many more external complications. We now deal with a growing number of multi-channels with customers, each with their own set of priorities and responsibilities. Even the relationships you have with your competitors aren’t cut and dried. There are some companies that you compete with in one market but collaborate with in another. And any single item mentioned here could change tomorrow with little warning, replaced instead with a new challenge.

Recently I have reflected on the fact my clients also feel the pressure of managing a complex business world. For example, I have just finished a Customer Experience Management Certification course with one of the largest companies in the world. Their people were looking for a ‘recipe book’ of things to tell them how and when they must do things; a step-by-step guide for the customer experience that is broken down in the same way a Lego set explains how the pile of plastic bricks can be constructed into a fire engine or the Death Star. They wanted to be told, do this then that.

To this client I was deeply empathetic but sadly unable to comply!

I told them that improving the Customer Experience is not like that. It is complex. There is no set guide for it. If there was, everyone would be doing it already. Over the weeks in our training we gave them a series of tools, the ingredients they need to progress and we told them they now have to apply these tools in the best way. Sometimes they don’t fit exactly and you have to adapt them to the situation. We made the point that this means they need to think about it and decide which tool is best for each occasion. In other words, they have to make a judgement call. I have to say they were initially concern but after coaching became comfortable in this new environment.

This is why in a world where your competition can also be your partner, where we have worldwide matrix management, where a company’s goals can be conflicting, a major skill that everyone needs to learn is dealing with ambiguity. So how well do you deal with it?

Melanie Allen, a Life Coach who specializes in Career Development, has an interesting article called, “Dealing with Ambiguity and Developing Resilience” that covers this topic well. She advises that the best leaders are those that rise to the challenge of ambiguity and respond with confidence and adaptability.

I agree with Melanie but what she suggests doing and actually doing it can be more challenging than it sounds.

Here are my 10 tips for dealing with ambiguity for today’s leaders. As you read these consider how well you perform against these.

1. Suppress your urge to control things. People like to feel in control of their businesses. Often, this results in stress when ambiguity enters the scene. The business world is getting more complex not less and therefore you need to suppress you let go of the notion that you are ‘controlling everything’.

2. Learn to act without the complete picture. In an ambiguous world you will never have all the information you need for absolute certainty. Don’t wait for that final bit of hard data that will tell you what to do because it may never come. Get all the information available, make the best decision you can and act on it.

3. Understand that some of your decisions will be wrong. Now that you made the best decision you can, realize that it might be wrong. But sometimes a wrong decision is better than no decision. Ambiguity means sometimes you will make the wrong decision. Don’t let that put you off. Being a good business person is about making more right decisions than you do wrong. Get comfortable with making mistakes by looking at them as learning opportunities.

4. Work on your flexibility. Be willing to change course as more information comes to light. Don’t let pride delay you from correcting your course. Ambiguity can reveal facts at any time that are going to affect your best decision. Be willing to accept these gifts and incorporate them into your direction and make the necessary changes.

5. Learn to deal with uncertainty. To deal with ambiguity you need to be comfortable with uncertainty. My natural urge is to control everything, but I can’t. So I cope with this by being prepared for what I can.

6. Realize there is not a defined plan you need to follow. Make your peace with the fact that there is no defined ‘right and wrong’. As I told my client who wanted a handbook that gave them all the answers, it isn’t that simple. In my world, there is no recipe book to follow for improving the Customer Experience.

7. Be confident in yourself and your abilities. Part of learning to deal with uncertainty is to have confidence in your ability to respond to what you can’t control. Confidence is a huge asset to a person in business and life in general. The best article on confident people I have ever read is ‘9 Qualities of Truly Confident People’, by Dharmesh Shah. Dharmesh says that confident people are not afraid to take a stand, are good listeners, avoid the spotlight, ask for help and aren’t afraid to be wrong. They also avoid putting others down and own their mistakes. Having these qualities will help you adapt and respond to a market you can’t control, whose future is ambiguous.

8. Listen to your voice. People talk about their ‘guts’ or ‘making a gut decision’. What you attribute to your gut is really your subconscious looking at inputs from around your world. Our processing power is powered 95% from our subconscious, or your brain looking at information ‘offline’, processing it and then telling you what to do. Therefore, listen to it. This is the wealth of your knowledge speaking in a small voice. Listen to the voice.

9. Listen to advice. At Beyond Philosophy we use a phrase ‘None of us are as clever as all of us’. Do you think that because you are the boss you have all the best answers? You don’t. Be comfortable with people being cleverer than you and use this as a resource. Surround yourself with good people and remember you have two ears and one mouth for a reason. Listen to what your people say. Weigh up their concerns. Embrace the people who look at the world differently because it’s always great to get a contrary view or a view from outside the box as it can be the answer or half way to the answer. Also, don’t steal their ideas. Give them credit so they will carry on giving you lots of great new ideas going forward.

10. Learn to deal with your stress. Even if you do all of these things, ambiguity can still cause stress, as the world is uncertain. Learn to manage this stress by having outlets to relieve your stress. When you are relaxed you are far more able to respond to problems and challenges with successful solutions. Investing some time in cultivating a relaxed state of mind is important to your leadership skills.

Ambiguity is challenging by definition but you can learn to deal with it. In my view it is becoming an increasingly important skill particularly as you progress to more senior positions. I hope these tips help you as they have helped me…

How well do you deal with ambiguity? Do you have any tips on how to deal with ambiguity?

If you liked this article, you might like the following blogs :

• 15 Statistics That Should Change The Business World -But Haven’t
• The Importance of a Customer Experience Council
• Where Does Your Customer Experience Start and Stop?

Colin Shaw is the founder and CEO of Beyond Philosophy, one of the world’s first organizations devoted to customer experience. Colin is an international author of four best-selling books and an engaging key-note speaker. To read more from Colin on LinkedIn, connect with him by clicking the follow button above or below.

If you would like to follow Beyond Philosophy click here

Business Queensland encourages you to start thinking now about how you are going to best benefit from the free and low-cost events during the 2014 Queensland Small Business Week from 1-6 September. The stats from the 2013 event, say it all.

 

Author: Cam Wayland – Channel Dynamics

In 1906, Italian economist Vilfredo Pareto created a mathematical formula to describe the unequal distribution of wealth in his country. He had observed that 80 percent of the property in Italy was owned by 20 percent of the people. It was Quality Management Pioneer Dr Joseph Juran however who suggested the principle within his field and then made the assumption that it could be applied to broader concepts. His theory was that 80 percent of the results of any situation are due to 20 percent of the contributors.

This idea is often applied today to data such as sales figures i.e. 80 percent of the sales results come from 20 percent of the clients. Given Juran’s broader application and development of the 80/20 rule it is argued that Pareto’s Principle has actually been inaccurately attributed to Pareto rather than Juran. Despite the possible misnaming of this rule, Pareto’s Principle can be a very effective tool to help you manage yourself and the channel effectively.

What It Means

The 80/20 Rule means that in anything a few (20 percent) are vital and many (80 percent) are trivial. In Pareto’s case, it meant 20 percent of the people owned 80 percent of the wealth. In Juran’s initial work, he identified 20 percent of the defects causing 80 percent of the problems.

Project Managers know that 20 percent of the work (the first 10 percent and the last 10 percent) consumes 80 percent of your time and resources. You can apply the 80/20 Rule to almost anything, from the science of management to the physical world

Within the context of a channel program, you can look at the channel partners who are generating the majority of the sales results and you will find that the same principle applies. That is, twenty percent of your partners will be generating 80 percent of your sales results. The challenge is how you manage your portfolio of partners to ensure you “don’t have all of your eggs in one basket”. You need to ensure you decrease your risk, while still having the time to manage your internal and program resources wisely across the most appropriate partners.

Here is what people forget about with regards to the Pareto Principle. You know 80 percent of your channel sales will come from 20 percent of your channel partners. However, 20 percent of your channel partners will also cause 80 percent of your problems. The principle works both ways.

How It Can Help You

The value of the Pareto Principle for a channel manager is that it reminds you to focus your resources on the 20 percent of the channel partners that really matter. That is those 20 percent that can or should produce 80 percent of your results. Identify and focus on these partners. If something in your schedule or program has to slip, if something isn’t going to get done, make sure it’s not going to affect the focused 20 percent.

With that said, focusing entirely on your top 20% of partners is not practical in the real world. The business environment and circumstances change over time and you should not overlook those partners that have the potential to be in your top 20%. By also working with these partners the result will be that you will have a larger number of partners making up your top 20%, as your partner base as a whole grows and becomes more diverse. Doing this will therefore eliminate some of the risk of just strictly sticking to the Pareto Principle concept.

Helping a partner with potential become a significant contributor is a better use of your time and resources than helping an already great one become slightly more productive and terrific. Apply the Pareto Principle to how you manage the channel, but use it wisely. Don’t just “work smart”, work smart on the right things with the right partners and you will get the results you are looking for.

Best Practice Channel Management Ideas Using the Pareto Principle

1. Define what the characteristics (beyond revenue) of the top 20% should be i.e. What makes a key account, is it the most profitable, key location, the largest, most potential, etc.
2. Review your partner’s results and rank them monthly. Know who the top 20% are and who the remaining 80% are. Make sure you know why they are the top (or focus) 20% and re-prioritise quarterly at a minimum.
3. Ensure you are measuring all of the required information to get the full picture, not just the good news or sales results.
4. Ensure you are not only focusing on the existing top 20%. Implement KPI’s as part of any incentive scheme to help groom those partners with potential to move into the top 20%.
5. Align your channel support programs in the same manner. 80% of your resources should focus on 20% of the channel in order to provide more “bang for your buck”.
6. Implement a quarterly review mechanism to professionally remove those partners that are not supporting you and have no further potential to move into the top 20%. If this is not done you will not have the required resources to grow your channel profitably.

 

The 80/20 rule is both useful and diverse, and particularly applicable to channel partner management. Using it wisely as outlined above will enable you to focus and assign your channel resources appropriately in order to yield the best sales results for your company. The principle can also be used to reduce your business risk through continually growing and developing partners that could be in your top 20%. Business environments are dynamic and reviews of partner’s direction and performance should always be ongoing.

Church is about God isn’t’ it?

Or so I thought until a few weeks ago when I first attended the Brisbane Sunday Assembly.

I’d read a little of Alain De Botton’s 2013 book “Religion for Atheists: A Non-believer’s Guide to the Uses of Religion”, but still wondered what a god-free ‘church’ would be like, and why you would want one in the first place.

I put these questions to Anne Reid, who I had met when she was the Secular Party candidate in Griffith in the 2013 election, and she invited me along to the Brisbane Sunday Assembly to see for myself.

So, on a wet Sunday on April 13 I joined Anne and a small enthusiastic group in Ashgrove. I felt a bit like an intruder, especially as I was planning to write this story, but after warm greetings at the door, I immediately felt welcome.

Anyone stumbling into a meeting of the Sunday Assembly for the first time could be forgiven for thinking they were in a church.

The meeting commenced with music provided by a live band (clapping and singing along), followed by a reading, a key speaker, then a word of testimony, more singing, and some silent contemplation. The group meets in a school hall but so do a lot of religious groups these days.

This structure was familiar to me from my past life in a Protestant community church. The similarities stop however with the outwards trappings. The songs were not hymns: on the day I attended, songs included Cat Stevens’ ‘Peace Train’ and John Lennon’s ‘Imagine’. The reading was not from the Bible: it was a poem titled, “A Square Deal” by iconic Australian, CJ Dennis. The key speaker was not a minister or priest, but a professor of quantum physics (and the custodian of the world famous Pitch Drop Experiment) at the University of Queensland. Professor Andrew White did not present us with a sermon or a homily; instead he gave an amusing and accessible overview of an aspect of his work.

This was certainly not church as I had known it.

In the final segment of the meeting, Chrissy Dunaway, one of the founders of Brisbane’s Sunday Assembly, explained why, as an atheist, the concept and practice of Sunday Assembly is important to her. Brought up in the Mormon Church in the United States she came to a point where she could no longer accept the religious dogma and she left. Her mother, she said, characterised her life after Mormonism is a being like “a ship without a rudder” and that, she said, was a fair description of how she had felt. Ms Dunaway said that what she had been looking for was a philosophy and a supportive community; the very things that she had lost when she had left the church.

The concept for Sunday Assembly began just one year ago with UK comedians, Sanderson Jones and Pippa Evans. They say on their website that, “they wanted to do something that had all the best bits of church, but without the religion, and awesome pop songs.” In the short time that has followed, Sunday Assembly groups have been established in a number of UK and US cities, as well as in all mainland Australian capital cities. The Brisbane Assembly attracted over 200 people to its first meeting and around 100 people routinely attend its monthly meetings.

Grant Richards, well known in Brisbane as “Grant the polite guy”, told me that he first encountered Sunday Assembly as an invited speaker. Once homeless himself, Grant is the founder of Signal Flare which runs barbecues and raises funds for the homeless. Sunday Assembly and Signal Flare have since developed an ongoing relationship, with Sunday Assembly helping at barbecues and providing clothes and toiletries and other essentials for homeless people living in and around Brisbane and Ipswich.

When I asked Grant if he is happy with the non-theist basis of Sunday Assembly, he said, “I love the community spirit here, and the three point philosophy: ‘live better, help often, and wonder more’.” Adding, “It is awesome, it’s the community coming together to celebrate life”.

Commenting on the Assembly’s work with Signal Flare, Ms Reid said that some people think that charity is the province of the churches, “but I have been openly atheist for some time and I have been involved in a lot of charity work”. “In that [charity] scene”, she said, “the question is always about what church you belong to. The assumption being that only the religious do charity work. I would very much like to change that perception”.

Ms Reid considers that in the future Sunday Assembly could provide a base for the many overseas students she meets. Such students, she said, are often in need of a community in Australia and they are frequently drawn to the churches for support. She thinks that it could be important to have non-religious organisations available to these students to help them navigate the basics of living in a foreign country without the associated belief system.

Both Ms Reid and Brisbane Sunday Assembly President Cameron Reilly said that criticism of Sunday Assembly has mostly come from other atheist organisations which consider it is too similar to a church. Ms Reid said this was a pity because, “atheists come in all ‘makes and models’ and all outlets of atheist expression should be encouraged.”

Mr Reilly said, “We really do like people, and we like community, and we want to help other people. This criticism that atheists should not get together as a community, just doesn’t make a lot of sense to me”. He added that the structure of the meetings is intentionally similar to a church service, “we deliberately take what we think are the best parts of religion, because it works. What a lot of people are looking for is community and that sense of knowing your neighbours, and having a group of people you care about, that care about you…that you share some common interests with”. “The thing with Atheism” he said, “is that it tends to be a solitary thing. You may be part of a music group, or a sports group, but nothing that really talks about how you live your life, about how you support one another in times of need; what your philosophy is. I think there are a lot of us that are yearning for something like that.”

De Botton says much the same thing about ‘Religion for Atheists’: “For too long non-believers have faced a stark choice between either swallowing lots of peculiar doctrines or doing away with a range of consoling and beautiful rituals and ideas”.

I asked Mr Reilly whether Sunday Assembly will create its own rituals to mark life events, such as births, marriages and deaths. He said that he and his partner have a baby due in 3-4 weeks, and they have been talking about how Sunday Assembly will welcome this new life. “Those sorts of rituals are an important part of the human experience, and an important part of being a community: celebrating and supporting people through major life events”.

Sunday Assembly meets each month. For more information on their meeting times and events, see the Sunday Assembly website or look them up on Facebook.

For Signal Flare’s next event see their Facebook site.

I’d like to thank Jo Stevens for providing the images that accompanying this story.

The last two years have been the hottest in our history, according to the Australian Climate Council.

The Climate Council report finds the last 24 months are shaping up to be the hottest in Australia’s recorded history, further evidence that climate change is already influencing our weather.

“We have just had an abnormally warm autumn, off the back of another very hot ‘angry summer’,” says Climate Councillor Professor Will Steffen.

“The past two-year period has delivered the hottest average temperature we have ever recorded in Australia.”

“Climate change is here, it’s happening, and Australians are already feeling its impact,” says Steffen.

The findings are contained in the Climate Council’s latest seasonal analysis report, Abnormal Autumn, released by Professor Steffen on Monday 2^nd June.

The report outlines weather records, including the recent “warm wave” in May, and says it is likely the country will experience an El Niño event in the second half of the year, with the potential to exacerbate the climate-change driven warming trend.

“El Niño events usually make life tougher in rural Australia, often triggering drought, water restrictions, extreme heat and increased bushfire risk. When it comes on top of two years of climate change-related record warmth, you have to be concerned,” says Steffen.

The Climate Council’s report highlights the records that were broken in May 2014.

Sydney had 19 consecutive days of 22 °C or above from 10 to 28 May. That is 10 days longer than the previous record.

Sydney, Melbourne and Adelaide also broke records for number of consecutive days of 20 °C or above.  Sydney had 28 days, Melbourne 13 days and Adelaide 16 days.