Sunday, 29 March 2015

Welcome to Planet of the Apes!



I've often regarded the long-running film and TV franchise 'Planet of the Apes' as the metaphor it was intended to be for the perils of atrophying human intelligence and wisdom.

It's based on the 1963 satirical novel 'La Planete des Singes' by French author Pierre Boulle, which highlighted the failings of human nature and mankind's over-reliance on technology.  It depicted a faraway world in which animal like, speechless humans had, through complacency, allowed themselves to become subjugated, hunted and enslaved by intelligent apes.  Amongst other things one can see in it an obvious metaphor for Edmund Burke's famous saying which I've quoted in previous blogs: "The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing".

There are many topical examples in the news, and I've experienced some in my business and personal life recently.  Complacency is indeed a huge peril, perhaps the greatest one of all to long-term human survival and happiness.

  • A 28-year old (scarily young) deluded narcissist with a known, troublesome medical history which prevented him from achieving his heart's desire to captain long-haul flights apparently decides to fly a commercial airliner into a mountain at 500 km/h, taking 149 poor souls with him, stunning the world, and permanently destroying hundreds of lives, including his own family's.  Yes, realistically it could not have been foreseen, but there were ample reasons why he should not have been flying an airliner nonetheless.  No doubt we'll hear in due course that as well as seeking everlasting global notoriety (already widely reported) he also intended to punish his employers, and/or his former girlfriend, and/or his parents for dealing him such a rotten hand of life cards, i.e.being born into one of the safest, richest, most civilised countries in the world, without obvious disability or suffering, and with a strong intellect and superb life chances.
  • A talented, intelligent, maverick but arrogant and utterly selfish, anti-social journalist (I've heard 2nd hand stories from people who've dealt with him personally) who deliberately courts fame and controversy by being a boorish, obnoxious, insulting thug in front of a global TV audience, thus making the BBC £100s of millions annually, finally oversteps a 'line' after years of incidents by assaulting one of his colleagues and subjecting him to unwarranted, prolonged, extreme abuse in a hotel they were filming at 20 miles up the road from where I live because the chef had gone home and there was no hot food at 10pm in the evening.  He is suspended from work pending the outcome of an investigation by his employer. His friend the UK Prime Minister inadvisedly professes support for him, and the Prime Minister's 10 year old daughter reputedly (and one hopes jokingly) supports a petition of 1 million to have him reinstated by saying she'll "go on hunger strike" (a severe case of anorexia clarksona?)  The BBC's internal investigation proves assault (the police are now examining the case) and the Director General, who confesses he is a fan of the journalist himself, is apparently subjected to a death threat when he makes the only decision available, to fire him - see http://bbc.in/1xK7iw8.  Puerile BBC interviewers leave their brains (what brains?) at the door and suggest that he and the BBC are over-reacting and have lost the plot.
  • A police investigation gathers pace into increasing reports of child abuse and subsequent cover-up by politicians, celebrities, senior police officers and clergymen in Central London in the 1970s and 1980s.  Already several celebrities are behind bars and others, now dead, are disgraced as a result of the unfolding UK child abuse scandal.  Informed sources tell the media we are looking at a Pandora's Box of depraved behaviour by people who considered themselves above the law and thus covered up for each other.  I cannot conceive of anything more insidiously, cynically evil than this - it makes my blood boil.
  • The police officer in charge of the stadium at the appalling 1989 Hillsborough disaster in Sheffield in which 96 Liverpool FC fans were crushed to death finally admits to the latest official inquiry 26 years later that he panicked, lost his head, did not consider the impact of his decisions, that they caused the loss of 96 lives, and that subsequently he and his superiors in South Yorkshire Police systematically covered up their mistakes by submitting false statements, requiring fellow officers who witnessed the terrible events to do the same, and leaking to the media a false story that drunken Liverpool fans had caused the tragedy.  He apologises publicly to the families of the dead, many of whom are in tears in court listening to his unexpected confession.  His life since 1989 appears to have been decimated by the trauma of what he is responsible for - he was retired early from the police on grounds of ill-health and has suffered regular, serious bouts of depression.
  • I visited a close friend this week in another part of the country.  She and her husband, whom I introduced to each other over 20 years ago, set up a vibrant new community church last year in a school in their local town after a small coterie of nominal Christians used a procedural ruse to expel them from the mainstream church her husband led, which had been growing successfully with young families under his (and her) dynamic, inspired (though by no means perfect) leadership for 10 years.  The national leadership of the denomination in question were unhappy about it but were apparently powerless to intervene because the organisation's rules embed authority at local level.  The main reason the established church is on its knees in the UK is not because the country has become substantially more atheist.  It is because it is largely discredited due to the out-of-touch, complacent (that word again), self-serving people who control it locally and in blissful stupidity think it is there to serve them and their cliques, not to make a positive difference by giving practical aid to anyone in the community who needs it, regardless of their faith or lack of it, and without proselytising them. These people have truly lost the plot, and whether or not it exists there is no place for them in Heaven! 
In two blogs last November - How the brain works and why you should know and Why selflessness is good business - I described the 4 level hierarchical structure of the human brain captured in the Neurosequential Model of Therapeutics (NMT) and derived from studying how the human brain has evolved over millions of years since we were.....guess what.....apes!!  The juxtaposition and inextricable interconnectivity of our primitive brains (brain stems, at the rear top of our necks) and neocortexes (upper brains) led me to use the analogy of a 6 year old child who has found the keys to Dad's Ferrari and is intent on taking it for a spin, with inevitable, catastrophic consequences.  The challenges we face, individually and collectively, are beautifully captured in Dr Steve Peters' 'The Chimp Paradox'.  Dr Peters has become well-known in the UK in recent years for his work as a sports psychologist with the likes of the world-beating British Cycling Team, snooker world champion Ronnie O'Sullivan and more recently Liverpool FC and now the England soccer team.  He describes the battle we each have to fight with our 'inner chimp', aka the irrational, oft-threatened primitive brain, and he trains people to deal with it successfully.  The likes of Andreas Lubitz and Jeremy Clarkson could have done with his input.

Irrespective of your personal beliefs, and to be blunt no-one can prove the existence of a higher intelligence (God, Allah, Yahweh, whatever) or its benevolence (which seems to me on the basis of available evidence to be seriously delusional, wishful thinking), many of the biggest problems humanity is currently facing arise because we complacently believe we don't need to follow what I might characterise as 'the maker's instructions', in other words the essential, pretty much universally shared principles of goodness and self-sacrificial love.  THEY WORK, and they tend to keep us out of trouble. As it stands though, watch out - the intelligent apes are coming, in the guise of narcissistic humans!

My business life is now informed by a detailed understanding of how the Top 1%, most enduringly successful businesses all swim against the tide by following humanity's 'maker's instructions'.  And do you know what, it's the best fun I've ever had - I heartily commend it!!


__________________________________________________________________
I’m grateful you’ve taken the time to read this article. If you find it helpful please click on 'Like' and also share it using the Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn or Google+ button. And make a difference - be a smart giver and do something positive for others this week. Pay it forward.
Recent blogs you may find helpful include:
If this blog is particularly relevant to you, your organisation, or to someone else you know, I may be able to help or advise. I strive to be a smart giver – Adam Grant’s excellent book “Give and Take” (2013) explains why smart givers are the highest 25% of achievers in all walks of life. They go out of their way to help others, intelligently, without allowing themselves to be widely exploited. In this way they inspire higher performance and create sustained new value through collaborative exchange.
My business Resolve Gets Results provides commercial expertise, leadership capabilities and in some cases financing to different sized businesses with long-term growth potential. I work with a superb small team of Board-level professionals, each a leader in their field with over 30 years’ business experience. We are based in the UK but have international business backgrounds, in my case including 5 years in the United States, where I ran a high growth machinery sales and service business.
You can find my contact details under the ‘Contact info’ tab near the top of my LinkedIn profile.
Mark Ashton
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Sunday, 1 March 2015

How to get people to do what you want

"Leadership is a potent combination of strategy and character.  But if you must be without one, be without the strategy."  General Norman Schwarzkopf


As a student of leadership whose passion for it has intensified over many years I'm increasingly struck by its parallels with parenting.  And as father ('Pop') for over 14 years to an adopted son who turned 19 this week I find them even more striking.

Good leadership, like good parenting, requires self-sacrifice, love, wisdom, patience, resolve, humility, and the ability to learn from frequent errors.  It is a lifelong quest, not a destination, and it is the most basic role of any human being.  As I blogged last September great leadership is fine art, not painting by numbers.

Poor leadership, like poor parenting, is characterised by selfishness, neglect, bullying, intimidation, manipulation, sniping criticism, the portrayal of self (inadvertently perhaps) as controlling and all-knowing, an inability to learn from mistakes leading to their constant, needless repetition, and often a compulsive need to belittle others to puff up one's own fragile self-esteem.  Poor leaders are often unhappy people - fearful and insecure, though they may conceal it well.

As I used to say years ago of an admittedly talented narcissist, one of several I had the misfortune to work for!: "He's like a tennis coach.  The first thing he does is take your game apart................er, that's it!!"

Great leaders are, at least when it matters, at ease in their own skin.  Above all they are self-aware. That breeds humility, but they also have keen insight into their ability to make a positive difference and they aren't afraid to do so.

Like great parents, great leaders are inspirational and utterly transform other people's lives for the better.  They are die-in-a-ditch, princpled people who infuse others with confidence.  They can be in sharp conflict with one another - witness Churchill and Ghandi, Montgomery and Rommel, or Lincoln and Robert E Lee for example.  There are many examples in sport of competing coaches, or competing captains, who are both great leaders.

Sadly in 'real life' great leaders often suffer, and sometimes pay the ultimate price - Friday night's brutal execution of Boris Nemtsov within spitting distance of the Kremlin in Moscow is a painful reminder of that horrible truth.

However, like great parents the majority work anonymously in the background and don't seek the limelight or take the credit.  They are more than content to enjoy the unfolding results of their long-term labours, in the form of the happiness, performance and fulfilment of their charges. Or put another way:

"By their fruits ye shall know them".


In stark contrast are the managers.

For over 20 years the BBC has produced the peak time TV show Room 101 in which celebrities talk about their pet hates and send them to outer darkness - Room 101 - a prison cell for which they throw away the key.  I'd love to consign the words management and manager to Room 101.


In the spirit of the 'Stop Doing Lists' of the Top 1% companies in Jim Collins' Good to Great, and with tongue only partially in cheek, this would be a major contribution to organisational excellence! And in the spirit of Jardin's Principle (see Focus - it's easy, right?!) it would simplify organisations wonderfully, focus minds, and prevent humungous time-, energy- and life-wasting for millions.  After all, as Peter Drucker put it:

"There's nothing quite as soul-destroying as doing with great efficiency that which one should not be doing in the first place!" 


I would therefore replace the word management with the word bureaucracy, and manager with bureaucrat. My wife says this sounds perjorative (contemptuous/disapproving) - I say "Exactly - it's meant to!" So instead of Sales Manager, Operations Manager and Technical Manager I would have Sales Bureaucrat, Operations Bureaucrat and Technical Bureaucrat, etc. Finance Manager would of course be Finance Bureaucrat, and Accountant would be Accounting Bureaucrat!  Only teasing guys, and I'm privileged to have associated over the years with a good selection who defy this particular stereotype!

I'm not alone.  There are many great books and research programmes that support the basic premise behind this unashamedly irreverant take on the world of management.  See 'How Google Works' (Eric Schmidt, Jonathan Rosenberg - 2014) for example - if this sort of thinking is good enough for Google to create over $50 billion in revenues in 15 years from a standing start it's good enough for me.

"So what?", I hear you say.  Where is this going?

In last week's blog Don't get ill in the UK!!! I described the Dickensian standard of medical care my father-in-law has experienced in recent weeks as he waits for a hip replacement.  It has long been de rigeur in the UK to decry the at times breathtaking dysfunctionality and self-defeating stupidity of the National Health Service (NHS).  Yet there's an almost hysterical resistance to creative, common sense thinking about changes to the NHS that would benefit everyone, most of all patients, for goodness sake!  Oh yes, sorry, did anyone tell you they're real human beings, not inanimate widgets to be processed through the system??

My father-in-law and I talked today about a perfect example of NHS idiocy.  As a diabetic he has suffered two hypoglycemic episodes (abnormally low blood sugar) in the last 2 days, whilst in hospital.  He told me the food is very poor, unappetising, often not properly cooked, and made from poor quality ingredients because of course the over-riding focus is cost.  Choosing external contractors on cost is somehow not deemed as "creeping privatisation", whereas more effective solutions are. The hyporcrisy and closed-mindedness is infuriating.


My father-in-law knows his own body and manages his diabetes very successfully when he's at home. In hospital he is finding it difficult to do this since the diet isn't geared to his diabetes. Sorry.....did I hear that correctly?   He's in.......hospital, did you say.......and the diet is not geared to his diabetes?!

He and I swapped ideas for improving hospital food.  He suggested providers of airline food could do a better job.  Ever the entrepreneur I suggested patients could pay for their own food.  I can hear the sharp intakes of breath from NHS true believers - what a sacrilegeous suggestion!  Surely I must be some rabid, facist, free marketeer?!

OK, now you've vented, think about it logically (and no, I'm not, by the way).  Patients would be paying for their own food if they were at home, within their own budget, so why should it be free in hospital and thus inevitably farmed out to the lowest cost bidder??  Why not offer a range of foods that could be brought in from outside, ranging from budget to gourmet level, and give patients the choice? Indeed why not offer a whole raft of other services to patients that help them to feel they are still in control of their lives, not some helpless piece of meat left in the lap of the gods, at the mercy of an incompetent system?!

This brings me to the crux of the argument.  In study after study after study you find that the highest performing organisations in all walks of life do exactly the same 5 things:

  1. They devote themselves to the end-user of their products or services, in this case the patient.  Google's astonishing success is built on this principle - read 'How Google works'.
  2. They pursue an inspiring non-financial purpose and they do not compromise on it in order to achieve financial targets, whether on sales, profits or costs. 
  3. They focus on effectiveness in striving for the non-financial core purpose and meeting the needs of the end-users, not on efficiency. (They learn from Peter Drucker's maxim quoted earlier.)
  4. They measure the performance of the whole system in delivering value to the end-user, in this case again the patient. By focusing performance measurement on the end-user they highlight all of the really big inefficiencies, which occur at the boundaries between different parts of the organisation along the so-called value chain, or value stream.  And so they dramatically outperform the pedants who steadfastly refuse to see this logic, and who tend to be.......bureaucrats rather than leaders.
  5. They engineer the entire organisational model to gradually deliver more and more value for end-users and to systematically eliminate waste, classified as anything not adding value for end-users. This strategy was originally called the Toyota Production System and it turned Toyota into the No 1 car company in the world.  It is now called Lean Thinking, but is commonly totally misunderstood and incompetently applied, including by the NHS, to improve efficiency for 'internal' stakeholders rather than effectiveness for end-users.

Should this all seem rather theoretical I conclude by offering a compelling personal case study that it really does work, which you'll find in full on my LinkedIn profile.

In late-1999 I was asked on behalf of the Chief Financial Officer of £4 billion turnover British Nuclear Fuels Ltd (BNFL), to undertake a rather unusual and challenging assignment at their infamous Sellafield site on the North West coast of England.  BNFL bore many of the hallmarks of the NHS - a large, complex, essentially public sector organisation run by bureaucrats and unchallengeable black art technocrats, in this case nuclear engineers rather than consultant doctors. Like the NHS the costs to the UK taxpayer of the nuclear industry were slowly, inexorably spiralling out of control.


Sellafield

My 'Mission Impossible' was to come up with a way of quantifying the financial value of decommissioning and waste management at Sellafield.  It is the largest industrial site in the UK, and one of the largest in Europe. It contains dozens of streams of nuclear waste, some coming from the decommissioning of 1950s, 1960s and 1970s nuclear weapons programmes and spin-off civilian nuclear power programmes, and some from plants which reprocess fuel for British nuclear power stations and for overseas customers, principally the Japanese.

Reprocessimg was viewed as highly profitable by BNFL managers (bureaucrats and technocrats), whereas decommissioning and waste processing were deemed necessary evils, to some extent distractons, paid for by the UK taxpayer, who would of course go on picking up the tab ad infinitum.

By applying the five principles above I created a financial performance measurement system that met the brief extraordinarily well. far better than any of us could have imagined.  The CFO, a very experienced senior accountant who had worked in a tightly financially controlled large corporate (plc) environment previously, described it as the best measurement system of its type he'd ever seen. By making the true financial picture starkly visible in a way that non-finance people could immediately understand it completely transformed both the operational and the strategic realities.  It broke down barriers along the value chain, leading to far greater effectiveness and efficicency, and it contributed to a complete restructuring of the nuclear industry. The UK Government broke up BNFL and formed a new public body - the Nuclear Decommissioning Agency - to oversee a strategic shift away from reprocessing to decommissioning.

A similar earth-shaking change is needed in the NHS.  It starts with the correct application of the 5 principles.  It's essentially the same change that CEO Dave Lewis is applying to turn around Tesco's fortunes (see How to make your company more resilient, Stop your company's demons coming back to haunt you and Was Tesco's Terry Leahy really such a great leader?).

So how do you get people to do what you want?
  • By acting like a selfless, nurturing parent, not a selfish, petty bureaucrat
  • By focusing unequivocally not on internal targets, especially financial ones, but on the needs of others, first and foremost the end-users of your products or services.
As Norman Schwarzkopf so memorably put it, at the end of the day it's about CHARACTER, stupid, and it ALWAYS will be, whether individually or collectively, and on whatever scale you care to name. 

The evidence is out there in spades if you're willing to listen and learn.  Go for it!

___________________________________________________________________________

I’m grateful you’ve taken the time to read this post. If you find it helpful please share it. And make a difference - be a smart giver and do something positive for others this week. Pay it forward.
Recent blogs you may find helpful include:


If this blog is particularly relevant to you, your organisation, or to someone else you know, I may be able to help or advise. I strive to be a smart giver – Adam Grant’s excellent book “Give and Take” (2013) explains why smart givers are the highest 25% of achievers in all walks of life. They go out of their way to help others, intelligently, without allowing themselves to be widely exploited. In this way they inspire higher performance and create sustained new value through collaborative exchange.
My business Resolve Gets Results provides commercial expertise, leadership capabilities and in some cases financing to different sized businesses with long-term growth potential. I work with a superb small team of Board-level professionals, each a leader in their field with over 30 years’ business experience. We are based in the UK but have international business backgrounds, in my case including 5 years in the United States, where I ran a high growth machinery sales and service business.
You can find my contact details under the ‘Contact info’ tab near the top of my LinkedIn profile.
Mark Ashton

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Sunday, 22 February 2015

Don’t get ill in the UK!!!



This is the 1st of a 2 part blog which examines the performance problems of the UK National Health Service.  Today’s blog uses the current story of my father-in-law to highlight these issues graphically.  Tomorrow’s blog will explain how I believe these problems should be addressed, based on my relevant experience.  The lessons can be applied to the quest for excellence in all types of organisation.  

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In last weekend’s blog Is trouble brewing? Read this… I mentioned the previous week’s publication of Sir Robert Francis’s report on whistle blowing (staff flagging up problems or even deliberate wrongdoing) in Britain’s National Health Service (NHS). 

The NHS is already a huge (literally) political football in the run-up to the UK General Election on May 7th.  Political parties are vying to stretch credibility beyond its elastic limit yet again by telling us that somehow they will magically succeed where they and their predecessors have abysmally failed and solve the intractable problems of this chronically diseased, sclerotic, impenetrable bureaucracy, the 2nd largest employer in the world after the Chinese Red Army. 

For me the trouble with the NHS is that brutal honesty is one of its thousands of avoidable casualties annually.  Until the patient is told the bad news about their diagnosis nothing of importance can or will change.  For an explanation of the life-saving Stockdale Paradox see my recent blog The truth may hurt, but seeking it sets you free.

Little did I know the awful realities of the NHS would be brought home to me immediately and in stark personal terms this week!  Admittedly, borrowing from the title of last week’s blog, trouble has been brewing for some time with my 79 year old father-in-law’s health, but it exploded in our faces at 6.45am yesterday having deteriorated rapidly this week. 

Having metaphorically frothed at the mouth with frustration and anger about it for 24 hours and decided to make it the topic of this week’s blog I woke up this morning with a strange calm and an incisive clarity.  The problems facing the NHS are in fact common to most organisations, but tend to be much worse in the public (government) sector than the private sector, simply because in the private sector the marketplace eventually extracts an often savage price for incompetence and failure to adapt whereas in the public sector dinosaurs do not die off for years because they remain protected species.  The larger and more labyrinthine the organisation the worse it gets, whether public or private sector.

Fundamentally the problem in the NHS is one of values, or precisely of translating values into urgent, radical and proven effective action instead of repeatedly parroting them as mindless, inane rhetoric to the point of utter meaninglessness, which is what politicians, NHS bureaucrats and wealthy consultant doctors insult our intelligence by doing. 

Unfortunately inertia, vested interests, smug complacency, stupidity, and a failure to face brutal reality and learn and adapt breed the sclerosis (hardened, unyielding arteries) of the NHS that must be broken down.  The patient may soon be flat-lining – this winter has seen unprecedented failures to meet targets in Accident and Emergency (A&E) departments in many hospitals as the system creaks at the seams.  To use another analogy, it’s running far too hot in the red zone and something has to give.

Ironically the main problem I see in the NHS is NOT lack of money, which is the standard mantra on most people’s lips.

So what is the problem, how can it be fixed, what does it teach us for our own organisation(s), public or private sector, and can I justify my solution with hard evidence (answer – yes!)?

To bring the problem to life here’s my father-in-law’s healthcare story so far. 

  • He has had Type 2 diabetes for over 25 years.  Diabetes is an epidemic affecting 2.9 million people (4.5% of the population) in the UK, a number which has more than doubled in 20 years.  It is one of several chronic diseases imposing unsustainable burdens on the NHS.  This time last year it was causing major, prolonged problems with his eyesight which unfortunately coincided with the death of the lady he’d lived with for 26 years. 
  • He was told 7 months ago that his left hip joint needed replacing.  Since then he has struggled with increasing pain and decreasing mobility, resorting to crutches, unable to drive, increasingly housebound and unable to sleep comfortably at night.  He lives 60 miles (100km) from us but my wife and I have each tried to get down to see him once or twice a week.  Moving him to stay with us might seem an obvious option but we live in a remote, rural area whereas he is in Manchester and his doctor, friends and good amenities are all on the doorstep, relatively speaking.  And home is home, all the more so when you are suffering.
  • In early-December he was told that his operation would be on 22nd January.  He relaxed and enjoyed the Christmas break, safe in the knowledge that the pain, discomfort and lack of mobility would soon be a thing of the past.  He spoke enthusiastically of driving again and getting out to visit some of his favourite places.
  • 10 days before the operation he went for a pre-operation assessment.  Tests revealed that his blood count was not satisfactory and he lost his place on the waiting list, a major psychological blow.  He was told that he would need an endoscopy – a camera investigation of his oesophagus and stomach.  
  • A date was set – 20th March – more than 2 months away!  This was depressing.  His physical condition continued to deteriorate.  His mobility has worsened significantly and over the last few weeks we have noticed him looking increasingly jaundiced.   We believed that his doctor’s surgery was trying to get the endoscopy brought forward and that they were aware of his condition.
  • On Wednesday I persuaded him to call the surgery to ask them to make a private referral to the consultant so that we, his family, could pay to get his endoscopy done rapidly.  At that point, only at that point, he was told that it was pointless us spending the money because his endoscopy had been set for 20th March for clinical, not organisational reasons, connected to his specific symptoms.  Still no assessment of his all-round needs.  I told him to call them back and arrange an assessment.  They told him they were not responsible for at-home care, and did not tell him which agency to call or give him a phone number.  He asked if the doctor could come out and see him.  It took some time to convince them that he was unable to come into the surgery to see the doctor – he was essentially immobile and in almost constant pain, in spite of the painkillers he’d been prescribed which his friends had collected from the surgery.
  • Late on Friday afternoon I called to see him briefly – I had been at a meeting in Manchester and needed to get home for a charity function that evening.  I was very concerned by his condition.  In retrospect I should have stayed with him.  My wife was due to visit him early yesterday morning.  I left after making him as comfortable as I could.  20 minutes later I phoned him and told him I’d come down this afternoon and stay as long as necessary.  He was extremely grateful.
  • At 6.45am yesterday he called us to say he’d fallen and couldn’t move.  We rang his late partner’s daughter who went over immediately with her boyfriend.  They could not move him, which was just as well – it was not the right course of action.  They called an ambulance and got him into hospital.  My wife went straight to the hospital and spent the day there.  He was initially admitted to Accident and Emergency (A&E) where they gave him morphine to ease the pain.  His hip was X-rayed several times because they couldn’t tell if it was broken from the fall.  Eventually they decided it wasn’t – it had just disintegrated ‘naturally’ over time.  Don’t pinch yourself – this is 2015, not 1815!
  • I’m on my way to see him this afternoon.  Apparently they’ve done more tests and X rays this morning.  They’re saying there are underlying health problems which the diabetes has masked, which have to be fixed before he can have his hip replacement.  We’re not medics, but we could have told them that – it’s the sort of thing a child’s instincts would have detected.
I tell the story pitilessly to hammer home the brutal realities.  It’s typical of the stories of thousands of patients and their impotent families occurring every week in the 6th richest economy on Earth.  One of my business partners lost his father 4 years ago when he went into hospital to have an ingrowing toe-nail attended to, caught a hospital-borne infection, and died.  14 years ago my mother endured a similarly Dickensian level of care during the final stages of her battle with cancer.

In tomorrow’s blog I’ll propose an approach, with supporting evidence, that I firmly believe would dramatically improve NHS performance and can improve your organisation too.

___________________________________________________________________________

 I’m grateful you’ve taken the time to read this post. If you find it helpful please share it. And make a difference - be a smart giver and do something positive for others this week. Pay it forward.
Recent blogs you may find helpful include:
If this blog is particularly relevant to you, your organisation, or to someone else you know, I may be able to help or advise. I strive to be a smart giver – Adam Grant’s excellent book “Give and Take” (2013) explains why smart givers are the highest 25% of achievers in all walks of life. They go out of their way to help others, intelligently, without allowing themselves to be widely exploited. In this way they inspire higher performance and create sustained new value through collaborative exchange.
My business Resolve Gets Results provides commercial expertise, leadership capabilities and in some cases financing to different sized businesses with long-term growth potential. I work with a superb small team of Board-level professionals, each a leader in their field with over 30 years’ business experience. We are based in the UK but have international business backgrounds, in my case including 5 years in the United States, where I ran a high growth machinery sales and service business.
You can find my contact details under the ‘Contact info’ tab near the top of my LinkedIn profile.
Mark Ashton






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Sunday, 15 February 2015

Trouble brewing? Read this...



Wherever you look it seems there is corporate or individual wrongdoing on an industrial scale.  In business and professional life cynics could be forgiven for citing corruption, deceit, bullying and abuse as prerequisite ‘qualities’ for leadership!


Sadly this should come as no surprise.  The vast majority of us fall into two camps – ‘takers’, who pursue selfish goals at the expense of others and occupy disproportionately the positions of power and highest reward in all walks of life, or the so-called ‘herd’, too scared, apathetic or blissfully ignorant to question or offer resistance!  Many takers know it is too easy to manipulate the herd and thus live a life of easy complacency – most of the time they away with it since “evil happens when good people do nothing” (Edmund Burke).


There is compelling evidence that a third way is safer and comprehensively rewarding on all counts, including financial and ego-related.  What’s more the Internet era is destroying the power of secrecy like a bushfire, smashing down boundaries and nourishing emerging global generations with values of openness, sharing and empowered democracy.

Combine this with rising indignation at avoidable suffering and the obscene, indefensible, dramatically widening discrepancies between the ‘haves’ and ‘have nots’ and you have potentially career-, power- and wealth-threatening conditions for the much of the anti-social elite.


It’s a good time to be a freedom fighter for positive values – here’s why.  

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In the UK this has been the week of the whistle blowers - people who highlight their organisation’s misdemeanours to their managers or (more often) to the outside world.  Normally they are forced underground or have to go public because organisations have a predictably depressing track record in acting against wrong doing, whether individual or collective, and tend to ‘shoot the messenger’ by finding ways to punish them. 

After all, turkeys never vote for Christmas, do they?!



Firstly we saw the publication of Sir Robert Francis’s report into whistle blowing in the National Health Service (NHS), the 2nd largest employer on the planet after the Chinese Red Army.  The NHS is a dizzying hierarchy stuffed with petty, mediocre, ‘target driven’ bureaucrats, and clever technocrats – wealthy, highly respected top consultant doctors.  Many NHS doctors at all levels of seniority work incredibly hard and under great pressure, but in the minds of a significant minority this only serves to emphasise their Messianic self-importance.  Those in some of the less pressurised disciplines have pampered lifestyles and pick and choose their working hours.  In addition to high NHS salaries they often have lucrative posts at private hospitals and clinics.  They are powerful beasts - difficult, if not impossible, to manage, often supremely intelligent and with intimidating egos and commanding reputations.  A significant minority exhibit Autistic and other anti-social tendencies.  Their breadth of life and organisational experience in fact may be quite limited, but their behaviour is nonetheless imperious.



A few months ago I saw one of those superbly satirical cartoons that hits the nail squarely on the head.  It showed a white-coated senior consultant doctor on his daily hospital rounds, accompanied by a dozen student doctors, all of them wearing white coats too and holding clipboards.  They stood around the foot of a hospital bed whilst the consultant addressed the patient lying in it.  The caption read “Mrs Blenkinsopp, do you mind the students listening in whilst I conceal the details of your botched operation?”!


This week’s second whistle blowing story concerns the Swiss private banking arm of HSBC allegedly helping wealthy private banking clients to evade UK tax.  Throughout the financial crash of 2007-08, the subsequent recession and in recent years HSBC has enjoyed a reputation as the most competent and ethical of the UK’s Big 4 banks.  Former CEO and later Chairman, Conservative peer Lord Stephen Green, a friend of Prime Minister David Cameron and, extraordinarily for a career banker, an ordained minister in the Church of England, resigned this week from a leading City of London advisory group because he felt the focus on him and the tax scandal would detract from the group’s role.  Cameron was fiercely questioned in Parliament and angrily denied that he or the Chancellor of the Exchequer (Finance Minister), George Osborne, were aware of details of HSBC’s support for illegal tax evasion.  And the whistle blower, Herve Falciani, who first reported his concerns to the UK tax authorities in 2008 and got no response, gave an interview to BBC Business Editor Kamal Ahmed in which he said there were more revelations to come.  He told the BBC of the horrible personal struggle of the last 7 years, which has included a jail sentence, and the vilification of his personality – he flatly denied claims that he had sought payment for data about tax evasion which HSBC claims he stole.

To be confronted with your, or your organisation’s shortcomings is usually threatening.  Some find it deeply threatening.  To those in positions of money and power, many of whom are vain, full of hubris and over-confident, it often represents loss of face and potential loss of authority, even loss of income.  So the temptation to either a) avoid dealing with the revelations; or b) stamp on the whistle blower is usually very high.  Two weeks ago I highlighted another example, the Rotherham child abuse scandal, in The truth may hurt, butseeking it sets you free.  Last August I pointed out some of the most common dysfunctional organisational behaviours in Humanweakness – a competitive advantage?  In November I highlighted how all of us, no matter how refined, educated and sophisticated, respond to threat in How the brain works and why you should know and Why selflessness is good business.  

So with these issues in mind here are 8 actionable points for staying out of trouble and improving your results, individually and organisationally:

1.       Secrecy is invariably a bad idea.  Over the years I’ve learnt it’s safest to assume people will find stuff out, domestically, socially or professionally.  If they don’t find out they will often suspect, which can be even worse!  So act accordingly.  Intelligent disclosure is always the best policy.  Understand your motives for wanting secrecy – are they really valid?  People will often bend over backwards to help you if you admit you’re having difficulties, especially if you’re in a leadership position, since it makes you more human so they can relate to you better.  It can be the difference between success and failure.  You ain’t expected to have all the answers yourself, or to act like a cyborg!

2.       The role of leaders and bosses is to enable and empower others.  This is enlightened self-interest.  If you dedicate yourself to advancing others you will receive far more than you give, and you will avoid one heck of a lot of trouble, period!

3.       Giving is always the healthy option.  It’s far less stressful and much more fun.  DO NOT fall for the cynical standpoint that all of us are as bad as each other so you should not be so ‘naïve’ as to be selfless.  Humans are neurologically hard-wired to collaborate – the majority of us respond warmly and reciprocally to anyone who does so, especially if they are in a position of authority, and even more so in environments full of takers, since it represents a sharply contrasting breath of fresh air and reassurance that real human values still matter.

4.       If you observe bad behaviour in positions of authority you can be 99% certain others have seen it too.  So don’t try to tackle it on your own.  Find out who else knows and work out a common action plan.  You can guarantee that ‘cornered animals’ will fight; don’t let that stop you, be brave, be smart and be patient.  Gather the facts and data.  Behave as if it is a court of law – the case must be proven on evidence, not emotion or hearsay, and you will be subject to potentially brutal cross-examination, so strength comes in numbers and cold, hard analysis.  As I’ve often put it, revenge is a dish best eaten dipped in liquid nitrogen…..

5.       Do not keep your head down and hope it will go away.  99% of the time it won’t – it will get steadily worse.

6.       Do not fall for the self-limiting lie that there are no alternatives.  Frankly that’s rubbish – it’s a trick our minds play on us all the time because we’re afraid of change and confrontation.  Putting up with bad situations is always worse than taking action to improve or exit from them, though you must avoid impulsiveness.

7.       Always seek advice and act in balanced moderation, after sober reflection.  Righteous indignation is good and healthy, counter to what many will tell you, and change does not have to be negative, but you must ensure you are acting on rational grounds.

8.       Do not lose heart, and do not give up.  It will probably not be easy, there may be brickbats, but it will be worth it in the end.  Life is not about avoiding scars – that’s impossible.  It is about growing and becoming a better person.

Life is too short to put up with unhealthy, unhappy situations caused by chronic bad behaviour.  If you do so you are stealing – stealing your own time, happiness and potentially health, and stealing that of others around you who might also benefit if you refused to accept the status quo.  Facing up to unsatisfactory situations and seeking change helps you, those around you and your organisation to grow healthily and sustainably.
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I’m grateful you’ve taken the time to read this post. If you find it helpful please share it. And make a difference - be a smart giver and do something positive for others this week. Pay it forward.

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If this blog is particularly relevant to you, your organisation, or to someone else you know, I may be able to help or advise. I strive to be a smart giver – Adam Grant’s excellent book “Give and Take” (2013) explains why smart givers are the highest 25% of achievers in all walks of life. They go out of their way to help others, intelligently, without allowing themselves to be widely exploited. In this way they inspire higher performance and create sustained new value through collaborative exchange.
My business Resolve Gets Results provides commercial expertise, leadership capabilities and in some cases financing to different sized businesses with long-term growth potential. I work with a superb small team of Board-level professionals, each a leader in their field with over 30 years’ business experience. We are based in the UK but have international business backgrounds, in my case including 5 years in the United States, where I ran a high growth machinery sales and service business.
You can find my contact details under the ‘Contact info’ tab near the top of my LinkedIn profile.
Mark Ashton

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