He not busy being born

Is busy dying

-Bob Dylan

            

Dylan’s verse is true of both individuals and organisations. Part of being born is knowing and believing in what is optimum; what is the greatest good?

The opposite of this, of course, is pessimism; someone busy dying, someone waiting for it to rain (to use a line from Leonard Cohen). The pessimist sees no point in trying to achieve the greatest good as we will all die anyway. The great humanitarian Albert Schweitzer described pessimism as a depreciated will-to-live.

The wonder of optimism is that it has a focus on possibility, on what we could do, could achieve. Interestingly there was an movement begun in 1919 in America called Optimist International. It was made up of professional and business people devoted to civic improvement and improvement among all people.

Importance of purpose

Great organisations have embedded in their brand purpose and their stories a strong sense of optimistic meaning. They therefore naturally tend to attract optimistic people who can support and direct their behaviours toward this optimum concept.

It is my experience that the poison that negatively impacts on brands and organisations and which is far more detrimental than the force of competition is pessimistic staff. This manifests as corridor whining and undermining; a cynicism toward and mockery of forward motion. Author Milan Kundera described this phenomenon as the rust that corrodes all it touches.

Implicit in optimism, as Dylan suggests, is a continuing rebirth, innovation, growth and forward momentum. But, too much of what actually happens in organisations is not about visualising and moving forward, but is too much about what can’t be done and a focus on bureaucratic systems that make it challenging for anything to be born and often leaves most ideas still-born. This is what the plethora of meetings actually achieve.

Organisations need to value optimism and all those people who exude this energy. They must establish pessimism-radars to quickly identify muttering sources of can’t be done and sort them or eject them. Pessimism kills, partly because it is so quickly degenerates into cynicism - the energy of which is 'why even bother'.

Ratchet optimism

Protect your organisations, and align your purpose to specific optimistic behaviours. Certainly do allow sceptical questions as they help rebirth, but do make it as impossible as you can, to allow any fertile soil for cynicism, mockery and pessimism.

The other upside for getting this right is that optimistic people are usually happy people and this energy has magnetic attraction and over-rides obstacles and challenges.

One might ask how to ratchet up levels of optimism and this could require revisiting the purpose and values of the organisation and or the leadership and management thereof.

I guess the above also applies to societies and countries.

If anyone wants an example of unfettered optimism, sit and watch children at play in sandpits and on jungle gyms, merry go rounds and swinging as high as they can.

Remembering You

Remembering You...

The Laughing Heart

your life is your life

don't let it be clubbed into dank submission.

be on the watch.

there are ways out.

there is light somewhere.

it may not be much light but

it beats the darkness.

be on the watch.

the gods will offer you chances.

know them.

take them.

you cant beat death but

you can beat death in life, sometimes.

An the more often you learn to do it,

the more light there will be.

your life is your life.

know it while you have it.

you are marvellous

the gods wait to delight

in you.

                                                                         - Charles Bukowski

Within two days two special young people connected to Vega died.

Megan Byrne, 18 years old, was a free spirit challenging her school system; principled, fun loving, full of energy and passion. Her father Tim, a friend of mine, has been a stalwart in the advertising industry and is now managing Brand Communications at Discovery. He was lining up interviews with us at Vega as they felt this environment could further unlock and better structure her restless and creative energy. This was not to be.

She had symptoms of flu on Saturday and died five hours later with a deadly form of meningitis. This was not meant to be.

Ntwanano,Tiny Maluleke was killed in the early hours of Monday morning in his rented house in Soweto. Shot through the chest in the dark by intruders who took two cell phones and a TV.

Tiny was a final year BA student. More than that he was a larger than life renaissance personality - an innovative thinker, fashion connoisseur, a rebirth of Sophiatown, a photographer, writer and music lover. His most recent Facebook status postings were:

I'm living on a cloud.

I'm a simple guy, its sophisticated.

and finally: 

I am inspired. Be inspired.

A tornado of creativity. The life taken. It was not meant to be.

Both memorial services broke out of the allotted seats and space. In both instances the application of social media brought together very large numbers of people within a few days - notwithstanding that students were on school holiday. The communities of family, friends, fellow students and staff, representing many of our cultures, were present.

In the case of Tiny, some 30 former Parktown Boys High School students, now 3 years out of matric, squeezed into their school blazers and sung an impassioned, grief-torn war cry.

Megan's school friends gave their emotional tributes and spoke of her mischievous and optimistic nature.

At Vega, Tiny's final year class, the Student Liaison Body and a former graduate arranged the entire service, designed the programme. Fellow students play the piano and sing. This was not meant to be. Children should not have to arrange memorial services for another child. This should not be.

Notwithstanding the untimely taking of life, both Megan and Tiny have left an indelible imprint on all they touched.

A professional golfer, Ken Venturi (1931 - 2013) said: The greatest gift in life is to be remembered. In the case of Tiny, Vega will name a creative studio after him and we are currently consulting as to other ways to remember the talent and life Tiny brought to the corridors of this School.

Whatever we do on an annual basis, it will be called something like - The Tiny Inspired Bursary or The Tiny Inspired Award. I’m sure Megan's School and friends will do something similar.

Both Megan and Tiny indeed had laughing hearts and it is ironic that, whoever chose this poem for Megan, probably her father Tim, was selecting a poet who would have been an outstanding, albeit difficult but brilliant Vega student. Ironic too, because Tiny's trademark was his laugh.

The Hotel School Dilemma

Imagine a Hotel School training staff for Fawlty Towers

Marketing.... is the whole business seen from the point of view of its final result, that is, from the customer's point of view. Concern and responsibility for marketing must, therefore, permeate all areas of the enterprise.

- Peter Drucker

A couple of weeks ago when on a trip to run Brand Building workshops, I stayed in a Hotel School in a sub-Saharan country.

I must stress that this School is part of an institution to set benchmarks for hotel leadership, management and service. Most of the tools of marketing apply to service brands. such as the School. Per the work of Chris Lovelock in his famous book Services Marketing there are 3 specific tools applicable to service organisations. 

The first is the opportunity to add physical evidence or tangibility to the implicitly intangible service. On the upside, the architecture and facility which includes the rooms, dinning hall, kitchen and landscaping were superb.

The wheels fall off at the front desk where you may or may not find anyone and certainly from 5pm there will be no one.

Physical evidence for a service brand also includes uniform, whether a formal or an informal one. It is a benchmark in a decent hotel to have some formal uniform at least on the frontlines and in the dinning hall. This was not the case. There was also no evidence of any management or leadership. The School appears to be run by whoever you find walking about.

Managing the customer experience

The second critical factor to build a service brand is the use of flowcharts to design systems and processes that manage customer journeys and contact points on both the front and back stage.

The first challenge here was no working bathroom light nor reading lights. Obviously no checklists were being applied. The lights were fixed the next day by taking the bulb of another light in the room for the reading lamp and fitting a bulb in the bathroom that vaguely lit the basin but not the shower or toilet.

Returning at the end of the first day the room had not been cleaned and the bed unmade. The one receptionist who always appeared to understand (but I learnt, never did) assured me that all would be sorted the next day. It wasn't. I eventually found a "manager" who then made frantic phone calls to establish that the actual problem was that the previous guest had taken the room key. The receptionist assured me that she was well aware of this but had forgotten to ask me to leave my key on the first day so that another could be made. Apologies were never in order.

Do we laugh or cry?

On being assured that there was room service a call for a drink failed to result in one. The wireless network is promoted as a service but it was quickly evident that a password was needed. Another of the various casual receptionists was perplexed as to how to find a password but after thrashing the computer handed me a hand written code on a scrap piece of paper. Back in the room, the password failed. The response was that we would then have to wait for someone else. The next day a new code was  neatly typed out but instead of handing me the clean sheet of paper, it was torn off just missing one of the critical letters. I did establish that these ladies have been working in the hotel school for a number of years.

Leaving in the morning to go about my business there would be no one at reception. On arriving first at the start of dinner one would need to pop into the bar to encourage the crew to hit the floor. It should be mentioned that the stay was not for free and the rates are apparently not significantly discounted when compared to a hotel or guest house. I should also say that the quality of the cooking was very good.

The people issue

The third tool mentioned by Lovelock is the quantity and quality of people working for the service brand. Aside from general scarcity of service people the earnest intent and passion was less than that of underpaid and abused waitrons. The people element also includes the extent of visible management and leadership. At least Fawlty Towers had a clown leader and the place is full of colourful and dysfunctional enthusiasm.

As John Kotter has remarked: The increasingly fast-moving and competitive environment we will face in the 21st century demands more leadership from more people to make enterprises prosper.

Based on my experiences, it was, therefore, not surprising to learn that the tertiary institution behind the Hotel School was anxious about financial sustainability. This of course underscores the fundamental truth that well led and managed brands are the precursor for sustainable businesses.

Perhaps most remarkable was to see the institution's leadership having regular lunch and dinner meetings in the Hotel School but clearly neither hearing nor seeing much.

While we all understand that it is difficult to maintain a consistently strong service brand  there can surely be even less of a margin for error in a School teaching people how to run hotels.

As a customer we probably do have some responsibility to inform management of poor service experiences and I undertake to my readers that I will do so.