A Story for a Rainy Monday Morning

There are, as always, there are several versions of this story and it's perfect for those,  dull rainy mondays, when your to-do list is growing as you look at it, when the promised cheque has not yet arrived, when you are wondering exactly why you set yourself up in business in the first place. 

There was a gardener who ran a small nursery business. They did bit of contract gardening, landscaping, sold local grown produce. His wife and father worked there, his nephew and his wife. The staff were happy, and customers loved to visit the shabby old big shed they used as their shop, or to have the staff work on their gardens or make deliveries - anything from trees to tie ups. It wasn’t exactly a shiny garden centre with the coffee shop and home furnishings.

For as long as anyone could remember though , the current owner and his father and his father before hime were extremely positive enthusiastic people.

Most people assumed that this was because the business was doing really well. But they had a secret. Their business was indeed pretty good, although they had their share of tough times like everybody else.

What never changed however was the staff’s attitude, and the fact that they would always wear a big blue badge. On it was written the words Business Is Great!

Everyone who saw the badge for the first time would ask the obvious question "What's so great about business?" Or then proceed to dump on them just about how bad it was for them, their problems, or just how stressful and depressing it all was. 

The Business is Great badge always tended to start a conversation, which generally involved the wearer talking about lots of positive aspects of business and work, for example:

• they meet new people everyday and got to know them and their stories
• how much fun it was to share problems with your colleagues and work through them
• finding great new staff and sharing your experience with them
• the fun and laughter in a relaxed and healthy work environment for 
• the fascination in the work itself, and in the other people's work and businesses
• the brilliant feeling when you finish a job and have done the best you can
• learning new things  every day - without going to school or studying
• and the thought that everyone in business is blessed - to have the opportunity to have a choice, the safety, health, lack of hunger, that millions around the world don’t share

The list went on and on. After just a couple of minutes listening to all this infectious enthusiasm and positivity even the most down hearted, miserable listener would begin to smile.

But if you ask the owner what the real secret of his business was was he would say quietly, so no one else could hear.

"The badge came first. The great business followed."

Have a great week. 

Storytelling for business web site

For those of you who follow my posts you might like to know I've got a new storytelling web site Www.storytelling4business.com Love to see there, where you can find out find about the day job.

Cowbird - the next big thing? Selfishly hopefully not.

Over the Easter break been indulging in Cowbird, maybe the most interesting site I've found this year  Human stories from humans powered by benevolent technology.

At the moment the site has some great quality, and personally would not like it to be diluted too much, so maybe not good to mention. So my advice is to stick to Pinterest  to tell your story. Not really but had to try.

Just like I don't mention my fave place for coffee, or my holiday destination, so I can get a seat or a room.

It's a great spring board for your own creativity, some smart photography and stories that push the limits sometimes

Enjoy but don't tell too many of your friends

Employee engagement - A lesson from 100 year ago

You know how sometimes the most obvious things are looking you in the face? I've been looking for examples of employee engagement stories. The bad stuff, and I mean really bad, cringeworthy examples of ill conceived communications, the well intentioned ideas that backfired or the complete and utter miscalculation of some of the bosses, we have all probably come across at some point. You know exactly what I am talking about. And, of course, to get a bit of balance, the stories about the truly amazing stuff too.

And then I remembered..... how could I forget? 

I am a direct product of one of the greatest employee engagement stories of all time. The story that created one of the world's largest companies and boxes full of household name brands that have become intertwined with virtually everybody's life. If you having been thinking that employee engagment is about just being being a bit more  cuddly, or that it  might be a 'nice thing' to put a few bits of gym kit in the basement for your staff, o rmaybe put in a shower, I am here to tell you that you really don't know the half or it. 

I am a child of a village called Port Sunlight, created over 100 years ago to look after the workers for the Lever Brothers soap factory, by one of the greatest social philanthopists the commercial and industrial world has ever see. It is still there, in all its pristineness, just a twenty minute drive from the Pier Head in Liverpool. A magical, inspiring place of space and calm that sets the benchmark for how to treat and nuture your talent; your employees. 


Growing up in the village a bit like going through the wardrobe to Narnia It was just a perfect place to grow up but, more than that,  it raised my expectations and lifted my eyes to new horizons and, maybe most of all provided me along with the humanitarian lessons, that a staff’s welfare isn't just a nice thing to do and think about, but has a bottom line effect that can help create, and this is not to any degree hyperbole, an empire. The Unilever Group now includes the ultra brands of the likes of Lynx and Ben & Jerry’s and employs hundreds of thousands across the Globe. All because of palm oil and one man's vision of how to add value to it.

Today the village is still very much as it was. Although there are naturally more cars it still is remarkably peaceful. The wide vistas, pavements and green spaces are all still their, manicured and coiffured. The buildings, columns, walls and the numerous nods to a world history of architectural styles are devoid of any graffitti, anywhere. At the centre of the village, the hub holding the glorious spikes of its structure together, is the stunning war memorial, one of the most glorious and moving examples of the art form built anywhere.  

The outdoor swimming pool, heated to almost tropical delights by the factory, in which thousands of us Sunlight children learnt to swim, is now a garden centre. But pretty well everything else is still there as it was when it was built 120 years ago - although the slopes we rode our bikes up and down and the statues and fountains we climbed over, seem a lot smaller these days.

There are hundreds of stories that feature the founder, William Hesketh Lever and his wife Elizabeth, and what they did on a day-to-day basis for the welfare of their staff, but I think one story epitomises what they may have felt about what was the right thing to do.

Imagine it is the early 1900's. The factory has blossomed since its opening in 1887, and new demand means they are opening their first factory overseas in Brussels, so what does Lever do?

He shuts the factory and the village for a weekend. He takes 2000, yes that's 2000 of them, on a trip. That's pretty well everyone in the village. They are used to the paid for annual trips to indulge in the delights of Blackpool, the garden parties in their own home, the birthday presents for every child, often delivered by Elizabeth herself. This time, they are given an adventure few would ever dream of. The employees are all given colour coded tickets to board specially hired colour coded trains, (you could do that in those days), to take them to the English Channel, then by ferry to Ostend, where this small victorian army is collected up by more painted trains. On their arrival in Brussels that are wined and dined at a string of restaurants across the city and then given a tour in a fleet of 300 wagons and landaus before the opening ceremony that evening. The village's own 40 piece orchestra play to entertain them.

This was in 1900. Can you imagine challenges of this logistical feat? They did have the help of another famous company, that is still going strong, one Thomas Cook, but even so? Can you imagine asking your board to write that cheque? And why did he do it?

It was I believe pretty simple really - he realised that, 100 years before we ‘invented’ the concept of work life balance, 60 years before the UK’s welfare state and free health care, 100 years before the creation of the EU and maximum working week directives, that the single most important factor in creating a happy and willingly cooperative and productive workforce was to build within it a sense of belonging.  And he also was always mindful that you cannot build anything with people who do not care and that his own personal wealth arose from their labours.

This wasn't just a one off either. Change is not a single event. The list of events and goes on and on. I have scores of stories about the ideas and initiatives, of his innovation and sometimes down right cunning; how he introduced a maximum 36 week for  all female staff - this was in the 1890’s for heavens sake - free medical treatment in their own hospital, workers education programmes, it just goes on and on. Although undoubtedly driven by pure benevolence, he wasn’t just being Father Christmas, it was also had a pragmatic bottom in too. Something he was very, very aware of. 

He makes you feel a tad of ashamed with our miserly efforts, and IC managers worrying ourselves to death about whether the intranet works.

History is often a useful reference, but don't we we all need a 'root's story anyway?


Please feel to post your example of the good or bad internal communications or employee engagement   below,  anonymously if you like or give is us link to something, or just share.

How to do a to-do list - Advice from the front line

No time to do a to do list

If I hear another person say to me, ‘You have to work smarter not harder’ I may loose the plot. It’s the sort of consultant speak sound bite that wrankles to the core of my bone marrow. This is not just because everyone uses it; it’s become a consultant's karaoke song, like 'Imagineering' or 'lean manufacturing' or 'just in time'. Urgh! Even the simple act of just writing the phrase down gives me that squirmy goose bumps feeling. Because, as a piece of advice, it is sooo utterly useless.

If I was smarter I wouldn’t have to work harder now would I?

I’d love the time to get myself smarter. To be ultra efficient, successful, smug. It can’t be that hard. I mean look at my dingbat competitor down the road. He's playing golf everyday and picking up his kids from school and was in the bottom set for maths!

‘What you need’ the life coaches and mentors say,’ is to take control of your 'to do' list’. It’s a start I suppose, and I take their point but I am a little bewildered. Exactly which list are they talking about here? Is it the one I have on my Windows Outlook that I started in the airport departure lounge, in a fit of organisational sobriety while I had nothing better to do? Would this be the very same task list that I’ve forgotten to update or delete the items I actually did remember to do, that pops up with those annoying reminders every time I open my e-mail?

Or, perhaps they mean the list on that piece of paper in the black-hole thingy in the car door, where you put stuff so it doesn’t disappear into the foot well while your testing your ABS. Under the sticky stack of car parking tickets?

Or, maybe, it is the list stuck under the magnet on the fridge beneath the pizza delivery number and the invitation to a swimming party. Excuse me while I go off at a tangent here, just because I can . Those invites often say things like ‘Adults are welcome'.….welcome to do what exactly? To turn an interesting shade of pale blue and stand around catching veroucas’ in last year's all too snug swimsuit, trying not to look at cleavage or cesarean scars while you  suck it in to the point of hyperventilation. Mental note to self. Book tanning session at gym before aforesaid party. Membership should be used for something. Better put it on the to-do list.

There must be some better way of organising our lives. If we can put man on the Moon and crash a beagle into Mars surely we can have bash at some personal organisation?

There is my problem though. Frankly, I’ve got no tips to offer personally. I could try to delude myself that I am some sort of guru or practitioner in the art of time management. But numerous editors and colleagues will gleefully attest to by deficiencies in this area. Frankly, and I can say this from behind the sofa of anxiety attacks, that finding this article on my to-do list was a bit of a surprise and completing it an almost herculaneum task. Whenever, by some chance of fate, I do actually remember what the knot in my hanky is actually tied to remind me to do, I have to lie down in a dark room with a wet towel on my head to recover from the shock.

But, I know a man, or in this case a women, (why isn’t that so surprising?) who really knows about this stuff. She is one of those adorable American woman who can run a law case in three cities, solve a murder, referee her kid's softball game and figure out how to print out her spreadsheets so that they fit on just one piece of paper and maintain readability without optical aids, all on the same day…. And then, to add insult to injury, she even has the time to share with you, on her life-coaching blog site, her daily dose of assertiveness training and motivational adrenalin while casually throwing in the fact that she has today, a well as qualifying as an airline pilot, won the high school moms home baked cookies competition. She is Oprah on speed…

So I asked Melissa.

Melissa’s number one tip is to actually use paper, don’t make digital to do lists on your computer or electronic devices. Now before I get the tree conservationists rounding on me, and rightly so, I probably will need to remind the readers that even though they, and they know who I am talking about, will probably input all the relevant information into the ether of their hard disk, more likely than not they will probably only print this list out anyway. This will take up three lines on a piece of A4 paper, in the corner, fold it in half and then they will stick it in their filofax or under a pile of papers and lose it. The paperless office is just a mirage. An interesting side note here. Just read a pamphlet on the paperless office. Did the irony get lost somewhere?.

The advantage of using paper is that you may also use both sides, which will probably be really useful as you have run out paper anyway as you didn’t put ‘getting more printer paper’ on your to-do list. The technophiliacs amongst us, may well be using a spreadsheet to help you with managing this list. Now this is fine but, if this is the case, my advice to you is that you and your Excel should really be getting out more often. I used to work at a company (in fact to be honest most of them) where Excel prowess was seen as some sort of light sabre for the Jedi management classes, where management peer respect was judged by your manipulative skills of spreadsheet dynamics. It was not uncommon to see a 'droop' (my collective noun) of managers peering intently over a screen of grids with numbers in hushed conversations about what the benefits of a ‘pivot table’ in this application could be. (See, I know the jargon at least)

That’s another story, for another time. The point I think she is making here is that paper is so err …substantial. There is something oddly alluring in experiencing the pleasure of scribbling in the margin and that thoroughly satisfying feeling you get when crossing something off the list. It is the same feeling you get when watching the Sunday afternoon films after your mum’s Sunday dinner and the dishwasher is on it's cycle. I know it's pathetic, but these are small battles won.

Somehow, if it is on paper, you feel you own it, it's personal. Digital is antiseptic. Not quite there. Maybe it is one of these left side, right side brain things, a psychologist somewhere will undoubtedly have a word for it. It's like your pump bag at school; it may be embarrassing to own up that it is yours, but it belongs to you and if anyone nicks it you will cry. If you ‘own’ it, you are more likely to take an interest in it and actually do something about it.

M’s next world shattering point knocked me bandy. To be honest she was on a roll and there were several she mentioned actually but I want to build up the excitement. She asked me to ask myself, or indeed you, this question. Should the item even be on your to do list? Does it actually need to be done? What would happen if you didn’t do it? Would the sky fall on your head? Should somebody else be doing it? If not, why not?

I felt a wave of feng shui flow through my nether regions. Here was a new personal mantra. I was aligned! And then she gave me a new chant. 'Only ever put three things on your to do list'. Wow there, mister! Three? Really? But, she added, keep two lists - I knew there was a catch.

Apparently you have to have two lists, one in the back of your filonotethingybook, and one in the front. You move things to the front only when they have to be done. Now this is radical stuff but it actually makes sense. I can cope with about three things at a time, anymore and I get sidetracked and end up not finishing anything. I can hear the sound of heads being slapped across the Kingdom. There is nothing common about common sense is there? We just need to be reminded about it once in while. Pity it has to be by an American.

My friend also told me to tell you that if you do something for 21 days you will develop the action into a habit. For most of us getting past 21 minutes is tough enough. There are so many more interesting things to distract us. Like the satellite remote control or putting the kettle on. Not necessarily to make a drink, just put it on and forget you have.

By now light bulbs were popping on in my head like a deserted fairground and a kid with a catapult and grudge but we haven’t finished yet.

Don’t open your e-mail box before you look at the to-do list. E-mail and to-do lists are non-compatible. Like olive oil and gravel. Didn’t Bill and his buddies realise this when they came up with Outlook. It has become some unwritten law, but one I’ve never actually seen it in any operations manual, that the reading and the replyment thereof of the new e-mails of the day shall take preference over all life processes in the Universe, even it is only from your mate discussing the lamentable merits of Leeds United FC’s 4:3:3 system. As soon as you hit your mail in-box your intentions to tackle your tasks, keenly honed on the commute to work, are gone like a leaf on the breeze. Take a deep breath and be brave! The World will not collapse into a black hole if you don’t look at your e-mails for ten minutes. Honest Injun!

Finally, two gems Melissa thought we should share in the spirit of sharing and caring as her 'Blogyourwaytolove' web site puts it.

Firstly, prioritise the list, even the three things you have on it. OK, so that is pretty obvious but some tasks are always much more important, relatively. An air traffic controller’s to do list for example, item 3. Must get the other plane to change altitude and course in the next er.. five seconds, has a smidgen more urgency than say putting together a budget for indoor plant decorations.

How to prioritise though? That’s easy. I knew this one myself. Number one priority every time, is the completion of task on the list that is going to make my boss look good? After that, really just take a pin.

Mel's last tip was how to deal with the big items that sometimes appear, hysterically, the week before you go on holiday. For example, the complete, new interactive catalogue for a brand new e-commerce site in fourteen languages that the MD wants to launch at the sales conference in two weeks. Piece of cake!!!

Before we go into M’s solution to this all to often problem, when a task is just so big it won't fit on the plate, I just wanted to flag up this Alert! More consultspeak!! 


You may well have been wooed with the idea that you ‘should break these big projects into smaller projects'; that you really can ‘eat an elephant, if you do it one piece at a time’ or that ‘epic journeys start with one step’. OK, that’s fine, I get that. The fact remains that you will still have to eat some pretty unsavoury bits of an elephant that frankly make the bush-tucker trials look like a picnic. (Which, agreed, to some extent it is). So, and I agree with Melissa here, you should be thinking of ways to make the unsavoury bits more user friendly. Maybe share that task with a friend or colleague. Or better still, delegate. PTB to you and me.

The 'Pass-the-Buck' technique only works, of course, if there is actually somebody to delegate to. You may well be looking down from your heady heights at a responsibility vacuum. The clue for you here that this strategy won’t work for you is when you realise that you don’t actually have to appraise anybody yourself.

Or, you could try to do it in a different way, in another environment. Like brainstorming at Starbucks and wash it down with a Caramel Machiatto to get rid of the taste.

Speaking of which, that reminds me, I notice that beverage replenishment is fast approaching on my mental to do list. Now if I could only find my filofax, make sure my MacBook is charged up and my smart phone is synced I’ll be in complete control of my appointments, contacts and damned list, and able to work on the run. I’ll be off then but before I do I will leave you to ponder this.

In the words of Melissa. ‘The knot in the hanky of life is there to simply to remind you. It won’t do it for you. Getting your thumb from out of your arse will always help’. Thanks Melissa. Hold on a sec, was she talking about me? Must add writing a to-do list on to my to-do list.