Monthly Archives: April 2016

Diving Deep into Working Hours

29 Friday Apr 2016

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scorpene-c-dcns-slideshowWith a Government sliding in the polls based on the perception that they are doing nothing, there have been a slew of announcements this week. One that particularly took my eye was the awarding of the building of 12 new submarines for Australia to the French Government owned DCNS at an estimated cost of $50bn. They are going to be built with Australian steel, Australian jobs and most importantly by Australian workers.

Without revealing my sources I have come across a schematic of the new submarine. Probably highly classified I feel justified in leaking it (should we talk about leaking when referring to a sub?).

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The sharp of eye among you will spot the obvious and reductionist cultural stereotyping that I have humorously deployed (ok I’m trying to get a few defence terms in here and there). While doctoring the drawing I recalled my time at Business School in the US. We were given a couple of lectures by a visiting professor from the French business school IAE, Pierre Casse. Casse is now Dean Emeritus at the Berlin School of Creative Leadership so he is still regarded as a thought leader in the area of cultural differences. His lecture though went down like a lead weight. At the coffee break between his two sessions the overwhelming consensus was ‘how dare this upstart Frenchman (actually he’s Belgium) come over here and tell us how we should conduct our lives, especially given the Europeans lazy attitude to work.’ By the end of the second lecture most of us had ‘got it.’

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Casse was telling us that we need to learn from the European’s attitude to their work which embraces family and leisure time in a much more conscious way. This is often characterised by the European penchant for dining and enjoying good food and wine. Too often, it would appear, our own attitude to food is to refuel to get ourselves back to work, or to get pissed as quick as we can so we can enjoy our night out. Some things the Europeans just get. It’s been too easy to look down our nose at the flailing Greek economy or the amateurish Belgium counter-terrorism.

The implication, of course, of work-life balance is that there is always a trade-off. Sure the Europeans can enjoy their short work weeks and long holidays but that means they are not very productive and what they produce is low spec anyway – their scientists are too busy enjoying the bon vivant of Parisian bars.

So it is a bit of a shock for some to discover that the French won the submarine design and build bid out-gunning the hard-working Japanese and more industrious Germans. Even harder to swallow must be the fact that the French – so preoccupied in their endeavours to get a work-life balance – can build the submarine cheaper and in less time than our own smart, hard-working South Australians much vaunted in the country for their industrial prowess. What’s more DCNS is some lazy old government-owned enterprise. Sacré bleu!

I can’t recommend highly enough Callahan and Kelley’s book Final Gifts: Understanding the Special Awareness, Needs and Communications of the Dying. Far from depressing it is an uplifting book with much wisdom to share. I cannot recall any mention within its 256 pages of a dying patient reflecting and regretting they didn’t spend more time at work. And yet we continue, in Australia, to work longer and harder. The technological aids that have enabled us to enjoy our leisure time e.g. an ipad to watch Netflix, simultaneously becomes a really easy interface device for typing out substantial emails or reports. We seem too willing or too pressured into the latter over the former.

Fortune magazine ranked 36 countries for average hours worked and Australia was 25th highest at 32 hours per week compared to France at 28.33. (This includes full-time and part-time workers). Suffice to say the laid-back Australian way of life does not prove factually correct when we analyse the hours we actually work. Herein lies the enigma though. With the French working on average fewer hours they appear to be able to put a high-tech submarine together quicker and cheaper than what we can.

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Perhaps then, and I’m speculating here, it comes down to how we spend our working hours rather than the hours made available to us to work. In a spooky quirk of circumstance here I turn to British naval historian C Northcote Parkinson to explain. In his infamous text Parkinson’s Law he espoused that work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion. Perhaps if we paid the workers in South Australia the same amount of money for building the submarines but gave them fewer hours to do so we could get our submarines quicker and as a result cheaper. Sounds illogical but I think management theory backs this suggestion.

Next time you are out at a French restaurant or quaffing a lovely Burgundy just reflect that the nation that spends so much of its time sitting in chic cafes watching the world pass by is the ultimate designer of our coastal defence system. I’ll drink to that!

Asleep at the Wheel with the Bard and the Bankers

21 Thursday Apr 2016

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I always thought writer’s block was an excuse for a lazy break in the Bahamas but now that I’m a ‘committed’ blogger I get it. It’s been two weeks and, guess what, I have a touch of writer’s block. It’s strange really given there is so much on. But perhaps that’s the problem? My mind has been flitting from one topic to another, it’s been hard this last couple of weeks to reflect and go a bit deeper. So, listening to my ‘go to’ broadcaster (Fran Kelly) in the car this morning on the way to work, I resolved to write about what is happening right now and see if firstly I can make any sense of it and, much more challenging, see if I can integrate this into a meaningful blog.

On the matter of integration I’ve just signed up for the Dan Siegel visit. He’s coming to Sydney to do a seminar on Optimal Leadership. Siegel is a Harvard trained UCLA paediatrician and psychiatrist who is one of the world’s foremost experts on mindfulness. His Mindsight Institute focuses on, guess what, integration, which he describes as acknowledging the differences and celebrating the linkages. A bit like my blogs! Given we have just had a double dissolution trigger in the Australian Parliament this week, let’s hope the 2016 Australian Federal election campaign embraces some of Siegel’s principles and we can have a campaign unsullied by rancour that focusses on policy debate. Let’s acknowledge the differences and celebrate the linkages as a voting public.

For many, the thought of a long election is enough to send them to sleep. And it was on the matter of sleep this week that got me interested in the new Arianna Huffington book The Sleep Revolution. Huffington’s latest advice is to get more sleep. Wise words that are sometimes harder to achieve than we might think. I’m putting my sleep deprivation down to Netflix. I’m finding the urge to watch the next episode straight after the one I’ve just watched sometimes too much of a temptation. It’s like a bag full of lollies. It will still be there the next day but hey…just one more.

It’s the 400th anniversary of Shakespeare’s death this weekend. Many school students would list Shakespeare as their number one cure for insomnia but he has always been my ‘go to’ bloke. In my early career I went for a job interview and midstream one of the panellists interrupted everyone else and asked me to tell them a joke. I was so focussed on the interview questions and process  I couldn’t disengage my brain to bring a joke forward; needless to say I didn’t get the job. Henceforth I have always had a joke up my sleeve. It goes thus:

‘Shakespeare walks into a pub totally inebriated (I may occasionally say ‘pissed’ if I get the feel that the panel is warming to me and wants a bit of moxie) and the landlord shouts at him ‘you’re bard’.

Silly, sure, but it is very fit for purpose. It is rapid fire so sounds like you are quick on your feet, everyone gets it, it’s totally inoffensive and it gives a suggestion that you can be intellectually highbrow without the associated snobbery.

As it happens I studied Shakespeare all my way through university so am familiar with quite a few of his plays including many of the seldom studied ones e.g. Troilus and Cressida and Coriolanus. My all-time favourite though, is the lesser known Timon of Athens. A short synopsis is warranted:

Timon, a friendly and generous Athenian nobleman, has many friends because of his generosity, often lending money to his friends with no expectation placed on them to pay it back. He loves to spend money and holds frequent parties. A day comes, however, when he falls into debt and his many creditors put pressure on him to pay them what he owes. His steward, Flavius, tells him that he’s completely out of money. Timon sends servants to his friends to ask whether they can lend him the money he needs but they are met with excuses. Timon is disappointed and angered. He invites all his friends to a final feast where he presents them with only warm water. He makes a speech denouncing them, and also harangues them with a bitter tirade against mankind generally.

My favourite line of Shakespeare’s is what Timon says to his onetime friends as they gather at the tables to gorge themselves on his supposed hospitality. They lift their individual cloches at the same time and the hot water steams in their face. He shouts the unforgettable line:

‘Uncover you dogs and lap.’

The Banking industry is very much in the news at the moment. Calls for a Royal Commission by the Labor (sic) opposition have so far fallen on deaf ears. Banks are interesting organisations. I’ve had friends who have worked in them and they have a sort of ‘cultish’ feel. It used to be true at least that banking staff only really socialised with banking staff. You only got your friends back when they left that industry. Scientology – not quite – but on that spectrum for sure. An analogue might be the police socialising with other police. Only other workers in the same industry can understand the issues is the suggestion. I get it with the Police having to deal with the horrors that often make up that job but the horrors of banking …really?

But think again – there have been so many horror stories lately perhaps the bank staff are right. Only other banking staff can ever understand the duplicity/two-facedness, the wild nights out, the crazy remuneration, the adrenaline rush, the desperate desire to get your business and the immoral speed at which they then cut you off. I don’t hate the banks. At times I despise them for some of the things they do. One of my biggest bugbears is the shameful advertising that they do. They are obsessed with presenting this friendly face to woo you as a customer but really if you don’t keep up the repayments they are dispassionate to the point of cold-blooded ruthlessness. Ask my mate recently made bankrupt in New Zealand by one of the big four Australian banks. He’s in commercial leasing like me and when he got into a spot of cash-flow difficulty the banks called in his loan and did a fire sale on his property. A property valued by a professional valuer at $1.7m was sold in rapid time for $500k.

It can only be rationalised as a decision that totally takes the humanity out of the equation and looks purely in dollar terms. An economic rationalist model stretched to its breaking point. I still am no supporter of a Royal Commission into the banks though. I’d rather load up Google’s AlphaGo (the one that beat the Korean Master at the almost impenetrable game of Go) super computer with some block-chain rules, feed the banking data in and just email out the results to the banking executives, which may or may not contain their ‘pink slips’ (aka P45s, separation certificates). After all, the banking sector is leading the way on automation and taking humans out of the loop. What goes around…..

My final reflection is on innovation, which will be a theme for future blogs as well. In Queensland this week we have outlawed Uber and other ride share companies. Those caught driving Uber cars face substantial fines. As many are migrants and students looking to make some extra bucks, then this will be a big disincentive for them to keep driving. I can’t square the notion of disruption and innovation, which is being encouraged at the Federal level, with State protectionism. Some of the argument is that ridesharing is an unregulated service. Fact is I can’t think of anything better regulated than Uber, perhaps other than eBay or AirBnB. Regulation comes through the rating of the service which is where the app and its disruption comes into play. The ability of me to rate my Uber driver, which I always do, means that any misbehaviour has a direct hip-pocket consequence for him or her.

Our State regulated Taxi monopolies on the other hand are apparently stringently regulated. My daughter recounted stories to me of her and her friends being not infrequently ‘propositioned’ by their regulated taxi drivers that there might be other ways of paying their taxi fare that did not involve a financial transaction. Do this on Uber and you lose your rides. In fact, I heard this week that the situation has got so bad that a company in the US called Chariot for Women is starting a ride service by women for women, primarily to deal with this issue. We simply have to think smarter to address disruption. Outlawing it strikes me as counter-productive and ultimately futile. We all know that in the long-term the collaboration (share) economy is here to stay; our asset hungry acquisitive Baby-boomer lifestyles have seen to that.

The other interesting thing that happened this week at work was some internet surfing that took me to Jessica Hische’s website. OK you might think what has this got to do with work, but it so happens Hische, who is a letterer, coined the phrase ‘procrastiworking’. It’s something I do most days between 3.30 and 4.30pm when my blood sugars are low. What is drawing me to street artists and people like Hische is that they seem to embrace the paradox between being radical individuals raging against the machine and great collaborators. A lot, not all, are young but they are all bloody talented. How, I ponder, do they manage to be so ‘anti’ but so ‘together’? So creative but so organised? I have a feeling if we are to unlock the huge potential in Australia and create true innovation we need to understand what makes individuals and teams like D-Face, Hische, Smits Lister and their cohorts tick.

Therein lies a rich seam of knowledge that can reap reward. If we fail, we may well find ourselves asleep at the wheel of a downward spiralling economy. No-one wants this except possibly Adrianna Huffington….the sleep bit I mean!

 

Changing Culture to Small is Beautiful

08 Friday Apr 2016

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In Australia we do appear obsessed with size. Big is beautiful. We celebrate tall people, we talk about which State is biggest. We celebrate the big hits between big men in the State of Origin and we often hear people say how many times the UK could fit within Australia; sometimes said with an earnestness as though it was a likely proposition. It’s a cultural thing. Depending on what your yardstick is for measurement, we are in fact a very large country as land mass goes. By population we are of medium size at around 23 million. Pakistan for example has 183 million, Indonesia 254 million and Saudi Arabia 30 million. All bigger – the relevance of which will hopefully be apparent later.

I’ve just got back from a week in New Zealand. It was quite enlightening. Way down there close to the Arctic it’s got no right to be as successful, culturally and ethnically diverse and modern as it is. Of course I’m extrapolating my experience from a trip to Wellington, the wind beaten capital of the shaky isles as they are known because of the prevalence of earthquakes. But I’m probably OK in doing so. What characterises kiwis (aside from their penchant for gathering on the Gold Coast) is their get up and go attitude. They call it the ‘number eight fencing wire attitude’ which is an oblique reference to their ability to fashion pretty much anything from anything. Sitting in a trendy coffee shop on Cuba Mall I mused that what stands out with the kiwis is they are really good at marketing.

I noted that Wellington uses the three word strapline ‘absolutely positively Wellington’ to promote itself. Furthermore, though, it has embraced its lack of stature. It’s only New Zealand’s third largest city and can never compete with the sprawling metropolis that is Auckland. Auckland is big and wants to play in the big league. Wellington embraces its diminutive size and markets this. It’s not something we really understand in Queensland where I live. We’re bigger than Texas and proud of it. As we know when size is an issue you are constantly comparing sizes and celebrating when you are bigger. No-one brings a measuring tape out to prove assertions made about being smaller.

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In 2011 Lonely Planet named it the 4th best city in the world to visit. They described it as ‘This little capital…’ and so the embrace of its slight stature cleverly started. It was subsequently voted the best small capital in the world. Small sounds ‘cool’ as in groovy, welcoming, warm and of a human scale. The opposite end of the spectrum – best big city in the world – just sounds cold, alienating and exhausting.  Walking on the trendy waterfront I noticed the cruise ship terminal proudly describing itself as the ‘Best Little Cruise Ship Terminal in the World.’ Wow that’s clever. To combat that you pretty much have to say ‘our’s is smaller.’ To be fair it was small. Pointing to its obvious lack of stature takes away any implied criticism about size and gets the cruise line passengers to think about the building in another way.

And that’s where my ‘aha’ moment kicked-in. Here at the Construction Training Centre (CTC) we have at times been fixated on size. I admit to having Googled other training centres in construction in Australia to determine whether we are bigger. At 12.2 hectares we are just not that big and in the past we have tried to ‘big-up’ our reasonably modest estate. That made me think about the possibility of inverting that and describing our self as a small Precinct; or as one of our Team commented when I floated the idea – niche. To say we are the best construction training Precinct in Australia sounds like bragging. To say we are the best small niche training centre in Australia feels like our bragging is tempered with some humility. It’s much more authentic. We do want to be the best we just don’t need to be the biggest. This mindset is now percolating through our Team. It will be interesting to see where it takes us. It’s about amending our culture to embrace the true nature of what we are in terms of what we do, why we do it and our geographic and spatial realities. Once again it’s about being authentic doing the things we are good at well and not trying to be what we are not. After all culture is best described as ‘the way we do things around here.’

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Discussions around culture are very timely at the moment in Australia especially in the corporate sector and specifically banking. ASIC Chair Greg Medcraft suggested that Directors be held responsible and accountable for the culture of their banks. There’s an expression in management, popularised by JFK that ‘success has many fathers but failure is an orphan’. We do see Directors taking credit for success but when the remuneration policies agreed by them create a culture of greedy risk-taking they appear somewhat dumbfounded and admit to not knowing. In fact I’d like to challenge the basic premise that Directors actually do set culture. The setting of culture like setting of strategy is the Holy Grail in management. It’s like being good in bed and a good judge of character. Very few admit to short-comings in either area! So to suggest that in fact Directors don’t set the tone or culture is a bit of a come down for those at the very top of our Corporate world. I actually think Directors should monitor culture but not set it. Let’s be honest, when we look at Corporate Australia we are in pretty rarefied air. Hard at times to come down to Base Camp as you traverse from lofty peak to lofty peak.

I manage a small investment portfolio at work (there was a day when I described it as ‘substantial’!) and as a result pay pretty close attention to who are setting strategy for the companies we invest in. I’m disappointed time and again to find what I call ‘over-boarding’ where Chairs and Directors of our large ASX listed companies have a number of Boards that they concurrently serve on. They are nearly always listed in the Director profiles and appear to be something of a badge of honour. I read such lists with concern. If a Director has more than two Boards (and the majority do) then I do not believe they are capable of exercising the roles they are required to play under the Corporations Act 2011 and the ASX Governance Rules to any satisfactory level – certainly not to mine. It expands the boundary of common sense that these very busy individuals can set the tone and culture of an organisation when they spend so little time in it. ASX Governance Rules recommend independent Directors and therefore they are unlikely to have much skin in the game. No skin no passion; no passion begets flitting in and out. Duties elsewhere dictate this anyway.

Culture embodies the overall collective of the way people think, their behaviours and their commitment. To get a successful culture you must embrace the whole and just not think about the head. If Banks are to get their culture right Directors need to be able to read the cultural temperature gauge but not set the ambient temperature level. When it’s not right the CEO and Executive Team should be held to account. If Directors can’t read and amend culture through their Executive team, then it’s time the Directors stand aside.

Culture of course has another meaning. It is about the understanding of the world in which we live and the wonderful diversity this brings to the workplace especially in a country such as ours where we celebrate our cultural diversity. This week we were approached by one of our Tenant’s staff for access to the First Aid/Breast Feeding Room to pray. This again provided time for reflection. While we are very female and wholehearted-friendly on the Precinct I wondered just how culturally accommodating we are. In a time of increasing pressure on our Muslim communities because of terrorism acted out in the name of fanaticism and not religion I pondered what we were doing to provide safe prayer facilities for our Muslim customers. A quick meeting with the person concerned has us now in advanced stages of installing a prayer room. Not as easy as it seems. Sure it’s easy to buy a prayer mat, Quran and put up a sign showing the direction of the Qibla. More difficult is dealing with the uncertainty amongst team members and tenants who do not have the level of cultural quotient that would otherwise allay their fears. What is important about the introduction of, on the face of it, a very small room is the fact that team members can raise concerns in a way that supports their concerns but also enables them to gain additional information that will make the concept be seen for what it is; an endeavour to continue to provide value adds to our tenants and their staff.

Being aware of culture, be it organisational or geo-political is an important aspect for a well-rounded manager. Managing this to provide business outcomes is a very important and over-looked feature. I think our culture is good at work but we can always improve. Culture is not static it changes from week to week sometimes. It changes when team members leave and new ones come in. Everyone leaves a mark. If they didn’t they would just be robots. I’d like to think that our new way of considering ourselves, as small, will be a breath of fresh air. Of course when put in the context of my recent trip to Wellington that has a whole other connotation!