Blog Posts - A Portfolio Life

A Portfolio Life

Like a Virgin Train?

21/12/2014

I never travel first class on trains. Once, maybe twice, my entire life. I'm too class conscious. Oh, and not rich enough. Except the other week, planning a train back from London for me and Anne I noticed that the super special advance tickets were something like £16 each for standard and £26 for first class. Normally I would immediately put that £20 saving towards drink or dim sum or doughnuts or something, but it was Christmas and I thought – oh surprise Anne – a nice treat as we wend our weary way home.

The train was part of the new Virgin direct service to Shrewsbury, not that we knew that when we booked it, only heading as far as Birmingham. I'll overlook that Virgin might have suggested this would have been a better journey than the one I had planned but, hey, I'm in the mood to be generous. Which I wasn't when we boarded the train at Euston. We found our reserved seats in Coach D, except Coach D was quite definitely second class. We were not alone. Half the carriage had similarly upgraded to nothing. The other half was fighting hand to hand over the seats in Coach E, the only bona fide first class carriage.

Back in Coach D, the passive-aggressive sweat of Middle England was overwhelming the carriage. Those with second class tickets were utterly bemused. By Watford there was an undeniable whiff of a Blitz spirit brewing as the people opposite us ordered their free orange juice nevertheless. Via tannoy we were told to put our first class tickets on the table in front of us to claim our complimentary microwaved cardboard snack. “Oh no this is just embarrassing now” someone said, a little too loudly. “Let's have an outbreak of class warfare in Coach D”. Then I realised that was me. And it was definitely getting a bit confusing. One of the people in our second-class, first-class coach had paid the full walk-up standard fare. It was more than we'd paid for two first class tickets.

Being good Guardian readers we finagled free orange juices for the woman and her two kids squished into the seats next to us, a closeness that had replaced our pre-booked single seat luxury. As our reward the boy sat on the mother's lap and poked me in the face no more than seven times between Watford and Coventry, entirely unadmonished. Frankly, this is exactly why we chose not to sit with the proletariat in the first place.

Virgin have considered my complaint and offered me a free first class return sometime in the next six months. Just me, mind. I'm not sure what Anne did to upset them.

(Image Omnibus Life in London - William Maw Egley 1859)

Who's Your Team?

16/12/2014

I ran a load of courses this year covering my own take on what people management is all about. They were very well received. (There's a lot to be said for occasionally stripping things right back to first principles – especially when, as I suspect, most people have never actually been shown the first priniciples.) Very well received, despite me breaking nearly every rule of training. In essence, it was a stand-up routine by a fat bloke with a flip-chart.

And I'm in the sort of place where I'm pretty relaxed about making the sort of mistakes that are the stuff of amateur dramatics and village halls. When I was young and oh so keen to make an impression these would have thrown me off kilter, would have made me try too hard, would have hurt. Now, not so much. I enjoy them. In particular I enjoyed the question “Who's your team?”

At the start of the course I ask the group to write down the answers to four key questions. At pressure points in the training I return to these questions, get their answers and weave the ensuing learning points seamlessly and powerfully into the day. That's the idea anyway. But the first time I ran the course I asked the question wrong. Instead of what I meant to say, I asked “who's your team?” which won't win any awards for clarity.

But the answers were great. Some were obvious, some were where I was leading them, but some were surreal, some were joyous and some were bonkers. So on each course thereafter I continued to phrase the question this way. I won't tell you what the real question should be, nor what the answer should be. You have to pay me for that. What I will say is that my own answer has proven ridiculously powerful at all levels from team leader to board level.

But that's not really my point here. I'm not trying to big myself up. I'm just suggesting it as a question for any trainer/coach/facilitator/manager out there. Try asking it. See what happens...

Aldi Wines

15/11/2014

So, purely for the benefit of my friends, I have spent the last couple of weeks road-testing the entire Aldi wine range. Well, I say the entire range, but I haven't bothered with the posh stuff they're making a big hullabaloo about in their attempt to crack their last remaining supermarket demographic – Anne and Waitrose. Oh, and I haven't bought anything from the cardboard boxes on the floor that seem to cost under £3 a bottle, which after taxes etc mean they contain exactly threepence worth of wine. See, my days of snorting rough-cut cider are behind me at last – how I've grown.

Now, people who should know better talk about the 10,000 hour rule to mastery. Well me, I've drunk at least 10,000 bottles of cheap supermarket plonk so, trust me, this is something I know about. And here is your cut out and keep guide to the best five bottles of wine at Aldi for under a fiver. Or, how I like to think about it, a fucking fiver for fuck's sake!

Chilean Pinot Noir £4.99. This is rather hilariously called “Reserve”. When I'd bet odds-on that it's actually a bottle of Cono Sur pinot noir which you can buy elsewhere in a nicely branded bottle for £6.99. Which always seemed like a fair price. At £4.99 it's special supermarket deal every day of the year.

But the thing is, their “Unreserve” French pinot noir is actually a bit better and 60 fucking pence cheaper. But, hang on, you don't need to scrimp and save to treat yourself to that once a week when they have a secret weapon. No, not their Bordeaux Superieur, which frankly isn't, but their Cotes De Rhone at £3.89, which is 10p cheaper than it used to be down Peckham Sainsburys in 1984, and which is really, totally, perfectly drinkable. Like all good house reds - from Chinatown to your local curry house - it's brilliant with spice and fat and garlic, and it's perfectly possible to polish off a couple of bottles during one episode of Strictly Come Dancing.

Now, a little something for the ladies. Sadly, their sherry range only extends to supremely sticky, so you'll have to slum it down in the chardonnays. The Australian one is serviceable, Anne is face down in one as I write but, again, at current exchange rates it was almost certainly made, without any contact with grapes, in a stainless steel vat the size of New South Wales. Their French version is also okay but why go for that at a heady £4.99 when you can go Hungarian, which is where anyone with £3.49 to spare is heading these days. Budavar, Budavar, chants the checkout girl.

My first ever gig at the Edinburgh Fringe...

21/8/2014

Last night Edinburgh and I were not getting on. Which isn't unusual. I like it and loathe it in the same way I do Bath. The first three people I spoke to were incredibly rude considering their jobs in retail and hospitality, and it came as a shock after the friendliness of Sunderland and Swansea on similar gigs in recent weeks. My mood wasn't helped by a knock-on effect of the Fringe - I was staying in a hotel Tripadvisor had overrated as 144th out of 147 in Edinburgh, and for a mere £124 I had apparently reserved the toilet suite. Oh, and, yes, it was raining. Life on the road, folks, life on the road.

I wandered off to find my venue for tomorrow's gig, for I am a pro and have never played the festival before, but rain drove me to seek cover in what looked like an ersatz proto-chain French brasserie instead. My heart did not soar like an eagle but, for once, luck smiled. For it turned out to be a near authentic bistro with a Scottish twist. Homemade black pudding with raisin and apple compote, rabbit in mustard sauce and a superb house red. I was warming-up.

Replete, I wandered off down George Street towards my compact and bijou venue on the second floor of a bank, feeling much more confident that my eight hour, one-man-and-his flipchart-routine on how to be a good manager is destined to win the Perrier it so deserves...

My Definitive Guide to the Best Place to Work...

15/7/2014

I'm a sucker for those lists of best or worst places to live, or best schools or universities, or holiday destinations, whatever. Regardless of how ridiculous and meaningless the whole process is, I still can't help reading the list and then shouting out something like “Horsham, you're fucking kidding, right?”

Not to be outdone, I've just wasted half an hour compiling my own list of the places where I've run training courses or have otherwise worked. As with the above lists, this is based on little more than sweeping generalisations based on spurious criteria, dressed up in pseudo science and presented to you as the definitive guide to the best place to work. Indeed, based on such rigorous evidence I fully expect Michael Gove would have turned some of these into Academies.

And here it is in all its glory:

London 87
Bristol 82
Oxford 77
West Malling 72
Exeter 70
Croydon 64
Cardiff 62
West Bromwich 61
Birmingham 60
Swindon 59
Bromsgrove 58
Edinburgh 57
Altrincham 56
York 55
Liverpool 54
Redditch 53
Peterborough 52
Basingstoke 51
Reading 51
Swansea 51
Cheadle Hulme 50
Whyteleafe 49
Glasgow 49
Bradford 48
Leamington Spa 47
Chatham 46
Leeds 45
Manchester 44
Stockport 39
Romford 33

I'm off to add Sunderland this week...

Dear Call Centre, I just want someone to listen to me...

5/6/2014

I hate dealing with big businesses. My past experiences are so bad that when I encounter anything that requires me to talk to a call centre a little part of me dies inside. When our home flooded in 2007 we moved house four times in under a year and each time I ended up in tears on the phone at some time. And yes, it was mainly you, BT Broadband.

- The Operations part of big businesses worships efficiency. It's not entirley their fault. They are always under the cosh to rationalise and only ever seen as a cost to the business.

- Bureaucracy worships process. Customers aren't people. They are square pegs, to be suffered and counted and categorised and treated with utter contempt.

- Call centres worship scripts. They make wage slaves move to the beat of the drums of efficiency and process, regardless of outcome.

Currently I am having to set up a new business bank account for reasons too dull to share, but also to do with the need to meet someone else's requirements for efficiency and process. And you'd imagine opening a business bank account would be simple. A new customer. Surely, the holy grail of today's world. You'd think banks would be falling over themselves. Oh Lord, you'd be wrong. So wrong. It's probably easier to score Class A drugs. Or to get a gun and strike down upon thee with great vengeance and furious anger.

So, this week, unfortunately being a committed pacifist unable to take a toke of skunk without passing out behind the sofa in a pool of my own vomit, I shall mostly be naming and shaming those banks who have made me want to scoop my eyeballs out with a spoon and post them off as proof of my identity.

The Power of Stationery

10/4/2014

All trainers know the importance of stationery. Want a course to go well? Worry less about the content and delivery and far more about what folders and pads and trinkets you can buy cheaply from Rymans. And, somewhat bizarrely, in my experience the more senior the trainees the more this holds true. I've seen a FTSE 100 Director hug a free A4 pocket file with dividers to his chest like it was a long-lost love, and a public sector Chief Executive finger her free Moleskine notebook like she was stroking her wookie.

Tuesday, I spent the day with two colleagues designing product vaguely based on happiness at work. John, as the host and driver of the project, presented us at breakfast with a table of Staples' goodies. And we were off and running. In the next 12 hours we opened every single item, whether we used it or not. Giant post-it notes; quarter size flip-chart pads; pens of all varieties; glue and sticky animals; fluorescent stars, notepads Maddie and I refused to use and immediately put in our bags for later. If John was after our approval and engagement he could hardly have played it better.

Come mid-afternoon and I was expounding on my theory of people management, sticking as many gizmos as I could onto the window, only to notice Maddie was more engaged making Postman Pat's black and white cat out of plasticine. She's never looked happier. Come 9pm, after a long day in the stationery cupboard, we stole as much as we could and promised John we thought it was a brilliant idea, with many legs, most of them made out of tinselled pipe cleaners, and we'd be sure to get back to him once we'd run out of blu-tac and glitter pens.

Notes on Bankers (6) - there's no collective noun

21/3/2014

I'll leave others to come up with a collective noun for bankers. And will laugh along with the best of their efforts.

But I'll also feel sorry for all those people tarnished with the brush, when all they are doing is working on the front line trying to give the best service they can. Here's an excerpt from The Northern Line to Shropshire that explains what I mean:

Barclays Shifnal

Ever since we moved to Shifnal we've been impressed by the Barclays Bank in the middle of town. It has an old-fashioned feel to it. You know, one where you talk to a real person. And they actually do what you want.

Unlike in Tooting, there isn't someone controlling the queue, saying why don't you try our fantastic self-service option, or suggesting you bank on-line, or otherwise advertising themselves out of a job. Just people waiting, chatting. I watched one of the cashiers, Natalie. She greeted her last six customers by name before they'd even reached the counter, saying something like: “Hallo Mr Twynam, I haven't seen you in a while”. There was a slight problem so she said she'd call me when it was sorted, and an hour later she did.

No doubt by the time this book is published the bank will have closed down.

Water, water everywhere

10/2/2014

We know Mary Dhonau of the National Flood Forum. Well, that's not strictly true. She came for dinner once in 2008ish. She was going out with Anne's brother, presumably before she realised his dress sense was holding her career back. I hope I convey my feelings when I say I found her forthright and intelligent.

Anyway, her and my brother-in-law went their separate ways and we never saw her again. Except on television, a lot. And so it was that our own experience as flood victims and “Mary Dhonau” became conflated in our heads. Comes the rain, and comes Mary. Local TV and the River Severn love her. For seven years Anne and I have had a running joke whenever the 6 o'clock news covers flooding. “Things are bad. The situation is grim. Mary Donhau will be on later, stood by a river, talking bollocks.”

And so it was. Except tonight. Except tonight Mary took an ox-bow loop away from her usual platitudes about Blitz-style stoicism and the need to do something. Instead she made an impassioned plea to stop excoriating the Environment Agency and Chris Smith and to recognise what an amazing job they were doing in the most difficult of circumstances. Shamelessly political and wavering of voice, in an anorak with the hood up. Good game, very well played.

Training Masterclass (1) - Pacing

7/2/2014

Inexperienced trainers and presenters always make the same mistake in how they judge their audience. They are quite naturally drawn to those people looking at them encouragingly - smiling and nodding - whilst feeling less positively about those sitting there with arms folded, or doodling, or otherwise seemingly not enjoying themselves.

It's an important lesson to get across that the actual engagement of the audience often has little to do with the non verbal feedback each individual is giving you. Some people naturally “pace” you and others naturally don't. I was waxing lyrical about this very subject once upon a time in a training session, enjoying the sound of my own voice and the positive feedback I was receiving from a couple of attractive young ladies to my right, when the rest of the delegates drew my attention to the person right in front of me. A heavily pregnant woman, who had just fainted...