Nicholas Bate

Why We Love The Beatles: 20 of 100

Being situated on the western shore of San Francisco Bay, those who attended games at Candlestick Park were used to strong winds causing odd playing conditions.
At Candlestick on Monday 19th August 1966 a different chill wind was gathering: the realisation that the cult that had become know as Beatlemania was about to be played out. This was going to become the last full commercial concert by The Beatles. Ever. Period. I know: I missed it, too.
The lads were both at the top of their game and losing it rapidly. They’d been doing it for close to a decade. Played nearly one and a half thousand live shows. Answered millions of stupid journalist questions. Run from hotels to cars to concert stages. From stages to cars to planes to trains. Hidden in hotels for days on end.
The concert? Oh-the concert was a fantastic experience (how could it be anything else?) but an appalling performance: thirty-three minutes of: Rock And Roll Music, She's A Woman, If I Needed Someone, Day Tripper, Baby's In Black, I Feel Fine, Yesterday, I Wanna Be Your Man, Nowhere Man, Paperback Writer, and Long Tall Sally. Not that you could hear a note or a lyric. But you know that: it’s urban legend.
John was pissed off, Ringo was blasé, George needed a retreat. Paul knew there must be something better.
And there was. We hadn’t seen anything yet. The real legend was about to be built.
That's another reason we love The Beatles.

The A to Z of Things to Watch: H for Hope.

Bottom-line, I define great leadership as the provision of apparent sustainable hope. It's clear in Churchill, Ghandi and JFK. It explains how Hitler got as far as he did. It'll decide the current presidential election. It's given PM Brown of the UK a much-needed second wind.
And in very tough times it's what your people need from you:
HOPE: a belief that it's all going to be OK. You can get them out of this mess and restore their lives to some semblance of normality.
SUSTAINABLE: no quick blips, please. We want the real thing.
APPARENT: here's the catch. We won't know until you have been doing it for a while.
Here's hoping.

Power Question: 4

A powerful, focused question can get to the heart of the matter:
Here’s a great golden ratio: 8/8/8/. That’s 8h of work, 8h of play and 8h of sleep. Perfect. Mess with the heavenly ratio at your peril!
How are you doing?

Celeb Productivity: Richard Bandler

Tony Robbins wants you to walk across fire. I ask you: why walk across fire when you can simply walk around it?

Richard Bandler at seminar many years ago.

Power Questions 1-25: 3

A powerful, focused question can get to the heart of the matter:
Is how you spend your time absolutely, single-mindedly aligned to what you want to achieve?
So what adjustments need to be made?

TTD (Things To Do): To Get Some Goddam Thinking Time

1. Open schedule.
2. Create phantom event of 1.5h at regular intervals entitled: Brand Ochre Client Project Review.
3. Lock down event so only title can be viewed in schedule; no detail can be investigated.
4. When event occurs, pick up Moleskine and sharpened HB pencil.
5. Walk confidently to stairs and walk all eleven levels down to street level. Skip first Starbucks (they all congregate there). Find a quiet table in the next.
6. Get drink. Think.
7. Release your genius, again.
8. Return: take the lift back.
9. Repeat at regular intervals.

At Times, Life is Like...

...your physical desk-top. A total, chaotic, entropic system-defying sprawl. But it's in there somewhere.

Why We Love The Beatles 19 of 100

The Beatles never made it easy for their listeners and fans. That wasn’t their purpose in Life. They hadn’t identified a ‘target market’ which needed ‘a product’. True artists, they played what stimulated their brains, what arrived at their finger-tips , took them (and us) to places we’d never been before and what was sheer fun to do. Along the way they cajoled engineers, producers and whole orchestras to never accept ‘it ain’t possible’, to take risks and – for goodness sake – just lighten up, will ya? Just when we were getting used to enjoying their tales of endless love in tracks such as Love Me Do, we were taken on a roller-coaster ride of being amazed at epic tales in tracks such as Eleanor Rigby, caused to be curious of the social commentary in material such as She’s Leaving Home, encouraged to listen carefully to euphemistically challenging (for the time) material in Baby Drive My Car and spell-bound by tracks we weren’t sure what to make of such as Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds before being pulled into story within a story material such as Sergeant Pepper. And after the initial jolt of listening to the new album and wondering if they had gone too far this time, we – invariably - fell in love. With The Beatles. All Over Again. One More Time John, Paul, George and Ringo.
That’s another reason we love the Beatles.

Beat This Tough Recession Now 25

It seems as if it’s going to be a tough one. Get a plan and work the plan. Print and use the following as your basic work-list if you need a starting point. Add your own points. Circulate to the team. Insist on more action and less talk about the stock market, customers who have frozen budgets and how the local Starbucks is closing.
1. Set up an action team who meet every morning for 30 minutes prior to the working day to ask the question: what’s holding us back from best performance? List EVERY issue and give each an owner tasked to resolve it in 24h. I know: no more Mr Nice Guy.
2. Seek incremental improvement in everything you do. A 1% improvement here, multiplied by a 1% improvement there, multiplies up to deep, high pay-off improvements.
3. E.g. how can the sales team be coached to be at least 1% better at closing?
4. E.g. how can the payments team be encouraged to get money in at least 1% earlier than they currently do?
5. What does your analysis of ‘lost sales’ show? You don’t have one? Get one. Then take the biggest reason first and solve it. Then the next. Etc.
6. E.g. the biggest reason quoted for ‘lost sales’ is ‘price too high’. Mmm. Could be price is too high, could mean sales team are poor at handling price objection. Fix it. Quickly.
7. Work on how to increase the average value of the sale by 5% within 25 business days. Get creative. Check out Creativity101.
8. E.g. start charging realistically for your time.
9. How could you increase margin? What – if anything – in the portfolio is more price elastic i.e. the price can be put up without demand dropping? There MUST be something!
10. E.g. your cabling price per metre could be increased by 3%. Sure it isn’t much. But it is over time and over bigger projects. And it’s not a discretionary purchase.
11. All this attention on the here-and now is great. But are you making long-term progress, too? And what long-term thinking needs to be done?
12. When’s the next let’s go (not too) wild session? Gotta have some fun, you know. Fix a date. Let everyone know. Make sure it’s fully inclusive and not just free beer for the lads.
13. Is there anyone with whom you can partner to 'increase the pie' for both of you.
14. E.g. You sell water for coolers. They sell coffee for machines. Can you sell into each others customers? Sure you can.
15. Re-analyse what your potentials customer do, read and eat. What would be a simpler/budget way to speak to them? What about an advert in the flower bed at the junction to the industrial park where they all seem to be based? They don’t allow ads? They didn’t-you can surely overcome that objection!
16. Where are the biggest costs. What can be reduced? Or delayed?
17. E.g. get a handle on all the multiple often fuzzy costs e.g. expenses, stationery purchases.
18. What needs do you meet? How can you make that need more acute? Bigger? More urgent? Needed by more people? Anybody will buy anything as long as they have a big enough why.
19. Who’s your best salesperson? How much better are than your weakest? What do they do that makes them better? Transfer that skill or attitude across the rest of the team. Now.
20. Get a few good sales books. Ask the sales team to read handy tips at the sales meeting. Check out Beat the Recession and Instant MBA from me. Thanks so much to cool blogger Cultural Offering for a nice review of the latter.
21. Who buys from you? Which are your key accounts? How do you thank them? Do they know you love them dearly. It’s no good telling them when they leave you.
22. Drink more water. Take a 5 minute break every 45 minutes. Take a lunch break of 45 minutes.
23. Go home on time.
24. Thank people for doing a great job.
25. Keep in mind what is really important: don’t get trivia hypnosis.

Why We Love The Beatles 18 of 100

Rock 'n Roll. Serious rock 'n roll. The Beatles gave us plenty of it and they were good at it. Pick up iPod. Select Beatles, Track Revolution. Play loud. Now, don't you feel better? That distortion at the start certainly wakes you up (and concerned early purchasers that their personal 45RPM vinyl version had scratches on it). Revolution is one of the rarer Beatle songs where different versions are in clear public domain and don't need to be hunted down on bootleg or somehere on an Anthology disc. The lively, electric version most of us know is the B-side to the A-side of Hey Jude. There is a different version on the White Album. The Beatles were getting to a stage in their career where not all the loose ends were being tied up as had been in the 'micro-manged' early part of their career (sorry, John: we can't tell anyone you are married, just yet).
It's another reason we love The Beatles.