Nicholas Bate

A Mini-Retirement?

Top thinker Michael Wade who has a wonderful blog reminds me of the super-cool designer Stefan Stagmeister. I will leave Daniel Pink and Michael to tell their own tale in the link. Mine is that upon coming across Stefan's work and reading one or two of his inspiring books, I wrote to Stefan to complement him on his concepts and had a very thoughtful personal note in reply. More recently I wrote to Stefan again, this time to send him one or two things in which I thought he would be interested. Again I got a very personal note but this time from one of his team saying that Stefan couldn't reply in person as he was having a 'client-free year'. I love it.

The Seven Sales Power Questions

(Asked nicely of course)

1. How much money do you have? (Basic qualifying question)
2. Can you decide to buy? (Ditto)
3. What exactly do you want to achieve? (Needs analysis question)
4. What's the cost of NOT meeting that need mentioned in 3? (Pain question to create momentum)
5. When shall I ring you to review the proposal? (Early close question: check seriousness)
6. If we did give you some discount, what extra volume of business would you offer us? (Negotiation question)
7. So. Are we set to go? (Final closing question)

On Being Late 7

1. Tired
2. Unsure of route
3. Act of God
4. Over-slept
5. Got really lost
6. Sat Nav broke
7. Heavy congestion on route.

Only 1 of the above is acceptable.

Tomorrow's Marketing Strategy Meeting

If you don't say something at tomorrow's marketing strategy meeting to get it back on track after 11 weeks of pure indulgence: nine people are wasting their lives, the product launch will be delayed (and you know it), you'll take the stress from that meeting into your week-end, your MBA has been mostly wasted, you'll never be able to look your kids in the eyes and tell them they need to learn to face up to Life's challenges. Say something. Boy will you feel good once it's done.

On A Coffee Cup in Downtown Toronto

"when I was young I was misled by flash cards into believing that xylophones and zebras were much more common"

Amy-Elyse Neer.

The Things You Love About Her 7

1. Her smile;
2. her extraordinary reading;
3. that she has a vinyl collection;
4. her love of all that is Italian and hand-made paper and that espresso machines can be a thing of beauty;
5. her real understanding of 'gorgeous'; 
6. her philosophical-at times poetic-thinking; 
7. her texts.

On Latin

(And for Latin read whatever subject/s are being removed from the curriculum in your part of the world). That Latin was relevant was not the point. Is Art? Music? Shakespeare? No, it’s not relevant but it is timeless and full of eternal truths. To get to grips with Latin you need:

• to manage complexity, particularly interdependencies;
• to be logical and yet subtle;
• to understand rules but realise there are exceptions;
• to be pragmatic and yet poetic;
• to manage incredible frustration with ambiguity;
• at times wonder what the point of it all is;
• to recognise it really is hard.

Sounds a bit like life? That’s why it’s so worthwhile. Studies should be hard then Life seems easy. It strikes me that we are increasingly trying to make ‘school’ easy. But who are we kidding? Life, business and relationships are hard-that’s why they are so worthwhile. Just a thought.

Challenge 7

1. How much fun can you have without spending money?
2. What is your number 1 blocker? What needs to be done to resolve it?
3. What gets you out of bed with 110% enthusiasm in the morning? How can you harness that?
4. How many days could you go in a typical week without using a car?
5. If you really had to, could you read a book this week? One a day?
6. What's actually the worst, really the worst that could happen if you tackled the bullying client?
7. If you knew you couldn't fail, what would you start? 

12 Ways To Improve Work-life Balance, Starting Today

1. Insist meetings are 45 minutes not units of 1h. That allows some processing time.
2. Define work-life balance for you; really clearly. It's difficult to access if it stays general.
3. Get a stress management strategy beyond alcohol and coffee.
4. Zone work so that it doesn't 'leak' into 'you' time, children time, meal time....
5. When you add an activity, drop something. You can do anything, but you can't do everything.
6. Write stuff down so your brain can work at solving challenges rather than remembering trivia.
7. Go on an assertiveness course.
8. Introduce systems for typical hassles such as no food, no clean shirts, forgetting to pay a bill. The web has 100s of ideas to help: search super specifically for what you want.
9. Get a bigger picture: what are you doing all this for? 'The kids' is not enough. 
10. Decide to get more healthy over the next decade, whatever your age. Not the reverse. 
11. Spend more time with people and less time with machines.  
12. Do one thing today. 

Noise Kills Creativty

from clientk