Two Rules, Same Issue

Hot foot from his sleazy holiday on an expensive boat in Corfu, courtesy of David Geffen of Dreamworks, Lord Mandelson personally intervened to strengthen laws against those who download music or films illegally. He did not attack the real perpetrators of the crimes, those who steal the content, but the people who take advantage.

Think about this. Suppose you invent something really clever and you then patent it. Next step, you bring it to market somehow and you find it is serving a need and it becomes successful. The next thing you know, another company or individual steals the exact same idea, even though you have a patent, and starts to make and then sell an almost identical product at a slightly less price. You would have incurred all the development costs associated with bringing the real thing to market, the 'cloner' would have simply capitalised on all that expense and taken a slightly lower margin to whip you with the same idea.

In law, there is nothing stopping people buying the 'cloned' product. We are getting some pretty poor attempts to stop the illegal trading of designer label goods like clothes, but that's a brand protection issue not inventions. Realistically patents are swiped every day in the area of technology and there is huge money in it. If the owner of the patent wants to do anything about it, then they can only sue the violator of their patent and that is a long, expensive and nasty process. You only have to look at what happens when you see Apple's incredibly long running dispute with Microsoft over the infringement on their patent on an operating system using windows.

Notice how this long running sore and drain on people's ideas has never been tackled. Despite serial inventors like Trevor Baylis lobbying Mandelson, nothing will get done as he has no expensive yacht and he wields no power in the world of business and commerce. There are no plumb non-executive jobs at stake or any movements in the world of the rich and famous. Inventing can be the grubby domain of garage-based grease monkeys who have passion and commitment, for who the money is really a bonus - it is the invention that provides the stimulus.

Not so in the high octane world of David Geffen and his peers. The laboratories and offices are full of the latest hi-tech kit and littered with the brainiest of talent who work on taking other people's ideas and turning them into films. Often, unless you are people like JK Rowling, who have their own way of controlling their income by having the much needed sequels in their head, the writers get little return compared to the producers, actors and others who distribute the content in the digital world. The popstars have to be pretty hot and consistent to keep the mincing machine going which is why people like Geffen and Cowell deal in the numbers game - and are so incredibly rich.

In the new digital world, it is the creators and inventors who are preyed upon by the likes of Google who take their content like any old piece of junk and just distribute it. Today you can buy ebooks by any old duff author who couldn't sell an actual book alongside the classics. Google is strangling the life out of news too by making the value of the content almost worthless but the distribution is worth billions.

So in the new digital age, Mandelson rides roughshod over inventors who have genuine patents logged and waves two fingers at them by focusing laws only on the digital age. He has even made those laws geared toward the downloaders, the equivalent of nobbling those of us who by PCs with Windows, which was 'allegedly' invented by Apple. It's actually the wrong way around as you need to stop the actual thieves.

But no, life at the top is all about being smooched by rich people. Laws are crafted far more carefully if wealthy people directly gain as then you have some favours to call in later. The new Digital Britain Laws are absolutely barking up the wrong tree. If content, illegally replicated is made available on the web, the people who replicated it should be the ones prosecuted. There is so much free content made available on the web, it is crazy to implement laws which puts the onus on individual users to check the intellectual property rights of the source of their download - it is sheer lunacy and flies in the face of digital media and freedom to access content. This is a problem the software and media industry should solve, not users.

Mandelson has got it completely wrong. Should he now be attacking all of us for not checking whether Microsoft has infringed any IP before we buy their products? No, he doesn't ask us that but frankly, there is a fair bet they have in many cases judging by the amount of companies who sue them each year. Such companies are far too rich and nice in his eyes to bring a case against them. The same actually goes for David Geffen and his peer companies - have they observed the rights of all the individuals and companies they should have in producing their content?

Why should ISPs knowlingly allow illegal content to be made available via their portals to the web - why are they not prosecuted instead of their customers?

This is a huge blow to the individual freedom of any user of a PC and having access to the web. It has meant that we, the users, are responsible for checking the validity of the IP of all content, not the people who distribute it. Content aggregators like Google, ISPs, telecom companies, and all others who present content to us over the web just got off scot free. Should anybody who is prosecuted under these new laws have a case against their ISP for allowing the content to be downloaded in the first place?

The users have become the criminals, the people the furthest from the source of the alleged crimes. Welcome to Digital Britain, Mandelson style.

Learning By Failing

In today's Telegraph there is the usual feature of 'Ask James' where the Dragon's Den star, James Caan, gives his sage advice to job seekers. He is definitely qualified to do so, having made his considerable fortune off the back of starting, building and selling a successful recruitment company.

I had the good fortune to listen to James Caan speak last year at a small conference in London and he is very polished and enigmatic - every inch the 'nice guy' you see on Dragon's Den. I also think that much of his advice is very sound and this week's advice was a very good debating point about how to handle the very tough interview question of, 'Why did you leave your last job?'

I can sympathise with Caan's experience as I have heard every last excuse about the employer did not value the person, the targets were unrealistic, the hours too tough, the boss was an idiot, the company was going down the toilet, the pay was not good enough, the commission scheme changed, the company held back commission payments, the job role changed, and many more. I am excluding redundancies here but there is no reason why you cannot include them in the same question. The point being is that most candidates at interview look for another excuse to hide the stigma of having left their last company. And I say 'stigma' here as that is actually what they think it is. After all, no one would want to air their views about their boss at an interview with their prospective new boss, would they? Not unless they thought that leaving their last job was in some way a stigma that had to be explained.

Maybe I am using the wrong word here but it is that mental concept that an excuse or plausible reason has to be found for leaving your previous company and especially in these troubled times when there may be a considerable gap between leaving and finding a new role. Someone or something else has to be blamed.

Having been the interviewer in such situations many times, I cannot tell you how underwhelming it is to hear such excuses pushed out time and again. It doesn't matter who the person is or their age, the excuses seem to be the 'island of comfort' to explain people's inner lack of confidence in their abilities - the paranoid instinct that says there is always someone else to blame.

Failing, if it could be called that in losing your job, is part of life. It is as enriching as succeeding in terms of experience as without failing it is hard to know how to avoid it again while the subsequent feeling derived from succeeding after is all the more intense. We can all give our pithy stories of those celebrities or business people who pick themselves up after failure to succeed as such role models give us inspiration, but I often go to far greater depths to see how how people cope with and use 'failure' to their advantage.

Now let's stretch the word fail, here. Failure is not the only thing that pulls us down in life - there are many more reasons why people have to pick themselves up or make the best of a situation and I include in that people who suffer adversity for no good reason as well because they have similar, and often far steeper, mountains to climb but the principles are similar. So when I use the word fail in the same sentence as a name like Simon Weston it is not what I mean that he failed but here was a person who was dealt the cruelest of blows by being in the wrong place at the wrong time. He is one of hundreds of names we could use in the same context who have powerful, often thrilling stories of how they conquered adversities that threatened their very lives as well as their abilities to heal and move on.

It is from those people who have been dealt such huge blows by dint of accident, birth or negligence by others who use their situation to their advantage and become stronger characters and then successful people despite their enormous problems. Their special inspiration started by dealing with their point of adversity or 'failure' rather than dwelling on who to blame.

So when you sit down to think about the fact you have been made redundant or have lost your job because you personally failed to hit your target, don't try to hide the problem by inventing a reason or trying to transfer the blame. Think for a moment that you are in that position and you can dwell on the inequities that you may think put you there or you can plot your way forward, shedding the 'monkey on your back' that is the stigma of losing your job.

JK Rowling gives a very good account of this in her address to the Alumni at Harvard University where it was only when she faced the total depression of having no money, no job and no prospects that she could truly focus on the most important skills and ideas she had. It is something we can all use as well. Losing a job is tough and it is worse in a tough time. You may well have to accept that you did not perform as well as you should in your last job or because you were in the lower quartile of sales performers that you were identified as one of those who should leave.

Get over it. Think about what was it that you did and, more importantly, did not do that made you less successful than you should have been. Think about the number of meetings you regularly had, how you presented yourself, sold your company and why you failed to influence people as well as you could have done and then start thinking about what you can do to change things. So many times in my career I look back and think about how I could have done things differently and better, even when I was successful, and always it comes down to my lack of prioritisation. Even when I succeeded, I could have still not got bogged down in certain things and focused on more productive things that could have yielded even greater success and very often I find it was all to do with not moving from my personal comfort zones. Once I identified that, came to terms with it, I find things are far easier.

Sometimes you have to be honest with yourself about these things and being your own hardest critic is a recipe that can often lead to depression but is also the way to catalyse change. So when you think about that tough question about why you left your job, don't do what everyone else does and blame your last employer or someone or something else - take it on the chin if that's what it was.

The important thing is to do some reflection, once you have realised that you own your life and you are just as much to blame as your employer for losing your job. Was it your feisty attitude that put you at loggerheads with management which caused you to defocus? Was it the fact you you found it difficult to juggle personal issues and work? Think hard about why you possibly failed because learning the reasons allows you to see how you can change and be better for it.

There is a good reason why I mention all this which James Caan did not mention. That is that when I hear those 'excuses' from candidates I think to myself these things can easily be repeated.

If it was an issue with the boss then I know I am not perfect so it's likely I could cause the same issues for the candidate. If it was the company's lack of resources, well no company is perfect and so there is bound to be small things that cannot be provided. If it was the company not doing so well, it could happen here. The fact is that as an interviewing manager I would rather have people who have experienced things, understood what they have gone through and tell me how they dealt with it and how they will perform better in the future. Excuses are not a lot of use to me, interesting as they may sound.

Honesty is the best way and that starts at being honest with yourself. If you left a job because the money was rubbish, my alarm would be then why did the person enter the job in the first place? If the resources were rubbish, explain to me which ones were missing and tell me which company has it 100% right? If personal matters got in the way, what strategy have you worked out to cope with issues that may occur in the future that will no longer affect your performance? You see, employers should be very concerned about excuses about leaving the last job and it is certainly the reason why I ask the question. And for the skilled interviewer, if the answer is in the slightest bit unconvincing, then the follow up next questions will be like body punches as every interviewer should be looking for weaknesses and gloss.

Here's an exception - I saw the interview by Alan Sugar of the Apprentice, Jasmine, who won the competition and he lined up the question beautifully. Jasmine was the owner of her own restaurant business and Sugar pointed out that she would never enjoy such freedom to be as creative and as successful as she liked than when owning her own business, so why did she want to work for him? Her answer was that she wanted to work for Alan Sugar and here the alarm bells should have clanged. She was either bare-faced lying, motivated only by winning the prize of winning a job working for a dubious boss at £100,000 a year or her business was not as good as she made out. There was no follow up question - he left it at that. A skilled interviewer would have picked that whole 'facade' to pieces and find out what really made the girl tick. The same for the other pretty blond girl but each interviewer in turn backed off.

Most managers just want to hear what they want to hear. So you can get away with playing the excuses game in an ideal world. But today we are no longer in the ideal world - companies are not recruiting much at all and the jobless total is rising fast. Each interview is a precious moment to sell yourself better than any. Only you know your superior qualities and in that short time you have to show the exceptional things that make you different, not just qualified for the job, and sometimes exactly why you may not be qualified but the right person. You will still get the odd tree-hugging manager who has to have an exact match to the piece of paper but trust yourself that your special qualities will win.

So when asked that question - you will have done your contemplation. You will have come to terms with why you were chosen to leave in preference to others, you will have looked at yourself in the mirror and seen your flaws, you will have had your honest words with yourself and you will have identified what you need to do to be more successful in the future. By the time the question has ended you will hit the interviewer square between the eyes and tell them you failed but you know why, you dealt with it, you benefited from the experience and this is what you have done about it and why you are a much more capable person because of it. In fact, you were glad you failed because most people go through life never knowing the reasons that hold them back from being very successful - failure exposes the weaknesses within, that becomes the powerful force for change that is the platform for a successful life.

So when Simon Weston realised that he could not turn back the clock or get his body back, he faced it down, stopped blaming others for his misfortune (even though there were others to blame), fought the demons it caused and used it to become the incredible man he is today. He, along with thousands of others who have been dealt the really hard cards in life, are the most inspirational people on earth because their 'failures' made them the people they are today. At a recent service on the Falklands, Weston met the man who pushed the button that sent the Exocet missile into the hull of the Sir Galahad that fateful day and changed Weston's life for ever.

He forgave him because in many ways, he had a lot to thank the man for. The ordinary guy from the village of Nelson in South Wales, became a great inspiration for many as a result.

That takes some incredible guts and human spirit to say that even if it sounds illogical, but misfortune and failure can make ordinary people quite extraordinary. Believe that, and you will ace the dodgy question at your next interview - just make sure you are 100% honest with yourself, know what you have learnt and why you are a better person because of it.

Play that message to yourself a few times and then think of all those whingers who make the excuses. Sounds a whole lot better, doesn't it?

The Power of The Negative

Whilst sitting in the bath, I noticed two pieces of reading material we have side by side on the window sill are, '1,000 Places To See Before You Die' and Richard Wilson's 'Can't Be Arsed'. Essentially Wilson's book is a parody of the theme of the one next to it and is a torrid but funny series of reasons why not to do exciting things or see certain places before you expire. It struck me as odd that such a negative series of thoughts could be turned to profit.

It reminds me of the situation we are in right now in some ways. We are in the heart of a recession and every way we turn there is negative information, news, thoughts and people - it's enough to drive us to despair and sometimes it certainly makes me feel down. Strangely, it as at such times I get more creative, am able to channel more energy into things and get better results. Maybe that's what Richard Wilson (not of 'One foot in the grave' fame) used to be successful with his book - I don't know.

Thinking about the subject further, one of our most useful inventions uses the principle of creating negative energy - I am talking of the refrigerator. Sometimes negatives can be powerful sources for positive thoughts and energy - call it desperation, call it 'when all else fails', it doesn't matter, I like to think of it as inspiration.

Inspired By Negatives

If you want to hear one of the most inspiring talks, then sift through the Harvard Review online and find JK Rowling's address to the Graduation Ceremony last year. She talks to some of the most gifted and un-desperate people on earth to tell them how she found inspiration in her darkest hours. When she was virtually penniless, a single mum, and having lost her job she was as big a failure as she could be. What she talks of was how, at that lowest ebb, she was able to throw off all the inconsequential things in her life that had no bearing on her position and focus only on what was important - her child, her home and a big, big idea.

From this lowest point, Harry Potter was crafted, having already had the idea some time earlier, and it became the focus of all her energy, turning negative energy into an incredible, powerful positive.

I have also read some articles from a chap called Richard Fenton whose mantra is 'Go For No!' in sales and he advocates that you should up your failure rate in sales. His perverse logic is that you need to fail regularly to be successful in sales. I can understand the gist of what he means as the more you fail, the more your desire to succeed should compensate - but that is not common to all people in sales or business. Sometimes failure drags them down.

At this point, the recession looks very negative. Wishful thinking people who have not heeded warnings have literally Hit The Wall and gone from having a successful business one minute to abject failure the next - simply because they had not failed enough in the past to sense it careering up into their faces. When it strikes, they simply abdicate all responsibility to cost cutters and pretend that it is the only way forward - in fact, they have already ruined their business by that point.

So the point of my article today is how negatives can be turned into positives - and how to take the recession by the horns and turn it to your advantage making it something from which to survive and, indeed, to thrive.

Hitting The Wall

When companies Hit The Wall, as I call it, they actually find that, in a very short cycle, just about all of their key business indicators have turned negative on them. I used the example of Norwich Union/Aviva lately who consumed a £multi-million budget to advertise that they were changing their name - yet, with some of the adverts still running, they have reported heavy losses, seen 33% wiped off their share value and shedded 1,900 jobs. They ran straight into a recession while spending more money on advertising in a single period than a good share of the combined sum of the salaries of the staff they have just made redundant.

That's what I mean - it is the idea that one minute the garden is rosy, sales are buoyant, the forecast looks good and you believe that you have a recession-proof business as everyone needs things like insurance. Suddenly, you are in the depths of despair and the only way out is to hand the business across to professional numbers-people and hack the heart out of the business.

For small and medium sized (SMEs) businesses, this can be far more damaging. Too many SME firms have either a one-track business or have too many eggs in too few baskets. When the recession arrives it can be like an absolute bomb going off, literally wrecking the business overnight. I know a recruitment firm that in one quarter went from record sales to 50% drop and had to shed 50% of its workforce. They are not alone, even the mighty Dragon's Den hero, James Caan, has a latest venture which is suffering while Michael Page has seen its worth drop dramatically from the point at which it turned down a bid from a would-be suitor.

Recessions pay no respect to egos or reputations - they can ruin anyone.

Turning Negatives Into Positives

The most common issues faced by firms right now is dwindling order books and low or negative cashflows. The answer in most cases is to dramatically cut costs and try to eek out longer terms with suppliers while voraciously collecting cash. These are the answers from the numbers-people and they make sense. However, it would help if sales went up and cashflow became more positive - but that's the point of a recession, they go the opposite way.

Too often in the recession, the above action is the limit of the thinking. Batten down the hatches until the market gets more buoyant. The sales-driven executives have handed the reins to the finance guys and that's that. When the negatives get too much, too many executives are happy to 'walk away' from their pulpit of success, hand over the power to finance and snipe from their background position about the company's long term prospects.

It's a pity they don't mobilise that negative energy into a powerful force for the positive - if nothing else, the negative attitude will rub off on staff and things tend to spiral from that point.

Here's a thought. If cash is tight and sales are low - how can you find more sales that bring in cash quicker? The first step is to ensure you know enough about your current sales to make an intelligent decision. The decision needs to be about the product or service you want to sell, what its value proposition to the customer is, who would be interested and how you are going to get that message to enough people in a short time to make it successful.

The heart of the decision is to make an attractive incentive for cash payment for the proposition, but the most crucial part is the value proposition - it has to resonate with the customers you choose. Messaging is vitally important here and everyone in the organisation must be word-perfect on the message and spot on in execution.

Very often, the answers to tough questions can lie right in front of you - only the negative thoughts stop you from seeing them. If you have a product or service that is valuable, then make sure the value is realisable fast and compelling - then make sure you know who would be interested, why and make sure you get in front of as many of them as possible, with as many of their objections thought of as you can, and as fast as you can.

A recession will kill those companies who stand still - mobilise your thoughts and people with cohesive messages and actions to turn negatives into positives.

Blue Ocean Thinking

It is always a surprise to hear that many successful companies started during a recession. Dave Hewlett and Bill Packard (HP) started their business in a garage in 1939 building a device used by the Disney Corp. on the film Fantasia - it was not what you would call ideal conditions for a start up. Cisco claims to have started in a recession, as did Facebook. The key to success in a recession is to find a part of the market where there is less turbulence from competitors or is simply an unaddressed need.

In the teeth of this recession, car sales in the US and the UK have dropped dramatically and there is a real risk that many car makers will either not survive or not exist in the same way as before. While sales plummeted 30% in the UK over last year in the peak selling month of March, in Germany they rose by 40% and in France by 10%. In these countries, in conjunction with the Government, a scrappage incentive was offered direct to consumers and backed by a vigorous sales and marketing campaign by the vendors and their dealer networks. The results were spectacular while in the UK we are still considering what to do.

The fact is, there are an awful lot of old cars out there, the dealer network has switched to secondhand selling and the car makers are in too much trouble to see what to do. By the time we do something, it will be too late.

What has happened is that while most car models have dropped in sales, small cars have bucked the trend by selling up 80% on last year - the Ford Fiesta leading the sales charge for the fourth successive month. Here is the plan for the future right in front of people's faces - swap production skills and tooling into making more smaller cars with ultra high fuel economy or new eco fuels and cut mid and high end cars to a minimum and charge a huge premium for them. It is the ideal time for better, more environmentally sound, vehicles to be made and a chance to shape the industry for the future. By using the scrappage incentives in a targeted way, swap out the oldest cars for the new small ones now.

It calls for a concerted line of thought and actions - we have the chance to build a new, better car industry from the ashes of the old, and the opportunity is right here and now.

Blue Ocean Thinking is all about re-invention and in a recession there is no time like the present. The recruitment industry has been cruising for a bruising for some time. In the sustained boom, it grew fat on high fees, low value for money and has spawned a new, valueless level of service on the internet. Recruiters have been very hard hit as companies have cut back on headcount and not replaced those who leave voluntarily. For my example firm, with too few large customers, the effect has been crippling. Correspondingly, large companies have devalued the recruitment process, outsourced it to foreign shores and introduced reverse auctions for placement - how on earth can companies get good people in a recession by using such a valueless selection process? Now is the time to re-invent the whole industry.

I have long held the belief that recruiters should share the pain for poor recruitment. I believe there should be performance related incentives for recruiters so that fees are lower up front and are earned over time according to the success of the recruit and their clients, and I am not talking stock options here. Instead of having salespeople in the recruiters, have professionals who have recruited and managed the kinds of people they are trying to recruit for clients. It will bring back the value in the industry, reduce the costs due to bad recruitment, create more value for recruiting clients and, long term, more profit for recruiters.

The firm that breaks the mould today and offers this kind of model will take the high ground - I know, I have already worked it with clients like Theorem Inc of the USA, and we are both better off for it.

Channeling The Negative Energy

JK Rowling created the most successful series of books in modern times which have also produced a string of fabulous films and merchandising - so becoming incredibly wealthy in a matter of just 10 years. The whole concept was built out of failure and despair. Sometimes you have to fail to realise what its like to really succeed and certainly success tastes that much more sweeter after a failure.

Rowling's message is simple - when you are at the lowest point, you can shed all of the things which are not important and focus only on the things that mean most. It means you can channel all your energy on the things that will bring you most success - by having that single-mindedness you can increase your creativity and make something far more powerful than you could ever do if all you have is success. For many firms, the recession will mean a re-focus on something new or an innovative change to their norm.

If there is one message out of all of this, it is to prioritise. Sit down, think what is important and, quite literally, forget all that is unimportant so that all energy, investment and skills can be applied only to what is important. Don't do an Aviva - now is not the time to blow a lot of money on nice-to-haves. Make sure every penny brings a return.

Make the recession work for you.