The lift is up where we belong

Welcome back and I hope you had a great Easter.

Please don’t think I am getting obsessed with lifts. You will know that barely two weeks ago I was talking about lifts and the need for us all to have our lift conversations to hand, ready and primed for use. I want to return to the questions of lifts again today but in a different context.

I am inspired this week by the works of Matthew Parris. I don’t mean the 13th century Benedictine monk, author and philosopher, though he does provide plenty of inspiration, but the equally inspirational 21st century columnist of The Times. I will come back to him in a moment but first let me tell you a story.

As I have explained to you before I am now sharing my marketing and business wisdom with an unnamed department of an unnamed government dedicated to ensuring safety and security for all its citizens. I would love to share more with you but I am sure you will understand the need for security and sensitivity.

In the building in which I ply my trade there is a lift and for as long as I have worked there, all of 4 weeks, this lift has been out of order. And not once have I seen anyone working on it trying to get it going. And according to the apparatchiks who have dedicated their whole career to serving the State and its citizens, this lift has been broken since at least the start of the year. I cannot say any more about this lift and even to disclose that there is a broken lift might be putting at risk my career and you would not want that, would you?

As is my philosophy I have picked up the napkin and reported it broken and tried to find out when it might be fixed. No one knows. No one cares. No one is it all fazed by fact that the lift has been marked ‘out of order’ for so long. Indeed people are more fazed that I should be so concerned.

Well I am concerned.

As I have said so many times before, everything communicates. To me, a broken lift that has been marked unusable for so long, says an organisation that can’t be bothered, that it doesn’t care, that it couldn’t give a monkey’s how it is perceived by its people, by its customers, by its stakeholders.

And I know that it does care but it is not communicating this thought at all times and across all touch points. In my book, if you get the small things right then the big things will surely follow. If you remove the interferences and barriers and excuses to great work then you get great work. It is that simple.

So where and how does Matthew Parris fit in?

Well my broken lift reminded of his experience of a squeaky door at Derby station which squeaked and squeaked to the annoyance and irritation of staff and customers, aka passengers, alike. All noticed but no one cared enough to fix it. And his solution was to develop a new branch of management consultancy and investigation.

Instead of businesses being subjected to major management investigation or scrutiny on the big issues, when it thinks it might be good practice to take a long hard look at itself, or when something big has gone horribly wrong to identify what went wrong, what lessons can be learnt, who should be blamed, it might be a much better idea ‘to zoom in with massive management attention to something trivial that went wrong, something just so blindingly, obviously silly that no one in their right mind could possibly defend it…..an investigation into how and why the indefensible was tolerated’.

And so going back to my broken lift, just think of the key questions needing answered;
Who knew?
Were there communication channels in place to bring the broken lift to attention of a higher authority?
Who should have shouldered responsibility for fixing? Why didn’t they?
Were people confident that their request to have lift fixed would be taken seriously or were they in despair and give up?
Etc, etc

I am pretty sure that such an approach to corporate investigation would reveal far more to an organisation about itself. The solutions would be easier to fix and maybe just maybe demonstrate and communicate better and more appropriate and relevant messages to all who work there and all who want to do business with it.

And so I ask and call upon you yet again to find and try to fix your broken lifts to help make your business a better place for your people and for your customers. As someone much more intelligent than even I, once said ‘you can become the change you want to see in the world’. Or as Bob the Builder said in similar vein, and who else can link Ghandi to Bob the Builder in the one paragraph, ‘Can we do it? Yes, we can’

And now for your favourite piece of this column……is it just me?

I have had a complaint from an eco mentalist who wants to know why I am always having a go at them. Well you will be pleased to know that yet again I want to ponder out loud about an eco mentalist absurdity and enviro mentalist illogicality.

The Green Brigade are always going on about the need to invest in renewable energy such as wind farms and solar energy. Has it never occurred to anyone that in this country at least it is not always windy or even sunny? This might come as a surprise to the eco warriors but I am sure that if you check with our meteorological media lovelies you will find that I tell no lie. This means that if we want to have 20% of our energy needs met from sources like this we also have to invest in traditional so called non green energy sources to make sure our lights don’t go out and our heating switch off when our weather takes a turn for the better or the worse, depending on your point of view.

So not only do we still need the energy sources that are seen as the Devil’s work, we also need to pay for all this surplus energy capacity. And there is only one person who is going to pay for this. Yes, you got it, you and me. Am I right or am I wrong? It is surely no coincidence that the word ‘mental’ is embedded in ‘environmentalism’.

I await more complaints

Have a great week.

Sit felix. Et sit fortunatus.