Author: neil

Under pressure.

Not the Queen song of the same name, but how I was feeling this morning as my first meeting of the day/week began. How fascinating, I thought to myself (HT to Ben Zander). I could see all of us in that session wrestle with the ideas we were trying to understand ourselves first, and then put into a series of communications to persuade others of their value.

I took it upon myself to pull something together that gave voice to my perspective. It’s not the complete picture, it’s not pretty, it’s not even sound. I did it in about an hour so I barely had any time to do this right.

When I shared it with a few people (show your work early!), I got useful comments on how it could flow better, and I’m already seeing the value of having done that initial hard slog for an hour. It won’t take too long before it is forged into something much stronger  than it’s original version. I’m glad I had the pressure on me to help me put out an early basic version of those ideas.

The weather outside was incentive enough to stay in bed today. It helped that it was Sunday and there were few demands. We binged watched reruns of Seinfeld – and it kept me thinking about how brilliantly the show lines are written.

Consistency, if I remember right, was Seinfeld’s mantra, dispensed to a young comedian Brad Isaac: “He said the way to be a better comic was to create better jokes and the way to create better jokes was to write every day.”

After what was a long day of driving to the big smoke and back, at 10pm, the last thing I want to do is to sit down and write. I know the chain of writing hasn’t been missed, and I was not going to break that today.  I have an accountability buddy who is sending me a quote for my Spencerian writing every day, & I’m not going to let them down because I don’t feel like writing. And given I’m posting that here, I am not going to not write 🙂 (double negatives?!)

I’m grateful for the last week; the decentralisation discussion on Thursday has been a splendid highlight for me. I’m glad that more people are starting to lean in, contribute, speak up, and offer their perspectives in ways I have not seen. That is the best feeling ever.

 

The young lad wants to buy a game for his Xbox. Should be pretty straightforward but after so much struggle, we’ve just discovered that the thing he wants is not available for purchase unless he is 18 or older.  Why not put that basic message up, instead of having to get your users (particularly ignoramus parents buying for this kids) to meander through this mess and buy stuff that simply locks you into subscriptions you can’t / won’t ever use?

The extent of friction that most companies seem to inflict on their customers, despite the lip service that most of them give to ‘great customer experience’ could certainly be a good one to exploit?  Why do these billing processes/ systems make life so hard for everyone involved?

I wonder if it has anything to do with the dinosaur finance execs? My exasperation with the awfully retrograde views of several finance ‘leaders’ whose only knowledge of business technology seemed to be the grid of spreadsheets forced me to give up and move away from the career I spent over two decades in.  Any novel solutions – nay, even the thought of examining possible solutions to remove friction  in the billing/finance processes – seems to get this lot in knots. Rather than argue with them, and get them to change their views, most people (including myself) simply take it as one of life’s unchangeable challenges.