In your business what do you do when you have a failure? Do you recognise it as such? Or do you make excuses?   If you do recognise it as such, do you diagnose what it is that you did wrong?   If you do diagnose what you did wrong do you plan to remedy [...]

For your business you’ll nearly always want to know why something is happening – not just that it is happening.   You don’t want to know why simply out of curiosity.  That’s useless.  You want to know why so that you can take action.   Imagine a customer satisfaction survey shows you that your customers [...]

My mother turns 90 next week.  I’m bringing her to a concert in the National Concert Hall in Dublin.   The online booking form included the question : “Would you like to receive details as to events… by Email”.  “Yes” and “No” were available from a pull-down menu – but neither was pre-selected.  However it [...]

I get too many emails. Now most days I do empty my in-tray – but I only manage to do that because I’m filing the emails in a series of sub-folders. And to be honest there are some sub-folders, e.g., the “to be read” one, that I hardly ever look in.   Last week, rather [...]

Some of you know I support Leeds.   (We’re talking football here!)   And you may remember a post I wrote back in April talking about Neil Warnock – the Leeds manager – and his failure to take responsibility for results. The team’s problems were always someone else’s fault.   At the time Leeds were in [...]

One morning recently I tried contacting a government agency.  Things must have been very busy for them because…   Their phone was not being answered by a live human being.   Neither was it answered by one of those messages that directs you to press different numbers for different departments.   And neither was it [...]

Last Friday my son and I drove by a hotel here in Kilkenny.  We were looking for a hot chocolate for him.  There were three flagpoles outside the hotel – for the European Union, Kilkenny & Ireland.  The Irish flag had fallen to the very bottom of its flagpole and was lying on the ground.  [...]

Earlier this week I ran a vox pop on President Obama’s focus in his second term. There were just 2 questions – firstly what his focus should be and secondly what his focus will be – and the options to choose from for both questions were identical and were as follows:   o Nuclear proliferation [...]

I’m a big football fan and I’ve just finished a book celebrating Alex Ferguson’s “25 Years At The Top”.  You may know about Ferguson but, if you don’t, he’s widely regarded as the most successful football manager ever.   I reckon though that his approach to the management of Manchester United contains lessons that can [...]