A better version of me

Subtle indicators

My wife Kate has developed an aversion to her phone. Yes, its an essential business and social tool, but she dislikes the way it continually interrupts her. And, she particularly hates the way it shocks us awake in the morning with its appalling selection of alarm tones.

So, she’s started a campaign of de-technologising certain parts of her life. First, she banished the phone from the bedside table, and replaced it with a svelte device called a?Loftie.

I’m old enough to remember the first clock radios and, yes, Loftie is basically one of those (but without the blaring radio). Instead, it’s a beautiful design piece with a soft digital readout (which dims for sleeping), a very subtle nightlight, and a selection of ambient sounds for falling asleep to, and waking up to.

It’s wonderful — our son also now has one (he loves falling asleep to the sound of a crackling campfire) and various friends have also fallen under the Loftie spell.

I see Loftie as a larger trend towards not de-technologising our lives, but embedding?more human?technologies into our lives. Google, which is probably more enmeshed in more parts of our lives than other tech company, recognise this, and have started thinking about ways our plethora of devices can notify us of things we need to know about. They have launched a set of experiments on how to do this in very calm, unobtrusive and subtle ways -?take a look at their explanation of ‘little signals’ here?- it’s marvellous.

In a world where marketing equals “getting heard above the noise”, and where introverts have multi-million selling books written about their contribution to society (and?its author’s TED Talk gathers 30 million views!) this is clearly a trend worth tracking.

Question: What unassuming ways do you have to get people’s attention?

How to work out where to focus

A client of mine is a household name service provider that operates 17 distinct service lines: each has a different revenue source, mostly different customers. Some are large ($10m+), others very small (less than $250k).

Their big question was how to think about diverse portfolio strategically, so that they knew what to maintain, what to divest, and what to grow. I suggested they plot them on three variables:

1. The degree to which they are ‘mission critical’, that is, contribute to this non-profit organisation’s purpose (the vertical axis);
2. The top line revenue contribution (the horizontal axis);
3. The profit contribution (yes, I know they’re a “non-profit”, but we still want funds for reinvestment), depicted by the bubble size.

What we saw was this:

The top right quadrant is obviously where the action is: the two service areas there are both large contributors on all dimensions, and more importantly, originated from the organisation’s own innovations. These have tremendous upward potential for organic growth, but other forms of growth also: quasi-franchising models etc.

But, what about the remaining quadrants?

It’s obvious when one does this that the strategy should be something like this:

• Quadrant 1: Grow impact
• Quadrant 2: Scale up
• Quadrant 3: Preserve margin contribution
• Quadrant 4: Divest

The subsequent analysis will help us determine?which?specific bubbles can be grown, scaled, preserved, so I’ll write more about how we did that in a couple of months.

Question: How much of your current portfolio of work is ‘upper right’ quadrant?

Being Me

I must admit I’m envious of James Clear, the productivity expert whose weekly newsletter?3-2-1?reaches about a million people (the one you’re reading reaches 4000).

His book, “Atomic Habits” has now sold more than 3 million copies, too. But why has his message about habits hit such fertile ground?

Clear’s premise is that habits are simply an aggregation of repeated behaviours that either act for us - or against us. So why not focus deliberately on those habits that we know work for us?

My good friend Sean showed me a phone app called?Being Me?that he uses to track his daily habits —- things like stretch frequently, write in his journal, ride his bike, drink water, eat only healthy food until ‘drinks o’clock’ in the evening. The app tracks his habits, and while Sean happily confesses to being a measurement obsessive, this also fits with what James Clear emphasises: “By measuring something, you become aware of it”.

Clear’s only caution is that the measurement not become the end in itself, but that the habit itself is the true outcome, or more precisely, the result of the habit itself.?

Question: “What specific habits do you know of that, if you did them every day without fail, would add to your quality of life, and overall effectiveness?”

Years ago, one of my constructive critics said that I cared too much about what people think of me. I’ve thought a lot about that remark and, if I’m honest, I don’t agree. I think feedback is the ‘coin of the realm’ for me as a consultant, and probably for many of you as leaders, innovators and creators.

So, please do let me know you’ve enjoyed reading by clicking the 'like' and, in the spirit of feedback, drop me a line below to let me know what specifically you enjoy about 5MSM — and if there’s anything you don’t, or would like to see done differently or better.

I look forward to hearing from you — and see you next Friday!

Andrew