How can you make your Boss Green with?Envy?

Friday is St. Patricks Day, and the whole world seems to go green for the day — 75 million people are Irish or claim Irish heritage — so in celebration of the time when St. Patrick allegedly banished the snakes from Ireland, I give you some help in transforming your business by helping you banish the “snakes” from it.

Three golden rules serve me well and how to make them work for you is detailed at the end of this article:-

• “Add value and become indispensable
• Ensure your boss gets no surprises
• Your boss is always right — even when they are wrong

These appear to be contradictory or confusing but the rationale is valid and based on the theory of cognitive dissonance and the theory of insufficient justification.

First a history lesson — if you are going to claim that “St. Patrick made me do it” you better have the facts at your fingertips:-

St. Patrick’s Day on March 17, is a public holiday in Ireland, Montserrat, and the Canadian province of Newfoundland and Labrador.?

Monuments around the world are greened in the run-up to the date and the river in Chicago and beer worldwide are dyed green — which is how most of the celebrants feel on the 18th of March.?

St. Sheelah’s Day on the 18th of March was celebrated in the eighteenth century — she was allegedly St. Patrick’s wife — those of a less charitable bent claim it's a drying out day.

The Irish global diaspora totals 70 million, with 36 million of them in America, a legacy of the famine — from an island of just over 6 million.

The British always seem surprised that Ireland has transformed from one of the poorest to one of the richest nations in Europe mainly thanks to a highly educated population and Foreign Direct Investment (FDI) from the US — Ireland is 1% of the European economy but attracts 12% of the FDI.

Would the fact that the British Diaspora in the US is only 25 million when the Irish total is 36 million — be a factor? Unlikely as FDI decisions are economic and not political — however as with any concentration of competence success breeds success and value-added results in profits.

A low tax regime may attract industry but will not retain it.

I have worked for 8 US multinationals in Ireland — globalising their products. I have had the opportunity to measure relative productivity in my global teams and know that success comes from performance, not plámás.

I had global PC testing teams in the USA, Ireland, Australia, Malaysia, and Japan. Engineers' salaries at the time ranged from $13k to $60k but the Irish productivity was up to 5x that of some other locations — when actual productivity was considered the Irish engineers were more productive in terms of the cost of testing per unit than Malaysia where salaries were half that of Ireland.

Another benefit was the willingness of my Irish team to take risks, because of management philosophy and employment law.

My philosophy was I got paid to take the blame for their mistakes and they got the recognition for their successes, together with employment rights that were absent in the USA — having the confidence that failure did not mean firing was a key element in driving global sustaining response time from 3 weeks to 3 days — saving millions.

So as you see monuments going green this weekend, ask yourself what makes a country successful and its people wealthy.

?It's not heritage or hegemony but competence and creativity…. and, as the Beatles told us “With a little help from my friends”.

As promised in the introduction — let's talk about how to apply my three golden rules to your business in a way that will your boss go green with envy this St. Patrick’s holiday.

Or you can continue to believe in “The Luck of the Irish” — personally, I find the harder I work the luckier I get.