I believe that the received wisdom on the subject states that the human species has to have a purpose in life, needs a goal – has to work. That seems to be born out by my experiences but I never cease to be amazed by the vast variety of things people do in order to “make a living”. Moreover, the numbers of people whom, in pursuance of their chosen trade think it is acceptable to bring their chosen trade to my door amazes me.  Let me first acknowledge that I could be describing a phenomenon peculiar to the UK here. Our streets lined with traditional looking houses and cottages presenting their front doors to all passers-by may indeed provoke the phenomenon of the casual business caller. I would be interested to know if it is more international than I realise.

Anyway, I digress. The casual business caller, cold caller, commercial traveler even opportunist. Call them what you will, I seem to get visited by an awful lot of them. Now, please don’t misunderstand me. I am an affable sort of person & having spent most of my working life in some sort of Sales & Marketing role I realise that very little happens in this world without some commodity being bought and sold…all the time. However, the succession of callers at both my home and business addresses really has lead me at times to doubt the validity of the commercial structure that underpins most of what we do in the modern world. It’s not so much the volume of callers but more the lack of any perceptible research activity that precedes the calls…..I don’t seem to get too many smart callers. For example. Almost as the last, pristine, brand new, rust coloured brick was laid to complete my driveway (resplendent with it’s contrasting grey edging stones & fresh dusting of fine sand to fill all the joints) there was an insistent ringing of the doorbell. Upon opening it I was greeted by a young man, much of whose skin was obscured by a shiny black coating of some sort. A quick inspection of his vehicle (which fortunately was not parked on my drive) showed that the black substance in question was likely to be Tarmac. I know this because his vehicle was laden with a large pile of the material along with a “steaming” cauldron of a more liquid version of the stuff.

I took some time to convince him that having just paid a small fortune to have beautiful red bricks laid to form the drive at the front of my property I wasn’t all that interested in having it all covered with the hot, sticky & foul smelling bituminous mass that was currently occupying the rear of his vehicle. Eventually he reluctantly had to see my point of view. What disappoints me about this is that the time he spent/wasted talking to me could have been spent with someone who genuinely needed his services (like my next door neighbour for example). It wouldn’t have taken much detective work to discern this fact.

And so it is with many of the callers. So frustrating is the issue that I have now prepared a written submission that is pinned to my front door. It goes something like this:-

“Dear Caller,

You probably don’t know me & I think there is a fair chance that I don’t know you…let’s keep it that way. I also don’t know what your products or services are but I’ll hazard a guess that I neither want nor need any of them. My driveway is brand new and made from very nice red bricks – you will know this because you are standing on it. It does not need to be torn up and replaced with Tarmac or printed hydrophobic concrete nor do I need the microscopic traces of moss and other vegetation blasted from its infrastructure with a high-pressure water jet. My trees are fine. They require no trimming, lopping, re-shaping or up rooting. My lawn too is adequate. Not the best you will ever see but we like it. I don’t need it to be greener and I certainly don’t need it to be replaced with Astroturf. The thought of the thrill of spending the cash resulting from the sale of my old lawnmower is not something that keeps me awake at night. I don’t have any scrap metal that I want to give you so that you can sell and this situation will not change no matter how hard you ring your bell. My house is fitted with plastic framed windows. Not the most attractive items you will have ever come across but they do a good job of keeping the worst that northern hemisphere living can throw at them at bay. They don’t need replacing and they are not worn out. In fact the window frames in question will probably outlast me, you, your children and their children. There’s a fair chance that they will still have retained their shape as our planet is swallowed up in the moments that precede our sun collapsing in on itself thereby signaling the end of life as we know it i.e. not for a while yet. I have some old clothes but rather than give them to you for you to sell to some unscrupulous operator that will sell them to the needy in the third world I’ll give them away to the same people. My electricity is great. It turns up on time, in the right amounts and it makes all my stuff light up. If it came in tins it would be doing exactly as the label described. I don’t need an alternative supplier. Not even one that will give loyalty points on a card I don’t want that I can exchange for a cheap radio alarm clock that will work for 3 months and then end up in landfill. Now the difficult one, God. Assuming I do worship some kind of deity then that surely is a matter for me. If I do, there’s a fair chance that his (or her) actions are not fair and they won’t have got everything right since the beginning of time. That’s no reason for me to change to worshipping your God…I’ll stick with the one I’ve got! Finally, and on a quaint historical note where I suspect this all started…I don’t need any knives sharpening either. However, if I have to write much more of this my view on this matter might change”.

Now, all I have to do is to work on an amended version for unsolicited telephone calls and I’m done.

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It all started with listening to the “musings” of various business coaches, life coaches and self improvement experts. I’m guessing you know the kind of people I mean so I won’t search for any more adjectives to describe them further. It seemed to me that no matter what their background, or their own work experience none of them – when addressing a business problem – could speak for very long without attempting to draw a parallel with the world of sport. In fact, more specifically the sport most often sought for enlightenment or comparison was golf.

There, I’ve said it, close the door on your way out please.

Anyway, for those that are still reading – golf seemed to be the “chosen’ sport. It seemed there was not a single issue of personal motivation, people management, conflict resolution or commercial challenge that could not be aligned to the life and works of Messrs Palmer, Nicklaus, Ballesteros or Woods. Interestingly the fact that each of those gentlemen had proved to be quite successful business people away from the golf course was seldom mentioned. Imagine Arnold Palmer visiting a business mentor and being asked to picture the challenges of a forthcoming commercial transaction as being like the 17^th at St Andrews. I suspect he might have felt that would be somewhat of an over simplification (tough though the 17^th at St Andrews is…er, so I’m told)

Anyway, time and time again golf would emerge as the measuring staff by which we were expected judge our business performance. It was proposed as our road map (course map?) by which we should look to navigate the difficult terrain placed in front of us as part of the challenge of running a business. The trouble is…..I don’t think I have ever really “got it”. The so called lights have never really come on for me. This seemed especially the case when a thorny business problem of range diversification (if, how much, what, when & where) was boiled down by one of these gurus as follows:-

“Think of it as being just like the first time you ever hit a golf ball. You couldn’t hit it straight, at least not very often. In fact, most of the time you either hit it with a snap hook (violently to the left if you’re a right hander) or a wicked slice (the opposite). Most golf holes aren’t straight and require you to be able to hit the ball to the left & the right as well as down the middle. So before you could hit the ball where you want it to go you had to learn how to hit it straight…even if straight was the wrong direction……(are you still with me?)….and then, once you could hit the ball straight then you had to set about learning how to hit the ball with a draw (shaping to the left) and a fade (shaping to the right) just when you wanted to”.

This was the point at which my simple little brain bailed out in search of relevance elsewhere. Imagine my surprise when my thoughts alighted upon another golfer…Anderson. Don’t worry, you students of the game will not have heard of him & especially will not have heard his name mentioned alongside those of Mr Palmer etc. The reason for this is that this chap, apart from being a friend of mine is just an ordinary, high handicap, weekend hacker kind of golfer…just like me. In fact, so bad a golfer is he that he claims he bought his last set of clubs from a Garden Centre (if that raised a smile, no matter how small then the chances are you are similar golfer to both Mr Anderson & myself!)

So why this Mr Anderson and his bad golf? Well, I suppose it’s all down to something he once said (whilst we were playing golf) What infuriated my friend was this:- His golf was so bad that apart from his tee shot (where his ball was nicely lifted up to an easy hitting position on a miraculous little wooden platform) and when putting on the green (the billiard table surface surrounding the hole) he almost never got to play the ball from the nice cut surface of the course or “fairway’ as it is known. He reckoned that 95% of his shots were played either from “in the rough”, “behind a (bloody) tree”, “in a bunker”, “in a stream” or “from behind a sod”. With this last one he is adamant that he is not referring to me or any of his other playing partners. And yet, despite all this adversity, all this intensive exposure to playing shots from difficult positions he never got any better at playing the shots. When his ball landed in a bunker it would still most likely take 5 or 6 shots plus the removal of cubic metre of sand before he managed to get his ball out. If his ball landed in a stream both you (and he) knew that a change of clothes would be required. When playing from behind a tree the outcome was a “done deal”. No amount of preparatory A level geometry and trigonometry would be able to calculate a result other than the exact opposite of what was required!

So I asked my friend why he thought it was that despite this intensive exposure to dealing with difficult shots actual improvement at playing them eluded him. He thought for a moment and then said “well it’s obvious really mate”…..I leaned forward intently so as not to miss the incoming pearl of wisdom. “it’s like this, I don’t get any better because – it doesn’t really matter, it’s just a game”. I paused, in silence, a bell rang, somewhere, deep, distant but certainly a bell. My friend then went on to say “unlike say, in business, this doesn’t matter. The worst thing that happens to me today is that I play badly, I write a big number on a piece of card and probably have to buy you a drink at the bar”. Still I stayed silent. “Compare this to how we run our businesses” he continued, “We make mistakes, we find difficult situations and we take actions to overcome them. When it works we repeat it and when it doesn’t we don’t. We get better because we have to. On the golf course, it doesn’t matter if we do or we don’t”

Mmmm now where’s the telephone number of that Business Coach?

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To me the phrase says a lot about the tendency to spend all our conscious time in what another writer has called “the now”. The actions events & reactions that are demanding all our attention right now. The things that tend, unless you stop yourself, to become “all consuming”. Perhaps it wouldn’t be so bad if it were limited to things that were of our own choosing…after all, in any life there are daily tasks to be undertaken. I suspect that if I search the volume carefully enough I’ll find that Robinson Crusoe had a “To Do” list even if it only comprised things like:-

1. Devise more Coconut based recipes
2. Carry out Friday’s performance appraisal
3. Remove sand from between toes

Somehow though, the feeling that one is not in control of current events is all the more threatening. It causes one’s horizons to drop (as you concentrate on what you are being told is the most important thing) at the exclusion of all else. Most worryingly, the exclusion of reality i.e. what is actually going on rather than what the global news machine would like you to believe is going on.

Allow me to explain. If you were in or near the UK anytime between July & November 2009 you most likely will have gained the impression that:-

1. The country had been invaded by so many economic migrants it was about to sink.
2. The fiscal system was broken.
3. Government debt had soared such that generations to come will feel the effects through personal taxation (actually, that bit’s true).
4. Millions more people became unemployed overnight.
5. Britain was deep in recession with absolutely no chance of recovery whilst the planets in the Solar System were in their current alignment.

…………and then…………the snow fell!
Suddenly the economic & commercial mire disappeared from the headlines & was eradicated from the 6.00pm news. We had a new crisis. The country was in the grip of snow & ice the like of which had not been seen for decades – the fact that it would have been perfectly normal in Scandinavia or many other areas in the northern hemisphere was of course overlooked by our dear friends in the news media. The UK was frozen and the news hounds were presented with an opportunity to paint a dramatic picture of a country grinding to a halt! Roads were un-salted, trains stopped running, schools were closed and industry ground to a halt. Or so our dear friends producing the TV bulletins and newspapers would have you believe.

The reality was somewhat different of course. Some roads were impassable, some gritting/salting was slow to start and even a few trains conked out! How did we fare at our manufacturing facility? Well, we had a couple of days where some folks had a bit of an ordeal getting to work. A couple of them didn’t actually make it. We also had the situation where a couple of customers orders were delayed as our friends at DHL & UPS fought their way through the snow and ice to collect consignments. However, collect them they did. Our staff made it in to work, raw materials were delivered, manufacturing took place and orders were fulfilled. OK, so we made some adjustments, a bit of re-scheduling here, a bit of re-prioritising there, but the important thing is everything carried on. Despite this our friends in the news media were reporting salt & grit shortages, national gas supplies being lower than ever and old folk being unable to heat their homes …………very little of which proved to be completely accurate.

…………….and then………………the snow melted!

What was next, floods, recriminations, inquests, ministerial resignations? None of these in great measure because unfortunately all this was overtaken by the terrible events that ensued in Haiti. Our “news ghouls” had a new crisis to report and what a genuinely terrible one it is proving to be.

What about the recession in the UK? Buried deep in page 26 of my last weekend broadsheet newspaper I found a single mention of “UK economic crisis”! Has it gone way I hear you ask? No, of course not but perhaps, just perhaps being on page 26 it might be slightly more in context. Maybe some natural balance has occurred and maybe that’s a good thing for the world…or at least the little bit of it we can see from our office windows.
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