No need for text for today’s post – just click play…
One of the reasons for launching Being Smarter a year ago was because of our wish to help people with workplace productivity.
In previous lives I spent many years watching people and businesses going about things the long way round… doing things in a particular way because… well it has always been done like that… not using technology to be more productive… or worse still using technology poorly and making things worse. I was inspired by some of these issues – and that was one of the reasons Being Smarter was born.
The 8.45 Club (one of our venture companies) has just re-released its course on workplace productivity. We’ve taken on board feedback, shortened it, and made the first session’s trial available without registration.
The course is made up of 12 video-based modules. (Do read them all, because there’s a bonus at the bottom of the page). Once you become a member, they are delivered to your inbox every two working days for a month and cover the following sessions:
Day 1: Keyboard shortcut keys – they speed up your life
We start with a free trial video and give you dozens of ways to increase your productivity by introducing you to the world of shortcuts. We throw down the gauntlet and say don’t do things in that way, just because you’ve been doing that for years – learn new ways to speed up you life. Will you rise to the challenge?!
Day 2: How to save hours a month through email productivity
We then focus on one of the biggest timewasters in business – managing email… and yes, it really is possible to do it better.
Day 3: Productivity monitoring – work out HOW you spend your time – then fix the problem
We then show you a way of getting organised and saying to yourself – are you really optimising the way you work (or your colleagues work?) We introduce a free tool which sits in the background and analyses how you spend your day at your PC. It’s invaluable and will almost certainly shock you at the end of the week when you look at the stats.
Day 4: How and why to share your desktop with anyone for free
We take a look at saving time and money from a travel perspective and see how easy it is to share your PC’s desktop with colleagues or customers, inside or outside of the firewall.
Day 5: Messy office? Not efficient and productive? There’s a link
Your office is a state isn’t it? Do you know where the post-it notes are? We give you plenty of thoughts from an industry leader on how to get more organised at home and at work. Note – this is bedtime reading as opposed to a video session today.
Day 6: Customize your desktop in seconds and save hours
We then move on to Day 6 and show you all kinds of time saving tips when it comes to customizing your PC to suit your needs, as opposed to Microsoft’s… This really isn’t for geeks – it’s for business people – so hang in there.
Day 7: To do list software – friend or foe?
Day 7 then moves on to talk about to do list software and gives you another free alternative which really should help you to get organised and improve the way your stats look from Day 3!
Day 8: Password management software – stop wasting time remembering your credentials
We then move onto the the tricky subject of password management software. How many passwords do you have – 10, 100, 1000? They are a fundamental part of every knowledge worker’s day and this advicelet shows you the perfect, secure way to manage them.
Day 9: Xobni review – Email productivity gets a boost with this awesome plugin
We then move onto looking at another real timesaver – back to email management and a plugin which should have been made by Microsoft originally – but they weren’t clever enough to think of it. We show you the plugin and the power it gives you when it comes to finding ’stuff’ in Outlook – which we all know takes ages… normally.
Day 10: How to write a good email – things you never think about (and should)
We may sound like we are teaching you to suck eggs – but we aren’t. Day 10 talks through some things to think about when you next write an email – taken from expert views in the industry. We bet it opens your eyes.
Day 11: Be more productive – how to fit 12 hours into 7.5
In our second and final piece of bedtime reading – we bring you a set of thoughts (ahem over 150) from industry leaders on the real vision for the course – squeezing 12 hours into your 7.5 hour day.
Day 12: Increase workplace productivity with this free mind mapping tool
And finally, we start with refreshing your memories on mindmapping – you’ve heard of it – but do you use it and do you want to spend £200 on the software? Well you don’t have to – it’s free now – and in the cloud – and excellent – we show you everything – warts and all today.
BONUS
To celebrate the relaunch of this already popular course – and as a thank you for finding Being Smarter… enter the coupon code “beingsmarter” in the registration box to receive a 50% discount until the end of September.
Workplace productivity can be found at this link. Enjoy!
We are pleased to announce today on Being Smarter another guest blogger, Ian Mash of Yeoman Consulting here in the UK. Ian helps us to continue the theme of ‘practical ways to help your business life” by sharing some of his experiences of working at the coalface as a senior manager in one of the UK’s largest companies – BT.
He starts today with a top tip on trend spotting.
Assimilating data quickly is a true management skill. Some managers can look at a page of figures (in for example a business case) and start asking deeply searching questions immediately. They can see anomalies and trends just from looking at the figures. However, not many of us can do this naturally and we have to rely on tools and techniques to guide us through.
Prior to working my education was science based but I didn’t have any business training per se until I did my MBA and that gave me a few tools to use.
But, the most useful everyday financial tool to me, is just a simple hand drawn graph to spot the trends.
You can do a very quick graph on excel if your drafting skills are poor.
It’s amazing how just say 4 data points drawn can show the anomalies in the trend that don’t immediately jump out of a financial analysis on the page and give you the leverage to start asking searching questions. Why does profit drop in year 3? Why is there a disproportionate capital spend in year 4? Etc.
It won’t give you the answers, but will start sensible digging with you and your team.
Ian Mash will be back with more pearls of wisdom in the next couple of weeks and can be contacted on +44 7860 621976 and via email at ian dot mash1 at btinternet.com
I seem to spend quite a lot of time explaining to people the power of social media. For some people, the penny drops. For other people there is much head scratching. For a different group of people, they plain don’t get it, don’t believe you and quite frankly, they prefer not to embrace change and the power that change can bring.
I’m not going to try and reinvent the wheel on this post – instead, I want to refer you to an expert in the field who’s written one of the best explanation I’ve seen about this whole mysterious area to the uninitiated.
David Meerman Scott draws an analogy between social media and going to a cocktail party. If you ever meet a colleague or friend who raises an eyebrow on the subject of social media. Refer them right here.
My wife is recruiting like crazy at the moment and I feel her pain… she works for a large corporate and the red tape around the recruitment process is a total nightmare. Of course it has to be done fairly and correctly, but it got me thinking that there must be a better way.
We’ve compiled a top 5 thoughts on how to recruit smarter. If you would like to add to the list – feel free below.
1) Is it time to ditch interviews?
How much can you really tell about someone in an hour’s interview? What if they interview badly and are plain nervous? What if they turn up 10 mins late because of a traffic jam, but interview really well? You then face a big dilemma.
As ever the marvellous Seth Goddin has some thoughts on this subject. I wholeheartedly agree with his approach, because I’ve done it!
2) Look online – but not the way you think
There are a number of fascinating stories around how people have been proactive online to secure their next dream role – so why not take advantage of the creativity which is out there and go search them out. Assuming you are looking for a dynamic, innovative, creative think outside of the box type of person, reach for the Google button. BUT whatever you do – don’t go near a jobsite. Instead use some of the keywords you associate with the job and see who crops up.
One of the fascinating stories we’ve found is Steve Chazin. He was made redundant from Apple, having spent nearly 10 years there. Instead of following the traditional path, Steve started a blog and wrote the e-book, Marketing Apple. He now does his dream consulting job, all because people found him as opposed to him finding them.
3) Generation Y – know your audience
Recruiting is a two way process – your candidate needs to actually like the look of your business and want to work there. Think about that as they sit across the table from you (assuming 1 doesn’t apply). Generation Y expects a lot. They want to know that your business is forward thinking. They want to know there’s opportunity. Most importantly they need to know they are going to like YOU. So sell yourself during the interview process. It’s like buying a house – ask yourself how gutted you would be if you lost that person to the competition.
The excellent folks at Tomorrow Today talk about this a lot. Here they talk about the war for talent.
4) Think about the cost of recruitment
Not something you necessarily think about, however if Microsoft can reduce their recruitment costs – you can too.
5) References
Be very sceptical of anyone who can’t provide a reference with a phone number. Where policy allows, ALWAYS call a reference before any offer of employment is made. It’s amazing the number of people who a) don’t bother and b) rely on written references. In 1 minute we’ve just found a dozen sites offering fake references, which we’re certainly not going to link to here!
Have a list of questions in advance and CALL at least one person. Doing that will be far more enlightening than requesting three written ones.
BONUS POINT
If you come across someone during the recruitment phase who clearly needs advice on how to come across at interview. Be a good citizen and point them at this Selling Yourself resource.
Happy recruiting.
Everyone has pet hates don’t they? Well one of mine is to see websites and other marketing collateral showing copyright dates with anything other than the current year. This becomes even more tiresome when you’ve actually informed the owner (who you know!) and they still don’t change it! (The two companies I’ve talked to in the last month shall remain nameless).
It’s got me thinking – why does it bother me so much – and does it bother anyone else? It bothers me simply because of my expectations around the speed of information change online. If someone hasn’t posted on a blog for a month, you assume the site is out of business… if someone is quoted in an article with a date from more than six months ago – you start to assume that they couldn’t get anyone better… We are all starting to demand real-time information – anything more than a few hours old is simply not uptodate enough. Am I being fair?
So back to the copyright thing. If you discover a new site and are wondering whether it is authorative – look for the copyright notice – is it showing this year? If not – vote with your feet – the owner hasn’t bothered to update it – the information is probably out of date. I’ve just done my own (very random) little survey (which took around 15 mins) and would suggest the following site owners take a look at the following:
All the above are top European companies, who almost certainly employee dozens of people to run their websites. How are you faring?
It’s so easy to become distracted from your working day with the browser constantly open and the Internet always available to you. Leaving your Outlook client on all day is another massive distraction too – which is another story. Turn that off straight away!
If you are looking for ways to be smarter when it comes to putting some focus on your day, Read it Later could be a handy little application for you to know about. In short, it stops you from becoming distracted from what you were doing, without losing a piece of useful information, which could just disappear into the ether.
Read it later is a simple, free application, which has just had its second birthday and comes in three flavo(u)rs – Firefox, Iphone, or any other browser. You are surfing away – trying hard to meet a deadline, and of course you become distracted by an unrelated blog post or other snippet of information that suddenly takes you completely away from what you were trying to achieve originally.
Get into the habit of clicking the Read it later button, which installs into your browser… stop being distracted! What will then happen is that Read it later will file away the URL you were just going to look at for easy access later. You can continue to focus on what you were doing – safe in the knowledge that during you allotted ‘follow up’ or ‘spare’ time even – you can go back and examine the link…
If using Firefox, you can click on the ReadItLater dropdown on the right of Firefox’s search box to expand the list of items you’ve added. ReadItLater conveniently sorts the links by oldest added (you can change this), so you see the stuff that’s been hanging out there the longest at the top. You can quickly filter the list by tag, page name, site, or URL, too.
One of the really cool features of ReadItLater is that it automatically saves links to your Firefox bookmarks in a folder you specify. So if you’re already syncing your bookmarks across computers, your reading list goes to other computers.
In addition – at Being Smarter, we send the list to an RSS feed, which we can then view in Google Reader when time allows.
This is an excellent recommendation for business people serious about putting more focus into the day. It’s a great habit to get into reaching for that Read it Later button…
Demo for you below if you like the sound of it… watch it and then go and be more focused… like its million other users!
We are pleased to announce our second guest blogger signing to the Being Smarter blog – from a CEO who’s company is all about helping businesses to become smarter. Aaron McCormack is the CEO BT Conferencing and will be joining us regularly with his thoughts on being smarter in business.
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So who gives a @$£%@ about the Tweeting and Blogging and Facebook updates of anyone, when we all have jobs to get done? I was much quicker to adopt social networking tools in my personal life. Although many Facebook friends are now professional contacts and it is hard to tell the difference nowadays.
Even Twitter (the “domain of twits” I used to say) has recently become an entertaining place for me (@aaronirish) following the updates from all the various riders in the Tour de France (#tdf)
But do these tools have any role to play in helping us, or anyone else, get our work done?
There is a view that companies enabling social networks for internal use will simply end up helping their people spend more hours gossiping and sharing pictures online, rather than helping people get things delivered.
I tend to agree.
Many of my colleagues disagree. They think that corporate social networking tools (those we know, and some that are yet to be invented) will be the way that people do business going forward. People point to the way that these tools help folks build stronger relationships, find the right resources, enhance knowledge management and gain wider perspectives. Books like the Wisdom of Crowds tell us that if we can find a way of sourcing everyone’s input in a group, then the group makes better decisions.
Because you are here reading this blog, you are more likely to believe that social networking tools are useful. But would you bet your own money on it?
Let us know what you think…
Aaron McCormack is CEO of BT conferencing http://www.conferencing.bt.com/ a division of BT Group plc, one of the world’s leading providers of telecommunications services. For over 20 years, BT Conferencing has specialised in the delivery of robust, reliable and innovative conferencing solutions – backed up by high quality service and support.
We are delighted to announce today our very first guest blog post from Jake Willott, a smart business owner who wanted to contribute to the Being Smarter community… Take it away Jake.
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Mark-up and Gross Margin are two different beasts
A clear understanding and application of the two within your pricing model will have a drastic impact on the bottom line.
Mark-up is the percentage difference between the actual cost and the selling price
£90 x 25% = £112.25
Gross margin (or gross margin) is the percentage difference between the selling price and the profit. Profit/Sales Price.
£22.50/£112.50 = 20%
These two definitions are extremely important because gross margin directly tells us how many of our £’s from sales are profit.
It is easy to make the mistake in thinking that if a product is marked up by 25%, the result will be a 25% gross margin on the income statement. However, a 25% mark-up rate produces a gross margin percentage of only 20%. By targeting the gross margin percentage vs the mark-up percentage, businesses in general can add an additional 5% profit to the bottom line.
A worked example:
If you increased the selling price of a product by 5% the figures then look like:
Buy at £90 sell at £120. £30 profit (or 25% gross margin)
Increase sale price by 5%. £120 x 1.05 = £126
The cost to us remains the same so the gross profit is now £36 and gross margin is 28.5%.
So the gross margin has gone up by 3.5%, which as a percentage of the starting 25% is an increase of 14%
So for a 5% increase on the selling price we’ve gained a 14% increase in gross margin.
Even better, let’s look at the cash profit. You were making £30 on the sale, now you’re making £36 – an extra £6. As a proportion of our initial £30, that’s a 20% increase.
A 20% increase in cash for a 5% increase in sale price.
The reason this happens (if you’re still here) is that any improvement in gross margin % is multiplied by the turnover.
In summary:
Figure out who your most profitable customers are, and we can only know that if we measure using the correct metrics.
And a small change in selling price has a large effect on increasing profit.
Jake Willott is the MD of Computer Medicine
The computer people who come to you
www.computermedicine.co.uk
If in doubt, call a meeting – that’s right isn’t it? Over 25 million meetings take place in corporate America daily. I suspect there is a proportional number in the UK too. Almost certainly half of that time is wasted.
According to a 2007 Microsoft survey, the average time a worker spends in meetings each week around the world is 5.6 hours and 69% claim these meetings are unproductive. Were you interviewed? because I bet you are in the same boat.
How many hours do you spend a week attending meetings? Is there a better way – would a phone call suffice? Would a quick chat over coffee get the job done? It’s always worth considering.
There are always times however, when it is absolutely necessary to have a meeting whether it’s to get a decision made or to review a business case. Want to know how to run a successful meeting? Then there’s some tips below and watch out for a post on ice-breakers coming soon.
1) Know when and when not to call one
If there are no clear-cut answers to this question, don’t hold it!
- Brainstorming
- Delivering information
- Gathering information
- Decision making
2) Get inspired before you start
3) Preparation is key
4) Focus on three areas beforehand:
5) Rules for chairing
7) Don’t let these things happen
(8) Action points – the whole point of a meeting