Brand and Ross – The cure for your recession blues

So two comedy muppets make some silly phone calls and the whole world loses its senses.

Or so it would seem to the untrained eye. But look past what’s going on here and you’ll see that this is actually a very clever tactic to stop the general public from committing mass suicide over the impending economic doom. All we need is some weekly celebrity outrage for everyone to take their mind off the fact that their house is now worth tuppence and before you know it, two years will have passed and it will be economic boom-time once more. Huzzah.

Here’s some of my suggestions for potential outrages that we can all get stupidly, overblownly upset about over the next few weeks:

Richard Madeley farts live on air into the face of a child with a poorly hand.

Sir Trevor MacDonald wops his cock out on News at Ten, banging it on the desk in time with the gongs.

Whilst on Countryfile, John Craven pats a sheep on the arse before turning to the camera and winking.

BBC’s Children in Need falls into disrepair when a human alphabet accidentially spells the words, “Get off your fat backsides and do something constructive you lazy bunch of worthless cunts” instead of the intended “We love you Pudsey” 

Simon Cowell stands up whilst one of the acts on X-Factor does another fucking godawful cover of something fucking godawful, turns to the camera mouthing the words “I’m so so sorry” and then machine guns Louis Walsh, Dannii Minogue and that one from Girls Aloud before turning the gun on himself, blasting his head across the crowd as his neck explodes in a firework of spurting bloodguts. 

Feel free to add your own atrocities below.

Tribal Business School

More from the CMI convention. And I was in a session by Jo Owen where he was talking about his discoveries in researching his book, Tribal Business School. There’s a lickle video where he explains what its all about:

http://www.meettheauthor.co.uk/bookbites/1527.html

The way he described it to us was that there are Five Pillars:

1. The Art of Unfair Competition

Tribes survive and thrive because they get fool-proof advantages – they don’t have a bare-knuckle fist fight with a lion to kill it, they shoot it from a distance with a poisoned arrow when its unaware that it is under attack. Jo says that we need to think about how we apply this to our businesses. What are our foolproof advantages? Do we even have any? If not, how do we get them? There is a line of thinking that might say as a Students’ Union in many ways our foolproof advantages are that we have more opportunities than other businesses to impress our customers. In Student Activities, we tend to be the sole provider of activities and therefore new friendship groups – and if we’re not the only people doing that activity, we’re actually the easiest for people to discover. Because we are right on their doorsteps. In a way, the laziness of our students could be considered an unfair advantage to anyone who doesn’t have the ease of access that we have – if they have to search very hard for something, they are unlikely to bother.

An interesting point Jo brought up with this was the idea of picking the right battles. You might not be able to win all of your battles, but don’t make that worse by picking ones that you definitely aren’t going to win. Be pragmatic, sensible. I think of conflict I’ve had in the past, whether inter-departmental, between our office and a student group, or even at home with my girlfriend and I think about the wasted energy and the potential damage to reputation that has occurred unnecessarily. 

2. The Secrets of Leadership

And the main secret seems to be that the perfect leader doesn’t exist. Some of the terms used to describe the perfect leader are in polar opposition to each other. The perfect leader would implode under the weight of the contradictions. But what was noticed was that “perfect” leadership changed dependent on the situation and that at each level of leadership, the expectation of the followers (and of the leader themselves) was different. 

This didn’t feel like it was massively new news – I’ve read and practiced situational leadership so I’m already a convert to the idea of doing different things to be the best in any particular situation. But it was interesting seeing it expressed in a different context. It was also interesting when he said that followers look for 3 key things when they look to their role model leader: Courage, Contribution and Responsibility. That’s interesting because those are three concepts that can be readily applied to the workplace environment. I can think of times when I’ve seen colleagues show great courage (and also when I’ve seen them be incredibly cowardly) and how I’ve felt about them because of that. Contributing to the overall success of a project is vital, often in terms of simply making the thing happen, but it also shows the people you work with that you are not afraid to muck in to create success and that you are not asking them to do something you wouldn’t be willing to do. 

Responsibility is something which I have a major issue about. I look around and I see a culture of blame shifting, a culture where people are afraid to admit to their mistakes. When at work I tell my team – I don’t mind people making mistakes, because with the best will in the world mistakes will happen. What I want you to do is say, yes that was my mistake, and this is how I solve it. A major problem that we have in Student Activities at Leeds is where the committee members of our groups won’t own up to the mistakes they’ve made, sometimes outright lying when the evidence is right in front of them. The problem is that by trying to protect themselves, they create a blame culture and affect people’s perception of them. I think this has a clear link to Jo’s next point…

3. The Respect Agenda

In tribal societies, the emphasis is on the community. These people live and die together. Therefore, there has to be a respect for the community – the individual cannot survive without it. There is a stark comparison to be drawn with Students’ Unions here – the community as a whole supports the activities of the smaller groupings by drinking in the bars and buying things from our shops. Collectivism is at the heart of our model – this isn’t rock science. But the next bit was more like it.

In talking to a tribal leader, Jo was told that before you can respect your peers and your community, you have to respect yourself. This is particularly true if you are the leader. Now think about a society demanding funding from a Union. What is at the bottom of this request? Many would argue that there is no problem with self-respect as they often have a very high opinion of their own importance and how good their are. But does it come from deserving this because they are good or is it something else? I suspect that the main reason societies get demanding about money is because of fear. They fear that they won’t be able to run their activities, that their events won’t be very good, that their members will vote with their feet, and that as the organiser, they will look bad. However, if they are comfortable with what they provide, if they know that it really is a high quality product, they don’t have to worry about the money as people will pay the price. We’re seeing this more and more at Leeds – insecurity is removed not by providing shedloads of cash as a buffer, but through groups understanding their worth, and the worth of other groups. They look outwards at the effect they have on each other now. This is a stella leap from where we used to be. And its due to the fact that they don’t have to talk a big game any more, their activities back them up. The output backs them up.

4. The Search for Fit

The essence of survival and success is perfectly adapting to your environment. The search for excellence is an exercise in futility – stop trying to be like someone else and find out what works for your environment.

I want to take those words and tattoo them onto the foreheads of everyone who works in Students’ Unions. We talk about sharing best practice to not reinvent the wheel. What we mean is, I can’t be bothered to think of an idea, your’s works so gimme that. Every time you put something on a mailbase, take the principle and adapt it to fit your area, don’t just ape it or change the logos. To fit your environment you need to understand your environment. Get out and hear what your students are saying. Create a vision for your area and work to that. We do things differently here and people say “oh well, that’s because you’re Leeds and you can afford to”. So we can. But what can you do with your resources? What are your natural advantages? Work to them and stop thinking you’re in my shadow!

5. Change or Die

I don’t think I need to explain this one. At least I hope I don’t. We’re on a road and the only direction is forward. Don’t change for change’s sake, but keep yourself current, appropriate, interesting. Adapt to your challenges and change for the better. There’s an exercise about future thinking where you think about what it was like 10 years ago compared to now and then project what 10 years in the future will be like. Its actually pretty impossible. Here’s a list of things that didn’t exist or weren’t so ubiquitous in 1998:

iPod, Facebook, Myspace, Youtube, Sky+, Zoo & Nuts magazine, Pear Cider, etc, etc, etc.

Things that are everyday parts of your life (or maybe just my life) weren’t in existence. Now think about your union. What are you still doing that you did 10 years ago? How has that changed? Has it changed? If not, why not? 

Overall, Jo Owen presented a number of interesting conclusions, conclusions that can be readily adapted and implemented in a Union environment. That is, if you’re willing to take up that challenge.

Club & Society Sustainability

I went to the Chartered Management’s Annual Convention down in Birmingham last week and jolly good it was as well too. I’ve realised that the thing I like about conferences these days is that they often give you an opportunity to look at your own work from a distant, removed point of view. You might not necessarily learn any new skills but you always come away with a new idea or a new way of approaching a particular subject.

The opening speaker was from a company called Johnson Matthey – they work mainly with precious metal and using them as catalysts in chemical processes. So far, so ho hum. But it was less his background and more the concepts he was talking about that interested me. The subject of his talk was Sustainability and how as a principle it should be embedded into the planning and operations of any business. He outlined that it wasn’t simply an additional initiative outside of the day to day running of any business that could be tossed away when, like now, economic times were not so great. Instead, he stated that sustainability, if used as a key process, could lead to more efficiency and cost savings. Therefore, there was never actually a better time to focus on it.

It got me thinking – for a club or society, what does sustainability look like? Its funny because we have an award in our annual award ceremony but I don’t know if we’ve ever bottomed out exactly what we mean. Is it from an environmental point of view? Or looking simply from the direction of ongoing financial stability? Furthermore, its not a concept that we raise at any point with our committee volunteers – it doesn’t form any part of either the initial induction or the mid-term review meeting. We seem to be therefore expecting that our volunteers both understand what the concept means and that they can take this concept and from it form initiatives that affect the way their activity runs improving it for the future.

It seems to me that before we can get volunteer buy-in, we need to make sure they understand what we are saying. And I think the way that we make them understand what we are talking about is to give them clear examples of what a sustainability initiative or goal looks like. The speaker gave a couple of good examples: “Achieve zero waste to landfill” & “Halve the key resources we consume (per unit of output)”. Whilst these are clear in a commercial environment, how would this translate to the football club?

Sport is a clear area where sustainability needs to be considered but is probably furthest from people’s thinking. We calculated that last year we produced 3.1 tonnes of CO2 from the volume of travelling that our sports teams did getting to their various fixtures. We’ve tried to reduce the amount of travelling we do, the number and size of the vehicles we use, and where possible we try to put teams together in buses. We’re not doing this because we are concerned about the amount of environmental damage we are doing – its purely a cost-saving exercise. In the end, we could only reduce it to a certain level so we chose to offset our production by donating to a tree planting project. I’d like to think we’ll also be looking to use hybrid and electric vehicles when more come onto the market in the coming years.

But we are only one institution who plays sport in the UK. BUCS (British Universities & Colleges Sport) is the governing body that covers over x institutions who take part in sport. Some of them are smaller than us in terms of their programmes, some are larger. It would be unfair to simply take our carbon total and multiple it by the number of institutions as this might over state the amount of CO2 produced by competitive sport at University level. Some interesting stats you can find though are if you search for “sustainability” on the BUCS website, it yields one result – a link to a HEFCE event on wellbeing which is running in Newcastle at the start of next year. A similar search for “environment” yields more results (40), but none of these articles refer to any kind of policy about sustainability considerations – instead the search software is simply finding the world out of context in other articles or, in 12 instances, in job adverts.

I’m not stating this to pick on BUCS or try to embarrass them – mainly because I doubt they read this blog, but also because if they did I suspect not many of them would actually give a toss. And that to me is the major problem. How do you engage someone in this debate when they don’t see it as being an important consideration of their work?

There’s a step that we can take and a step that they can take. We need to brief our committees about this and get them to understand the importance of it. As the man at the conference said, “Long term the resources are going to become more scarce and therefore, more expensive”. We need to provide them with opportunities to think about how they current run their activities and how they can do it in a more sustainable way in the future. Another quote from the man, “As soon as cost-saving was called sustainability, the team had six times as many ideas.” There has to be a way to translate this into a language that makes sense for our committee volunteers.

But we also need big groups like BUCS to take a stand and start to lead this agenda. I know its going to be difficult because it doesn’t seem particularly sexy – but this is an organisation where people will volunteer to set fixtures and change league structures. Surely amongst the mechanics there’s someone with an interest in sustainability issues and how this relates to sport.

The more people who are talking about this, the more our students are likely to pick up on it and make the changes that they need to make to their groups.