When your head get dry, just wander

Selling possible is the most challenging profession of all.
Let's see, a very good salesperson have to be smart; honest; sincere but delicate; self confident; well dressed; charismatic; have a nice sense of acting, pace and timing; have a good voice; be capable to run a marathon of work; be in form for travelling a lot; and after all that, must have a lots of pragmatic creativeness that is distilled in a headline seasoned with facts and anecdotes that sell.

But, what happens when suddenly your head gets off-tune? When no one of your anecdotes fit the situation, when you can't find the way to match your environment with a miserable headline:

Suddenly you get dry of ideas

That is what just happened to me coming back from a business journey to Madrid. I spent three hours in the cabin, trying to find the correct headline, searching for the right facts that would hit the heart, the tummy and the heads of those whom I must talk next day...nothing, nothing get out from my mind.

I was really worried and somehow frustrated by the idea of defenselessness in front of that white paper sheet: when you got no ideas, you really can't sell anything, because selling is always a mental attitude whose currency are words. Words full of sense, of course.

Luckily, I remembered that getting deep in the situation wouldn't resolve my problems. Letting run my imagination as I was walking from train station to home would. And really did. Why?

Because daydreaming help to free your mind, gives your head the necessary spaces for linking ideas -that at first sight, may seem without any connection. Wandering gives you the scenario for daydreaming -the changing spaces as you walk, discovering new details in architecture, looking and imagining with garden shapes, lights and shades, even reading the rotten street advertising boards.

Simply visualize your destination, ask your head to do its work, and help it fantasising.

It really works for me, at anytime..that's the reason why my favourite hobby is letting fly my imagination.

Lazy managers: taking easy decissions on crisis time

Few time ago I read in a forum a challenge posted by a colleague in a consultancy firm: "He was  asked by company CEO to reduce loss in 10%", mainly caused by economical crisis and company drift (that CEO was commanding) in searching business deals.

Answers were diverse, but I will take the one from a "manager"  that took all my attention: "Fire 10% of human resources".

So,  the problem would be reduced to whom of all those employees should we fire and how expensive could it be (really "fire the less expensive group that suppose an increase of 10% in savings"). Lamentably he was not the only one, another managers proposed similar  easy solutions.


"Simple, mathematical and unethical"

My perception of unethical is not only because the consequent human side of the history, but because of the consequences for the company.

There are more to lose than to win if you fire people from a company:

• Loss of knowledge: is a reality in any company that the knowledge is still saved at human hard-drive, the brain of every employee.
• Loss of motivation in those that remain and that see that their heads will fall if more savings are needed.
• Finding a place for those that are forced to abandon the ship, something that is usual in consultancy firms (at least till now).
•  Loss of new products and markets: any employee is hired because his capability to generate or develop products, services or enlarge the market.

Such an answer can only come from a "lazy manager" that want to achieve his objective in the easiest and direct way possible. Desperation is not an excuse (his work is just managing).

"lazy manager is blind to the fact that firing part of his team will result in a bigger loss than the 10% of saving"


Lamentably this situation is not so rare. Lazy managers are abundant in companies of all sizes, but specially in big ones.

In crisis time real managers, or better said, real leaders are needed. Leaders that empower their employees to think deeply and achieve a real solution to the problems. Leaders that see all the facets of company and take correct decisions. Leaders that see the positive formulation of the situation.

In this problem (where business mix with human facet), a leader that reformulate the problem as the way to "how to earn a 10% more" define a better objective, because focus in growing. Everyone in company would be involved and more motivated in that challenge and, as we can remember, if we propose our brain the correct question to be solved, it is able to give us, early or late, the correct answer.

Those answers could be: finding new products observing market opportunities or competency weakness, redistribution of company structure, enhancing of company activity map, and so on.

"Crisis time is full of difficult moments, obviously, where character of people are proved. But crisis are time for huge opportunities too, if you are able as "manager" to look reality in deep and be brave enough to don't take the easy way and give the steps toward the correct direction"

Swarm Intelligence: think about business like social insects do

As technology flood our lives filling every interstice, it has brought to us a new way to relate with each other and has opened a new box plenty of possibilities for business, all in all a new way to think about it.

This technology is intended to help everyone of us to play in a technological social world (linkedin, facebook, twitter, etc), with minimum effort (no deep thinking needed), where, in an ubiquitous manner (say through smart phones), each of us contributes to a whole, follows simple rules and finding exciting ways to solve complex problems, and makes his or her work in a free non-controlled way.

If we summarize all above, we will reach a conclusion: we are becoming social insects.

All kind of social insects (like bees and ants) have been studied by scientists since long ago because their amazing efficiency. Since a decade, big companies are actually putting that research to work: the outcome is impressive!

"Southwest airlines company turned to an unlikely source, ants, to solve cargo problems looking how they forage: using simple rules, always found efficient routes to food resources. This knowledge applied to this artificial environment resulted in an improvement of 80% in transfer rates and an important workload decrease. Other examples include Unilever, HP, Xerox, McGraw-Hill, etc… (Harvard Business Review, May 2001)"

The key for social insects is the teamwork that is largely self-organized, coordinated primarily through simple rules, which allow solving complex problems (like find the shortest path to forage) due to three important characteristics any company would like for itself:

• They can adapt to their changing environment with impressive flexibility; 
• The group can still perform its tasks, even when one individual fail, maintaining robustness; and 
• No need of central control or supervision for activities, they are capable of self-organization.

If we translate this ideas to an organization, we will realize that the trend of technology and organization behavior take us to a scenario of collaborative team work, where controlled chaos represented by self-organized workers can give a company the capabilities to be so much flexible and robust to cope the economic fluctuating reality.

To do this possible a system composed by multitasking self-managed workers is needed; everyone should be specialized in one aspect, but capable to perform any sort of task in the organization, giving this the required flexibility and robustness.

In this way the organization chart should be flat and leadership will be distributed along the members’ interactions and its main task will be the empowerment of characteristics said (See figure 1 against 2).

So, to this point, Management should see clearly that the endowing of enterprise with these tools is actually the one solution we (and Nature) know to face up this complex reality, where the change and uncertainty are the only and invariable truth.

As a last word it must be said it’s great we start to work like bees do, it’s great our organizations and relationships become collaborative, and flexible and robust, but every one of us should be alert not to become as meager in intelligence as a bee or ant alone are.