The Weekly Distillation No.33
Delegating Your Work; Coronavirus; WFH; Technology To Change Our Future; The Next Decade
Mars, from the UAE spacecraft - as published by Sky News
This newsletter is written for entrepreneurial organisational leaders and aims to help map current events to longer term themes of our context and provide questions, tips and tools that can help in navigating these times.
“Facebook’s actions to unfriend Australia today, cutting off essential information services on health and emergency services, were as arrogant as they were disappointing. They may be changing the world, but that doesn’t mean they run it.” - Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison
Tim Boyd, Mayor of Colorado City, Texas. He later resigned after realising he may have slightly misjudged the moment.
“We are choosing to use the very limited headroom we have right now to get at least some children back to school - because children's education and wellbeing is such a priority.” - Nicola Sturgeon, First Minister of Scotland
“Of all tyrannies a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive.” - C. S. Lewis
“I get a little behind during Lent, but it comes out even at Christmas.” - Frank Butler
Delegate to Elevate
Photo by Luis Villasmil on Unsplash
There’s a book I read every year called Traction. I read this book more than any other book apart from the Bible, it’s that good. I hesitate to even mention it as 99% of my business chat is informed by the ideas and principles in here. I currently am listening to it on Audible. In essence, it’s an operating system to run an organisation - very logical, very simple and clearly has an impact - I have two good friends who run their businesses off it and swear by it. I use Traction principles in a lot of my coaching and have 2 current coachees reading it. I should be on commission. Whilst it is aimed at organisations doing $2m+ of revenue, I have found many of the principles do apply to earlier stage ventures too.
One of the key principles of it came back to me this week and it was “Delegate to Elevate”. I’ve been struck by how much life is often shaped by interruptions and is rarely linear and as planned. However, it’s also easy to get distracted onto the urgent, or the noise, and watch day after day pass when you are not focused on the key goals that drive the organisation forwards. You can’t ignore the urgent - so how do you make capacity for the unexpected, or the noise? Delegation.
By delegating, even when you could do it better, faster, with less resources, it’s still better to delegate. I hate delegating - everything in me says “don’t ask someone to do something you are not willing to do yourself”, “you’re not any more important than they are and it’s arrogant of you to hand off your work to them”, “they are busy too” or “it will take even more time to train, correct, review than if you did it yourself” - but the reality is it is an essential practise to scale yourself. I’ve now taking to the practise of turning my task list into “Key”, “Secondary” and “Delegate”. It’s amazing to me how good other people are, how much joy I get out of receiving work that other people did (often done better and quicker than I would have done it), and how much more capacity I free up to work on key goals.
In 2021, it’s likely to get go crazy busy as lockdowns unwind, consumer and corporate confidence returns and everyone wants to buy,buy,buy. The practise of delegation is a good one to remember for keeping yourself sane, focused on your goals and in not becoming the blockage to organisational progress. #notetoself. (If you’re a solopreneur, think about how you might leverage freelancers and outsourcing opportunities).
Coronavirus
More good news this week with the collapse in case numbers (-75% from the peak daily rate), falling death rates and rising vaccination numbers. It’s impossible to tell from these charts if that is down to 1) the lockdown 2) winter or 3) the vaccine, Mapping vs the US where there are less lockdowns would suggest a lot of this is seasonal, plus some lockdown impact, but not really any major vaccine impact as yet.
Vaccine roll out has been quick in the UK - with over 95% of over 85 year olds now vaccinated and everyone over 75 having been offered a vaccine. Some children go back to school on Monday, two months after they broke up for Christmas, and this marks a major milestone for both our family but also for the start of the unwinding process.
In my neighbourhood of 4500 people there have been 6 positive cases in the last 7 days (135 / 100k). Six. And yet we remain unable to travel outside of our city, meet more than one adult for exercise, or even leave our homes for anything other than essential purposes (a tightly defined list which for me is basically exercise). I have taken to doing a lot of walking phone calls for work. Short may this lockdown last.
The Future of Work
CBRE has produced a report showing only 28% of workers want to work fully remotely but only 6% want to work fully in the office. The hybrid wave is here - there will be no going back to masses of people full time in offices. The graphic above is fascinating - but the satellite office network is lacking. How far do you want to travel from home? Probably not much more than 1 mile I would have thought. How many spaces within a mile of your home can currently give you privacy, community and a professional and enjoyable space at an appropriate cost? Who pays? Will the employer pick up the cost of serviced office desks remotely, as well as the ongoing city centre leases? Unlikely. I used to do some of my remote work out of a nearby church building that was rarely heavily used Mon-Fri - these are classic spaces that could serve the distributed office space demand.
Here’s a tip - it’s not good for you to work from bed for a year.
And here’s how the jobs market is going global. Your next job will be harder to get as a result of Covid driven workplace changes.
How Technology is shaping our future
Photo by Nizzah Khusnunnisa on Unsplash
A few stories on tech that caught my eye:
How anti-human-trafficking apps are failing to live up to their promise. I talk to several entrepreneurs who are building apps to bring about positive social change - but is the reality harder than the imagination?
Many people in the whisky/whiskey industry believe that the process of crafting spirits is 1 part science and 9 parts art. It’s a guaranteed way to upset a distiller if you mention Lost Spirits, or Bespoken Spirits, or any of the other companies that claim the can use technology to age whisky/whiskey overnight. There is high conviction in the industry that these technologies will never equate to a similar product. I think the marketing around these industries is so strong that the industry is safe for a long time yet. But I always remember a lecturer of mine at University who said that the railroads in America didn’t die out as the primary form of transport because they made better railways, or faster trains - it was because someone invented the airplane.
How scientists are working to invent ways of turning your body into a battery. So many applications for that.
Brain implants that can fight depression. Mental health is one of the great battles of Western society (and for Gen Z will be truly horrific) so seeing technology solutions to tackle it (the irony is not lost on me) is fascinating.
A Long Read for the Weekend
Photo by Vlad Tchompalov on Unsplash
There’s a growing narrative, and one bought into by financial markets, that the 2020’s will be the most amazing decade: Covid will be defeated; the pent-up savings will be spent in a burst of hedonism and relief; interest rates will be kept low to avoid bankrupting nation states with 100%+ debt to GDP ratios; inflation will remain low thanks to global supply chains and technology and finally the maturing of many of the startups of the 2000s will lead to tech advancing the quality of our life on earth (how’s that social media addiction going?).
I’m sceptical because of the history of mankind and its ability to do stupid in the face of great opportunity - but it’s pretty certain that there will be a near term mass uplift in economic activity in the next 2 years, this is not rocket science. But what might impact the rest of the decade?
Thanks for reading. As ever, if you liked this then please share it with others.