How to be persistent and adaptable at the same time

The British venerate the “stiff upper lip”, the persistent, uncomplaining attitude on which, it is often written, the empire was built. Sir Winston Churchill, recently voted the greatest ever Briton, famously said in 1941:

Never give in - never, never, never, never, in nothing great or small, large or petty, never give in except to convictions of honour and good sense. Never yield to force; never yield to the apparently overwhelming might of the enemy.

Churchill’s persistence was legendary, but his circumstances were also exceptional. For many of us good sense requires that we do give up from time to time.

Often we have to ask ourselves "Am I being persistent - or foolhardy?"  While it can be difficult to tell without the benefit of hindsight, sometimes it is better to walk away than to stick to your course of action to the bitter end.  In fact, sticking to the wrong course can lead to far worse results than walking away...

Are you a quitter or a sitter?

When you review your life so far, do you notice that you spent longer in jobs and relationships than your peers?  Or maybe you move nimbly from one role to another but sometimes wish that you had stuck at something for longer?  Everyone has a predisposition to a certain level of persistence, and if you're persistent in one area of your life the chances are you will be in all of them.

But regrets for having stayed too long can be just as powerful as regrets for having quit too soon.  Sitters lose time while quitters lose opportunities.  If like me you've grown up believing that quitting is a sign of weakness, it's worth remembering that persistence is a means to an end, not an end in itself.  There is nothing good about sticking to your course for its own sake - especially if it's the wrong course.

Knowing when to walk away

Look around you always.  If you notice that the circumstances that made your goal worth pursuing have changed, ask yourself whether persisting is still your best course of action.  And look at yourself.  Are your dreams and aspirations still the same, or have they changed so that your goal is no longer as important as other priorities?

These internal and external considerations can help you identify whether it's time to walk away by helping you identify whether there is something more important to walk towards.

Choosing what to walk towards

So the decision to quit doesn't have to be a negative one.  It can instead be a decision that due to changing circumstances, a new goal is even more important.  This is a positive step rather than an act of cowardice - it ensures that your efforts are most likely to deliver results, and that your persistence is applied where it will be most effective.

The great economist John Maynard Keynes said: When the facts change, I change my mind.  What do you do sir?

If you can choose distant goals that provide a unifying purpose for all your actions, you will be able to master Churchillian persistence.  A coherent and convergent vision of what you want to achieve provides the best possible framework for persistent effort.

Don't call it "quitting" when it's "fitting"

Once you've identified your long-term goals, perseverance and change can co-exist.  Your pursuit of your goal is a constant, persistent theme, yet you can adapt and adjust to fit your environment.  Just as water always seeks the lowest point but will follow many paths to find it, so you can change course and speed en route to your goal and try many routes, while all the while persisting towards your ultimate destination.

On competitiveness - picking the battles you want to win

On Monday evening I was invited to the launch of Row2Recovery - a great new charity supporting injured servicemen and women and their families. Sir Ranulph Fiennes gave a very entertaining speech about motivation, and its role in the many expeditions he has led. Motivation was a very relevant topic - the Row2Recovery team, including several servicemen who have lost limbs in Afghanistan, are preparing to row across the Atlantic.

Although his subject

was "motivation", one theme kept recurring - competitiveness. It was very clear that Sir Ranulph's principal motivation is competitiveness. Time and again he described decisions to prepare an expedition based on a desire to beat all other explorers - usually the French or Norwegians. As more and more of the world's challenges have been notched up by explorers, he has operated in the margin between that which has already been done, and that which is not possible.

Sir Ranulph explained that he was also competing for media attention - so that he could attract the sponsors who finance his expeditions. So when his New York based literary agent told him that desert expeditions were going out of fashion and that polar exploration was the new vogue, he began looking for cold weather records to break (and found several).

Few of us operate in the extreme competitive environment relished by Sir Ranulph, and I saw an example of the kind of competitive consideration that is more relevant in most of our lives when I visited a company yesterday. Hanging from one of the walls was a board with an African Proverb written on it - so I pulled out my camera.

A gazelle does not need to be the fastest gazelle - but it needs to be faster than at least one of its companions if it is to survive for long. This echoes the advice given to people going camping in bear country: "you don't need to be able to outrun bears, just take a slow camping companion with you".

Many organisations struggle to define their competitive set. It's very important to know who you need to beat in order to be successful, and sometimes it's not obvious. Sometimes the competitors you choose can respond very differently from you - for example because the cost of failure to them is much higher, or much lower. As a result, your competitor analysis should contain a thorough examination of what your rivals are seeking to achieve too. You may find that you can conserve resources by not taking on competitions that are unwinnable or unnecessary - and from time to time it makes sense to cooperate with your competitors to enlarge the opportunity that you both wish to exploit.

It pays to be a winner

If you would like some practice, try playing "it pays to be a winner" with some of your friends. The rules are simple. All you need to do is choose a distant but visible object, ideally at the top of a hill. Then race each other around the object and back to your starting point. The first person back to the starting point wins the first round, and can relax and watch as the remaining players repeat the process, until there is only one loser left!

This game has a number of benefits:

1. It will get you very fit
2. You'll find out how fast you are compared to your friends
3. You'll learn how to judge when to use your resources

This final benefit is the key one. There is no point in expending energy coming second, so the best players conserve their resources until they know they have a good chance of winning - and then they go for it. To do this successfully you need a thorough knowledge of your rivals' strengths and weaknesses, and their appetite for risk.

Go on - give it a try!

The team from Row2Recovery are competing against each other for places in the final crew, and then they will be competing with the elements and with other crews to cross the Atlantic as quickly as possible. That's competitive spirit, and a battle worth winning!

Take risks early - lessons from Commando Training

This is one of a series of articles on lessons from Commando training.  Here is the full list.

Commando training offers lessons that reach far beyond soldiering skills. One of the widely applicable lessons of Commando tactics is the evaluation of risk and return - and the timing of risk-taking.

After a few weeks of learning the basics of field survival, navigation, communications and weapon skills, Royal Marines learn to disappear.

The "tactical" phase of Commando training enables Royal Marines to see without being seen, and to move undetected from place to place. These are vital military skills, and tactical movement gives big advantages on the battlefield and in low intensity conflicts where discretion is required.

One of the most important applications of tactical movement is reconnaissance. It's often said that "time spent in reconnaissance is never wasted" - but this isn't true!

I was introduced to tactical movement on a patrolling exercise called "Long Night". It was well named: we spent every night for a week conducting reconnaissance patrols around Norfolk, and every day planning the next night's outings. We would typically creep around 5 miles per night, silently but at a snail's pace.

Towards the end of the week, we were all very short of sleep, and we asked our instructor, who was an SBS Sergeant, what he thought. His answer has stayed with me ever since:

"If you're going to take risks, take them early"

That night, my 4 man team ran several miles towards our reconnaissance target (by an indirect route to avoid potential ambushes), ghost-walked a few hundred meters, leopard crawled for several minutes, and finally kitten-crawled the last few silent meters into position overlooking our target, where we took detailed notes. Then we reversed the process (though not the route) and were back at our base in time for a good long sleep.

The lesson we learned that night was really about matching risk with expected return over time. In any endeavour, the least bad time to fail is early, when you have invested minimum resources and time, and as you progress towards your goal you should moderate your risk-taking to reflect the value of what you stand to lose.

This trade-off informs both the "fail early, fail fast" approach used by R&D departments to winnow their research and focus on the most promising projects, and also the investment strategies of pension funds, which steadily reduce the risk of their client's portfolios as the pension nears maturity, for example by switching from equities to bonds.

For all of us, it's worth remembering that it's the timing of your risk taking that can be critical - a risk taken early usually puts less value at risk. Get it right and you'll probably sleep better at night too!


This is one of a series of articles on lessons from Commando training.  Here is the full list.

Headache? Get it checked out.

If you have a persistent headache, I recommend you get it checked. One month ago I visited my GP with what another GP had diagnosed as sinusitis. It had persisted longer than I expected. My GP asked me a couple of questions, then asked me to walk a few paces. Finally he asked me to sit down while he called Charing Cross Hospital and requested a CT scan and an ambulance.

Shortly after the CT scan I was given an MRI scan, and here are some of the scan views, showing the fist-sized tumour they found in the right side of my forehead:

If the tumour had remained undetected for another 10 days, the surgeons reckoned I would have died. They didn't wait: after a further scan to include some reference markers, they cut a 36 cm incision over the top of my head, exposed the skull and removed a large panel of bone over my right eye. They removed the tumour and sent it for tests. It turned out to be a benign meningioma - the best news I could have had.

I'm still amazed that I'm alive. My recovery is going exceptionally well, and I'm deeply grateful to the GP who diagnosed me (who would expect to see this kind of symptom only once every 5-10 years) and to the team of experts at Charing Cross who somehow removed the tumour without damaging my brain.

My wife, mother and sisters especially endured a tense time when the prognosis was very much less encouraging. And I'm very grateful to my family and friends who have been great sources of support. I've been very moved by the generosity of friends from far and wide who have got in touch with all sorts of offers of help. It's been a great opportunity to witness the breadth and depth of people's kindness.

I've had a very lucky reprieve. If you have any doubts about a persistent headache, get checked out. If you are unfortunate enough to have a tumour, I hope that you enjoy the same good fortune as me.

Wise advice from a fool

I was lucky enough to see the new production of King Lear in the newly refurbished theatre at Stratford on Saturday.  It's an excellent production and I recommend it if you have the opportunity to go.  One of the few wise characters in the play is the fool, and he delivers this lesson to King Lear:

Speak less than thou knowest,
Lend less than thou owest,
Ride more than thou goest,
Learn more than thou trowest,
Set less than thou throwest,
Leave thy drink and thy whore
And keep in-a-door,
And thou shalt have more
Than two tens to a score.

Good advice!

Supplier Induced Demand - should you lead or follow your customers?

Many people take the view that a big part of the secret of success lies in knowing the needs of your customers better than anyone else.  As a result they place great store in analysing feedback and transaction data and in studying industry trends.  Of course this is based on the assumption that your customers are relentless optimisers, pursuing rational economic logic to identify their best outcome.

During the last month I've had the opportunity to talk to people from a wide range of professions and one theme has emerged repeatedly to challenge this consumer demand-led approach - Supplier Induced Demand.

Supplier Induced Demand arises when suppliers have an advantage over consumers in their knowledge of their product or service and are therefore able - knowingly or subconsciously - to encourage their customers to buy regardless of the needs of the customer.  This effect is most apparent in markets in which the products and services are complex (such as medicine, financial services), or where the consumer is distracted by other factors such as fear or shortage of time.

I'm struck how widely across sectors the effects of supplier induced demand manifest.  It's clear that in complex markets such medicine and financial services, regulators try hard to counter the effects by encouraging transparency and the disclosure of vested interests, as well as the alignment of incentives.

So if you (like me) are designing business propositions to address consumer markets, it's worth considering whether your intended market is characterised by supplier induced demand.  If it is, you need to know how and you can seek to induce your own demand.  If it is not, you need to master the art of determining what the demand of your customers is - and your best tools will be data analytics, competitor analysis and customer feedback.

A medical example

Supplier Induced Demand was most clearly articulated to me by an eminent epidemiologist, who explained how different healthcare commissioning models can result in predictable biases in the provision of certain operations and medications.  For example, he cited the fact that current NHS policies tend to encourage inputs rather than outputs - number of surgical procedures completed within 18 weeks rather than number of patients reporting reduction or elimination of pain.  In a more extreme example of market failure following from supplier induced demand, and the associated concentration of power in the hands of the commissioning doctors, he reported that a liver transplant in the US currently costs $2 million, while the same operation in the UK costs only $70,000.  For an illustration of comparable effect in the cost of drugs in healthcare, see the recent Economist article illustrating how Big Pharma holds the French and US healthcare systems in hock.

A retail example

But during the last month I've also had the opportunity to talk to several retail experts, and it's clear that even relatively straightforward products can be pushed on unsuspecting consumers (and some would argue that they should be).  For example, the decision to stock a new line in an established retail outlet represents a supplier bet that the demand will follow the increased supply - build it and they will come on a small scale.  This incremental approach to retail stocking, of course, works best when the retailer has a deep knowledge of the consumer market and can deliver informed, market-leading insights.  I've been struck how strong the instinct for this is in three retailers in particular that I have spoken to recently.  These are not followers - they are the makers of fashion!  An effective retailer can quickly create demand where none previously existed.

A contrasting consumer marketing example

Two weeks ago I spoke to a successful entrepreneur who is developing a business to collate aspirational purchase data - wish lists of items that people would like to own.  This is an example of consumer induced demand.  The entrepreneur wants to collate this demand data and then sell it (sensitively to the privacy of the individuals) to retailers who may be able to meet the demand.  As we talked, I wondered whether the aggregation of this information would provide a sufficiently concentrated opportunity for retailers.  Organisations like Groupon attempt to induce demand by offering discounted volume sales to retailers, but making the market from the other direction - from consumer to retailer - requires very agile retailers who are prepared to chase very niche and typically low-volume opportunities.  In defence of his idea, the entrepreneur cited the sale of Mint for $400 million.

Conclusion

As a supplier the balance between inducing and responding to demand will reflect your confidence in your market knowledge, your willingness to gamble on over-stocking and your freedom within your regulatory environment.  It's possible by be successful both as a leader and as a follower - after all while the early bird gets the worm its the second mouse that gets the cheese.  The trick appears to be to pick the products in which one has a particular advantage in terms of supply or demand knowledge, and lead confidently with these, while monitoring other lines and joining the fray when demand levels are established.

If you have a view on the whether you should lead or follow your customers, please share them here.

21 tips for life

I recently met with a family friend who very kindly offered me some advice.  We spoke for an hour and he has since introduced me to several very interesting people and new opportunities.  He is 77 and has lived an impressively varied life, most recently becoming a film extra.  As we parted he passed me an A4 sheet with a list of aphorisms which he had collected together to offer at the 21st birthday of a friend of his.

Here they are:

1. This above all - to thine own self be true. (Hamlet Act I Sc 3)
2. Half the battle in life is to decide what is important and what is not.  Have a sense of priorities.
3. Reflect a lot and then take action absolutely secure. (Pope John Paul II)
4. Ambition should be to make the most of oneself, not only for one's own sake but for one's family, friends and the world in general.
5. Never be too proud to listen to advice, remember, you need not take it.
6. Try not to indulge in self pity; others will have even bigger crosses to bear.
7. Always carry a little slate with you and wipe it regularly clean of all grudges. (Sir Winston Churchill)
8. Regardless of how much or little money you may have, it is a subject best talked about only selectively.
9. Be a good listener; it will help you develop an enquiring mind.
10. I think one has to be ready to start all over again any number of times. (Abbot Herbert Byrne)
11. Try to be an independent thinker.  It is necessary if you are to keep your personal integrity.
12. Make the best rather than the worst of people; it is both right and rewarding to do so.
13. Live as if you are to die tomorrow, learn as if you are to live for ever. (Erasmus of Rotterdam)
14. Imagination and patience solve many problems.
15. Always try to turn adversity to advantage; it usually can be, sometimes dramatically.
16. Why use a five dollar word, when a ten cent one will do. (Ernest Hemmingway)
17. There is a right and a wrong way of doing most things in life be they personal or practical.
18. Life is made up of opportunities few of which recur.  Remain alert.
19. What you do not wish done to yourself, do not do to others. (Confucius)
20. A sense of humour enhances life as also does a smile.  They cost nothing.
21. Use your mind as well as your emotions in all important decisions, especially in matters of the heart.
22. One extra - In short, there are three things that last: faith, hope and love, and the greatest of these is love. (St Paul I Corinthians Ch 13)

What advice would you give - or wish you had received?