Let the celebrations begin.

We have just seen two weeks of celebrations at the Olympics. It's where we celebrate the coming together of the world, we celebrate the athletes and we celebrate the city hosting the games. It is such an enormous task, taking so long to construct and devise that we only do it every four years, even though the after glow is something we would like to feel all the time. Work can sometimes feel the same, as projects, initiatives and the daily grind take time to develop to a successful end. The end celebration of the project, if there is one, becomes a milestone worth aiming for but what if the project takes 6 months or a year to complete and then you jump onto the next undertaking, how do you keep up the motivation and engagement of the players?

Celebrate more often is the catch cry of many in the corporate landscape as they struggle with long implementations, long projects and long times between drinks. It's an absolute necessity to celebrate achievements within organisations but it is even more important to develop a culture that understands how to celebrate success and why it's important to do so more often. More often is the clue and here you need to segment your work load into achievable successes to keep your people stimulated and galvanise them into a team capable of continuing lengthy activity.

Celebrations needn't be the closing ceremony, or the opening for that matter but thoughtful collaborations that don't need the formality of the above and bring forth camaraderie to amplify the good work done so far. So far, is the guiding principle, as work continues unabated but can be refocused with milestone celebrations. Where milestones used to be just that, the distance marked over a journey, those markers today, have work connotations that require acclamation and attention as the spadework continues. Work is a challenge for everyone nowadays and people need more reasons to come to work

The more reasons you can find to celebrate success, no matter how small, the more chance you have of maintaining your workforce, giving your staff a reason to come to work and cultivating the right aptitude for continuing accomplishment. Sometimes it can be as small as celebrating the mere fact of getting this far in the business year and as no lesser light in business success Oprah Winfrey points out, "the more you praise and celebrate your life, the more there is in life to celebrate."

The more reasons you can find to celebrate, the more reasons you have to market and communicate with your customers, for they are just as important in the cycle of achievement. Set criteria for celebrating so that people can focus on attainable targets, make sure the right people are celebrated and honour them and their achievements accordingly. Often that needs to be more than a mention in the Friday office dispatch, so use imagination that includes upper management involvement, parties, photos, videos, lunch, vouchers, newsletters, customer involvement, music and if necessary, dancing girls. Leave no stone unturned in the search for a reason to celebrate.

When was the last time your work celebrated?

Out of the box.

I love it when companies decide to branch out into the unknown. Who knew a small German soda factory would get me through my teens via cassette tapes and then turn into the world's largest diversified chemical company called BASF. I look at the initiatives of the Petters Group Worldwide who decided to branch out and turn their company into a Ponzi scheme and lose the money of over 3,000 employees and investors. Some stay within their core product like Qantas who successfully launched low cost carrier Jetstar, so well they now over shadow the parent. The success ratio really depends on the skill set within management and how far from the mainstay mission of the company they decide to stray.

I mention the above because next time I travel to Europe, I intend to take some basic tools to build a more homely environment where ever I stay. Screw driver, hammer and drill will be my friends as I move from town to town sampling the best of the new economy hotels by Ikea. We have all juggled the flat packs of furniture bought home, attacking them with zest and only a small allen key to get us through the weekend of carpentry hell. Seems the simple designs and modular set up of Ikea furniture will be the centre piece of their new low cost design hotels to be built throughout Europe, with the first one slated for Germany. Visions of having to construct my bed before I can sleep in it or quickly putting the kitchen cabinetry in before I can eat breakfast bring forth more concerns than just your room is ready sir, here's you allen key.

Looking to open up 100 hotels, Ikea is angling for an established hotelier, no doubt one with handyman skills, to run the new conglomerate. Inter Ikea, the parent company will over see the construction and no doubt add insightful nuances to differentiate their product, Swedish meatballs on the menu might be one of those insights? No doubt this belief in their ability to branch out into accommodation started after they built a hostel next door to an Ikea warehouse, so that shoppers who needed to spend more than one day roaming the aisles could spend the night and get an early start on the next day's shopping. Ikea is so motivated on this project that they have gone one step further and branched into city planning, designing a self contained neighbourhood to be constructed in 2013 in London, called Strand East. Occupants will no doubt require carpentry skills along with a keen eye to finding all those little widgets that come with every purchase.

Either way, hotels are a long way from flat packs, balsa lamp shades and modular book shelves and the accommodation industry will be watching with interest, to see if the new apprentice has more than just interior design skills. Moving away from what you do best can certainly broaden your horizon but too far away and it's a long swim back to shore. I'm not expecting Apple Airlines to take off any time soon.

Hoard.

A long time ago I had a garage. It was my garage, a guy's garage, a man cave where I put the mighty Ford to bed every night. I filled it with sporting equipment, tools, bits of furniture that were destined for the tip but just maybe, had one more move left in them, plus an array of items passed their use by date but happily ensconced in my cave. It didn't take long before the car was parked in the driveway and the garage was a wall to wall treasure trove of useless abundance. I give an insight into my past bowerbird tendencies because UCLA has just finished an anthropological study on the middle class dual income families in Los Angeles and the findings closely mirror our own proclivity for collection to the extreme.

The presumption of too much stuff easily identified through photographic evidence, showed all manner of useless accumulation stuffed into every corner of the house, the garage, storage facilities and any spare room at Mum's place. So much proliferation that 75% of families had stopped using their garage to park the car, had acquired a second fridge to cover all manner of natural disasters that would require ten dozen cans of beer, two dozen frozen hamburger patties and an assortment of frozen food from the previous decade, along with the requisite TV for every room. Nothing was thrown away because it never got a chance to become old as planned obsolescence ensured new and shiny replacements pushed yesterday's purchase to the garage .

From the study, I was able to avoid one downfall, children, due to forgetfulness or expense, I can't remember but noted each child added another 30% more possessions to the household, putting even more strain on the confines of the family abode. It wasn't a study on those crazy hoarders you see on current affairs program's but normal families living and breathing the consumer culture of today. The ampleness of acquisitions caused stress levels to rise in mothers as they spent hours cleaning, tidying, rearranging and finding house hold items to get everyone through the day.

Time was the most precious item lost within the cacophony of clutter as no one really knew where the scissors were, what had happened to the good pair of socks or how come the Bon Jovi CD was in the Rihanna cover? With so much stuff it becomes over whelming and the justification of picking up 50 items or 5 becomes easy territory to do the least and suffer the consequences. Following our American cousins, we have taken on one of the worst offending catalysts, the big box stores such as Costco et al and we now fill the boot with 24 rolls of paper towels, trays of baked beans and a plentiful bounty of frozen pizzas, all to be stored and admired in the second or third fridge.

He who dies with the most toys wins, is an anachronistic term penned in the over abundant 80's and has no place in today's busy world where we only need to accrue one thing. You'll be pleased to know I have broken the yoke of aggressive accumulation and now park my car in a spot under our apartment with no recourse for boxing any sale items, under threat from the body corporate. The less is more mantra has become all consuming as I become the beneficiary of more time accrued. Now that's worth hoarding.

World's favourite pastime.

The world's first department store, Bon Marche established in Paris in 1838 predates the giant American Macys, Wanamakers department store which started operation in the 1860s and both predate the first self serve grocery super market, Piggly Wiggly which opened in Memphis in 1916. I give you these interesting facts as the world of shopping takes another step into the future. We have all become accustomed to online shopping for our favourite products and nothing seems out of reach to consumers with access to the net. The department stores have certainly felt the effect of online consumerism but the grocery super markets have had only a slight online dent in the weekly shopping cycle. Seems we still like to squeeze the rock melons and wait in endless lines with our trolleys laden.

Two years ago, UK chain Tesco was trying to penetrate the Korean grocery market where the general population spent a lot of time at work and commuting and as such shopped locally. Their decision, to try and keep up with the local grocery brand on every corner by building hundreds of stores or come up with an alternative. Tesco came up with the virtual super market by buying all the subway wall space they could lay their hands on, covering those walls with pictures of grocery filled shelves that commuters could shop from via their smart phones. By simply taking a picture of the QR code attached to the item you want to buy and adding it to your virtual cart, paying with your virtual wallet, you will have those items home delivered before you get off the train. The logistics of building warehouses and the distribution system was much cheaper than constructing a grocery store on every corner and sees Tesco as the leading super market in Korea with an increase in profits of 130%.

Mobile analysts indicate 90% of all phones in the developed world will be smart phones by 2016, leading Tesco to surmise their Korean experiment has legs, which segues to the opening of the same virtual style grocery store at Gatwick Airport. No longer will you have to be concerned if there is fresh milk for a cuppa when you get home from a trip, just take a picture and it will be waiting for you when you get home on the date you select.

While we have gotten used to eBay, Amazon and all manner of online department stores, the green grocer, the butcher, the baker who long ago were rolled into the super markets still seemed ubiquitous to our cycle of life around touching, smelling and tasting the wares as the squeaky wheeled trolleys were pushed around the aisles. Will this next online avenue of convenience see Woolies walls on the unadorned tunnels of Central station, will we see Coles plastering pictures of grocery specials on the sides of buildings and will the next generations care? After all the one thing we are all aiming for with the new modes of convenience shopping, is gaining more time in our lives to do the important things, like shopping!

Watch the Birdie.

It's all our fault, the sun shone for two weeks, the public transport system didn't break down, no one got eaten by a shark and we put on the perfect Olympics. The best for decades, after the Munich kidnappings, the Moscow boycott and the Atlanta bombings, gave us pause for thinking the spirit of the games was but a hazy memory. No matter where athletes finished in Sydney, they smiled, they hugged, they competed the right way and all seemed right with the world for two weeks. The ambiance captured in Sydney was replicated over the next couple of Olympics and they became shining examples of doing the right thing, the distillation of the Olympic objectives. Even the most obscure sports were given the spot light for just a second and enjoyed their moment in the sun, no matter who was casting doubt on the sporting prowess of the competitors.

London looked like it would follow our lead but for all that London had to offer and had accomplished, it will always be remembered for the one tarnish, from here on in to be known as "Birdgate". The entire world of Badminton was turned upside down by winners not wanting to win, not wanting to win within a rules system in need of an update and never once playing within the spirit of the games and doing the right thing. Not since the Christmas BBQ incident, known as Uncle Harry's fall from grace, where he lightly tapped his partner, cousin Jean, on the bum with his racket after her astonishing return of aunt May's underhand service, has the badminton world seen such controversy. Like the badminton disciplinary committee's quick action against the offending teams, uncle Harry was banished to the BBQ pit, to preserve the integrity and credibility of the sport and to give aunt May recourse for a good talking to later on. Uncle Harry was able to redeem himself later on the day with a winning run at Monopoly and has the opportunity for more gold moments at the next family gathering, something the Chinese and Koreans will miss out on.

Comedic analogies aside, the defining moment was all about not doing the right thing and trying to gain advantage bypassing the paradigm of what the Olympics stand for. Having played sports my whole life I often try and bring the same motivation and correlations aligned to winning within a team environment to business and examples like "Birdgate" certainly become good bench marks for how not do business, even if you can avail yourself of a murky situation to gain advantage. Like sports, business runs best when a sense of the right way to do things is espoused by top management, not inherently different to the Olympic oath, where the athletes declare to compete "in the true spirit of sportsmanship, for the glory of sport and the honour of our teams" Learning how to gain magnanimity after not achieving the result you promised yourself and others, learning other competitors aren't the enemy but someone to bring out the best in you

There are always business lessons to be learnt from sports on a big stage and maybe London delivered more than we expected after all.

Insouciance.

You know the scene, laying by the pool, sand between your toes, being fanned by a super model, drinking an ice cold beer watching your team on the big screen, all the while contemplating the night's festivities to come. Then someone in the 10 o'clock meeting asks you a question and you are right back where you started, bored at work. You try as hard as you can but nothing sways you from turning off and sitting zombie like in your cubicle, your office or the lunch room. Depending on which report you read, 25% to 80% of people are bored at work too much of the time, bored with their job and bored bored bored. Even at the low end of those statistics, a lot of people are being paid for just showing up and no one, least of all the bordee, the apathetic, benumbed, detached, moribund, jaded, stultified, torpid and hebetudinous( who knew, so many words for
bored )is making any effort to change the situation. Who's responsible, who's accountable, who's answerable, who cares?

The many reasons for being bored at work, including environment and work practice not being challenging enough, you are a pirate born two hundred years too late, through to repetition of tasks that numb the brain all have antidotes, maybe not the pirate. No one disagrees that patches of boredom creep into every job, even rock stars get bored of the money and girls being thrown at them? Okay, certainly the finance departments get bored with the same old receipts and reconciliations.

Taking a lead from the experts, clearing that lingering inbox, decluttering your desk and work area, straightening your tie and then getting on with the job at hand, after all it's a job not a hobby, gives rise to push back from people wanting more in their work day. The problem today being the majority of people work in office confines in artificial environments without a lot of stimuli to keep them active, motivated and challenged beyond their job description. That is of course, unless you work for the Google like companies looking to continually stimulate and galvanise their staff for greater success.

So step outside of those confines when that Tse Tse fly of boredom comes buzzing around and create your own Google complex with new endeavours to keep you energised, like meditation, drama lessons over the phone to give you that radio announcer voice you've always wanted, sit ups to start your new fitness regime, use the powers of restorative healing and take a nap, play Sudoku, read a blog (hint), write the great Australian novel or just gravitate to things you do well and do them even better. If all of that fails why not look for a new job, it certainly couldn't hurt.

Everyone has a choice not to be bored to death at work and as Norman Mailer pointed out,
"The war between being and nothingness is the underlying illness of the twentieth century. Boredom slays more of existence than war", it can be sole destroying, so don't battle it out in the trenches, get creative, go crazy, stay alive, not bored to death.

Where exactly?

I thought I'd do a little Olympic flavour this week and my inspiration comes from our friends at NBC studio who have hundreds of people in London assigned for their extensive TV coverage. Hundreds of people looking after the smallest of details, handling incredibly complex technology for satellite transmission, making sure their viewers are given only the best when it comes to sports entertainment and having at their disposal only the best in their field. Add on hundreds more back in the US doing research and you have a large company doing what it has been doing for over 60 years.

So why wouldn't I get a laugh, when looking for Australia on their web site over the weekend, I find we have magically been transported back to Europe. Seems no one had bothered to check the old chestnut mixup with Austria as I found Australia, "Located in central Europe, bordered to the north by Germany and the Czech Republic, to the west by Switzerland and Liechtenstein, to the south by Italy and Slovenia, and to the east by Hungary and Slovakia. Is primarily mountainous with the Alps and foothills covering the western and southern provinces."

Makes the last tourism campaign of "where the bloody hell are you" seem quite apt and if it was true would make my flights to Germany about 22 hours shorter. I bring all of this back to accurate information being freely available to everyone with any kind of access to technology today. I'm guessing with all that satellite technology at NBC's disposal, no one bothered to check and someone who hasn't left the confines of greater north America and didn't pass high school geography was given the job of loading the relevant or in this case contrary information onto the web site.

It's always the small things that catch companies out and make others remember the errancy of their story. Comedians ( on other channels of course ) will have their way with NBC and no doubt the social media platform will be alive with heckles at the expense of the broadcasting company. The broadcast will be flawless, the commentators will be erudite and pithy in their discourse on the athlete's endeavour but people will still be talking about the little mistakes that people and countries especially, take umbrage over.

I'm pleased to say after the weekend, we made it back to where we belong, an island in the middle of nowhere. It might be a long way from anywhere NBC considers important but to us it means a lot and we'll no doubt continue to take great delight at the ineptitude of a company that should know better. It's good to know that our "sister" country Austria can find humour in the situation as well, when you see the biggest selling T-shirts at Vienna airport proudly stating, "Austria - no kangaroos".

The little things always count, especially when we are the biggest little thing in the Southern Pacific.

Brand you world.

Be yourself, everyone else is already taken. Oscar Wilde had it right all those years ago but there were less of us and it wasn't anywhere near as crowded as it is today. So nowadays it's all about how to stand out in the huddled masses, how to have an identity, how to have visibility, how to shine brighter than the person standing next to you and most importantly how to then sell yourself. Seems everyone is keen to be the next one, the next celebrity, the next online sensation, the next big personality, the next one to stand out more than the others, the next big brand.

The online world is littered with information, forums, literature and experts who will give your accord a successful identity, establish you as a brand and make you the second coming of your favourite impresario or entrepreneur. As much as people are striving to give themselves a makeover via a branding application, the world isn't looking for a copy of someone else, rather it is looking for more originality and innovation. Trying to be like someone you admire and hold in reverence is telling the wrong story about who you really are and most likely covering up your best attributes. Your uniqueness already has a chronicle that makes you different from everybody else and if you can articulate that story better, then you can compete and be noticed, all without the falsehood of so called brand attachments. Do you have something to sell, do you have something to offer are very product driven questions that have taken on an individual bias and have accelerated the over abundance of personal branding messages aimed at your appearance, your personality and your competencies.

You already have a personal brand and if you were to look at it from a product base, maybe it needs a polish or update to realign people's perception of you. Today everything seems to be about brands as we surround ourselves with products, services and leaders that cloud our vision and ability to tell our story and stand out in our own way. It's not about becoming someone else but being noticed and appreciated for what you bring to your relationships, your work environment and your community. It's not about packaging yourself along the lines of the latest personal marketing management techniques, it's about your reputation for doing the right things, having integrity and credibility and always keeping an eye on not turning into someone you aren't.

Branding isn't so much about the packaging, self promotion and event marketing, it's about the authenticity and personal trust you wake up with every day and it's about not wavering in the face of self help gurus looking to be the next great brand, via you. It already exists in you and all you need do, is build your story around the things you do best, no matter how trivial you may think they are, you have something different to offer, you are someone no one else can resemble and as such are one in seven billion. Congratulations you are brand you.

Technology Hostages.

I want to travel back in time, carrying only my tablet and maybe a phone or MP3 player. Not hundreds of years, not even fifty years, maybe just 20 years. A hundred years ago I would have been burned at the stake as a witch, just by playing a bit of music and showing photos on the above equipment. Fifty years ago the newspapers and publishing world would have made my equipment disappear and me along with it. Two decades ago I would have been anointed a global genius as the web in its infancy looked towards a wireless future of connectivity and entertainment.

Ten years ago the iPod was considered the height of miniaturisation and technology innovation, six years ago the iPhone took further hold on our imagination and three years ago the iPad gave us a reason to stop buying paper products and enriched ours lives with just a ten inch screen. I use the Apple products as a timeline example only, as I look around my world and see a decade of shift that won't be reproduced again. Technology has come such a long way in such a short time that expectations are heightened to the extent we now expect everything to work all the time and when it doesn't, we have no benchmark for our irrational behaviour towards technology. The expectation that someone somewhere is already working on our wildest dreams can over shadow what we have today and I see it daily in the frustrations encountered in what we consider the most mundane of technology.

Where's my folder, why is it taking so long to boot up, how come my system freezes, why isn't it working like it was this morning, did you change my settings and a plethora of frustrated out bursts litter our offices, lounge rooms and cafes. We have careened into the future so fast that we forgot where we came from and how difficult it used to be just to imagine today. The greatest innovations of our time, the car, television, air travel and spandex, all took years to mature and for society to fully embrace them and in spandex' case to leave them behind. Even the Internet took a while to catch on but now it's about how quickly technology can move to keep up with its own publicity and deliver results beyond our wildest fancies.

In fact technology has replaced our future to such an extent, we no longer dream of the future, we expect it delivered to our front door. The moon used to be so far fetched that nothing we thought of technologically was ridiculous, yet today we live and breathe the ridiculous every day. We are so entrenched in a technology future that the obstacles we encountered twenty years, ten years or even two years ago seem trivial, so trivial as to make us hostages to expectations that technology has the ability to fulfil our wildest dreams. Beam me up Scotty.

Appreciation Society.

I like what you do, you like what I do, makes for a good start to a lasting relationship, working or otherwise. The problem with this, we often don't know what people are capable of doing and we don't go out of our way to find out. From that, the follow on is lack of appreciation and recognition. The last job you accepted, was likely based on your qualifications and you no doubt continue in the job using the skill set noted in your resume. Your colleagues and even the boss, continue relating to you through those skills but if they only knew more about you, you could be so much more, valuable and appreciated by the company.

For many people the thank you's become infrequent as time worked, reverts to normal expectations of a job well done. It's hard to notice something that isn't there and doing a good job becomes business as usual and anticipation of acknowledgement fade as you continue to perform as expected. If only they knew you were a passionate musician, skilled in the art of negotiation, a fine writer or even a speaker of note, management might consider using those skills in a way to benefit the staff and the company. If only you could point out your merits without bragging, without coming off as obnoxious and without being seen as self centred. Appreciation of those "other" skills would go a long way to remunerating the bank of thank you's, that is running low due to lack of acknowledgement.

Recent work on social networking tools designed for companies wanting to find out more about their employees has shown a marked improvement in culture, retention and profits as management find more reasons to appreciate their staff. An example is the Skillcloud platform that allows employees to circulate their extraneous abilities, hobbies, sports, interests and accomplishments, within a social context that people have become used to using. This gives companies the ability to source people skills, often not mentioned in resumes and interviews, while finding more ways to engage with their staff.

No one dies from lack of appreciation but it makes enough of a difference that people find more reasons to come to work and bring that little bit extra of themselves. It makes people feel more authentic and whole, elevates levels of engagement and motivation, while giving the company more reasons to show appreciation. So without having to swagger through the day pointing out your achievements, social platforms bring another approach for companies to work closer with their employees.

People leave their jobs for many reasons and appreciation and recognition are high on the list cited by employees waving goodbye to companies that didn't take the time to find out more about them. This openness needs to be part of a company culture and as such has to come from the top. So if you know nothing about your boss or upper management, they don't know anything about you other than what they see everyday, and appreciation is lacking because of that, maybe it's time to go social platform and open up the thank you bank again.