Is this the Western Australian persona?

As I go on my travels from meeting to meeting and from networking function to networking function I am always amazed by the sheer courage of people to take on new ventures and in many cases forge out on their own or take on challenges that once they would have bulked. Well done to all who don't take the easy way out. As I wrote recently there is so much talent out there seeking to make its way in business and in life in general.

I was fortunate to meet with someone this morning who is absolutely inspiring but who has, to my pleasant surprise, also has experienced something that I was beginning to think was either all in my head or a function of my own poor judgment or pure unfortunate happenstance. Both of us are born and bred Western Australians but we would contend there is an undoubted reluctance of our compatriots to pay for service until the goal has been achieved and sometimes not even then. This has obvious ramifications. One, it forces people to look elsewhere and those that are reluctant to pay have to,in the main, put up with inferior service which ends up seemingly justifying their stance. A classic vicious circle.

My own experience has led to concentrate my efforts on servicing Eastern States firms, market WA innovations to overseas clients or to international companies. Eastern States firms are increasingly a profitable target client base as the resources boom returns and the relative growth rate of Western Australian vis a vis the rest of the country ex QLD attracts them to our market. Not that this is without dangers either as our friends from over East are often frustrated by arcane planning laws, archaic restrictions on trade, a Soviet approach to trading hours, a strange debate on daylight saving and again a reluctance to pay for quality. Dangerous and contentious views? Maybe so, so please feel free to challenge me on any or all of them.

Just while I'm feeling gently combative let me hit you with my view on daylight saving in general and not specific to WA. Am I missing some simple piece of logic? The original purpose of altering the clocks was to "lengthen" the day in order to conserve energy. As our summer days receive the most sunlight hours anyway wouldn't it make more sense to have daylight saving in our winter. We get up in the dark any way so there's no difference there but by moving the clocks forward it would mean that it's getting dark an hour later. Anyone who recalls football or hockey training in the midst of winter will know that by half five all had to be over because it was dark. Those children now lucky enough to have lights burn more energy and households burn more lights and more fuel. So daylight saving in winter would add an hour of usable daylight in the evening and reduce one of the key downsides of that season. Just a thought? Having it in the summer surely means we run our pool filters longer and use our air conditioners at home more. Hmmm, what a good conservation of energy that is, not! Just to be completely perverse, even so I'm actually in favour of it but that should be the argument of the nay-sayers, nothing to do with carpets, curtains and cows.

Cheers, Jonathan.

So much talent out there!

I had the privilege to spend a day today with Dr Joanna Martin who generously shared her perceptions on "speaking from the stage" to a sizable audience of business owners, innovators and entrepreneurs. Proof of the effectiveness of the program will be obvious once I begin to "strut my stuff" and your support and feedback as and when will be greatly appreciated. What is apparent to me is that there is a huge bank of talent out there seeking to expand their own horizons, inflate their comfort zones and achieve success beyond the norm. Whilst there is no end of "personal development" opportunities currently in the market place there is also some very high quality on offer. People are keen to learn skills to enhance their business but today was more than that, it was exercise in upskilling people to enhance their lives. The latent talent that resides in all of us is often shielded or constricted by our own hesitation to take risk: trusting in the lessons of the past has been to the cost of faith in the future and the limitless opportunities before us all. All a bit "New Age?' Perhaps but I know myself that when I have taken the biggest risks I have experienced the biggest wins but when I have been conservative I have suffered the greatest losses. I'm in the midst of huge risk at present and I am very excited by the future. I'll let you know how it pans out. Cheers, Jonathan.

The karmic returns are beginning to flow .........

Yes, I've had a bit of a lay-off and whilst there are plenty of reasons there's certainly no excuses. Thankfully it it has just been a function of extreme busyness and not all business either. even so the networking side of things is really picking up and I have been privileged to meet some really interesting people of late. That's not to say that those I have met previously are not really interesting too but the latter ones justify the earlier ones in that the connections between them all become more and more powerful. The seems to be hardly a person with whom I cannot make a connection with someone else. I have long said that the six degrees of separation in the world translates to point five here in Perth! Of course a good deal of my connectivity is not down to me at all but is made possible by the activities of those that I meet and their own proactive natures. And what is the purpose of all this? Firstly it's just plain good fun and secondly it promotes the possibility of being able to solve problems, whether they be mine or those of others, in a more more human, personal and referenced manner. The karmic returns are beginning to flow and whereas many meetings at the outset seem to be somewhat limited they are in truth only limited by the relative openness of one's mind and time and they are rarely limiting. The only limiting factor is the increased possibility of conflicts of interest but most of those issues can easily be managed away or precluded by upfront candour. What has been evident of late with the support of social networking groups and communications in general is that one has to try very hard not to be found, the mobility of people used to severe the lines but these days one is more likely to "put it out there" or be the subject of genuine enquiry. I recently met a person whom I have never met before from a country that I have never been to and was challenged to recall our first meeting! I was "known" but it turned out that I had "been Googled" and the person had recognized me from my online photographs. Such is the nature of the internet and the unexpected impacts of our own and/or others' actions. The rise of the "tagged" photograph is a case in point. Ramifications, unexpected consequences, un-looked or undesirable outcomes are the downsides of all the positives of being wired in in this wireless world of ours. Best regards, Jonathan.

Internet censorship, nanny state, police state!?

The attack on internet freedom like so many things this Rudd Govt does or wants to do, sounds plausible enough on a superficial level but digging deeper and understanding the ramifications or indeed the unintended consequences of actions is not their strong suite. What may start out as an attack on illegal sites will very likely end up with the Government telling us what to think. You reckon I'm joking....this is the Government that requires all MP's, not just their own, to have written matter vetted/approved by them before mailing out to constituents and all criticism of policies or individuals has a very hard time getting through. The seemingly inexorable slide towards a nanny state is the same slide as that towards a police state. Freedom of speech, as I have written before, needs to be just that, not a value judgment of some government official, elected or otherwise. Bad ideas are best defeated out in the open, resentment and fomenting of suspect ideas happen most often in the dark. The though police are on the march (read Janet Albrechtsen's piece in The Australian this week, )the do-gooders and the apologists are perversely crimping the freedoms of the majority. Certainly minorities need to be respected and protected but not at the expense of our general freedoms and it needs to be a level playing field. When did Western society, generally the van of freedom, become the whipping post of other cultures in our own midst? We have actually been victims of our own cherished freedoms but the solution is not control but nurturing the freedoms we retain and pushing back the creep of political correctness, cant and prejudice. When someone says something we don't like we should say so but at the same time defend their right to say it and fair do's, when we say something they don't like then they should argue against us but at the same time defend our right to say it. Some chance but we can but try. Best regards, Jonathan.

You gotta have some luck now and again

How's this for two stories....

In my first ever substantive interview for a broking position in London I was asked by the Managing Director if I knew anything about Australian stocks. I answered that it wasn't not a lot though I had done rather well in my Law unit on the regulation of the market and what constituted illegal transactions. That patently was not good enough and I was again challenged "Come on, you must know something about the companies, say CRA..." to which I replied "Let's be clear here, do you mean Con-zinc Rio Tinto Australia?" He did of course and generously told me that not many on his current team of experienced brokers would have known that and promptly offered me a position. It just so happens that in my last major Audit unit at University we were required to randomly pick a company and dissect its accounts and I had fortuitously chosen CRA!

On Monday I was queried about an old school pal whom both and and the questioner had lost touch with, not seen since 1975. I had no notion of where he was or what he was doing. That evening whilst scanning for a chap on Linkedin who had been in my year at University I found that he worked at a local engineering company of some note. I then scanned his company and lo and behold my old school mate used to work there too and was recorded as such on Linkedin. He now works in Zurich (but happens to be in Perth this week !) and works for UBS. Guess who I used to work for in London, yep, UBS.

Let anybody who does not rate online social networks or fails to think on the power of the universe consider these two stories. Chance, happenstance, fortuity or Providence? Take your pick or choose D, All of the above.

Best regards, Jonathan.

Friends assisting

Not a lot of inspiration tonight but I just posted-up a personal note on Facebook saying that "I'm cracking-on helping other people's businesses and have a host of friends helping mine." Certainly 2010 has a much better feeling about it than last year though to be candid I do recall saying much the same at this time last year. Whilst highly nervous of the market at the time I had no idea of the scale of the GFC looming and of course the shock of it seized-up a good deal of decision-making capacity, the life blood of consulting and much else. off to bed now to contemplate a busy day tomorrow. Best regards, Jonathan.

Emmission standards are not monitored

Do people know that emissions standards especially for motor vehicles are not monitored after the car drives out of the showroom and off the forecourt? Do people know that no matter what the advertising of one petrol brand over another there is no guarantee of "clean and dry" fuel out of the bowser? Do people know that... we change oil at the same time as changing oil filters because the filters have in effect not worked, i.e they have failed to keep the oil clean. Imagine a swimming pool and its filter, it'd be a bit rum if every time you cleaned the filter you had to empty the pool and refill it with clean water. That's what you (or your servicer) in effect does every time your car goes in for service! There is so much we can do in a highly practical way to improve our emissions but the OEM's together with general societal ignorance conspire and collude to perpetuate 1930's technology.

Tenacity wins the day, the other side of cutting and running

Back in my institutional stockbroking days in London, with the encouragement of a great friend/previous client, I visited a particular institution in a particular European capital trying to convince them that both my firm and myself were worthy of their business for five years without a ticket.

Sure I was writing business with other clients in that town which gave me the opportunity to keep up the visits but as you can imagine my management had long since given up on me ever justifying that investment of time and travel. However, for the following five years that client was my largest commission generator and taker of primary product bar none and the largest offshore account of my two firms respectively during that period!

Growing my own business over the last 18 months has felt very similar. Plenty of hard work, staying the course, having faith and of course one has to have the wherewithal to achieve the results required but there is no doubt that tenacity has and will pay-off. My brother calls it doggedness, my wife determination, others persistence and myself, tenacity but I guess it is all of these and more.

Sure the business has had to evolve; early supporters will remember the original construct was to introduce people with good ideas to people with money to invest. Then of course the GFC hit and whilst the moneyed people were and are still just that their return hurdles went naturally higher and their appetite for risk justifiably declined. Hence freelance business development and with the pleasantly surprising change of State Government, political lobbying.

There remains no shortage of people with good ideas and I have not abandoned all of them though some abandoned me along the way but I have sought to help them in different ways. Some of these are now on the verge of full-on commercialization and I am pleased that Glorfindel Advisory Services has played its part in helping that happen.

A friend of mine loves MAD, making-a-difference and I guess if both people and businesses can do that along the way they will not only survive but flourish.


Best regards, Jonathan.

When to cut one's losses

Circumstances (specifically my youngest daughter's swimming classes)precluded any other action such as getting there earlier or catching the train but I drove into Perth City last night to attend the free opening of Festival 2010 and then spent 40 minutes trying to find a legal parking space.

Plenty had parked illegally and perhaps I would have too if I had more clearance on my car/had been driving my wife's car but to no avail and we came home. I wasted time, petrol and above all an opportunity. Still we cut our losses, my youngest really did need to get to bed and my eldest got to watch a double episode of her favourite TV show (she was very happy) and my wife was at book club anyway. No harm done.

It struck me however that many activities including business are similar. Unrealistic goals are set without too much planning, time is wasted and opportunities go begging. One can go around in circles, all for a worthy cause but nothing is achieved and there comes a time to cut one's losses. But...someone recently told me that the light at the end of the tunnel is there and a lot closer than we think but it is around the bend and as we know light doesn't go around corners and just can't see it yet.

My conclusion, unlike last night's event (and to be brutally candid maybe I would have tried harder/taken more risk if I'd paid for tickets) where on balance it was best to cut and run, if you have a dream, are running our own business and have a realistic goal then stay the course as success whilst not visible yet maybe just around the corner.

Best regards, Jonathan.

Focus versus perspective

I had a really really difficult day to day but there's nothing like a child's smile and all is forgotten. Well, let's be realistic, not everything is forgiven or forgotten but isn't it amazing how different things can look, albeit when there's no substantive change, with a different frame of mind.

The world of a consultant is one fraught with undervalued time and effort and full of real pleasure in adding value, making a real difference and seeing people succeed where otherwise it wasn't likely.

The biggest problem is getting people to make a decision and this is particularly frustrating when it is blindingly obvious that costs can be saved, sales could be enhanced and profit increased. I say "blindingly obvious" in a somewhat qualified sense as it might be obvious to me but not to them. Indeed I may not have the full picture and therefore not be as right as I think I am and/or they may be too close to the issue or too focused on their product/service to see what would be to their advantage.

Focus versus perspective, a desire for action and and a reticence to try something different; sounds like business/life to me. The wisdom that doing the same thing thing and expecting a different result is tantamount to insanity is instructive.

I have a business that includes management consulting, freelance business development and government relations(political lobbying)- each arm supports the other and opens up opportunities. The man of a thousand watches always has something for everyone but is that the value that the customer is after? There's the rub, finding the balance.

I will have a really good day on Monday and know that people will do the right thing, see the paths to success and accept both advice and reality. Also physician, heal they self.

All the best, Jonathan,

Practical, understandable..............

My comment on Tony Abbott's Wall hit Letters to the Editor of the Daily Telegraph thanks to the inspiration of a new Facebook friend! I simply said of the Direct Action Plan was that it is "Practical, understandable, AFFORDABLE, do-able and I suspect just the start of a myriad of sensible actions to change the way we l...ive and work without destroying the way we work and live. Well done Tony, well done Team."

The underyling philosphical difference

In no way am I claiming this to be an original thought and it's one that often been debated but it occurred to me this morning (again) that apart from all of the debate as to whether one policy is better than another, whether one is a believer or a skeptic the key philosophical difference between the Parties says it all; Labor would penalize and part compensate whereas the Liberals will reward and encourage, Labor wants a top-down big stick approach and the Liberals want a bottom-up carrot approach. Statism and Corporatism versus Individualism and Free Markets. There is the choice is increasingly clear for Australians.

I am stasggered that governments around the world and including Mr Rudd's think that they can create a marekt in a commodity overnight. The stock market has been evolving for hundreds of years and still has problems and will always do so but at least it is protected by history, experience and the clearer aspect of supply and demand. There is nothing clear about the supply and demand mechanism of any artificailly constructed market place and we'd all be hard pressed to think of any governement or bureacratic construct that doesn't eventually self-destruct because they think they know best,the Wheat Board and the Wool Corporation come to mind, the USSR!

Whilst the inexorable shift of history seems to demand more and more of governments we must become more and more vigilant to ensure that we do not end up tying ourselves in knots of our own creation with the constraint refrain of "someone (government)should do something about it."

Best regards, Jonathan
·

A couple of things left off the list......................

SAS Group (www.sasgroup.net.au) This is the governement relations business of which I am associated. The three founding partners are all ex Federal Ministers and together with their US affiliate , the American Continental Group make for a powerful advocacy team.

Image Power (www.imagepower.com.au if you want training for yourself or your work foce in cultural awareness, social skills for the workplace and skills to give you an employment advatge please contact my good friend Natalia Josephs.

Office Automation (/www.smibusinessimpact.com.au)For those brave enough to accept that there can truly be a paradigm shift in the way that we conduct our business processes and that it can be WA born and bred then this is the company for you. Contact Barry Hatton or Simon Ackland at SMI Business Impact.

Cheers, Jonathan.

People confuse the Green Movement with the Green Party

People frequently confuse the Green Movement with the Green Party. The Movement has actually done a pretty good job as nearly all of us would now consider ourselves “green” these days in terms of nurturing and husbanding our planet. However the Party that has grown out of the Movement has many other non-green related policies that place it way out on the Left and thus make a more natural ally for the Labor Party. In addition and unfortunately many well-meaning people who have little understanding of politics only think of the environmentally friendly themes of the Green Party and don’t even delve into those policies let alone deeply consider their ramifications. Thankfully what was announced yesterday ( by Tony Abbott of the Liberal Party in Australia)will give a practical focus to many of these good people and begin to breakdown the belief that only one side of politics can look after our environment. Best regards, Jonathan.

A momentous day for Australia and a higher quality of debate

We should change import regulations to ensure that all imported engines, gen sets and turbines (close to 100% of all the engines we use) meet or exceed NAS 6 and Euro 5 oil and fuel filtration standards to reduce emissions on a constant basis, to reduce waste oil, increase asset life and reduce servicing costs.


Those not reaching those standards would be retro-fitted in bonded warehouses before being released into the Australian market.

There are proven technologies/products (see below) the OEM's don't want you to know about that would facilitate this new "world's best practice" to improve all metrics of performance at a cost REDUCTION to the current regime of 1930's thinking and technology and in reference to oil changes and pertinent to the entire inventory of the country; proposed emissions targets would then be easily attainable.
Whilst being cognizant of the dangers of promoting an individual company product this is another practical measure which would have an immense impact and though it would initially benefit ProtxL (and Australian product) it would perforce encourage all the OEM’s in reach the higher benchmark standard.

All the best, Jonathan.