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Are you an inbox slave? Do you use Outlook as the record of everything you do at work? Your safety net? I have questioned people with the largest mail histories in various companies and none have ever actually gone back through their mail history to prove a meaningful point. By this, I mean saving them from losing their job or helping them get a pay rise or promotion. Live in the moment. Delete your email history regularly. Then start the new habit of never sending an e-mail unless you absolutely have to. This is a goal. An unachievable goal you may say. Having a go at reaching this goal will change your life. When discussing what takes up time in the day with people in the business workplace, the volume of emails is near the top. People feel slaves to the email machine. Sadly, I remember the days before email, and I am sure my physical inbox was lower volume than my electronic one. The reason for this is the ease with which we can create communications electronically and the ease, that we can send them far and wide. My email rules are as follows: Don’t send an email if you can call, speak to in person or direct message. Read and delete. Never reply to an email. Especially never say, thanks or okay. Tell people to assume you have read it if they have sent it—they will ask why you didn’t respond. Tell people you will only respond if asked a direct question to you as a named individual. Do  use email to share a document or for mass communication to your teams. Delete every email that gets into reply all wars. Work on the basis that if it’s that important people will call you. Unsubscribe from every sales email—including the internal ones. The basic rule of thumb is the less emails you send the fewer you will receive. I have been running this method for 10 years and on average receive less than 20 emails a day. I always end the week with fewer than 10 emails in my inbox. Impossible I hear you say. Frankly, if you choose to use your inbox to cover your rear; keep a history of all interactions; your delegated task manager; your project management tool and so on then it will be very full. Amazing what happens when you talk to people. The culture around you morphs into something rather lovely. This is one of the 10 don'ts in my successful leadership model. For more hints and tips on how to be a better leader, more efficient and take control of your work self - read the book - How to be the Grit in The Oyster

This is my equation for business transformation. 75% or more of them fail. The equation highlights how easy it is at a mathematical level to turn a transformation into a failure. One negative in the equation turns the whole thing red. Yet nobody comes to work to fail. Nobody sets up a transformation with the expectation it will not succeed. If that’s the case, why do they fail and why do so many fail? Two key reasons come to mind. The first is the adoption of traditional leadership practises and the second is using the same generic processes or small variations away from it that have led to this poor success rate. Together these can be regarded as the often-misattributed quote that the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result. Looking at the process and behaviours around it, here are my top 10 observations leading to failure. Any one of these is enough to turn one of the elements in the equation red. How we articulate The Problem - it has be be big and complex. How we Sell it to the executive and board teams - it has to be a big costly solution. We pretend The Benefits  are fact and not just a set of directional guesses. We present multiyear Plans  as detailed facts and are not honest they too are guesses. We do all this with a very small Team  and don't allow others to help build and challenge when they join to help deliver. Often the leader gets carried away and allows their Ego  to become a driving force. Too often we give Change Management  lip service and don't plan and execute it properly. We launch a branded programme with mug instead of making our First Steps  baby steps. We sell it well and the CEO and CFO convince the Board, it soon becomes Too Important to Fail. The CEO and the Board believe the hype and demos are real until it becomes Too Late to Intervene....... As per the equation, only one or two of these need to come to pass to increase the risk of failure. If you can tick the top 8 then you are doomed to be in the 75%. To understand the transformation equation, for more detail on the 10 reasons and how to avoid these traps read - read the book - How to be the Grit in The Oyster .   It also include many more hints and tips on how to be a better leader.

It is my observation that we, in corporate life, seem to be a little surprised by the outcome of chasing diversity. It seems to be an unexpected consequence that people will behave differently in a more diverse environment. We cannot expect to effectively emancipate generations and see no behaviour change in corporate life. Changes and experiences at the very heart of society are driving generations to behave differently and corporate culture is no longer able to impose its way of thinking and behaving on individuals. There is a kind of freedom of thought and expression embedded in younger generations because they are now allowed to simply be whomever they want to be. There are three areas we need to understand and work around in our thinking and behaviour. Intergenerational divergence. The four generations in the workplace today are miles apart in their life experiences, expectations and the way they operate on a day to day basis. The world I went to work in as an 18 year old some 40 years ago could not be any more different than the one an 18 year old enters today. Its the pace of the changes that cause challenges as we try to assimilate huge societal change within one generation. The last time we experienced anywhere near this level of change was the Industrial Revolution which arguably took 4-6 generations to evolve and assimilate. Workplaces adjusted slowly to the radical changes. Behavioural diversity. Technology has driven diverging behavioural paths for individuals particularly through social media. The way we consume and utilise information has drastically changed in a relatively short period of time. Minority causes become mainstream alarmingly quickly. The way data is used has changed. No longer is there a single trusted version of the truth but rather data is manipulated to prove and back a point or cause. Search glass of wine a day for fun and you will see that the data says it will save your life or kill you! Business model divergence. No longer is profit the sole driver of value. Unicorns are built on customer numbers and distant future growth plans not on current day and next years performance. Investors back a range of business models and the playing field is no longer level. Your closest competitor may be funded to make losses to win or be subject to a short term privately backed growth plan with no view on the long term. Internal investment profiles differ massively, largely based on when your company first adopted technology, causing further bumps.                                                                                            We as leaders need to understand this diversity and divergence not from any political or judgment stance but simply as a guide to our new leadership challenge. As leaders, we need to take people with very different experiences and views on life and turn them into a team to drive common, shared and beneficial corporate outcomes. Our historical leadership models have been built on the imposing of and adherence to a corporate culture to coalesce largely non-diverse populations into teams. These are simply no longer relevant, yet we have no data on which to build new models. We, therefore, must understand the diverse and diverging nature of the people we need to form into high-performing teams and bring appropriate leadership qualities to bear. Painting the zebra crossing or crosswalk in rainbow colours is not going to achieve this. Each and every leader needs to adjust how they bring themselves to work and the habitat they create to drive value from this increasingly diverse and diverging melting pot. For more hints and tips on how to be a better leader, more efficient and take advantage of our new paradigm - read the book - How to be the Grit in The Oyster