Sunny Sunday studying e-journalism

Well, I admit that I wasn’t exactly enamoured with the idea of getting up early on a Sunday morning to attend the course that I had booked myself onto in a technology self-development mad moment but I travelled to Southwark on a delightfully empty commuter train. My heart sank though as I trudged around some rather dubious Waterloo back streets where the leftovers from the previous evening’s alcoholic excesses lay strewn about the pavement. It sank further still when I arrived at some rather shabby portakabins with a motley crew hanging around outside waiting for the doors to open. However, all this was to change.

During the excellent instruction I was in my element. Call me a sad technie but I LOVED finding out about how to do all those clever things with beta versions of new Google products. I was in my element experimenting (on my friends, natch) to see just how much information I could obtain about them – legally – with the latest tools. I was wowed by the Google translate gadget and immediately grabbed by the scholar and trends products and bowled over by the latest live web site visitor tracking software and the freedom to browse – untraceable – using a proxy server. And watch my really advanced Internet searching now – lock up your PDFs! I was speechless at Google Earth photos.

And I am now initiated into the wonders of cloud computing – no more software storage and version control problems for me when I am mobile computing. No wonder the world of journalism has changed so dramatically! And the venue location turned out to be just 5 minutes walk from the home of one of my sports journo buddies who lives in Borough – so we met for a quick drink afterwards so I could tell her all about my exciting discoveries. It just remains to express my sincere thanks to the team at the Chartered Institute of Journalists for putting on such an excellent day and at such a reasonable price and to lecturer Alun Hill whose enthusiasm, patience and expertise was boundless.

The message for managers

During the management course I was running today at the fabulous training centre at the Institute of Director hub at Old Broad Street House, we spent some time contemplating good management (which is not the same as good leadership) and considered a number of interesting issues. Amongst them was the finding from the Centre of Creative Management which shows the differences between the success factors for early management positions and those of more senior leadership positions and reflected on how many in the professions have stuck with those factors which were only appropriate at relatively junior levels.

We then worked through the ten components of a thinking environment (Nancy Kline) and observed that the negative “male conditioning” factors must be the main inhibitor to greater involvement in many professional firms. The other ideas that really got us thinking was the observation from personal relationship academics that a good relationship has a ratio of six good pieces of feedback for every one negative, good feedback is like a beefburger – the “meat” of the feedback cushioned into two softer and more positive observations and that a core idea of Ken Blanchard’s “One Minute Manager” was the need for both one minute praisings as well as one minute reprimands. Perhaps if we were just to increase the amount of positive feedback within the professions a little bit…

Summer evening in Portman Square

One of the good things about a career in marketing is that you get invited to some interesting events at lovely venues with nice people. On Monday evening, one of my legal clients invited me (and some of my accounting clients) to join them for a few drinks and tasty nibbles at the Portman Square Garden Party. And although the British weather often lets us down, on Monday night it really did us proud. We stood around on the grass, enjoying the warm sunshine, admiring the huge trees that I hadn’t really noticed before despite walking past each week, sipping wine and chatting happily as the distant traffic and West End shoppers carried about their business. It was relaxed and enjoyable and I had time to temporarily stop being the “busy marketing consultant” and to get to know the people behind the partner, assistant and support staff roles a little better. And it reinforced the need to take time out of our busy lives to get to know the real people we work with every day – whether they are clients, suppliers or colleagues. A simple pleasure that doesn’t have to cost a lot of time or money.

Young Marketing Executives face same old problems

I spent yesterday in the City with 17 young marketing and business development executives at one of my popular “Proactive Marketing Executive” training courses. As well as delegates from lawyers, accountants and architects in large and medium sized firms in London there were a group from Bristol and one from Dublin.

Over the years of presenting this course I have noticed how the quality of marketing executives has increased. Presumably as professional firms became more sophisticated in their marketing and business development activities, so has their demands on these young marketing professionals and so the calibre of them has increased significantly.

But whilst the marketing credentials and business acumen of these young people has increased immeasurably from even just five years ago, the problems they face each day sadly remain the same. Top of the list of things that they wanted to tackle was dealing with “difficult” partners – achieving the necessary buy-in and co-operation that is necessary to allow them to do their jobs properly, having the confidence to present their really very excellent ideas to resistant, busy and sometimes downright rude partners or plucking up the courage to say “No” on occasions to a deluge of petty administrative and inappropriate tasks.

My heart went out to them. But I tried to explain the very tough circumstances under which their partners operate (pressure to bill time, constantly demanding clients, keeping up to date with large amounts of new regulations, learning how to use all the new technology, the constant treadmill to recruit and train the right calibre of future fee-earners, the mountain of financial and HR administration etc) and the fact that educating, winning over and helping the partners change is the heart of what makes the life of professional services marketer both so very frustrating and challenging but oh so much more interesting and satisfying than your average marketing career.

Law firm managing partners consider partner appraisals

Last night I joined one of my long standing accountancy clients – haysmacintyre – when they hosted an informal dinner at the Institute of Directors for managing partners of small and medium sized law firms with speaker Phil Gott (www.philgott.com) talking on the subject of partner appraisals.

It was a fascinating discussion and I regret that for confidentiality reasons I cannot disclose either the attendees nor the specific topics discussed but one of the interesting points I noticed was how many relatively small firms, over such a short period of time, have embraced the concept of hiring professional managers to assist with practice management, marketing and human resources.

I was also tremendously encouraged to learn that most firms do appraise the performance of their partners – and some even see it as a really valuable development tool. Mind you, exactly how you assess the effectiveness of a partner in the areas of marketing, selling and client relationship management remains a bit of a black art!