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I'm starting up a tiny boutique consultancy for helping professional services companies to the next level. This is my personal lifestyle business, not a big growth business. Zero full time employees, no real plans to expand, fully virtual. Only the experience I have, a network of top experts and a small number of hand picked customers at any given time.
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Too many people still talk about work-life integration as a life goal. To me this implies work is something that needs to be balanced, or perhaps even avoided. Why is this?
Most of us spend a large part of our waking hours at work. It's kind of sad to think of this as something that must be done in order to earn money. To me the work itself brings meaning, it's something that's tightly integrated to my life.
I can work anywhere and at any time. I often do long weeks, but they don't feel long because the work is well integrate to the rest of my life. The work is interesting, challenging and keeps me learning new things. I'm very good at my job because I enjoy doing it and want to improve all the time. The financial rewards are just the end result of being good at the job and also spending quite a bit of time at it.
Naturally not all jobs today can be done at any time and anywhere. However I think most new jobs are. There are fewer jobs in the traditional industries or even service. Automation, advanced self service, software and hardware robots continue to kill these jobs. New jobs are often digital services, content production, product development, consulting and so on. Most of these new jobs are largely location and time independent.
What worries me is that few companies work actively towards work-life integration. Many companies could, few do. Even many better employers today just focus on balancing work and life. Today mostly just self-employed can reach a great work-life integration. When do we see more companies pushing for work-life integration?
Many companies move back and forth in outsourcing and using in-house teams for web development. The reason for insourcing is high cost and failure rate of outsourcing. Succeeding in outsourcing is easy, but it requires a different approach from the traditional procurement process.
Too often procurement is all about who "wins". The vendor tries to maximise their profits and the customer tries to haggle the price as low as possible. It's a game of cat and mouse where professional sellers try to outwit (in?)experienced buyers with all sorts of dirty tricks.
This is not a good starting point for a healthy relationship or a platform for building a successful project. Any great relationship in life is a win-win, both parties gain something fairly. Because win-win definitely sounds like a buzzword from the 90s, let me explain..
The definition of a win varies for each customer. Typically it's something about reaching or exceeding your business goals as early and as cost efficiently as possible, but the details are always different.
For a vendor winning is typically about three things:
A real win-win relationship meets the win criteria for both parties. This means the customer can't only focus on winning, but must also understand how to make this a win for the vendor. This requires transparency from both parties during the procurement process.
So how to actually run the process? It just happens that I've written a procurement guide in my previous company. It's a free download and covers the entire process.
"Lets just aim for the minimum viable product first." I suppose you've heard this before? At least I certainly have. So what actually is a minimum viable product or a MVP?
In my books MVP is something that you'll use to test a business, product or feature idea. It's something you do when you are not certain if an approach will be successful or not.
This doesn't mean building a crappy version of a product quickly. It certainly doesn't mean cutting back on quality. It means coming up with a simple way to test the idea.
This can be done with a manual process instead of an automated one. It's often cheaper to skips fancy features and just use people for customer service when testing if something works.
Say you are customising content for users based on behaviour. How about initially picking groups manually for first users? Or providing an entire service process manually if you are unsure how it should be implemented?
A MVP may also mean using quick & dirty solutions like Google Forms or other SaaS platforms. They may not do a perfect job in most cases, but they are very quick and cheap to implement.
Building something quickly in crappy quality should never be considered a MVP. With that you'll never know if the idea failed or if the implementation was simply so bad that it killed the idea with it.
Building something with less features is fine in some cases. Working less on details is also acceptable, naturally it may lead to worse user experience initially. The most important thing is being smart on how to test your assumptions, the answer is not always in software.
I've been averaging some 150 days of travel and 100 flights per year for quite a few years now. People have been asking for travel tips from time to time, so I'm sharing some of my personal best practises in a series of five short blog posts.
Check in online as early as your airline allows you to in order to get good seats, typically 24-36 hours before the flight. If you have problems checking in online the flight may be overbooked or cancelled. It's worth calling the airline before heading to the airport. Never leave checking in to the airport, you'll just risk long lines and possibly your flight not operating at all. It's really satisfying being at home instead of the overcrowded airport when the flight is delayed by 8 hours.
Make sure all of your devices are charged to 100% before you leave and recharge them when ever you can. You'll never know when you have the next change to recharge and you are likely to rely heavily for electronics both for getting work done and entertainment on the road.
If there is one thing that makes you hate travel it's crossing the borders. For most EU or US internal travel you don't have to worry about this, but if you live in the UK or are flying long-haul you are out of luck. It can be pretty annoying to have a 45 minute flight to the UK and standing in the EU passport line for over 60 minutes.
Get a biometric passport if you don't have one, all new ones are these days. Most large airports already have ePassport gates that help with the lines. Just be careful which line to pick, in my experience especially at Heathrow the line for ePassport gates moves a lot slower than the old fashioned one.
When landing in the US without citizenship or a green card there really is only one thing you can do: RUN! Every person in front of you in the line means extra 2 to 5 minutes of standing in line. It's not all that uncommon to be stuck in line for 1 to 3 hours at the US border. These lines can get so bad that you really don't want to do short business trips to the US at all. There are a few ways around these lines, mostly for UK and Dutch residents, but they are not available for most people.
There are a few things you need to do differently from home when you arrive. First of all you should immediately unpack all of your clothes and hang them. Do the same thing when ever you change clothes during the trip, hang them immediately. This helps you to avoid ironing and actually keeps them feeling fresh for longer as well.
Stay even more clean than usual when traveling. Taking multiple showers a day is not overdoing it. You have a limited set of clothes with you, you need to get more mileage from them. Besides traveling tends to make you feel a bit scruffy anyways.
Next post has some tips & tricks for travel in the last post of this series.
I've been averaging some 150 days of travel and 100 flights per year for quite a few years now. People have been asking for travel tips from time to time, so I'm sharing some of my personal best practises in a series of five short blog posts.
You are carrying too much stuff. Way too much stuff.
I travel very light, yet I've never had too few items with me. I've done a two month trip around the world with carry on luggage only. Most people take too much stuff with them "just in case", this makes traveling more inconvenient.
The first rule of packing is to never check in anything. Luggage is lost, damaged and means extra time spent at the airport. If you can't avoid checking something in, for example for a ski trip, just make sure you are prepared to spend your holiday without your checked in luggage. It happens a lot.
Only bring items you'll definitely use during the trip. You can wear the same clothes for more than a day. On a longer trip you can get your clothes laundered. Bringing too few clothes is also a good way to force yourself to do some shopping, that's assuming you are a guy and don't really like shopping all that much.
When packing keep in mind that you'll need to have easy access to your passport, mobile, laptop and liquids. Little planning makes security a lot less painful experience.
I recommend keeping everything in exactly the same place when traveling. People lose a lot of stuff while traveling. Don't be that person, make sure you always know where everything is. It may feel stupid, but being overly anal about keeping everything in the same place will save you from losing your credit cards, passport, laptop or in some cases even your entire carry on bag.
You don't need many special items for travel, I have just a few special things for traveling.
Having two passports is the most important thing if you travel a lot. Check if your country allows you to have two passports if you have a good reason for it. For example if you need to apply for a visa to Russia, the Russian embassy will hold on to your passport for about a week. It may be impossible to avoid travel for a week, so you'll need the second passport. Just take care with US ESTA and other visas, they are always valid only for a specific passport.
A dedicated set of toiletries for travel also helps. I have a small bag and small refillable containers for all of my toiletries. This makes packing faster, means I don't forget anything and liquids allowance on flights is not a problem at all.
High quality headphones can make a big difference on a long flight. I used to have Bose QuietComfort 15 noise cancelling headphones. They were pretty awesome, but unfortunately they filled half of my carry on and it was not easy to sleep while wearing them. After some research I switched to Shure 535 in-ear phones. The sound quality is great, they block the noise very efficiently and I can also sleep on my side while wearing them. High quality headphones are a big investment, but their price per hour of usage is very low if you travel a lot.
Clothing and shoes are the last consideration. Having business casual clothing that you can wear pretty much anywhere and is light weight to pack helps. If you like running or long walks I also recommend getting used to barefoot shoes. I take my Vibrams to all trips longer than two nights, they take very little space in my carry on and are great for running.
On the next post I'll cover the actual trip.
Photo Credit: marcp_dmoz via Compfight cc
I've been averaging some 150 days of travel and 100 flights per year for quite a few years now. People have been asking for travel tips from time to time, so I'm sharing some of my personal best practises in a series of five short blog posts.
I usually fly with One World carriers, mostly with British Airways. I'm willing to pay some £150 more for a direct short-haul flight flight with BA when compared to for example Lufthansa.
It's not that I'm willing to pay extra for the service or the miles on my account. It's because I know I always have a fast track for security, can go to the gate later, have lounge access, can pre-book a seat, get frequent upgrades to business and so on. All this translates to saving time and also makes it easier to work at the airport when there are delays. On an average short-haul return trip I'll save 2 to 3 hours. This makes a big difference if you fly all the time, for less frequent travel it's not such a big thing.
Even for less frequent travel it's a good idea to join the frequent flyer program of your most used airline alliance. First you need to do your homework on which airline to choose in an alliance. For example if you live in Finland and fly a lot with One World carriers, British Airways Executive Club is easily 2 to 3 times more rewarding than Finnair Plus.
Direct flights are great when available. They are often the cheapest option when flying in economy and almost always the most expensive one when traveling in business. Choosing the right airline and the right airport can make a big difference.
There are no fast and hard rules for picking an airline. I personally recommend using European or Middle Eastern airlines and avoiding the US ones. Try to avoid airports that budget airlines operate from, they are designed more to take your money than convenience. There is plenty of information online on airlines, airports and specific routes. Try SKYTRAX to get a good idea.
For business and first it's especially important to do some research before booking a flight. Business or first are not a standard offering at all between airlines, you need to understand what you are paying for. Check what type of aircraft is used to operate the flight before booking. Check SKYTRAX or Seatguru to get an idea what to expect. If the airline doesn't define the type of aircraft used just assume the worst one they have.
It may be a nice adventure on a holiday to choose an AirBnB or a tiny hotel with incredible value. However for business travel this gets old very quickly. We are talking about your second home and you don't want surprises with it on every trip.
My recommendation is to choose a few large hotel chains and stick with them. Personally I mostly stay with Hilton, Starwood and Radisson Blu. With them I know what to expect regardless of where I travel. This means having to carry less stuff with you and as an added bonus you'll usually get upgraded to a better room for free.
I use Tripadvisor to check for hotels when I'm going to a new city. The hotel doesn't have to be the highest rated in the city, but I don't usually book hotels that are rated for less than 4 out of 5. Different people have different tastes and there is no such thing as the best hotel in a city. On the other hand there certainly are a lot of bad hotels and you really want to avoid them.
In the next post I'll talk about luggage.
Photo Credit: Fotografik33 via Compfight cc
I've been averaging some 150 days of travel and 100 flights per year for quite a few years now. People have been asking for travel tips from time to time, so I'm sharing some of my personal best practises in a series of five short blog posts.
The most important tip I can share about traveling is to make sure everything is always fine back at home. If you are in a relationship and intend to stay in one, do take extra good care of your better half when not traveling. Being away from home a lot puts extra stress on your relationship, remember to compensate for that. If you get this part right, the rest of it is pretty easy.
Having the right flights and lodging makes a big difference. If you only travel every now and then it's ok to just go with the cheapest option. However if you travel for 100+ days per year we are really talking about your second home.
If you want to get a good deal you should plan about 2-3 months out for the flights, that's when they are the cheapest. Make a full price hotel booking at the same time with free cancelation to secure a room. Check a few days before the trip for last minute discounts on hotel rooms. If you find a radically reduced last minute rate just cancel your original booking.
Before you book anything, make sure you have a great travel insurance. Insurances are relatively inexpensive given how much they cover. The coverage of different insurances varies a lot, so you need to read the small print. Are you covered if you want to book a hotel room when your flight is delayed by 6 hours or more? Having 2 or 3 different cheap insurances can be a good deal, they usually cover different things and if you max out one with a claim another one should cover for the remainder of the claim.
The next part of the series, is all about airlines and hotels.
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