Resistance is Useless: Three Hot Survival Tips for SME Entrepreneurs

In our 24-7-52 world (which is perhaps moving towards a phase of post-globalisation), the potential demands on our time have never been as taxing; with the added dimension of cyberspace, activities that were once constrained by such small factors as time and geography are never more than a click or swipe away. The truth of this state of affairs is felt even more intensely by SME entrepreneurs, who usually feel compelled to attend to huge numbers of individual tasks – except with resources that anyone at a larger enterprise would find unacceptable and unrealistic.

So what can SME entrepreneurs do to machete their way through to the clearing of productivity? What follows are three Mediolana tips for resistance-free business:

1. Keep Good Company. SMEs may not have a great deal of cash at their disposal – but increasingly in the (post-)developed world, neither does anyone else. Moreover, with business solutions increasingly scalable, most CEOs of SMEs will doubtless be surprised as to the size and nature of companies that are more than interested in partnering with them. Leverage their power towards increasing the value of your own products and reap the rewards.

2. Avoid Conflict. Heading off the cowboys at the pass – however these dangers may manifest themselves – is simply essential. The limited duration of the day – no one has yet managed to extend it much beyond 24 hours – means that spending time (not to mention energy) on conflict, whether this be in chatrooms, forums or via the exchange of communications between legal representatives, is an expressway to self-sabotage.

3. Cut Your Losses. Persistence with any idea or person is vital – unless it’s a total no-brainer that the opportunity cost of doggedness is jeopardising the point of the enterprise. As the 2006 FIFA World Cup round of sixteen match between former tier-two imperial powers Holland and Portugal illustrated, if entities are hell-bent on destruction, even the most lenient arbiter will have no choice but to brandish card after card – almost invariably, some of them will be red.

Paying Attention to Productivity: The Experience of Massimo Ambrosini

In an era which is arguably defined by distraction at the hands of electronic devices, high productivity is seemingly the Holy Grail that most seekers will not have a Belgian chocolate’s chance in hell of ever attaining. Yet as our CSO observed tonight’s 2011-2012 UEFA Champions League quarter-final first leg between AC Milan and FC Barcelona, it became clear to him that better productivity is within reach of anyone who attributes value well to their experiences, and seeks to learn from them.

This realisation was exemplified by a masterful performance by a midfielder who has won every major title possible for a player whose entire career has been spent in Italy, yet who garnered a mere 35 caps over nine years (1999-2008) for a national side that he was never a mainstay in: Massimo Ambrosini. Blessed with neither sumptuous technique nor physique – at a slender 1.82m, he is physically rather average – his game nevertheless evinces a precious refinement through one key attribute: his reading of a football match. Anticipating seemingly every pass, his breathtaking challenge to deflect Lionel Messi‘s shot wide was something that should not have been possible for a 34-year-old man in the seventy-seventh minute of an extraordinarily draining encounter. Yet his experience guided him to the optimal outcome.

Far too often in life, mistakes are made which on a closer examination of our existence to date are both recognisable and avoidable. Constant consciousness of who we are, where we are and what is occurring at any given moment – particularly during activities which are vital to our lives – should yield higher levels of learning and ultimately greater skill at the tasks that lay before us to be accomplished.

Workplace and Academic Productivity: Appraise, Adapt, Achieve

As a company headquartered in what we increasingly feel is Western Europe’s most surreal metropolis, Mediolana is not immune to the effects of the cold spell that has recently had much of the continent in its firm, icy grip; while the probable impact of the North Atlantic Current means that temperatures in London have not plummeted much below -5℃, freezing nights and chilly days have done nothing for the productivity of the Mediolana CSO, whose RescueTime statistics are in genuine danger of slipping below 99%. The harsh weather in a usually benign climate means that the mind is prone to lose concentration, wandering to prosaic matters such as when to make the next hot drink, feeling the radiator to verify its continued functioning and choosing whether or not to put on that extra layer.

With the weather patterns set to change quite dramatically over the forthcoming week – incredibly, the forecast is for a 9℃ increase in night temperatures within 48 hours of the publication of this blog post – this may strike many readers as an essentially temporary or at worst seasonal issue. Yet it has set us thinking about productivity generally, and why so many companies and institutions stick to the same modus operandi regardless of any changes in external conditions.

Long, hot summers – which, amazingly as it may seem now, were a regular feature of capital life in the late 1980s, 1990s and early 2000s – are often greeted by corporate London as little more than an opportunity to sweat in a suit. Meetings are held in the same conference room for decades, regardless of the preferences of either the host or the client being seen. Staff, demotivated by years of toiling in an office with an uninspiring location, are not permitted – even in the epoch of the mobile telecommunications revolution – to work in a more interesting building even for one afternoon in their company career.

Human beings may to some degree be creatures of habit, but blind obedience to pointless protocol is rarely going to engender any spectacular results in the domain of workplace (or indeed academic) productivity. Stumbling through days, weeks or longer periods with little or no regard to whether current working practices do at least the courtesy of lip service to practicality and comfort is an unfortunate norm that no business, other institution or individual can afford to perpetuate.

Rescuing Rescuetime: Productivity ≠ Percentages!

For those who take their productivity in front of a screen seriously, RescueTime – a programme immortalised in Timothy Ferriss’s 2007 classic The 4-Hour Workweek: Escape 9-5, Live Anywhere, and Join the New Rich - is something of an essential. Registered users – an entry-level, comprehensive version is free to all those who submit their e-mail address – get access to an application that logs and categorises every second of time that is spent at one’s PC, and then engenders a panoply of useful data that can be utilised as a motivational tool.

Indeed, the idea that being confronted with the fact that one’s life is being lost to viewing a friend of a friend of an acquaintance’s three year old photos on Facebook can serve as a catalyst for change has arguably never been more powerful. Away from certain authoritarian regimes in the Middle East, the liberating effects of social media are rarely obvious; most users appear to be trapped in a universe of insubstantial trivia that rarely matters beyond the moment the status update or photograph has been posted. The fact that access to this universe comes at a punitive price – as of September 2011, the planet was collectively spending 700 billion minutes per month on Facebook, with Twitter handling 1.6 billion requests per day – needs to be acknowledged and addressed by all those who have ambitions beyond passive consumption and active inertia.

Yet we at Mediolana feel that we should point out an important aspect of RescueTime that we think will be overlooked by all but the most zealous and imaginative users: the time spent on an activity is not actually the only significant indicator of its distractive potential. Our CSO has regularly clocked outstanding scores on RescueTime – even in comparison to the other members of the presumably clock-conscious RescueTime community – but did not feel completely satisfied with his allocation of attention resources.

This is because in the era of browser cookies and auto-completed website URLs it is possible to spend minimal time on distracting websites while simultaneously devoting a disproportionate amount of concentration to them: flicking in and out of e-mail, Twitter, and Flickr may involve nothing more than a couple of quick keystrokes, but it is a behaviour which can destroy any pretensions to productivity a person may once have possessed. This is not to say that being more productive than 68% of users and spending 72% of one’s time in the top 10% of RescueTimers is meaningless – far from it – but it is not necessarily the elysian ‘Nerdvana‘ that it appears to be, either; in this sense, the quite brilliant RescueTime is as necessary as it is insufficient.

The world of work around the world: five suggestions for best practice

In the hugely impressive March 2011 edition of Monocle, the self-styled briefing on global affairs, business culture and design, the existential issue of working hours is the focus of an essay by Sophie Grove, Work in Progress. Amongst other things, Grove informs us that South Koreans toil for an average of 2,316 hours per year vis à vis the average German’s input of 1,141 working hours; that a mere 60% of self-employed Albanians enjoy being their own boss, versus 100% of corresponding Swedes; and that staying in the office beyond 17:00 hours is deemed to be a sign of inefficiency in Finland, the spiritual home of 24-7 mobile communication.

A quantitative analysis of working hours such as that provided by Grove is to be welcomed. But what about the quality of working life? What can organisations do to increase this beyond the clichés of subsidised gym membership, twenty-eight days’ paid annual leave and private health insurance to treat the medical conditions acquired over a lifetime of office stress?

1. Waste less time. Far too many organisations treat time as an infinite resource. A case in point: most companies’ insistence that their staff come to and depart from work at more or less exactly the same time as employees in other companies, which in big cities with less than adequate transportation options (and there are lots of these) means the evaporation of many hours each week in crawling traffic jams, idling metro cars and overcrowded train stations. Starting and finishing the working day even one hour later could obviate much of this loss;

2. Make earnings more heterarchical. In many companies – particularly though not exclusively those with Anglo-Saxon origins – senior staff guzzle vast chunks of the economic pie, leaving little more than crumbs for the rest of the organisation, despite the fact that the former may create a small proportion of the total value in a corporation. During the 1990s, executive pay in the United States rose by 570% while the average worker saw a mere 37% increase (just beating the inflation rate of 32%). Such stark inequalities between people often working in the same building almost inevitably make for a poisonous, conflict-ridden workplace;

3. Utilise the cultural resources available. Wandering through a great many company offices – even in metropoli of global standing, such as London and Tokyo – yields little but the identikit: staff of the same social class, ethnicity, religious persuasion, gender and tennis club. Entities such as this are ignoring vast pools of talent for the false friend of familiarity, and will find it increasingly difficult to survive in the future;

4. Give employees a sense of agency. Most companies – even the ones which win awards for being excellent places to work – tend to be highly prescriptive about the way work is done, particularly in terms of location and method. While this may work for some employees, it risks alienating a large body of highly talented people who may not appreciate being subject to a canon of restrictions. Organisations would to well to focus on results rather than dictating exactly how these are to be attained; in an era of cloud computing, whether an excellent report is written at a desk between the hours of 09:00 and 17:00 or penned in a different context entirely is arguably no longer a material issue.

5. Provide meaning. In many organisations, the function of the entity does not seem to extend beyond making enough money for the managing director to purchase a second sport utility vehicle. Companies that do not serve a wider purpose than lusting after the dollar often end up having staff turnover rates typical of the fast food industry. Conversely, corporations which provide their employees with the knowledge that their product or service contains value often attract and retain talented, motivated people to the benefit of everyone involved.