The door in my favourite café is slightly hard to shut so it has three positions: open, nearly closed but still letting in a draught, and fully open. So, if I sit near the door in what has been chilly and wet April weather sipping my cappuccino I am (a) most happy if the door is fully closed; (b) mildly annoyed if the door is partially closed and (c) get up and close the door if it is left fully open. I accordingly rate the courtesy of customers entering and leaving by reference to their consideration in how they approach this simple test. Not surprisingly those who fully close the door get an A star whereas those who leave it completely open and expose customers to a current of cold damp air get the Eurovision Song Contest “null point” for their complete lack of consideration.

In a voice from the last century which still resonates in this, Dale Carnegie, who wrote the book How to Make Friends and Influence People first published in 1936 (summarised nicely in this article), advises If you can be kind and considerate for one day, then you can be for another. It won't cost you a penny in the world. Begin today. He develops this theme by saying “One of the surest ways of making a friend and influencing the opinion of another is to give consideration to his opinion, to let him sustain his feeling of importance.”

Courtesy and consideration for others is one of the essential characteristics required not just in our personal lives, but very much in our professional work. The Encyclopaedia Britannica defines courtesy as polite behaviour that shows respect for other people. The word courtesy apparently comes from Old French, describing the rules that nobles had to follow when they gathered together in court. This blog Create a Culture of Courtesy in Your Business advises In the best of times, etiquette can give you the edge over your competition. In difficult times, manners will set you apart. There are any number of companies that can offer the same services and products as you. The critical difference is ultimately how you make people feel when they do business with you. Manners are the missing link. Excellence in etiquette will send you over the top.

It also identifies the challenges of our online world, advising Make sure that whatever you send online is as impressive as your handshake, your voice mail greeting and your personal appearance. I consider we have to work much harder to be courteous in the online world. In an in person contract negotiation there is nearly always some preliminary contact where you greet colleagues and the other side with a handshake and get tea and coffee chatting together before commencing the formal meeting. This allows the formation and development of personal relationships which can be crucial when the going gets tough in the negotiation. There are also in the real world break outs for various reasons which provide an opportunity for one to one discussion outside of the main meeting.

The virtual world of Teams and Zoom meetings and instant messaging does not I suggest lend itself so readily to politeness and professional courtesy. Different rules apply when we are not face to face and we should seek I propose to find alternative ways of practising professional courtesy. This blog The 7 rules of virtual meeting etiquette every professional should know advises Leave the keyboard alone and Dress appropriately. I also like the  17 Rules of Virtual Meeting Etiquette All Professionals Must Follow which includes use attentive body language to show the speaker that you are listening and the obvious but often forgotten Introduce each member of the team as well as Plan breaks for lengthy meetings.
This Forbes blog Courtesy in the Zoom Age: How Civility Can Transform Your Virtual Meetings takes this further observing that Civility goes deeper [than good manners], linking behaviors integral to respect, honor, trust, empathy, and courtesy. It recommends

• Make “eye contact”: Remember that when we’re looking at the video of others or ourselves on the screen, we appear to be looking off to the side.
• Be present: Avoid the temptation to check messages, respond to a text, or eat while others are speaking.

And recognises the challenge of hybrid meetings It’s especially important to consider civility during hybrid meetings when some participants are in person and others attend virtually.
 
Courtesy and consideration can nevertheless be promoted in online meetings. This Harvard Business review article Remote Workers Need Small Talk, Too  observes: Small talk can help people disengage from the “home” role and ease into a business mindset. That’s why it’s a good idea to build in time at the start of every meeting for members to greet one another, exchange pleasantries, and ask playful questions. This can also set a positive tone for a meeting.

The benefits of acting courteously have been recognised throughout the ages. The Chinese philosopher Confucius in the fifth century BC teaches “Consideration for others is the basis of a good life, a good society.”

While Aesop Greek the sixth century BC fabulist and storyteller said “No act of kindness, no matter how small, is ever wasted”.

Thomas Fuller the seventeenth century scholar, preacher and author observes “All doors open to courtesy.”  
The nineteenth century poet and philosopher Ralph Waldo Emerson says “As we are, so we do; and as we do, so is it done to us; we are the builders of our fortunes.”
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And coming right up to date in the twenty first century:

• David Chiles  author of The Principles of Netiquette advises Netiquette: Be nice to achieve status in internet circles.
• Columbus State University guidelines provide The golden rule of netiquette in an online class or environment is, do not do or say online what you would not do or say offline.

The one really fascinating and also challenging aspect of chatbots using artificial intelligence (“AI”) and natural language processing (“NLP”) is their ability to continuously learn and improve. As we mere mortals seek to preserve our professional roles it is I suggest imperative that we move up the value change developing knowledge and experience in equal measure to provide our clients with added value. This I propose means that now more than ever we have to embrace a learning culture.

This article What is a learning culture? defines the concept as follows. A learning culture is where you naturally embed learning into all facets of the organization. A learning culture in the workplace extends to all levels of the seniority hierarchy. If your people are going to have the skills required for success, learning needs to be a strategic imperative. It then proposes learning operates at three levels

• organisational
• team
• individual

and offers 5 ways to promote a culture of learning including encouraging active learning and making learning fun and social.  It concludes An effective learning culture at work is the key to business success in this age of accelerated change.

While this blog How Creating a Learning Culture Drives Customer Loyalty and Profit defines “culture” as “ a set of values, conventions, beliefs, practices, and goals relative to the current and appropriate environment and society. Culture in its broadest sense is explicit and implicit patterns of learned behavior. And a learning culture as one where the values, conventions, beliefs, practices, and goals are centered around training, education, and advancement. It advises Make a learning a company priority and ensure that leadership and management is not only on-board, but promoters of learning.

This commendably  thorough and well thought through report by the CIPD (The professional body for HR and people development) Creating learning cultures: assessing the evidence  provides helpful guidance including approaches to organisational, team and individual learning and takes the concept of learning culture a stage further concluding:

This report brings together the evidence on learning culture – a broad concept commonly used in practice to describe the ideal set-up for organisational learning. We suggest that reframing ‘learning culture’ as the ‘learning environment’ would provide a more practical and easily definable concept that learning professionals at all levels can implement, while still being an important element of learning culture. Learning culture can be more greatly influenced by professionals in leadership positions who have the ability to mould the more general culture within the organisation.

One of the challenges to continuing personal and professional development is that it is generally said to be harder for adults as opposed to children to take on board new things. As this blog Overcoming Adult Learning Anxiety says  As adult learners, we are much more likely to suffer from learning anxiety, as the habit of daily studying, along with the pressure of tests and examinations, are no longer part of our daily lives.

Another impediment to continuous development that we as human beings may suffer from, which a software programme driving an AI platform won’t, is this phenomenon “learning anxiety”.  This Harvard Business School interview The Anxiety of Learning - The Darker Side of Organizational Learning with Edgar H. Schein who was professor at the MIT Sloan School of Management proposes that: Learning only happens when survival anxiety is greater than learning anxiety so that Either you can increase the survival anxiety by threatening people with loss of jobs or valued rewards, or you can decrease learning anxiety by creating a safer environment for unlearning and new learning. He also says learning starts at the top - unless leaders become learners themselves—unless they can acknowledge their own vulnerabilities and uncertainties—then transformational learning will never take place. When leaders become genuine learners, they set a good example and help to create a psychologically safe environment for others.

Whilst I am not sure I agree with all of this approach, we maybe should as professionals have a measure of “survival anxiety” as we contemplate the age of intelligent machines, but more importantly we should recognise and overcome any “learning anxiety” and adopt a “learning culture” embracing continuous professional development.

As technology like AI marches onward at an exponential rate we as professionals should welcome and seek to learn and benefit from technological progress and not fear it. This requires an open mindset and a willingness to contemplate fresh ideas or practices and be prepared to acknowledge we don't know everything, accepting the possibility of failure. Trying new things outside of the workplace can assist learning in our professional lives by promoting a personal culture of continuous development.

I recently took up Tai Chi which is a soft martial art whose practice consists of forms which are really a series of movements relating to fighting positions and blows or blocks. The "short" form has 24 different moves of which I have learnt around 6 after several lessons. I have had to humbly accept how little I know and take on board the comments and demonstration of the sensei (or master). But even he admitted that he was still learning aspects of the short form after over 20 years practicing and teaching this and other schools of martial arts. Teaching also develops the teacher.

As Nelson Mandela observes “Education is the most powerful weapon you can use to change the world”.

While Albert Einstein commented “I never teach my students, I only attempt to provide the conditions in which they can learn.”
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And for a great concluding comment “The single biggest driver of business impact is the strength of an organization’s learning culture,” Josh Bersin the  research analyst, speaker and writer formerly with Bersin by Deloitte and now The Josh Bersin Academy.

The leadership of a business, or indeed any organisation or team, can be conducted in many ways. One of the few things I remember from A level history is the contrast between the approaches of the seventeenth century French Cardinals Richelieu and Jules Mazarin. Both were extremely powerful statesmen, but their methods were very different.  As noted in a Wikepedia article on Cardinal Mazarin:

The management style of Mazarin was entirely different from that of Richelieu. The contrast was described by Cardinal Retz, the future enemy of Mazarin, in his Memoires: "One saw on the steps of the throne, where the sharp and fearsome Richelieu had thundered rather than governed the people, a leader who is gentle, benevolent, and demands nothing...He has the spirit, the insinuation, the playfulness, the manners, but also a certain laziness...."

In other words, Mazarin was more an exponent of “soft power”. This is a term which the American political scientist and Harvard Business School professor Joseph Nye explains centuries later in Soft power: the origins and political progress of a concept was coined by him in his 1990 book Bound to Lead. He describes the concept as follows:

Power is the ability to affect others to get the outcomes one prefers, and that can be accomplished by coercion, payment, or attraction and persuasion. Soft power is the ability to obtain preferred outcomes by attraction rather than coercion or payment.

As originally conceived this concept was applied in the context of nation states and political power, but soft power is equally applicable in business. Writing in the Harvard Business Review in The Benefits of Soft Power Joseph Nye also comments that:

Soft power rests on the ability to shape the preferences of others. In the business world, smart executives know that leadership is not just a matter of issuing commands, but also involves leading by example and attracting others to do what you want. Similarly, contemporary practices of community-based policing rely on making the police sufficiently friendly and attractive that a community wants to help them achieve shared objectives.

Jim Collins in Good to Great, which chronicles what makes certain high performing companies outperform their peers, describes the nature of great leaders as follows:

“The good-to-great leaders never wanted to become larger-than-life heroes. They never aspired to be put on a pedestal or become unreachable icons. They were seemingly ordinary people quietly producing extraordinary results.”

In other words, the exercise at the very top of successful businesses of soft power. I have seen this working in professional practice and large corporations, both as a characteristic of very effective leaders who I have admired, but also as a means used by those supporting and working for leaders to influence the management and direction of the business. Indeed, professional practices with the number of leading experts in their fields working within them readily lend themselves to the exercise of the art of soft power. Management structures can be said to be flattened by the influence of subject matter experts and client rain makers. The term “herding cats” can be aptly applied to managing professional practices!

Technology developments have also enhanced the practice of exercising soft power. Returning to a quote from Joseph Nye:

“Information is power, and modern information technology is spreading information more widely than ever before in history.”

As this LSE blog How the new digital world is changing how we conceive of soft power observes:
The other major change affecting soft power definitions and policies is technological innovation.  It has created new communication channels and an unprecedented level of connectivity in a multitude of ways.  New media has changed the direction of soft power message dissemination from its traditional diplomatic sources to “user-generated content” outlets where ordinary citizens, not government experts, start and dictate soft power conversations.

While this article Technology and The New Digital Soft Power from the National CIO Review in America observes in the context of emerging technologies that:

This growing influence can be considered a “digital” soft power and will determine how technologies such as 5G, Artificial Intelligence (AI), facial recognition, and quantum computing will be inculcated into our lives.
 
I recently attended a law firm webinar on AI and ethics which illustrated the pervasive influences of these new technologies and proposed that ethical considerations would be crucial in the application of AI. See this Strathclyde Business School blog Leading Forward: Soft power and a compelling purpose by a visiting professor and non-executive director, which makes a similar point and describes soft power as “a major differentiator in sustainable successful organisations” commenting:

My definition of soft power is “a persuasive approach to employee, customer and stakeholder engagement, involving the use of values-led influence” – the power of a healthy culture that you can feel, smell, and taste.

What I mean by persuasive is inspiring people through a relentlessly high bar of standards which give people energy. My notion of great leadership is based on morality, ethical behaviours, kindness and the belief that the person at the top is there to service as well as direct.

I suggest that soft power is even more pervasive and relevant in the third decade of the twenty first century than it was in the seventeenth.
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As Dwight D. Eisenhower shrewdly observed “Leadership is the art of getting people who want to do what must be done”. 

As we enjoy the Easter holidays one certainty is that travel will be frustrating. By road it will be stressful because everybody else has the same idea, while train travel is equally difficult and annoying because so many lines are closed in the UK for engineering work over the bank holiday. If travelling by train it is best to be well on time to get a seat and a comfortable journey. We have probably all experienced the last-minute dash to catch the three minutes past the hour train which is just about to leave the platform at a major London terminal, running round people whilst trying to find your pass or ticket. Whether you succeed and jump on the train - where there is by now standing room only - or frustratingly miss it by 30 seconds – it is a stressful experience. You are left hot and bothered either way and, if you fail, stressed about being late for work or home.

​I have tried a new approach which is simply not to rush and try to be more on time, but if I miss one train to recognise there is nearly always another. I can then usefully spend the time I am waiting for that next train getting a drink, reading or working, sending WhatsApp messages to family or work colleagues to tell them when to expect me. Of course, timing may be critical if you have an important meeting to go to or a job interview, but then I suggest travelling should be more about effective planning and time management in the first place.

See this LinkedIn article Why I never run to catch a train and why you shouldn't either which observes three things
1 never run to trains looking like an ill organised idiot;
2 always plan ahead to ensure sufficient time;
3 If for whatever reason you miss the train don't feel bad as you have an opportunity to use the time to improve yourself.

 When presenting at a meeting I always arrive early. It is almost always the case that something needs to be organised, like handouts or your laptop communicating with the system used for the presentation. I have literally seen the CEO and another senior executive of a large organisation in a meeting room on their hands and knees ten minutes after the start time of the meeting still trying and failing to connect a laptop with the projector screen for a presentation.

Here’s a great article from the American University of St Augustine for Health Sciences 9 Proven Time Management Techniques and Tools which recognises that  Different people need different effective time management strategies. The recommended techniques include:
 
Pareto Analysis (a.k.a., the 80/20 rule)
The 80/20 rule is a technique created by the Italian economist Vilfredo Pareto. It’s the idea that 20% of actions are responsible for 80% of outcomes.
Eisenhower Matrix
Before Dwight Eisenhower became president in 1953, he served in the U.S. Army as an Allied Forces Commander during World War II. He was faced with difficult decisions every day that led him to invent what is now called the Eisenhower matrix, or the urgent-important matrix.
See the following graphic which illustrates this technique.
https://www.upwork.com/mc/documents/Einsenhower-Decision-Matrix.png
Eat That Frog Technique
This technique is named after a Mark Twain quote: “Eat a live frog the first thing in the morning and nothing worse will happen to you the rest of the day.” Start your day by doing the most onerous tasks first and getting them out of the way.

See also some other suggestions in another interesting article on the topic 18 Effective Time Management Strategies and Techniques. These include:

• Divide larger projects into smaller tasks
• Limit distractions
• Leave the emails for later

The last is really worth considering. We tend to be slaves to email which  can be an unexpected time sink. Every time you stop what you’re doing to check your email, you’re derailing your productivity. This applies specially to those long and convoluted chains of emails where the crucial information you need is hidden away as an attachment to the eighth email. I have a colleague who has stopped using email for the most part, and yet still carries out a senior and responsible role working more efficiently as a result. Nowadays the effective use of tools like Microsoft Teams gives us more options as to how we communicate and provide our professional services.

I had a client once who took punctuality to an extreme. If you were late even by a minute to an in person meeting you were not permitted to join – and even senior executives were left kicking their heels outside the room. This is perhaps going a bit far and is more difficult to implement in an online meeting, where it is harder to stop participants joining late. It is annoying though when the last person to join sends a Teams call messages everyone else saying they are “sorry but their earlier meeting has overrun by 5 minutes”. Everybody else then has to wait for them. As well as being disciplined and managing time better a litmus paper test as to how to avoid this is to assume each meeting is a critical one with the company’s chief executive. It is surprising how rarely participants turn up late to a meeting with the CEO.

And if you never seen it have a look at this YouTube video in which  John Cleese (of Monty Python fame) nails the challenge of efficient and effective time  management  in a classic 1976 work “Meetings, Bloody Meetings”; his hilarious portrayal of meeting culture still seems worryingly accurate today.

See also this post 46 Positive Quotes on Time Management to Inspire You which states These quotes can offer advice on increasing productivity, beating procrastination, multitasking, or setting priorities. Three that struck a chord with me are:

"You may delay, but time will not." – Benjamin Franklin.

"Don't make the same decision twice. Spend time and thought to make a solid decision the first time so that you don't revisit the issue unnecessarily." - Bill Gates.

"If I had six hours to chop down a tree, I would spend the first four hours sharpening the axe." - Abraham Lincoln.

This week on Wednesday I had the same coffee I always order in a café I frequent – a cappuccino. It was so much better than the identical drink I had in the same café on Monday, probably because it was made by a different and clearly more experienced barista. In fact, making a great cappuccino with just the right taste and froth on the top is quite a complex and detailed art form. For example, a traditional cappuccino should contain 25 exactly milliliters of espresso coffee and 100 milliliters of steam-foamed milk – see this blog on How to Make a Perfect Cappuccino at Home.

This attention to detail is equally relevant and of paramount importance in our professional practices. A doctor needs to know the exact symptoms in order to best treat a patient and must prescribe medicines precisely. Lawyers and commercial advisers have to be especially careful as word smiths drafting opinions or contracts, where the language in the event of a dispute may be interpreted forensically by an exacting judge in a court of law. Precise wording may help avoid litigation in the first place, but if it does occur any ambiguity will be revealed and may work against the interests of their client.

Especially when in these days we can “Google” anything and use chat bots like ChatGPT  (the artificial-intelligence chatbot developed by OpenAI and launched in November 2022) to seek answers to almost anything, it can be harder to focus on accuracy. The level of "noise" from the plethora of information available on the web on any subject can disguise or mask this essential part of our professional practices. We may, for example, be tempted to jump to a conclusion without drilling down into the details and expressing these clearly in any communication or document. For example, a legal commentary summarising a case is all well and good, but reading the actual judgement will provide a more complete picture.

In fact, for a long time historically lawyers did not use any punctuation at all in case it caused a misinterpretation of the words! Here is a fascinating article Should Lawyers Punctuate which delves into the history of drafting commenting that English-speaking lawyers and judges have wrangled for centuries over the proper role of punctuation in legal documents. As recently as 1989, the United States Supreme Court split 5-4 over the significance of a "capricious comma in the middle of a federal statute". and observing that The Greek and Roman systems were not syntactic; that is, the punctuation marks were not intended to affect meaning and were not based on grammar, as our marks are today.  English historical practice was similar:  As in the Greek and Roman systems, the punctuation used by English-speakers in the early 17th century was not syntactic. Its function was primarily rhythmic and elocutionary. For example, Simon Daines, an English grammarian writing in 1640, described punctuation marks as having time values, like musical notes and rests. A comma, with a time value of one, "hath its place at the foot of the line and is marked with a femi-circular forme like an halfe Moone. "

 We have thankfully moved beyond this, though drafting precision remains essential; for example, the difference between a disjunctive and conjunctive i.e.  “and” “or” can be critical. If you say “X and Y” it means both whereas “X or Y” means either. Some drafts people try to avoid this by saying “and/or”, but this can get you into more trouble – see this academic article from the American University Washington College of Law "And/Or" and the Proper Use of Legal Language which comments Other courts have denounced the phrase by labeling it as a “crutch of sloppy thinkers” and “senseless jargon.” A Texas court expressed that a plaintiff should have used either “and” or “or” to express either the conjunctive or disjunctive; because the plaintiff used and/or, however, he “expressed neither.”

The use of numbers in contracts can be particularly vexatious – if a value is expressed in figures alone one misplaced comma can have a dramatic effect.  Best practice is to set out numbers in figures and text, although this interesting article Numbers in contracts – 18 best practice rules suggests that A very old-fashion way of expressing numbers in contracts is to write both the number and the figure between brackets (or vice versa). I am not sure I agree with this because certainty should be of paramount importance. I also found this US post on a case Words Prevail Over Conflicting Numbers in Contract: A recent Delaware Court of Chancery decision determined that “words” prevailed over “numbers” when they appear next to each other as contract terms in a manner that is inconsistent and contradictory . In other words, if the document states “fifteen (30)” that means fifteen. However, to demonstrate the complexity, this further US blog actually entitled Fifteen (30) disagrees with this conclusion and observes pithily principles of interpretation are frail things. They’re expedient and arbitrary guidelines devised to help courts with the mucky business of making sense of bollixed contract language, and they don’t always work, even if you try to elevate them to the level of scripture!

Changing professions, this short blog Beware The Decimal Point – A Branding Issue observes in a medical context that People have died because 2.0 was written or read as 20.0 and too much medicine or painkiller administered.  It also notes that the decimal point is routinely replaced by a comma elsewhere in the world which could cause confusion. This article from the US National Library Of Medication entitled  Medication Dispensing Errors And Prevention makes the same point noting that Each year, in the United States alone, 7,000 to 9,000 people die as a result of a medication error…….. For example, when writing digoxin, it should be written as 0.25 mg and not just .25 mg. Again, if the decimal point is not seen, it can easily lead to a tenfold increase in dose.

Of course, it is always advisable to get the big picture right, but as John Foster Dulles, an American diplomat comments "A man's accomplishments in life are the cumulative effect of his attention to detail."
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The same is true in sport:  basketball coach John Wooden observes "It's the little details that are vital. Little things make big things happen."

And to end on a historical note "Details make perfection, and perfection is not a detail."- Leonardo Da Vinci, Renaissance Italian artist, inventor and scientist.