I bought a new tennis racket a couple of weeks ago only to find that it wasn’t strung properly and didn’t play well. No problem, I got one of the professionals at the club I play at to restring it properly. I left the racket late one evening and early the next day, hurrying by the empty pro shop on the way to the courts, I saw my racket left out, collected and paid for it at reception without really checking too carefully – only to get a call from the professional a couple of hours later to say he hadn’t restrung it yet!
 
I was rushing and made a quick (and stupid) decision, easily remedied but annoying. Very recently I saw this on a transaction. The other side sent back some comments on a document, promising a mark-up to follow. I pointed this out but our sales team was in a hurry and insisted we respond straight away by email, which we did. The next day we received the promised mark-up - which actually solved the problems we had gone back with. No harm was in fact done, but we could have damaged the negotiation relationship quite easily.
 
These days as a professional person everybody wants an instant response and technology supports this. Not content with email many clients use IM and text to seek advice by return. Many years ago in a law firm it was quite common for all the partners to get together and look through the letters the firm received that morning, and then make sure they were all understood and properly dealt with.
 
That would be impossible these days given the expansion of professional firms and of the means of communication. Each of several hundred lawyers could receive upwards of two hundred or more emails alone every day, which is impossible to monitor in this way.
 
Still that does not mean we have to rush when we reply to requests for advice, and if we do more often than not we make mistakes. It’s also not good for our health and the workplace generally. An article in the Wall Street Journal concluded “Rushing creates anxiety and resentment among co-workers” and can create and exacerbate stress.
 
And not rushing is even more important in other disciplines such as flying. The cockpit checks have to be all carried out before starting, even if a flight slot is missed. One of aviation's worst disaster, the terrible KLM / Pan-Am accident at Tenerife was due in part to schedule pressure problems experienced by both flight crews.
 
Dwight D Eisenhower the 34th president of the United States summed it up when he said “Let’s not make our mistakes in a hurry.”
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We are all as professionals also in sales whether we acknowledge or like it or not. We need clients in private practice and even in industry our reputation brings us work, or not, as the case may be. Robert Louis Stevenson said “Everyone lives by selling something.”
 
So selling matters and there are numerous consultants and courses advocating how best to do this as a professional person. Techniques vary and involve sales pipelines, unique selling points, customer relationship management, networking and these days the use of social media.
 
But there is one thing that is often overlooked – the need to be polite and persistent and to take a long term view. If at first a potential client does not seem interested do not abandon them and move on to the next target, even if at first sight they may not look a very promising prospect.
 
When I was about 12 I desperately wanted a Dawes Red Feather bike. There was a shop across the road from my school which had one in the window. I went in to have a look and the owner after a few minutes made it very clear he did not want schoolboys wasting his time in his shop. But I wasn’t. I was a genuine prospect who would subsequently return with his father to buy a bike.
 
More recently I had a discussion with a car salesman who quite rapidly seemed to conclude that it was a bit too early to change my car and clearly lost interest. He never seemed to be at the showroom when I said I could visit. And yet actually for various reasons I was and am now again considering the possibility of changing my car and I am not sure I will go back to the same person. I’ll probably use a service like carwow or Orangewheels anyway which get you better discounts.
 
The motivational speaker Patricia Fripp said "To build a long-term, successful enterprise, when you don't close a sale, open a relationship."
 
That’s the key. Be very careful before writing off prospective clients in especially in the professional world. Find ways to keep in touch and remind them you are still there and interested in working for them, even though they may not immediately require your services.
 
A quote attributed to Buddha says “Endurance is one of the most difficult disciplines, but it is to the one who endures that the final victory comes.”
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In 2005 I reviewed Richard Susskind’s book The End of Lawyers? For the SCL Magazine. I read some of the book on a ferry going to France and the theme of my review was that just as ferries seemed to survive against the odds of the Channel Tunnel and budget airlines, so would lawyers despite advancing technology.
 
Richard Susskind has subsequently extended his hypothesis that lawyers as a profession will need to change and adapt to meet the challenge of technology to other professions in his latest book The future of the Professions.
 
Since 2005 we have also seen startling advances in robotics and artificial intelligence and the use of robotic process automation (RPA) which is described as the application of technology that allows employees in a company to configure computer software or a “robot” to capture and interpret existing applications for processing a transaction, manipulating data, triggering responses and communicating with other digital systems.
 
So should those of us who practice in the professions just give up and assume that the end is indeed now? I don’t think so, accepting that we will need to adapt and utilise the very technology Richard Susskind so eloquently describes.
 
The reason I take this optimistic approach is that at the end of the day a human being in need of professional advice or services will in the final analysis prefer for critical bet the company advice or transactions to rely on another human being, albeit one supported by all manner of technological “servants”.
 
Most commercial and legal issues, for example, have some kind of emotional element. Some interplay between people which has caused or contributed to the situation will need to be taken into account in its resolution.
 
Eoin Treacy the analyst and writer said Don't think of robots as replacements for humans -- think of them as things that will help make us better at tackling many of the problems we face.
 
I think this is the right approach – technology will help us and will definitely change how we work, but I suggest will not replace us for the foreseeable future.

​Have you ever worried about the adverse impact of some of your organisation’s processes like time recording or expenses? Do you see senior managers and advisers spend struggling to deal with their expenses on an “automated” system which is supposed to improve the old one but demands exactly the right entries in precisely the right format or rejects the request.
 
In previous times these sorts of systems were manageable because almost everybody had access to a secretary who knew the systems intimately and simply took the burden away. However nowadays things are very different and we all do our own typing and you have to be very senior to have access to a “PA”.
 
But do we really want our key performing individuals locked away on some system for hours doing their expenses or booking meeting rooms? They should be doing their jobs – a professional adviser is paid to do just that and should not have to be concerned with the intricate demands of obstructive administrative systems.
 
Of course these systems are lauded as time saving but I suggest they can be a false economy if they distract senior people from doing their job.
 
It’s similar to having a policy that requires all employees, except maybe the top echelons of management, to fly economy on long haul flights. The company asks you to fly for 14 hours in cramped conditions and then go straight into a key business meeting. Small wonder mistakes are made and the wear and tear and stress imposed on key business executives is exacerbated.
 
People are the most critical part of any organisation. Anne M. Mulcahy the former chairperson and CEO of Xerox said:
 
Employees are a company's greatest asset - they're your competitive advantage. You want to attract and retain the best; provide them with encouragement, stimulus, and make them feel that they are an integral part of the company's mission.
 
Cost cutting and so called “efficiency” measures should therefore be designed to take away distractions not add to them. It is a false economy to impose time consuming systems or policies that may save a bit of money in the short run, but at best result in inefficient working and at worst may demotivate, possible damage or even drive away critical people.
 

​I have just returned to the UK after a sailing holiday in the British Virgin Islands chartering a yacht to explore what for me were new seas.
 
The great thing about this sort of break is that it is such a complete change from regular working life that it is almost like being on a different planet. The weather (warm sunshine!), managing and piloting a sailing boat from place to place, experiencing the Caribbean with its different pace of life, mooring in different places every evening became our daily routine to the exclusion of everything else.
 
All of this gives perspective and a sense of refreshing renewal I have not always experienced on holiday. I did not look at my work emails and only checked my calls a few times and had no work crises, but it was more than this that made a couple of weeks seem like much longer.
 
Coming back, it’s like having recharged batteries and means being better prepared for the challenges the year holds on a personal, work and it would seem political front.
 
Some of it is about the sea – John F Kennedy said “We are tied to the ocean. And when we go back to the sea, whether it is to sail or to watch - we are going back from whence we came.”
 
And some of it is about the Caribbean. We met or heard about several people who had gone to visit the Caribbean and simply never left. They bought a house or better still a boat and created a new life running a restaurant or in one case making surfboards. We met a man and his wife sailing around the Caribbean for a couple of years as a part of their “bucket list” of things to do, but many make the change permanently.
 
There is a sort of laid back enterprising culture that underpins everything. We stopped over in Antigua and saw a local man with long dreadlocks (looking a bit like Johnny Depp in Pirates of the Caribbean) offering to rub juice from an aloe vera plant he was carrying onto very red sunburnt looking tourists. A very sensible idea on a scorching hot day as aloe vera gel does relieve sunburn - its medical uses can be traced back 6,000 years to ancient Egypt.
 
He obviously asked for some payment as well for his services (which is fair enough) and as he went off along the beach after treating one particularly burnt woman he was saying, as he looked for his next customer, – “You burning – I earning”!
 
I recommend the climate, the culture and really just the whole experience of the Caribbean as a way of having fun and gaining new perspectives.