​It is often what we do not say rather than speaking all the time that defines us. We all I am sure know friends and colleagues who seem to want to talk all the time. They appear to assume that we all want to hear the minutiae of their last experiences, good or bad. We are all capable of this behaviour. I have for the last few weeks consciously tried to avoid visiting my latest minor commuting or work woes on the next person I speak to.
 
In fact, this doesn’t always go down particularly well with your audience. Dale Carnegie advised that the recipe for poor relations was “Never listen to anyone for long. Talk incessantly about yourself. If you have an idea while the other person is talking, don’t wait for him or her to finish: bust right in and interrupt in the middle of a sentence.” By contrast as Benjamin Disraeli said “talk to people about themselves and they will listen for hours.”
 
In professional life silence can be both threatening and useful depending on how you approach it. This article discusses silence as a tactic in negotiations commenting that: People who are involved in a negotiation really don’t like silence. It makes them feel uncomfortable. When a period of silence happens, they will start to talk just to break the silence. The result of this talking is that they may end up revealing too much or even backtracking from their original position.
 
This short blog has some good advice on the use of silence including Avoiding the desire to fill gaps. This can in my own experience be disastrous and lead to conceding a hard fought for position or giving away information without intending to.
 
Here’s a great quote on the subject in this article from Joanna Coles a former editor of Cosmopolitan Magazine:
 
"In any kind of negotiation, silence is often your best friend because you don't want to give too much away, and the truth is, actually, I normally hire someone to negotiate for me. It's just easier, and I don't always feel comfortable telling somebody quite what I want. But I'm always amazed when I'm negotiating with people from the other side of the desk, how people will rattle on and not stop talking. People talk a lot when they're nervous."
 
Pythagoras said A fool is known by his speech; and a wise man by silence.
 
It was Thomas Carlyle the Scottish philosopher, writer and historian who coined the phrase Speech is silver, silence is golden.

One of the things I have noticed over a long professional career is that on transactions there are good teams and there are bad teams. By which I mean that some groups of people function better together and deliver higher quality work. They are more likely to win a bid or succeed in protecting their organisation in a negotiation.
 
This may seem a statement of the obvious, but get the A team and things are sorted out successfully whilst the B team will not do so well. And despite the best efforts of management consultants there still seems to be some very random elements in how a team of say lawyers or negotiators or business managers are put together. Often it may be who is available or who the leaders or stakeholders know and have worked with before.
 
There is an argument that it doesn’t matter because the team will gel together eventually anyway. On a team building management course I once attended the task of the various teams was to build the highest Lego tower. Our team had too many leaders and not enough builders or something because despite careful planning our tower was the first to fall over. I asked the organiser out of curiosity who had built the highest tower ever. Ah they said, interesting, one team did no planning or any preparation or design whatsoever and just got stuck in to building the tower – it reached the ceiling and stayed standing.
 
Still I think there must be some more science to the creation of successful teams. Here’s a checklist published by Harvardon Building High Performance Teams. While this article from the Harvard Business Reviewargues that team building is a science not an art and that we have identified the elusive group dynamics that characterize high-performing teams—those blessed with the energy, creativity, and shared commitment to far surpass other teams. These dynamics are observable, quantifiable, and measurable. And, perhaps most important, teams can be taught how to strengthen them.
 
Here’s a good article published by McKinseyentitled High-performing teams: A timeless leadership topic which has some good ideas on team composition and team dynamics. It has a great quote from basketball legend Michael Jordan: “Talent wins games, but teamwork and intelligence win championships.”
 
I also like this article from the New York Times Business sectionwhich addresses planning, culture, respect, the impact of bad bosses bad bosses and the hazards of email.
 
As Jim Collins the author of  the book Good to Greatcommented in the context of building successful businesses “If you have the wrong people, it doesn’t matter if you discover the right direction; you still won’t have a great company. Great vision without great people is irrelevant.”
 
Henry Ford once said: “Coming together is a beginning; keeping together is progress; working together is success.”
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​I have just returned from an enjoyable family holiday in Sardinia where we rented a villa with two terraces, a swimming pool and stunning views. Our only real challenge was when we first arrived in the evening in a rented minivan, late and tired after our flight, the instructions on how to find our residence were anything but clear, not helped by a recent change of street names which seemed to fool Google Maps.
 
We ended up all marching around a housing estate getting increasingly annoyed and agitated with the situation and with ourselves for half an hour, discovering our villa did not seem to exist. Eventually we contacted the people who were meeting us to give us the keys and introduce us to the villa and found our way there.
 
It struck me how easy it is to be calm and collected and “cool” when things are going easily – and by contrast how hard it can be in those tougher situations where things go wrong. When you get to the airport and your flight to a key business meeting has been cancelled. When it is late at night in a negotiation and the tired participants are almost at each other’s throats and the deal is breaking down before your eyes.
 
It’s about our reaction to managing under pressure and still performing well. I recall a professional tennis player saying that they would pretend a real match was just a practice one and so manage the otherwise inevitable tension and nerves that inhibited their best play. 
 
This articlehas some interesting thoughts on how sports players still perform to their best in pressure situations, relating this to the business world. Its theme is that dealing with pressure is all really a state of mind, quoting the Roman Emperor Marcus Aurelius You have power over your mind – not outside events. Realize this, and you will find strength.
 
This interviewfrom the Harvard Business Review suggests stress is good up to a point – it originates from a natural reaction of the body to danger – but go too far and it has a negative effect. 
 
And we can all worry too much and inhibit our performance. As Winston Churchill once said When I look back on all these worries, I remember the story of the old man who said on his deathbed that he had had a lot of trouble in his life, most of which had never happened.
 
The book Performing Under Pressure: the Science of Doing your Best When it Matters Mostby Hendrie Weisinger proposes that The difference between regular people and ultra-successful people is not that the latter group thrives under pressure. It's that they're better able to mitigate its negative effects.
 
I agree and think it comes back to anticipating times of stress in our business and personal lives if we can and then being able to react and manage the situation, not panicking or getting annoyed or frustrated. 
 
As Ernest Hemingway said Courage is grace under pressure.

I used to be an avid camcorder user - remember those? All our family holidays were captured, if not very professionally, on a Sony or similar video recorder. All of these seemed to disappear overnight when smartphones with high quality video capability became ubiquitous.
 
But there is always an exception and one that had passed me by until some friends introduced me to “GoPro’s” on a sailing holiday in the BVI last year. I finally got around to buying a GoPro Hero in an airport lounge last week for our current and planned holidays this year.
 
If you have never seen one, they are amazing. Essentially a very small and extremely tough camera and video recorder that will go anywhere – up mountains under the water on boats or bikes – you can swim with it, fix it to helmets or handlebars. On the box it actually says: “if you can break it we will replace it.” How much better is that than your standard electronic guarantee, caveated by so many conditions.
 
It doesn’t have a traditional set of instructions, which those of us of a more mature age might be used to. There are a few diagrams on the box and then you sort of just work it out for yourself, it’s fairly intuitive – or Google it if you are really stuck. You also need a sort of handle as an accessory to use it properly and frankly not to lose the small camera.
 
This story of survival of a concept albeit in a different format makes me think of how as professionals in this day and age of technology and artificial intelligence we have to make sure that we don’t just stand still but evolve with the times. Even in the hallowed realms of the lawyer, doctor or commercial adviser we cannot I suggest ignore this lesson of recent history.
 
This Economist article Equipping people to stay ahead of technological change provides some good insights into this challenge and albeit suggests . Commenting on another time of fundamental technological change, the Industrial Revolution it says: The combination of education and innovation, spread over decades, led to a remarkable flowering of prosperity. 
 
It proposes that Today robotics and artificial intelligence call for another education revolution. This time, however, working lives are so lengthy and so fast-changing that simply cramming more schooling in at the start is not enough. People must also be able to acquire new skills throughout their careers.
 
It does suggest there may be a greater impact on lower skilled jobs, but I am convinced that as professionals we are equally going to get caught up in this revolution and will need to change. This McKinsey article on Technology, Jobs and the Future of Work analyses the difficulties for all workers on a global basis and highlights some of the opportunities as well. 
 
New technologies have the potential to upend much of what we know about the way people work. But disruption is an opportunity as well as a challenge—given the promise of digital talent platforms and new options for independent work, for example.
 
So we will need to avoid being stuck as camcorders and make sure that we reinvent ourselves as GoPro’s, and then continuously as our work and technology advance.
 
As Bill Clinton said The price of doing the same old thing is far higher than the price of change.
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