I went into a high street chemist this week to buy some mundane thing like plasters. As I entered the shop I noticed an elderly person approach the one open till with several items and lots of different vouchers. They then started a negotiation with the till person about getting the best value from a combination of the vouchers and a loyalty card. I wandered around, found my plasters and then approached the till to find the discussion just finishing and the till person having to do several transactions to obtain the best value for the customer.
 
I, by contrast, took about 30 seconds to pay for my item. I am not criticising the other purchaser because they wanted to get the best value for their money. However, if it had been me that would not necessarily have meant the best value for my time on a day when I was working and had little spare time.
 
We all as professionals “value” time. Some of us charge by hourly units. All of us are aware of the pressure of time to complete a transaction. However, I wonder whether we always use the time we have for any aspect of our working or leisure lives to the best advantage of each activity?
 
I, for example, receive a weekly blog, the Tuesday Tip, from Andy Boundswhich focuses on improving communication and meetings, often proposing ways to reduce unnecessary time spent in these activities. It suggests useful ways to truncate meetings and to communicate in more timely and effective ways.
 
This week to my surprise I received a call from the secretary (remember those!) of a South African lawyer asking if I could speak to her boss and then putting me through. I cannot remember the last time I had somebody place a call for me. It seems out of place in this digital age. And yet it did mean that the lawyer concerned could focus on more important matters like legal advice. Google is apparently developing a true digital office assistant – some aspects of which are already available – see this link. This Guardian articleasks are digital assistants the future of the office?
 
If you visit a doctor or consultant it is amazing and concerning how much administrative paperwork they are obliged to complete during your visit when you imagine they will just be focused on you and your health.
 
This is all about managing time on which there are many good articles such as this oneentitled the Importance of Time Management in the Workplace suggesting Time management is the process of planning and exercising conscious control of time spent on specific activities to work smarter than harder.
 
However, I think this is also about recognising the value of time in our busy connected lives these days and then using it well. As Steve Jobs said “My favorite things in life don’t cost any money. It’s really clear that the most precious resource we all have is time.”
 
Charles Darwin summed it all up well: “A man who dares to waste one hour of time has not discovered the value of life.”
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​I am writing this blog in the courtyard of a well-appointed apartment in Split Croatia, under an awning next to vines and a pink bougainvillea, having just returned from a week’s sailing out of the ancient harbour town of Trogir which now has two extensive modern marinas.
 
In a Brexit obsessed Britain, whether you are for or against leaving the EU, everything seems to be focused on the exit exercise almost to the exclusion of all else. It seems to me that as a result generally there is less of a feeling of dynamism or development in the country.
 
By contrast the Croatians can definitely teach us a thing or two about enterprise in tourism. Starting no doubt from a lower base of resource and national wealth they are steaming up on us staider and distracted British in the development of their national tourist industry.
 
The pilot books for the sailing charters can barely keep up with the development of new marinas and facilities and all of the associated opportunities for shops and restaurants in the ports. Without spoiling their country Croatia is riding on a wave of tourism and yachting that is inspiring to behold.
 
To be fair Croatia is dependent to a large degree on the very same tourism, struggling more to develop other industries. However, it is in the tourism field that they display a true spirit of enterprise. All seem engaged in this from the taxi drivers through the department owners to the yacht charterers and restauranteurs. We have had lots of free liqueurs, on the house, and last night the manager of the restaurant in Trogir hurried up to say goodbye and thank us enthusiastically at the end of our meal. They are polite, helpful, speak various languages and seem to want to share their beautiful country.
 
The same should absolutely be true of a professional firm or business. We should all be aspiring to build and develop our practice ceaselessly looking for enterprise and improvement. To do otherwise is potentially to go into reverse and stagnate and ultimately possibly disappear as a business.
 
This report in Forbes Insightstitled Nurturing Europe’s Spirit of Enterprise:
How Entrepreneurial Executives Mobilize Organizations to Innovate asks What are the personal qualities and enabling factors most likely to help Europe’s garden of innovation grow?It then commentsIn its older sense, the term enterprise denotes the readiness to take on new projects and challenges, especially daring and courageous ones. Johannes Gutenberg, Eli Whitney and Tim Berners-Lee all shared a spirit of enterprise that led to world-changing innovations.It discusses the types of people more likely to support innovation and concludes In today’s flat world, where productivity and the ability to connect with the customer are so important in creating value, a high rate of innovation is one of the few ways to sustain competitive advantage.
 
The report also discounts country effects and here I differ from my recent experience in Croatia where you can almost “feel” the enterprise and innovation. And in big organisations as perhaps in some countries maintaining an entrepreneurial spirit can be difficult as discussed in this older Harvard Business School article which quotes a senior Xerox executive If innovation is the ability to recognize opportunity, then the essence of being an entrepreneur is being able to mobilize talent and resources quickly to seize that opportunity and turn it into a business.  
 
However as the ancient Chines general Sun Tzu said: Unhappy is the fate of one who tries to win his battles and succeed in his attacks without cultivating the spirit of enterprise, for the result is waste of time and general stagnation.
 
As for me I am going to enjoy a bit more of Split - and I plan to be back next year, this time for two weeks!

The saying goes that first impressions are always right. I am not so sure. Making snap and particularly critical judgements of people and situations in professional or social life can be misleading or unjustified, is sometimes poor manners and can often be a waste of energy. As the old English saying goes“Marry in haste, repent at leisure.”
 
Take an example from leisure activities. I do quite a lot of sailing. The most dangerous times on a yacht are in reality when you are out at sea and something goes wrong, an unexpected storm, the boat starts leaking (that has happened to me) a fire or somebody is taken ill. Yet the most embarrassing times are when you mess up mooring once you have safely reached a harbour. Sailing boats have one propeller, don’t like going backwards and have a tendency to “prop walk” – that is pull the stern to one side depending on which way the propeller turns. In general, they have a propensity to be a right pain when trying to reverse into a tight mooring in a marina or picking up a buoy in an anchorage.
 
Yet once you are safely and securely moored and heave a sigh of relief I have seen people on another yacht actually stay on their boat and spend the next hour or so watching newcomers arrive and criticising their technique or even laughing at them when they make mistakes and miss the buoy or drop a line – making a snap judgement about their competence and readily forgetting that it’s not easy and that “There but for the grace of God go I”.
 
Apart from anything else this sort of behaviour is a waste of time, when you might be getting away from your boat on the nearest beach or enjoying a beer or a gin and tonic assure in the nearest bar.
 
Similarly, if you walk into a negotiation and get an impression the other side is either a push over or impossible to deal with, that could be wrong and may prejudice your ability to obtain the best deal. This article from Harvard Business Schoolentitled  How Snap Judgments Can Lead Bargainers Astray In Negotiations says that New research shows that our stereotypes about other people’s warmth and competence often mar our decisions and behavior in negotiations and discusses the dangers of “Putting people in boxes.”
 
Apart from anything else as a professional person making snap decision about a client or patient based first impressions can be utterly wrong. I now deliberately try to avoid arriving at a definitive legal decision too quickly by, for example, waiting for a day before providing advice, assuming this is possible in the context of the transaction.
 
Winston Churchill commented that Hasty work and premature decisions may lead to penalties out of all proportion to the issues involved.
 
So as Sophocles said quick decisions are unsafe decisions. So as the American author David J. Lieberman suggests The next time you make a snap judgment about a situation, take a few moments to understand an opposing viewpoint.

Having worked on project negotiation and the delivery of high value outsourcing contracts for many years I have discerned two general approaches, usually the same for each phase and mainly, but not completely, dictated by the customer. These are confrontation (or competitive) and cooperation.
 
Here is an essaythat looks at the cooperative and the competitive approaches and saysnegotiation involves a fundamental tension between whether parties feel they need to cooperate or compete in order to achieve their goals.
 
The confrontation style assumes that not only is the party concerned always right in everything, but the other party must make the least benefit possible from the transaction. To the proponents of this approach, by way of example, a “partnership” means that the other side takes on more onerous obligations than if it was a less privileged supplier or customer.
 
And as I say whilst it is usually the customer that sets this sort of tone, there are suppliers who behave in the same way whether because of their size or the nature of their service (like some commodity cloud suppliers) and for whom it can be “my way or the highway”.
 
Whilst confrontation may work in a supply of commodity products, though even here I am not sure, it definitely presents serious challenges to the successful conclusion and implementation of a more complex contract for say IT services.
 
Cooperation means that that whilst each side may still drive a hard bargain, at the end of the discussions each side believes that they will gain from the deal over the long term.
 
This study from Stanford Business School  Negotiating the Big Deal: Cooperation Can Beat Confrontation suggests that seeing business interactions as cooperative rather than confrontational can often produce better outcomes.
 
I personally believe that the cooperative approach has to some degree to be utilised if the project is to be a success. A customer which feels it has been pushed into a corner by a greedy supplier which happens to have the only available solution at that time will always be looking for a way out as early as possible. It will not be seeking a long-term supply relationship. A supplier that is making no money or which has accepted impossible timescales will either cut corners or be unable to deliver leading eventually to complete relationship breakdown.
 
I have helped resolve project implementations that were failing not because they were intrinsically going wrong but because one side or the other had been forced into a fixed position by the harsh nature of the deal they had concluded. In the most extreme example of this I was in private practice acting for a large customer on a renegotiation not the original deal. The supplier simply explained that we had a choice of resetting the contract or facing total failure of the project and a long and expensive reprocurement – because otherwise they would go bankrupt. 
 
I am not suggesting being weak and giving way, far from it. You can behave in a co-operative manner and still gain your objectives – see, for example, this Harvard Business Review articleon How to Negotiate Nicely Without Being a Pushover.
 
I like this quote from the author Virginia Burden Cooperation is the thorough conviction that nobody can get there unless everybody gets there.
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