Going badly everything is, you think

Whenever I am involved with a project and start digging down into detail, I invariably find things that I am unhappy with. A recent example of this is our current telematics price quotation document, that is sent out to customers following a conversation with one of our sales people.

The pricing table looked disjointed and difficult to tie back to how we had presented our offer on the phone, the product descriptions were very old and hadn’t been updated to include a lot of our recently developed new features and the overall language in the email didn’t sound professional and was probably written by someone that learnt most of their communication skills texting on their phone!

Back in the old days I wrote every quote and was responsible for every single bit of sales and marketing material that left the business. Now there is an army of people involved (marketing, project management, developers etc) and with no individuals taking ownership which has lead to a gradual deterioration of standards.

I push back at the our sales leadership and point out that they are responsible for anything they send out and that they need to tell the “middle men” what they want and then sign everything off before it is released.

So back to the title of this blog and how I want our new generation of young people to approach their working day as they set about trying to help Radius grow. Well I want them to “Think everything’s going badly” as they go about their daily tasks which is the subject of Lesson 14 in the new book and a key characteristic I want them to take on as we try and develop them into future leaders. You can find lesson 14 here.

I had a chat with Yoda in our Sky Bar a little earlier this morning and asked him what he thought on this subject and decided to use his reply as the title for this blog.

I also asked him what he thought about my new book as he has been avidly reading it over the last few days and he replied “Read this book, you must!”