John Linton ....one of the saddest, stupidest and most self deluding statements in business life.
It's that time of year again when the calendar year actually ends and even people who live their working lives 'second by second' like me tend to do a 'look back and review' at this time even though I know how pointless it is to do so. There is nothing so useless as looking back at past events and regretting your decisions or the way you addressed past issues - if you think you could have done things better the time to have done that was then - "the past is a foreign country, they do things differently there" (L P Hartley) and in my case they have also locked the borders and aren't issuing any more visas. Similarly looking back at the 'good' things of the past twelve months is equally pointless in terms of any thing practical but it is something that is more enjoyable than looking back at the things you regret. So I tend not to do that too.
What I, and I assume most other realistic people, do is to deal with problems as they occur and try and do something about them at the time. Similarly, when 'good things' happen I try and see how to repeat whatever 'caused' the good thing to happen in the future. Boring and patently obvious but it does save the time not so sensible people put into trying to work out how to avoid past mistakes and repeat past 'triumphs'. Of course this would not work for 'media commentators' who endlessly fill in column inches or air time with stupidly pointless "annual reviews" for most of December (and early January) for their readers/viewers who presumably have the mental retention abilities of a gnat or who didn't bother to acquaint themselves with the facts at the time and some writer/commentator seems to think they would like to be acquainted with the circumstances too late for anything of value to be obtained.....other than their ability to get paid for writing such useless summaries to fill in the media space/time when nothing else is happening.
The new 'business year' will start this coming Sunday and the fact is that if a commercial entity doesn't have everything fully prepared by midnight on Saturday 31st then precious time (in terms of meeting 2012's targets or the balance of the financial year's targets) is being wasted that can never be recovered. But what will most mediocre business managers be doing at midnight this coming Saturday? They will be on 'holidays' leaving the start of the new year to maundering on about how good/bad/indifferent the last twelve months have been and, if they consider their 'working lives' at all it will be to promise themselves that they must get around to doing something or other "when they get back to work" before the alcohol erases their short term memory later in the small hours.
There is no virtue in not taking a holiday at the end of any given year - most people who work hard need such a break having tired their body and their brain over the previous twelve months - but all the sensible ones ensure that the work required to start the new year on 1/1/nn is done before they take their holidays. Personally I have reached an age where my body and mind are permanently tired and I take breaks much more often than each twelve months. What I observe about so many of Exetel's suppliers is that they take holidays at this time of year without either completing their essential obligations to us nor even making any sort of adequate preparations for the coming twelve months leaving us to exclude them from future planning. I find that not only stupid but also very rude. It seems strange, at least to me, that in a business such as telecommunications any sensible person could ever think there are periods when they can effectively shut their business relationships down for a month - they obviously realise that they can't shut their networks down. Maybe such people are able to get twelve month's work done in eleven months - I have never been able to do that.
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