Finding my Voom!

There are lots of approaches to understanding how people relate to one another: there's every chance you've come across a few.

One of the most useful in practical situations is Belbin's Team Inventory, which gives insights on how people work together (or how they don't!).

In this, I turn out to have two very strong peaks: top is Shaper (also called Driver), next is Plant.

Here's a nice page giving some succinct definitions.

Shapers like to make things happen; plants generate ideas. Now you already know quite a lot about what I do best: take an opportunity or a situation and generate new creative ideas; take someone's idea and turn it into reality.

That's not a usual combination - in fact most definitions of Shaper suggest these are the last people to generate ideas. And most definitions of Plant suggest those people tend to be a bit removed from the practical 'how-to.' But I have a suspicion that 'type infinity' maths people may often show this combination: being able to do maths means plucking inspiration out of the void, then relentlessly haring down the answer.

An ideal team needs all the roles: the tool helps to build balanced teams and to understand the dynamics when people are operating out of their optimal team role. It's helped me to understand how to seek out individuals whose strengths lie in the other critical areas so that the whole can be greater than the sum of the parts rather than less, which is the default for teamwork.

By a fluke for which I can claim no credit at all, I've spent my whole working life either in or connected to startup businesses or companies considering major change. You won't be too surprised if I tell you that in my experience, startups don't start up and certainly don't succeed without someone being the shaper. You might be surprised that although it's my natural lead role, I don't particularly enjoy being the overall boss: my technical skill area is marketing and I'm happiest in the Marketing Director role where on the Board I lean to my Plant side - looking for new opportunities and new ways of seeing situations - while day-to-day I love to lead marketing operations.

For similar reasons I secretly enjoy working a way down the organisation with teams that have something great but maybe not the political clout to deliver. (And in this context I take secret delight in turning finance people into effective sales pitchers: more than once that's been the secret weapon that's got projects resourced and executed.)

It also helps explain what can also seem like a contradiction: I'm a tactical strategist. The maths thing again seems to deliver without much conscious effort insight into big strategic issues; then the shaper kicks in to act.

So you can ask me what Voom! is. It is, of course, what Dr Seuss's Little Cat Z produces from under a hat to sort out the mess. And it's that bit of me that I've had to hog-tie in college, because it's always straining to make things happen, and frustrated when people set their sights too low and achieve even lower.

I'm enjoying letting my Voom! out again, if only for short bursts.

Bring on the asset-strippers, really

Through a series of fortunate events, I had my first taste of a startup business between school and college. I was the first paid employee of a software business in 1983. I'd taught myself to program from books in the days you didn't see computers, hand coding, hand running and testing, and put that into more practical use when Acorns turned up at school. Three of us sixth formers had even set up a tiny enterprise selling game and utility software we'd written to people at computer shows. Then I found myself surrounded by experienced computer people, something of a dream come true.

So I saw and got involved in innovation without ever naming it as such. We sold other people's software and developed our own. Before Windows, before the direct forerunners of the PC, there was no guarantee programs would work properly. One of the things I used to do was to debug other people's programs, for instance finding out why one spreadsheet was a memory hog, why another word processor messed up the screen display on the systems that were our focus. Debug meant running them in a debugger, step by step with no access to source code. Usually I tracked down the problem, I'd write a bit of fixing code, find somewhere to insert it and update our software masters. And that was one of the reasons we got a reputation of selling the same software you could buy from three bigger distributors for higher prices but with better value.

My job title was support programmer; I felt the problems from customers and took action to fix them at source. There was no-one else to do it, so I did it myself. I was given freedom to do this, and the wiser heads of my bosses found ways to turn these skills into differentiation. Lots of things to do, so few of us to do them, and the urgent daily need to sell things and keep the door open. Hunger makes good kitchen. I moved into marketing when I realised (was helped to realise) that my core skill was practical strategic insight.

Through a corporate career, I consciously tried to keep that thinking going, and whatever my day job I sought out people with small businesses or new ideas who would like fresh eyes. And I developed a reputation for being someone whose advice was worth having and whose plans tended to work, even if (typical mathematician) my reasoning was sometimes utterly unintelligible.

I was - and remain - excited that large enterprises have the resources to achieve amazing things; I was - and remain - convinced that most large enterprises tend to continually self-organise to prevent this ever happening. The best results can come from skunk-works: semi-authorised, resource-strapped, teams ready to be audacious and take risks. I've done some; and I've had to terminate some that haven't delivered.

Excuse the I-fest. This is intensely personal experience.

In times of turmoil, what we can be sure of is this: what used to work may fail; what used to define excellence may have become toxic; what can't be done can after all, perhaps.

The Gadarene banking swine, possessed by a spirit of - well, you choose - galloped off the cliff. The UK Government caught them in fall, with the result that Legion is now free to rampage.

So we the people have become leading shareholders in banks. The Government wants no part in day-to-day operations, lacking the expertise, so we have incremental change and business-as-usual. Banks don't lend, because the model is the same. They loved their own astonishing risk-taking because they either misunderstood it or calculated that personally it was a win-win, even if (as it has) it all went wrong. And now they hate everyone else's risk, because what used to be the heartbeat of their operation, the local banking team, is de-skilled and disempowered.

Breathe deeply now. Are you ready?

The Government needs to get the best asset-strippers in the country (and yes, we do have some of the best in the world) on the case on our behalf. 

They are the people who can make good decisions about how to deal with organisational structures, remuneration policy and junk operations. 

They are the people who will find the profit opportunity on the ground - the opportunity that derives directly from the risk in small and medium-sized businesses and their need for borrowing. 

They are the people who will rewrite the rules and reshape the products to deliver on that opportunity.

'Business as usual' seems to be shaping up as the worst of all possible worlds: printing money to prop up failing monoliths, with loose change left over for gesture politics, and the reality of surging unemployment. 'Wise heads' nodding that this is what it means to make the best of a bad job.

We need an economic surge. And that must come from the real resource - people freed to think and act creatively, to collaborate and share (redundant) skills. Dragon's Den in every coffee bar. And a benefits system that recognises that this is no worse, and may be infinitely better, than sending off yet another CV for a 5% chance of an interview.

Liquidity

For us here in Britain, the banking system as most of us have known it through our lives has come to an end.  From today, our taxes will support our loans, and the increasing inflation that will come with increased public sector debt will be the legacy of the banking bubble.

You meet this scenario quite early on in maths, where instinct and 'gut feel' are tested to destruction.

For instance, common sense says if you take a punt on the toss of a coin, head or tales, then if you lose just double your bet, however many times it takes.

And if you have unlimited resources, and unlimited time, and the person you're betting with gives fair odds, and no limit to stakes, your expectation is to come out even. But...

But at every loss, your exposure increases.  In every real game, whether in a casino or in commercial banking, the odds are not fair.  And in every transaction, the strongest party calls the shots.

At some point in time, if I understand it correctly, 'real' banking activity became smaller than  the casino.  For instance, derivatives (bets on share price movements) became more significant than shares.  On the surface everything continued as normal, but vast profits in some places must imply vast losses elsewhere, and the whole thing turned out to be a latter day South Sea bubble, where the vast losses turn out to be everywhere.

Banks are not the same "yesterday, today and forever."  My immediate future and yours will be adversely affected by this, one way or another.  We had better look for security other than in the securities market, for peace elsewhere than our pensions, for liquidity in the one moving over the face of the waters and not the one drowning in them.