Learning to fail
I’ve always been a bit of a cynic when it comes to those motivational speakers who come in and tell us what can be achieved with a bit of drive and ambition.
Let’s face it, what can somebody who won a silver medal in the men’s badminton doubles at the Commonwealth Games in chilly Edinburgh in 1986 really tell me about how better to harness the potency of a well executed Pivot Table?
I prefer to find my inspiration elsewhere.
Advice can come from the unlikeliest quarters. The phrase that springs most readily to mind after an “incident” at an analysts briefing recently was uttered five years ago by Roy Keane, the former Republic of Ireland footballer and current Sunderland manager.
Appalled by the Irish team’s lack of preparation for the 2002 World Cup, the fiery Keane came up with the memorable phrase “fail to prepare, prepare to fail”.
I must admit, despite my loathing for all things Keano-related (except for his very cute labrador Triggs), I love the phrase and barely an hour goes by when it couldn’t be applied to operations at Blaminio.
So to the recent analysts’ briefing by my highly nervous FD to a hand-picked selection of the City’s finest. The biggest error was moving away from death by PowerPoint.
FD had seen a real expert manipulate Excel in front of a massively appreciative audience. And maybe it would have been as simple for him as well, except the IT department had been installing Windows Vista across the group.
The software hasn’t reached my team yet, but it had reached the group finance function. To be fair to him, FD is actually pretty spreadsheet literate and you would think he would be fairly confident about navigating his way around a couple of spreadsheets in front of an audience. Not so.
First, the group financial controller had put the spreadsheets together using Excel on Vista.
Second, FD was under the additional pressure of having his every mouse-click examined by the assembled bloodthirsty throng.
Third, FC was a bit better versed in the subtle differences that exist between running Excel on XP and running it on Vista, which is still a rather new piece of software.
Perhaps it was inevitable. The spreadsheet being demonstrated was necessarily simple, so that it could make a couple of punchy points.
The group controller had put together a simple cash flow using our old friend the NPV function (corrected for the Excel error, naturally) to demonstrate some investment appraisal in one of our overseas operations.
You’d have thought that it would have been fairly low risk – even a salesman could use it for God’s sake.
The problem arose when FD fell back on using some of his old, tried and tested shortcuts – none of which worked. I don’t know whether it was the software, the pressure or a combination of the two, but something was very wrong.
If you’ve ever seen a particularly unfunny comic die on stage, you’ll know what happened next. The room held its breath while FD staggered to plan B: trying to open another file in Excel.
Now, this is where the he got plain unlucky, as opening the new file just caused the whole system to freeze up.
It seems that our IT team has had one or two problems getting Excel to successfully run on Vista and the opening two files issue has been encountered by others.
I don’t know how or why the installation was so badly bungled, but the IT director certainly had a stiff talking to after the embarrassment of the meeting.
Following the harsh words it was apparent that FD and IT director decided some lessons had to be learnt.
First, Blaminio now has a policy of a full dry run of any presentation before going live.
Second, play it safe and stick all of your data into a simple PowerPoint presentation and use hard coded data in an environment that’s built for presenting. What kind of audience – with the exception of us jockeys – really wants to stare at a spreadsheet on a big screen for an hour?
Third, if you’re going to use new software, no matter how subtly different from a previous incarnation, make sure you’re fully au fait with the differences.
To be fair to FD, he soldiered on gamely by abandoning the Excel spreadsheets and resorting to a flip chart. I guess that’s why they pay him the cash – thinking on his feet. But even I’m not going to remind him about his afternoon from hell for a month or two.
Tags: blaminio, vista, excel, spreadsheets, fd,
