AMI London, 15 Stratton Street, Mayfair, London (2026)

26/05/2023

Everyone makes mistakes. But there’s a difference between a one-off error or lapse of judgement and the kind of systematic failure that leads to catastrophic results. Even in the best run organisations, mistakes happen. Systematic failures do not.

It was not a simple mistake that led to the crashing of two Boeing 737 MAX planes in 2018 and 2019, killing hundreds and costing billions.

These ‘mistakes’ were the result of a systematic failure of governance. Subsequent investigation revealed that Boeing’s Board had neglected its duty to prioritise safety. They had a strategy of minimizing training costs in order to keep the overall cost of their planes as low as possible, effectively gambling on pilots being able to respond in seconds to any malfunctions.

Few organisations get things so spectacularly wrong But not all have the frameworks of accountability in place that they should. It’s important to have not only a chain of command, but a rigorous system of oversight and reporting to ensure red flags are not only not missed but actively sought out. A well-run organisation embeds this in its very culture, so it is hard-wired, and from the most junior to the most senior level, everyone knows what is expected of them, and others.

Problems often creep in where ‘microcultures’ are allowed to develop. Silos where team members feel accountable only to one another and not to the wider organisation. Of course, this is particularly egregious when it happens at the top. The scandal over parties in Downing Street when the rest of the UK was under Covid lockdowns spoke of a culture of immunity, of the rules not applying to a gilded minority. Not a good look in a democracy.

Perhaps most importantly, an organisation that values accountability is one that is able to learn from its mistakes. That means acknowledging when they happen and acting fast both to mitigate their effects and to find out what went wrong.

24/05/2023

Are you aware of your team members individual workload and can you help to identify efficiencies and delegate where appropriate?

19/05/2023

There’s a famous old joke about an Irishman who, when asked for directions, always begins by saying, ‘Well, I wouldn’t start from here’. It might not sound like the most helpful advice, but there’s wisdom in it. It’s always good to acknowledge when you find yourself in a situation that’s far from ideal. It might even be that you got yourself there by heading deliberately and enthusiastically in the wrong direction. But that’s all the more reason to admit your mistake, and pledge to learn from it.

Of course, once you’ve done that, you still have to correct your course and start moving in the right direction. The problem is that sometimes people are so committed to a particular course of action – however wrongheaded – that they feel unable to do that. Is it ever ‘too late’ to admit your mistake and change course? I don’t believe it is – unless, of course, the business actually collapses, but in that case, persevering as before is not an option either. It really is all over!

‘Where there’s life, there’s hope’, the old saying goes. And hope implies the possibility of change. So however far gone you are down that dead end, however much damage you might have done, it’s always better to hold up your hand and start making changes than to hold the course all the way to irreversible ruin. I’ve helped enough clients out of seemingly hopeless situations to know that.

In fact, I have many good clients who tell me they should have sought my help long before they did. They didn’t because they didn’t know yet that they were taking things in the wrong direction. That’s why it’s so important to be able to say, ‘I wouldn’t start from here’. It’s the first step in changing direction, and getting to somewhere you would want to start from.

So, no, I don’t think it ever is too late to turn things around. To name your mistakes and learn from them. If you tell yourself it is, you’re only robbing yourself of the freedom you still do have to fix things.

17/05/2023

Are you consciously thinking about Priorities and Urgent tasks?

11/05/2023

From flat management structures to remote workforces to incorporating technology into decision making, today's leaders have to juggle many ways of working. But what's the impact of all this 'tinkering' and should we be tinkering more or less?

09/05/2023

Attracting and retaining the right talent for your organisation is never easy. The Covid-19 pandemic brought matters to a head in many sectors, as the shift to flexible working and general disruption prompted employees to rethink their careers. The bigger picture, though, is that people’s expectations of work were changing anyway.

The millennials and Generation Z tend to take a more instrumental view of their jobs. Their parents and grandparents (mostly grandfathers) perhaps sought a job for life with good prospects for promotion in a stable and reliable organisation. They are more interested in a series of rewarding and enriching experiences with a variety of employers. They like to be challenged and to grow in whatever role they take on, and have no qualms about moving on with no hard feelings if a job no longer feels as rewarding as they would like.

Smart employers have learned to adapt to these changing expectations, in part, by changing their own expectations. Retention is not an absolute goal in its own terms: the key is to make the most of people while they are with the organisation, and to keep them happy and productive for as long as possible.

For organisations involved in transformational change, the challenges are obviously even greater. A successful transformation will see some roles disappear altogether and others change beyond recognition, while other ‘vacancies’ will appear with no obvious internal candidates. That is why it is so important to be open to the possibility that existing team members can be transformed along with the organisation itself in order to fill those vacancies, embracing new challenges and opportunities for growth in the process.

Even when an organisation is not in the process of transformational change, ‘interviewing’ existing staff is a good technique for optimising their performance (and keeping them engaged).

04/05/2023

There comes a point in the life of a successful business owner when they face something of an existential crisis. As their business grows and diversifies, are they still just a business owner or managing director like any other, or have they become a different kind of beast altogether? Have they metamorphosed into a portfolio manager?

In a technical sense, the question is easy to answer. If you own more than one company, you have a portfolio to manage. For many business people, however, the difference is academic. They simply get on with managing their various businesses, whether these make up a consolidated group or a more random collection of concerns. And they remain as committed as ever to controlling the overall direction of those companies.

The idea that managing a portfolio rather than a single organisation is somehow less labour intensive is fanciful. If anything, then, portfolio management is management to the nth degree (n being the number of companies for which you are responsible!). Organisations do not start managing themselves just because the boss has fingers in other pies. And successful business leaders don’t get successful by neglecting their responsibilities.

Successful portfolio managers combine two crucial qualities. They have the same drive to maintain control over the direction of each organisation they have built as they did when they founded them. And they have a clear understanding of which high-level decisions will make a difference to that direction. They learn to focus their time and energy on those decisions that have maximum impact, and leave less pivotal decisions to those they are paying to take care of them.

So portfolio managers are not a different breed at all. They are managing directors who have reached the next level, and perhaps have to learn a new set of skills. Ultimately, though, the buck stops with them, just as it did when they started their first business.

03/05/2023

The hybrid car is a case study in compromise. It offers the greater sustainability and lower carbon emissions of electric power combined with the performance and reliability of the internal combustion engine. It doesn’t have to be all or nothing.

Drivers of hybrids don’t have to depend entirely on electric power and the limitations associated with current battery technology. But nor do they have to use expensive and unsustainable petrol or diesel all the time. It’s a wonderfully integrated piece of design.

In recent years, we’ve also heard a lot about hybrid working. In one way, this is nothing new. The technology has been around for decades, and working mums and others with non-work commitments have long been using it to work from home at least some of the time. Just about everyone who could work from home did so for at least a few months, which meant the potential became apparent to employees and employers alike.

Less discussed but just as transformative is the ‘hybrid high street’. Long before the pandemic, traditional high streets were losing out to online retail. Consumers preferred the convenience of shopping online to travelling to town centres to wander round brick-and-mortar shops. Prices are generally cheaper, choice is much greater and products can be delivered to their door, often the next day or even the same day. For many, high streets became somewhere to examine products close up before ordering online anyway.

Smart retailers also encouraged shoppers to use a phone app that bridged the divide between the online and in person experience. The hybrid high street offers consumers a better way to shop that keeps physical store alive.

The beauty of compromise is the recognition that few choices in life are all or nothing. The challenge for business leaders is to find ways to compromise on everything except innovation.

02/05/2023

The Covid-19 pandemic and associated lockdowns brought global supply chains into everyday conversation for perhaps the first time. Conspicuous gaps on supermarket shelves were just the tip of the iceberg lettuce, with production lines held up for lack of parts and economic growth curtailed accordingly. Suddenly, everyone was talking about ‘just in time’ production, the global division of labour and our utter dependence on China for something as basic as PPE. ‘Where’s all the stuff?’ we asked forlornly. As Otis Redding once sang, “You don't miss your water till your well runs dry”.

For decades now, the advanced economies have drawn their water from a vast, global well whose depths lie mostly in the far east. When it works, it works. Businesses have flourished and fortunes have been made on global supply chains. Parts and finished goods alike have been shipped across the world to get where they were needed when they were needed. And despite the costs of shipping, differential costs of production have made the numbers add up.

When supply chains are disrupted however, the consequences can be disastrous. The pandemic provided the first shock to the system. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine provided another hot on its heels. That’s two of the four horsemen of the apocalypse in short order. Even without Famine and Death making an appearance by 2024, though, it is clear that the global systems of supply chains is less stable than many once thought.

Whatever the reasons for disruption, forward-looking businesses have to be able to adapt when essential suppliers can no longer come up with the goods. Typically, if one supplier can no longer provide what’s needed, or no longer provide it at a realistic price, others will face the same issues.

Ultimately, businesses need to be prepared for the worst, and willing to make hard decisions fast rather than hanging on for a miracle.

27/04/2023

We hear a lot today about echo chambers. Closed conversations in which the same opinions circulate in a self-reinforcing loop. Whether these are political, cultural or more esoteric, the effect is to cut people off from the wider world.

When it comes to business, echo chambers are not only self-perpetuating, but self-defeating. A cohesive culture throughout an organisation is a good thing. But when that organisation becomes too set in its ways, when people start to take certain assumptions for granted, things can go very wrong. A culture in which people say things like, ‘we’ve always done things this way’ or ‘if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it’ has lost its dynamism.
Things get even worse when the organisation’s leaders are singing from the same hymn sheet rather than having real conversations.

Often the problem comes into view when one or more colleagues collide with that reality. Too often, though, when they point out that the old strategy is no longer working, they are met with blank stares. Senior colleagues, secure in their conviction that they know best, assume that those raising problems are trouble makers. In the worst cases, those ‘trouble makers’ either leave or learn to shut up – and to warn others they had best do the same. I don’t have to tell you how this ends.

The first step to resolving this kind of situation is acknowledging what is happening. Only when the organisation’s leaders recognise a mismatch between their baked-in assumptions and stark reality can they begin to challenge those assumptions. It can be hard to convince colleagues to stick their necks out and say what they really think.

Their most important tool is data. Good, objective data, that is. Not the cooked-up ‘happy sheets’ that too often circulate in dysfunctional organisations. Objective data allows them to identify where things are going wrong, and point the way to solutions.

26/04/2023

Not everyone we work with knows that AMI is a family business. It began after the Second World War, at a time when nobody had heard of PMO services. Or at least, if they had, they were probably referring to Post Military Opportunities rather than Project Management Office!

My grandfather’s business was founded in the thick of Britain’s post-war boom in heavy industry. It was dirty and dangerous. The risks involved were not merely financial or reputational. That meant the business was deadly serious about risk management every minute of every day. And it was a 24/7 industry.

No doubt, certain elements of AMI’s DNA go back to those origins. Close attention to detail. Rigorous checking and double checking of procedures. Perhaps above all, a no-nonsense approach to getting things done properly.
Too many business leaders think of their organisation’s vision as so high-level and remote that they never need to think of updating or changing it. And their mission – if it’s distinguished from that vision at all – tends to be equally set in stone. This is always a bad sign. Of course, some might protest that consistency is a good thing. But unless your vision and mission are so generic as to be meaningless – “striving for excellence”, anyone? – they should be open to evolution.

Properly understood, a vision implies transformation. It’s not a snapshot of what your organisation looks like now, but an ambition – a dream even – for what you want it to be.

Evolution is the process by which life is transformed as it adapts to the changing natural environment. Over time, that transformation can be dramatic: remember human beings share common ancestors with the apes. (We’ve both been successful in our own ways.) Those dinosaurs that failed to adapt became extinct.

25/04/2023

Sometimes it’s not clear what’s stopping a project progressing until you stop looking for external obstacles and start looking closer to home. Because sometimes the problem is nothing to do with constraints imposed by others, or even with the objective difficulty of bringing about change. Sometimes the problem is you!

I have encountered numerous companies and organisations that simply could not deliver change for reasons entirely of their own making. Sometimes this was the fault of a single, influential individual who was obstructing change, whether deliberately or – just as often – unwittingly. Sometimes the problem was the corporate culture, which is a much tougher obstacle to crack. Whatever the proximate cause, though, there are a number of underlying reasons why organisations get in their own way.

Often it is a question of maturity. If the organisation lacks clear processes, realistic targets and systems of accountability, it is always going to be reacting to events. It will be almost impossible to bring about meaningful change, even assuming someone in the organisation has a plan. They will struggle to get others to pay attention, let alone execute it.

One of the most common ways an organisation gets in its own way is through a lack of alignment. If executives – let along everyone else – are not singing from the same hymn sheet, there is no chance of everything coming together harmoniously. Internal squabbles, office politics and psychological games undermine collective efforts to deliver change.

Where the problem is one of maturity or capability, the solution is to take a sober look at the organisation as it is and identify improvements that need to be made before even embarking on a change programme.
There are many obstacles to any transformation, some of them unavoidable. But you can save yourself a lot of time and expense by ensuring you are not getting in your own way before you start tackling those external obstacles.

AMI London

26/05/2023

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