How to be your Own Guru

Any financial expert worth listening to will tell you not to expect any recovery from the current mess until well into 2010. Plan for the worst, tighten your corporate belt and get on with it. Welcome to 2009.

Apologies to those who may have heard this before, but as Wagamama's chairman Ian Neill recently observed about our current predicament: "We've got to get over worrying about how things used to be, and get our heads round the fact that this is how it is.

"Let's reset ourselves and chart a course through a difficult but not totally insurmountable trading period."

Good quotes are worth repeating, and at this time of year when resolutions are normally all the rage, this isn't a bad one to be adopting.

In these tough times, we will all be looking for some inspiration, encouragement and resolve. We will also need to pass that on - to inspire, encourage and galvanise our teams too.

So where to find it? Some will be stretching over to the bookcase to dust off the old faithful management books or industry biographies.

Over the summer I read On The Brink, the story of Norm Brinker, the iconic US casual dining pioneer. Part biography, part leadership manual, and now over a decade old, it is nonetheless full of great entrepreneurial insight.

Then there's Setting The Table by Danny Meyer, the legendary New York restaurateur, reckoned by many to be the best book ever on the business of restaurants.

Or perhaps it's time to revisit Howard Schultz's Pour Your Heart Into It: How Starbucks Built a Company One Cup at a Time -particularly relevant as the coffee chain founder is himself revisiting the brand he created. This is a favourite of mine. Schultz's is one of the great stories of our time.

Making time to thumb through even slim volumes will not be high on everyone's agenda, however.

Other people will find their spark among business colleagues, whether sharing ideas or just seeing what's working out there in the market. Being open is usually the best way of getting something back.

Networking will never be more important. This is no time to be stuck in the office. If you're not out in your own business, be in someone else's.

Knowing that another group is filling its sites on New Year's Eve by offering free cabs home to anyone in a three-mile radius is valuable information.

We will need to get our inspiration where we can - and plenty of it to sustain us through what looks like being a very long year.

Not that there won't be opportunities to exploit, and the right balance between caution and adventure to be struck. As the Economist magazine pointed out a week or so back: "As in every downturn, who succeeds and who fails is likely to be determined not by what costs are cut, but how they are cut and above all which ones are not cut."

It went on to observe: "One reason why downturns tend to be good times to launch new businesses is because established companies abandon growth opportunities too fast."

These two thoughts will give finance directors a few palpitations, but they are nonetheless on the mark, and will rightly get the entrepreneurs thinking about how they should exploit their own company's situation.

Smart quotes are not only worth repeating, but worth collecting too. They can precisely sum up your business ethos, and because they come from someone else can carry more weight with your colleagues. They can also be effective shorthand for getting your message over to the team.

Collect enough and you may have the basis of your own management handbook and to become your own in-house guru.

One of my own favourite lines, picked up from Business Week a few years back, but still true, is: "Drawing in consumers means studying lifestyles and creating destinations where they delight in spending leisure time."

One of the best aspects of that example is the use of the word 'delight', which conjures up so much more than simply 'enjoy'.

The danger, of course, is in sounding too corny. We British can be pretty cynical and unforgiving about triteness.

But it is not just about words; it's action too. Picking up on what others are doing, and finding out for yourself if another's advice really works, is where there is real value.

The reaction to Jim Sullivan's London workshop last May, when the US restaurant leadership expert addressed a sell-out audience of UK pub and restaurant executives, has been remarkable. Not least for the bosses that have changed their business practices as a result - and found unexpected dividends.

One chief executive confided only the other day that he had restructured his monthly schedules to spend much more time out in the business with his managers. "We are also much more thorough about knowing what's going on. We look in every drawer and behind every door," he said.

So much so that he discovered enough unopened Christmas crackers left over from last year, stored but forgotten in cupboards and cellars, to provide for the first week of this year's Christmas parties. There's a lot of other excess stock he's found too. He's a happy man.

Staying close to your business and staff is crucial. As Norm Brinker observed back in the 1990s: 'There is no substitute for spending time with the troops in their own environment.'

So too is keeping track of new developments and trends in the wider market. The pub sector has been the hardest hit, but there's also innovation coming through there.

Apart from Hotel du Vin at the top end of the market opening its first pub in Brighton, perhaps the most interesting and creative development is Leicester-based Everard's Project William, which is supporting small craft brewers in co-operative ventures.

First published in M&C Report newsletter, January 2009