Welcome to A Job Done Well

Episoide 1. Introduction – A job done well

Um, Uh, Uh, Uh

[00:00:10] Jimmy: Add one job and we get that.

[00:00:12] James: That is You have one job and jazz mate. That is the music of the intellectual. Do you know what the best thing about that is? I know you hate it. And that plinky plonk cost me nine quid and that was the best nine quid I have ever spent. It’s interllectual masterbation more like

[00:00:27] Jimmy: anyhow.

Welcome to a Job Well

Done podcast. How to improve the Daily Grind

if you

wanna do your job well,

or team, organization, or colleagues. More engaged and put in a top class performance at work then listen on.

[00:00:42] James: Yeah, and it’s more than sorry, there’s more to it than just you because we’re a couple of old blokes and we just get really frustrated by poor organization and poor customer service. So the other day I was phoning my insurance company and I was sat there for 30 minutes and then this bright voice came, come on and said, Oh,

Your call is important to us, please hold on.

And I thought, clearly my call isn’t important to you, otherwise I wouldn’t be sat here for 30 minutes. So, we also have a desire to improve the way some organisations work.

Because some organizations, they really couldn’t organize a piss up in a brewery and then we just want to help you enjoy your work and be as successful as you can be in your working life.

[00:01:25] Jimmy: And it’s

not just call centers. This is for

anyone

doing work in offices, shops, factories, whether you’re leading teams, running your own business, or just want to improve your working life. Do you know, we spend 90, 000 hours of our lives, a third of our lives at work. So why not make it as enjoyable and as successful as possible?

[00:01:45] James: Is it that much? 90, 000 hours? And there’s that book, isn’t there, what’s it called? Outliers by Malcolm Gladwell. And he says that there is some debate about it, but he says that to do something really well, you need 10, 000 hours worth of practice. So if you spent 90, 000 hours at work, then by the end of it, You as an individual should be really good at it.

And you’d hope that every individual in the business was good at it, the whole business would be good. Yet that doesn’t seem to be the case, does it? In fact, quite often I am sadly disappointed by organizations. So that’s our challenge, is to help you and your organizations become masterful at something.

[00:02:25] Jimmy: podcast will be packed with hints and tips, ideas, hopefully it’ll be entertaining and some entertaining and thought provoking stories, otherwise known as case studies, but it’ll be light hearted and practical. And

[00:02:39] James: between us, Jimmy and I, we’ve got over 70 years of experience. So as they say, there’s no point getting old if you don’t get wise.

[00:02:46] Jimmy: over 70

 We are young elderly. I only heard the first bit that young.

[00:02:55] James: right. You’re kidding yourself. It’s like the last of the summer wine meets a business podcast.

[00:03:01] Jimmy: I like to think of it more like diary of a CEO meets Peter Kay.

[00:03:05] James: Yeah, steady on. Let’s not overreach ourselves. Um, the other thing that I should point out is that we are sitting here surrounded by wires and computers. And we have no idea what we’re doing technically. So you’ll have to bear with us if we have the odd glitch.

I apologize for that.

[00:03:18] Jimmy: and I did press record, didn’t

[00:03:20] James: record, didn’t you?

I do hope so.

[00:03:21] Jimmy: Anyhow, who are we, and why should you listen to us? Well, let me introduce James. He is the brains of the

outfit. He’s done everything from shelling peas, making Mars bars, lending money to sending them round the bailiffs. Anyway, more importantly, he is a best selling author. His book.

Managed

by morons is available now and it’s topping some of the bestseller lists But he’s also one of the best problem solvers around

and he tells a great story. So you’ll hear

Lots of lots of interesting facts. He’s always worth listening to

[00:03:56] James: And also we have Jimmy, as you can tell, uh, Jimmy is from North London, but we won’t hold that against him. He left school after fluffing his A levels and he went and worked in a bookies in North London somewhere. Where was it you said you started working?

[00:04:09] Jimmy: It was, uh, in Kilburn, Northwest

London.

[00:04:11] James: Lovely. And you know what they say, you can take the boy out of North London but you can’t take North London out the boy.

But anyway, despite that, and rather surprisingly, after that inauspicious start, he actually ended up as the Chief Operating Officer of somewhere really quite important. He was also, my boss for five years.

So there you go. There’s proof that there’s hope for us all.

[00:04:32] Scarlett 2i2 USB-3: a

[00:04:32] Jimmy: Anyway, we thought we’d just start with a little teaser for our first episode. So the first thing we’re going to talk about is purpose.

[00:04:39] James: Now the reason that I’d like to talk about purpose is, um, it’s really important. Two reasons for that. First of all, it obviously gives you work direction and gives you a, well, a reason to get out of bed. But secondly, it acts as a design standard for everything that you do. So what is the purpose of your organization?

And are you fulfilling that? So let me give you, a couple of stories about purpose.

So one of these stories you will no doubt have heard before. Now apparently in 1962, John F. Kennedy went and he was given his first tour around NASA and whilst he was walking around, he saw a bloke standing there in the corner and he introduced himself and he said to the guy, you know, I’m John F.

Kennedy, I am the president. Uh, what do you do here? And the bloke looked at him and said, oh, well I’m busy trying to help put a man on the moon. And apparently that was the janitor. And you just think about that. That’s a really powerful story, isn’t it?

If you could get everybody, even the janitors focused on putting a man on the moon or whatever it is that’s important to your organization, then things would work a lot more smoothly. It’s not always that great though.

My daughter, bless her, is currently at the University of Birmingham, and she wanted to know if she’d done any one of her exams. So she has to see her past paper, because a good way to learn is to look and see where you’ve gone wrong and learn from it. And they wouldn’t give her that, that paper.

And the reason they couldn’t give her to her past paper is a little bit beyond me.

They didn’t say anything coherent, and I can’t help but think that the reason they didn’t give it to her was it just made work for them. And they were more interested in making it easy for the examiners to set papers than to educate my daughter.

were more interested

So the question is, for the university, what’s their purpose? Are they there to educate people or are they there to make or give lecturers an easy time? So there you go. Purpose. We’ll talk about that a wee bit more next week.

[00:06:28] Jimmy: That’ll be an interesting subject for us to, uh, explore. And each week we’re going to bring you another interesting topic to go through where we’ll share some of our views, some hints and tips, some ideas, and some case studies to help you improve

Both your performance and your enjoyment of work. we’ll also be taking questions so you’ve got any questions on purpose or any other work related subjects then feel free send them in to Jimmy@Ajobdonewell.Com

[00:07:07] James: Yeah, that’s right. Send all your questions to Jimmy@ajobdonewell.Com because you’ll get more sense out him than me.

Anyway, with a bit of luck, we will speak to you next week. Look forward to it and I hope you enjoy A Job Done Well, our podcast. And finally, we’re going to end with some world class jazz just for my mate.