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Member in the spotlight Julian Ranger of digi.me on simplifying and solving the personal data dilemma
Hanging in the balance Why achieving equilibrium between work and home life is a challenge for working parents
T h e
I n f o r m e r Issue 19
September 2018
theclubhouselondon.com
THE PRICE OF PERFECTION Could aiming to be ‘good enough’ take your business further?
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Meet. Work. Grow.
Risk is good Disruption is the law of tomorrow The rules of business and society have changed. Only 12% of Fortune 500 ďŹ rms from 1955 still exist. Creative disruption is crucial to economic growth. How will you embrace the opportunities? Discover what you can do with the law of tomorrow, today at mishcon.com
Business | Dispute Resolution | Real Estate | Mishcon Private
INTRODUCTION
ADAM BLASKEY FOUNDER & CEO The Clubhouse
W e l come September is typically a very busy time of year for many of our members. After a long summer, during which the pace of life thankfully slows, the kids are back at school and we are firmly focused once again on how to get the best out of ourselves and our businesses before Christmas. In The Informer this month, we have some great advice so before doing anything, read our feature on perfectionism on page 4. Recalling Jim Collins’ seminal book Good to Great, originally published in 2001, we have to be mindful that the pursuit of perfection can often do more harm than good and, therefore, sometimes just being ‘good enough’ should be your aim. A large number of our members are parents and, although many may be overjoyed that their kids are back at school, working parents can often feel overwhelmed by juggling
both business and family responsibilities. Read our feature on page 7 to ensure you stay in control and balance your time effectively. Continuing this theme, and alongside our aim at The Clubhouse of making our members and their businesses more successful, we have some great events this month: our Members’ Breakfast on 18 September, in partnership with law firm Mishcon de Reya, focuses on incentivisation and will look at various employee incentive structures that are available to help attract, recruit, retain and motivate key members of your team. Following this, on 26 September please join us for our Members’ Evening when Tim Steiner, co-founder and CEO of Ocado, will be our guest speaker. Tim will share his insights into how technology has disrupted the supermarket industry along with how Ocado
will continue to expand internationally over the coming years. Also this month, we are looking forward to hosting PACE – a quarterly conference which explores the future of marketing technology – and in addition a repeat of the very successful Leadership Masterclass we held earlier this year. Turn to page 6 for full details of all of these events. Finally, we are always extremely grateful to members for referring potential members to us, so if you know of anyone who you think may also benefit from becoming a member of The Clubhouse and accessing our growing network of innovative, design-led, flexible meeting and workspaces, please let us know. Details of our members’ referral programme can be found in the members’ area of our website.
THE CLUBHOUSE P R O D U C T I V I T Y T I P #1 9
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Read the room In your next meeting, take time to pay attention to what’s not said. Look at who is sat next to who, their body language, who looks relaxed and who doesn’t, facial expressions and posture. Check in afterwards with those who concern you. DESIGN & ART DIRECTION
Christian Gilliham_christian@cgcreate.co.uk_07951 722265
To partner with The Clubhouse or promote your business in The Informer please email adam@theclubhouselondon.com Copyright. The Clubhouse London Ltd
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PERFECTION
ARE YOU A PERFECTIONIST?
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Rather than being a valued trait, it could be getting in your way
he importance of high standards and hard work should never be underestimated but, on the flip side, striving for absolute excellence in everything you do could actually be counter-productive, inhibiting your chances of success, damaging your health, stifling your business, and even driving colleagues away. Here we explain why aiming for perfection is detrimental to your business, and what you can do about it.
deeply and for a long time, possibly leading to a reaction that’s out of proportion to the situation. For colleagues this can be a disaster as they are either judged as harshly or have to cope with emotional fall out of the perfectionist. Ultimately a perfectionist will become exhausted and burn out. Learn to accept ‘good enough’ Understand you can meet your goals and progress through being ‘good enough’. Setting realistic targets and expectations, which you can meet without being perfect, will help you learn how to achieve your aims without burning out, thereby conserving your energy and giving you more balance. While your inner critic may want to tell you how you could’ve worked harder or longer to do it perfectly, accept and celebrate that you got the task done successfully and move on to the next item on your list. Perfectionists can think they are effective multitaskers but the reality is a different tale. Multitasking is exhausting, ineffective and stressful. By concentrating on one thing at a time you’ll be more effective and probably more efficient. Set a deadline and stick to it, trusting yourself to get it done in time to a satisfactory level. By working within a time frame, you can avoid hours of rumination and procrastination, especially if you’ve learnt from other experiences and successes. This way you can apply previously used and proven processes rather than endlessly researching new, alternative options. Being a perfectionist is draining so learn to say no and set healthy boundaries so you can work on what really matters. Take a break to rebalance and recharge – prioritise this in the way you would a new work task and it’ll help you keep every challenge that comes your way in proportion. ●
The risks of pursuing perfection Perfectionists commonly self-sabotage in their relentless attempts to obtain a mistakefree performance every time. The fear of any flaw can lead to a person losing sight of the bigger picture, with unrealistic expectations and demanding criteria becoming the norm. This can produce high stress levels – life becomes a fight between you and the pressure you’re putting upon yourself, with little time to relax and recharge. In turn, your physical health will suffer, with sleepless nights, erratic eating patterns and lack of exercise taking their toll. For entrepreneurs, perfectionism can really get in the way of business development. Spend too much time planning and finessing and you’ll never feel ready to launch the product or seal the deal. By searching for the best choice every time, perfectionists can struggle to make decisions or take action. True perfectionists are risk averse, avoiding challenges due to the fear of failure, leading to missed opportunities to learn from mistakes and move forward. Entrepreneurs need to be flexible; at times they need to adapt their behaviour quickly to respond to a changing business environment so they can be their most innovative and creative – idealist perfectionists struggle to do this. When a perfectionist falls short of their standards, the rumination of what went wrong and why can be felt very
Spend too much time planning and finessing and you’ll never feel ready to launch the product or seal the deal
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Meet. Work. Grow.
MEMBER STRAPLINE IN THE SPOTLIGHT
JULIAN RANGER CHAIRMAN AND FOUNDER digi.me
Solvin g the d a ta d i l e m ma Tell us about your company. The most significant new technologies of our time (AI, Personalised Health, Fintech, IoT, Smart Cities, Blockchain, etc) often depend on one thing to achieve their goals: availability of rich consumer data with privacy, security and consent. It has been assumed that this dependency will be solved at some point – it has by digi.me. Digi.me solves the personal data issue by enabling individuals to own and control their personal data themselves, and then share with consent to any business that asks using the digi.me Consent Access system. This is all done with 100% privacy and full security, with a decentralised architecture where digi.me does not see, touch or hold personal data ever. Any business can access rich data for any individual, whether that business is a oneperson start-up or a multinational. That rich data is single source, wider across data categories and deeper in time, 100% accurate, fully normalised, consented, private and secure. This enables radical changes in health through patient centricity, enables new FinTech models, new models of consumer engagement and more. In a GDPR world, isn’t it good to know that you can do more with personal data, with full privacy, security and consent – not less. Just use the digi.me platform! What has been your biggest success? With digi.me it has been getting the Icelandic government to create the world’s first patient-
facing API, so we can give Icelandic citizens their health data, and on the same level getting a worldwide agreement with the large system integrator, ITC Infotech, to include us in their reference architecture for all their Tier 1 clients. What project are you most excited about right now? We have a global health exchange being created using our platform – this will allow health researchers from all sizes of companies to access consented, longitudinal rich, health data sets for research that will undoubtedly lead to many new cures and discoveries being made. How has being a member of The Clubhouse contributed to the success of your business? We are based outside London, yet so many of our deals must involve meetings in London. Having multiple options to host such meetings, either formally or informally, and then work between meetings is invaluable. Digi.me operates to very high-quality standards in what we do; we want the facilities we use to do so too and The Clubhouse definitely provides that for us. Where can members find you? My favourite Clubhouse location is St James’s. Or to get in touch, I’m @rangerj on Twitter, julian@digi.me on email.
QUICK-FIRE ROUND
Favourite place to go in London? Natural History Museum – a stunning building and the contents are fabulous too. Who inspires you and why? Fictional: Biggles – made me want to work in aviation, travel the world and go to space – the first two I’ve completed, and the third will be next year with Virgin Galactic. Real life: Burt Rutan – an innovative genius and one of the last who can say they designed a whole plane or rocket themselves. Best bit of advice you’ve been given? Loss of face never made anyone look stupid. If you were on a desert island, what would you bring? A telescope to watch the stars – and the lenses would help start fires too. What is the worst business ‘faux-pas’ you’ve committed? In my first business, agreeing an EU grant contract with multiple Italian partners outside my business’s direct expertise area, which directly led several years later to me having to sue Lockheed Martin in the High Court for my final sale payment (I did win though). Lesson learnt: know what you know; be careful with what you don’t know.
digi.me
theclubhouselondon.com
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FUTURE EVENTS
The Clubhouse
The Clubhouse
BANK
ST JAMES’S
MEMBERS’ BREAKFAST Employee Incentivisation
An evening with Tim Steiner, co-founder & CEO of Ocado
TUESDAY 18 SEPTEMBER 8:00 am - 9:30 am FREE FOR MEMBERS AND THEIR GUESTS The competition to attract and retain talent is fierce. All business leaders need to think about how to keep their employees happy and motivated. It is important to determine what’s valuable to the employees, the owners and the business as a whole. This session with Stephen Diosi of Mishcon de Reya will cover topics from the various incentive structures available including: designing a plan and working out what is right for the business; share options, growth shares and phantom awards; tax considerations and how this influences plan design; and typical issues faced throughout a plan’s life cycle.
SA V E THE DA TE
Stephen Diosi
Tim Steiner
WEDNESDAY 26 SEPTEMBER 6:30 pm - 8:30 pm FREE FOR MEMBERS AND THEIR GUESTS/£25 FOR NON-MEMBERS Tim Steiner is the co-founder and chief executive officer of Ocado, which he started in 2000. Prior to Ocado, he spent eight years as a banker at Goldman Sachs, during which time he was based in London, Hong Kong and New York in the Fixed Income division, having graduated from Manchester University in 1992. Join us for an insightful evening when Tim will talk about Ocado’s history, including how the business started, the disruption it caused to the supermarket industry, the uprise of technology and its advantages in this field, as well as the plan to take Ocado internationally and what the future holds.
HOW TO BOOK: VISIT THECLUBHOUSELONDON.COM OR ASK AT THE FRONT DESK
❂ NEXT MONTH ❂
Gabrielle Hase
PACE:
Leadership Masterclass:
Members’ Breakfast:
HUMANS VS. MACHINES
DEVELOPING THE MIND OF THE LEADER
TOP 10 RETAIL TRENDS
PACE is a quarterly conference focusing on exploring the future of marketing technology. The combination of smartphones, apps, social media and the responsive web has driven the last 10 years of our digital experiences. The next batch of technologies that are hurtling towards us include Internet of Things, Artificial Intelligence, Blockchain and Mixed Reality, with Nanotechnology and Genetic Engineering hot on their heels. Join us for an afternoon of insightful talks, followed by networking and drinks. £149+VAT for a single ticket; £120+VAT pp for groups of 4 for more; members of The Clubhouse can take advantage of a 30% ticket discount using the code CLUBHOUSE30.
Being a leader in today’s fast-paced, ever-changing corporate world means your ability to maintain awareness of self and others is constantly under siege. This impacts on your ability to create a world-class team and culture where people can do their best work. Discover how to become a better leader in this half-day leadership masterclass delivered by Daniel Stane, mindful leadership expert and consultant to many FTSE250 organisations and Pamela Major, former senior diplomat and now executive coach and mindfulness trainer. £95+VAT for members; £145+VAT for nonmembers; 20% discount for joint bookings of two or more colleagues from the same organisation.
Matter Of Form are delighted to invite you to hear their co-author and guest speaker Gabrielle Hase (advisor to brands such as L.K. Bennett, Hobbs, Fenwick’s and non-executive director and advisor for boards including Tate Galleries and Knomo London) discuss the findings from their latest retail trends paper. This session will explore how retail business models are having to be drastically re-engineered to keep up with ever more demanding consumers and sector innovation. Topics will range from how to breach the online/offline divide, the importance of investing in the last mile, and developments in AR, VR and voice technology.
WEDNESDAY 12 SEPTEMBER 2.00pm-6.00pm THE CLUBHOUSE, BANK
WEDNESDAY 19 SEPTEMBER 8:30am–12:30pm THE CLUBHOUSE, BANK
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Meet. Work. Grow.
WEDNESDAY 10 OCTOBER 8:00am–10:00am THE CLUBHOUSE, ST. JAMES’S
BALANCE
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or working parents, trawling through a to-do list can feel like climbing a mountain, with cracks becoming crevasses and the summit an out-of-reach goal. Fire-fighting colleague demands and being absent from your kids can frequently turn a tough day in to a terrible one. You can feel overstretched, tired, angry and shorttempered with everyone around you, unable to perform at your best at home or at work as you battle through each day. Feeling overwhelmed under these circumstance is normal. There’s a lot going on. Daisy Wademan Dowling, founder and CEO of Workparent (workparent.com), a consulting firm that provides advice, solutions and training to working parents and to the organisations that employ them, has these four key techniques to help create a calmer, more competent you. Know your end game Well-run organisations, and good managers within them, have a clear, compelling view of the future. With clarity on where they want to go, they have confidence in their decisions and take motivation from what lies ahead. As a working parent, do you? Most working parents are focused on simply getting through the day, which — let’s be real — is daunting. By identifying the long-term, positive outcome of your working parenthood you can begin to flip that equation. Knowing that your goal is to “serve as a vice president of this organisation, while raising my children to be healthy, financially independent adults” provides a sense of self-determination, confidence, and motivation. You made the decision. The goal is reachable, and you can focus on the tasks that accrue toward it.
y o u r l i f e b a l a n c e ? Being a working parent can feel overwhelming and out of control at times, with demands from both sides throwing you off kilter Invest your time accordingly Working parents who have a clear view of what they’re working toward are more able to prune their calendars of commitments that don’t align, and to spend time and energy on the things that matter. With your working-parent vision clear, try spending 10 minutes each Friday doing a “forward calendar audit”. Look over next week’s to-do list, identify the items that don’t fit with your goals, and commit to delegating or saying no to 5% of them. By making this a habit, you will be able to win back a significant amount of your own time, and increase your sense of satisfaction and control.
Keep a “got it done” list Uncompleted tasks torture us: they take up all our mental space and create enormous emotional noise and tension; when we don’t have closure, we get anxious. And for any working parent, with all the open items we have both at home and at work, that’s a lot of anxiety. The effective short-circuit is to keep a brief, informal list of completed (rather than undone) items, from both work and home. Write down this year’s finished projects, problems solved, your wins — whatever “win” means for you, for example, beat our quarterly numbers; watched Ella’s netball match. Remind yourself of how much you’ve done, how much you’ve produced and accomplished, in both spheres. Schedule a regular power outage As a working parent, your to-do treadmill will never slow or stop, but you can choose to step off it, briefly. Sometime in the next two days, set aside 20 minutes in which you turn off all devices, set aside your task list, and do nothing “productive” at all. Your job is simply to spend time in an activity you enjoy with your family. It could be eating dinner together, dancing with your toddler, or going on a jog with your teenage son. Even in such a short window of time, you’ll find that your stress will decrease, and your feeling of “having done something positive for myself and my family” will go up. And even more important, during a crazy day, you’ll regain a sense of control: you’ve taken an affirmative decision to do this, and made it happen on your own terms. ●
Fire-fighting colleague demands and being absent from your kids can frequently turn a tough day in to a terrible one 7
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