Christmas is fast approaching….

I’m not a big fan, if I’m honest. I’m not Christian for a start, so the religious aspect is rather lost on me. I’m just about scraping by financially so the commercial aspect is not one I can indulge in, and even if I could, I don’t really have much of a family to speak of, not that I am on speaking terms with anyway, being a bit isolationist so I don’t really have anyone to buy things for, and the whole family coming together thing doesn’t really happen for me. Now don’t get me wrong, I’m not particularly grumpy about Christmas, it just isn’t that important to me. If other people want to decorate their houses from top to bottom, if they want to go out to lavish office parties, or spend time in contemplation and praise of the birth of their saviour, or if they just want to spend a few days devoted to having quality family time that is absolutely fine with me. In fact I applaud them for it, as I applaud anyone with the get up and go to engage with the wider World.

Of course what this does mean is that I get to have a quiet giggle about the whole commercialization of a religious festival arguments, which is always fun. Christians being labeled killjoys for wanting to keep consumerism out of the celebration of the birth of their Lord, fans of presents pointing out the Gold, Frankincense and Myrrh brought by the wise men, Christians retorting that these are allegorical presents denoting the life and more importantly the death of Jesus, thereby being prophetically integral to the biblical story. Ah, but what about the shepherds bringing their lambs? Those are allegorical too apparently, and so it goes on, often for many hours. For me it is just a bit of fun but they take it all rather seriously, as though it actually mattered. I can’t see the Christian God as I vaguely understand him giving two hoots what people get up to in terms of gift giving. Didn’t he give us free will to sort that out in our own heads? Still, makes it all a bit more jolly Ho Ho Ho!

And on that subject, we come to the hero, or villain of the piece depending on your point of view and bank balance, the Jolly fat man himself, Father Christmas or St. Nicholas or possibly Odin in drag or King Wenceslas from the carol or the Holly King of Celtic mythology or the Coca-Cola advertising campaign if you want to be really cynical, but whoever and whatever he is, this chap brings presents to all the good little boys and girls, and nothing to those who have been naughty, although I’m pretty certain a little naughtiness is usually acceptable. I mean we aren’t talking arson or manslaughter here right? Just a bit of petty thievery perhaps? So that’s fine. Now there are some who argue that the whole concept is just more pressure heaped onto already overburdened parents to buy yet more junk for their offspring in the hope that they won’t get bullied too much at school for having last seasons trainers or whatever it might be. There are others who say that allowing a little magic into childrens lives helps to spark creativity and allows the child to develop a sense of theatre and drama.

Whatever your personal take on Christmas, Yule, Hannuka, Saturnalia whatever you or your forefathers chose to call the time around the winter solstice, stay safe, stay as happy as you can, eat well and try not to stress too much. It is seldom worth it in the long run….

Your website is your shop window

There can be little doubt that the percentage of business done online is increasing year on year. In the US in since 2001 online transactions have increased from $249 Million to $49.8 Billion in 2009. A similar trend has been seem across the developed world. In addition to this the demographic of online consumers has changed even more dramatically. In 2001 the percentage of women regularly using the internet in the US was 2.1%, by 2009 this had risen to 52.8%, almost exactly matching the total population demographic.

Combined together, and taking into account the fact that these increases have an impact not just in B2C online transactions, but also in B2B transactions, it becomes clear that as a business, your web presence is only getting more important.

Think in terms of the  sociological reports on the effect of appearance on high street shopping. Studies have shown that if an area is visually unappealing, has shops that are closed down, has litter on the streets and is poorly lit at night, footfall in that area drops, and sales drop accordingly. Now translate that into your business website. If your site is cluttered, if things are hard for your customer to find, it your customer has to click through screen after screen, if the visual impact of your site is jarring, if buttons don’t work correctly, or send people away from your site, the same thing can happen. Visitor numbers fall, the amount of time people spend on your site falls, and the business your site generates falls.

The technology behind websites, and the design principles and trends in terms of appearance change over time. Typically websites go out of date in two years, and in order to maximize search engine friendliness really needs to have some work done every month, in just the same way that the street outside a shop in the real world needs to be swept and tidied regularly. Your online presence may, in some cases, be the only contact your customer has with you, it is increasingly becoming the first point of contact your customer has with you. Get it right, and success becomes easier to achieve, get it wrong, and you may never know how many customers never get as far as contacting you.

Working with a good web design company that will offer you content management, and ongoing maintenance can make a huge difference to your business, and when that is combined with a company that really understands how to analyse where your website is strong and where it needs work, you can, by partnering well create a unique and successful web brand that achieves your goals and ambitions.

Business basics 101 – Understand your business

Whether you have run businesses for years or you are starting out fresh having been working as an employee the first step in creating a new business venture is planning. The drafting of a complete business plan should be a very early priority after the initial idea phase. Coming up with a good idea for a business is actually not that difficult, and it tends to be in an area in which you already have some expertise. You may be a builder, electrician or plumber looking to start up on your own, or a website designer tired of the 9 to 5 grind, or a business manager looking to break into consultancy. It doesn’t really matter, chances are you are looking to utilize some of your existing skills but in the context of reaping the rewards yourself. Of course the potential downside of this is that you are also taking on the risks yourself.

Having formulated an idea of what you want in your new business, the crucial step as previously suggested is to develop a well worked out and thought through business plan. There are plenty of templates available for free online that will help with this process but essentially your business plan is an opportunity to explore in thought how you feel your new business will operate. It allows you to contemplate how you will generate business, what the risks are likely to be, what the costs will be, how much revenue you can generate, how long it will take you to turn a profit, how much investment you will need and even how you will drive the business forward, your mid to long term goals and an analysis of the marketplace you are entering into.

Bear in mind that this business plan, whether you end up showing it to anyone else or not forms the blueprint for your business and can easily be the difference between success and failure. It is by no means set in stone, but it is certainly something that you should regularly refer back to and modify as necessary. Of course, if you are looking for business funding, whether from the banks, or from private sources you are going to need a very carefully worked out business plan in order to demonstrate business viability. Whatever your reason for producing one, whether for personal use or for fund raising, your business plan must meet three criteria. It must be credible, in that figures must be realistic and achievable within the timeframes established. It must be as accurate as possible as it forms the basis of your business strategy moving forward, and finally it must be understandable. There is little point in filling your business plan with buzz words and acronyms if they are meaningless, or worse still irrelevant to anyone reading it.

It may sound like a long winded and onerous task, but you will have to trust me on this, a well structured, clear, concise and above all usable business plan is absolutely the best way to invest time in setting up a business. The very best advice I can give you, in summary, is : Keep it simple, keep it relevant, keep it usable and above all, keep it honest. If you follow these guidelines, you will find yourself in a much stronger position than the next guy who is starting up on a wing and a prayer with nothing but self belief and a half baked idea…..

Moments of madness…..business nightmares….

There is an old saying, American I believe, that goes something along the lines of “If you can’t learn you ain’t worth whipping”. It sounds vaguely Texan and refers I think to the image of a recalcitrant animal that resists training to the extent that it is better to give up on it and accept it as it is than continue trying to train it. I know a few people like that, and indeed I’ve met a few people in business like that as well, and one thing that they have in common is that they don’t seem able to learn from their mistakes. When things are going well, or when it is happening in a company that you have nothing to do with other than being an observer it doesn’t present a problem, but when it is a company that you work with, or worse still work for, that is far more of an issue.

Let me give you an example of a company I am familiar with. The owner of this company is great at coming up with ideas and plans and schemes, but is pretty much useless as seeing those schemes through to fruition. Now this per se is not a major issue, there are plenty of successful people who are ideas focused and find productive and efficient people to work with and for them who can organise those ideas and drive them forward to create a very nice business indeed. In business as in life we all have our roles to play. However, in this particular case it does present rather more of an issue because this particular business owner is not very good at discriminating between a good, solid completer/finisher and a complete chancer who has little if any idea of how to run a successful business.

Consequently this fellow has so far had an idea for a telecoms company that he left the running of to a twenty two year old lad who could barely manage himself let alone a telecom sales company. He then moved on to web design, having seen the telecoms company disappear in a cloud of debt, and handed the running of it to a sales guy who funnily enough was also twenty two, and could also talk the talk, but was functionally illiterate and struggled to manage himself let alone a web design business. Now letting this happen once is a mistake that anyone can make. To paraphrase Oscar Wilde, letting it happen twice smacks of carelessness. But it gets worse. Having had the web design company disappear, funnily enough into a remarkably similar cloud of debt to the previous telecoms business he is now planning an online retail business, the running of which he is giving to…..yes you’ve guessed it, a twenty two year old sales type who can talk the talk, although not, it has to be said in English…..oh dear oh dear oh dear.

So, what does this tell us, other than that this guy is not someone on whom it would be good to rely? Well, it suggests a fundamental lack of insight, or the ability to analyse previous mistakes. What is interesting in this case is that the gentleman in question is very much in the habit of apportioning blame to the people that he puts in place to run things, rather than perhaps considering that it is his judgment that should be called into question for picking them so poorly in the first place. It seems, from an observers perspective that he invests complete confidence in these people without understanding or questioning whether that confidence is well placed or not. The consequence of this is that his plans invariably fail but he considers himself blameless.

I have begun to consider why this might be. His plans are not necessarily bad, his puts together business plans that have merit, and starts them well, but I wonder if there is at some level an aberrant psychology that is causing him to feel that the business may fail but that he must do all he can to avoid having to shoulder responsibility himself. I know from his history that he has been responsible for several businesses failing at significant cost to suppliers and employees, and I wonder if he is just not willing to face that possibility again, leading to him shifting responsibility onto these youngsters who are relatively easy to blame when things go wrong, as they inevitably do.

It seems an odd way to go about running a business, but each to their own I guess, and I’ve heard that denial is a very pleasant place to live…..

Pagan beliefs in a Christian World

Here in the UK our conversion to Christianity began more than fifteen hundred years ago with the Romans just before they left our shores. The process was a long one as our nation was invaded and colonized by non-Christians coming over from Europe. The Germanic and Scandinavian countries from which most of our invaders came remained at least in part non-Christian until the mid eight hundreds, and as a consequence Christianity was not established as the dominant religion until the defeat and conversion of the Danish leaders by the Christian King Alfred in the ninth Century. The process was completed as far as some historians are concerned by the invasion in 1066 by the Normans and the establishment of the Norman Church in Great Britain. So the process of Christianisation can be considered to have been an ongoing process over approximately five hundred years, and it should further be noted that there were additional discrepancies in that there were at least two rival versions of Christianity competing for influence, the Church of Rome coming up from the South and East and what has been loosely termed Celtic Christianity coming from the North and West, particularly Ireland.

It should perhaps be noted that there are some historians who consider that the Celtic Church was more or less influenced by the integration of Druidic teaching as a hold over from the Roman defeat of the Druids at Anglesey in the first century AD. There is evidence of a continuation of Druidic colleges in some form in Ireland and to a lesser extend in Scotland, but this evidence is not strong and exactly what influence, if any Druidic practices and teaching had is hotly debated. There has been, for the last three hundred years or so a movement to increase the perceived influence of Druidic thinking on early British Christianity that has clouded the question somewhat. Evidence of this can be seen in the attribution of chalk hill figures to ancient Druids when there is little evidence for any of them before 1700AD and it is likely that they are all at best recreations, and at worst complete fantasy. There have even been suggestions that Stonehenge was a Druid monument or temple when it has been dated to a period between 4000 and 2000BC which makes it firmly Mesolithic into early bronze age, and almost certainly pre-druidic.

When considering the spread and development of Christianity across Britain it should be considered that the majority of that spread was through Christian missionaries coming out of monastic orders that had been established as seats of power over several hundred years. They had developed strong links in the surrounding area and taken control of considerable farmland and resources. They had been destroyed and rebuilt several times in some case and they were largely intolerant of alternative faith views. Given this background it seems unlikely that there would be a place, even within small rural communities, for local non-Christian practices to continue, although this is not to suggest that practices such as herbal medicine, bone setting and the day to day practical solutions to practical problems that the church had little influence over didn’t continue. The role of cunning folk and wise men and women is likely to still have been prevalent, and this brings an interesting wrinkle to the story.

If we consider the role of healers and spiritual leaders in non-Christian societies we find similarities globally. There is a clear role of healing through medicinal plants as well as a role for integration of the spiritual wellbeing of the community, often linked to a veneration of, or at least a reference to, significant ancestors, particularly those within family groups. This family grouping is interesting because it appears anthropologically that in many non-Christian traditions, information such as the correct plants to use is passed down generationally within a family, rather than being passed around generally. This could be a consequence of the principle that knowledge is power, but it seems likely that there is also a possibility that there is a basic understanding of heritance and that if someone has an aptitude for a certain task within the group, then it is likely that their progeny may have that same aptitude.

It is also suggestive that the targets for the witch trials and accusations throughout the middle ages tended to be those who took a healing, and community leading role, the people who in other societies would probably be considered Shamanic. It could be suggested that there was a feeling of threat on the part of the Church from these people, as the aim of the Church is control, and these people challenged that control by offering alternatives. Certainly we see within the Roman Church an understanding that healing, weather, harvests and the like were at the divine providence of God and could not be influenced by man other than through the intercession of the priesthood. This belief persists today with sites such as Lourdes being incredibly popular as a site of healing and prayer. Thus the church appears to have considered that it could replace local healers within communities and excerpt greater influence and control over the populace.

It is interesting to note that there are regular debates and discussions about the way in which the Church may have taken over existing beliefs and customs and modified them to make the Church more acceptable to non-Christians, but this seem generally to be predicated on dates and locations, and is to my mind highly questionable given that the Church is not known for its tolerance of existing beliefs. If we look at the way missionaries within recent times have acted towards none Christian beliefs we see a tendency to obliterate rather than integrate. To use a recent example of Papua New Guinea we see a tribal society, largely functioning at a neolithic level of subsistence farming and hunter-gatherer communities, with a broad range of beliefs and local deities and spirits. The actions of Christian missionaries has been to eradicate existing idols and fetishes, to completely change, and in places ban traditional burial practices, and to effectively de-consecrate spiritual sites rather than integrate them.

Certainly it could be argued that this is the role of a Church secure in itself and it’s beliefs operating largely unchallenged, a position that is not equivalent to that faced by one of several Christian Churches attempting to develop early Britain into a Christian nation so parallels are not necessarily valid, but none-the-less it does make one wonder if the supposed integration of previously sacred sites, the use of pagan images in churches and so on are as relevant or indeed possible as is made out. A common reference to Pagan images in churches are the green men and the Sheila na gig carvings, but these are by no means exclusively pagan, and the image of natural generation shown in these carvings can certainly be traced through purely Christian iconography. Similarly, the discovery of sacred pagan sites supposedly under Christian churches almost certainly owes as much to the limited availability of suitably elevated and secure sites than to any overt move on the part of the Church to subvert existing beliefs. In general, and on principle the idea of Christianisation is to teach that the old ways were wrong and that any reference to them must be expunged by re-birth within the community of Christ rather than being integrated.

There is a lot of nonsense written about the history of “native” religions in Britain, but there is little if any direct evidence of any beliefs directly attributable to pre-Christians, the evidence that we do have coming from external sources, since the society before Roman occupation was pre-literate, and archaeological finds are subject to interpretation and speculation. Again a good example of this is the theories around deposits of broken metal artifacts in wetland areas, frequently categorized as votive offerings to the local water deity to alleviate flooding, rather than, lets say, the scrap waste from a bronze age metalworking site dumped in the river because it was convenient, and the idea of recycling hadn’t taken hold. Just a thought….

Striving for perfection…..

For years I kept trying to tell myself that I didn’t get the whole perfection thing. That for me perfection was a concept that didn’t make sense. Perfection, even in the smallest of things is impossible, I would say to myself, as there are always improvements that can be made, no matter how small. I even tried to convince myself mathematically, an interesting decision given my lack of mathematical knowledge or understanding, but I latched on to the old Mandelbrot stuff about coastlines. You know the one, however hard you try to measure a coastline you can never measure it exactly because the coastline is fractal in nature, meaning that as you look closer and closer at a coastline you see that the lines you thought were straight and easy to measure are in fact made up of ever smaller lines each of which have to be measured, and each of these is made up of lines and so on and so on ad infinitum.

I am finally coming to the acceptance that this may not be the case for me. That there is at least the possibility that for some things, small things, things like writing a short article, cooking a simple meal, enjoying a film, can reach a state of perfection. Not perhaps in the sense that they are impossible to improve, but that they are perfect enough. Ok so this may be starting to sound like a cop out, but let me try to explain. There is a principle in economics called the law of diminishing returns which states that there is a point in a system at which the value of the amount of effort to make an improvement exceeds the value of the improvement. To give an example, lets say that you manufacture cardboard boxes. You start out making ten boxes a week by hand, and you sell them all so you decide to invest in another staff member, and they produce ten boxes too, so now you and your employee are both producing ten boxes, twenty in total and you sell all of those. Great! You think, and indeed it is, so you take on another staff member who makes ten boxes, and another and another, and then you reach a point where the last worker you employed only makes five boxes, so you think, that’s a bit odd.

When you investigate the situation you find that the last worker doesn’t have enough room to work so they are less productive. In fact they are so unproductive that they are costing you more in wages than the extra boxes they are producing. This is the law of diminishing returns. The extra labour input has reached a point that it is not efficient, there is another limiting factor, in this case space. I think, for me, there is an argument that in some situation perfection works in a similar way. Lets suppose that I write one of these articles, and I’m pretty happy with the first draft, but as I read it back I think “hmmm that bit there could flow a little better, and that word there is a little clumsy” so I make those changes and I read it again and something else could do with refining, so I do that, and so on until I reach a point that I am becoming unhappy with the article because each change requires other changes and I am spending so much time and effort getting it right that I end up ruining the article.

Wouldn’t it be better to make a few changes until I am pretty much happy with it and then get it posted up and move on to the next one, which may be better still a I will have learned from the last one? I am beginning to think so. So perhaps not completely perfect, but as perfect as it can be without getting a bit silly really. I will be interested to know what you lot out there think of this as an idea. I think it needs a bit more work on my part to understand where the cut off points are, and how I know when something is approaching diminishing returns, and how I overcome the idea that maybe one more change won’t hurt, when it is quite obvious that it will. Maybe I need to combine this idea with working on my ability to accept things as being good enough? It’s a tricky one, but the core idea remains interesting. Maybe I am more of a perfectionist than I allowed myself to believe, just with a modified idea of perfection as something that isn’t an absolute in the mathematical sense…..

A beautiful early Winters day….

For those of you who are regular readers you may be developing the impression that I don’t have much time for pleasantness and niceness. I am aware that I do tend to rant a bit, or burble on about whatever random nonsense is in my head at the time, so just for a change I thought I would ramble on about something a bit lighter. From my office window I can see down the road to a beautiful Georgian church square still surrounded with the Georgian townhouses that were originally built with it. The low Winter sun is bright in a clear blue sky and is bathing the church in glory, highlighting the magnificent stained glass windows. I can only image the rainbow of colours within the church created by the sunlight streaming through those windows but I imagine it to be fabulous.

This is one of my favourite times of year for many reasons. I love the cold, crisp morning, the taste and smell of fresh snowfall, although we haven’t had that particular treat yet, the sounds of the hardier birds still flitting about the place but probably most of all the wonderful artistic quality of the light. On those days when the skies clear the low transit of the sun keeps the light streaming at an angle that lends a sharpness to everything it touches. The stonework of the building opposite gleams, and even the mundane red brickwork is lent a special aesthetic by the rays and the spectrum of the light as it is forced to arrive through more atmosphere than the summer sun.

I’m constantly surprised that I don’t see more people taking a moment to pause in their busy day to just enjoy the sights and sounds of a beautiful Winters day. For me there is something deeply special about it, but I guess it takes all sorts. I have never been one for the more obvious heat and light of Summer, finding it too close and hot, but this afternoon, sitting in the window, watching the World go by, seeing the light shift as the sun tracks across the sky I can easily believe that all is right with the World, even if only in this moment, and this mind. It gladdens my heart and lifts my spirits and for a short while the World becomes bearable.

For me, taking the time to really appreciate these moments is crucial as it gives me a high point to refer back to in the darker days. To know that I can feel and experience beauty reminds me that I am human, that I part of the great, complex, ever changing pattern of life on this planet, and that there is always something to savour, something to enjoy, even when it feels like there is nothing left that is worthwhile.

I love Winter, and I love that I can find beauty in something so simply complex as the play of light on the wall of a building and through the branches of a tree. Today it is good to be alive…..