There is a famous story about the late Prof. Theodore Levitt from Harvard Business School where he says people don't want to buy a ¼ inch drill, they want a ¼ inch hole. 

In business, it is critically important to understand why your customer is buying your product or service. It is very often not for the product or service itself, but for the experience or utility that your specific product or service will deliver them afterwards.

I am reminded of this story because I went to meet with EazyCity recently and expected to learn about how they provide accommodation and language training services to their clients but instead ended up learning about how the staff at EazyCity are passionate about helping people change their lives!!

And of course, it makes perfect sense. Young people don't travel to a new city for the accommodation, or even for the language. They can learn that online from home. They travel to new cities because they are looking to change or improve their lives in some way. The accommodation, the language training, the translation services, even the job finding services, they are all the drills. The life changing experience, now that is the "Hole"!

EazyCity are a tremendous success story on so many fronts. They started in Cork 10 years ago and today they have offices in Cork, Dublin and London and are in the process of moving into the US. Their workforce is young, dynamic, passionate, dedicated and above all flexible. And, as I witnessed first hand when doing a team workshop with them recently, they are happy!

So what is their secret?

Well I think the first thing is that the owners, Julia and Enrico, understand and care about what their customers are looking for. They have traveled to other countries themselves and they understand what is driving the young traveler these days and they are passionate about looking after them and helping them fulfill their dreams. Ask any of the staff and they will tell you they are "welcoming service" and they are there to help their clients in whatever way they can. Julia herself says that the day will never come when a client is left to fend for themselves because of something like a delayed flight. They will always be there to welcome the client into our cities no matter what time of the day or night they end up arriving.

The second part of their secret is the staff they recruit. As Julia puts it, they are looking more for attitude than skills. The important qualities are commitment to the job and flexibility. They work long hours and they are available to their clients 7 days a week. If someone is going to be resentful that they are missing a social engagement because the client they are welcoming has a delayed flight, then they are not the right person for the job.

That may seem like a tall ask – yet they have pulled it off. All of the staff that I interviewed spoke about wanting to do all that they can to help their clients and solve their problems and even referred to the role they were playing in helping improve their clients' lives. The key attitude they say they bring to work with them every day was positivity.

The third part of their secret is the culture of the organisation. This is something that EazyCity's owners, Julia and Enrico, pay a lot of attention to. They have identified their 8 core values, which can be seen displayed in their stairway. 

Thank you Troy, Barbara, Justin, Luca and Julia for sharing your wonderful story with me. Thank you for showing me how seeing beyond the mere product or service you are providing to the great positive impact you can make on people's lives can make a great, dynamic, exciting and fun business.

How about you reader? Have you managed to understand the real driver behind why your customer wants or needs what you are selling? Do your staff understand it? Does your company's culture support it? To learn about how you can get your organisation totally aligned with your customers real needs, drop me line at miriam@spaceforchange.ie. 

To learn more about EazyCity check out www.eazycity.com

I think something special happens when we let our businesses express what we believe in, what we are passionate about. I believe that is what we saw with Fred and Ger Karlsson in DoneDeal and it is what I saw when I met Attila and Levi from Mamukko recently in Kinsale.

Mamukko consists of two Hungarian brothers that make cool and trendy bags from upcycled sails and bicycle tyre tubing amongst other things. When you meet them, their genuine, warm personalities are disarming and their passion for what they are about is infectious.

When I ask Attila and Levi to describe what they do, they say they are simply doing what comes naturally to them. And if I were to sum up what comes naturally to them it would look something like this:
Master craftsmanship – Attila and Levi come from a family of master craftsmen – both mother and father are master leather workers as well as their parents before them. Their parents came to Ireland to teach them the skill of production and template making.

Art and creativity – Levi has studied art in various forms for 12 years and his natural eye for form and colour shines through in all their work.

Conscious living – Both Attila and Levi are passionate about the upcycling aspect of their work. They are not just latching onto an up and coming trend to sell their work. The upcycling ethos is present in every part of it. For example, they use old Lidl posters to cut out the reusable templates for their bags when they are designing them.  They are both DJs and love listening to music while they work. And of course, their music of choice they tell me is conscious music such as raggae, African beats and hip-hop.

Bring all the above together with Attila's natural instinct and appetite for Smart Business Development and you have a recipe for a business that speaks volumes about values, quality and creativity.

Three years ago, both Attila and Levi were unemployed. Now, they are finding it hard to keep up with the demand for their product. They have been shortlisted for the 2013 Green Start Up Award in the Green Startup of the Year category, they need to find a bigger premises and they are looking at taking on an employee.

The positive psychology movement tells us that if we are given the opportunity to use our strengths in our work (and note, in this case, our strengths are not what we are good at but rather what energises us, what we can enjoy and lose ourselves in) we will not only be happier but far more successful.

In my years of working with teams in the workplace I have seen this in evidence all the time. When a team was able to allow its individual members play to their strengths in the service of doing the job on hand, the success rate of the whole team grew. But not just that, when the team members believed in the purpose of their mission, they were happy to give that extra effort that pushed success rates up to the exceptional level. Some industry experts claim that extra effort, or discretionary effort as it is sometimes called, can give a business up to 40% more productivity!

Attila and Levi are prime examples of this. The goals that energise and motivate them are to take the craftsmanship of their parents and make it contemporary and to be part of pioneering the upcycling movement in Ireland. They couple their passion with their respective strengths and everything else is naturally flowing from there.

  When you speak with them, they are open, generous and very happy to share any knowledge they have with you. They are full of creative ideas. The only challenge for them is to find the time to act on them as they are currently working so hard to meet demand for their upcycled bags.

Everything about them just seems so "natural" to use their own words, and so right. They deserve all the success that their business will bring them because they are showing the rest of us that it is possible to marry our values with our work and find a way to make it all work for the better of the world.

Thank you Attila and Levi for letting me into your world and for reminding me that it is possible to express my own values and passions through my own work and still be successful.

Are you or your people able to express their passions, values and strengths in your organisation? To explore how you might introduce more of this into your organisation contact Miriam at miriam@spaceforchange.ie.

Check out more about Mamukko here.

You might have known this for years, but I have just had a major revelation! I feel kind of foolish because I have known this at a head level for a long time but it is only now that I am beginning to really understand it at a heart and gut level.

Here is what my revelation is:

Sorting myself out is not about “sorting myself out” at all, but about accepting myself as I am, flaws and all, and stepping out into the world boldly, but otherwise completely unchanged!

Over the last few weeks I have felt the desire to retreat into my burrow and have a good look at myself, sort out my issues, clear any blocks that might be holding me back from achieving that which I set out to achieve. It has been a really good process. I felt, and still feel, as though I have made a few important breakthroughs.

Today, I let myself out in public and I got involved in a conversation that challenged my new view of the world and I could feel a level of anxiety creep up in me and I thought to myself, I am not ready yet, there is more work to be done!

So I retreated back and took myself off for a walk by the sea and a bit of meditation. A routine always sure to ground me and calm the incessant thoughts that spin around in my head. And there it came to me, an image of myself keeping the world locked outside my door while I tried to “sort myself out”! What a futile exercise!

Firstly, I cannot “sort myself out” in a vacuum. I can reach all the amazing conclusions I want but if they fall apart the minute I step into relationship with other people, they are meaningless. So I have to do at least some of my “sorting out” in public, live, “on-the-fly” so to speak. I have to take risks, experiment, fail and try again. This, in the past, has gone completely against the grain for me.

Secondly, if I cannot sort myself out in a vacuum, it means I have to be willing to take myself, as I am – warts and all, out into the world and start acting from this place of imperfection and flaws whilst fully acknowledging the “less than ideal” state that I am in. This thought suddenly makes me feel light, like a burden has been lifted. It means I am going to give up the notion of waiting until I am ready or “good enough” to take bold steps and accept that I can make the brave moves right now, as I am. I am now longer going to waste my energy making war with myself and my flaws (a lovely phrase I picked up from reading the Walks with Yogi blog (http://walkswithyogi.wordpress.com/tag/carl-jung/), but rather carry them with me as an essential part of who I am. This gives me so much more energy to get on with the joyful business of living. I now finally get what Carl Jung meant when he said “I’d rather be whole than good”.

Finally, I am reminded of Anold Beisser’s Paradoxical Theory of Change – another piece of wisdom that I fully sign up to but have to be reminded of at a deep core level every now and then.

Beisser states that… “that change occurs when one becomes what he is, not when he tries to become what he is not. Change does not take place through a coercive attempt by the individual or by another person to change him, but it does take place if one takes the time and effort to be what he is — to be fully invested in his current positions.”

When I am only what I am, and fully what I am, I have the power and the energy to take on the world and win. I cannot do it by trying to be someone or something else at the same time.



My ambition now is to be ME to the fullest extent of what that means. I know that the times in the past when I have achieved this is when I have done my best, most meaningful work. It is when I am truly at my most powerful.

Have you found the path to being YOU in all your beautiful and ugly glory?  

Have you been through a redundancy or early retirement process recently, either as ..

• An employee leaving
• An employee staying with the company
• An HR person or leader managing the downsizing process
• A union official supporting staff?

For some, redundancy or early retirement, is a welcome opportunity to pursue dreams or take a well-earned break. For others, it can be a diminishing experience, leaving them unprepared and ill equipped for their new lives.

In some companies, the process is handled very well, with sensitivity, consideration and foresight. In others, it can be cold, clinical and rushed.

In researching best practices for redundancy processes, I can find plenty of material to help companies cover themselves legally and reduce costs, but very little in the line of how to manage the human story here. I personally have been through a very well managed redundancy process. I left feeling appreciated and well looked after. But I am meeting many people who have not shared the same experience.

A downsizing or redundancy process affects everyone it touches, be it the people leaving, the people remaining behind, the leaders who have had to make the decisions – or at the very least, communicate the decisions and support the staff, the HR staff who have to implement the process and the trade unions who have to represent the staff. It can be stressful, harrowing, enraging, scary and confusing and yet if handled thoughtfully and sensitively, it can allow people to move through it, to have good endings and positive beginnings and feel appreciated and empowered.

I would like to start a conversation here that will, through the stories of real life experiences, allow us to paint a picture of the practices that will make the Human Story of Downsizing an uplifting one – that will be a guide to other organisations who are facing this challenge so that they can care for all their people well through the process.

If your experience of a redundancy or early retirement process was a positive one, please share it with us and tell us what were the key things about it that made the difference for you.

If your experience of a redundancy or early retirement process was a negative one, please tell us what hurt you and what were the most important things in your opinion that would have made a difference to you. What would you ask the company or organisation to do differently?

Let’s learn from all the experience we have recently had in this field and put it to some good use!

I have just discovered that “pollywog” or “polliwog” is another name for a tadpole but I have also heard it described as that stage where you are halfway through the transformation from being one thing to another, from being a tadpole to a frog. Remember, the tadpole starts off its life as an aquatic creature with a long tail and gills but gradually starts to grow legs, loses the tail and develops lungs so that it goes from living above the waterline to below it. Quite a metamorphosis. But when it is in mid transition it must be one hell of a tough place to be. It is neither tadpole nor frog. It must feel awkward, unfamiliar, clumsy. I wonder if it knows that it will come to an end and that one day it will finally grow into a frog!

Life feels a little like that for me at the moment. I have left a full-time job and set up my own business. I feel like I have left the safe pond of the organisation that I worked for and have hopped out onto the bank of the world of the entrepreneurs and the self-employed. The only problem is I am not yet a fully formed frog. I am still in the process of developing the legs and lungs that I need to survive in this world. I feel awkward and ill-equipped to deal with all the complexities of owning your own business. Sometimes I feel I just want to turn the clock back and jump right back into the pond that I came from but I know that is not possible.

It is scary and it is exciting at the same time. I have moments of blind panic interspersed with little moments of achievement such as writing my first blog, publishing my website, opening my business bank account, getting my first client ….. all little milestones in the life of the 21st century entrepreneur. I know I can never turn back and I know it may not work out as I hope it will. But there is one thing I know for sure….. every time I get that knot in my stomach or hit another milestone, I know I am really alive, really living and I would not have it any other way!

Rebbit!!

I know, I know, loving change ain’t all that easy. Change can be painful, hard work, uncertain and to say the least, uncomfortable. Unless we are in a really bad place (and sometimes not even then) most of us wish that we would never have to change.
But, to quote a Mr. Robert C. Gallagher, ‘Change is inevitable, except from a vending machine”. We are always, and have always been, in the middle of some change process or another, even if it is just the process of aging. And nowadays, change seems not only to be found everywhere, but seems to have developed a speed that leaves the mind boggling. There is no escaping it!
And since there is no escaping it, we may as well learn to appreciate it and embrace it. Imagine what the world would be like if we had no change – we would still be living in caves!! Imagine what we would be like as individuals if we never developed and grew! I shudder to think what I would be like if I never changed from my first job all those years ago. What if the seasons never changed? What if we never grew old and died? We would have to stop having children. We would never bother challenging ourselves or doing new things because we had eternity to do it. We would never appreciate the smell of fresh flowers or the sight of a beautiful sunset because the fact that we had eternity to experience them would make them seem commonplace. Imagine all the joy and experiences we would be missing out on if we did not have change!
Even when change is painful, it is usually necessary for the cycle of life to continue.
So, while we may curse and resist change, we should learn to love it too as it is what makes life interesting and worth living. And maybe the next time we will move to meet it half way and welcome it as an old friend; a friend who may well challenge and frustrate us, but who always leaves us wiser and better off for having known them.


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