The difficult we do now, the impossible takes a little longer

Tim Marshall, CEO of JANET UK next up with a talk entitled "The difficult we do now, the impossible takes a little longer".

He started with a short film - of something happening to people as they entered a lift - we never did find out what it was! The preise for his talk was that this year we have to going to think the impsible, as something is going to happen in to us in our lifts.

Tim's talk as always was very entertaining, and illustrated with stories form his tme as BBC tv Director and his work with Disney and the dot coms.

The context was the public sector debt - currently standing at £845billion - apparently this is enough to buy 48 million Ford Mondeos, 15,000 Wayne Rooneys or run 2,600 Universities of Leeds. We're facing 25% public sector cuts over next two years to reduce national debt, note this is the debt - not the deficit). In order to deal with level of cut, the country needs war time generals – those that understand how to manage under these constraints to see us through these times .

Tim's 5 principles to deal with the impossible are:
Know your business.
Know your numbers - be able to read financial statements. Understand NPVs and TCO.
Strive to be trusted - trust will be more and more important - don't have to agree, but trust and respect is important.
Empower the team - tell them what you want, not how to do it. Instead of 2 years experience, suddenly have 100 years.
See over the horizon

And finally - if you have to deal with the impossible, look at it from a different point of view - is there a different way of doing it? There often is.