My Christmas talk to the schoolkids

You know, it's always a great honour to be able to point young people in the right direction. It's a source of great sadness that I'm perhaps failing with my own son who is turning out to be a bully and a hooligan but there are special circumstances there relating to my beautiful wife and her young lover which I won't go into here.

Anyway, last week I gave the first of my Christmas talks to schoolkids and boy were they enraptured! Fantastic! Clearly they were filled with respect for me as an able and important person doing a much more difficult job than their teachers - or probably their parents too. I offered them a glimpse into the future and used it as an opportunity to explain in layman's terms, some of the business philosophy behind the Auchterness project. Here's a brief extract:

Good Morning trainee adults - how are you today? At Auchterness, we are all about our people and our values, constantly refocusing and concentrating on our cause. To be good at planning, you have to think outside of the box 24/7 and keep discussion on a high level. We must shift paradigms and walk the walk but once the final issues are resolved, we run a final meta go-no-go decision matrix, as maintaining the status quo is no longer an option. We touch base with our customers every day and push the envelope with a win-win philosophy but of course, it's time to backstop things if we ever feel we have lost control of what we are doing. Trying to get corporate approval is like herding cats of course.

We contribute positively to our community and environment although sometimes we have to guesstimate the deadline for this or that project. We take ownership of problems and don't pass the buck. We deal with great ideas during meetings or off-line. Embracing diversity as an essential component of the way we do business. We get together and really drill down on this as the need to alleviate our human capital is paramount. You are definitely not cool if your company is not running at internet speed.

We establish strategic partnerships with another entities by going back to our roots to connect the dots and focus on the low-hanging fruit. We are proactive - we run the skills matrix yes, but if we do not upskill ourselves, we may become unemployable. So breaking out of the victim mindset and engaging with business in a more positive and effective way is the way to go. We don't look at this as a problem but as an opportunity. We refocus and concentrate on our core business while realising that our competitive advantage is great customer service. We have the computing power and we have the intellectual infrastructure. We constantly operationalise our strategy starting with the historical data and after that, we can double-click on the proformas, double-checking that the customer is still in a good mood. Our core purpose is to provide an uplifting experience that enriches people's daily lives. Let's take a short bio-break before moving on to action plan the options.

Great isn't it? There was a tremendous round of applause when I finished and I felt uplifted, valued and just brilliant. I hope these kids have a really good Christmas when it comes.