We’ve got two signs hanging in our meeting room.
Both feature a quote, one by the legendary Henry Ford, and the other by…well…me.
I’m no stranger to a spot of DIY (years of working in the IT industry means I’m pretty handy in that area), but I didn’t hang either of these signs.
Not because I’m too big for my boots, but because I’m not allowed!
You see, we’re in managed offices, and we’re not allowed to drill holes in the wall, so we asked the business park to do it for us.
We wanted each quote on either side of a big, wall-mounted monitor, so one evening, John the maintenance man came around, drilled the required hole and mounted the signs.
We came in the next day to find the new sign 20cm closer to the monitor, and 20cm lower than its sibling on the other side – not exactly what I had in mind, and certainly not the aesthetic that any of us wanted.
The irony? The Henry Ford quote is this one:
“Quality means doing it right when no one is looking”
I’m guessing John didn’t look too closely at the wording on the sign!
We know that if we watch someone do something we’ve asked – or paid – for, they’ll probably do a good job. But what happens when they are out of sight?
99% of what we do for our clients is out of sight – which brings us neatly to the sign on the right of the monitor.
I’ll tell you more about that another time.