How are you doing working from home?

Anyone who's read my blog will know I'm a data nerd. I'm extremely grateful to all the business professionals in my network who answered this survey for me earlier this week and who are continuing to answer the survey. 

If there are any major shifts in insight, I will update this blog based on your new responses. I hope you find the results as fascinating as I do. Please click on the charts, and they will enlarge. This should help you to see them properly, particularly on mobile devices.

Companies seem to be doing a good job of enabling their employees to work from home effectively. You can see some of the challenges that they face, including social isolation. Some of your other responses that stood out for me included:

• Seeing people live, interacting with them. Feeling the vibe in the team.
• Not being able to have face to face meetings with clients and in some cases colleagues too.
• I prefer working from home so no issues
• People and mental breaks with others.
• Co-worker engagement. Time and space to separate work from home.
• Nice to work face to face particularly at the start of new assignments
• Physical stand up desk, appropriate chair, internet reliability and performance.
• Direct contact with coworkers- ability to meet in person to go over drawings.
• Frequent and informal communication.
• Contact with others, commute, Coffee breaks with friends

Everyone seems pretty happy about their WFH arrangements and not any more pessimistic about the future than they were back in March. 

The top challenges you are struggling with include Social Isolation and Internet connectivity. I get the struggles of wifi, for sure!

As before, under 'other' you've put given us some wonderful insights into how you're coping with working from home during this pandemic. I found some of your responses funny and others, a bit ominous.

• Efficiency of others - this is a bit scary!
• Difficulty staying focused because I am at home all the time
• Missing the face to face communication, which can mean better communication overall.
• Too much meetings  - Love this one!
• Informal communication is harder,
• Creating a good work life balance
• Sensing other actual demeanour and appetite for the work is more difficult when not face to face.
• I work more, with less breaks so the burn out is around the corner...
• Difficulty repairing staff computer when either of us are not in the office.
• printing - Who doesn't get frustrated with printers? Luckily my home HP printer is working fine right now!

I've also been running this same poll on Twitter. So far 1,285 people have answered. Here are the results:

In the charts above, I was first pleasantly surprised at how open everyone was about talking about their mental health. I was expecting to see this result that your mental health has suffered through the pandemic. There's been a lot of discussion in the media this year. However, poor mental health did not look nearly as much of a problem as you'd imagine by looking at all the media reports on this.

What I thought was great news, was that your physical health and wellbeing seemed to be actually improving whilst working from home. Perhaps you have more time to exercise and you do not have to spend so much time sitting, stuck in cars or trains, commuting to work?

It was interesting how your work patterns have adjusted to a purely work from home situation.  I imagine some of you who are almost entirely not working to a regular 9-5 schedule has the type of work that supports that 

- Perhaps architects or software programmers? - I know from working with them, that they (software programmers) often love to work late at night, for example.

You can take the survey here.

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Check out my Cybersecurity investment webinar below 

 

Dummies Guide to Office 365, Cybersecurity investment guide, Gartner report on cool cybervendors, & more

You will find my June 2020 investment guide below. It outlines my investment philosophy: Investing only in businesses that I have worked in or worked with, that I have researched thoroughly. 

The reason for that is that my analytics skills developed whilst taking an MBA and working as a Financial analyst, together with real-world experience of working with these companies, give me a unique investing edge. 

That's why I have concentrated on the US High-Tech sector, and primarily companies that have recently been listed on the Nasdaq. I was paid handsomely for this work by a US investor. But you can get it for free, here. 

....along with some other guides that I think will help you understand the cybersecurity and cloud-computing sectors. 

Investing in the Cybersecurity sector report, Published June 2020

Dummies Guide to Office 365, Published March 2020

Gartner Guide to Cool Cybersecurity vendors, Published May 2020

ESG research Group Present and Future of Security Operations 2020, Published March 2019 

Find out how I accomplished 'a four-hour workweek' investing in Cyber Security Stocks. Top Cybersecurity companies. For more information go to my website.

Sir Ronald Cohen, founder of UK's largest Venture Capital Company, at Oxford University.

Apax Venture Capital, $51 Billion in assets.

I was lucky to get an invite to this exclusive video call from Exeter College, Oxford University, where Sir Ronald Cohen was an undergraduate.

After graduating with an MBA from Harvard Business School, Cohen worked as a management consultant for McKinsey & Company in the UK and Italy. 

In 1972, along with two former business school colleagues as partners, he founded Apax Partners, one of Britain's first venture capital firms. 

The company grew slowly at first, but expanded rapidly in the 1990s, becoming Britain's largest venture capital firm, and "one of three truly global venture capital firms". 

Apax provided startup capital for over 500 companies and money for many others, including AOL, Virgin, Waterstone's, and PPL Therapeutics, the company that cloned Dolly the sheep. 

One of the firm's co-founders, Alan Patricof, was an early investor in Apple Computers. 

My favorite part of the discussion was when Sir Ronald Cohen was talking about his career progression. Ronald said that Oxford was the more intellectually challenging of the two institutions he attended. He said that Harvard Business School was more 'like a trade school'. 

Sir Ronald made the world's most prestigious business school sound like a cookery, electrician or plumbing school! 

Harvard Business School has the most famous MBA program in the world where titans of industry, like Steve Schwartzman, founder of The Blackstone Group, Jamie Dimon, CEO of JP Morgan, and Sheryl Sandberg, COO of Facebook, all studied.

To be fair, Ronald said later that he wouldn't have achieved the success he did if he hadn't attended Harvard Business School. If you are eighteen or nineteen at Oxford, studying a subject like PPE, you would have had various intellectual stimulations. But getting an MBA is a much more focused endeavor. 

Below: Steve Schwartzman, Founder of Blackstone Group.

This webinar suffered somewhat from the same malaise as the Steve Schwartzman of The Blackstone Group interview that I attended at the LSE a few years ago. 

Just like the LSE student who interviewed the founder of Blackstone two years ago, Sir Ronald Cohen's interviewer was too deferential for my liking.

- Don't you find these types of talks more entertaining when the interviewer throws in a few hardball questions? 

Also, these interviews with the Super-rich talk about how awful inequality is, has been done to death. 

I would have loved to hear more about his career and the birth of the VC industry in the UK, which he described in his excellent book 'Second bounce of the ball: Turning risk into Opportunity'

On a macro level, how effective will these initiatives be? Government can do more to 'level the playing field'. But I'm still open-minded, and Sir Ronald did make some excellent points worth considering, on how social investing can benefit society. 

Investors are increasingly considering all aspects of the businesses they back - not just how much money it makes, but also how much the industry contributes to society. 

Is the company a significant polluter, like BP or Shell? Or does it have a vision for a greener future, like Tesla, which has seen its share price grow 300% this year? 

Here's Sir Ronald Cohen's new book: Impact: Reshaping Capitalism to drive real change.

And his previous one, which I enjoyed reading: The Second Bounce of the Ball: Turning Risk into Opportunity.

Video spikes during sporting events - Velocix can help your network

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Velocix was recently sold by Nokia to Constellation Software, a $30 Billion Canadian company that makes brilliant bets on new technology.

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10 Stock Picks in the Covid-19 Crisis

My first experience of investing in the stock market was terrible. Back when I was young and naive, I got a lump sum after my brother decided He wanted to sell a property we owned together. I did not know what to do with my half of the proceeds of that sale.

So, on the advice of an old family friend, who I trusted at the time and who was well versed in business and finance, I invested the money with a broker at a well-known Bank.

Unfortunately, the fund did poorly, and it lost most of the money. Besides, I had to go through an elaborate ritual (sending faxes, etc.) to extract my own money from this Bank. Not only was my broker charging a significant fee, but he was also arrogant and uncooperative whenever I asked him why he was losing my money. 

Has your fund manager lost most of your money?

I learnt one fact then that has stayed with me and now has been absolutely confirmed by one of my own investment gurus, Nassim Nicholas Taleb (of 'Fooled by randomness' and 'Black swan' fame): Be wary trusting people's advice when they have no 'skin in the game'. 

It's easy giving people advice on other people's money. It's even easier managing someone's money when they don't have a lot. A bigwig might ruin your reputation. But if you lose a small-time investors money, 99 times out of a 100, you'll have zero repercussions. 

In the twenty years since that broker lost my money, I put myself through business school, took an internship at a US investment bank in New York City, graduated with an MBA in Finance and worked for several years as a financial analyst.

I trade stocks myself now with my own account. My portfolio is up 50% since the Pandemic, while the S&P is down 10%. The UK FTSE 100 is in even worse shape, down about 16% over the year. Most fund managers have lost money this last year. The UK property market is also underwater, maybe even by as much as 20%, no one knows the exact figures for that yet.

I have used my experience in Cyber Security to select some reasonably safe, but high returning Cyber stocks. I have invested in Gold as a hedge against currency devaluation due to massive government economic interventions.

Please also sign up for my Cyber Security Investments Webinar on Saturday, July 18th at 4pm UK/ 11am EST/ 8am PST talking specifically about my own investment strategies, mainly in the Cyber Security sector. 

This is not a 'snake oil' pitch. I am not claiming that my strategies are a foolproof way to make money. All I am saying is - here's what I'm investing my own money in and here's why I'm doing that, and up until now, it's been successful. 

This webinar is simply my attempt to stimulate a discussion on investments. Maybe, like me, you'll start making some good money from it. I'm keen to hear your views as well as your questions too. Perhaps I will learn more from you than you will learn from me?

Of course, you need to practice discretion and wisdom when investing your own money. You are the best judge of that decision. But why let some broker who doesn't value your money trade with it, especially when most fund managers can't even beat the S&P or FTSE 100 index? Why give them a fat commission for that? 

 

Get the report here.

Five things to think of when you're moving country for work or study

MBA Class of 2008 dinner
Boston, MA, USA

The first big move I made for my career was in 2005 when I decided to take two years out, to study for a full-time MBA in the USA. I hoped to work in the USA for a few years afterwards and get some good experience there.

If you gain a Master's degree in the US, you can work there for one year afterwards. Often foreign graduates are then 'sponsored' by their employer company to continue working in the USA with an H1B work visa.

I got a scholarship and a part-time job in the Marketing Department at Northeastern University - Office of Corporate Programs. So that also helped financially.

Returning from Boston to move back to London, 10 years later (2015), was a far bigger and more complicated affair. I was now married, with a 6-year-old son, with disabilities (ADHD and Dyspraxia) and a 9-year-old daughter.

My wife, Catherine, born and raised in Worcester, Massachusetts, had always wanted to live in the UK. She was running College recruiting at her company, Akamai, in 2015, when she was offered the chance to go to London, to run EMEA recruiting there, managing a team of twenty-five recruiters.

I found a great job too, setting up Lead generation in the UK and Europe, for a little-known Cybersecurity start-up called Zscaler, founded in 2008. It has since had an IPO and is now valued at twenty-three billion US dollars on The NASDAQ. 

This brings me to my next point:

1. Paperwork: Other than the usual challenges of getting an MBA; Taking The GMAT, making the applications, writing the application essays, interviewing for the schools, and finding the money to go; I'd say getting the Visa sorted out was the hardest part.

It required me to complete a lot of complicated paperwork. Further down the road, when I finally got my US Permanent resident card ('Green Card'), it was even more problematic. There were so many hoops to jump through that I eventually had to hire an Immigration lawyer at considerable expense to expedite it.

Equally important, though not as hard; after two years of living in the country, I had to pass my US driving license - many years after passing my British driving test. Ironically I passed my UK driver's license the first time. But for my US one, I had to take it twice!

Help, Where's my car? I need to get to work!

2. The Weather; My second shock was rather more prosaic; I was just not prepared for Boston's weather. In the winter, it gets down to -25 C. You also have big snowstorms.

For example, the last winter I was in Boston, in 2015, over 14 feet (4 meters) of snow fell in the city. In the summer, you need air conditioning in your apartment. It gets up to 40 degrees centigrade.

3. Get help: Make sure you employ all the services you can. For this, we used a corporate relocation company to manage our move. Moreover, we used an army of staff, from childcare professionals to cleaners.

Corporate relocations have experienced a paradigm shift in the last fifty years. In the twentieth century, the husband usually worked, and the wife, who did not, would manage a lot of the move.

Today, more often than not, you are dealing with 2 parents, who both have to manage demanding jobs. Consequently, anything that will save you time is an absolute necessity.

My son, Jack, in our dining room in Boston, Massachusetts, USA 

4.  Make sure you employ technology to your advantage. We live in a digital world for a reason. It's fast and efficient. Everything from using DocuSign to sign all our documents (including the sale of our house in Boston) to Skype or teams for all those international calls, to using video surveying tools to track where all our furniture was.

5. The importance of having flexible work. There is no way We would have managed this move so effectively without remote working.

I had two weeks of training in Austen, Texas, and I travelled back to Europe several times to run conferences there. Just after the move, I had to go from England to a Sales kick-off in Las Vegas.

During this time, I was partially renovating and selling our house. We were unhappy with our real estate agent, so we had to switch agents mid-way.

Throughout this, Zscaler allowed me to work remotely for the UK office, from Boston, USA, for almost four months. Zscaler's and Akamai's flexibility made a big difference to Catherine and me.

Original Post on Buzzvault (Insuretech's website) 

Can we be happier?

'Did you know the time of the week that the average British worker is most miserable? When He's meeting with his manager!' As Professor Lord Layard said this, the entire audience laughed. This is from his research from his latest book, 'Can we be happier?'.

Last night, I attended a great lecture with Professor Lord Layard, the happiness expert at the LSE, where I was an undergraduate Law Student.

Below: Dame Minouche Shafik and Professor Lord Layard

          

Lord Layard started by talking about the foundation of the LSE, by Beatrice and Sydney Webb, Fabians, who believed in the importance of improving society. William Beveridge, who set up the modern welfare state in the UK, was a Director of the LSE and was also profoundly concerned about the happiness of society.

Then Lord Layard talked about how society seemed to be getting less happy. This is confirmed by looking at life expectancy, which is now going down for the first time in recorded memory in the USA and to some extent in the UK. I believe that Coronavirus will accelerate this trend.

As Society has become more selfish, individualistic and competitive, according to Lord Layard, unfortunately, we have created a happiness 'Zero-sum game'. Each time I 'go up', someone else must inevitably also 'go down'. 

How can that philosophy of one-upmanship that many live with create happiness across society? Perhaps that's why, despite all our improvements in material circumstances, we, as a society, are more miserable than ever before.

Professor Lord Layard mentioned that the best way to determine an old person's life expectancy is not their doctor's 'physical' exam, but simply asking the patient 'are you happy?'. 

We put together a stimulating group for drinks and dinner after the event. This included a school teacher, Polly, and her husband, Ben, a software programmer, who works for Google's Deep Mind. My old school friend Lucas, studied PPE at Oxford University.

Lucas was the smartest pupil at my school - he got the second-highest first-class degree in his year, studying Politics. Philosophy. Economics at Oxford (this was back in the days when very few students attained a first-class degree). Then he took a PhD at the University of Pennsylvania. He is now a Professor of Philosophy at Bogazici University, in Istanbul, Turkey.

Lucas brought along a close friend from Oxford University, Tara, a management consultant. I also invited Steve, who studied at Oxford and is a Doctor and Professor of medicine. We had a wide-ranging discussion about happiness. Some of the topics we covered.

Steve said he preferred the word eudaimonia —Aristotle's concept of flourishing—rather than happiness, which seemed to be more based on luck (Eutuxes) than living a good life.

Tara said that certain people, 'Eeyores' are always going to be miserable, and others will usually be happy. Then, Lucas, Polly and Steve discussed how bad the education system had become in the UK.

They all agreed that the institutions' constant performance monitoring was sucking the life out of any innovation. You can read more about this here - Moonshot thinking to unleash innovation.

Go to my website.

Six reasons why long-term productivity growth has flatlined in the UK .

                                      

One business issue that keeps resurfacing here in the UK is that of productivity. The big question is, 'Why has it flatlined here since 2008?' I noticed that, yet again, the Bank of England has predicted 0% productivity growth for this year in the UK.

I have much experience of living and working in other cultures. I was born in the Netherlands and lived there for a time. I have also lived and worked in South America, Spain and India, and most recently, in the USA from 2005-2015. Therefore, I have some practical context to explain what's happening in the UK, relative to other global economies.


1. Business transactions take too long to carry out here in the UK. For example, buying and selling our house in Boston took less than a month. In the UK, it takes far longer.

2. Business people need to be bolder. They also rely too much on gut feeling and should incorporate more data, more rigorous thinking, and fewer biases into their decision-making

  

3. Training and education. A lot of British businesspeople need help to write accurate, grammatical English. They need help to do basic maths. 

Lack of education has got to be a key reason for our poor productivity. We need better education - more executive coaching and business education, both online and traditional. 

And the general level of primary education needs to improve here. Spelling, grammar, maths, you name it. Knowledge of foreign affairs, news and even a foreign language is good too.

4. Investment has got to come a close second. If you want to be a productivity ninja, you need the tools. I worked at one company where I was managing a six-figure marketing budget, but the company gave me a faulty computer that crashed the entire time.   

Talk about an unproductive false Economy! All the evidence points to us needing to spend more on equipment, from essential productivity apps to tools like DocuSign or Microsoft Teams, to speed up business interactions. In addition, there is far more employee training in the US. 

When I was at business school, many MBAs were financed by their employers. I rarely see that in the UK. Why aren't UK companies trying to develop their employees -  sending our employees on professional training to boost their skills or even actively encouraging employees to get training themselves. 

I have done much of this in my career, but these efforts were only supported regularly in the US. In the UK, companies prefer to poach talent from other companies rather than develop talent internally.

5. We have seen a fall in leadership quality in the UK. You only have to look at the government right now. Our Prime Minister pledged five points that he would improve. Most of those situations are now worse, and he hasn't even improved one

Failing to hit these goals will undoubtedly reduce our productivity and competitiveness as a nation.

 

6. We in the UK have a fatal weakness for conventional wisdom. I'm paraphrasing Dominic Cummings here. But undoubtedly, one of the reasons his Brexit campaign defeated the much better-funded and institutionally backed remain campaign was because his team was creative and unorthodox. The other side was neither (To clarify, I was and am pro-European Union, but I admired the Brexiteers' strategy and execution).

The current conventional wisdom is that productivity will rise if we all return to working in the office. 

Even though productivity declined for fifteen years or more before the trend for remote work even began. 

If you want help thinking more unconventionally, I recommend this Malcolm Gladwell book for inspiration. 

website.