I know that some people believe that travelling on business is really 'just a junket', however lets just look at it a little more closely.

1. If you are from Australia, the US is not just around the corner.  So really who does enjoy the process of catching a plane and the absolute boredom of sitting in a plane for 16+ hours in a very small chair with no leg room?
2. You are away from your normal connectivity.  Getting your laptop online is not so much of a technical issue these days and global roaming for your phone works, albeit expensive,  however your normal work mode is completely disrupted so you cannot expect to be as responsive to your business demands. 
3. Nobody has actually come up with a resolution for the time-zone problem.     One day ahead and 6 hours back does not leave you much room to be engaged with staff and customers. 
4. Travelling back from the US you find the two days just disappears behind that cramped little seat and that dam time-zone thing again. 
5. I miss being around my family.  Actually, in order of priority - that is No.1. 

I try to make sure I'm getting value from my investment in time and money.  If for some reason I don't feel like I'm getting value  - I'm going to stay home.

Scorecard for this trip to the US - 8.3/10  - guess that means I'll be going again! 

A bit like a high performing sporting team, sometimes we get caught up in highly complex activities or even an extraordinary workload.  Sometimes you just have to make sure you are doing the basics right to be successful.  For example:  

We work in an environment whereby we are all pretty remote from each other most of the time.   It creates a massive reliance on getting the communication right.  Whether that be email, TXT, IM , phone or anything else – we must treat each other as a very high priority and ensure that we are using the right medium for the right purpose.  In our environment we all have the right tools in order to stay connected – in fact we have an equally important issue about when we can turn it off.  In general during business hours:

·         We do not encourage people to be online without starting Office Communicator.

·         We expect phone calls to be return on the same day the message is left. 

·         We expect that an email will be returned ASAP – and if it’s likely that it will be a couple of days before a clear reply can be sent then it is expected that a quick return email stating the date they will have a reply is a polite thing to do.

·         It’s not silly to follow up an email with a phone call.

·         If you are ‘off the air’ for an extended amount of time – announce it, leave an out of office reply, change your presence awareness etc.

The other area I think that we need to ensure that we have right centres around relationships.  As a management team we are constantly busy – what we find is that we can run out of time to ensure that we are finding time to:

·         Reach out proactively to our customers

·         Meet with our staff face to face

·         Attend and support community/industry related events

Seems so obvious that I’m sitting here wondering why I’d bother to blog about it.  I reckon, like a highly tuned sports person – sometime we forget to ‘watch the ball’.