Christmas cards and the man from Del Monte

Should we mourn the passing of the corporate Christmas card? Those big, posh, glossy cards bearing the signatures of half-a-dozen people you have never met are becoming as rare as pixie dust. I still get a few but their number is dwindling every year, replaced by emails, messages about donations or simply nothing at all.

I remember the days when the office secretaries at the Financial Times would dust down their lists and ask if we had any names to add. Most years the FT cards looked pretty swish with scenes of old London until one year we had one with a commercial-looking Santa that triggered an editorial protest led by the then banking editor, David Lascelles.

After that, David became the FT's Christmas card "man from Del Monte" until one year the cards did not appear - gone in the seasonal economy drives that began with the diaries.

In the 1970s and 1980s you knew you had arrived in the executive suite when you received one of the big black desk diaries with a gold embossed FT on the front and an atlas in the back.

I would get half-a-dozen to hand out to favoured contacts (or relatives, since there were no questions asked). The problem was that giving a diary to the same people every year created an expectation after the initial pleasure of receiving one had died away.

First they (faceless management) cut the quota down, then the diary allocation disappeared altogether. But the Christmas cards continued until they too made way for a charity donation.

The same thing happened to the boozy expense-account lunch. Of course, they still continue among a few stalwarts, but nothing like they were and some will say this is a good thing. Much better to stay at your screen, messaging your Facebook friends than sharing a plate of cheese and a glass of wine with a colleague. What does this old fool know? He's nothing more than a ghost of Christmas Past.

Some principles for living

Having just written a magazine article on how businesses can maintain success when they achieve it, I was asked by the commissioning editor if I could give him 10 bullet points for achieving personal success.

I pulled Stephen Covey's The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People off my bookshelf (over 10 million sold it says on the cover) but couldn't find much inspiration there. His first habit was: be proactive. That's not a bad habit if you can handle such a horrible word. But it seemed a bit obvious, as did habit number three: put first things first. As for habit two: begin with the end in mind, I'm just not sure about that. When I started writing a children's book I had no idea where it would end and that was part of the fun.

Habit four: think win/win is very American. Habit five: seek first to understand, then to be understood is not bad, but habit six: synergise is pretty meaningless and habit seven: sharpen the saw sounds very motherhood and apple pie.

So I put together my own list and, if I say so myself, I'm pretty pleased with it and want to share it with you. On reflection I would regard these as pointers, not so much on how to be successful, but on how to live well. It's how I try to live my life anyway. Will these habits bring success? It very much depends on how you define it and measure it. I'm sure there are many better habits than mine - I love Mahatma Gandhi's aphorism: be the change you want to see - but these are the ones that underpin the things I do.

I haven't managed to stick to every one of these lessons - I don't always learn from my mistakes - so I might hang on to this note as a reminder. In no particular order:

1. Know yourself, be yourself and trust yourself.
2. Learn from every experience and every mistake.
3. Collect great people, work with those you respect and stay loyal to friends, colleagues and family.
4. Play the long game.
5. View every change in life as an opportunity.
6. Always listen to advice, then make your own choices.
7. Don’t be afraid to trust people.
8. Never walk over others to get where you want to go.
9. Always take the road less travelled.
10. Have fun, don’t take yourself too seriously and enjoy today for tomorrow it’s history.

The list could be longer and it doesn't work for every occasion. Sometimes, when I'm down I need to read Rudyard Kipling's poem, If. It works like a tonic.

People, work and management

It's difficult to cover workplace, management and leadership issues as fully as I would like in my various newspaper and magazine columns. This new blog is designed to cover opinions and news items that I think are worth considering for human resources professionals and anyone else who takes an interest in the way that people develop their careers.

The aim is to separate the writing on such issues that appears in Donkin Life so that those concerned only with management issues need not worry about the other musings that invade my daily life.

In Sunday newspaper parlance I am "sectionalising" my offerings enabling you to look only at those bits that interest you. I hope this does not prove as much an annoyance for you as all those bits of Sunday papers have proved for me. If you don't like this new approach, please tell me and I will have a rethink.

Every week I have about three or four ideas for my Financial Times column and only one of them makes it. This can disappoint some people - writers, consultants, companies, PR people - who all think that their stuff is most worthy of coverage. Some of this material is indeed interesting although there is a lot of tripe out there and I consider it part of my job to offer a measure of protection from such rubbish to those who take the time to stop here.

That is not to say you will never read rubbish in this blog. But if you do so, I sincerely hope that it will be my rubbish.

If, in the meantime, you're wondering what inspired this coming Thursday's column in the FT, I would urge you to visit this site that introduces Randy Pausch. More about this on RichardDonkin.com later this week, or read my Thursday column.