This is a little blog about my new trainers for wearing with my scrubs at work.
The trainers are a metaphor for what is happening in the practice.
Firstly, they’re probably not CQC compliant (I realise this).
I bought a pair of On-Running trainers about 18 months ago, because they are the coolest thing in trainers if you are an older guy who was or is in to triathlon, and they are taking the world by storm around Under Armour, Nike and Adidas.
Swiss engineering and branding at its best!
So, I wanted a pair to wear with my scrubs for ages after I gave up on the Adidas Stan Smith’s that I talked about in the blog previously.
I don’t want bespoke trainers; I don’t want them made to measure and I don’t want them made of gold because that is not my tribe.
I want to wear On’s but I’m not buying them until the budget says I can.
That is a system and a system that I stick to in the practice. My phone was ready for an upgrade and the bill is paid for by the practice and so I waited until the upgrade was due, downgraded my phone to a sim only contract (I’ve had it with new phones every 2 years) and half of the money that I saved I have spent on On’s.
That’s not the only story about the system though, but it was a system that I stuck to, so I saved the practice money and got my trainers at the same time and that is good business.
In a practice like ours, with a budget as big as ours it is completely irrelevant, but to me it feels like leadership and it feels like a metaphor for how the practice works.
The next thing though is the socks, £18.00 a pair to match the trainers and 2 pairs of socks, we wash our own stuff in the practice, all our socks and all our scrubs etc and then the socks went missing.
I put a picture of the socks on our internal discussion platform (Slack) and told people how important they were and how I didn’t want them lost and now every time someone puts a new uniform in my office there is a pair of clean On running socks in the pocket.
The socks didn’t go missing because nobody gave a s**t, just because nobody knew that they were important, and important to me.
Once I put the “socks system” in place, everybody knows and in fact people will say to me “I sorted your socks today and put them in your pocket”. Problems are never the problems that people cause in business, it’s always the problem that the system causes. The socks and the trainers are a tiny drop in the ocean that make no difference at all, but they’re a metaphor for how the business runs.
Blog Post Number - 1981
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