The Future of Work - Richard Donkin

Shopping genius

2012-02-02T02:37:00.000-08:00

So you thing work isn't changing, or you think it is but you're not quite sure how. Take 12 minutes of your day and watch this video.

I'm not going to explain it much since it explains itself. It shows how robots are changing the way that pick-pack warehouses go about getting our online purchases to us.

It's radically changing the way that packers work, that's clear enough, although I'm not as convinced as the presenter is that it's making their work more fulfilling. This looks very like moving assembly to me and I'd argue there's a fine line between "stress free" and "boring".

How long before the packers themselves are replaced by robots? It can't come soon enough in my view, but then I'm a commentator, not the man of or woman trying to earn enough to keep their house together.

On the other hand I'd argue that robotics should free people up to work in better ways (and so do some of those commenting on the video). But there's a lesson here for me too.

This lecture covers the sort of stuff I once wrote about in the management pages of the Financial Times. It would have taken me a day for the travel and interviews (assuming this is in my home country, which it isn't) and a day for the write-up.

Reading the article would have taken a little less time than watching the video, but would it have been as rich an experience as actually seeing how these robots work and how their work is represented graphically? I doubt it.

No, the internet is not only removing the traditional job of the shopkeeper but also the traditional job of the journalist. What's more useful: a year's subscription to the Harvard Business Review, or regular visits to TED? After all you could watch this, standing on the train.

One last point: it's clear that some clever mathematics was involved in modeling the robotics and the logistics. A note today on the Facebook flotation mentioned a Harvard mathematician Jeff Hammerbacher who left the company in 2008 after two years, disillusioned by its commercial focus. He told Business Week: "The best minds of my generation are thinking about how to make people click ads. That sucks."

Faceless on Facebook

2012-01-05T06:30:00.000-08:00

Here's a tip about social networking - if you don't want it or don't have time for it, leave it alone. I suspect that thousands of people who have signed up to Twitter, Linked-in and Facebook, did so because of peer pressure, workplace dictate, or mild curiosity.

But if your heart's not in it, the best thing you can do is remove yourself altogether, rather than sit there, inactive, while telling all you know that you have better things to do. I have plenty of time for social networking refuseniks. I'm not at all convinced that the advantages of all these online services outweigh their enormous potential for distraction. It certainly takes an iron will to ensure that they are used proportionately.

But I do get irritated when I see people registered on Linked-in or Facebook who haven't uploaded an image. If you can't be bothered to do that I'm not going to be bothered contacting you about anything. More than that, you are sending a negative message to those who are active on these networks. It's like going to a party and standing in a corner. Don't be surprised if no-one comes up to chat.

I'm not arguing that you should be tweeting every hour of the day - although I know a few people who do just that. I'm saying that if you are going to maintain a presence in a network you just need to do a few things as a minimum and one of those is to post a photograph. Fill in your career details on Linked-in, add a few skills and perhaps join one or two relevant discussion groups, or simply don't join.

The New World of Work

2011-12-08T19:52:00.001-08:00

Anyone who reads this blog on a regular basis will know that I have two sons in the online gaming business. Watching their progress is like a laboratory for future business.

Their latest game is Bad Eggs Online, reviewed here by a developer at Aardman, the Cardiff-based animation company.

The multi-player gaming format with a forum attached and a shop where gamers can buy new weapons and eggshell avatars, is enabling the brothers to build some knowledge of their customer base. It is also creating a community around their game centred on a forum which the boys used recently to hold a competition among their 300,000 registered users to design some new player-eggs.

The forum is proving a useful source of ideas and input in to their game development, an example of the value of crowd sourcing that is growing in popularity among those companies that are learning how to harness the power of social networks.

I have discussed some of these developments, their merits and potential drawbacks in a Financial Times series called The New World of Work.

One feature looks at the pros and cons of social networking, another looks at potential tensions between different generations and their work styles. A third piece examines the arguments for using online tools that may be adopted for staff collaboration.

The series includes a handy timeline that makes a useful reference for anyone seeking to dis cover how offices have changed over the years.

Of course if all this reading looks too much like work you might examine how easy it is to become distracted from office work, playing games such as Bad Eggs Online. It's a lot of fun.

Moving up the ranks at Jaguar Land Rover

2011-12-08T19:37:00.001-08:00

In my book, The Future of Work, I devoted achapter to performance management because it seemed to me that this would be astrengthening feature in the workplace in coming years.

The degree to which companies aredeveloping employee metrics was highlighted at the Guardian’s Future of HRConference in London earlier this week where I shared a platform with variousHR commentators.

I stayed on to listen to Des Thurlby, HRDirector at Jaguar Land Rover, outlining the company’s forced ranking schemewhere all 21,000 of its staff are ranked annually on their performance.

I suppose I shouldn’t have been surprisedto find forced ranking systems gaining a foothold in the UK, given the way it waspopularised by Jack Welsh when chief executive of General Electric some yearsago. But at Jaguar Land Rover it appears to have become a keystone of employeeappraisal.

I guess if you’ve become accustomed torankings in the education system it’s not going to be such a shock tofind you are still competing with your peers when you enter the formal workplace.

Mr Thurlby says that while the trade unionshave not welcomed the ranking system at the company, it has brought some transparencyand honesty to employee development. Everyone can see where they stand on theperformance graph and the poorest performers know they must improve if they areto survive and progress in the company.

I don’t like these systems, but they arenot going to go away and if companies feel they must have something like thisas a component of their HR management it is best if they make them as explicitas the system at Jaguar Land Rover so that no-one is in any doubt aboutexpectations. A lack of clarity around management expectations is a persistentsource of employee unhappiness in companies.

Jaguar Land Rover must be doing somethingright. The company is actively hiring to staff up its expansion programme inthe UK and the company has been making its way up the Times Top 100 employerrankings in graduate recruitment.

Rock bottom, the solid foundation

2011-08-19T01:59:00.000-07:00

As school students opened their A-level results this week, it must have led many of them to contemplate the difference between failure and success. Some like Prina Shah, who achieved straight A*s in maths, further, maths, chemistry and biology, yet had rejections from four of the UK's best universities, might reflect ruefully on what it takes to impress selectors.

Prina wanted to study medicine. She has been accepted now by Durham University to study anthropology. But if her heart is set on medicine she should stick to her guns. It takes a certain level of courage and tenacity to do that.

Just how much tenacity is described here by J K Rowling in a 2008 speech to graduates at Harvard University.

The story of Rowling's rise to prominence from a point "as poor as it is possible to be in modern Britain without being homeless" is as dramatic as anything in Horatio Alger's rags to riches tales.

Failure, she says, "meant a stripping away of the inessentials. I stopped pretending to myself that I was anything other than what I was." This mental adjustment allowed her to concentrate on her big idea. "Rock bottom became the solid foundation on which I rebuilt my life," she says.

Anyone who has never failed might reflect on Rowling's assertion that: "It is impossible to live without failing at something unless you have lived so cautiously that you might as well not have lived at all, in which case you've failed by default."

There are quite a few gems in her speech including this one for young people who seek to blame their parents for the choices they make in life: "There is an expiry date for blaming your parents for steering you in the wrong direction."

I enjoyed too her quotation of Seneca: "As is a tale, so is life: not how long it is, but how good it is, is what matters."

Feeding the feral rich

2011-08-16T05:24:00.000-07:00

It’s a managerial cliche in every corporate episode, good or bad, to “take away the positives”. Surely there must be some lessons we can salvage from the turmoil of last week’s riots.

The riots were shocking for many reasons, one of which is that they lacked any sense of reason. Many of the people engaged in rioting and looting fitted a stereotype of social deprivation drawing on permutations of various descriptions – unemployed, poorly educated, mindless, dysfunctional, criminal, indiscriminate, opportunist, yobbish – pick your favourite combination.

But some who have since appeared before the courts do not fit such stereotypes. Among them is an Oxford University law graduate accused of throwing bricks at police, a soldier who tried to sell a stolen guitar, a fashion model who tried to loot an Argos store, an Olympic ambassador and various university students.

It was as if something in the air gripped an otherwise bored section of society and invited them on to the streets to share in the risk and excitement that goes with wanton plunder.

Most of the “professionals” – the hooded and masked hard core gang members - will be sitting at home today inspecting their new trainers and watching their looted plasma TVs, safe in the knowledge that their features were hidden from CCTV cameras and that their reputation for intimidation is powerful enough to preserve the omerta of the streets.

It is the opportunist amateurs that are packing the courts – young people irresponsible enough to allow themselves to be gripped by the fever of lawlessness that seems to have bred a belief that they could steal and get away with it.

These people are the real source of our worries. There have always been yobs who will riot at the barest excuse. They are not going to go away. Some of them may find redemption if they fall in to the right company – a helpful teacher, a strong parent, an influential role model at work or among their social circle.

But there is a much larger group of people on which any society depends – the people who bother to vote, who will take up their sweeping brushes to clean the streets, who continue to show that they care about their community because they feel a sense of outrage at wrongdoing. This group must prevail for any society to maintain cohesion.

The fear now is that some who we may have relied upon once to maintain that cohesion have become so alienated from government, so lacking in moral instruction or example, so cynical of authority and so saturated in the spirit of entitlement peddled by our consumerist culture, that they can be persuaded to neglect their sense of right and wrong.

A number of commentators have pointed to the lack of a cause behind the rioting. As Zoe Williams, writing in the Guardian, said: “I think it's just about possible that you could see your actions refashioned into a noble cause if you were stealing the staples: bread, milk. But it can't be done while you're nicking trainers, let alone laptops.”

She also pointed to what I would call the death of consequence, at least as a perception. Rioters who failed to cover their faces, she wrote, were failing to understand that their actions could rebound on them: “People just don't believe they'll go to prison any more, at least not for something as petty as a pair of trainers.”

Williams, like many others, was intrigued at the prime targets of the looters – typically gadget shops, electrical suppliers and, in several instances, branches of JD Sports, a downmarket retailer of casual clothes and sports trainers. The trainer, more than any other item of dress, appears to have assumed mystical proportions in gang culture.

Charlie Brooker, also in the Guardian, wrote: “Time and again, shops selling trainers or gadgets were targeted first. Fancy shoes and electric widgets mark the peak of ambition. Every looter was effectively a child chanting: ‘Give me my toys, I want more toys. ‘ “

These behaviours suggest that too many young people have grown up in a dependency culture characterised by a distorted sense of entitlement. This culture, as Peter Oborne observed, writing in a Daily Telegraph blog, has been nourished by the poor example set by expense-fiddling politicians and corporate opportunists.

He wrote: “I believe that the criminality in our streets cannot be dissociated from the moral disintegration in the highest ranks of modern British society. The last two decades have seen a terrifying decline in standards among the British governing elite. It has become acceptable for our politicians to lie and to cheat. An almost universal culture of selfishness and greed has grown up. It is not just the feral youth of Tottenham who have forgotten they have duties as well as rights. So have the feral rich of Chelsea and Kensington.”

It was strong stuff. A day or two earlier a distraught shopkeeper had caught the attention of the media when she likened the rioters to “feral rats”. That word feral struck a chord and Oborne knew what weight it would carry in using it brilliantly to focus attention on unacceptable behaviours among the more privileged in society.

Where do these feral rich go for their inspiration? Their bible, says Oborne, is "the repellent Financial Times magazine How to Spend It". Good on you son. It's high time someone said that. In an otherwise responsible newspaper, this magazine, an acknowledged advertising magnate for luxury goods, is permitted to plough its own furrow, focusing entirely on luxury and everything it represents in its own little blinkered Midas-like world.

As a result, wrote Oborne: “The rioters have this defence: they are just following the example set by senior and respected figures in society. Let’s bear in mind that many of the youths in our inner cities have never been trained in decent values. All they have ever known is barbarism. Our politicians and bankers, in sharp contrast, tend to have been to good schools and universities and to have been given every opportunity in life.”

He could have gone further. These same people gravitate towards and mix in what we loosely describe as the establishment. In so doing they too often overlook their own advantages, a tendency acknowledged across the Atlantic by one of the world’s richest men.

Writing in the New York Times this week, Warren Buffett, urged the US government to “stop coddling the super rich”. Why weren’t billionaires like him expected to pay more tax when those on modest incomes were struggling, he asked. Last year, he paid £4.2million in taxes, but, he disclosed: “What I paid was only 17.4 per cent of my taxable income.” He added: “If you earn money from a job, your percentage will surely exceed mine – most likely by a lot.”

Buffett belongs to a rare breed - the deserving rich. He has used his wealth to invest wisely in sound businesses, cornerstones of the capitalist system. He lives relatively modestly and has committed most of his wealth to worthy causes. He could never be described as a carpetbagger or an asset stripper, yet such individuals roam this system like hungry hyenas, ripping the heart out of our greatest economies.

The damage caused by unbridled speculation far eclipses any that was caused across London and other English cities last week. That is not to condone the violence of the streets or to forgive the perpetrators. But if one positive thing came out of these riots it is that those in Government and in authority have been forced to sit up and listen to the inarticulate voices from the street.

And if they fail to make sense of the lame justifications we have been hearing these last few days, they should listen instead to those like Oborne who can articulate the underlying frustration of those at the fag end of consumerist opportunism.

I agree with his conclusion that: “The culture of greed and impunity we are witnessing on our TV screens stretches right up into corporate boardrooms and the Cabinet. It embraces the police and large parts of our media. It is not just its damaged youth, but Britain itself that needs a moral reformation.”

Written on the London underground between meetings

2011-08-07T03:53:00.000-07:00

Career path

There are seconds,
Whole seconds
That pass and
I do not breath.

There are minutes,
Whole minutes
That pass and
I do not feel.

There are hours,
Whole hours
That pass and
So do people.

There are days,
Whole days
That pass and
I do not hear music.

There are weeks,
Whole weeks
That pass and
I do not see art.

There are years,
Whole years
That pass and
I do not know ideas.

There is a lifetime,
A whole lifetime
Passing and
I have not learned to live.

Silent workhorse

2011-08-06T01:23:00.001-07:00

Some people are challenging us to think more deeply about work and what we do. Watch this video, listen to the narrative and ask yourself: is this work? The video maker, Mickey Smith simply says it is what he does - documenting wave-riding. It's a dangerous pursuit and he doesn't make a great living from filming those places where the sea meets the land - not yet, at least. But he loves what he does and he is developing a skill and a philosophy of living that seems, well, more alive than sitting at a desk all day.

Mickey's mother knew how to guide her son. It was her words that inspired him. Parents take note. Our working future starts in the home, but our visions can soon become derailed when we enter institutional life. Why don't teachers and careers offices open us up to the endless possibilities for building work from our desires? That's where we need to start our careers - in our hearts: registering, interpreting and understanding what it is that brings us alive. Only then shall we redefine what work is. Mickey Smith has done just that. He describes himself as one of the "silent workhorses of the surfing world."

Tomorrow's boss

2011-08-05T06:18:00.000-07:00

Sometimes people ask me (actually nobody ever asks me) how people running businesses will look and behave in the future? Well this is what some of them look like today. No management speak, no mention of HR, marketing, finance, no apparent interest in MBAs, board composition, corporate governance. I don't think these chaps have time for that, but they are passionate about business start-ups. So is she. It's time we ended stereotyping in business. It's time we stopped making judgements based on suits and ties and listen instead to what people say and, even more important, measure what they do.

Oliver Twist in the high street

2011-07-29T04:59:00.000-07:00

What does this picture of a dragonfly have to do with work? Everything and nothing. I usually do a round of the garden before starting work on a morning and this morning I spotted something I hadn't seen before, perched on one of the yellow flag iris leaves by the margins of our pond.

I've found dragonfly larva casings many times but I've never found a dragonfly as it emerges during that vulnerable period when it must wait for its body and wings to take shape and harden. The first picture shows the dragonfly as I found it, and the second (below) about two hours later.

The thing is, once I had found the dragonfly, I wanted to photograph and watch its progress more than anything else on this day. I didn't need to look in my diary. There are no appointments, nothing pressing; there rarely is. It's the way I live now and it's one of the compensations of working from home.

I follow the corporate world but I read things on twitter and online, stuff about board composition, executive pay, the (self) importance of HR and so much of it is tedious beyond belief. I suppose that's why I stay with it. There's much that needs fixing about the modern workplace. Without strong trade unions to act as checks and balances, management is becoming increasingly autocratic and it's making me angry.

It's difficult to be angry on a day like this when you've been watching one of the wonders of life. But the simplicity and purity of birth only re-enforces how much we begin to muck things up ever after.

HR stifling corporate life

I've been trying to bury my anger in the last day or two. It's focused on Human Resources management just now, as it so often is, these days, and some of the colourless processes HR has introduced in to companies - processes that are stifling corporate life, killing the life spark of employees and slowly atrophying those companies that allow it to happen.

I heard a story the other day - it's a true story - about a supermarket that dismissed one of its counter staff. The supermarket had an arrangement to reward customers who used their own shopping bags instead of the plastic store bags. There's plenty merit in that. Originally it gave people a penny discount on the groceries for each own bag used. To save money it changed the discount to one Nectar Point per bag (worth half a pence). Some members of staff began taking advantage of the deal when buying their own groceries, clicking the single number code for the maximum nine-bag discount.

These coded clicks showed up in the accounts department which became suspicious when one member of staff had knocked up a nine-bag discount on 30 consecutive occasions. So HR was informed. The young checkout girl was summoned to the staff office and told to leave immediately and report back the following day when she was dressed down and summarily dismissed. Dishonesty cannot be tolerated, not at any level. That is the bottom line. Her "theft" was Nectar Points to the value of £1.35.

Dickensian retailers

I'm reminded of the harsh punishments delivered to those urchins who pinched handkerchiefs from gentlemen's pockets in Victorian London. A long stretch in prison or transportation were common penalties at the time.

Today Oliver Twist is played out once more in our Dickensian retailers. Except the modern twist is that this supermarket uses artful dodger Jamie Oliver to promote its brand. Couldn't they have given the girl a ticking off? She wasn't the only one doing it. But no, they felt they needed to make an example of her. Why? Because they could. It's how these HR and middle management apparatchiks get their kicks.

They have their staff just where they want them. Duvet day? Just try it. Staff will plead for some Paracetamol to keep them going for fear of facing one of the back-to-work sessions when they must give a detailed account of their illness. Trust is for cissies in this work environment.

There's a lot of potential in retailing as a career. Just look at the success of Sir Phillip Green who earned a knighthood for his services to British retailing and saved himself £285m in tax in a single year by choosing to be domiciled in Monaco. I wonder how much that adds up to in Nectar Points?

In the time it has taken me to write this, the dragonfly has gone. But I'm glad I saw it. As W H Davies once wrote: "A poor life this, if full of care, we have no time to stand and stare." It might make a nice quote to hang on the wall of the HR department.

Plus points for Google

2011-07-28T08:20:00.000-07:00

If you're one of the 20m invitees to be testing out Google+, the new social networking service, in its beta phase, don't be feeling too smug, not unless you too have a bunch of tickets for the 2012 Olympic men's 100 metres final. That's smug.

And if you're not one of the chosen 20m you must be pretty desperate or pretty sad to bid for an invitation on EBAY. But people are doing just that. Google is cashing in on an old marketing ploy - first you create your buzz.

The big attraction of Google+ - the ability to create circles of friends who have a common interest - sounds a good idea. For me, however, this would only be partially effective. Of the circle of friends who watch England rugby union internationals, only two are on Facebook. The same applies to friends I know who shoot or fish - more off than on Facebook. The idea that I could persuade any of them to join yet another social networking service, when they were never sold on the earliest ones, is fanciful. Still, its got people talking.

On reflection, I'm not sure categorising people is so helpful. I don't have dinner parties very often because I find them dull. Of the few I have attended, the most successful are those where people have little in common. As a newspaper hack there's nothing more boring that sitting around after work droning on about newspapers with other media types.

Neither do I like the idea of one single mighty provider for everything. It might take some time for the supercharged elite that is Google to cut a swathe through the vast Facebook army. Facebook will already be working up its own versions of every Google+ improvement. So the battle will be interesting. Still if you are one of the chosen few and you want to invite me, I'm yours, but I'm not paying for it.

Incidentally, some have questioned why they cannot use nicknames in the new service. I'm with Google on this one. I use a few forums that encourage use of a nickname so if that's what they want, that's what they get. But I don't like the habit. It encourages people to display less deference to others than they should. That's not to mention the spammers that hide behind pretend identities. No, let's stick with who we are.

A man alone......

2011-07-26T14:24:00.000-07:00

Son Rob's latest game came out today, Synapsis 2. As he says on his web site, most of the credit should go to his collaborator RobotJam who conceived the game and was responsible for the great artwork. Rob did the coding.

One new (for him) piece of coding allowed him to produce what he calls a "wibbly effect" in connecting doors. Pass your cursor over the pool. Fun, isn't it?

Synapsis 2 is another great point-and-click game but business seems to be getting tight in the independent flash games market. Web sites once willing to pay handsomely for the best games are now expecting to download them for nothing. Synapsis has been delivered on a pay-for-plays basis and it needs to be played a lot to earn them a decent return.

This niggardly approach from websites is going to strangle the market if it continues. The best game makers will leave and the market will be left with inferior product.

I've noticed this phenomenon before - on mummy portraits from Feyum in Egypt. If you study the portraits you find that the best artwork is represented in the earlier works. It was something I recorded in my History of Work.

As the market for these portraits grew, it drew in ever more suppliers, some of whom were willing to provide cheaper work that was inevitably somewhat "dashed off". I don't know this to be the case for certain, but it would explain why the quality of the work decreased over time. It is what happens when craftsmanship becomes commoditised.

I'm wondering if flash gaming has already seen some of its best work, forcing the more talented games designers to seek out new markets and revenue streams. That seems to be Rob's experience as he is currently working with his brother, John, on a different type of game which he believes has great potential.

There are broader lessons here for the internet. While I'm a supporter of open sourcing and the sharing of ideas, there needs to be new and better ways of rewarding people working independently within the internet.

Some blog colonies, like those on the Huffington Post, have profited from exposure afforded by mutuality in branding. But exposure alone does not put bread on the table. On the other hand, collectivism still matters in attracting a mass audience.

A long time ago I read Ernest Hemingway's To Have and Have Not. One quotation from that stands out: "A man alone ain't got no bloody chance."

The power of Twitter

2011-07-25T06:52:00.000-07:00

When Adam was a lad and I moved in to journalism, there was a standard procedure for categorising and delivering news. You, the reader, received what the publisher served up for you based on the judgement of journalists. You bought a newspaper and, if you didn't like what the newspaper was publishing, you switched to another one.

Newspaper circulations rose like housing developments steadily progressing with the occasional promotional boost. Sometimes a newspaper would lose its way and the circulation would begin to decline. Now almost all circulations are declining but most have been augmented by an online presence.

The social media has changed the architecture of news. Today, a single canny Tweeter can have the same effect of those news-sellers at the railway stations with their billboards revealing enticing snippets of news.

A couple of days ago I experienced the Stephen Fry effect. My blogs generally plod along with a few hundred viewers each day. But the blog before this one - on Pushnote - has been viewed by more than 40,000 visitors, all drawn there by one Stephen Fry tweet.

I'm mighty chuffed but I've got hundreds of other much more entertaining blogs and articles that are feeling positively left out. What about the funny dog blogs on Donkin Life? Everyone, surely, likes funny dog blogs. Fishing? Sailing?

As Stephen (look we're already on first name terms) mentioned in his tweet, he would agree with me wouldn't he, because I was extolling the virtues of a service in which he has a financial interest. Pushnote has been bobbing along but hasn't quite taken off yet since its inception in January. It hasn't reached that glorious state that Malcolm Gladwell calls the tipping point when a note no longer needs to push.

While I cannot command the mega-billion Twitter audience of Stephen Fry, I could offer the small but not insignificant currency of impartiallity. I think Pushnote is a great addition to the social media pond.

Who am I to say? Well I have quite a decent pedigree in journalism and column writing, even if I have put that behind me. I've written a couple of books too, one of which, The Future of Work, is trying to understand how the digital age is transforming the way we work. This blog is an extension of that.

One thing I've noticed about social media is the need for aggregation of various services. People came to my blog in this instance, not through Pushnote or from a TV or newspaper reference, but from a passing reference and link made by someone who has established himself beyond his acting and quiz-mastering career, in to something of a media maven. He has done so through a compulsion to communicate, to tell people things he finds Quite Interesting.

But corporately-minded people would find Fry's tweeting a little odd - something is missing and that something is financial reward. I dare say there's a few commercial interests who have sought endorsements but that isn't going to happen in tweets because that would break one of the unwritten rules of social media: thou must not advertise or self-promote (or at least, if one does, don't make it perfectly obvious).

If Stepehn Fry were to tweet he had brushed his teeth that morning with Macleans toothpaste, his followers would rightly begin to smell a rat as they rushed round to their nearest pharmacist to buy their own Fry smile. It would be the beginning of the end. While it might be OK for Lewis Hamilton to walk around in a track suit covered in endorsements, this has not yet entered the political and intellectual arena. What price Vince Cable wearing a News Corp tie?

As an old newspaper hand I know that only a handful of visitors who came from the Fry tweet will stick around for more of the Donkin magic. The stats don't tell me, for example, how many glanced at a few words and flitted on like flies touching down on a lightbulb. But if you happen to have read this far, please do come back. I don't just do this blog but write also on fishing, sailing and plain me (latterly more about my dog). Or you can go to my website and read some of my travel pieces. Nothing will have changed much since I wrote them - one reason I can't be bothered to read contemporary travel journalism. Maybe if you're on Pushnote you might be kind enough to highlight one - but only if you think it's any good.

Pushnote - yes it works

2011-07-23T04:01:00.000-07:00

Social networking - yes it's moving fast blah blah, transforming blah. The blahs are not a criticism, merely accepting that a blog can't keep up with all the new new stuff. But I know that some readers don't care too much for (or just don't get) the instant everything, sound bite world of Twitter etc. So this is for you.

You don't need me to tell you what an influence Twitter is having in the way we share and track news. I found it some years ago now. But when I enthused about it back then, a lot of people I told about it said: "Not for me", or "I just don't get it" or "I don't know how to get followers." It still happens.

You have to be in there doing it to understand it. If you're not on Twitter how can you begin to understand the value of the hashtag? I put this question there for tweeters. None tweeters can look it up here.

Yesterday I met someone in a charity media role whose job it was simply to push stuff out on the new media. She sits at a screen and tweets and Facebooks and links on LinkedIn all day long and she's paid a good salary for doing so.

But she hadn't heard of Pushnote. I wrote about Pushnote here some time ago and circulated the site to people who I thought just might try it out. These were people already LinkedIn, Tweeting etc. But few took it up and one or two said, "well it's just like so and so...." or "not another one!"

I detected social networking fatigue. Even some who use this stuff regularly are questioning what has become a habit as addictive as heroin. Instead of injecting our veins, we stimulate our brain cells in ways that seem to be eroding our capacity to focus and concentrate.

And yet if you work in anything touching the media, as many do now, it is difficult to ignore this stuff. I tried Pushnote for a while but didn't see much take up. Then about a week ago, an email pulled me back because the Pushnote people have improved it in ways that have convinced me that Stephen Fry's much publicised investment in the service is safe.

Pushnote allows you to make a comment on any page on the web. In its first version you could see the comments of other Pushnoters who had been there and you still can. But, because the service was new, there weren't many comments and most of them were reserved for the well trodden sites such as the BBC and Google, or were simply people commenting on Pushnote because it was new.

Now you can follow people on Pushnote just as you can on Twitter. And comments pile up, just as they do on Twitter. But one clever innovation allows you to drag your favourite links in to a faves (awful Americanism, I know, but there we are) box. You can also see the favourite pages of those you are following.

If you use Stumbleupon.com - and you really should by now if you are trying to make the web work for you - you will be familiar with the way it sends pages to you at the click of a button, the stumblebutton. But not all these pages are interesting for you. Pushnote allows you to follow people who might reflect your interests in the web pages they visit and like. These people become your own personal mavens. If you don't know what a maven is in social networking terms, look it up on Google. I'm not going to do it all for you.

That last point is important because effective social networking has to be active. It's the opposite of sitting on the sofa watching TV. You have to go out and find stuff, then broadcast it to people, sharing your thing, whatever it is, with others.

If you have read this far, and you still don't get what I'm on about re-Pushnote, join up and try it for yourself. Start following a few people. Why not try me?

If you do so but you can't be bothered with everything I have to say, just go to the faves box and trawl it now and again. It will change over time and, if it doesn't, I'll probably not be worth following.

If you look today (Saturday July 23, 2011) you will see my number one page is something by Kevin Slavin on algorithms taking over the world. Spend 15 minutes of your life watching it and be amazed. If things have moved on find Slavin anyway - very interesting.

You may have already seen it. If so, my Pushnote has been of little use for you. You may have seen the video and not have rated it: ditto. But you might think as I did: "wow, don't understand it, but wow!" You may also think "wow this TED site is great, didn't know about that." Or you may think: "yes there's lots of good stuff on there."

I'd been there before and thought just that but went there again when I saw a Pushnote comment this morning by John Leaver, Pushnote founder and CEO, someone who I follow on Pushnote and who follows me. Well if you get in on the ground floor you find the movers and shakers. There's still time, trust me, but be quick about it because I'm more convinced than ever that Pushnote will take off.

I know - because it happens all the time - that some of you reading this will say: "Bollocks, I'm sick of all this stuff, just get a life," and I sympathise and one day you will look at your kids and you will be excluded and you'll find that they don't care and that will hurt. So you makes your choices.

And if you are one of those people, this blog is for you because I'm trying to give you some guidance. If you value any of this one tiny bit, here's my list of "must haves" in the social networking world: Twitter, Pushnote, LinkedIn, Facebook, Stumbleupon; and probably in that order. Yes, I really do rate Pushnote. I'm sure that better informed people than me would have better recommendations still. And I'll probably find them on Pushnote.

Stay hungry, stay foolish

2011-07-15T03:03:00.000-07:00

The rise in university fees should lead parents and their teenage children to think long and hard about the best options facing a young person as they make their next steps in life.

Universities have been the passage of choice in education for many years now and will be so for many years to come. But not everyone who succeeds in the workplace has relied on university for their entry in to work. I didn't.

I left school at 18 to work in a supermarket as a trainee manager. It was the only job I could get at the time after my applications to local newspapers had been ignored. It was while working for the supermarket I heard of a job vacancy at a local newspaper from one of the shoppers, an old boy of my school who I met in the store. I applied and took a pay cut to follow the path in to professional writing that I'd wanted to take since my early teens. That three years on a weekly newspaper was my university. I learned a lot.

University is fine for people who do not know what they want in life. They will extend their friendships and contacts, build on their knowledge and come out, all being well, with a degree that is seen by so many employers as the basic qualification for entry in to junior management or on to further studies for a professional qualification.

So if you know you want to be a lawyer or an accountant, and certainly if you want to move in to the medical profession there's little option but to attend university. But a degree is not a guarantee of great work as some graduates find to their disappointment, having invested heavily in time and money. Moreover, today the communications revolution has led to the opening up of many different avenues in to careers. Both the high road and the low road can lead to unimagined paths.

My two eldest sons both have degrees and one has a masters degree, yet neither of them is working at anything that demands a degree. In some ways their work demands much more than a degree. They need to take risks, be confident enough to back their hunches, ride the disappointments and develop their skills without any guiding hand from senior management or a professional body. They're doing all this because it something they love, something in which they believe, and something that's tough and difficult.

Today I came across this speech by Steve Jobs on the excellent TED website. If you are moving towards a career choice or trying to advise your children facing their own choices, I would urge you watch it. And if you take just two messages from it, they are these: keep looking, don't settle; and stay hungry, stay foolish.

Power Point unplugged

2011-06-08T09:10:00.000-07:00

I love anything - web sites, newspaper articles, tweets, you name it - that exposes the worst aspects of the modern workplace. One of these is the over-elaborate power point presentation. I do enough presentations so I'd like think I have avoided most of the pitfalls awaiting the power point junkie. Here are some who haven't and who now find themselves listed as winners in the Worst Power Point Slides Contest. You have to roll down to the fourth slide for the winner, The IT Modernisation Roadmap - no contest.

Repundancy

2011-05-24T05:43:00.000-07:00

Making light of redundancy on Twitter. Glad someone is.

Signature work

2011-05-10T13:01:00.000-07:00

I've just been watching Britain's Next Big Thing presented by Theo Paphitis. What a great business programme (reviewed here), so much better than the rather stage-managed Apprentice and Dragons' Den.

What I loved about it was the creativity and faith and damned hard work people were putting in to their ideas, while Paphitis was passing on real business nous in an attempt to steer these entrepreneurs away from basic mistakes in areas such as cash flow and accumulated inventory.

Instead of interviews with a panel playing for the cameras, the featured entrepreneurs were facing no-nonsense meetings with company buyers representing Liberty, Habitat and Boots.

The buyers didn't mess about. When faced with a novel line of earthenware using wood grain in the moulding, the head buyer of Liberty made a beeline for the maker's studio in Scotland and a deal was sealed on the spot.

What struck me about this deal is that buyer and artisan were happy with the arrangement. Small product runs ensured exclusivity and the hand-on approach of the potter meant that customers could be assured they were getting something special and unusual, not a mass-produced line.

I'd like to see more of these arrangements focusing on the productivity, craftsmanship and signature of the artisan. I've been speaking this week with designers of superyacht interiors who both mentioned their "signature" in the work they do. It's a style that marks out their work.

It's encouraging to see such individuality flourishing in an era where stale management approaches are commoditising so much employment. The result is bland product and bland services competing on price and driving down value for everyone. This must not be the future of work. Everyone needs to b e aware of what they can recognise as their signature work.

How big is big?

2011-04-14T03:15:00.001-07:00

Some time ago I became interested in performance measurement which, as the term suggests, is the part of performance management that is supposed to deliver the evidence of management success (or failure).

I outlined some of the pitfalls associated with HR metrics in my book, The Future of Work and there's more writing on the subject in the human capital section of my website.

As any HR professional who has attempted to measure human performance will agree, the field is strewn with variables and flawed assumptions.

In a winner-takes-all game the variables don't matter so much. For three days at last week's US Masters' golf tournament in Augusta Rory McIlroy was the best player. But a wayward shot on the 10th (the difference between hitting and missing a tree branch) spiked his game and any residual confidence he still possessed after a shaky start to the fourth round, and he finished well down the leader board.

What does this say about McIlroy's performance? Firstly it says that he didn't win and, after playing so well and leading initially it would be reasonable to say that he lost (although "didn't win" would still be more accurate).

We see immediately, then, that measurement only begins to mean something when we achieve some common understanding of what the measurement is supposed to mean. Measurement is tricky. It can mean different things to different people and its meaning is influenced by time, circumstance and human emotions among other things.

In last night's Champions League game between Tottenham Hotspur and Real Madrid, Gareth Bale was clocked running at 20 mph down the wing. It was an interesting statistic but it didn't bring Tottenham a goal and wouldn't have made much difference had it done so (or would it?) as Real Madrid ran out 5-0 winners on aggregate.

A better example of the complex mix of measuring and emotion is Usain Bolt's 100m win in the 2008 Beijing Summer Olympics. He broke the world record with a time of 9.69 seconds. While the record-breaking achievement was important it was the manner of his win and his showmanship that lasts in the memory. It sparked a variety of emotional response, even debate, as some argued that the time could have been even faster without his victory wave before the line.

But it was Bolt's obvious joy in winning, the celebration of his superiority and class in an event that is decided by fractions of a second, that transformed him from a world-beating athlete into a global superstar.

Star quality is one of those things that will continue to defeat the best attempts at measurement. It matters in business as any film producer could testify. A star name can carry an otherwise mediocre film, adding millions of dollars to box-office receipts.

So why do we persist with the dreary science of measurement in the workplace? And where we do, why do we resort almost inevitably to counting stuff? The answer is that counting things (such as days of absence) is easy and some of us - the tabulators (you know who you are) - just love to pour over statistics.

We probably have more metrics and more instruments for measuring today than we have ever had. We belong to a statistics-obsessed society. An example is a car journey. Before SatNav we made our best estimates based on experience. Now we can look at estimated journey times on a screen. But even these estimates are far from perfect as this article demonstrates.

The last line of the feature is worth recalling. The author decides that the time and distance taken over a journey "is what it is", but measurement, he says, is something else. "Measurement, as we all know, is also about the measurer." So it's about people and the different interpretations they place on measurement. Most of all it's about meaning. Measures that work best are those that have established a common meaning through personal experience. If you don't believe me, try answering this question: How big is big?

If you're planning to introduce new metrics in to your organisation, don't do it because you heard about it at a seminar. Think about what you are trying to achieve and think even more about the potential consequences. Even more important is to think about the "why?". Remember that measuring sends messages, measuring is emotional.

Postscript: I was chatting with a colleague on the Financial Times the other day who told me about a newspaper in the US that introduced a points measuring system for its journalists. A short story carried so many points, a longer story, more points and an exclusive carried even more. Collectively these stories could add up to far more points than could be earned on a broad ranging investigation lasting several weeks. Yet it was these investigative stories that earned the newspaper its reputation among its readers. Guess what? No-one wants to write investigative stuff anymore. Be careful what you wish for.

Working on the dangle

2011-04-13T07:37:00.000-07:00

The news that more maintenance workers at Nissan UK are to be trained to work on ropes and hoists suspended from the factory ceiling raises the question of whether this kind of working could be helpful elsewhere.

As health and safety regimes grow ever more stringent, household maintenance and decorating companies are becoming less willing to rely on ladders and regulations now insist on the use of scaffolding where work is undertaken over a certain height.

But if more structures - even domestic houses - were constructed with secure rope anchor points or rails, the need for expensive scaffolding could be avoided if employees had the necessary training and equipment for rope and harness work. It's surely safer and more efficient to work on the dangle than on a ladder.

BranchOut if you must

2011-04-12T07:15:00.000-07:00

The stuff I do in the spirit of research. Some people I know think I joined Facebook, Twitter, Linked-in etc as an early adopter because I'm some kind of social networking junky. Not so. But I do think it's important to see how these sites work and how their use may be integrated into creating a better working, not to mention social environment.

In the process I've been surprised at the reaction I have received when seeking opinions. In the early days of Facebook some seemed to adopt it with enthusiasm immediately, some ignored it and some seemed suspicious. It's the suspicious reaction that intrigues me most.

But the majority of people seem to have simply gone along with this stuff, not sure of its worth but viewing it as relatively harmless. Media types love it because they produce creative stuff and they want it to be noticed and read.

Many bosses hate it because they want to be remote from their staff and fear that too much chuminess will make it difficult for them to admonish poor work or to fire people. Neither do they want people to use the faux chuminess of Facebook to indulge in any kind of sucking up.

Teachers have the same problem if they seek to remain detached from their pupils.

But it's difficult to explore the potential of these things if you simply turn your back on developments. Besides I think it's important for me to keep up with trends on the internet and how they're influencing the future of work, so if something comes along that looks promising I sign up. I did so with Pushnote but it hasn't really taken off yet and may never do. We'll see.

Yesterday, on the recommendation of a headhunter who told me it was the coming thing, I signed up to BranchOut. Now I'm wondering if this was such a good idea. As far as I can see this seeks to stimulate peer recommendation on Facebook in recruitment. The site raised $6m in venture capital and has been backed by some well-known internet hot shots.

Pulling in friends and relatives on personal recommendations is a trusted and popular form of recruitment because it reduces the need for expensive overheads such as advertising and headhunting. Southwest Airlines has been recruiting in this way for years and the company is frequently cited as a model in people management and recruitment.

I'm not looking for a job just now (although I'm always looking for work) so I'm not looking for "ins" using Facebook friends, but this is exactly what BranchOut appears to be doing on my behalf although I have yet to receive any feedback. It's early days so I can't yet report how it works but I'm already a bit sickened to have been offered an early adopter "badge" that presumably I can display with pride on my Facebook page.

Even more sickening is the discovery that there are other badges to be earned or awarded, rather like the badges we used to collect on our sleeves in the cub scouts. Examples include: Bad Ass Coder (yes, it's American), Awesome Manager and HR Ninja. Now I've met quite a few HR people over the years and not one would I describe as a "ninja".

To complete your profile you have to seek an endorsement (done that on Linked-in, don't want to do it on Facebook), do an IQ test (no thanks), and click the "like" button (how insincere).

You might, therefore, want to look at BranchOut and sign up for yourself or you might prefer to let me suffer the pain and embarrassment of doing so on your behalf. I'll keep you posted. If you dive in too, please let me know of your experience.

One last thing: the theory behind the idea of finding work through friends is reasonably sound. A well known study by Mark Granovetter found that friends of friends were the best contacts in finding work - what he called weak ties. It seems to me that the average collection of Facebook friends is a mixture of weak and stronger ties so the theory might work here. This one has to be work in progress.

Game changing work

2011-04-12T02:46:00.000-07:00

When my parents were alive if I'd told them that two of their grandsons would build careers from creating free-to-play games that would be viewed and played by millions of people all over the world, they would think I had gone off my rocker.

First of all they would not understand how something that was free to download and play could make money (they would not be alone in that). Secondly, they would struggle, as I do, to understand the viral processes that make these games so popular.

Thirdly they would be amazed, as I am, at the proliferation of internet-related work that is weaving itself in to the fabric of our working and domestic lives.

Executives in conventional companies are going crazy trying to deal with changing behaviours among their teams and in their own lives in the digital revolution. They know that checking BlackBerries and iPhones is an addictive behaviour and, just like addicts, they can't help themselves.

They worry about employees playing flash games and apps in company time and well they might. They worry about internet security and they worry about the Cloud because they don't know what it is or where it is. Much of this worry is founded on deeply ingrained behaviours and attitudes towards control, ownership and transactional arrangements.

It might be comforting, therefore, if they were to learn that all those people making free-to-play games are also desperately trying to work out the best way to make a buck. My son, Rob, has explained some of the flash game development process on his blog here.

He's now taking his business in to new areas, incorporating as Bad Viking Ltd, taking his girlfriend, Victoria Wood (no not that one) in to the venture and working now with his brother, John. John is trying to sell his first game and is working on another now with Rob. John is learning fast and should benefit from the inroads Rob has already made in to the business.

So the little acorn is growing and it's exciting to watch. It doesn't mean that Vicky's ambition to be an opera singer has been sidelined but it does mean her talents can be put to use developing the website and structural and marketing side of the business instead of working for an employer that doesn't know how to make the most of graduate potential. Rob likes to concentrate on game development and there was a danger that his Bad Viking site was being neglected. Vicky now can explore new ideas in site development and building site traffic.

In recent days Rob and one of his collaborators, RobotJam, have been negotiating a deal to make and promote their Hambo game as an app. From what I hear it sounds very like a publishing agreement. As the originators, the two Robs will get a percentage of the gross from app sales, the rest will be divided between the app developers, marketers, promoters etc plus the hefty percentage that goes to Apple. Even if the game does very well it does not mean wealth and riches for the originators.

But it will provide a new income stream, new learning, broader exposure and better understanding of other parts of the multi-billion dollar worldwide computer games business.

Rob knows there are risks in incorporation. Overheads go up, the work begins to be spread and more people become involved in the enterprise. But that's the deal for any enterprise and as long as the cleared profits justify the investment in skills and people, he can be confident he has made the right decision. But he also needs to know that the more you become involved in administration the less fun it can become. And just now he seems to be having a lot of fun.

Watching Rob and John discussing game possibilities at the weekend was like having a ringside seat in an ideas factory. Sometimes I even get to contribute the odd idea and that's great. In my book, The History of Work, I wrote about the freethinking atmosphere at Thomas Edison's Menlo Park laboratory. Edison referred to his young collaborators as muckers. "Hell, there ain't no rules in here. We're trying to accomplish something," he said.

One of the other fascinating aspects of this world of gaming is that anyone can get involved. A middle school teacher in the US reviews internet games with his class every Thursday. He also makes up little songs. Now he's made one about Hambo. Yes you read that right - it's not a school kid but a teacher doing this. If you were under the illusion that flash games were just for kids you need to think again. And if you are inclined to dismiss this stuff as trivia I'd urge you to also to think again. Games are changing the world.

Cheap flights

2011-03-22T07:48:00.000-07:00

The cheap flight has been a corporate phenomenon of the 21st century. How do they do it? You can read no end of analysis in the FT and other financial papers but no analyst yet has put it quite as succinctly or as amusingly as these people.

Leaving the Age of Stuff

2011-03-14T09:16:00.000-07:00

Computers seem to die like people. Either it's the finality of the blue screen that strikes like a heart attack or the gumming up of the virus that accumulates and spreads like a cancerous presence.

Our attitude to computers is mirrored in attitudes to aging. As our PC grows old we begin to expect less of it and grow frustrated if it doesn't do everything with the speed we have come to demand. We begin to think about a replacement, something that will do the job faster and more efficiently.

If we had looked after our PC a little better, if we had not pushed it so much or taken it to dodgy web sites, riddled with viruses just waiting to be picked up, it might have gone on serving us reliably for some years to come.

But the truth is that we live in the era of the upgrade and the next new version which always seems to promise more than before. Computers, like younger employees, seem cheaper and we're attracted to their newness and potential. We buy a new computer for its promise; we don't look at our old PC for its future worth but as a machine that is full of knowledge, that worked well in its time, but is no longer equipped to handle the demands of the modern workplace.

What about a new battery, some more memory, perhaps? Not worth it. We know the replacement will be costly and that there will be an element of programming, but it will soon be running at speed.

And so it's turned out with my brand new MacBook Air. The old Dell laptop is comatose on a table upstairs. I shall need to boot it up for one last wheezing contribution to the new regime. It needs to cough up work in progress that all but ground to a halt last week when the lap top simply ran out of puff. The rest of my documents are stored on a hard drive.

Processing speed

There's another analogy to human knowledge in the way that computing is developing. Independent memory isn't quite as important as it was. What matters today is processing speed.

The same applies to people. There is far too much information in the world today to try and store it all in our heads. We simply don't need to know dates and the order of monarchs, other than to impress our peers. But we do need to understand context, pathways, connections and how things work.

So why do school examination systems continue to rely on the regurgitation of facts? Educators will tell us that they're looking for facts to be assembled in clear arguments demonstrating understanding and analytical skills. But they still award marks for chunks of information (partly because it's easier to do so for the sake of consistency).

Students are rewarded for delivering a formula that coincides with that of the examination board. Original thinking might be admired but it will need to be exceptional to attract extra marks and might lose marks if it strays in to areas of controversy or heresy in contradiction to received wisdom.

Even if we know it in our hearts, even if we could mount a pretty good argument to back our assertion, we know that we would be committing academic suicide to declare that something within our studies is "all bollocks." And yet, not a few days ago, I sat through a marketing presentation and drew just such a conclusion. Not only that, but others who sat through it too, concurred. Yet none of us said anything because we were too polite to do so.

The world is full of nonsense and some of it is spoken by people who have the paper qualifications to prove their apparent expertise. Take economics, the so-called dismal science. Economists are wringing their hands just now because we're not spending enough in the shops. If we don't all spend collectively, we cannot support the industries that give us the work and wages to be able to spend in the first place. Businesses will go bust, jobs will be shed and the whole economy will grind to a halt. It sounds, on the face of it, a cast iron argument and it held good throughout the 20th century.

But we live within economies that are founded on the myth of inexhaustible resources. They're founded on another myth too, that our desires are insatiable - that we can never have enough.

Exhaustion of desires

We need to change that thinking as we are not only heading towards an exhaustion of resources as Ernst Schumacher warned us years ago, but also an exhaustion of desires - that is desires for more stuff. Fortunately salvation awaits and it may well be delivered in line with those old economic theories (which is just as well as we have nothing to replace them as yet).

Salvation can be delivered, as it has in the past, by design but the design in future must be focused much more on the consequences of resource depletion. I am not convinced that we can design our way out of climate change, but we can design better lives that do not rely, as they have in the past, on the accumulation of ever more stuff in goods and materials. The age of stuff is coming to an end.

Taking its place is the age of knowledge, something we've been accumulating at an exponential rate so that today it's everywhere. We don't know what to do with it all. Some people spend their lives storing it in a systematic way so that they can answer almost any question that is thrown at them. There was a good programme on BBC Radio 4 at the weekend, all about quizzing. I didn't even know that quizzing had acquired a new meaning as a verb. But today there are people arguing for quizzing to be adopted as a cerebral sport in the manner of chess.

I'm still far from mastering the knowledge economy. I spent a bit of time yesterday downloading on to an iPad about two dozen out-of-copyright books, some of which I have read and some of which I suspect I will never read. But I wanted to "have" them. Why? The books are there, available to be read or download at any time. In the knowledge economy it's difficult to shed the old habit of collecting things and sticking them in a box, even if that box is a digital memory bank.

Hot spots

But we need to let go of those old habits. We went out in the car yesterday with the iPad programmed to pick up the hot spots that BT-Fon is building within its network of users. This is an exciting development that relies on us making available chunks of our broadband for public use. Sadly we went past plenty of closed systems, indicative of two things: first the fear we have of people invading our wireless systems and possibly stealing our digital information, second an innate antipathy to sharing. We need to get over this. I'm not saying that identity theft doesn't happen, but mostly it happens in films and in the imaginations of those who earn their bucks exploiting our fear of digital theft and piracy. Besides, BT has circumvented these fears by fencing off the broadband we need for private use.

A big fear today is that of being left behind in the wave of applications and programmes that has pervaded our society. But the fear is groundless. When it comes to ubiquity, cheapness, convenience and disposability it is still difficult to beat paper and pencil. Although, as you might guess, someone has also brought out an app for that.

Japan will be back

2011-03-14T02:54:00.000-07:00

The Japanese earthquake has been a terrible event, leaving a wounded nation struggling to come to terms with the loss of life and consequences for an already fragile economy.

As specialists were working to prevent a catastrophe within the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant today, some newspapers were drawing parallels with destruction by bombing in the Second World War. In mid-1945 the whole nation was on a war footing with millions dead in its cities and in its armed forces. Entire sectors of the economy were paralysed and destroyed.

The two events are barely comparable in scale but there may be parallels to be drawn in how Japan responds. Japan recovered from the Second World War through the hard work and ingenuity of its people. I wonder if 10 years on from the earthquake, the Japanese will be able to look back at good things that emerged in the aftermath.

The Japanese people, probably more than those in any other industrialised nation, have grown accustomed to living in an "always on" society where the neon lights in downtown Tokyo burn 24 hours a day. Today those lights have gone out as Japan responds to an urgent need to conserve energy in the face of power cuts.

Environmentalists would argue that energy conservation is a priority for all of us, and they would be right to do so, but sometimes it takes an international emergency to shock people in to the appropriate responses.

It didn't take long for the consequences of war in Lybia and unrest elsewhere in the Middle East to feed through to petrol pumps in British garage forecourts. That kind of pain is felt in the pocket.

In Japan, a whole nation is in a state of shock, whole communities have been destroyed and tens of thousands of people killed. But we know a little bit about the Japanese spirit in adversity. The Japanese will pick themselves up and I suspect their response will more than meet the current crisis. Japan will emerge a better country from the Earthquake - more aware of the Earth's fragile environment and better equipped with even more expertise in nuclear power safety. That expertise will be valuable as the world extends its dependence on nuclear power in spite of all its attendant dangers.

Just now the Japanese administration is calling for voluntary restraint on power, asking people to use their laptops less, play fewer video games and economise on electricity where they can.

What goes for Japan, should go for all of us. We have all become over dependent on power in our lives. I'm writing these words on a laptop wondering, even as I write them, whether they would have better remained unwritten.

But I'm writing because I think there is such a thing as national industry, particularly in adversity, when nations do pull together for the common good. And I think people feel better about their lives when they work in this way. In truth I only know about this from conversations with earlier generations and from books. I haven't experienced it for myself other than in community events and charity fund raising.

I've never been in the position where my home has been reduced to rubble, where water and electricity has been cut off, where I'm struggling for warmth and where I don't know how to find my next meal. I live in a comfortable world and I think it has become too comfortable.

Comfort has a corrosive effect on our priorities and this is manifest in the way we behave and the things we say and do. It breeds a complaining and, frankly, lazy mentality. The solution isn't boot camp or a dose of discipline, but a little bit of self-imposed deprivation does no harm.

If you were at any of the Rugby internationals this past weekend you would have observed a minute's silence for the Japanese earthquake victims. Two weeks earlier there was a period of silence for the New Zealand earthquake victims. I sometimes wonder whether such gestures of respect are the indulgence of a comfortable society. It is entirely right to identify with those in less fortunate circumstances than ourselves but we shouldn't treat such moments as absolution.

I suspect there's a temptation to knock off a minute's silence as the "right thing to do" at such gatherings, then we can put the tragedy out of our minds and get on with life. But the real value of these moments should be to translate that collective silence in to action, some different individual behaviour perhaps.

Have I done something special or different in response to these events? I don't think I have, other than to write this blog and think a little bit how we might work collectively and more effectively to build a better world. It is far more difficult to do so in the comfort of an armchair than in the discomfort of a ruin. One harsh conclusion might be that people need setbacks in order to improve their lives.

When Japan was in ruins at the end of the Second World War, some of its future industrial giants were finding inspiration in lectures by management experts from the United States. Before the appearance of those pioneers of the quality movement, W Edwards Demming and Joseph Juran, a manager called Homer Sarasohn, was lecturing Japanese industrialists on the priorities of management (recalled in more detail in The History of Work).

His best lecture was one that urged companies to think about their priorities in the most basic terms. He quoted the founder of a Newport shipbuilding company who said: "We shall build good ships here; at a profit if we can; at a loss if we must; but always good ships."

Can you imagine that shipbuilder going in front of today's Dragons'Den panel with such a proposition? The collective response would be "I'm out" at the madness of focusing on anything other than profit.

And yet building good ships is the right thing to do. The problem with two many businesses today is that they have lost sight of their real expertise and their real purpose, concentrating instead on all the things they must do to market themselves and turn a profit. They tend to take for granted that they "build good ships."

We're all Mad Men now to some extent, imagining ourselves as 21st century Don Drapers, capable of waving a creative wand over some lack-lustre business. But not even Don Draper could help some of today's businesses that are barely worth saving in an ailing economy. A sense of renewal would do us all good.

There is no such thing as a good disaster, but good things can come from destruction and one of those good things is a clear-out of all the dross, the flabby concepts, the copied, ill-understood management practices, the know-nothings and the incompetent. Once they are out of the way, a business, if it has been robust enough to survive, can see a way forward with more clarity.

When the dead have been mourned, the tsunami devastation cleared and the power industry stabilised, Japan's business community will move forward once more with a renewed sense of endeavour, more clarity of purpose and a collective commitment to excel, reflecting that of earlier generations. We live in a world where bad things happen, but where good things still prevail.

Not everything grows on trees

2011-02-28T04:55:00.001-08:00

Don Tapscott, among others, writes with a sense of reverence about the "digital generation," and the special capabilities of young people who have grown up with the internet.

But has this generation become so unquestioning of information it draws from the internet that it has acquired a worrying level of gullibility?

The question was posed some years ago by Donald Leu, a researcher at Connecticut University, who studied the responses of students who were asked to investigate the plight of the endangered Pacific Northwest Tree Octopus.

The result was that most students found their way to the above website. So convinced were many of them of the octopus's existence, that they continued to vouch for its authenticity, even after the website information was disclosed to be a fabrication.

The experiment highlighted the level of misplaced trust that people can invest in the internet, although I wonder if the results would differ if the experiment was repeated today? The ubiquity of Photo-shopped pictures and doctored videos has led some to pronounce "fake" almost as soon as they view anything out of the unusual online. Either way, it's a cautionary tale.

Perhaps for their next assignment students should be asked to research the history of spaghetti production.

Daniel Bell

2011-02-23T08:38:00.000-08:00

Daniel Bell, one of the great prophets of post Second World War society has died, aged 91. Bell's 1973 book, The Coming of Post-Industrial Society, described a world where economies would shift their focus from the production of goods to services in what his contemporary, Fritz Machlup was already describing as knowledge industries.

Bell was writing of a new "information age" well before the personal computer appeared on desktops and a generation before the emergence of the internet.

Playing in company time

2011-02-21T10:23:00.000-08:00

It occurred to me that a few human resources people may have read that last post about Bloons and flash games and wondered what on Earth I was on about. I mention these games occasionally to HR audiences and it's generally greeted with blank stares.

The IT people understand, however. They are the ones often tasked by their managers to disable Adobe flash on company computers to prevent employees playing games in "work time."

There seems to be a growing neurosis about people surfing the internet in working hours, doing anything but the requirements of their job. But managers who set down their expectations of a job should have nothing to fear. If the expectations are clear and reasonable and matched to the skills of the employee, and the time allowed generous enough, managers would be justified in dismissing unacceptable results.

The problem is that some managers do not understand the individual skills possessed by certain employees. These managers may have no idea how long it takes someone to do a job. I know one employee of an investment bank whose role is to keep the derivatives specialists honest.

He makes sure that the instruments they have developed do what they're supposed to do. The thing about derivatives is that they are often so complex that only a handful of people understand them. "No-one in the company knows how much time I need to spend on these things," he says, "And quite honestly, know one cares as long as everything works fine. So I have plenty of time to do other things."

If people are doing what is expected of them, it shouldn't worry managers what else they may be doing at work, as long as this non-work is not affecting the company or the morale or work of other employees. We should not be measured by time on the job but by results.

Solicitors, consultants and accountants bill their contributions by the hour because historically it became a requirement of clients seeking to impose some measures to the work that was being undertaken for them. But these people are employed for their expertise and that expertise doesn't flow like metered electricity.

Some commentators have written about "flow" in work and sport and there are times, that every professional would acknowledge, when work seems to flow. But a more accurate picture is one of fits and starts. Flow is broken all the time.

We can all recognise good work when we see it, so why isn't that enough for us? When the Pied Piper rid Hamelin of its rats he'd done a good job. But the task seemed so simple that the town worthies denied him his reward. That was not their call. His job was to get rid of rats. How he did so or how long the job took should have been of no concern to anyone.

So if your highly efficient assistant spends some of his or her time playing solitaire on the computer (this is not possible in Sainsbury's because the management there has disabled it on its supermarket floor computers), then don't worry too much. Just be thankful for that efficiency.

Endnote:
Do not expect to get this advice from any of the thousands of productivity and IT consultants whose business is trading on management nurosese. The business of fear is one of the most lucrative earners in the market.

Bloons a billion

2011-02-11T08:21:00.000-08:00

Is Bloons the first flash game to notch up a billion plays online? I can't think of another. Eat your hearts out Angry Birds.

The flash games phenomenon and the Bloons story can be found in my book, The Future of Work. These are game-changing stories in the online business revolution.

Flash games are free to play online (unlike games bought as apps). This is one reason why many companies have disabled the Adobe flash programme on their systems - they don't want employees playing such games in company time (even though thousands are playing games downloaded as apps on their iphones all the time).

But it does not explain why Apple has refused to accommodate Adobe flash on its iPad. This means that iPads can't play flash games or run the short films that appear on the BBC website.

We live in a society which has become accustomed to free-to-market services in the pay-for-premium-get-the-basic-stuff-free model. We have Facebook, Twitter, Linked-In, Skype, Wikipedia and now Pushnote. But the iPad has said no to Adobe and the customer loses out.

Perhaps it's time for Angry Bloons.

Mad man

2011-02-11T05:20:00.000-08:00

I hate complaining and hate complainers. But I have just discovered that failing to complain costs money. Some of you may know this but I didn't until I rang BT Broadband today.

OK, I'll be honest, Gill, my wife and general person-who-gets-things-done-around-here, rang BT and spoke with the nice Indian lady-who-is-always-there. It all started with Gill's inability to stream an episode of Mad Men from BBC iPlayer on her new iPad. That made her quite iRate. We'd watched something at Christmas this way at the in-laws in Yorkshire. But when we tried to do the same here in Surrey it didn't work.

Why? We're in Surrey where everything's supposed to be fast. Here we were thinking we were paying for a high octane Ferrari version of broadband, but in actual fact had been chugging up the M1 all this time in our cyberspace equivalent of an Austin 7 blowing purple smoke out of the exhaust.

My brother-in-law-who-likes-gadgets introduced Gill to an app (I hate using this language of the digital age but if I called it a thingy I don't suppose it would help). Anyway this app thingy tested the broadband speed on the phone lines and gave us a number which could be accurately translated as "rubbish."

So this is what we told the nice Indian lady. She was very nice about it all and agreed, after some testing to confirm our discovery, that yes this really was rubbish and we could and should be getting something more than five times the speed. Not only that, but we needn't be paying as much for it.

She then passed us to another nice lady from somewhere around Gateshead, I would guess. This particular nice lady was from the sales side of BT Broadband so she was oozing niceness. Very quickly she worked out that this was our lucky day because we could not only be getting much faster broadband but could also get that at much less than we were paying at the moment.

"Well why didn't you tell us this?" I asked.

"Because you didn't ask."

So, let me get this straight, I said; the customers who are constantly weaving and dodging and looking for better deals elsewhere and complaining - they're the ones that are going to get the best deals?

That was about the size of it, she said, although her niceness training didn't allow her to say: "If chumps like you are daft enough to pay the old rates for the rubbish old broadband speeds, we're not going to put you right."

But there was a time that chumps like me were regarded by businesses as loyal customers. They were coddled and prized. Now, sadly, we're just chumps because the market for goods and services today is no longer a market. It has become a bazaar where everyone is expected to haggle and threaten to walk away.

I threatened to walk away but with no real appetite for doing so. That was when the nice Gateshead lady told me it was our lucky day and that we could have broadband at the Ferrari speed plus unlimited calls all for £15 a month (£180 a year) less than the chumps' rate we had been paying for the Austin 7.

There was a catch - and she held her breath at this point because she knew the smart people are reluctant to do this - we would have to sign up for 18 months. No problem, I'm a loyal customer, I said. I'm sure I could hear her saying "chump" as she put the phone down.

The episode made me wonder how many more people there are like us out there. We are the easily contented silent minority - generally pleasant people who chug along through life and stop at zebra crossings, and we are treated by business with contempt.

The same happens in the banks. You open an account at an OK interest rate, but if you fail to spot even better accounts available down the line, no-one is going to call you to tell you this. Ordinary people are being cheated rotten every day and that can't be right.

I suppose this is just another sign of the times. Not long ago, before we had the "benefit" of online streaming, we'd have simply watched Mad Men on the telly, or missed it and been none the worse for that.

Is Mumsnet a model for the modern trade union?

2011-02-10T02:59:00.000-08:00

I’m chairing a round table discussion this evening on Trade Unions and the social media. The event, hosted by the employment team at the law firm Russell Jones & Walker is headlined a “New Collectivism for the Me Culture.”

One proposition behind that headline, beyond the obvious observation that the world has changed, is that we have changed as individuals. While our mothers and fathers (or in most cases today, grandmothers and grandfathers) were prepared to subsume personal concerns and go to war for the common good, there is a suspicion today that we have all become rather selfish and insular. I’m not so sure that is true, but I do think that we live in a society that reflects individualism more than collectivism.

That spells bad news for Trade Unions, founded as they were, on the belief in strength through togetherness, the conviction that the best way for workers to secure better pay and conditions for themselves in an exploitative workplace, is to stand together.

Father of chapel

It’s a belief, I should say, to which I still subscribe but it’s not why I have been asked to chair this discussion. I doubt if the organisers have investigated my roots thoroughly enough to know that I was once a trade union shop steward (or what journalists rather quaintly call a father of chapel) during the dark days of the Callaghan administration. We stood on a picket line with our braziers when it was the turn of the provincial journalists. Yes I was there.

I remained a trade unionist for most of my employed life until one day during the late 1990s I resigned my union membership. I had taken a year out to write a book and the chapel, meanwhile, had become a release valve for hot air. Activism was dead. We grumbled and we negotiated and then we took their offers.

By that time the management had grown cute to the individual performance review and we were singled out individually for praise or censure and negotiated our own deals where we could. An across the board pay rise didn’t mean much any more.

Pay and jobs

Of course trade unions were about many more issues than pay alone, but pay has always been a dominant one. It’s all very well for the TUC’s online home page today to be calling on members to march in solidarity with Egypt’s democracy movement, but that won’t pay the mortgage or the petrol bills.

Even bigger than pay, however, is the job itself and today the public sector unions are facing their stiffest challenge in many years, fighting the swathe of job cuts about to fall on local and central administration. Next to pay is the pension and that too is at risk within the public sector, whose workers cannot look for solidarity among their private sector counterparts. Instead private sector workers say, privately of course, that their public sector chums have had it too good for too long with their protected pensions and cushy jobs. Not much solidarity there and that’s what we probably mean by the “me culture.”

Trade union membership in the UK has declined from its peak of more than 13m in the late 1970s, to just over 7m today. Funnily enough we all wanted to be in trade unions during the winter of discontent, perhaps because we felt we were making a stand and it felt good. There was real warmth and friendship gathered around those braziers even if the odd passer by said we should be stood up against a wall and shot.

Missing a trick

So why am I, and the biggest percentage of employees today, not rushing to join a trade union? Have the unions been left behind? I suspect that this will be part of the discussion this evening. But it must be a discussion in a spirit of respect. Seven million people is still a lot of people and whatever you may say or think about the trade unions, their members and their leaders are not daft. They understand what’s going on; but they may be missing a trick.

I clicked on the TUC website today. Then I opened up the website of Mumsnet. They’re worth comparing side-by-side and as I compare them I’m tempted to ask: Is Mumsnet a model for the modern trade union?

Trade unions run campaigns. Mumsnet runs campaigns. Trade unions negotiate discounts for their members. So does Mumsnet. The members of Mumsnet say that Lidl nappies are better than Pampers. Does the TUC or any other trade union tell you who are the best and worst employers? No. But this site does.

There is a story to that website. It used to be called Jobvent and it ranked employers based on employee reviews. Now it has been sold to new owners who have censured, apparently, many of the most damning comments. So there is not as much venting going on any more. Why wasn't it bought by a trade union, or, if not bought, why not copied? The online ranking of employers by trade unions would be a useful service to members and give an independent assessment of employment quality. Employees need something like this and employers need it to keep them honest. There has to be more dignity in the workplace than an employee-of-the-month badge.

Online forums

Never mind Best Companies To Work For and other such organisations run by human resources people and sponsored by the media. The Trade Unions have the integrity and fair mindedness to ensure that any rankings they hosted would not become simply a forum for dissent and abuse.

Talking of forums: they should be hosting those too online but I can't find one on the TUC website. Mumsnet has scores of well ordered and focused threads in its forum, populary supported by its 850,000 regular users, a membership that any trade union would love to have on board. Indeed I'm sure that Mumsnet has its share of trade unionists but have they found the same voice in their unions?

Mumsnet focuses on work too. It knows the concerns of its members because the site is in touch with them every single minute of the day.

Some trade unions can not even keep track of their union memberships where membership cards are administered locally. They also know that a proportion of their members do not possess computers or access to a computer. These are real problems when considering online delivery of services. Members cannot be disenfranchised. But most people seem to have mobile phones these days, even most of the unemployed. If people can get to a phone to vote in the X-Factor they can vote in their trade unions. Given their traditions, unions could be and should be pioneers of the instant plebiscite.

I know these issues and more shall be discussed tonight. You don't need Twitter and Facebook to ensure a lively discussion when a bunch of trade unionists get around a table. But you might need a chairman. I'm looking forward to it.

Management book awards

2011-01-26T02:15:00.000-08:00

It's a long time since I won an award so it was good to pick one up for The Future of Work at the inaugural Chartered Management Institute's Management Book of the Year last night.

My book won in the digital book category. Apparently this is the first time an award has been given for a digital book. I suspect there are going to be a lot more entries in future as digital books take off on iPad, Kindle and the rest.

I take my hat off to my publisher, Palgrave Macmillan, in what was an astute move to get the book in on the ground floor, so to speak. I didn't know much about the entry or the competition and certainly didn't know the book had won. The only speech I had prepared was a one word expletive to utter to myself if it had not won.

The overall winner was Henry Mintzberg's book, Managing. Mintzberg is a big hitter, established guru and author of countless books on management. In my mind I tend to lump him with Frederick Herzberg as one of the two "bergs."

Consulting my History of Work, just now, I find he gets a mention on page 275 for something he wrote in The Nature of Managerial Work published in 1973 before I had left school.

One chap was kind enough to come up and shake my hand at the awards and tell me he thought my book was better than Mintzberg's - oh the flattery. But it's just what I need as things have been a little lean for me of late as I'm trying to decide what book to write next (I have a few candidates) and as I await news on my novel which is looking for a publisher. Come on publishing folks, I'm an award winning author for goodness sake. Yes I like that. Get that sticker on the cover.

Pushnote note

2011-01-23T04:16:00.000-08:00

Following on from the previous blog, I've spent a little more time looking at Pushnote because I think, if it takes off - and that's still a big "if" - it could prove to be almost as significant as Twitter and Facebook in revolutionising the internet and the way we do business.

Indeed I think that if we're looking at overall social and commercial impact of the web we should not be looking at each of these services (what else should I call them?) in isolation. Their integrated value is far more powerful than any stand alone value.

This is something that I think many people who use the web have yet to understand. Linked-in, alone, was a rather sterile list of business contacts, but the second generation Linked-in with its social networking architecture and ability to take feeds from Twitter and the like is becoming far more significant as a business tool.

I can recall the time pre-Google when I barely used the internet and when I did it was to visit sites I knew about. I still have a book - yes a book - listing great sites on the web.

This was before search engines perfected algorithms that sought out frequently visited sites. Then along came Stumbleupon - rarely mentioned in the same breath as Facebook, yet, for those who used it initially, it at last made surfing the web meaningful. Here was a piece of personalised web architecture that allowed you to feed in your various likes and dislikes and responded accordingly by pushing potentially interesting sites to you.

In effect Stumbleupon is a "digital friend" that says "hey, have you seen this site...?" Just as your real friend may not hit the mark with a suggestion, so Stumbleupon suggestions will often fail to hit the spot. But sometimes it does come up with something quite startling that makes you sit up in your seat.

Facebook did something quite different. It allowed each of us to use it to re-enforce our identities for ourselves and for others. It allowed us to reach people we knew in ways that were impossible previously. Yes, sometimes it irritates, but sometimes you might get irritated by a friend calling round in the middle of the day. Yet deep down, below the irritation, we welcome that call. Sometimes we don't know ourselves enough to trust our intitial reactions.

Twitter was something else again. A lot of people - even people who use it - don't really understand it or - and I sympathise here - don't have the time or creative thought to use it. That's not a criticism. A lot of people have no desire to blurt out something in to the ether in 140 characters.

Now Pushnote has arrived and it offers something that seems familiar but is actually quite new. Pushnote allows you to leave a comment on any web page - any comment you wish - and those comments remain there to see for anyone in the Pushnote community. Stumbleupon does something similar but the crucial difference there is that website reviews can only be viewed on the "home" pages of individual Stumblers.

So what can Pushnote do? Suppose you have visited the sale at Selfridges and you have found a range of jeans, say, at rock bottom prices. You could highlight that fact for others.

I did something similar on Amazon yesterday, commenting that I could sometimes find books better priced at another website, The Book Depository. Now this was a tip I picked up from chatting with someone a week or two back and which I had already acted on, so I know it's true and I know that the Book Depository is a reliable company. So you're getting a recommendation from someone you trust (hopefully) and those are the very best recommendations in business.

Now just see what is happening here for the Book Depository. Fellow Pushnoters who visit Amazon can see this comment. A few may act upon it. If I chose to Tweet or Facebook that comment (an option on Pushnote), then Twitter followers and Facebookers can see it. This is all good news for The Book Depository.

Of course, one Pushnoter subsequently might have a bad experience with The Book Depository.

But Pushnote alone is probably not that interesting. It becomes interesting if it gains a critical mass and particularly if it is integrated with other internet services.

One of the problems in what I would call the cult of the new, is that the fashionistas love to fly from their existing perches and flock around the new new thing (before flocking elsewhere). What's important for effective internet use, particularly for businesses, is to remember some of the older internet stuff. For example forums are still extremely powerful web sites since, by their nature, they are self-selecting.

As a game angler I am a member of both The Fly Fishing Forums and the Salmon Fishing Forum. I prefer the latter as that one covers my favourite kind of game fishing and the posters are less likely to become abusive (a real problem on fishing forums where individual anglers will sometimes forget their bankside manners and go hammer-and-tongs at each other in the safety of an internet thread).

On a recent visit I noticed and commented on a thread praising John Norris, a fishing shop in Penrith. Many anglers who drive from south to north for their fishing, know this shop as it's conveniently situated just off the M6 about half way on the journey. So Sunday lunchtime (Sunday is the changeover day on salmon beats) is always busy. Now I would imagine John Norris would have been delighted to have their business highlighted on the forum. But of course, they must take the rough with the smooth. Not everyone was complimentary about the service. But there again, the negative comments can be vital feedback for any business striving to improve.

So this stuff is already happening in forums and various ranking sites. Now it can happen on Pushnote in a far more generalised way.

Pushnote and the early adopters

2011-01-21T07:03:00.000-08:00

"Have you heard of.....?" That's how it starts.

I remember contacting friends and acquaintances about Facebook and then Twitter when these web sites were relatively new a few years ago. The reaction was always mixed. Some were curious and joined up to find out what it was all about. Some simply didn't want to know: "Not for me mate," and ignored any approach. Many were sceptical, typically saying: "What use is this for me?"

I couldn't tell people how to use such sites. That would have been far too prescriptive. The idea of these sites is that they present themselves as services and it's up to those who adopted them to find a way of using them as they wish. No-one is forcing anyone to use this stuff.

A few in my generation, I believe, were a little bit embarrassed about the idea of using Facebook initially, partly because it didn't reflect the way they viewed friendship. Having a few hundred Facebook friends lacked authenticity, because many of these people would simply be people you knew reasonably well or barely at all. Most were not your bosom chums or confidantes. Another problem for those late adopters was that they knew life might be a bit lonely on Facebook for a while as they built up a circle of internet friends.

Gill, my wife, resisted it for some time until I persuaded her to take the plunge. Now she enjoys "Facebooking", whatever that means(and for each of us I think it probably means different things). She doesn't use Linked-in for the same reason that she can't see how it might help her (but she should use it).

The thing is, you will never know how they can work for you until you use these things. I know some people who have ventured timidly and reluctantly on to Twitter (probably because they were advised to do so as a marketing opportunity). My brother Philip is one of these people. "I just don't know what to post," he says.

"It helps if you begin following a few people," I say.

"But I don't really want to follow anyone. I don't really get it."

He needs to "get it." He runs a small stationary company, A4 Stationers, which has the potential to be quite a bit more successful beyond its shops, now that he has placed his stock on the web at this site. It's a good web site, but not many people beyond his local regular customers know about it.

One thing he could do would be to research the market for bulk orders for his products. Many people who order stationary in companies are receptionists and secretaries. I don't know whether the Association of Personnel Assistants has a Twitter account, but if they do and if I was a stationer, I'd start following it.

I didn't get in to this conversation with my brother since he will always be my big brother. If you have a little brother you will know why. Little brothers know nothing (a family status that it seems must be maintained through life). But let's assume I'm having this conversation with you if you've read so far. Perhaps you're asking: what now? If so, then this is why you probably need a consultant. A good consultant will help you explore various possibilities.

A lot of business people prefer this kind of arrangement. If they're paying for something it reinforces the assumptions of businesses that business relationships are always financial. I can remember when people who introduced someone to a business would expect and get a "finders fee" if it led to a lucrative business deal.

Such fees are becoming rare these days as businesses become easier to find on the internet. But still many of them do not do enough to exploit web architecture that is free to access, even when they may be paying for a web presence in "pay per click" advertising. It's as if they're suspicious of anything that is free to use.

Anyway all of this up to now was by way of preamble to yet another new Twitter-style service. This one is called Pushnote and it's still in beta testing.

I only signed up today so if you have never heard of Pushnote that makes me the one-eyed man in the land of the blind. Rather than inflict this on Facebook friends, I have enrolled immediate family as guinea pigs. If you go on there you will find other bemused early adopters wondering what to make of it.

This is what it does: once you've signed up it will ask you to tell other people. Tell whoever you wish. It will then put a little cartoon bubble on your toolbar at the top of your web page. Now go to a website, any web site, and if you feel moved to comment on it then do so. I have just commented on my brother's site: "Useful stationers". This comment with the web link now appears in my Facebook, Twitter and Linked-In threads and the comment stays with that particular site if others in the Pushnote community go there.

Now others in my Pushnote circle (still immediate family) will notice their speech bubble glowing to denote that one in their circle has just commented on a site. If you click on the bubble it will not take you to the site but it will show the comment. The bubble glows either red or green, red if it's a Pushnote friend commenting on a site, green if it's someone commenting on a site you visit.

So what's the point? I'm not sure yet, although Stephen Fry has been persuaded to become a shareholder in the business and we know he is an arch Twitterer. Will it be used for promotion? Of course it will be, I've just done it. Will it be abused? Probably. Will it annoy the Hell out of website owners when there are negative comments? Almost certainly. Could it change the way we do business? I think it might well have an impact.

For example: you're following a business, Amazon say, you turn to a page for a specific book and you see Pushnote comments that the book can be bought more cheaply at another website. Goodbye Amazon.

Footnote on Pushnote: I've just sent Pushnote invitations to 25 Facebook friends. This is always a risky business as some may really not appreciate being asked. Yet others might be miffed that they were not asked. As usual some will be curious and join up and yet others will be saying: "Not another bloody gimmick/app." All I can say is that I've Donkin-tested this and I think it has potential. But I accept that it also has potential to clutter up the Facebook thread.

On the other hand it seems to be a tool that, like Stumbleupon, is helping to make the web more focused and useful for those who want to seek out useful or entertaining sites.

Agesim isn't management

2011-01-14T06:13:00.000-08:00

It's good that the Government has confirmed the phasing out of the default retirement age of 65 by the end of September. But don't expect the workplace to be filled with the over 60s any time soon.

If that is to happen managements will need to radically change their attitudes towards older employees. Right now I see little sign of this. Assumptions about age are so ingrained in our psyche that they will not disappear overnight.

Yesterday I was visiting my tax adviser and we were discussing earnings generally. He is in his thirties with a young family and a mortgage. My children are grown up and the mortgage has been paid so I probably need to earn less than he does.

But he assumed from this that my career was "winding down" now I'm in my fifties. It's a common misconception of younger mid-career managers. I have no intention of winding down my career. Yes, I want to push it in new directions but I want to keep on working because I still have various ambitions. The question I and many of my generation are asking ourselves, however, is "who wants what we have to give?"

Many of my friends have their own businesses and most of them have already prepared or are engaged in preparing the way for their successors. Some have groomed managers in order to sell their businesses in management buyouts. Quite a few have shifted from the chief executive to chairman role and are finding that getting used to a life that is not quite so "hands on" is taking time.

"It was quite a surprise to find that someone else could run the business just as well as I did," said one of them. "Now I give my advice but they don't always take it."

Some of these people are looking for new interests, sometimes helping other businesses or setting up a new venture. Almost all of them are in a position where they don't need the money.

But I don't have that luxury and one or two other friends don't either. I want to go on working but I also know that I need to do so if I'm to pay the bills in future. I'm not whining about this but I am angry about the way one can be forgotten so quickly by people who take the view that "you have had your day, now it's our turn."

Miriam O'Reilly, the former BBC Countryfile presenter, was a victim of ageist thinking when she was unfairly removed from her job to make way for a younger presenter.

Her industrial tribunal victory this week may help the cause of others in her place but it won't stop managements "easing out" people who they think no longer fit in to their plans.

The reality is that in many careers today people are not sacked. Instead they are put in a position where they want to leave. After all, who wants to stay with an employer who has demonstrated that they couldn't care less whether you stay or go.

This easing out happens for many reasons. Often it is financial. If you are an experienced specialist you may well find that you are earning double the salary of a colleague with less experience but with many of the same skills. Often these colleagues are more pliable and a little easier to manage. Young managers often hate being reminded of the greater experience of an older hand. They really would prefer to make their own mistakes.

Perhaps this is the way it has to be. Older employees need to learn some sensitivity in the way they deal with younger managers. But it's difficult, nonetheless, to deal with someone who you know still has a lot to learn. This is the real age gap that no amount of legislation will easily overcome.

As for the invidious practice of "easing out," typically achieved by offering the target employee a less attractive job; that's not going to end in a hurry, but it shouldn't be disguised as good management.

Cream rising

2011-01-05T10:28:00.000-08:00

The power of YouTube: His name his Ted Williams. He's been living on the streets, begging by the roadside in Columbus, Ohio, but as this video shows, he also has a voice that was made for the airwaves. He knows it too and now, thanks to YouTube, he's just been given a job with the Cleveland Cavaliers.

Postscript: Now on the BBC website, but you read it here first.

Earth rarer than tulips

2011-01-04T04:24:00.000-08:00

In the middle of the 16th century when the world seemed a much bigger place than it does today, anything sourced beyond the borders of Europe could be considered exotic and precious; and few discoveries excited the covetousness of men more than the turban-shaped variegated petals of the tulip.

The Swiss naturalist and father of modern zoology, Conrad Gessner, first excited a European craving for tulips when he described a plant he had seen in a Bavarian collection whose owner had been sent a bulb by a friend living in Istanbul (then Constantinople).

Wealthy people in The Netherlands and Germany began to prize the flowers and were willing to part with extravagant sums for the finest specimens. The tulip became a hallmark of good taste and status, so much so, that the urge to possess a collection filtered down to the middle and merchant classes. By the turn of the century, anyone who was anyone had to have a private tulip collection. One trader in The Netherlands paid half his fortune for a single bulb.

What became known as Tulipomania is perhaps the most famous historical example of irrational exuberance that can overtake whole nations once they become gripped by what Charles Mackay in his book of the same name called Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds.

The mania for tulips that transformed a whole nation – one must only visit the Netherlands in the spring to encounter its lasting influence – did not last beyond a manic trading in tulip futures that collapsed in 1636.

The same fever that excited speculators in tulips has emerged time and again and we can see it again today. Last week the share price of a company rose by 66 per cent, simply because it changed its name to Rare Earth Minerals.

Rare Earth is the name for ores that are rich in certain scarce minerals such as scandium, yttrium, and the fifteen types of lanthanide. The vast majority of the world’s rare earth supply is today mined in Inner Mongolia, part of the Chinese Republic.

Rare Earth Minerals doesn’t have any earth – rare or otherwise; not even a plant pot of soil sufficient to nourish a tulip. According to the Daily Telegraph up to just over a week ago the company was called Zest, a loss-making music business. But penny stock investors seem to like the name and have been piling in to the shares.

Financial historians may recall the South Sea company formed in 1711. The company was granted a monopoly of trade with Spain’s South American colonies and subsequently assumed a large proportion of British government debt. Speculating in South Sea shares dramatically increased the company's value. Not to miss the boat, other speculative ventures began issuing shares on dubious potential.

Almost a hundred of what came to be known as bubble companies were created with all kinds of imagined ventures. Indeed one of them had not even imagined what it might do. This was the business that famously described itself as “a company for carrying out an undertaking of great advantage, but nobody to know what it is".

Nothing has changed. Just as the Dutch speculated in tulip bulbs, the Chinese have now begun speculating in French wine, driving prices of the best French wines to more than four times their normal value in 2010. This year it will probably all happen again, partly because some are prepared to deliberate on whether the Chinese market for high-priced French wine is sustainable. It is not: the speculation in French wine is a classic bubble in the making.

Two years ago Berry Brothers and Rudd, the wine merchant, predicted that the quality of Chinese wine will match that of Bordeaux wines within 50 years. Make that 20 years or even less. The Chinese move fast. They will soon produce enough fine wine of their own to meet growing domestic demand

The nature of bubbles is that they are not always apparent as they expand. But some don't care whether they are apparent or not and will happily disguise a bubble for their own benefit. The keenest gamblers see bubble speculation as nothing other than a matter of timing, getting out before the pop.

Meanwhile penny stocks such as Rare Earth Minerals are enjoying bubble fever all over again. We’re forever blowing bubbles.

Bad call

2010-12-16T09:37:00.000-08:00

We all make decisions we regret in life. A friend was reminding me of an approach he had during a ski trip some years ago asking if he was interested in investing £30,000 that would have given him a substantial share in a start-up retailing business.

He turned it down, saying: "Who's going to want to buy mobile phones in a shop?" The business was Carphone Warehouse, now valued at more than £1.8bn.

Workworld awards and new careers

2010-12-08T05:11:00.000-08:00

I spent the whole of yesterday judging entries in the Work Foundation's annual Workworld media awards for journalists who specialise in business, work and management.

I must have been on the panel for more than 10 years. The format hasn't changed much but there are occasional changes in categories. For a year or two now the panel has been struggling over what to do with online journalism.

The problem has been defining just what that it is. When the printed media began putting its journalism on line it tended to take the form of a print news story republished on to a website. Sites whose editors better understood online media began including links to other sites within the copy.

The ability to do this has existed for more than a decade. We were doing it ten years ago when we set up FTCareerPoint, a recruitment website that used to be attached to FT.com. Such links are a defining difference between information we can read in books and that we can access online.

I was surprise to find in the Blogger award category yesterday that some blogs still fail to use these links. It's rather like standing with someone in front of the window, closing the curtains and describing what there is outside. Surely they can look for themselves.

There is also a view that only professional journalists should write blogs. That's nonsense. The great thing about the web is that it is liberating the way we engage with the world from the constraints and conventions imposed by professional dominance and control.

We still trust newspapers. But we should no longer trust them to bring us the very best that the world has to offer. Great stories, inspiration and information can be found anywhere. That's always been true but the web today has some ingenious ways to help us look. This story I've covered on Donkin Life is only one example. There are many others.

Once upon a time there was a menu of careers. It's still very much in evidence. But more and more people now are creating their own careers in their own way. This too is the future of work.

How the talent market works

2010-12-02T02:20:00.000-08:00

It's snowing outside and there's a thick layer on the hill, but Gill has just taken our Jeep to Guildford to help out in a pharmacy short of staff.

She wasn't planning to work today but the phone rang as she thought it might. It was Boots where she is listed as one of their locum pharmacists. She used to work for them regularly until an area manager told her one day that a new company policy would provide locum cover from full time staff wherever possible.

But managers still call her because the policy isn't very efficient. There is no sense of loyalty to locum staff. Boots simply have a list and work from name to name. Where the need for cover is known in advance some companies put out an email with a list of dates on a first-come-first-served basis. It's a modern-day version of that once used in ports where workers were picked from those milling outside the dock gates. But instead of waiting at the dock gates, today's "stand-ins" wait beside their phones.

Boots would have struggled to find anyone today because side roads are all but impassable for anything other than a four-wheel drive vehicle. Gill was happy to help them out and did not negotiate a premium. In her shoes I would have done so. She was putting a specialist vehicle at their disposal and she was taking some added risks. There would have been no difficulty justifying charging more and I'm sure that Boots would have paid. As it was they offered a slightly better rate than normal. They drive a hard bargain on locum staff and treat them as a necessity they would rather do without. So locum staff should adopt the same approach in return. Gill didn't need to work today.

She didn't seek a premium because that's not in her nature. It is typical of women generally when approaching pay. They simply don't negotiate in the same way as men and lose out because of it.

Gill is like thousands of other committed people out there who will move mountains to get to work and then move mountains when they get there. She works hard. She's what employers would call "a good worker". And she's good at what she does too, keeping her knowledge sharpened through continuing professional development.

I'd like to say that her willingness to work would send a message to Boots that here is a reliable locum who will step in when others don't. But Boots don't think like that. Gill and other locum pharmacists like her (and many other employees across a broad range of professions and skills) are viewed as commodities.

I have a builder friend who, when he needs an electrician, or a brick layer or a roofer, will call an agency and tell them he needs some "skins". That's a general term in the trade for workmen.

Human resources practitioners will tell you that today there is a market for talent. What does that mean? Today Boots needed a "skin with a Jeep".

How some people rise without trace

2010-11-27T04:19:00.000-08:00

I would guess that most of us have heard of the Peter Principle, that in a hierarchy people rise to their level of incompetence. It's often used to explain away the idiot manager, although many of these people seem to have been promoted beyond their level of incompetence or even because of their incompetence. "Better to get them out of our hair," seems to be the reasoning behind such a move. I've known it happen in schools where useless teachers have been given glowing reviews in order to send them on their way.

But how do these people cope with their incompetence? Surely they are stressed and unhappy to discover they are out of their depth and cannot command the respect of their teams. Well this isn't necessarily so and it can be put down to a less well recognised phenomenon called the Dunning-Kruger effect.

The Wikipedia definition to which I have linked here, attaches the effect to the unskilled, but it seems to me that the illusory superiority it mentions, where people can rate their ability much higher than it actually is, can be applied to many people in the workplace, including some who have moved up through the ranks in their companies.

These are dangerous people because they have come to believe their own press and listen to the flatterers who are simply other incompetents who want to fill their boss's shoes one day.

I sometimes wonder if there is a special track for these people, a track from which all obstacles are magically erased in front of them, allowing them a smooth path through life, conveniently distanced from the disasters they leave in their wake. They rise without trace and because of the Dunning-Kruger effect they have no idea of their extraordinary good fortune.

But just as there are people who believe their high opinion of themselves is wholly justifiable, I believe there are others who don't understand just how able they are. Either through a lack of confidence or some other aspect of their background - perhaps they didn't go to a good school or were discouraged from being ambitious by their parents - they watch in frustration as often the less able will be promoted above them.

These people - the unpromoted stars - are doomed because they can be perceived as troublemakers by the promoted incompetents. No-one likes a clever Dick. So there are only two options for such people - to get out and do something else, or to keep their heads down for the sake of a quiet life. Many people do the latter and thus, an imperfect hierarchy is maintained.

Stuck at home, stuck in post

2010-11-10T08:45:00.000-08:00

The biggest obstacle to moving jobs from the north of England to the south, 23 years ago, when I made the move, was finding a new home. House prices in the south had shot up compared with those in the north. We simply couldn't sell at a price that would have bought any reasonable property in the south. We moved anyway, kept out house in the north and rented in the south.

Now, according to this article, the difficulty in selling houses is restricting job movement once again. It's dressed up in a fancy term used by economists: structural unemployment.

I made some related points about the mortgage traps a few years ago in this piece on Woking. It's not about economics, more about relative wealth, that and death.

HR and the social media

2010-11-10T04:02:00.000-08:00

Some thoughts here on the social media and why it might not be used much by human resources people. There's a debate hosted by the Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development on Twitter tonight at 7pm that will no doubt be beamed on screens to anyone at the CIPD's annual conference who chooses a more passive involvement (if not, then it should be).

The Twitter discussion - at least each input will be brief (Tweets are limited to 140 characters) - will be hosted here.

The general question is: How do we get more people in HR to use the social media? Maybe that's not the question, maybe it has nothing to do with effective HR, but if you're not at the conference or you're not using Twitter, you won't be able to tell anyone. Perhaps the question answers itself.

Personality testing and the zealots

2010-11-08T07:02:00.000-08:00

More than 16 years ago I wrote a sceptical column in the Financial Times on the uses of personality testing in recruitment, drawing on the expertise of Steve Blinkhorn and Charles Johnson, two highly respected occupational psychologists.

For all their scepticism, which has never been refuted, at least not to any satisfactory degree as far as I can see, recruiters continue to rely too readily on the outcomes of tests that can be easily faked or misinterpreted.

I've stayed in close touch with Steve Blinkhorn over the years and he sent me this link the other day with a note saying: "What did I tell you?"

For anyone planning to jump on the personality testing bandwagon it's worth a thorough read. Here the author explains that it's zealotry in testing that worries her. Me too.

Getting to the top

2010-11-05T01:54:00.001-07:00

Of course when you're trying to look at work in the future it's easy to become focused on desks and computer screens. But work for many people is out there facing the elements and we should never forget that. I've heard of military leaders saying they would never ask anyone to do something they would not do themselves. Well if that applies to all work, I'd challenge anyone to try and do the job of this worker, filmed here reaching the top of his profession. Watch it all....if you can.

Dangerous world

2010-11-03T09:48:00.000-07:00

Planning your next business trip? Be careful where you go.

Building New York - virtually

2010-11-01T16:05:00.001-07:00

Maths is not my strongest point but I've just been doing some calculations around these statistics compiled on Facebook usage. According to this blog Facebook now has 500m active users worldwide. That's 1 in 14 of the world's population who together are spending 700 billion minutes a month on the site.

Now by my calculation if you translate that figure in to man hours in construction, say, it is the equivalent of building more than 20,000 Empire State Buildings a year.

Given that there are roughly 100,000 buildings on Manhatten, and given that very few are anything like the empire state building in size, I reckon that had the time spent on Facebook since its inception been allocated into building work it would have been sufficient to build a modern metropolis on the lines of New York from scratch.

I wonder what we shall remember as our greatest monuments to posterity - the world's great buildings or the messages we post each other every day on Facebook? Another way of looking at it, however, is that the virtual world may be the eventual saviour of our overcrowded planet as our economies begin to transfer themselves on to the networked world of the internet.

Zuckerberg's Rosebud

2010-11-01T10:03:00.000-07:00

Have you been to the cinema to see the Social Network yet? It made me think about the way that companies are run.

There must be thousands of books on corporate management and leadership and yet Facebook, a company set up by a computer geek, has stormed through the crowd of more established companies to become an enterprise valued at anything between $11.5 bn and $25 bn, depending on whichever speculative or rumoured valuation you read.

While it is far from clear yet where this business is heading, what was abundantly clear from Aaron Sorkin's script is that all the stuff we read about corporate strategies is not worth a string of beans against the power of an idea.

Facebook was not set up to make billions of dollars. The motivations behind it, suggests Sorkin in the screenplay, were fairly basic - a kind of dating platform for students. The brilliance was in the algorithms, the simplicity of the format, and the way that it touched a need in people to be noticed and form relationships.

But is it a business? That's the $25bn question. Revenues last year were $800m, generating profits in the tens of millions. Microsoft, meanwhile is counting its quarterly profits in billions ($5.4bn) in the last quarter.

Mark Zuckerberg, the 26-year-old founder of Facebook, has criticised the film that portrayed him as someone focused obsessively on gaining access to Harvard's exclusive college clubs. In the last frame he is seen brooding over a former girlfriend who no longer wants to know him.

The scene evokes the final part of Citizen Kane when the audience discovers that Kane had never got over the loss of his mother's love, embodied in his toy sledge called Rosebud.

And that's what makes this film so thought provoking. It's one of those "what the hell are we doing all this for?" dramas. Many of us may ask the same question.

Rise of the new robber barons

2010-11-01T05:28:00.000-07:00

Robert Peston's analysis of director's pay awards, based on contrasting surveys published within a week of each other, throws in to sharp relief the difference in pay policy between those at the top of the UK's largest public companies and those running medium and small companies.

I couldn't improve on Robert's argument so instead would urge you to read it for yourself. It's clear from the data that a two tier system of fixing pay has emerged in the private sector. The system for large public companies - where the pay of the chief executive is fixed by fellow board directors acting on the advice of remuneration committees - has become far too cosy and self-serving.

Remuneration committees shore up their advice using data supplied by pay consultants who come to the meetings armed with pay data that show, in quartile comparisons, the earnings of those running other companies of comparable size in the same sector.

In the same way that top football clubs feel they need to pay ever escalating pay deals to keep their top players, the big public companies have been persuaded that they must pay top quartile salaries and bonuses to keep their stewards. The problem with paying top quartile salaries is that it has the effect of ratcheting up the mean, escalating pay deals beyond those of the real world and the rest of the private sector where directors and business owners have shared the medicine of recession.

Just once I would like to see a FTSE remuneration committee very publicly saying "no" to the boss of one of these big companies. But that's a pipe dream because it is not in the interest of anyone on those committees to do so. But please don't let us be fooling ourselves in to believing this is a market for talent, like that of footballers. There has been nest-feathering of scandalous proportions that makes the largess of MPs' expenses pale in comparison.

The real scandal is that these new robber barons are lauded inside and outside their companies. They really believe their own press, with headhunters in courtship admiring these puffed up emperors. Perhaps all this is sustainable. It's been going on for a long time and scale still carries weight. But there are consequences. There are consequences in competition from overseas and from more nimble competitors. Of course, by the time the big company begins to crumble, the "hired guns" as Robert calls them, are long gone, riding off in to the sunset with pensions as bloated as their pay packets.

Wake up call

2010-11-01T02:23:00.000-07:00

I'm working on a presentation I'm giving tomorrow to a gathering of human resources directors and managers in London. Standing in front of an audience is a good discipline. It helps me to stay sharp.

I've probably assembled too many slides but it's an hour-long slot and I always worry about not having enough material. It's never a problem. There's always time for a question and answer session and that's often the best bit, particularly when it's more of a debate which it should be since I don't claim to have all the answers.

Almost 12 months have passed since the publication of the Future of Work and it's been good to see that governments are beginning to try and tackle some of the issues it raises, particularly those around the aging workforce. In the UK The official retirement age is to rise and the default retirement age is to go in October 2011.

But not enough thought is being channelled in to preparing the younger workforce. We need modern structured apprenticeships that carry the same status if not more, than degrees. If young people are going to be asked to cough up £9,000 a year each in tuition fees in future, then they need a practical alternative to university, one where they can leave school and enter the formal workplace earlier in the knowledge that they will not be disadvantaged later by a fast-tracked graduate intake.

I've just run through my talk - 1 hr 10mins - that's about 20 minutes too long, too many slides. I always do at least one run through, often two or three. The audience today is my dog, a West Highland white terrier. He stayed until the end but didn't move much. He slept through most of it and he's still sleeping now. I hope I get a better response tomorrow.

Exit interviews

2010-10-30T04:11:00.000-07:00

You can find out a lot of information from exit interviews when people are about to leave an employer. But don't expect to find out everything. Most people, rightly, are guarded about the things they say. It's good to leave with dignity. The skill is the interpretation of the things that are said.

But sometimes, if really hacked off at the way you were treated, you might need to get things off your chest. This is not the way to do it. If you have not come across this before, you should know that this frank exchange of views is played out by actors. It might be adapted, however, for an amusing training session.

This blog went viral in August when quite a lot of people thought it was genuine. Of course the impact is so much stronger if you believe the people and their sentiments are genuine.

The lesson, if there is one, is that this kind of thing could happen to an employer. It's unlikely, however, because people do not have the time, the originality or the brass neck to undertake such an exercise in washing their dirty linen. I wondered what a HOPA was and looked it up. Apparently it's an Americanism (Hot Piece of Ass). They don't seem to worry too much about the order of the letters in the US.

Meerkats, not polecats

2010-10-05T05:15:00.000-07:00

Joined-up thinking: you hear this phrase a lot in company boardrooms but you don’t see it much in companies. Instead they just spout the jargon because it’s part of the language of teams, and companies are obsessed with teamwork.

Obsession or not, the reality of organisational dynamics is often quite the reverse. If it’s not invented here, it’s not on the agenda. In a recent presentation, a chairman showed a picture of meerkats in the Power Point show, an example of how some animals organise themselves for the benefit of the group. I couldn’t help thinking that a picture of polecats might have been more appropriate.

In groups comprising talented individuals, academics and creative types, people sometimes talk about herding cats but this week’s Ryder Cup tournament showed that when highly talented people focus themselves on a common cause they can bury their differences, at least for the duration of an event.

When organisations become spread internationally it is even more difficult to maintain a united front. People form working relationships in their immediate circles. That is when the full panoply of communications devices and software can come in to their own.

The secret today is not to rely simply on conference calls and presentations, but to utilise everything to hand in social networking media. If your staff aren’t using Twitter and Facebook and Linked-in and special interest forums, then they’re missing a trick. And if you aren’t using these things you should hand over your job to someone who is.

“But they’re naff, these social networks,” I hear you saying. “They waste too much corporate time already. I have no time for them and take a dim view of anyone who breaks off their real work to tittle tattle on line.”

There was a time when managers thought the same of staff who talked to each other while working. Gossiping in the office typing pool was once discouraged. Well now we don’t have the typing pool. Call centre workers – the modern equivalent – are perpetually hooked up to their calls, so they get little time in office hours to use social media.

Thinking inside the box

Managers, on the other hand, are so wedded to their emails, they can barely concentrate on a meeting without looking down at the blinking light from yet another incoming email. Each and every one of us is in danger of exhibiting symptoms of attention deficit. Thinking inside the box is becoming a luxury.

The key to effective use of social media is to dip in and out as needs must. Just because you are a registered user of Twitter doesn’t mean you must be tweeting continually. But you might use it to test the zeitgeist out there or to find out information quickly.

For example, if you wanted to find out the Ryder Cup score before the main media, one way would have been to search Ryder Cup on twitter for instant feedback from the course. It’s like having a hundred unmanaged journalists simply bleeping their instant reactions. It could be a score, a thought, an observation, no more than that.

So Twitter would not be used in isolation. You could be hooked up to commentary on another special interest web site. Equally, in a workplace setting, members of one of your teams could be tweeting each other in their own private group. It’s vital to explore these media rather than dismiss them with the phrase “I just don’t get it.” If you don’t get it, others will.

You have a meeting with a few people you don’t know. Why not look them up on Linked-in? Who do they know? Should you be linked to them through this site? No harm in that, is there? That’s the thing about social media. The harm in such tools - if you must see them as tools – is imagined rather than real.

If you think that undergraduate messing around on a dance floor on Facebook is not fit to work in your company then you should take a long hard look in the mirror and a long hard trip down memory lane. You were probably that undergraduate once and, if not, where have you been all your life?

Missing a trick

So now look at your web site. What’s on there? Do you have full control over the site? How much does that matter? You might have a community of stakeholders on there feeding in and discussing ideas, as there is on this site. If not, you’re probably missing a trick. It’s hubris to believe that if something hasn’t passed your desk first, or hasn’t met with your approval, then it’s wrong or dangerous.

The social media is the real world and it’s a big world, a soup of interchanging ideas. Sure, there’s a lot of claptrap out there, but that too is the real word. There has been much discussion about the wisdom of crowds. But you can be the judge of that. Crowd sourcing can be a powerful strategy if employed well.

You probably know of the example of Gold Corp quoted in Wikinomics: How Mass Collaboration Changes Everything by Don Tapscott and Anthony D Williams. Gold Corp is a mining company that, in order to attract some prospecting expertise, published its most sensitive geological data on the internet, offering a reward to anyone who could pinpoint gold reserves. This so-called open source exploration helped catapult this $100m underperforming company in to what the authors called a “$9bn juggernaught” in less than 10 years.

Tapscott and Williams continue to evangelise on their theme here at Wikinomics.com.

So you should be crowd sourcing all over the place and you should be layering your thoughts and ideas and those of your colleagues, suppliers and customers in visible tweets and blogs and forums. But what about confidentiality? What about your competitors? What if they see the ideas? What if some of that stuff is already out there?

Some of it probably will be and that’s where you come in and all the people in and around the organisation: the people who make the company what it is; the builders of reputation, excellence and quality. Some of those people may be outsiders.

Viewers and listeners tell the BBC what they think, both directly and in audience figures. Customers tell companies what they think in sales figures. But wouldn’t it be great to get this feedback before you launch that expensive duff product?

Yes there are focus groups and expensive marketing tools. Alternatively why not run your own focus group on Twitter or through your blog or combining both with clever links to outside media and forums? You don’t know how to do that? Well you never will if you don’t join the party. The world is buzzing but a Queen bee is nothing without the swarm.

The last guru

2010-09-16T02:30:00.000-07:00

I've just begun reading Still Surprised, the memoir of Warren Bennis. Modesty would have prevented him using such a title, but it should have been called The Last Guru.

He must be the last survivor of the Drucker generation of management gurus who earned the term, unlike today's generation who do not seem sufficiently possessed of the diversity of experience enjoyed by those whose collective wisdom enriched post Second World War corporations.

I know much of Warren's career highlights but this new book is giving me his life story and that's far more illuminating than the structured thoughts of an academic. Come to think of it, he has always relied on anecdotes and stories to frame his thinking and that's why I've enjoyed his work so much in the past.

I shall read the book alongside another new book, launched amid equal measures of fanfair and opprobrium - Tony Blair's political memoir - A Journey. I'm not too far in to the book but I like Blair's style of writing which, I assume, has been helped in some measure by ex-journalists Alistair Campbell and Andrew Adonis.

The Bennis memoirs have been written with his long term collaborator, Patricia Ward Biederman. Warren is a fine writer in his own right but he has had the good sense in recent years to share the joys and burdens of writing with a skillful co-author. His books have been better for it.

I used to meet with Warren on his annual visits to London. His enthusiasm and support for my History of Work project was important in giving me the confidence to take time out of my full time job to research and write the book. He stopped coming to London a few years ago - old age, I guess - and I've missed his mentoring although it's still available in emails.

Sooner or later, I hope the Labour Party and possibly even the Government will begin to look on Tony Blair in a new light. The first newspaper reactions to his book were facile and shallow, typical of today's media that treats news as a fox behaves when it gets among the hens, ravaging the lot and leaving the undigested carcasses behind in pursuit of its next victims.

I'd rather read his book and make up my own mind. Both of these books, in their own ways, are discussions of leadership. I think they'll go well together.

The brave new world of employment?

2010-06-16T04:20:00.000-07:00

When employer branding goes beyond the pale. The stories from staff at American Apparel say it all.

Job ownership back on the agenda

2010-06-03T07:23:00.000-07:00

Employee ownership appears to be back on the agenda in Government. In his first speech as the UK's Business Secretary, Vince Cable told an audience at Cass Business School today that he planned to introduce partial employee share ownership to solve what he called the "nagging problem" of the Royal Mail.

"I want to see private capital and worker share ownership in the Royal Mail – commercial discipline alongside employee involvement," he said.

Just what this means is not yet clear but he seems to be suggesting a structure that would combine private capital with employee shareholdings. Perhaps at the same time he will do something to make the pay structure more equitable, given the kind of pay that the Royal Mail awarded its former chief executive and other directors.

Mr Cable also made some cogent points about skills training and higher education:

"My priorities are an increased emphasis on lifelong learning, stripping out some of the bureaucracy around further education making sure that the outdated value distinction between blue collar apprenticeships, and further education on one hand and university on the other is disposed of for good.

"In the last few weeks I found scope within my department to refocus £200 million in capital spending in FE colleges and 50,000 extra apprenticeships. Indeed, it is shocking that we only have 250,000 apprenticeships to start with.

"Education and learning are of course desirable in their own right. Education for education’s sake – learning how to learn - benefits the economy in the long term. Philistinism is bad economics. It is also fundamentally unacceptable."

Restoring respect in apprenticeships is a big challenge for any government. Acknowledging education for its own right is equally enlightened. It's good to see that Mr Cable is moving in the right direction.

This blog has moved

2010-04-29T04:36:00.001-07:00

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Working class heroes

2010-03-11T03:41:00.000-08:00

Members of Parliament have been grumbling at proposals to cut first class train travel from their expense allowances. They say that a first class seat enables them to work on the train since they can plug in their lap top computers.

I’m taking advantage of a first class ticket to do just that right now although the internet access is not brilliant.

If the MPs have a point, perhaps it is time to rename first class and call it Working Class. Labour MPs would probably be happiest buying working class tickets. Once upon a time first class had something to do with status. Today, it seems, it's about plug sockets.

It’s quite possible, of course, to work in second class but there is a real risk that in the cheaper seats MPs would have to mix with more of the people responsible for voting them in to Parliament.

They might even have to mix with children. Children and babies are rarely seen in first class because most people with first class tickets are travelling on expense accounts as I am just now. It’s one of life’s ironies that, come the General Election, when Parliamentary candidates are out on the hustings, they will pick up any random baby if it helps ingratiate themselves with the electorate, or if there is a photographer on hand.

But once the election is over and these men and women of the people are travelling to their constituencies, the last thing some of them want is any contact with voters. That is not true of all MPs just as it is not true to suggest that all MPs have abused their expense allowances.

Second class travel for MPs should be compulsory. That would give them the greatest incentive to ensure that people can travel and work comfortably wherever they find themselves on a train. Two-tier travel should be viewed as an anachronism. We're all working class now.

Education for the over-50s

2010-02-17T01:10:00.000-08:00

As this report suggests, universities must begin to take seriously people in their fifties and beyond who wish to undertake courses. But the thinking needs to go further than the provision of part-time courses.

Anyone embarking on a full degree course at the age of fifty could have twenty years or more in front of them to contribute to a new pursuit. In economic terms, that is useful productive work. Not only that, the student would be able to bring to their learning all their life experiences and expertise gathered in one or more careers up to that point.

Mature students could prove a mentoring resource for younger students. Inter-generational collaboration is important in the workplace. Encouraging this in our universities can only promote better understanding that is going to be increasingly relevant as a result of demographic trends.

Fat hamster

2010-02-15T08:31:00.000-08:00

The modern relationship with work is often portrayed as something of a hamster wheel. I hadn't thought much of the hamster itself, however, until I saw this. One shouldn't blame the hamster. It doesn't know any better. Neither, it seems, do we.

Putting in the hours

2010-02-15T07:32:00.001-08:00

It was inevitable that this New Economics Foundation report suggesting the adoption of a 21-hour working week would be ridiculed. Radio Four's Today programme loves this sort of thing so it was no surprise that it lined up a couple of polar opposites here to debate the suggestion.

"Total madness, fantasy land economics," said Mark Littlewood, director general of the Institute of Economic Affairs. He had worked out, he said, that if people spent such little time working there would be "None of this retiring at 60." People would be working up to the age of 80, he said. What's wrong with that Mr Littlewood? Many people will be willing and able to spend part of their time working long after the normal retirement age.

The things Anna Coote, author of this report, is saying are very much in line with my own thinking on the future of work. I'm not in favour of a compulsory working week of 21 hours. But I see a lot of merit in working towards a three day weekend. Wouldn't it be better for everyone if work was dispersed more equally in society? The real problem is to find an equitable way of doing this that allows those who want to work more the right to do so.

Mr Littlewood says people should have the freedom to work as many hours as they wish. But he wouldn't say that about airline pilots or lorry drivers. Some jobs should carry hours restrictions for the sake of public safety. In the 1990s some junior doctors were putting in 100-hour working weeks. They didn't to want to work such long hours. It simply became a working practice that was tolerated by health authorities until their weeks were capped at 48 hours under the European Working Time Directive.

That said I'm in broad agreement with the argument that, where safety is not an issue, people should have the right to work as long as they wish. I would be very unhappy if anyone were to try and stop me typing these words because I had filled my quota for the day. Then again, too often I ignore other important things - time for leisure, socialising, exercising, in a love affair with the keyboard, books and the internet that is bordering on obsession. Sometimes it is helpful for someone to lay a gentle hand on your shoulder and say: "That's enough for today."

Tomorrow's world - but where is it?

2010-02-02T03:15:00.000-08:00

Predicting the future is tough. This short 1958 film, Magic Highway, shows how the Disney studios imagined transport would develop in future. More than fifty years on we can see how short of the mark they were. A few predictions had it right. Modern cars do have more electronic safety devices on their dashboards and some use TV cameras for reversing.

But it was the bigger picture that the Disney people failed to understand. Some of this could have been predicted. Had they worked out that greater wealth would have meant more cars, they might have suggested that motorway speeds would have been unable to increase because of congestion. Neither did they factor in safety considerations and energy-saving needs that would influence traffic legislation and traffic speeds.

Some predictions, that cars would run automatically with people doing other things as they motored, may yet happen. But where the forecasters really let themselves down was in understanding social trends. In the film when the car gets to the city, father heads off to his office and mother goes shopping with their son. This was still a time when households had one breadwinner, usually the man. It was a time of married couples and nuclear families, not the diverse relationships we have today.

The most mistaken assumption of all, however, was that technology would give people more leisure time. The futurists did not factor in the need for ever greater productivity in capitalism's duty to compete.

It's clear also that environmental factors do not figure much either. The animators did not envisage that environmental concerns would inhibit road building. Indeed they saw the highway as a beautiful construction in its own right, enhancing, rather than despoiling the countryside.

More than anything, however, the film shows the extent to which Americans had fallen in love with the car. In some respects that has not changed. The love affair continues. But the obsession with speed has been contained. Apparently it did not occur to anyone that people might not need to go to the office or the shops.

Own your own space station

I wonder if there will come a time when some people engage very little with each other outside their family homes and local communities. Some, it seems, already value their virtual worlds as much as the world outside their homes.

Erik Novak, who plays a MMORPG (Massively multiplayer online role-playing game) called Planet Calypso, recently spent $330,000 on a virtual space station called Crystal Palace at an online auction. Not, only that, he regards it as a good deal and who is to say that he's mistaken? Virtual worlds attracted $1bn of investment in thew 12 months to October 2007 although most of this was business purchases.

"This is a stunning investment opportunity and I have complete faith I will recover what I spent relatively quickly," said Novak, whose avatar uses the name of Buzz Erik Lightyear. It's good to see that Disney still has some influence on tomorrow's
world.

Elephant in the room

But elsewhere Disney has a patchy record. In this clip outlining the progress, or lack of it, to Disney's House of Tomorrow, the most worrying trend on display is the obesity of the people looking around. Talk about the elephant in the room!

Networks and workplace freedom

2010-01-16T08:27:00.001-08:00

I have just renamed this blog to reflect the issues I've covered in my new book, The Future of Work. Collecting material ahead of two speaking engagements last week it was clear that events with an impact on our working futures are happening constantly so I want this to be a living document featuring developments that I think are relevant to the changing workplace.

Some of these may seem surprising. What, for example, does the news that a former Guantanamo Bay inmate now includes his former jailer as a Facebook Friend have to do with work? I think this shows how people are connecting with each other today at levels that are challenging the controls and expectations placed on populations in the past.

Imagine back in December 1914 if British and German soldiers fraternising in no-man's land been able to exchange their Facebook and email details, organising a "let's go home" group on Facebook, for example.

You think it couldn't happen? I'm sure some EMI marketing executives had similar thoughts when Jon and Tracy Morter, a couple living in Essex, decided they would orchestrate a Facebook campaign to ensure that their favourite song by Rage Against the Machine, became the Christmas number one single (see augmented reality blog below).

People didn't just vote for the song, they dug in their pockets and bought it, such was the bloodymindedness of a section of the British public.

Much of the corporate sector has become increasingly controlling in the way it runs business. Employees are often forbidden to talk to journalists about their work without referring queries to press offices. But attempts to create workplace firewalls simply will not work in a world of Twitter and Facebook.

How will China's standoff with Google pan out? It's too early to say but the struggle for communications democracy is important not just for our personal freedoms but also for our freedoms in work.

The disposable worker

2010-01-16T08:16:00.000-08:00

Is this the future of work? I sincerely hope not. This BusinessWeek article examines the growth of what it calls "the disposable worker".

If companies choose to concentrate on elites, as they do in some talent management systems, while treating the mass of employees as commodities that can be exchanged at will, they are contributing to an ugly future even for those who have profited at the expense of the less well regarded.

Sense and nonsense

2010-01-15T09:00:00.000-08:00

My Uncommon Sense column in Human Resources Magazine is to become highly uncommon after next month as it's had the chop. This is one very good reason why I would never advise anyone to give up their day job without some deep thinking.

Charles Handy's freelance portfolio lifestyle can be an excellent way of making a living when times are good. But when budgets get squeezed as they are just now it is the outsiders whose bum cheeks are closest to those who wield the boot.

My own bum cheeks haven't stopped smarting for more than a year as a once healthy portfolio has been whittled away to a single monthly column in the FT, and who knows how long that might last? The wolf is not at the door anymore, he's making himself comfortable in my favourite armchair, pouring himself a gin and tonic and watching repeats of three little piggies - apart from the ending; he doesn't watch the last bit.

Meanwhile I have started a new book, not about work this time, but about the shape of things to come, although it will not be forecasting the end of the job, a theme I once explored in this old column. Funnily enough one of my sons is inventing computer games these days. Yes, times are hard in the Donkin household. I hope I'll be able to write a happy ending.

Prisoners of the market

2010-01-15T07:56:00.000-08:00

All those hard pressed chief executives and bankers worried about the flack they have been receiving on pay and bonuses can sleep more easily in their beds this week after Stephen Hester, chief executive of the Royal Bank of Scotland gave them what must be the ultimate in justifications. There was nothing highly paid bankers could do about their pay levels, he told an House of Commons select committee, since their employers are "prisoners of the market".

Never again do wealthy executives have to feel cornered at dinner parties. All they need do from now on is throw up their hands and declare: "I'm a prisoner of the market." Case closed, move on.

Augmented reality and the future of work

2009-12-29T04:01:00.000-08:00

In my new book The Future of Work I included one chapter of out-and-out futurism. The book concentrates on themes that are influencing workplace change today and which I believe will strengthen in the future.

I thought it would be dishonest to suggest that I had some kind of crystal ball capable of predicting future events. Nonetheless I thought it might be interesting to indulge myself in a description of what life might be like 50 years in to the future.

This presented immediate difficulties. How can we know the rate of resource depletion when we have no idea of the breakthroughs that might, for example, make fossil fuels an unnecessary resource?

Two strands of thinking dominated the projections. The first concentrated on communications technology and the second explored the idea of extending democracy in government to the kind of decision-making we already experience in "vote-off" shows such as the X-Factor and Strictly Come Dancing.

These shows already have a kind of government - an appointed panel to help us with our decisions, aided by a supporting administration of experts who help to find and groom the talent. But the decision about who wins and who loses is taken by the TV-viewing population. Why couldn't this approach be adapted for the process of legislation?

Politicians might point to the dangers of disruptive voting organised by so-called "mavens", under-the-radar influencers who can use modern communications channels to work beyond established norms of market behaviour and control.

A good example of this is the way that husband and wife a Jon and Tracy Morter, unhappy at the way that the Christmas number one music singles were being monopolised by X-factor winners decided to orchestrate a campaign on Facebook to promote the rock group, Rage Against The Machine, as an alternative. Enough people bought downloads of the track, Killing in The Name, to ensure it occupied the number one spot at Christmas 2009.

What started, said Tracy Morter, as a "silly idea to spice up the charts" developed a bandwagon effect, initially through social networking media and latterly through mainstream media as the campaign became a news story.

The old market-dominated rules of transactional behaviour have changed. Yes, the market is cleverly exploiting the new forms of communications, in viral marketing on YouTube, for example. But it no longer controls the winning idea. Winning ideas, such as that of the Morters can and will emerge anywhere. The Morters' success also makes a mockery of so-called talent management. The couple have proved themselves masters at social-network-based manipulation without an ounce of formal expertise.

I believe that it is inevitable that advances in electronic communications will transform democracy. The only question is how long it will take Governments to respond. The age of the metal ballot box where people enter voting booths is coming to an end. In future we shall all vote from our living rooms.

The chapter also looked at screen-based technology. This feature on Augmented Reality - a system for integrating the use of screens with all kinds of decisions we make in everyday life - fits with the scenario I outlined of wall-sized screens in domestic homes. In future I believe that miniaturisation of screens will develop side-by-side with super-sizing. Small size will equate with convenience whereas bigger screens will allow a variety of uses similar to those discussed in the article. The cost and availability of power, however, may be a limiting factor. But in 50 years time I'm sure that other power sources, including human-powered machinery, will have become far more efficient.

Free online personality tests

2009-11-04T16:37:00.000-08:00

In a move that could shake up the psychometric testing industry, a team of former-SHL test developers is releasing a series of industry-standard assessments online free of charge.

A new website FindingPotential has been established to access the tests. The first in the series is a personality test and more tests are to be rolled out shortly.

The website explains all you need to know about the so-called big five personality traits. If this testing resource really is as good as the providers says it is it could have a profound impact on the test publishing and assessment industry.

I have just tried the individual personality test. . It looks very like others I have taken and the results correspond with those I have encountered before. The analysis is good too. Why pay when you can have this?

Tales from city recruitment

2009-11-03T02:51:00.000-08:00

The things recruiters do and say. And here is a little more of the reality of City recruitment.

Employers should brace themselves for new swine flu attack

2009-10-13T16:07:00.000-07:00

The National Health Service is preparing for a return of swine flu this winter and has warned that the pandemic could infect as many as 18m people in the UK - up to 30 per cent of the population - in a worst case scenario currently circulating among regional health trusts.

If Government fears are realised, the impact for employers will be profound with staff absences of up to 12 per cent of the working population. Such heavy absences would have a serious effect on the economy.

Modest recent increases in reported cases and in demand for the flu drug Tamiflu suggest that the UK could already be two weeks in to a second pandemic. If so, within the next week or so the number of reported cases is likely to show a steep rise well beyond the peaks experienced in the summer months.

One worry is that the rise in cases could overtake efforts to introduce a vaccination programme. The first vaccine, GSK, will be available from the end of October but it will take several months to deliver the full programme.

If the pattern of a winter outbreak follows that of the summer, cases will be concentrated among the youngest and healthiest parts of the population. Older people are thought to have built up partial immunity to the virus through previous flu exposure.

The second wave of the virus is expected to last for 15 weeks and to reach ten times the number of people affected in the first wave.

Details? Who cares about details?

2009-03-09T05:50:00.001-07:00

Thank you to the Strategic Planning Society for reminding me of my membership number (I didn't even know I was a member) in a letter. Next time, perhaps you will include in your strategic planning the necessity to affix a stamp, or, even better, send an email. Or are these the kind of details that do not concern strategic planners? It concerned me. I had to pay the postage and handling fee. I suppose I should plan a strategy for getting it back.

Confirmation that all those long hours are bad for us

2009-02-25T08:40:00.000-08:00

I gave up pastries for lent. Perhaps it should have been work.

Problem solving on the net - more than Factory Balls

2009-02-21T12:28:00.000-08:00

Something big is happening on the internet that is demanding our understanding. I'm not talking about Twitter or any of the other forms of social networking that are fascinating in their own right. I'm talking about flash games.

You may have come across some of these games when whiling away a few minutes at work (which can easily extend to a few hours, hence their notoriety in some workplaces). But what is grabbing my attention, increasingly, is their levels of sophistication in problem solving. I have already enthused about them here but more are appearing all the time and they just get better and better.

I have learned quite a bit about them through my son Robert who has begun making them. He hosts his own games and those of others on his website, BadViking.com.

Last night I was playing this one called Electric Box. Yes it's a game but imagine this was your introduction to physics. I urge you try it. There's a small tutorial to start you off and then you're on your way. Each component and its function in the increasingly complex circuits outlined in the game is explained so that as you move from one level to the next you are building on accumulated knowledge.

Are these games being used in schools? Are they being used in recruitment? If not, they should be. Many of them are marvellous educational aids because they present learning as something that is fun and allow learners to move at their own pace.

Companies are paying consultants small fortunes for delivering so called "training solutions" that are far less sophisticated than this. You want your employees to understand logistics and production flows? Try them out on Factory Balls here. Most flash game developers are relatively young like Robert who is 21. But don't imagine they are not aware of the power of the material they are producing.

Rob has had some success already with his Panda games like this one. His first panda game, Panda Tactical Sniper, has notched up three million plays worldwide. At first sight it looks like a so-called "sniper game" beloved of young teenage boys. But if you try playing it you will find that it's all about problem solving.

He has deliberately avoided shoot 'em up games so that his site concentrates more on thinking or reaction games such as his latest one called Popopop. It seems easy at first. It is not. One thing I like about this game is a feature that allows players to create their own "levels."

I'd like to grab a few graduate recruiters and take them gently by the hand in to this flash games world. The advertising agencies have already discovered it in their search for creatives - but why should they get all the talent? The answer is that too many companies rely on their future talent to come knocking on their doors. But companies can't rely on Robert and his pals, beating a path to their door. They're having too much fun.

Twit

2009-02-19T09:49:00.000-08:00

HR 2.0.,

What about the pay consultants?

2009-02-18T02:58:00.000-08:00

Much has been written these past few days on the size of bank bonuses. The big complaint, understandably, is that in the loss-making banks these can be perceived as rewards for failure.

Most of the criticism on bonus policy is being directed at the banks. These policies, however, are drawn up not by the banks but by their pay consultants who have been keeping their heads down in the past few weeks.

I would welcome some justification for some of these policies from those who advise their corporate clients on incentive pay. But I don't expect to see it.

The relationship between work and pay is complex. Pay does matter but it matters most at the point of negotiation and when there is a perception of injustice. Pay is used as a lure to recruit people but once they are on board it is unlikely to become a source of unrest unless they perceive they are being unfairly treated (something I explored in this column).

In the most senior ranks companies have lived with the reality that sometimes they will be paying for failure for too long.

I have yet to see a convincing argument to support the proliferation of the bonus culture in banks. As for guaranteeing bonuses, that is a nonsense as the only justification for the bonus is that it can be regarded as variable pay, offering some protection for the paying institution if markets take a tumble.

Of course, if employees have done all that is expected of them and more - which is the case for thousands of hard working people in the Royal Bank of Scotland and HBOS - it is natural that many will feel aggrieved to be losing their bonuses as a result of poor decisions at the top of the organisation.

On the other hand they may reflect that their projected bonuses derived from unrealistically high expectations over many years when times appeared good (but in fact, better than reality in a bubble economy). Those that retain their jobs must know they need to take the rough with the smooth.

A bonus must be just that - a sum of money that is not guaranteed and which should not be taken in to account in financial planning. The danger is that some people will have included expected bonuses when stretching their finances to meet a demanding mortgage, for example. They will suffer. But perhaps they should. Overspending on "hope money" is a harsh lesson for anyone, but one that should ensure greater prudence in future. Everyone must learn to live well within their means. That way they should live well.

Pour encourager les autres

2009-02-10T08:38:00.000-08:00

It's all very well hauling bankers before the House of Commons Treasury select committee, but it's not much of a deterrent. Neither is removing their bonuses. The Royal Navy showed how to deal with aberrant leaders when it made an example of Admiral Byng.

It prompted the French writer Voltaire's famous remark, in his novel, Candide, that in England 'it is thought good to kill an admiral from time to time to encourage the others'. Ah, those were the days....

Engelbert to the rescue

2009-02-09T03:11:00.001-08:00

While the newspapers are full of job losses it would be wrong to believe that everyone views the prospect of losing their job with foreboding.

I was chatting with a friend at the rugby match on Saturday who has been weighing up the financial realities of retirement. He's in his mid-fifties in management after spending all of his career with the same employer so the prospects look pretty good. But the company still values his services and is in no hurry to see the back of him.

"How can I hint subtly that I want to go without making it blindingly obvious?" he asked. Another friend came up with the answer: "Download the ringtone of 'Please release me' for your mobile phone." Perfect.

A good day for burying good news

2009-02-03T08:32:00.000-08:00

This is a story I received today in the form of a press release. I hope I am proved wrong, but I suspect that you will not read anything about this in the press. Why? Because newspapers regard every day as a good day for burying good news. I can only extend my apologies to Mrs and Mrs Ward-Henry that instead of the pink pages they find themselves here.

Here it is:

"Hello, our names are Michael & Sarah Ward-Hendry and this is our story as we lurch into the economic tempest that has enveloped us all.

Having started our business Ward-Hendry Photography near Banbury with nothing but personal debt and a great idea following redundancy, we have achieved 5 years of 100% year-on-year growth. Ward-Hendry (as we are known) has become the outstanding schools photography company in the UK and Ireland.

On Wednesday 28th January 2009, we met with our bank, Lloyds TSB, at our offices to review the business's financial performance and hopefully secure the bank's ongoing support regarding existing overdraft facilities and working capital. We were concerned that in the prevailing economic situation the bank's view would be driven by the need for caution.

The outcome of the meeting was not good...it was indeed fantastic and as good as we could have imagined it might be!

In an atmosphere of almost total uncertainty in all aspects of normal day to day business life in the UK, we have received the endorsement of Lloyds TSB for our ongoing overdraft and working capital requirements for the coming year.

From humble beginnings as sole traders working from a wooden shed at the top of our garden in January 2004, the business today employs 35 people, with annual sales in excess of £1.5m expected for the financial year ending March 2009.

Our offer is strikingly contemporary and compelling to the hundreds of schools and hundreds of thousands of parents who are our customers throughout the UK and Ireland.

We are formally endorsed by the National Association of Head Teachers (NAHT) as a 'Partner' of the Union, which represents a membership incorporating over 80% of Primary School Head Teachers, Principles and school leaders in England, Wales and N. Ireland. We are also a 'Sponsor Partner' of the Specialist Schools and Academies Trust (SSAT) where our offer receives similar endorsement and credibility to in excess of 3,000 state senior schools in England and Wales.

We plan to continue our acquisition of market share in the coming year with the aim of achieving £2.4m in sales and employ an additional 10 staff.

The signs are good for our continued growth and it would appear that Lloyds TSB are indeed true to their word and will support viable, sound businesses as we all continue our journey to broader economic recovery."

The greatest asset

2009-01-31T09:40:00.000-08:00

As a columnist with fairly strong views on things I'm used to criticism. But on this occasion I can only assume that it is because my argument has been misunderstood and that's irritating because it means I have not expressed myself well enough.

I was writing in Human Resources Magazine about the lessons that human resources professionals might draw from the bail out of the Royal Bank of Scotland which, without that bail out, would have suffered the fate of the Monty Python Norwegian Blue - it would have ceased to exist.

One of the things I said, and which I continue to say because I think the expression is dishonest, is that it is wrong for a company boss or a head of HR to declare that "our people are our greatest asset."

I say this because of the accounting convention to declare assets on one side of the balance sheet and employers on the other under costs. This also puts employment costs under the heading of liabilities. While I'm sure no-one would declare "our people are our greatest liability," I think few company bosses would demure from considering employees as their greatest cost.

For this reason I don't think it is helpful to use such accounting terms as assets and liabilities when considering the value of a workforce. Of course people are valuable. In some cases they are the only real value a business has apart from other fragile intangibles such as goodwill. It explains why I prefer to think of people as the living, breathing investment capital of a business. When a company recruits someone it is investing hard cash and not a little faith in the ability of the individual to add value to the balance sheet.

Training, promoting and rewarding that individual might well increase their capital worth. That is what investing is all about. But thinking of people in terms of asset values is less helpful since people can never be described as fixed assets. They can improve their value for a business or their value might depreciate.

It is why companies must think of inputs, outputs and value when looking at employees. Nor should they use such assessments purely with internal employees. External skills have a value too. Some companies prosper by outsourcing almost all of their talent. In fact some ventures, such as a West End musical, rely entirely on assemblies of talent. In such productions it is probably better to think of "we" in a collective sense than in the ownership sense of "our people."

Even companies with employees on their payroll should beware the "our people" claim and certainly any boss should be careful about talking about "my people." It is a highly presumptive phrase. People can never be owned. For that reason they should never be regarded as assets, not as long as they have legs to walk away.

You may, of course, believe this to be "tosh" but I don't know how to express my thoughts on this issue any other way. People are our greatest investment - now I can go along with that.

Free office space

2009-01-30T06:00:00.001-08:00

Starting a new business? This new offer from Regus could be worth a look.

25 years, still red hot?

2009-01-27T12:25:00.000-08:00

Virgin Atlantic is celebrating its 25th anniversary. But is it still red hot? A customer takes issue.

Cowbells and cuckoo clocks in Davos

2009-01-27T03:53:00.000-08:00

This week nearly 1,200 chief executives and chairmen, plus another thousand celebrities, politicians, academics and others who might describe themselves as power brokers, not to mention a small army of journalists, lobbyists and public relations people will converge on Davos for the World Economic Forum.

But there will not be very many women according to this article.

Not that women should alarm themselves too much. Davos does not have a great reputation for getting things done. It produces various publications such as its Global Gender Gap Report. But the above article would suggest that its organisers do not read them.

Yes, it has launched various initiatives that have done something to bring together businesses and political administrations. But its biggest benefit seems to be for Davos itself where increased sales of Swiss Army pen knifes, cowbells and cuckoo clocks ensure the continued health of its shopkeepers.

At least it is living proof that man-made global warming is a reality thanks to the billions of cubic meters of hot air it generates each year. Then there's the giant hole in the snow that is the Davos carbon footprint. We might be thankful, however, that this year it is getting some of the world's most senior bankers out of their offices for a while, saving depositors from even more damage, at least for a few days.

They say that pinstripes are out and sack cloth is in this year. Don't you believe it. The ritual massaging of egos and mutual bolstering of confidence among those disillusioned enough to believe in their omnipotence will continue unabated.

Summing up, a precis of the annual output of Davos amounts to this: "We have got to something about X" where X can be: world poverty, AIDS, malaria, global warming, or, this year, the international banking crisis. It would be a refreshing change one year if the bosses admitted that "x" meant "keeping our jobs."

Cook off, says the FT

2009-01-23T04:23:00.000-08:00

I notice that the Financial Times canteen is having a competition among its chefs this lunchtime billed as a "cook off." Several of its editorial staff, meanwhile, have been asked merely to leave.

Back-slapping hacks

2009-01-22T02:20:00.001-08:00

It was cocktails in the swish St Martin's Lane Hotel, London, last night for the Work Foundation's annual Work World Media Awards.

Maybe it was something about the venue but there was a pleasing intimacy about the awards this year and there was plenty of bonhomie, which makes a change among journalists.

Polly Toynbee, the Guardian columnist, seemed genuinely touched at receiving a lifetime achievement award. I suppose this is because it comes from within a relatively small circle of business, management and employment writers who are generally sparing in their mutual back-slapping.

As one of the judges, I can confirm that the BBC's Business Editor, Robert Peston was also a popular choice for two awards this year, including Broadcaster of the Year.

I have known him many years, ever since he came to the FT to take-over the investigative team - just as I left it for the employment beat, funnily enough. I have a lot of respect for the man we used to nickname "The Pest." He is not only a first rate reporter but a fine columnist too and a decent guy. He deserves his success.

I was saddened to hear of so many of my contemporaries at the FT who have decided to leave, taking one of the generous packages on offer just now. As one of them said, "it was too good to ignore." But I know, from my own experience, there will be sadness in going. Businesses are still shedding too much grey hair.

A bank too far

2009-01-20T04:01:00.000-08:00

I can relate to Fred Goodwin, former chief executive of the Royal Bank of Scotland, in more ways than one. We both had relatively poor backgrounds, both went to state grammar school and both worked on the liquidation of the Bank of Credit and Commerce International (BCCI), he as a Touche Ross accountant and I, as a financial reporter.

If only the similarities would end there, but a couple of others remain a source of pain. The first is that I regarded RBS as one of the best run businesses anywhere, not just in the UK, but anywhere.

I was so impressed with its operations - particularly in the way it handled employees - that I persuaded my wife (what's mine is 'ers and vice versa in our household) that RBS shares would make a good investment. I'm not a gambler. Banks are rock solid, I argued, and this is as solid as they come. They were around £12 a share at the time. Today they are trading at about 12p a share.

Goodwin was the Napoleon Bonaparte of banking, a financial general whose troops - or investors - would follow him anywhere. Even when the bank was suffering and instigated a rights issue, we responded in our thousands, like those who rallied to the Marseillaise at Waterloo.

We remembered the glory that was Nat West - Goodwin's Austerlitz. Few takeovers could have been administered with such aplomb so that Nat West's operations were absorbed almost without a hitch. But Goodwin was always eyeing a greater empire.

His own Waterloo was ABN Amro, a bank that he feared would be plucked from his grasp by a Barclay's Bank-led consortium. This was his undoing. Not all of his board was united over the takeover; some thought RBS was paying too much. But Goodwin by now was the general who saw the business as something of a battle for supremacy among banks. It was never that and ABN Amro was a bank too far.

How many times have we seen great enterprises wrecked on the back of a singular ambition? The thing is that there are still great people at RBS. Many of the old guard might have gone, but enough remain to remember the good days. Can they resurrect the best of the bank for taxpayers? I hope so, I really do, but they won't be doing it with any more of our money, other than our taxes. Even fools can learn.

The darker side of social networking

2009-01-17T08:20:00.000-08:00

You open your coffee shop for a new day's trading, a brick comes flying through the window, followed by mayhem. Germany in the 1930s? Think again.

Sitting in judgement

2008-12-10T05:41:00.000-08:00

In case you haven't noticed we are in the middle of the awards season that bridges the Christmas period and runs well in to the New Year.

I'm not sure why, but I'm a sucker for awards panels and have sat on quite a few, including the CBI's Human Resources Awards, the Recruitment and Employment Confederation's individual recruiter awards and the Work Foundation's Workworld Media awards.

I was judging this last one earlier this week. It's good to look at journalism with a more critical eye rather that simply reading a story or feature for its news, information or entertainment value.

Another good thing about awards judging is that you get to hear all kinds of juicy gossip but because this is picked up in what has to be a confidential discussion I don't get to repeat it anywhere (except in other gossipy behind-doors exchanges). That's the thing about gossip - everyone loves it but no-one likes to see it attributed to them, particularly since, by it's very nature,it lacks detail and sometimes accuracy. But what it loses in accuracy, it gains in emotional content. When people relax and chat together you get to understand how they feel about things.

Without going in to detail, it was clear from our conversations yesterday that there are worries about standards, not just among journalists but also in business. One of my fellow judges complained that newspapers were not holding chief executives to account for business failures.

I was surprised as I thought business leaders had come in for a hard time in the press recently. Not hard enough, it seems, but there is plenty of time for that. This week's "loan shares" scandal involving David Ross, the co-founder of Carphone Warehouse is just the tip, I suspect, of a very big iceberg (it's no big deal, says Luke Johnson). By this time next year we might even need a "financial scandal of the year award." Expect some fierce competition.

Seeing eye-to-eye at Cisco

2008-12-01T11:15:00.001-08:00

I visited Cisco's UK headquarters in Feltham today to try out its TelePresence conferencing system. It really was as good as I had heard it was.

All the things that have dogged video conferencing systems in the past - lack of eye contact, voice delays, detached voices - have been put right in this system. Yes, It's expensive at more than $300,000 for the top end of the range but competition will bring the price down over time.

Also I think this system is ideal for the rental market and can imagine pay-per-use conferencing facilities popping up all over the world.

Using this system in Cisco requires some time discipline because of its popularity. Demand is so high that meetings are booked by the hour. This means that there is an incentive to get on with the business in hand.

Technology works best when you hardly notice it and you soon forget that you are not sharing the same room with everyone else in the meeting. Indeed the sound quality is so good you can engage with people in just the same way as you would face-to-face.

Yes you still need to book a meeting just as you would arrange any meeting but the savings in air travel are such that it wouldn't take much use in a big company to justify the expense.

This system and other systems like it have enormous potential for remote working. This is just the beginning. While faster and cheaper air travel helped bring the world together, there was a price to pay in fuel and fatigue. Today we're coming together without leaving our offices. Tomorrow we'll do so without leaving our homes.

The new world of work

2008-11-11T09:19:00.000-08:00

I broke away from research work the other week to contribute some thinking for this FT project on The New World of Work.

Problem solving brilliance on the net

2008-11-05T04:53:00.000-08:00

Writing about officer selection in the Army I was struck by the lasting influence of problem solving exercises that have not changed very much in fifty years. Now I have found similar exercises on the web.

This one, Splitter, is brand new and brilliant. It's one of thousands of cheaply made flash games that are fascinating me just now through the work of my son, Robert Donkin, featured on the web site here and discussed in this blog here.

One of the great things about Splitter is that there is no single solution to the problems. The game, or exercise, could hardly be simpler but there's a time sensitive element too so you need to move quickly.

Companies are spending small fortunes on creativity training and consultants to try and stimulate so called "out of the box" thinking. Yet it's all here - for free. Catch staff playing this in office time, however, and you will probably conclude they are wasting their time. You might be right, but what's the difference between this kind of informal problem solving and creativity training? Nothing but the cost.

Workplace bullying

2008-11-03T03:31:00.000-08:00

I was in London yesterday speaking at an annual gathering called the Battle of Ideas at the Royal College of Art.

We didn't get too many at our session debating bullying in the workplace, a great pity as there were some interesting opinions. What makes these sessions much more stimulating than most seminars is the sharp, often challenging contributions from the audience so that you have a real debate, not just a platform presentation.

Another surprise was the way that audience responses led me to think and say things and head down intellectual avenues, even to the point of defending uncomfortable ideas, that I could not have anticipated beforehand.

Free from the kind of restraints I impose on myself when writing for a corporate audience in the FT, I found myself attacking many of the HR ideas that I have taken for granted over the past few years such as performance management, talent management and employee appraisals.

A distaste of what in an FT column I called the "Vote off society," led me to speculate that perhaps we are all capable of bullying behaviour in certain contexts. As an example I quoted the Stanley Milgram obedience experiment, using electric shocks, discussed here.

There are links here with the kind of dominance and mob behaviour explored by William Golding in "The Lord of the Flies." Bullying in the workplace was discussed by Robert Sutton in his book, The No Asshole Rule, mentioned here. But not enough work has been done to highlight the workplace environments that promote an atmosphere of bullying.

Perhaps there will always be "assholes" in the workplace. But when I started work, when trade unions still had some power, you really could say "you don't get me, I'm part of the union" - the lyrics of the old Strawbs song. I'm not sure we can say that anymore.

BlackBerry's big London adventure

2008-10-28T15:32:00.000-07:00

The BlackBerry trial (see previous blog) has stalled somewhat. I took it with me to London today and decided to consult its map section when I realised I had forgotten my little black book which has old fashioned maps on paper.

I had to speak at a seminar at the London Stock Exchange but was running on a mental programme installed during the 1980s which required a tube trip to Bank Station. Realising the exchange had moved, but forgetting the new location, I couldn't get the BlackBerry map to help me so resorted to that feeble non-digital standby of asking someone the way. It worked a treat.

Once installed at the venue with a bacon sandwich in hand I decided to look at some emails but the batteries were down so the seminar host offered to lend me his charger lead, plugged in to a floor socket. "But I might forget it there," I said.

"Don't worry, I will need to get my lead at the end," he said. An hour-and-a-half later we both took off in separate directions leaving the BlackBerry bleeping away contentedly all by itself, secure in the knowledge that its self-contained GPS system knew its exact position on the planet.

I had hopped on a bus, meanwhile, where I spent the next 10 minutes making faces to a toddler who was munching on half a Rich Tea biscuit. Switching buses I decided to check my emails. No BlackBerry. I believe now it is in the post, probably with my host's cable which I will need to mail back to him.

"You're not fit to have one of those," said Gill. I think she has a point.

Where's the "any" key?

2008-10-23T02:59:00.000-07:00

I suppose it had to happen at some stage. One of BlackBerry's public relations people got wind of some work I was doing on the changing workplace and, since BlackBerry, understandably, believes it is part of that change, she offered me a month's free trial of one of their devices when she discovered I didn't have one.

I don't have a BlackBerry because I haven't yet felt the need for one and I'm wary about their "crackberry" reputation, not to mention the cost of use. I notice that nearly all those people I see with them are salaried staff. Their companies give them BlackBerries to help them do their work.

"They're great," said Neil Buckley in the pub last night. Neil is one of the FT's Lex team. He was running the Moscow bureau but came back to the UK partly so that his wife, Emma Simpson, a BBC broadcast journalist, could resume her career.

I have known Neil a long time, ever since he joined the FT as a graduate. He's a fine journalist and, quite rightly, values his family life as much as anyone. So it was a bit of a shock to the system, he confessed, when he discovered he needed to attend early morning Lex meetings at 8 am every day with demands to file the first Lex notes for the web at noon.

More evidence, then, of workplace change. When I started my career at the FT there was no requirement to come in to work before 11 am. The working hours, protected by trade union agreement, were 11 am to 7pm.

Lex material could be gathered throughout the day in discussions with companies and analysts usually after the publication of some company news or results announcement.

Now notes have to be composed swiftly, often when analysts are too busy filing their own reports to handle queries from journalists. Everyone is indulging in a mad scramble to be first. Of course the FT wants to be first and it wants to be right but the faster you move the easier it is to make mistakes.

Another thing is that the "day after" news was always supposed to be considered analysis and that too is more difficult in the heat of an event. Neil was showing me an "FT Reader" service, available on the BlackBerry device, that lists stories by sector. Neil is a very "grounded" individual, another northerner who doesn't have time for flim flam so his recommendation means something. But he too need not worry about the cost.

It's a clever little gadget I'm thinking, but is it for me? When I was discussing the merits of the BlackBerry with Gill, my wife, I argued that I would be able to check emails in "dead time" on the train.

"But what about looking out of the window?" she said. And what about the other things I do on trains - reading books, newspapers, making notes, thinking, and sometimes, as happened last night for the first time in ages, chatting with a fellow passenger.

By the time I was home the BlackBerry had arrived, the box had been opened by two of my boys and they were busy caressing it, proclaiming it "cool" and reading the instructions. Then one of them did the stuff needed to set it up. So it was all out of my hands.

I didn't look at it until this morning when it took me about 20 minutes to find the "on" button. I shared the confusion of Homer Simpson when asked to press any key on his computer and he said: "But where's the 'any' key?"

Then I looked at some emails in tiny writing and replied to one. The situation lacked authenticity since I was sitting next to my laptop at the time which had my emails open in brilliant technicolour with keys I could use without trying to stub minuscule squares of plastic. I checked the reply on my laptop and found it hadn't sent my mailing address. I suppose I have to programme that in - more work, not good. This meant I had to send another email with the address from my laptop - duplication, not good.

The thing is that I couldn't give a bugger whether the BlackBerry is cool or not. I want to know just how important it is to be in touch with my emails and the web when I'm travelling and unable to use a lap top(which is not all that often). I want to know how easy it is to use. And, unlike all those company employees who use them, I want to know how much it costs to run.

Hang about, it's flashing now. There's an email from the FT. They want me to do a feature. But I'm writing a book. I suppose I can do both. So this is how it works and I'm still asking the question: is this a good thing?

Birds or the bank?

2008-10-14T07:38:00.000-07:00

Not such a tough call any more.

Buy-to-let misery

2008-09-30T22:58:00.000-07:00

Have you noticed how in the furore that has overtaken the financial markets in the past few weeks, the focus of blame has been – rightly, I suppose – on greedy bankers.

There is no doubt that those who lent recklessly in the housing market over the past 10 years should be castigated for pursuing lending policies that were only storing up trouble for the future.

But it takes two make a loan transaction – the lender and the borrower. What of the tens of thousands of buy-to-let borrowers in the past few years? Did they really think they were engaged in a one-way bet?

The proposal was simple. You went to a bank or building society and borrowed the full mortgage on a £100,000 apartment, say. You then rented out the flat to cover the mortgage and, in time, you could sell it at a profit and pocket the capital gain.

In a rising market the prospect seemed viable and, as the market continued to rise beyond all expectations, it grew increasingly attractive. Lenders were happy, because, although they knew there was a risk, they considered that their mainly middle-class borrowers – often with properties of their own – were good for the credit since their earnings would underpin repayments.

But the lenders were so happy they stopped worrying too much about the potential creditworthiness of the borrowers or, indeed, about the value of the property, sometimes lending over and above its value.

In the US this recklessness was taken to extremes on a scale far beyond that in the UK. So it it’s no surprise that when the housing market stalled people began to default on mortgages and what had seemed a lending bonanza turned to junk in a matter of months. It was then that we began to hear much about what the Americans called the “sub-prime” market – house lending to people with poor credit prospects.

As the housing market faltered in the UK those with buy-to-let arrangements began to struggle. Many of these people have indeed decided to dig-in for the long run, taking the loss on their properties. If they bought a few years ago they are probably still holding a capital gain, but the more the market falls, the longer the slump continues, the more they may see this gain dwindle.

Moreover, if at the same time they lose their tenants, or if the rental market declines so that mortgage payments are no longer covered by rents, the buy-to-let speculators face ever increasing burdens in servicing their debt. This is when the market begins to unravel.

It doesn’t take too many foreclosures to force more property on to an already flabby market, driving prices lower, allowing those who do want property to cherry pick their rents or force hard bargains on sales.

I remember the last housing slump in the late 1980s and early 1990s. I know people who held on to their properties, turning down offers which they thought poor, then taking lower offers a year later. When prices begin to fall like this the market usually gets worse before it gets better.

The main point I want to make here, however, is that the greed underpinning this latest financial crisis is distributed far beyond the doors of the banks. That said, while some of those who thought the sun would shine forever could be forgiven their ignorance, the lenders should have known better.

Whatever happened to the sound principles of lending to people with collateral? It is a fundamental principle of lending that you minimise your risk and you do that by assessing people’s ability to service their debt over the long term or, when handing out mortgages, ensuring that a property is worth a good deal more than the loan sum in the event of repossession.

I’m not a financially sophisticated person. But I know that much.

Casualties of the war for talent

2008-09-15T07:25:00.000-07:00

I'm going to the Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development's (CIPD) annual conference in Harrogate later this week where there will be the usual discussions on talent management. Is paying your staff $8.7bn in annual salary and bonuses sound talent management?
Lehman Brothers thought it was in 2006, a time when the self-same bonus-earning transactions were creating the problems that brought the bank down. Will companies never learn? And what of the war for talent now? Investment bankers are suddenly two a penny.

Denver says goodbye to its oldest working CEO

2008-08-14T08:22:00.000-07:00

The next time you're thinking of calling for early retirements you might think about this man. Retirement is a state of mind that we should all try to avoid.

Out with the strongest link - a big mistake

2008-07-28T04:11:00.000-07:00

Carol Vorderman is leaving the Channel 4 TV quiz show, Countdown, after 26 years after being told she would have to take a 90 per cent pay cut if she wanted to stay with the programme. The game's originator, Marcel Stellman is now threatening to remove the rights from ITV Productions which makes the show.

An angry Stellman praised her loyalty and so he should. I'm glad that the originator of the show is sticking by his "talent." Times may be getting hard in the TV industry but I can't imagine the BBC treating Anne Robinson, presenter of its Weakest Link quiz,in such a cavalier fashion. But the Weakest Link gets a much higher billing than the more intellectually demanding Countdown which fills the daytime schedules.

Countdown is much the better quiz programme. Unlike The Weakest Link it demands a bit of effort from viewers. I suspect too that Vorderman has the sharper intellect. Robinson is no slouch but I bet she would flounder trying to do one of Carol's speedy calculations.

The creative people in business must stick together and fight the bean-counters wherever they can. Countdown didn't need financial cutbacks; it needed better scheduling and promotion. It's one of TV's little gems that deserves better. Countdown has just said goodbye to its strongest link and that can't be right.

I wonder how Carol Vorderman responded to the reduced pay offer? At a guess: "Consonant, vowel, consonant, consonant, vowel, consonant, consonant?" Or perhaps she suggested the management view the odd rerun.

Give her a break

2008-06-27T03:41:00.000-07:00

Gill, my wife, works as a locum pharmacist. The other day she arrived at one of the large supermarkets (J Sainsbury) where she sometimes works, to find that the pharmacy kettle had disappeared. She found it in a cupboard with a tape stuck over it saying "do not use."

There was a note explaining that all electrical equipment in the store needed to be checked before it could be used. A check would cost £200 and, since new kettles were on sale in the store at £20, the management had withdrawn the kettle from use. Staff were being asked to use the canteen instead.

All well and good if you have breaks built in to your work. But this isn't the deal with locum pharmacists. If they take a break the pharmacy must shut down - since the presence of a pharmacist is a legal requirement - and the supermarket, which has a contract to provide 100 hours a week pharmacy cover, doesn't want that to happen.

So Gill must work the whole shift without a break and now, it seems, without a cup of tea. She used the kettle all the same. What else can you do when faced with such ridiculous measures?

These are the sort of everyday issues in the workplace that never come to the attention of the boardroom. They were the sort of "petty" things that led to strikes in the past when unions were stronger. Except they are not petty. These are basic issues that matter to people. Every employee should have an opportunity for a break

Recruitment just became sexy

2008-06-16T14:48:00.000-07:00

Everyone, it seems, had an opinion on the latest series of The Apprentice. Suddenly we all have something to say on recruitment. After 14 years my patch has just become sexy. It's been a long wait.

After reading many of the comments I decided the subject had been flogged to death so have avoided it in my upcoming Thursday FT column which, instead, will have more to say on social networking.

I do, however, have some sympathy with the comments on CV cheating in this item on the Recruitment and Employment Confederation website. It doesn't say much for the recruitment industry when one of their own is caught out in this way.

A curse on work or an online aid to collaboration?

2008-06-16T14:02:00.000-07:00

I don't know much about Zappos.com except that it is an online shoe retailer and that every member of the Zappos staff has a presence on Twitter.com, a social networking site. Why, you may ask? Social networking sites burn time among company employees. They must be banned.

If you have time to switch channels for a minute to the Donkin Life blog you can see the raw product of some discussion after my first attempts at twittering (although some may argue I've been practicing all my life). Jon Ingham and David Creelman make some interesting points. Note Jon's point that the Zappo twitterers (or tweaters) also include customers. Imagine the power of constant customer-employee dialogue. Just like it used to be before companies discovered the economies of online business.