SW6 — It’s been a really great World Cup.  I am watching it with some South Africans.  They were the ones saying it might be a train-crash of a tournament.  And now they’re proud.

And they’re suddenly feeling quite Dutch too.

Here are 5 things I have learned that also translate into the workplace:

1. The [...]]]>

SW6 — It’s been a really great World Cup.  I am watching it with some South Africans.  They were the ones saying it might be a train-crash of a tournament.  And now they’re proud.

And they’re suddenly feeling quite Dutch too.

Here are 5 things I have learned that also translate into the workplace:

1. The noisiest manager aren’t necessarily the best. (Stand up England, Argentina, France…)

2. Pretending to be sick, creating dramatics and appealing to higher authorities regularly doesn’t advance you career.

3. Sometimes things are unfair.  Suck it up and carry on.

4. Sometimes you can prepare for years, practice like crazy, travel a great distance… and get stretchered off after 5 minutes.

5. Even when you get a result, you will be penalised if you take off your shirt and run around screaming.

/df

BELGRAVIA — It’s sometimes worth pushing your chair back and having a moment to think.

What do you make of this picture (above)? 

It’s from this week’s media and is a photo of the Argentina football team coming home.

I love it for all that is obvious about it.  And also all that is incredibly weird about it.  [...]]]>

BELGRAVIA — It’s sometimes worth pushing your chair back and having a moment to think.

What do you make of this picture (above)? 

It’s from this week’s media and is a photo of the Argentina football team coming home.

I love it for all that is obvious about it.  And also all that is incredibly weird about it.  If you left this planet even 10 years ago you would have no idea what all the little blue lights are.

But to us, it seems quite normal.

Why is that?

Could it be that the future has arrived?

Monday there was a great hoax for anoraks like us.  It was said (and shown) that Monday was the day that Doc programmed into the clock in the car for in Back to the Future.

It’s a shame it’s not true.  Like most good hoaxes it seems credible. 

Maybe the future is here when have more toys than we know what to do with.  And we’ve stopped waiting for the rocket cars.

/df

PICCADILLY — My dad used to say that sometimes you had to wait for a few parishioners to die before you could make changes to the church.

It was typical of his kind of wry sense of the ridiculous.  But that doesn’t make it any less true.  It is a great truism that people have to [...]]]>

PICCADILLY — My dad used to say that sometimes you had to wait for a few parishioners to die before you could make changes to the church.

It was typical of his kind of wry sense of the ridiculous.  But that doesn’t make it any less true.  It is a great truism that people have to be able to adapt, or no progress can be made.

Looking today at the speculated new list of England players for World Cup 2014 (did you think we wouldn’t start talking about it yet?!), they’re almost all new.  As they should be.

I remember the shock when The Dreaded Sven brought in a whole new generation and shipped out the old.  But, bless him, it worked.

And then you have work situations:

• The newly merged company boss who wants to know why they can’t just use his old company’s ways

• The head of department who wants to turn her team upside down, but doesn’t want to upset anyone

• The process of replacing the unhappy employee that looks for the same kind of person for the same kind of job

• The business that can’t serve it’s clients and wants a contractor to do it at no loss of revenue

• The organisation that cannot change so they have brought in consultants, and won’t let them change anything

It’s perhaps symptomatic of the way people are.  We know the medicine, we just regularly ‘forget’ to take it.

/df

PICCADILLY CIRCUS — There’s a nicely dressed lady sitting in front of me on the bus – hair done, Dolce glasses.  And she keeps falling asleep.  It’s 7:50 am.  And she’s on her way to work like the rest of us.

I am nervous for her neck, which keeps snapping.  We don’t have the natural dexterity [...]]]>

PICCADILLY CIRCUS — There’s a nicely dressed lady sitting in front of me on the bus – hair done, Dolce glasses.  And she keeps falling asleep.  It’s 7:50 am.  And she’s on her way to work like the rest of us.

I am nervous for her neck, which keeps snapping.  We don’t have the natural dexterity of a Pez dispenser.

I have the bad luck of often getting mini-cab drivers who fall asleep while driving.  I once shared a car across France with a business friend, and his driver fell asleep at the wheel on the autoroute. (We were stopped in traffic.)

But what is it about this modern world that causes people to constantly be exhausted.  Even my 7-year-old wakes up looking like he’s spent a night on the tiles.

There’s got to be a better way to live.

/df

OXFORD STREET — At my local Starbucks everyone this morning was ending their sentences with “…for you.”  I think if I worked there I’d start doing it too.  It’s a cross over from a number of European languages that add the possessive to sentences for emphasis.

We don’t really do it English so much.

Except we do [...]]]>

OXFORD STREET — At my local Starbucks everyone this morning was ending their sentences with “…for you.”  I think if I worked there I’d start doing it too.  It’s a cross over from a number of European languages that add the possessive to sentences for emphasis.

We don’t really do it English so much.

Except we do now.

And why not?

We were cheering for Mexico in my house last night.  My kids are 1/4 Mexican.  And word from the other side of the ocean is that my mother-in-law was shouting at the TV and my macho brother-in-law was crying.

But we’ve actually spent far more time in France.  Cheering for the winners is maybe the fun bit.

There’s a story in the paper today about how the UK is suffering the creeping influence of Latin America.  Apparently there’s an Brazilian ice cream shop in Newcastle.

My British business partner has just gone on holiday in his native Italy.  With his Indian wife.

What have we become!

Pluralistic.  Open-minded.  And a damn sight more interesting.  Is the answer.

In my native Canada we’re still pretending that arguments about French and English matter.  In the UK we’re pretending that Class is an issue.  It’s not.  Ask the England football team.

Let’s more on. 

Is that okay, for you?

/df

ST JAMES — I think of rubbish collectors.  Or proctologists.  There are lots of jobs out there that no one really wanted, but had to be done.  And there are people doing them because the market makes it hard for someone to avoid doing them.

No one wakes up in the morning and says “I think [...]]]>

ST JAMES — I think of rubbish collectors.  Or proctologists.  There are lots of jobs out there that no one really wanted, but had to be done.  And there are people doing them because the market makes it hard for someone to avoid doing them.

No one wakes up in the morning and says “I think I’ll go make people miserable today” or “what I’d really like to do it spend my whole day is physical pain and exhaustion.” But there are jobs like that.

Both of my grandfathers were engineers.  Gavin, the great Scot and athlete, who was my mom’s dad lived on the Gulf Coast of Florida for 30 years.  Sox, who ran a big American engineering firm, was all about heavy equipment.  But neither man would have guessed that we’d be seriously trying to get oil out of the ocean floor.  Like it is something easy to do.

Imagine trying to collect rocks on the dark side of the moon.  Can do it?  Yes.  I believe we can.  Will we do it?  Of course not.  Why would we?

Demand drives behaviour.  In this case I don’t think we can complain about the behaviour unless we’re willing to look at the demand that drives it.

/df

BROMPTON ROAD — The story won’t go away.  Although coverage might have lightened today.  The 13 different Chinese 18-24 year-olds who have tried to kill themselves this year are not going unnoticed.  Most of them died.  But the world outside Shenzhen in southern China has paid attention.

Shortly after the media had packed up and left [...]]]>

BROMPTON ROAD — The story won’t go away.  Although coverage might have lightened today.  The 13 different Chinese 18-24 year-olds who have tried to kill themselves this year are not going unnoticed.  Most of them died.  But the world outside Shenzhen in southern China has paid attention.

Shortly after the media had packed up and left the Foxconn manufacturing site yesterday, two more employees attempted suicide.  One succeeded.  The CEO had to turn his plane around and go back.

There are 400,000 people in and around this Foxconn site.  Which makes it a city in itself.  With all kinds of people and a diversity of backgrounds.  So whether the actions of these employees be very private pain or a larger, global cry for help, the timing with today’s mad scenes on Regent Street and around the world with the launching of Apple’s latest must-have toy cannot be denied.

And yet Foxconn – like any other industrial enterprise — need not be in this situation.  There are a few simple things that can be done to relieve this kind of pressure.  Here are a few:

1. Create a better sense of community
As learned in the dehumanizing “council estates” of Britain, simply locating people close to each other doesn’t create community. Community organisations with shared responsibility and choice do.

2. Give people a sense of choice (decision participation)
Helplessness comes with a lack of involvement in the decisions that guide your life.  Those decisions don’t need to be big ones, but they do need to be freely made.  Where I live, who I live with, could be two.

3. Watching the most vulnerable
Every successful society looks out for it’s most vulnerable members.  It is a test of humanity.  And it is made harder when those people are hard to identify.  But no one intentionally makes bad decisions when alternatives and other views are freely available.

4. Think about how you run the business
We call it organisational culture, but call it whatever you want.  Businesses are not naturally benign or benevolent forces in people’s lives.  In fact, capitalism (yes, you can even say that in China these days) is just the opposite.  Businesses are not built for people, they are built for profit and for shareholders.  It takes strength of character and management to change that.

5. Show courage to act in the longer term
Foxconn has announced today that salaries will be increased.  A short-term and maybe initially successful reaction.  (I can hear my friends in PR high-fiving each other.) But the real solution to this issue and the others cropping up in rapidly industrialising areas is more complicated.  It will take longer.  It will involve more change and internal communication.  And more attention.

You can do it.

I know you can.

/df

TCR — What did you make of the football banner photo above?  I took it last night at the Europa Cup Final in Hamburg.

I found it quite amusing when I saw it. Because I think it plays on all our worries about social inclusion and the language that we use.

What do you think it means?

Here’s [...]]]>

TCR — What did you make of the football banner photo above?  I took it last night at the Europa Cup Final in Hamburg.

I found it quite amusing when I saw it. Because I think it plays on all our worries about social inclusion and the language that we use.

What do you think it means?

Here’s the story: One of the teams that was playing in the European football event was my modest local Fulham Football Club (FFC, for short). In the fairly basic approach to nicknames that football teams often use, Fulham refer to themselves as the Whites.  This is simply because their most common jersey is a white one.  (Down the street my other local, Chelsea is called… the Blues.)

One of yesterday’s unsung stars is a midfielder called Dickson Etuhu.  You can see him in many of the sad looking wire photos today.  He’s a Nigerian.   John Pantsil is from neighbouring Ghana.  So there is a strong West African contingent in the Fulham team.

Do you get the banner now?

What does it say to those who don’t know the story?  Something quite different, no doubt.

Context is what we call this.  Explaining the back story.  Examining what you know that others might not — and telling them.

In business we don’t do this enough.  In health and safety it often costs lives. In broader business it can ruin reputations and cost lots of money.

Putting decisions, policies, news and results into context allows everyone a fair chance to understand how they came about.

Sometimes it’s hard to do.  But that’s no excuse for not doing it.

/df

REGENT ST — My dad used to tell us that in Canada there was no obligatory military service, so everyone should work for the government for at least two years.

All of my siblings did.  My brother and I in federal politics and my sister in universities, for local government and running architecture associations in western [...]]]>

REGENT ST — My dad used to tell us that in Canada there was no obligatory military service, so everyone should work for the government for at least two years.

All of my siblings did.  My brother and I in federal politics and my sister in universities, for local government and running architecture associations in western Canada.  My brother was chief of staff to a Prime Minister.  I was less successful, but had an office in the Canadian Parliament Buildings that had been the entire Ministry of Finance at the time of Confederation.

If nothing else it gives you a better understanding of what public service is all about.  Why people do it and what difficulties there are in making it work.

I came to the conclusion that politicians need a rare and equal balance of:

1. optimistic desire that the world can be changed, and
2. egotism to believe that they can do it.

However, there are a myriad of ways that people can work in the public sector these days. And I am not sure we are taking advantage of that enough.  There are not enough people who really know what it is about.  And there are fewer still who think they will find pride and power in the public sector.

That’s wrong. 

There ought to be more people fighting for the fewer public sector jobs in our countries.

We need more, better bureaucrats.

Think about how well ‘less regulation’ has worked?  And the clear fact that governments will have to be smaller in the future, but better regulation is required.

Clearly good brains are needed.

/df

SW LONDON — We have had plenty of hung parliaments in the UK. Not for a while perhaps but they’re not uncommon. In other parliamentary systems, like my native Canada, they are the most common way of governing.

In fact, there’s a lovely guy called Ed Broadbent, who should really buy Nick Clegg a beer. I [...]]]>

SW LONDON — We have had plenty of hung parliaments in the UK. Not for a while perhaps but they’re not uncommon. In other parliamentary systems, like my native Canada, they are the most common way of governing.

In fact, there’s a lovely guy called Ed Broadbent, who should really buy Nick Clegg a beer. I remember an election in the 1980s when Mr Broadbent, the long-time head of Canada’s third party — the New Democratic Party — had a few days of embarrassing panic and puffed out chests, as the polls said he and his dusty academic cohorts might form a government. I’m sure he tells it as a great story now.

The NDP have never done better than a distant third. And with all the consistency of a Jackson Pollock painting.

What is fun about minority government is that the participants have to actually agree on stuff before they try and make it happen.  So that means less time on silly things like:

• Redrawing boundaries to make ridings easier to win
• Fewer bills that driven my single party interests
• Trying to make the opposition look silly

Maybe this is an opportunity.

Maybe I’m an optimist.

/df