All posts by Kevin

Management

A Personnel Revolution

“In an industrial society which confuses work and productivity, the necessity of producing has always been an enemy of the desire to create.”
Raoul Vaneigem, The Revolution of Everyday Life, 1967.

I am currently reading The East End of London by Millicent Rose (1951), which is a very interesting book about the history of London’s East End. In the chapter on the construction of the docks, she writes:

With the building of the docks, the Industrial Revolution came to the East End and transformed it. When work is done upon such a scale as Mayhew describes, the employers (not individuals now but a company) and those whom they employ exist together without either acquaintance or mutual responsibility. The works of Rennie, Alexander, Telford, with all their grandeur, have an oppressive and terrible impersonality that fits the new relation of man to man. Alexander looked back to the glories of Rome, but his creation inaugurated the pitiless anarchy of the nineteenth century.

What a shame that the industrial revolution had this effect on personal relationships. It’s legacy is still a problem today. My wife recently received an incredibly impersonal e-mail from the Chief Executive of the company that has employed her for more than a decade, a man she has met many times and with whom she is on a first name basis. His generic form letter was not addressed to anyone (it just arrived in her inbox without any recipients listed), and asked her to participate in a collective exercise intended to identify the company’s values!

How about uncaring, careless and lazy, for starters? The CEO’s message probably reveals more honest information about the corporate value system than any collective exercise will unearth. It is particularly worrying when you consider that this exercise is almost certainly an initiative of the Human Resources department, which should care more about the employees and how they are treated than any other part of the company. When will they learn that everything the company does is an expression of its values? When will they realise that their values are therefore plain for all to see in everything they do?

Culture

What Do You Collect?

“Preserving tradition has become a nice hobby, like stamp collecting.”
Mason Cooley

At the Victoria and Alberta Museum this afternoon, I came across an exhibit that asked people to write notes for the museum about their own personal collections. The question was “What do you collect?” Most of the responses were from school children, and the first one was as follows:

I collect ideas. Every now and then I change them. I throw the old ones away to make room for the new ones. Some ideas never change, they look old but they can be trusted. – George, London.

Can this amazing statement really be that of a child?

Personal

Dangerous Driving

“Forget the damned motor car and build the cities for lovers and friends.”
Lewis Mumford

Originally, I had plans to spend the Easter weekend in Cumbria seeing Hadrian’s Wall for the first time. I was thinking of driving from London to Carlisle, but now I am very glad I decided against it. Yesterday morning there was an accident on one of Britain’s motorways involving 100 cars, which resulted in a traffic jam containing 20,000 cars that didn’t move for five hours! Later in the day there was another bad accident on a motorway further west that also delayed traffic badly, and again today there appears to have been more problems heading north (see BBC News | Pile-up causes fresh delays) So this most recent crash was the third major accident of the Easter bank holiday, and it’s still only the first day.

I heard recently that Britain’s Secretary of State for Transport, Steven Byers, doesn’t posses a driver’s licence. Perhaps he’s trying to tell us something?

Current Affairs

Public Sector Blues

“One of the things the government can’t do is run anything. The only things our government runs are the post office and the railroads, and both of them are bankrupt.”
Lee Iacocca 1973

History seemed like it was repeating itself today with these two stories hitting headlines in the UK:

The railways in Britain have suffered from a lack of investment for decades, and commuters are now paying the price. I don’t think the general public appreciates how difficult it is to rejuvenate an industry like rail. It could very well take as long to renew as it took to decline, which puts the current Government in a difficult position. What can it possibly do to improve the railways before the next election?

The BBC’s business correspondent has an interesting albeit brief analysis of the problems plaguing the British Post Office (Drastic surgery at Consignia). As luck would have it, I visited my local post office today for the first time since Christmas. When I arrived, the queue was so long that I could barely cross the threshold. With 18 people in front of me and four tellers at work, it took 14 minutes to be served and the queue was even longer when I left. There clearly is a demand for the service, so perhaps a few of the 15,000 imminently unemployed workers should be retrained as tellers?

Ironically the Royal Mail is the best post office with which I’m familiar, the others being Canada Post and the United States Postal Service. If the recent experience of My Life As An American Gladiator is anything to go by, things haven’t improved much in the US.

Perhaps, as in other walks of life, modern technology is forcing postal services to come full circle by undermining the importance of the mail? In 1854 Henry David Thoreau wrote:

“For my part, I could easily do without the post-office. I think that there are very few important communications made through it.“

That certainly corroborates my experience these days.

What did Henry David Thoreau have against the Post Office? In 1863 he also wrote:

In proportion as our inward life fails, we go more constantly and desperately to the post office. You may depend on it, that the poor fellow who walks away with the greatest number of letters, proud of his extensive correspondence, has not heard from himself this long while.
Of course, he’s not really criticising the Post Office in this instance, merely the people who use it as a distraction from their own reality. It’s hard to imagine visiting the Post Office in order to escape, but if you replace it with television I think his statement would be equally applicable today.

Management

A Kinda Harman Kardon

“Workers of the world forgive me.”
Graffito on the bust of Karl Marx in Bucharest in 1990.

Here’s an interesting article from this week’s Economist (Are Sidney Harman and his kind the answer to America Inc’s woes?) about the management style of Sidney Harman, founder of Harman International (i.e. maker of Harman Kardon stereo equipment among other things). It seems the idea of improving business productivity by attending to the workers might be making a come back.

Personal

It Is A Small World After All

“All I know is I am not a Marxist.”
Karl Marx 1818-1883
41 Maitland Park Road, London

Karl Marx’s Last Home
41 Maitland Park Road

Yesterday I discovered that some of my ancestors lived two doors away from Karl Marx’s last London home only a few years after he died in 1883 (they may even have been living there at the same time as Marx, but that has yet to be proved). Earlier this year I confirmed that another branch of the family living at the same time in Canada was related to Ulysses S. Grant, 18th President of the United States.

These coincidences started me thinking about the phenomenon called “six degrees of separation” which is the theory that we are all only six people away from any other individual in the world (for more on the theory, aka the small world effect, and its increasing popularity see WLO: January/February 2000: Six degrees of separation).

This theory originated in 1967 but in 1997 some bright sparks thought of using the Internet Movie Database to demonstrate the theory on a small scale. I don’t know why they picked on poor Kevin Bacon, but you can try it out for yourself by viewing UVA Computer Science: The Oracle of Bacon at Virginia.

So in terms of connections between people, is the world getting bigger or smaller? There are more people in the world than ever before, so that should increase the degree of separation. On the other hand communication is easier than ever before, so that should decrease the degree of separation. Perhaps the two trends are just cancelling one another out and the degree of separation remains largely the same.

I wonder if anything else links Karl Marx and Ulysses S. Grant? Yes indeed. A quick search via Google suggests that:

  • both were born under the astrological sign of Taurus;
  • both suffered migraine headaches;
  • and both knew Horace Greeley, founder and editor of the New York Tribune.

Greeley employed Marx as European correspondent for the Tribune in the 1850s and lost resoundingly to Grant in the US Presidential election of 1872.

Media

Tempus Fugit

Time is a great teacher, but unfortunately it kills all its pupils.”
Hector Berlioz 1803-1869

BBC2 recently started broadcasting the American television drama “24” staring Kiefer Sutherland. The central idea of this timely thriller is that each hour-long episode portrays one hour in the same day. So the twenty four programmes will form a full day-in-the-life of the characters. Viewers are regularly reminded of this conceit by the appearance of a digital clock displaying the current time in this virtual 24-hour day. In another 22 weeks (5

Culture

That’s so Sept 10!

“It was very prettily said, that we may learn the little value of fortune by the persons on whom heaven is pleased to bestow it.”
Sir Richard Steele 1672-1729

The American Dialect Society has decided that the 2001 Word of the Year is the expression “9/11” in its various forms (e.g. nine eleven, 9.11, 9-11). It would be interesting to discover who first coined the phrase and the source of their inspiration, but I fear it’s probably a simple case of laziness.

I suspect whoever it was tried to apply the same logic as “24/7” (an abbreviation for “24 hours a day, 7 days a week”). Except, of course, that they got it wrong. In the case of 24/7 the units of time increase; hours are followed by days which are followed by weeks. But 9/11 is the opposite; the units of time decrease. So, the logic isn’t the same.

Of course, 9/11 is consistent with the standard US format for abbreviating the date in writing (i.e. month/day/year). But it seems strange that our spoken language should adopt the format of written English (or should I say “American”?). I was always taught that good writing should reflect the way we speak, but 9/11 is a case of speaking the way North Americans write. Here in Europe where the standard format is day/month/year, it’s only due to the incredible speed of the modern-day news media that we have realised those appalling events did not take place on the 9th of November!

Now, I gather someone has used the term to define an entire generation. “Generation 9/11” includes all those students who entered school in September 2001. I guess they’ll all talk like this:

“So, are you doing anything special for 12/25?”

“Yeah, I’m flying to Florida for 2 weeks. Leavin’ on 12/24 and I’m gonna party 24/7 the whole time! But don’t worry, I’ll be back for your big bash on 1/1. “

“Man, you oughta be more careful. That’s all so Sept 10th!”