Here’s an hilarious story of some confused British tourists who travelled to Sydney, Nova Scotia, instead of Sydney, Australia (Britons fly to ‘wrong’ Sydney)! In what must be the British understatement of the month (and today’s only the 5th) one of them was quoted as saying “Obviously, it was a big disappointment.”
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Careless Harm
Norman Jensen (onegoodmove) has found a great quote that he attributes to T. S. Eliot:
“Half of the harm that is done in this world is due to people who want to feel important. They don’t mean to do harm but the harm does not interest them.”
In my experience, this aphorism is particularly prevalent in business.
On the Ropes
I think I’ve become a fan of Alan Leighton, currently Chairman of Consignia (aka the Post Office), after hearing him interviewed by John Humphrys on BBC Radio 4 (On the Ropes). On the Ropes usually features people who have gone from riches to rags, or experienced some other personal failure in their life. In this case, it was argued that the Post Office is on the ropes and Leighton is the man responsible for turning the organisation around. Humphrys stressed Leighton’s reputation as a ruthless businessman, but most of what Leighton said seemed like common sense to me. Here are a few highlights:
“I believe fundamentally you shouldn’t pay people for failure.”
“All organisations I know, particularly those that are performing badly, have what I call layers of treacle or permafrost in them which basically stops stuff happening. You know, there are business prevention squads in most businesses. They go out of their way to stop things happening, and one of the things you’ve got to do is get around that.”
“In businesses, generally, the Chairman and Chief Executive create the context. They can’t do anything else. They don’t actually go and do very much. In retailing all the money is taken in the shops. It’s not taken in the head offices. So you have to get that piece of thinking around your head. Where does the money get taken? Who takes the money? Who does the execution? Well the front line, so this whole thing about people are business’ most important assets. It’s a sort of trite saying that everyone trundles out now and then, but actually it’s true. And if you actually understand it’s true and you get after it, it’s the only the way you turn businesses around.”
“…the execution has to take place at the front end and you’ve got to have the management who believe that too. You know lots of managers don’t believe that. Lots of managers think they’ve got a job by right. Their job is to bark out commands. Their job is to get people to do as they’re told. Their job is not to listen to what people say. Their job is they know best. Well in my experience the operators know best, and if you can get them to be involved in things then you get a better result.”
“The most bizarre thing about [the Post Office] is, this business is a monopoly. It’s got £8 billion of sales, it’s a monopoly and it loses £300 to £400 million pounds at the operating level. It’s happened over a period of time….[the Post Office] is so inwardly focussed it doesn’t think about the two things that count. If you don’t look after your customers and you don’t look after your people, you can be a monopoly and have £8 billion of sales and still lose a lot of money!”
“The most important thing is, do the right thing. If we do things wrong, we’re not going to sit on them forever, which is what’s happened in the past. We do things wrong, we get up, we say we did things wrong. We take the hit. We take the embarrassment, but we’re not going to continue to do something that is wrong.”
“In business turnarounds particularly, and in good businesses, most of the turnaround isn’t in huge, big programmes. It’s all about doing things better that you do everyday, and I’m sure there’s a lot we can do on the back of that.”
Although his comments make a lot of sense, these goals are very difficult to achieve in a large organisation, and I imagine the UK Post Office will be a challenge, even for an experienced businessman like Alan Leighton.
Fast Fatty Food
Here’s a legal case straight out of Ally McBeal, Fat Americans sue fast food firms. It seems a group of obese Americans are suing several fast food chains, accusing them of knowingly serving meals that cause obesity and disease.
“The fast-food industry has wrecked my life,” Caesar Barbar, one of plaintiffs, told the New York Post. “I always thought it was good for you. I never thought there was anything wrong with it,” he said.
Perhaps the fast food restaurants will use the same excuse.
Doomsday for the Domesday Project
The dot.life column on the BBC News website occasionally publishes interesting stories. The basis of this week’s story, No home for digital pictures, first appeared in the press in March, and it’s about the problems caused when technology changes too quickly.
Apparently, a visual record of life in the UK in 1986 called the Domesday Project has run into trouble because the medium on which the information is stored is becoming increasingly difficult to access, and the BBC thinks this issue will become particularly problematic for digital photography in the future.
“The problem is there will be no way to look at them [the photographs]. That’s because technology evolves so fast that any storage medium in use today is bound to become obsolete sooner or later. Finding the right equipment to retrieve digital images stored decades previously on obsolete media will become almost impossible.
In fact, it turns out that images stored electronically just 15 years ago are already becoming difficult to access. The Domesday Project, a multimedia archive of British life in 1986 designed as a digital counterpart to the original Domesday Book compiled by monks in 1086, was stored on laser discs.
The equipment needed to view the images on these discs is already very rare, yet the Domesday book, written on paper, is still accessible more than 1,000 years after it was produced.”
This comparison is interesting, but also rather misleading. Is the original Domesday book any less rare than the equipment that reads these laser discs? It may have survived a thousand years, but is the Domesday book really readily accessible today? Isn’t it kept under strict lock and key by the Public Record Office? Is it written in a language and script that most of us still understand?
Ironically, the best place for most of us to learn about the Domesday book these days is the Internet. In fact, the information contained in the Domesday book is now more accessible than ever before thanks to the very digital technology that is criticised in this story.
All technologies have strengths and weaknesses, and information technology is no exception. What this story really highlights is the need to ensure that important information is copied onto whatever media is most appropriate in the future. The difficulty is not posed by the technology, but by the need to define what’s important. I don’t know if future generations will consider a multimedia record of ordinary life in 1986 as important, but I’m pretty sure they’ll still consider the Domesday book worth saving.
Logical Career Move?
My wife and I spotted the latest edition of Private Eye magazine in our local newsagents this afternoon, and the cover made us laugh out loud. The newsagent laughed too, and said that he’d pointed it out to a customer earlier in the week, but unfortunately the customer turned out to be just such a professional! (point to the image)
Toast
How do you like your toast? Delia Smith suggests:
“When the toast is done, remove it immediately to a toast rack. Why a toast rack? Because they are a brilliant invention. Freshly made toast contains steam, and if you place it in a vertical position, in which the air is allowed to circulate, the steam escapes and the toast becomes crisp and crunchy. Putting it straight on to a plate means the steam is trapped underneath, making it damp and soggy. If you don’t possess a toast rack you really ought to invest in a modest one.”
On the other hand I have just found the antidote for Delia’s recipe in a recent Letter From America by Alistair Cooke. In writing about the lack of toast racks in America (!), he attributes the following quote to Mark Twain:
“In the heyday of the industrial revolution it took the mechanical genius of the English to devise a receptacle which guaranteed to deliver in the shortest possible time toast that was both cold and hard.”
I’m with Mark Twain.
BBC Gore
The new television channel BBC4 is turning out to be very good. On this evening’s edition of Talk Show the American author Gore Vidal told a funny joke at his own countrymen’s expense. One of the US President’s advisors explained the difficulty of working with the French private sector by saying, “the problem with the French is that they have no word for entrepreneur”!
You have to love this…
Here’s an example of the level of service now available from British Telecom that I mentioned in my previous post about British efficiency. These charts illustrating my household telephone usage were produced on-line automatically at the press of a button! BT’s billing information has gone from one extreme to the other in the last ten years, and in the right direction in my opinion. I wonder what they will do for an encore. Does your phone company provide a similar service?
More Civil Service Stupidity
“The reform [of the civil service] should be thorough, radical, and complete.”
Rutherford Birchard Hayes (1822-1893), U.S. president
Here’s another example of stupidity in the public sector: E-mail ban for council staff. Members of staff at Liverpool City Council are not allowed to send internal e-mail messages on Wednesdays. Can you believe it? The suggestion is that they talk to one another instead.
Chief Executive David Henshaw “wants staff to solve problems more efficiently, rather than passing them on to a colleague via e-mail”, and of course everyone knows that the way to get things done in an organization is to hold lots of face to face meetings, right? This is another example of retarding technological progress because of human incompetence. Discipline the people, don’t take away their tools!