More from that Economist survey:
Some employers handled last year’s job cuts in remarkably insensitive ways. For example, at Cap Gemini, a software firm, employees were informed by voicemail that they had lost their jobs.
This would probably happen more often if more businesses knew how to operate their voicemail systems!
Regular readers of this page (are there any?) will probably realise that “the theory of business” is a recurring theme. That’s partly because I have an MBA, which despite its reputation can be a highly theoretical degree in places, and also because my most recent former employer is the worst managed business I have ever come across. So every time I find new information about how businesses should be run I find it particularly interesting.
For example, this week’s edition of the Economist includes a Survey of Management (subscription required). As the introduction says:
This survey suggests that the core of good management is a set of three old-fashioned virtues that were often forgotten in the bubble years, when anything seemed to go. At a minimum, good managers have to meet the following criteria:
As is so often the case with business theory, this statement makes simple common sense, and I can’t help comparing it with my personal experience.
My former employer is incredibly old-fashioned (not surprising for a business founded in 1766), but lost sight of these principles long ago. It is not honest with customers or staff; it is extraordinarily wasteful, which is one reason why it is not very profitable (it actually made a loss in 2001); and it is rarely well prepared, which is why many business decisions are knee-jerk responses to fast moving events.
Had I known this was the case I would never have accepted the job offer, let alone promotion. How do you determine if a prospective employer subscribes to the Economist’s principles before it’s too late?
Just so you know what I mean by “old-fashioned” in the post above, BBC Radio has just announced that the British House of Commons has agreed that female Members of Parliament and staff will be allowed to breast-feed infants (with certain restrictions). My former employer only allowed women to wear trousers in 1998, at which rate breast-feeding should be permitted sometime around the year 2230!
“A plagiarist should be made to copy the author a hundred times.”
Karl Kraus 1874-1936
Never in a million years would I have guessed that I could influence the mighty Microsoft, but I’m pretty sure I have. Here’s how…
Thanks to the Internet I have become a world authority on the history of carbon paper. In 1994 I wrote an essay on that subject as part of my MBA. Later that year, when I was teaching myself HTML in order to develop my own web page I uploaded my essay as a simple test of my new web skills. I didn’t want to write anything new so I simply used my old essay. I never bothered to remove it, and so it’s been on my website in one form or another ever since.
I didn’t register my site with any search engines or promote my essay in any way, so I was surprised when a couple of months later I received an e-mail from someone asking for more information about carbon paper (although I didn’t promote it, the essay had a link back to my homepage). Since then (1995) I have received many similar requests. The essay has been referred to twice by articles published in the New York Times. It has appeared in an Australian anthology of stories (intended for school children) about the history of technology. I have had requests for more information from several manufacturers of carbon paper and even one German documentary film maker. I have even been interviewed via telephone about carbon paper!
Well of course, you can probably guess what had happened. The search engines had found my essay while crawling the net, and because it’s a fairly esoteric subject, my page was listed whenever anyone searched for information about carbon paper using Yahoo or Altavista or Infoseek, etc.
I must admit that I am amazed at the situation today, seven years later. Google cites my page first (at its old location) and second (at its current location) in its list of 670,000 hits when you search for carbon paper (try it now Google Search: Carbon Paper). Given the way Google ranks hits, this means in effect that my page is the most popular page about carbon paper on the Internet!
Interestingly, the third link in Google’s results takes you to an essay on Microsoft’s site about the importance of computer accessibility for people with disabilities: Curb Cuts and Carbon Paper. It includes the following introduction…
When a chime sounds to signal that an elevator car has arrived, few of us realize that we?re taking advantage of a technology originally developed to give people with disabilities extra time to reach the door before it closes. In fact, many technologies that were first designed to assist people with disabilities were later widely adopted because of their value to everyone. Carbon paper was first developed for blind and partially sighted clerks who could not tell when their quill pens ran out of ink. The typewriter was invented for a countess who was blind. Curb cuts, first created for people using wheelchairs, are now used by everyone from cyclists to parents with strollers.
Well, where did they get that information about carbon paper and the Countess? No sources are given, but I’ve never come across it anywhere other than my essay and my original source which was Michael Adler’s book on the typewriter. So, I’m pretty certain that Microsoft’s author took it as written by the world’s foremost networked carbon paper historian: me!
Today’s Financial Times has an interesting article by columnist Peter Martin about the latest research on the cause of poor corporate performance: Don’t blame the industry. The researchers were attempting to determine whether or not an industry’s fundamental economic structure might account for the lion’s share of poor performance. Peter Martin writes about the implications of their research for individual managers and concludes with:
If you are working for a company in a tough industry with a management that does not appear to know what it is doing, consider taking another piece of Warren Buffett’s advice: “Should you find yourself in a chronically leaking boat, energy devoted to changing vessels is likely to be more productive than energy devoted to patching leaks.”
I hate to be conventional by climbing on the self-reverential blogging bandwagon, but here’s a good story on weblogs from Canada’s National Post: Bloggers’ emerge from internet underground. It includes the following quote from Dave Winer of Scripting News:
If improved technology created the opportunity for a blog-explosion, it was Sept. 11 that created the desire for one. “A huge burst of growth came out of September 11th,” said Winer from his Silicon Valley office. “When there’s just an incredible amount of information available and people are so hungry for that information, then to have a great distribution system in place is in our national interest. September 11th was an incredible day for amateur journalism.”
I realise that modern technology has changed the scale massively, but it seems to me that ham radio operators were providing such a “distribution system” many years ago and it was equally in the “national interest” even then.
From Radio Canada International’s Cyberjournal:
“TORONTO: CANADIANS TAKE TO STREETS IN VICTORY
There was jubilation among Canadian hockey fans Sunday as they celebrated the country’s first Olympic men’s hockey gold medal in half a century. Car horns blared and fans streamed into the streets moments after Team Canada notched a 5-2 win over the United States. In downtown Toronto, euphoric fans streamed down bustling Yonge Street, many clad in Canadian colours and draped in Maple Leaf flags. Some leaned precariously out of car windows, horns blaring. In Ottawa, police closed off streets in front of the Parliament buildings as a spontaneous parade made its way to the Peace Tower. In Montreal, traffic on Ste-Catherine Street was jammed for blocks. The street was awash in red and white flags and Team Canada togs in a display reminiscent of the 1995 referendum rally. Similar celebrations took place across the country. In a written statement, Prime Minister Chretien said the Canadian hockey team showed “matchless drive and talent” in winning the gold medal. The prime minister congratulated the team, saying Canada’s men’s and women’s hockey teams have united the country “in a way that only hockey can bring us together.” The women’s team had earlier won gold, also against the US.”
So, the women’s curling team from Great Britain has won the gold medal at the Winter Olympics. That doesn’t surprise me as much as does the media coverage of the event. BBC Radio was incredibly apologetic about the sport, introducing several reports by stating something to the effect that “Although it may be unglamorous and dull…” and one sports reporter who was uncertain how to describe playing the game even asked the ubiquitous expert “How do you say it? Do you curl?”.
On the one hand, the Canadian in me doesn’t understand what all the fuss is about. Curling is a winter sport like any other, except that millions of ordinary mortals play it recreationally every year. Someone has to win the gold medal. Why not the British?
But it seems that despite winning the gold medal, the British (or more correctly the English) know nothing about curling. The women’s team are all Scots, and it turns out that whereas 20,000 people play curling in Scotland, only 300 play it in England and they all play it at England’s one and only rink somewhere near Chester!
The coverage on the web hasn’t been as bad (for an example see Conversion of the curling kind), but I imagine the Scots must be getting ready to break away from this not-so-United Kingdom.
Britain’s Channel 4 is broadcasting a series of programmes on Married Love at the moment. The first two episodes covered the sexual ignorance of previous generations and the increased sexual awareness of the “Me Generation”.
It’s ironic that as people have learned more about sex, they have chosen to have fewer and fewer children. One of my great great grandmothers had 13 children by the time she was 43; her daughter had six children; her granddaughter had three; and her great granddaughter had only two.
I know there are lots of reasons for this change, but it’s clear that sex is now almost completely divorced [excuse the pun] from its original purpose of reproduction and has become largely a recreation. I suppose for many people it must be right up there with shopping.
It’s amazing how dirty the word “socialism” has become. My dictionary defines it as “the belief that the state should own industries on behalf of the people and that everyone should be equal”. But here’s Digby Jones, Director General of the Confederation of British Industry, commenting today on a leaked European Commission draft proposal to extend temporary workers’ rights:
“The flexibility of the labour market…could be under serious threat from this. It’s depressing that Europe decides it’s going to try and bring everyone down to some sort of low common denominator…It’s socialism coming straight out of Brussels,” he said. (For more see Bosses warn against rights for temps.)
Which part of the definition do you think he means? Since the EC proposal does not promote state ownership, he must be referring to the part about equality. The EC is for it; he’s against it.
And yet this month’s edition of the Harvard Business Review contains an article (see They’re Not Employees, They’re People) by the dean of all business gurus, Peter Drucker, which is summarised as follows:
“In this essay, business thinker Peter Drucker examines the changing dynamics of the workforce ? in particular, the need for organizations to take just as much care and responsibility when managing temporary and contract workers as they do with their traditional employees.“
Those seem like opposite points of view to me. So who’s right? Common sense tells me Drucker. So what’s wrong with Digby Jones? He clearly has not read his copy of HBR!
Why is the best-selling TV guide still called the “Radio Times“?
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