Kind of Blue + In A Silent Way = £5 Huh?

My local Fopp was offering these two albums at that price recently. If you don't know either, read the reviews on Amazon. Then ask what relationship price has to quality when Kind of Blue goes for £3 and the latest Lily Allen album for £12. None, of course.

The value for the buyer isn't in the music, but in what that choice of album says about the buyer. You're not just buying music, you're buying – what? Participation, emotional connection, identification, a groove, a lyric that resonates with you (yes, this even applies to Lily Allen, though I'd rather not know too many details).

Still and all, pricing Miles Davis at that level sends the wrong message.

Here's an idea: jack the price up. Include both albums in a series called “Directions In Music” (but nothing like “Timeless Classics” or “Great Records” - which are cheesy) and make sure Timeless and the first Renaissance triple-album are in the series, along with Sgt Pepper's and Mingus Ah-Um. You get the idea. £10 a shot. 

Of course, all the record labels would have to co-operate with the brand or it would not get the range of artists and music it needed to be credible.

The Mysteries of Pricing: The Hourly Rate of Recreation

A few weeks ago I went to the Peacock Theatre in Holborn: the theatre itself is just across a side road from the London School of Economics. On was a troupe called les 7 Doigts de la Main with their latest show Traces (see You Tube for details).

The Peacock is pretty expensive: most seats cost £38, with a few at the back at £28 or so. The show was seventy-five breathtaking and charming minutes and I'm now a complete Heloise Bourgeois fan. 

I couldn't help but do the math: £30 an hour. I've had a similar thought when handing over £10 for a ticket to an exhibition at the Tate Modern: it's rare that anyone will spend more that an hour looking at a bunch of paintings. I think I was in the Rothko earlier this year for about eighty minutes one Friday evening, but I've seen people go in and out in thirty minutes: £20 an hour.

At the other end of the scale, you can sit in the Prince Charles cinema just off Leicester Square for £5 and watch a two-hour movie: £2.50 an hour. A rental DVD runs about the same, and a first-run movie in peak time is about £10 for maybe one hundred and ten minutes, around £5 an hour. Mainstream theatre in London's West End runs about £20 per seat hour and a fringe play runs about £12 for ninety minutes or £8 an hour. Oddly enough, tickets for Wagner are double the price of mainstream West End, but the operas are double the length, so per hour Wagner is no more expensive than Benjamin Britten and a damn site easier on the ear. When I cancelled my local gym subscription it was running almost £80 a month and I was making maybe ten visits a month of about an hour each, making about £10 an hour.

It took me about twenty hours to read Proust's Sodom and Gomorrah (and even longer to read The Guermantes Way) and that cost £10-ish, so at 50p an hour ol' Marcel is pretty good value. Computer manuals weigh in around £20-30 for the same length of time (but frankly I read them faster than I read Proust). At the other end of the spectrum, I think the most I ever paid for a meal was about £320 for a two-star Michelin in Rome, which was three hours for two of us, for about £27 an hour. 

Go watch Chelsea for ninety minutes and you will hand over between £40 - £65 for a ninety minute match, making £27 an hour at the lower end. If you count the drinks before and after, and add in the waiting around with your mates, I bet it comes out to about £10 an hour. Watching Nottingham Forest may be cheaper, but they don't win as consistently. 

Tickets for a Big Name Rock Band can run £100 an hour, but that's just silly. Only high-end hookers, so I've heard, charge that kind of money and get away with it.

So mass entertainment is around £5 / hour. High-culture events are around £10 / hour. Luxury and minority interest runs around £20 - £30 an hour, and after that "big name" events (Pink Floyd concert, EUFA match, Cup Final) run from £50 / hour upwards. 

No-one thinks about the price / hour when they cost these things. But see how it works out?

The Perfect Philosophy Course: History of Philosophy

Every now and then I distract myself with devising the perfect philosophy course. I did a joint honours Mathematics and Philosophy degree in my youth, and, well, this is what I'd do if it were me.

For the first two years there would be three strands common to single and joint honours: 1) Logic, Rhetoric and Epistemology; 2) History of Philosophy; 3) Morality, Law and the Good Life.

So here's the History reading list – and this is over two years. It's all the originals – no secondary works. There is no substitute for reading the Masters in the original. It isn't the Big Name Classics from each author (with a couple of exceptions) because those will turn up in the other sections.

The Symposium – Plato; The History of Animals – Aristotle; Dialogues and Essays - Seneca; Confessions – St Augustine; Selected Writings – St Thomas Aquinas; Guide for the Perplexed - Moses Maimonides; Novum Organum – Francis Bacon; The Prince – Machiavelli; In Praise of Folly - Erasmus; Discourse on Method – Descartes; Some Considerations on the Consequences of the Lowering of Interest and the Raising of the Value of Money – John Locke; Observations on the Feeling of the Beautiful and Sublime – Immanuel Kant; The World as Will and Representation – Arthur Schopenhauer; The Philosophy of History – G W F Hegel; The Subjection of Women – John Stuart Mill; The Gay Science – Nietzsche; The Varieties of Religious Experience – William James; Laughter: An Essay on the Meaning of the Comic – Henri Bergson; Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus – Ludwig Wittgenstein; Being and Time – Heidegger; Language, Truth and Logic – A J Ayer; The Effective Executive – Peter F Drucker; The Art of War - Sun-Tzu; The Structure of Scientific Revolutions – T S Kuhn; Against Method – Paul Feyerabend; The Meaning of Evil - Jean Baudrillard.

The Philosophy of Mistakes: Friends and Enemies

Make a mistake and the majority of people won't notice or won't make an issue out of it. This is indifference, and in this context there is a lot to be said for it. Other people, a small, valuable minority, will point it out in a quiet voice with the intention of helping you. The rest, a much larger minority, will trumpet it at the tops of their voices and to a cc list a hundred people long. Their tone will question your competence (muttering something like “can't even get one simple thing right”), they make a production out of it in meetings, use it to cast doubt on all your other judgements, wreck your appraisal and hold back your bonus. These people are The Enemy and you must know who they are. They must never see a working draft. They must only see the release version.

The catch is this: there comes a point when you can't see your own work anymore. You have to have someone else look at it. And for this task, you have to choose carefully.

The Enemy includes your supervisor or your manager because they are judging you at all times. The nature of the working relationship between you is that you are their servant. If you make the mistake of asking them for help, they will think you have submitted your work for their judgement. That's the nature of the relationship between you and them.

It can't be anyone who is an intended receiver of the document. They won't be able to stop themselves behaving as if they have the release version. They will get irritated when they see the glitches you can't see anymore.

It can't be anyone who is looking for promotion or other advancement. There are companies where people are promoted for the help they provide and told off when they sabotage other people, but neither you nor I have ever worked there. Advancement needs a demonstration that you can take someone down and are therefore to be reckoned with. Co-operation is for the weak.

It can't be anyone who knows nothing about the subject of the report or little about the products or business. They won't have enough expectations about what content they should be seeing to spot oversights and wrong numbers and statements.

It can't be anyone who is too busy to spend the time you need them to spend. Or who is suffering from detail fatigue as well.

Good luck finding anyone, because I've just ruled out everyone in my team.

If you do find someone, what they don't do is “check” your work. Too often “checking” means “scanning for a mistake, pointing it out and getting off the task as quickly as possible”. One of my team calls this “sense checking” - looking for silly numbers that might indicate a wrong formula or query. He will happily sense-check something. Ask him to “check” it and you get a case of the grumps. Because “checking” means line-by-line, it means, in effect, doing the work over again.

I don't like the word “checking”. It puts you in the position of pupil, them in the position of teacher and it becomes all about how many out of ten you got. So they are not sharing the responsibility with you, and they get to dodge out halfway through. This is neither collegial nor does it get the job done.

What does get the job done is the subject of the next couple of posts.

Niki de Saint Phalle

I've recently finished reading, though will be looking at the illustrations of for some time, Pontus Hulten's book on the French artist Niki de Saint Phalle. The book started as an exhibition catalogue, so the illustrations are wonderful and the artist's working life is outlined well, but the text is just a tad, errr, fawning. All the books on her are catalogues and there's a Foundation to look after her artistic estate and reputation, so for a while a real biography is out of the question.

(Photo mine, Nice 2002)

Some things have to be read from, rather than in, the text. Married and a mother at twenty-one, a few years as a conventional mother gave her a nervous breakdown and she took up painting as a therapy. Now I don't believe in lifestyle-induced nervous breakdowns. Having a life you can't make work doesn't help, but a full-fledged breakdown needs either an unstable personality or chemical assistance. An unstable personality would show in other ways. Perhaps in becoming an artist, separating from your husband and not having much to do with your children. This is not unconventional behaviour, but it is irresponsible. Either that or having two children when you really did not want to live your mother's life over again was irresponsible. It's also clear that she underwent some kind of episode during the years she spent making the Tarot Garden. Refusing to take painkillers and treatment for arthritis to the point where your hands become almost unusable is not, as they say, “normal behaviour”. People don't do that unless they are drinking too much or taking non-prescription drugs. Or of course going mildly doo-lally. She mentions years feeling “stoned” from the medications the doctors gave her.

(Photo mine, Nice 2002)

At one stage she considered suicide, but that is nothing. Not to have considered suicide at some stage of your life just proves you are a block of wood. As long as you are considering it, comforted by the thought, sustained through whatever emotional hell it is by the possibility that you could end it all here and now – as long as you're feeling the pain and considering it, you're not going to do it. Suicides are not done in a wallow of emotion, they are done when the emotion is over and can't get in the way of the practical preparations and the final moment when some banal act will take your own life. You can't be feeling to do that.

(Photo mine, Nice 2002)

The book doesn't examine the commercial side of her life – an artist's commercial life being until recently rather more mysterious than their sex life. She was one of the more successful artists in Europe – though her friends chipped in to provide the $4m she spent on the Tarot Garden over a twenty year period. In 1982 or thereabout she was asked to create a perfume (choose one made by a nose and design the bottles and packaging) and one of the copy-lines is “As controversial as the artist who made it”. Scanning the blogs it seems that those who liked it, are wild about it.

(Photo from Atalier Naff blog)

I remember seeing a documentary about a French art dealer, who was a little sharp around the edges, and in one scene he's wandering round an exhibition, picks up a little figure from a stand and says “It's a Nana, he (the stand's owner) doesn't know what he's got”. Her "best known" work is the Stravinsky Fountain for the Pompidou Centre in Paris.

(Photo from Niki de Saint Phalle Foundation website)

Niki de S-P is one of those quirky artists whose work you either get or not and like or not. If I lived along the Mediterranean the bright colours and rounded shapes of the Nanas would be perfect. In the grey light of suburban London they would look as out of place as Penelope Cruz in a Burger King. If you haven't run across her work before, it's well worth the look. And let's face it, anyone who makes paintings by filling various containers with paint, plastering them onto a canvas and then shooting at the containers with a .22 rifle, has to have something going for them.

Another July, Another Redundancy

You may have noticed I mentioned a re-organisation in a recent post. This is because I work for what is temporarily the largest retail bank in the UK. It wasn't when I joined it, before the sub-prime thing, when it was too big to take over or to be taken over. The Monopolies and Mergers Commission would not have allowed it. The sub-prime thing and the possible collapse of a Scottish bank found the government offering the CEO and Chairman – a good buddy of the Prime Minister – the chance to do a deal that would be nodded through. Their egos could not say no – and besides they and the other bank had been talking about it for some time. So the deal was rushed through, with, at the CEO's own public admission, about a fifth of the due diligence they would have done if the deal hadn't been politically-driven.

The re-organisation proceeded apace – a quite startling apace as well. They decided on systems (we won) and a board (we won). Within a few weeks they had decided on the next tier of management (the other side won) and then it reached the peons – me.

The decisions at the top level were about people. They actually got interviewed. We peons won't be interviewed unless it's a tie-breaker. Which means the decisions are about which parts of the organisation are going to be in which town and buildings, which roles are going to be moved from this group and moved to that group, which call centres are going to be closed and the like. The people will decide if they are willing to move or accept a changed role, and the management will get to choose from those who want to stay and are in the Pool. Ah yes, the Pool. So if Property have made the really big decisions, HR get to set the selection rules. And how difficult is it to say “You're in the Pool if you got a Satisfactory or better in your last two reviews”. There, I just said it. Between Property and HR, the decisions will be pretty much easy. In fact, the management may find themselves with fewer people than they want.

One of those fewer people will be me. I have been getting mediocre reviews. Probably rightly, as my heart isn't in the job and I don't fit in with large organisations, let alone large banks. There's a limit to how far you can be “professional”. I just finished the employee engagement survey (that's really what they call it and about which in another post) and I marked my job, equipment, training and development opportunities and overall satisfaction down at “are you kidding!” level. I've been looking for another job, but the market is slow. I'm only staying because I can't get out and I'm only being picky because the office is right in London's West End and I don't hate it that much to want to work in some industrial estate outside Bracknell. I don't like it so much I would be prepared to follow it to Bristol or Chester or Brighton or some industrial estate outside Hove. To mention some towns at random. I know exactly how much I will be kicking myself if I rented my house, found a flat in Lower Cokeatington and carried on in a similar role in a 1970's office block in Swindon. Within three weeks I would be wanting get the hell out and, being me, it would be showing in my behaviour.

This is the last time I make a decision to join an organisation because I'm going to be safe and get a shot at building up a pension. I've been made redundant three times already, each time in July, and this is going to be the fourth – unless the planets line up just right. If there's no chance to build up a pension in one of the country's largest banks, then there's nowhere to do it, for me, at all. You may be different, but I'm stuck with who I am. I can't make decisions about now based on a future that is uncertain, so I have to make today's decisions based on what's happening today. (That's how you reduce a middle-class lad like me to the same level as a corner boy in Baltimore.)

I woke up at half-past four this morning because this stuff was troubling me. It's going to be a long day.

The Philosophy of Mistakes: How Software Makes It Worse

In the previous post, I advanced the rule that mistakes only exist in the release version. If it's work-in-progress, there are no mistakes, though you may be irritating yourself with your slow progress, frequent re-writes and reference to the manuals. The cure for this is more practice, fewer late nights, less booze, more exercise, reading more technical manuals and going on more courses.

Back in the day no-one looked at the work-in-progress because it was a hand-written mess, needing the skills of the good typist to be made a “release” version. Lawyers had “travelling drafts” - literally a document that went back and forth between the two sides' offices with all the deletions and additions on it. Everyone knew the “travelling draft” was not the release version: it was hand-written and only the insiders could be bothered to read the handwriting.

Software changes all that. When the document exists only in the computer, the distinction between work-in-progress and release version blurs to disappearing. At any given time you can print your spreadsheet, word-processing document, presentation, flowchart, floor plan or whatever. Printed out, it looks like a final version. Worse, you can email it. There's nothing to say “this is not finished yet, so don't bitch and moan about stuff that ain't done yet”. Like it or not, it's going to be treated as the release version – especially when it goes to your manager or someone outside the team. That's just how people treat software documents.

When you had to get the handwritten document typed up, you had a deadline: leave it later and the typing pool would close or you would miss getting the memo out on time. You had to stop revising, adding and futzing and get the thing into the typists.

Software changes all that as well. Because printing the thing takes a moment, you (and more dangerously, your manager) can add, twiddle and futz right up to any sensible idea of a deadline. Running that query will only take a couple of minutes, as will knocking up a pivot table and working up some graphs. And can you show the percentages as well as the values? By region? Oh, didn't I mention I wanted it by region? Is that a problem? After all, at any given time, whatever you have can be printed and is faultless – right? Well, we just discussed that. So you never get a chance to check the damn thing through because the boss is adding, twiddling and futzing to her cold heart's content. There are no deadlines with software. That's just how people treat software documents. No deadlines means no time for proof-reading. Anyway, you do that on the screen, don't you?

It turns out that a computer screen is a lousy place to do serious proof-reading and fact-checking. It just is. The research says we do not treat content on the screen as seriously as we treat it when it's on paper. There is no substitute for paper copy when checking. Strike three for software.

By making it easy to produce huge reports, software provides more opportunities to make mistakes: nobody produced thirty page reports with sixty graphs and tables back in the days before spreadsheets. Nobody would have dreamed of asking for tweaks, revisions and additions to it if they had – but now they do. If you're dealing with very large workbooks with lots of interlocking sheets and large amounts of data and calculations, it will be several iterations before you get all the bugs (the polite term for what are going to be called “mistakes, oversights, omissions, errors and embarrassments” when your manager wants to be rude) out of it.

Which means that if you're doing anything at all complicated, even the release version will have mistakes, oversights and omissions. And it's going to go to a managerial type. Who is going to want to use it to advance their career. So if there's a glitch, you threatened her career, and she's going to threaten you. Dealing with that is the subject of the next post.