Tuesday Night Soho Rain

After my regular Tuesday meeting, I had espresso and pancake (jam and cream cheese) and a read of Aristotle's Poetics. Then the rain came down.

My route back involved finding out at Barons Court that there were no Richmond trains (flooding?) and taking the following route: Barons Court -> Victoria -> Vauxhall underground -> Vauxhall overground -> Clapham Junction -> change platforms -> home. I was tired and wet when I got back. It was this wet...

What Did She Say?

The other day our Director invited a number of us for a coffee session: it's a semi-informal Q&A with missing supervisors, so he has a remote chance of hearing something like the voice of the people. Which in The Retail Bank is very faint. The employee satisfaction figures had tanked so bad they weren't being circulated and he wanted some idea why – gee, d'ya think that's because they took seven months to re-organise us? At one point, however, Herself The Lovely One Whose Very Passing Makes Men Sigh, an intelligent, hard-working, sensible and no-nonsense early thirty-something, said in context that she “felt very cocooned in the brand”.

I swear. I am not making this up. I couldn't. I don't use language like that. “Cocoon” is a noun naming the silk casing round a grub silkworm and a “brand” is a set of tradesmen's marks on packaging. It's also a carefully-constructed (well, sometimes) fantasy in the minds of... well, consumers, media types and a handful of corporate managers. Fantasy. Not reality. So when Herself The Lovely One Whose Very Passing Makes Men Sigh said she “felt cocooned in the brand” she's saying that she is living inside a fantasy about what our mutual employer is like. Except she can't be, because she's way more practical than that. I think she was saying, in my language, that she felt as if she belonged in the company and it felt like a reasonably secure place to be working. But what she said “cocooned in the brand”. Which carries a whole other set of meanings whether you meant them or not. Even to the person saying the words, no matter what they thought they really meant.

The photograph? On my way into work the previous Friday, I passed this ice-sculpture being installed. Don't know why they were installing, but I do know that everyone who passed it took photos.

Tank Magazine Vol 6 Issue 1

Every now and then I'm entitled to a really trivial entry. I remember Tank when it first came out. It's always had more interesting essays than most style mags – check out The Cruel Jerk by Kevin Braddock as an example of one of the better essays – and an interesting line in photography and styling. Well, they've changed the format, made it larger, put in a spiral binder and in the latest issue, have lots of pictures of la Claudia. What's not to like? You can download a pdf of the shoot at their website, but here's something to be going on with.

You can, by the way, do a lot worse than see a movie just because it's got la Claudia in it (okay, other than Ritchie Rich): Black and White, The Blackout, Friends and Lovers and Love Actually are all a better way of spending your time than watching Funny People or The Hangover.

Why Sadness Follows a Politic Lie

Something I say all the time is “they don't mean that, they're just saying it to be nice / polite / because it gets them off the hook / whatever.” Remember how one the things I do is lie even when it would be easier to tell the truth? Well, I'm the one who says something polite, evasive, nice, vaguely sympathetic or ambiguously assenting when someone says something dumb, misguided, tasteless, crass, ignorant or otherwise fattening. For all I know, other people may be expressing their opinions honestly and with a minimum of editing and sugar.

So why am I lying? Because a) telling the truth (or telling my truth, which is not quite the same thing) would not achieve anything; b) because sometimes it's the polite or politic thing to do; c) because I can tell I'm dealing with a loony, a-hole, bigot, ignoramus, or someone who just doesn't get it and want to cut the whole encounter short. As for polite lies, no, of course your bum doesn't look big in those jeans.

As an example of the first type: somewhere out there is a woman in her mid-thirties who honestly believes that if the parents do anal sex, their male children will become homosexuals. She thought it said so in the Bible, and she's a fundamentalist. I know this woman exists because I've had lunch with her, and she was a guest of our mutual hosts. I said nothing while she spouted this hate-filled nonsense, and I haven't quite liked myself as much since. Why didn't I call her out on it? It was lunch and I was guest. She was the one breaking the rules by expressing such opinions. Anyway, nobody who believes such things would possibly be influenced by argument and facts, or even see the relevance of facts. (Fundamentalists believe despite the evidence – politicians and management don't believe and ignore the evidence.)

As an example of the third type: the other day at a meeting I found myself sitting next to a woman who, after we'd shaken hands and swapped first names as is an acceptable practice, proceeded to give me what ought to be hereinafter known as the “AA Check-Out”: how long had I been sober? How many meetings a week did I go to? Do I have a sponsor? Do I have sponsees? She was checking that I was an orthodox AA. From what she said later, she was hoping I would unwittingly admit to having some problem with my sponsor, so we could share. In my experience people who do the AA Check-Out are not so emotionally sober, and usually are having some sort of problem with AA as a social practice. Once again, I vanished behind some vague politeness and a comment that sponsors are like lamp-posts: she had to be sure she was using hers for illumination, not support. Get this person out of my life. Now.

When I started this entry, I thought what I felt on these occasions was guilt that I hadn't spoken up for myself. But it isn't. It's a little stab of despair that this is who I meet, an urge not to be near or talking to yet another head case. Somewhere there's a place with people I'd like to meet and who would like to meet me – and once again, it's nowhere I am.

Geoff Colvin's Talent is Over-Rated

I've been reading Talent is Over-Rated by Geoff Colvin, an editor at Fortune. It's a quick, clear read and a much more detailed discussion of the “10,000 hour” rule that Malcolm Gladwell travestied in his last book. Colvin is summarising a bunch of research which suggests that people who do anything – music, sports, mathematics, writing – at a very high level spend a lot of time doing deliberate practice: practice that is carefully designed to take you past your present limits and to remove any sticky spots in your present technique. Top-flight anyones do a lot of this. Indeed at the top level, you don't train to compete, you compete to train. Competition is there solely to identify the weaker points of your game.

Colvin is very good about the way that large corporations are set up exactly not to provide the environment and culture in which people can develop and perform excellently. “How often is feedback at most companies constructive, non-threatening, and work-focused? Evaluations at most companies are exactly the opposite: telling the hapless employee what he did wrong, not how to do better, and specifying personal traits (attitude, personality) that must be changed, all under the unspoken looming threat of getting fired.” Sounds familiar to me. What Colvin shys from saying why it's like this in most companies.

The research he's using suggests that the motivation of top-flight performers is intrinsic to the activity, it's about being excellent at what you do. It's not about winning, proving yourself to your peers, making lots of money, lavish praise, promotions and honours.

Well, unless you're a manager. Then your intrinsic motivations are exactly about proving yourself, winning, making money, status, praise, promotions and, who knows? Even honours, should you do the right thing by the incumbent Government. A manager's skills are the dark arts of seeking preferment, influence and advancement and avoiding responsibility, blame and ill-favor. Managers really are motivated by fear, praise, financial rewards and gee-gaws and they make the company in their image.

That's why most corporate appraisal schemes are fear-based and fault-finding; it's why the training is on the corporate intranet, non-accredited and shallow; why the courses they trumpet are about “leadership” and “effectiveness”; and why they can churn people and organisational structures every two or three years. That's why techies regard managers as untainted by the slightest skill or knowledge, and why the rest of the people who work there regard them as slightly sad or bad. Because they are motivated by the preferment of the powerful and the pursuit of power and influence, and there is something not quite right about that.

it's not to Colvin's detriment he didn't write that - because I'm sure he knows it - but it is a sign of how good the book is that it becomes obvious.

Never change your mobile phone number...

... and always have the phone charged and on. Lots of people don't update their records when you send out that mail about your new contact details.

Your work is what gives you satisfaction. It may or may not be what you do in your employment.

Your job is how you earn your money. You earn money now by doing what your current employer wants you to do, you earn money tomorrow by training on new stuff and finding your next job. When there was "full employment", that next job was with the same employer. Now there is a "flexible labour market", that next job might be with your current employer or it might be with another one.

Always keep in touch with your recruitment agents
Always go to every interview: you need the practice and you learn a lot
Keep your on-line CV's updated and consistent

Body Fat, Weight Loss and All That

I've been reading The Diet Delusion by Gary Taubes, which I commend to you if you want to know anything about diet and nutrition. It prompted me to think over the whole issue of weight loss, diet and exercise properly.

Let's start with the basics. You eat a 300 gram apple. As a result, you now weigh 300 grams more than you did. The only way you will weigh the same as you did before you ate the apple is to lose 300 grams. How do you do that? Well, what goes in has to go out or be stored. The stores are triglyceride molecules in fat cells or additional bone or muscle mass. What goes out is urine, sweat, faeces and moisture in your breath.

How about losing weight by exercising? Say, walking a mile at about four miles an hour. This will burn roughly 100 Calories. The body stores 7,700 Calories in a kilo of (white) body fat. So you have burned up 64 grams of body fat. The catch is, aside from the sweat you dripped onto the pavement or absorbed in your clothes, you haven't lost any weight yet. The body fat has disappeared in a reaction using oxygen and other chemicals to make various waste products: the mass of the waste products equals the mass of the body fat, oxygen and other chemicals. (To many, many decimal places, chemical reactions conserve mass.) Those waste products are still in your body, so you still weigh the same – this is why you never seem to weigh less after a work-out at the gym. You won't lose the weight until you pass water or faeces. What the exercise does is increase the amount of waste material you pass.

By 64 grams for a mile-long walk. Unless you are an athlete or an infantryman, you will use very little energy by “exercising”: most of your energy use is in your basal metabolic rate – keeping your core body warm, processing food, re-oxygenating blood, making all those cells to renew your body and other such work. For a man, that's about 2,000 Calories a day. Cut down your food intake to 1500 Calories in the right way, so that you burn body fat and you are losing 300 grams a day, or 2 kilos a week. That's how you lose weight without having a Hollywood trainer and all day to exercise.

So how do you make sure you burn the body fat? The answer, Taubes is suggesting, is “carbohydrates drive insulin, insulin drives fat”. Cut down on sugars and starches, your insulin levels go down and your body releases more fat from its cells, which burn up and create more waste products. It also reduces the need for all the water needed to handle carbohydrate-based food processing. A good chunk of weight loss in the early stages of any diet is water being disposed of because it's suddenly become surplus to requirement.

This, at any rate, is how I make sense of what Taubes is saying. I'm trying it right now. The challenge is eating a low (refined-) carbohydrate, low sugar diet while working in an office in central London.