September Holiday (Not Much)

I was on holiday last week. I didn't go away, in fact, because the sky was grey, the air full of some fungus that set off histamines in my bloodstream after ten minutes, the temperature neither hot nor cold, the air damp, there was nothing much on at the movies, plus I do not have £1,000 to blow on air fare, hotels and decent meals in, say, Nice or Paris, so in fact, I stayed indoors at home. I listened my way through a fair chunk of the Mariss Jansons' mix of Shostakovich's fifteen symphonies. I read a couple of books, kept trying to get started on Sartre's Being and Nothingness - which is a lot to get started on - and finished watching the first series of The Guardian, which is not a newspaper but a series about a corporate lawyer who has to work as a child advocate or go to jail for doing drugs. It's pretty good. Also I kept waking up at 05:45. I wanted to sleep late - 08:00 would do fine. But no, there I was, bouncing around at 06:00.

And at some point, it dawned on me that it's not me who doesn't get it, it's the management in The Bank. The senior management and the talk they talk? I thought they are smart people being cynically manipulative, but now I know they are ordinary, dull people who actually believe what they say and do. None of them would last a day in a real private sector company, though they might survive in British Telecom or Cable and Wireless. They read pop management books if they read at all. Somewhere inside they know that the whole financial services sector is a badly-run mess, and they think it's cute.

Anyway. On the one day I did go into town, I passed by the Lazarides gallery and had a look at the Botulism exhibition by a Brooklyn artist called Bast. I liked a lot of it. Here's one - Utz - that caught my eye even if it is beyond my wallet. The gallery were kind enough to send me a pdf catalogue.

As ever - if you need me to take this down, I'll be happy to oblige.

Also I downloaded and tried Evernote which is a cloud notebook application. It's way useful - I now draft stuff in Evernote rather than Open Office Word  - and it's on my MacBook Pro and Asus netbook. It's right up there with Dropbox as a must-have.

On Being "Done"

These are due to Bre Pettis.

Accept that everything is a draft. It helps to get it done.

There is no editing stage.

Pretending you know what you're doing is almost the same as knowing what you are doing, so accept that you know what you're doing even if you don't and do it.

Banish procrastination. If you wait for more than a week to get an idea done, abandon it.

The point of being done is not to finish but to get other things done.

People without dirty hands are wrong. Doing something makes you right.

Failure counts as done. So do mistakes.

Destruction is a variant of done.

If you have an idea and publish it on the Internet, that counts as a ghost of done.

Done is the engine of more.

The most important one for me is: the point of being done is not to finish but to get other things done. This helps me curb my tendency to hold back on delivering because it hasn't got this little tweak or that little feature. Doing so means I can't be getting on with other stuff. Which is the point.

Rescuing The Boss Isn't In The Job Description

At the end of Seth Godin's Linchpin is a plea for we poor bloody infantry to perform above and beyond to rescue (the customers and products of) corporations from the mess they're making of running themselves. Will the workers please rescue the managers (and for that matter, the cheap, chiselling, entitled customers as well)?

The answer to that is, of course, NO. Well-adjusted people don't do rescuing of anybody or anything from their own freely-entered-into dysfunctional behaviour. (Unless we are being paid huge fees specifically to do so - like the rehab clinic gets paid and for the same reason.) We're paid to do our jobs, and management are paid to run the company. That doesn't mean I do as I'm told all (or even any) of the time: I can question their policies and propose stuff, but the decision is theirs.

If management decide to outsource accounts receivable to India and the customers go ape hearing foreign voices demanding payment with all the sensitivity of anyone working a script, guess what? They don't get to shrug and tell us we have to make it work - which is pretty much like a gambler telling his wife to make ends meet now he's blown half the week's money at the track. It's for management to cancel the outsourcing contract and bring the work back home, with a mass apology to the customers along the line. No-one gets to screw it up, pay themselves a bonus, deny there's a problem and leave someone else to clear up the mess.

Well, except managements do that every day. However, not rescuing them from their own dysfunctional, narcissistic egos doesn't mean we do a bad job. Godin tells this little story:

"Working the First-Class cabin at British Airways can be a nightmare... Spoiled, tired executives are waited on by flight attendants for hours on end, rarely earning the service they demand. Sure they've paid for it, but all too often, they're not open or receptive to it. The secret of working this flight, I've been told by the people who do... is to realise that the extraordinary service being delivered is not for the passenger, and it's not for British Airways. It's for the flight attendant."

We do a good job for our own self-respect and because being a sabotaging grump is bad for us in so many ways. However, if we're not careful we give the employer and the customers a free ride on our good nature. Not happening. The trick is not to let the chiselling employer or the entitlement-laden customers benefit too much, if at all. That's a tough one for the cabin crew, but it's a lot easier for head office / back-office people.

Let's get this straight. I'm not saying we don't make suggestions about how to improve products or services for the customer, or how to cut costs and improve response times without cutting quality of service and reliability. Above a certain level, that's part of the job. I am saying that we don't "work round" a bureaucracy the management allow to be obstructive, nor do we try to fix the poor service from the outsourcing company. It's a subtle one. A customer who is polite and friendly gets helpful and friendly back: one who dumps their entitlement on you gets the minimum service with no value-add. (This is what I suspect the cabin crew do: what they're not doing is forgetting the bad passenger's drinks or spilling dinner over her dress. Which they would like to do.)

I am saying the company and the customers don't get a free ride. They don't get any more value-add for their business than they put in to us. I am saying we figure out how to get more value-added to us than they are prepared to offer. I'm saying you don't do anything outwith your core job description for the company that doesn't add value to and for you. And I'm saying that the constant re-organisations, mergers, disposals, outsourcing and use of consultants releases us from any obligation we may feel that we have to leave something lasting behind us.

So over some more posts I'm going to examine this idea a little more.

Parkrun Saturday - Bushy Park

A few times over the summer, first thing Saturday morning I've parked the car in Bushy Park to walk into Kingston, where I do a little market shopping for things like ripe fruit that supermarkets don't carry sell any more. When was the last time you had a ripe anything from Sainsbury's?

I've been greeted by a sight like this..

... of the healthy professional husbands, wives, partners and friends who inhabit the areas surrounding Bushy Park and do things like jogging at 09:00 on a Saturday. I assumed it was some local club. Until a couple of weekends ago when the crowd was this big...

I asked one of the stewards and they told me it was a 5k run organised by an organisation called Parkrun. It's done every Saturday morning all over the country and at all times of the year - they even run on Christmas Day. You just turn up. No qualifications, no entry fee, no minimum fitness requirement. See website for details. I'm going to pass over the bit where they let you run with a pushchair or buggy (which is carrying ostentatious parenting way, way too far) and stick to the bit where it looks like a great idea.

When I got from shopping at 10:30, the place looked like this...

...which gave me that "But they were here! Hundreds of them! You have to believe me!" feeling. The stuff that goes on when we blink eh?

The Covent Garden Early Morning iPhone 4 Queue

The new Apple Store in Covent Garden is a thing of temple-like spareness and beauty...

This was taken from outside because I had a feeling they wouldn't like me snapping it inside. There are three floors of those tables - never in the history of retail has so much floor space been given to such a small product range. Anyway, here's the thing. That snap was taken at 08:15 on Wednesday 1st September. (If I wake up early and can't doze off again, I'm going into London early and having breakfast there before going into the office.)

Round the corner was this...

This is the iPhone 4 queue. You want to buy a MacBook Pro, just walk right in. You want the iPhone, you queue. I'll say again, this is 08:15. These people were up at 06:00 or so to get there. It's been like this since the store opened about three weeks ago, and if you go at lunchtime, the queue is almost as large.

Fallout From Fruity Thursday

My nephew didn't get into university. He had enough points, but not in the right grades. He went through clearing - Royal Holloway and Essex - but didn't hear anything after three days and apparently, just as in the job market, that's them passing on you.

I'm upset. I was looking forward to telling everyone where he was going and then boring them rigid for the next three years by little news items about his progress and all the cool stuff he was doing. I'm still in a little bit of denial about it - like one of the universities he applied to will call up and say that he can come anyway. Which is not going to happen. There was a baby boom eighteen years ago and more young people applied this year than at any time in history. Just when the government cut back on funding for places.

So in one morning a couple of weeks ago he went from being a young man of promise to the lowest form of statistical life: a NEET - Not in Employment, Education or Training. Now he has to find a job. As he would in three years' time if he had graduated, but at least he would be competing with graduates as an equal. Now he has to find whatever jobs there are for people without degrees. And not just jobs: careers. I'm told that the magic number now is £10 / hour, or £17,860 a year (38 hours a week, 47 weeks a year). How does anyone live an independent life on that? Rent a flat, save for a house, attract and retain a partner and enjoy a hobby, entertainment that isn't TV and some culture? That would be a "they can't". I don't understand careers outside of head office staff and management roles. I know how much I pay tradesmen, but I don't see self-employment as my nephew's thing.

So suddenly life is going to be harder and irritating for all concerned. He's going to have to change his act at home and my sister and mother are going to have to accept he's not going anywhere for at least another year. No. I don't do having unemployed people in my house on a full-time basis.

Economically, coming out of education is a nasty moment. One day you're a respectable student studying hard and living off a loan and whatever subs your family can give you, plus maybe whatever work you can pick up, and then suddenly the day after the end of the final year, unless you have a job to go to... you're an unemployed bum. Maybe for new graduates and their parents it isn't the stigma it used to be, as being made redundant isn't the stigma it was in the 1980's. An economy which cannot provide appropriate starter work for its young people is not thriving - and I don't care how many cool toys the employed can afford.

But he still has to get a job.

Are You Indispensible? Seth Godin's Linchpin

Read the reviews of this book earlier in the year when Seth Godin released 3,000+ copies to anyone who wanted to review it and it's one gigantic love-in. Not so much for me. This book makes me slightly angry. It's this bit, right at the start: "you have no right to that job or that career. After years of being taught that you have to be an average worker for an average organisation, that society would support you for sticking it out, you discover that the rules have changed. The only way to succeed is to be remarkable, to be talked about... The only way to get what you're worth is to stand out, to exert emotional labour, to be seen as indispensable and to produce interactions that organisations and people care deeply about."

Where oh where to begin? Nobody has a right to a career or a job - but that doesn't mean it's okay for the CEO to run the company into bankruptcy or outsource your job to Chittagong. Godin accepts the current view that the behaviour of corporations is like the weather: you can't control it, you can't predict it, it doesn't make sense and there's no point complaining. Except the last time I looked, corporations were run by people who made decisions: it isn't the weather that puts a Tesco outside your nice little town and closes the high street in eighteen months flat, it's some guys in Tesco's operations planning department who know exactly how hard the store will hit the local traders. Godin never even nods at the possibility of a political solution to endemic job insecurity and declining real wages. He only needed to say, as Robert Townsend surely would have, "until the politicians do something to stop corporations behaving like juvenile delinquents fouling the neighbourhood, it's going to be every man and woman for themselves" and perhaps he feels that's what he has said.

Trouble is, the advice doesn't scale. We can't all be remarkable - because then remarkable would be the new average. If everybody's somebody then nobody's anybody - as Groucho Marx said. You can't work Godin's programme if your boss is a bully; if you and your work are recorded, monitored or targeted; or if you have low self-esteem or no confidence. You'll need to move bosses, companies or jobs first. To work his program you need a certain amount of organisational ambiguity around you, or at least a boss who isn't insecure, vindictive or a control-freak. Also you need to be the kind of person who is comfortable taking advantage of the ambiguity, lack of direction, clueless managers and empty policies that characterise the corporate world today. Put those two requirements together and it's not many people.

Neither will being "indispensable" - a "linchpin" -  alter your chances of being laid off one jot. No-one is safe when HR put the names into the hat. Managers use re-organisations to settle scores and get rid of people who don't fit in first, and then think about the job. Many re-organisations are done for the express purpose of removing skilled, experienced (and therefore more expensive) people from the workforce, so that the company can provide its no-quality, price-driven products more cheaply.

I don't like the insinuation that if your life sucks and you're just a decent ordinary guy or gal, well, then it's your fault. It feels like blaming the victim. That stuff about reaching out and trusting the Universe, following our bliss, giving gifts so that we receive a hundred-fold and all that is... tosh. It's a very useful line of argument for the guy who just closed the office in Lower Cokeatington, putting a hundred people out of work: "best thing that will ever happen to you, work out what you want, go after your dream, take responsibility for your life instead of letting someone else run it". Anything the Bad Guys can turn to their use that easily has to be flawed.

I hope one day Seth Godin realises that self-help books aren't enough and only a political movement will do. He would be a superb spokesman and he's nearly there: you can hear the disgust for modern corporations in his writing. It's a disgust felt by most grown-ups who have been through the redundancy / re-organisation mill at least once. Until then, it's every man and woman for themselves, and in that sad world, a lot of what he says - suitably sobered up and de-hyped - is pretty good.