Who Replaces Irreplacable Me?

Whenever I get a new supervisor, they always want to know how I can share my knowledge, or how other people can support me by doing something I do so that I can do something else. I listen politely and say that it would be a good idea.

Nothing happens. Never does. I think it never will.

I tell myself I have a rare combination of skills built up over decades, as well as a background in engineering, mathematics, and logic, as well as finance and accounting, marketing, pricing and operations, that let me do the job in the way I do. Also I can code: I’ve been doing it long enough to be able to work on the “need to nerd” principle.

This is not a combination of skills and knowledge anyone in their mid-20’s is going to have. And the chances of getting anyone who can actually code for work, as opposed to a university project they have now forgotten, is about zero. People who can code don’t look for jobs as pricing or insight analysts.

I’ve seen analysts come and go through my bit of The Bank for many years. They learn the party-tricks needed to do the job, and that’s it. The chances of them conceiving of a project that requires two hundred lines of SQL defining a bunch of temporary tables and bringing it all together in a comprehensive SELECT query, for dumping into Tableau, is about zero. Don’t get me wrong, these guys can think through business consequences to some depth. They just ain’t engineers.

I can’t teach the problem-solving bit. That can only be learned by doing, until one has enough experience for all the rules-of-thumb and how-to articles to make sense.

I could be being a bit of a dick about this. Telling myself I’m so damn special that no-one could possibly replace me. That The Bank could hire. There are plenty of people smarter, faster and more effective than me, but they won’t work where I work. Partly because it takes a serious attitude to work amongst a bunch of ambitious, focussed people who want results on their CVs. See, there I go again. I’m so special.

Maybe I suggest that they hire someone with the personality to work in the business, has done coding as part of their day job, and wants to help as much facilitating others as by writing Powerpoints with insights.

In the meantime, I can document all the stuff that needs taking out of my head and putting into print.

How Are Things at Work? I'm So Glad You Asked

Recently I entered the late-twentieth century at work: I was gifted a Tableau licence. Tableau is a data visualisation tool, basically a slick pivot-table and pivot chart program: the graphics are sharp and there’s a wider range of calculations available than Excel offers. And it doesn’t re-format graphs every time you change the underlying pivot table - Excel users will understand how valuable that is. It’s fast and organises a heap of charts way better than scattering them around on a worksheet. It’s a wonderful tool for analysts who do what I do.

At the moment my supervisor is a mid-level manager, rather than the ‘Head of’ I’m used to reporting to. She has chronic but low-level insecurity about her continued employment, so she thinks she needs to look as if she’s doing lots of things and taking lots of initiatives. In vain would I tell her that as a Head Office staff officer, she’s as secure as a) her ability to be seen to be bringing in business, or b) her ability to handle crap for her supervisor. Busy doing stuff is a nice-to-have in the good times, a point she doesn’t understand, but her predecessor did.

And somehow Tableau wound up on her busy-doing-stuff list. Which is exactly where it doesn’t belong. Because in and of itself, it reaps not, neither does it sow. It’s a better basket for carrying the corn, or perhaps, a better pair of sandles for walking over the field.

In the part of the business where I work, they are interested in two things: a) meeting their numbers; b) handling the crap that gets sent down from above. When we’re below budget, everything is judged by one criteria alone: will it get the business back on track? (You may think that everyone is business thinks like that, but in service departments, they don’t, and in analytical and strategy departments they never think of these things.)

This leads to extreme blinkers: if it doesn’t help the managers get done what they need to get done to look good against their targets, they simply aren’t interested. Dealing with the alternative reality of the company’s monumental bureaucracy takes up all their brain space, and they have nothing left for the real world. Consequently they have no interest in background knowledge, context and the broader view.

And then along comes my supervisor, asking for the benefits of using a souped-up pivot table, where ‘benefits’ means ‘something that people would think is useful, when they don’t give a crap about anything except making excuses for last week’s sales, improving next week’s sales, and progressing their projects’.

Um. No. Not going to happen. The only benefit to them is that it makes ‘more compelling’ Powerpoints they send back up the line when the high-ups ask silly strategic questions. Which, since that ‘compelling’ makes it look like we all know what the heck we’re talking about, is a helpful contribution to everyone’s job-retention. But of course, this is the one benefit that cannot be said aloud.

So my supervisor is looking to me to provide reasons that don’t exist for something that shouldn’t be discussed at that level anyway. (Tableau isn’t that expensive. If I wanted £100,000 for some of the fancy SAS visualisation tools, sure, I’d want a case as well.) Does that sound like something I can do? Or she should be doing?

That’s one reason I feel uneasy. I’ve got a supervisor who can’t read the politics very well. Still, she goes into bat for me at appraisal time, so I have to keep her happy.

The other is the thought of having to deal with the bureaucracy, with the incomprehensible online forms, sequences of web pages, questions that are written in a secret code that looks like English but really isn’t, and that require far too much background reading to deal with. And which end by sending my request for approval to a chain of people I’ve never heard of. Nobody understands this stuff, because there’s nothing to understand: it’s a series of ritual incantations: chant the right words in the right sequence and you get what you want. Get anything out of place and nothing happens, or you get refused and have to chant it all over again. And when I give up and have some priest talk me through it, it always turns out that the system wasn’t really designed to cope with the type of request I’m making.

If I’m not looking at data about customers and processes, I don’t feel like I’m doing the job I’m supposed to do. The bureaucracy can eat up all the time I give and ask for more. That’s not what I want to do.

Mandatory Training Questions and Answers

I can't resist this. Every month we have to do Mandatory Training. It doesn't actually train us to do anything, it's a box-ticking exercise so The Bank can say it makes us all aware that we shouldn't e.g. transfer money to anyone in Myanmar at all for any reason. So there's a Whistleblowing Line for when we catch our managers working scams (and in fairness, the scamming managers are always female, which I think is how Diversity should be). So this gives you a sense of what the test questions are like...


What happens to Jack now he’s called the Whistleblowing Line? Select THREE correct options 

1. He will never be able to get another job in the company 

2. His managers will give him unsatisfactory ratings until he leaves 

3. He will be treated as if nothing happened, as the Whistleblowing Line is strictly confidential 

4. He will be shunned by everyone around him

Except for where I'm being childishly sarcastic with the options. Should you choose 1,2 and 4, a pop-up will say something like

That's right! Jack has totally shafted himself by showing everyone in the company that he can't be trusted to keep a secret and let frauds and embezzlers get on with their scams in private. 

I forget what we have next month. Something about leaving wires to trail over the floor and not bothering to ask building services to use detergent to get the oil off the stairs.

It's Carl Jung's Colours Time Again!

Every now and then, we do Colours. It’s supposed to make us aware of each others' differing personal styles and so help us work better together. It was invented by C G Jung and is based on two scales: introversion – extraversion and intellectual – feeling.

It looks plausible and it’s fun. But it’s also based on a misleading concept of human action and personality. Here’s my take on it:

If I’m Cautious it’s because this is the kind of stuff that can wind me up in the shit , and I want to be sure I’m not going to wind up in the ….

If I’m Meticulous, it’s because wrong details will wind me up in the shit

I’m not Deliberate

If I’m Systematic, it’s because it saves effort when I have to do it again

I’m not Formal

If I’m Candid it’s because that’s what I think it might take to get the results I want

I’m Straightforward, because I’m a man

If I’m Single- minded, it’s because I want to get this shit done and out of my life

I’m not Purposeful

If I’m Persevering, it’s because this shit won’t go away so we may as well get done with it

If I’m Diplomatic, it’s because I think you’ve got thin skin or a bad sense of entitlement

I’m Nurturing, Supportive and Patient it’s because I’m a decent person, and you deserve it

I’m Dependable, because I’m a man, and you haven’t done anything to disqualify yourself

If I’m Impulsive, it’s because the sun is shining

I’m not Energetic, I just grind this shit out

I’m Optimistic when the odds justify it, which is not often

I’m not Lively

I’m Persuasive when I think you can be persuaded and I give a shit about whatever it is

People have styles, but these are superficial. The transition into adulthood is about living a life that is about achieving results, in a broad sense that includes raising children, making and nurturing friendships and having fun. So our actions are directed towards those ends, and the style with which we do them reflects the people with whom and the circumstances in which we’re doing them. We do what’s needed to get the job done. People who say “I can’t do that” or “I can’t be like that” might be having a childish moment, but mostly we say things like “Really? Is it worth it?” which is about risk/effort vs reward. That’s a very adult view of the world. So I’m meticulous when I need to be, but not otherwise, as are most people. Some people are just super-control freaky (I am meticulous, you are a little obsessed with details, he/she is a control freak) most of the time, and they have psychological problems. That’s why you need to be careful round them, not because they are detail freaks.

In other words, being an adult is exactly not about being at the mercy of whatever whimsical character genetics you were born with. It’s about transcending those to be someone who gets the shit they need doing, done. And Colours measure the residual stuff that we do when we’re not thinking about how we’re acting.

How Not To Lift A Heavy Object

We have to do “Mandatory Training” every month at The Bank. Year after year it’s the same old stuff. Every year there’s a health and safety thing, which includes instructions about how to lift heavy objects. Here are the photographs of the approved style.

I know. Seriously. This is a bank with… a lot of employees. So let’s go through what’s wrong here.

1. Remove the high heel shoes. Because you see lots of guys lifting in high heels.
2. Feet level and hip width or more apart. Because you don’t want to put rotational stress on your hips.

3. How about using the holes in the side of the box as handles? Which is, you know, they’re there for. 4. Holding the box by the sides means she must generate enough friction to equal the weight of the box. It’s very inefficient and not good for long distances of say, ten yards or more.
5. Just try lifting anything in this pose. Let me know how comfortable your right leg feels.

The point is, if they can mess up something this simple, how much confidence can we have that they are doing the complicated stuff right?

Bah! Humbug! Office Christmas Decorations

I have no idea what overcame the otherwise sensible, conservative people who work around me, but last week one of the senior managers decorated her sections with a few tinsels, a small tree and this gingerbread house...

and after a day, all hell broke loose.

Career Development

At my age? I'm supposed to be waiting out the years until I can collect my pension. Yet my manager talks about "development opportunities" for me, and he means the political / people / organisational stuff that would make me promotable. Within the context of The Bank, I'm not interested: I don't want to spend my days in meetings, as everyone at the grade above mine does. They can't decide anything, they have no sign-off authority, they have no teams or resources to dispose - so I have no idea what they do in those meetings. I have no desire to do what passes for "management" at The Bank.

Can I honestly go on at The Bank until I retire? Not if they carry on short-changing us with 3%-5% real pay cuts. I'll be a poor man if I do. Promotion doesn't get me out of that either: on promotion, you get a 5% pay rise, no better than a "developing" rating at your next appraisal which means an even smaller bonus, and no pay rise, since you just got one. You're actually better off not getting a promotion. It has ever been thus.

I'm ambivalent about the quality of the projects and challenges that we get. The section I'm in is basically about producing posters. We don't develop real products and services - we don't have the budget to make software changes, and even if we did, we don't have the priority. No-one ever got fired for telling our product to go take a running jump. Morale is low, and what's worse is the senior management have no idea why. Start with why The Bank can't be bothered to pay the FM company enough to clean the toilets properly. It's actually worse at other banks and insurance companies. 

I used to think my medium-term need was to save as much money as possible for my retirement. Pensions are a joke, so at this stage, I'm talking cash. My short-term need is to make my life as bearable as possible to make enough money to save. At my age, there is no long-term.

Yet I'm pretty sure I'll be working until the day I die - which I hope won't be much past sixty-five. Insh'allah. In which case, why do I need to save? Because I don't think I'll be able to earn a decent living after sixty-five. Except everything I know about knowledge workers and working says that as long as I keep up, I will be able to. The competition just isn't that good - not in this country. As long as no-one has a prejudice about hiring sixty-eight year old contractors - which they won't. Not in 2022.

If all that is true, then the one thing I need to be working on is my technical skills. There's precious little opportunity to do that at The Bank, except for SAS - which I don't like and doesn't have a free version to learn on. To be honest, four months of hard slog would put me up in the top five per cent, and that gets me to Christmas. Even if I went flat-out on a job hunt, I wouldn't get anything by then (it's mid-July now). 

The next thing I need to be working on is getting some kind of client base, or a relationship with the recruiters and agencies. While SAS is sellable, it's a production tool for big companies or a handful of specialised data agencies, which means a Bank-like environment again. That's what I'd like to avoid. The question is where? 

Where do I want to work? It's probably going to be small(er). It's going to be in the West End for preference, but within the Circle Line will do. It's going to have an interesting product that I would actually use. It's going to use some interesting tech. It's going to need what I can bring, which is no-nonsense insight and decent analysis->synthesis->presentation skills. These will make them money and help them design better products, and market those more effectively. I am really good at making money by processing and interpreting data better than other people at other companies - but I have no interest in trying to get the attention of an indifferent bureaucracy. So if you're a big company floating on heritage cash flows, depending on brutal sales techniques to shovel in the new business (and that's a lot of big companies), then we should pass on each other.

The next question is: who's hiring that fits that bill, how do I find them and how do I get there? Goody. My three least favourite questions.

Brand Control to Major Tom

I have just discovered that somewhere inside the Marketing department of The Bank is a person, or perhaps a whole department, who approves use of The Bank’s brands and logos in third-party applications. If they say NO, it might actually stop an entire project.

Some things a company can’t win. Given a fuss about an unauthorised use of the company’s logos, you can almost hear the snarks asking “Don’t you have control over who and when and why your logos get used? How difficult is that?” Then you have “You mean an entire £1m project was stopped dead for six weeks until it was pointless by a bunch of bureaucrats who weren’t convinced it was a proper use of the logos? What stupid bureaucracy.”  

There’s no middle way. There might seem to be, but there isn’t: any rule you make will always have some circumstance in which its opposite should have been applied, and by Sod’s Law, that will be the circumstance that happens.

I’ve always thought the bureaucrat-guaradians should have the role of explaining their reservations, but the ultimate decision must always rest with the project sponsor. And he/she can’t get out of that responsibility by referrring to the bureaucrats’s worries, but nor will they get into trouble if they go against the bureaucratic judgement and then it goes wrong for exactly those worries. Otherwise you send a “nobody ever got fired for going along with the bureaucrats” signal, and guess what your company turns into?

I'm A Million-Dollar Programmer

I've long believed that I'm at my most valuable when designing and coding software for my employers. Getting in the outsiders does result in a more polished and bullet-proof application - but then they get to use tools that I would never be allowed to use, like actual programming languages.

The other day I received this e-mail... (starts)

Hi All,

Unfortunately we’ve not been successful in securing the history for the XXX data feed. The main reason is due to the £1m cost and extra 3000 man days required to deliver this. The key benefit for having the history is to feed into the XXX pricing model but on balance, accounting for the additional cost and prolonged delivery of the feed, the decision has been made not to bring the history across from this source.

The history will start to build when the feed is implemented in July but history should already be building up in (system name)...
(ends)

What you need to know is that the work we were asking for was the productionisation of some routines that a co-worker runs on a Monday morning. I wrote the routines in about four days, which update tables I created and data-filled about nine months ago. That exercise - including documentation and manuals - took about four calendar months, so maybe 40 working days (I had crud work to do as well). It did build on some other exercises I'd done, count maybe 20 working days for those.

I do not get paid £300 / day. Not even close. We have asked how this was arrived at, but silence as there been deafening. Half of it will be for £400 / day "project management" and "design". That's why you have in-team analyst/programmers like me: it's way cheaper and faster. My managers have sent this up the chain saying "look how much value the smart people who work for me create". I'll go for that.

Need I tell you that these numbers come from a Big Name management consultancy and our own IT people? What I said to my managers (but not the high-ups) was: what else are they lying to you about?

On Freedom of E-Mail Expression

I write a weekly commentary about the competition's price changes. I use a sharp style, speculating about why the change might have been made and how important or effective it might be. I've been working in this market for a long time now and I'm fairly confident I can call the changes with a high degree of accuracy. People actually like my "edgy" tone and comments.

Recently I expressed a dim opinion of a competitor's change - saying that it was simply too small to make any difference to anything: margins, positioning or customer perception. This was included in a regular newsletter compiled and sent by a colleague  that circulates confidentially. He incorporated my comment and sent out the newsletter.

Someone sent this back...

"Thought I should point out that we are in a 50/50 joint venture with XXXX and I am not sure that we should be referring to their offerings in quite this manner. As equal partners they would probably not appreciate the tone. Perhaps some feedback to give the YYY team for their future updates."

My first reaction was "oh shit - I've overdone it. The boss will be round muttering at me in a moment." I didn't apologise or explain to the sender, let alone the competitor, and just left it for a while. 

About twenty minutes later, I found myself in possession of a pair. I sent this back to my newsletter colleague...

"We may be partners in a joint operation, but not in the sales arena. XXX run their own business and they take customers from us – they are a leading competitor for our best customers. I don’t see them backing off our customers because we are 50-50 partners in a joint venture - I see them offering the second most aggressive rate in the market.

Individual people may be upset by our opinions, and while that might be understandable on a personal basis, it’s not a professional response. Pricing and propositions are highly public activities and need a thick skin.

We’re as entitled to express an opinion about those decisions as we are about the decisions of ZZZ or anyone else. We’re also entitled to express it as we choose. Do we really want to be the kind of company that only expresses its real opinions in speech, and whose internal communications are anodyne twaddle that’s therefore read and trusted by no-one?"

My colleague agreed, pointing out quite rightly that the newspapers often say much ruder things. and we decided to carry on. No-one of weight has said anything.

It would have been so easy to back down and moderate my approach in future. So easy to agree that we shouldn't express the slightest criticism - by content or tone - of anyone we were even vaguely associated with. So easy to think that maybe the competition knew something we didn't. 

The point isn't that I might be wrong. The point is in the last sentence. "Do we really want to be the kind of company that only expresses its real opinions in speech, and whose internal communications are anodyne twaddle that’s therefore read and trusted by no-one?" Nothing thrives in denial, except confusion, politics and distrust. 

Outsourcing The Dirty Work

There was a very good article in the Guardian last week about Wonga. In case you've been on Mars the last couple of years, Wonga are a payday loan company which, according to who you listen to, has just spent £12m on advertising to make loan sharking look respectable, or so that decent people wouldn't have to go to loan sharks again. A payday loan is generally taken to be less than £500 for less that 30 days. If you have enough credit with your bank and manage your money with even a little sense, you will use your overdraft facility. Payday loans are for people who don't meet those criteria: low-paid, erratically-employed, bad with money or just downright irresponsible.

Personally, I think that the clearing banks - especially those owned in large part by the Government - should be made to extend short-term overdrafts to the low-paid for no charge. Compared to what they lose lending to dodgy Irish property companies and southern European governments, and to what they pay in fines and rebates for mis-selling, the lost interest on a few million quid for ten days is a mere trifle. But that's enough of that.

This is the bit that caught my eye: "The company offices are filled with around 60 mostly young employees, dressed down in internet startup style. There's a personal trainer, employed to take staff running in the park for twice-weekly fitness sessions. A senior team dealing with people who can't pay back their loans are in another basement room ("Don't ask me why Moira has got a Barbie on her desk") but there are a further 100 people in a callcentre in South Africa, charged with ringing people to urge them to repay their loans.Staff say this is a fun place to work. [The CEO's] has a starkly minimalist white office, with white leather sofas, without any papers (everything is digital) or really anything except a bottle of Evian, a bottle of Carex hand sanitising gel, and a huge print of Che Guevara."

The reason the call centre is in South Africa isn't because it's cheaper: there are cheap call centres all over the north of England and Scotland. It's because they want the dirty work done as far away from the shiny front offices as possible. If the sixty mostly young employees had to hear the one hundred debt chasers in action, it would not be a fun place to work for more than a week. It would be painfully obvious what the real work was, and who the customer really is. Wonga seem to be in a state of chronic hypocrisy about who borrows from them. 

I don't like outsourcing. It exports jobs and imports poverty in the form of low wages. It's a fact of business life, and it's not clear that Western economies have the capital to reconstruct China's manufacturing capability back home. Manufacturing may be a lost cause for that reason, but service jobs should be kept in the UK. Outsourcing your dirty work is doubly nasty.

I've had a couple of calls from agents looking for an analyst to work at payday loan companies: the Yanks have read the smoke signals and are setting up over here. I had to think for a night before I could get my personal feelings straight. I can't make a good living from selling to poor people. I'm comfortable fleecing the rich (I don't deal with the rich, but I would be if I was), but not the poor. Fleecing the poor is what governments make Revenue and Customs do, it's what the Welfare State does. Bad company.

This Year's Challenge?

In my first couple of years at The Bank I was always feeling as if there was six month's work for me and then I would be out, as the job would be done. My manager at the time told me that it didn't matter: exactly what we did would simply change, but there would always be work. He lacked the re-assuring bedside manner to deliver the message with conviction, but it's turned out to be very true. In the last three years, I've moved from pricing implementation, to reporting-centered MI, to projects intended to fill in some large gaps left by the IT and data people, to insight analysis, and my latest incarnation is now apprarantly as a product manager. No change in job titles, but some quite real changes in function. The sail of my job description swings with the organisational and political winds.

A little bit of background. When I started working at The Bank, it was dominated by the retail sales function, along with every other financial services company for the last thirty years, which is why the FSA is fining them now over insurance and will be fining them later over Added Value Accounts. Specialist functions such as pricing and product development trembled at the thought that what they had done might have reduced sales. (The same sales the FSA are saying shouldn't have been made.) There was no room for creative thinking about products or promotions: all anyone wanted was a edge on stuffing more down the customers' throats.

It took a change of top management to see that maybe there might be a better way of running things, and sometime last year, product management was duly granted a divorce from sales. It's taken a while for the management to work out what that means for how and what they contribute. The result is that I have become a product development guy with a sideline in insight-focused MI. No more regular reporting, no more projects to make up for the shortcomings of the IT function. A couple of weeks ago, in a fit of absent-minded doodling in a meeting followed by Powerpointing the next afternoon, I put together a product outline that people think is a neat idea and needs developing. By me. It's dawning on me that I should be thinking about spending much of the rest of this year developing and shepherding through the NPD process (pretend The Bank really has something that deserves the name for the moment). Which means I have to look like I'm actually a part of what happens there, and I'm not sure I want to be that. Because what has happened there has attracted a lot of attention from the regulators. Do I really believe it's a different organisation? Has Daddy really quit drinking?

The change in priorities is probably a good thing, because I'm getting tired of working round the limitations of The Bank's IT and data capabilities. It's time other people developed some serious chops, or were hired to provide some. If there was some cool software to be used, or a new language to be learned, I might feel more reluctance, but our three-year-old Chinese laptops use Windows XP SP4 and Office 2007. We don't have access to a real programming language - thought VBA deserves less sneers than it gets. So I'm ready to move on. It's very probably this year's challenge.

What Brainstorming Really Was

There's a fascinating article in The New Yorker  about how valuable being able meet other random smart people is for generating good ideas - that's my take on the description of Building 20. Explains a lot about why no good ideas ever come out of government or institutional British companies (neither smart, nor random nor able to meet).

What I didn't know was that "brainstorming" - the most bogus technique for idea generation ever - was invented, or described, by a Mad Man, Alex Osborn, a partner in the advertising agency B.B.D.O in the 1940's. The notion took off and has been blighting creative effort ever since.

He made the story up. Of course he did. It's what Mad Men do. He couldn't tell his readers the various truths about having good ideas. Who wants to know that good ideas come to you out of nowhere after you've been producing utter rubbish for weeks on end? Or from a random conversation with someone you met on a train, or from a song lyric, which meant something to you because you were soaked in the problem, but nothing to the person sitting next to you, because they weren't? And was he going to tell you what his "brainstorming sessions" really were?

Picture it. A bunch of the guys sitting around, relaxed enough not to be worried about sounding silly, throwing out any old bullshit that occurs to them. What does that sound like? Yep. I missed out the cigarette smoke, the drinks and the leatherette seating. They were in the bar after work, sending up each other's ideas, parodying the clients, making silly and probably obscene remarks about how to use the client's products, and suddenly... the copywriter scribbles something down and vows to use it next morning just as soon as he's had enough aspirin to ease the hangover.

Alex Osborn couldn't describe that. So he re-located it, took away the booze, cleaned up the dialogue and called it "brainstorming". How  else could it have been?

First Thoughts On Insight Analysis

Look at this year's job title and it says something about "Insight Analyst". If you've never run across one of those, it's not surprising: they only roam in companies with huge, and I mean millions and even billions of records, databases of customer data. It's what used to be called "desk research" but with mainframe computers: the buzz-name is "big data".

The insight agencies - such as Dunhumby, Tesco's in-house analyst - like to claim the value of their contributions. What they contribute is usually tweaks to the exact mix of coupons sent to a more refined mailing list. Given the costs of direct mail, that may be worth doing. Google and Facebook are basically selling their insight technology: they are offering the world's best targeted advertising. Tesco, Sainsburys and other supermarkets with loyaly cards can tie purchases to people, and banks can look at your current account transactions. Hint: if you want to hide your patterns of consumption from financial services companies, pay by cash. 

As ever, I like to contrast Amazon with the The Bank. Amazon use an insight approach when they make suggestions based on "people who bought this also bought these". It works well with genres - a textbook on Galois Theory, post-rock music, romantic novels or cookbooks - and it may work with accessories for bigger-ticket items, but outside well-defined genres, where customer volumes are small, it can get bizarre. With volume comes consistency and reliability, but also blandness: large numbers of people who bought Katy Perry also bought Ke$ha. I'd never have guessed. A mathematics publisher won't need telling that people  who bought Hartshorne also bought Hatcher, and Mumford's Red Book, but it's only news to outsiders. Which is exactly who it's aimed at: consumers like you and me who are browsing. I think the Amazon algorithms are fine, and the occasional bizarre suggestions just confirm I'm in a minority. What makes Amazon so effective aren't clever algorithms - though that helps. Amazon's real advantage is that it controls its data: you tell it what you bought, using the references that it supplies. Retailers do the same with bar codes. 

Not so much in retail banking. Retail bankers and their IT people aren't as aware of the advantages of standards as their counterparts in telecoms. As a result, a bank can identify the method of payment, but not what it was for. Reliably. That £254.32 you give to Sainsburys each month? We don't know if it's for food, a loan repayment, savings, a credit card payment or whatever else. Banking developed in the days when retailers generally did one thing - except the Co-op and Woolworth, and everyone paid them with cash. The industry never recognised a need for standards in transaction description.

As a result, when I took over a report that claimed to tell us how many of our customers were taking loans with other lenders, I found more ambiguities and estimates than had been advertised. And I can't resolve them. Nor can a room full of analysts, because we don't have the data. Big Brother may be watching you, but his glasses are steamed up, and he doesn't know what he's looking at half the time. (Are you convinced by those grainy CCTV photos they show on the news? Not me.) 

Messy data in, sloppy conclusions out. I discovered recently that people were using an earlier an even messier version of this data to calibrate pricing models. I have no shares in The Bank for  reason.

Insight analysis isn't management information, which is itself a step down from financial reporting. As long as the segment my analysis tells me should be large and spread over the country doesn't turn out to consist of two hundred people in Guernsey, I'm okay. Does it matter if it's really 4.5m people instead of 2.5m or 6.5m? As long as we start small with the ability to scale up quickly? The point is to spot a genuine segment, and it may not even be that. The point is to produce a product or service that makes money and people come back to buy. Does it really matter how precise the process is? Hell, I'd be happy if I designed the product for one group of poeple who ignored it completely but it was taken up by another group to the volumes we were hoping for. The onyl issue there is that I may not be able to repeat the fluke.

But if the success is big enough, I don't need to.

"Workwise" = "Work Dumb": How Not To Move Your Staff

We were moved to a new office a couple of weeks ago. Right next to Liverpool Street station. Some people think that means that we're now in "the City", but we're not. "The City" means insurance, law, merchant banking, some shipping and commodities trading. It does not mean retail banking. I prefer to say I work in Liverpool Street.

The office itself is cheap and slightly nasty. We will pass over the toilets that you would not accept in your home, the dirty telephones we all had to spend time cleaning, the flimsy keyboards that haven't been cleaned since purchased and don't always work, the floors that move slightly if someone heavy walks by, the weak-ass cafe, and the as-high-as-legal people density. The ceilings are about two feet too low, and the soundproofing so poor that the usual level of office chat, informal meetings and telephones calls generates a permanent background noise about the same as a cinema full of kids at half-term. Earphones and some music won't really do it - over-ear noise-cancellers might, but would look a little odd. 

There are deliberately not enough desks for the people based there. At the end of every day we have to pack up all our crayons and colouring books, laptop transformers and laptops, into a plastic box and put it in a locker. Each morning we have to set it all out again, and not always at the same desk either. Any alleged cost-savings are tiny compared with the twenty minutes a day per person to set-up and pack-up. Because you have to re-arrange all the wiring, computer screen and chair to suit you. We have to log into the telephone on our new desk every day as well - but many simply don't. Within the area allotted to a team, we can sit anywhere, and if someone from outside sits at one of "not-our-desks" we can ask them to move if there's no more "not-our-space". They would rather you didn't have your Amazon deliveries sent to the office, but will live with it if you don't overdo it: though you have to go to the post room to ask. Since you don't have a desk, they can't deliver. And they won't notify, either. Leave a jacket on the chair overnight, the cleaners will take it away. No personal effects, no baby photos, funny cartoons, toy animals, special mouse, technical manuals... nothing. Not even the management have dedicated, lockable offices. Yes, that's right, I'll say that again: not even the management have dedicated, lockable offices. 

This alienated condition is called "Workwise" and has the motto "Work is something you do, not a place you go". Not only does nobody "of weight" buy it, they can't even be bothered to pretend to buy it. Taking dedicated offices away from senior management is one gesture too far. Taking their pay rises away, so that they all face a five per cent pay cut, isn't the most sensible move either. 

It feels fake, only this time, it feels like people can't be bothered to pretend it's real. Not even the management. It's occurred to nobody except the workers that if work is what we do, not the place we do it, then it doesn't matter where we do it, or for whom. Way to go encouraging employee engagement there. 

And of course, then there's the Liverpool Street area. Packed. Everyone rushing everywhere. And they're all indistinguishable, no matter what shape and size they are, mere office canon fodder. The CIty / Liverpool Street is a huge industrial estate that doesn't actually make anything. It has a sense of history - you have to chuckle at "Frying Pan Alley" - but largely in the names and the churches. The best thing that can be said for it, is that I can be back in Soho in about twenty-five minutes door-to-door via the Central Line.

Now We've Had The News, It's Even Quieter

A couple of weeks ago I said that it was too quiet in here: no-one was talking about the upcoming re-organisation. Soon after that, we got the news. Or rather, we got our little bit of it.

The division was divided into grey and yellow positions. Grey positions were assigned - "blueprinted" is this month's word - to people; yellow positions are up for grabs by anyone within the division on the same grade as the position - "preferencing" is the word.

I have a grey position and working for the same manager as I am now (sigh of relief), but there's no place for our supervisor and that's a damn shame. About six other people are in grey jobs, everyone else has to preference.

Preferencing is where you fill out a form explaining what jobs you would like to do and why you should get one of them, and then they give you a job you never even heard of. Everyone who is bored or unhappy applies for anything as long as it's out of where they are: in the last round two years ago, everyone in my team applied to get out (except me, not because I liked where I was, but because anywhere else was even worse). Our Director carefully explained that a position and its accompanying person were grey if they matched seventy per cent or better: otherwise the job was yellow. The catch is that if the incumbent applies for their own job, they are pretty much the best-qualified, most-experienced for it, so they get it. Look at the new chart that way and you can put names to about half the positions.

The general feeling is that the re-organisation has been done to look strategy-friendly rather than practically useful. A perfectly good team of cross-brand analysts, product development and pricing people is being split into two by brand, so that there are two competing brands within the product. That reduces the support the brand teams can call on and when the people who aren't happy leave, one of those teams won't have any senior-level analytical support at all.

No-one is really talking, because everyone is competing for the same jobs, or isn't happy and doesn't want to let on that they will shortly be looking outside.

The real silence is from the rest of the organisation. I'm gathering that some areas are being cut with a blunt and bloody axe, but you wouldn't know it except from the rumour mill. Apparently the Unions were involved in this, but nothing came from them to their members, of whom we have a few. As yet, no real pattern or intention has emerged from what we've heard, no "getting rid of all the central / product / twenty plus years in the pension scheme / with red hair / from Wales / without at least one Sicilian parent / whatever" criterion. This silence is really quite spooky.

It's Too Quiet In Here

A few weeks ago, our CEO announced that 15,000 jobs would be "saved" over the next three years. Not from the poor bloody infantry in the branches and telephone offices. There were promises to leave the infantry alone and noises about "reducing layers of management" instead. Even in an organisation which hands out "manager" titles too easily, 15,000 is a big chunk: someone worked it out as 1 in 4. During the internal announcement, they mentioned en passant that The Bank hires 12,000 people a year, so a hiring freeze would do the trick. Maybe it does, but it doesn't hire 12,000 managers a year.

And if anyone is worried, they aren't showing it. There are no rumours, except that we should be hearing something in the next couple of weeks, and that the Director-level people know what's happening. There have been no mysterious project groups or secondments and if the angels of death from HR have been flying (they were roosting in senior managers' offices every day during the last re-organisation) it's been at night. Nothing. Which could mean everything (no change, just a recruitment freeze) or nothing (the evaluation and redundanc... err... rationalisation process will be announced).

Because of size of the company and the numbers involved, an actual cull would need minimum 30-day notice for At-Risk letters and a public process to get rid of people. This deflates morale faster than a pin in a balloon, and they did it to us a couple of years ago. The feeling is that with a major IT integration due to happen in the next month, management don't need us distracted by re-applying for jobs within the company, looking outside and generally feeling like crap. They don't need us feeling like that, but they might be willing to live with it.

I'm guessing everyone is thinking that it will be everyone else. A large number of people have been working full-time on integrating The Other Bank into The Bank, and yet the business has carried on. Those people are wondering if they aren't rather disposable. My bit of The Bank went through a blood-bath (sorry, rationalisation) a couple of years ago, when they really did get rid of a bunch of... less-performing... expensive middle managers. (And I got stuffed.) Other bits of The Bank dodged that, so many people in my bit think the axe will fall elsewhere. Everyone is hoping that Operational Risk will vanish in a puff of smoke to some central office, never to be seen again.

The City, of course, is expecting 15,000 pulses to be stopped. The internal announcements made it sound like it would be 15,000 positions, a decent proportion of which are already un-filled already, so what we were looking at is a hiring freeze. I don't think so.

Earlier this year, the new CEO held a meeting in Birmingham of all the managers and head office folk involved in the businesses. It took the largest conference hall in the NEC and the trains to and from London in the morning and evening were rammed. I'm guessing he took one look at the assembled crowd and said to himself "We do NOT need this many f....g people to run a frigging bank".

I think we're going to get a really nasty shock.

Seasonal Fatuous Advice For All

I thought I would bring you this piece of silliness, to add to all the other silliness of the season, from those people who brought you Lending Money to Irish Property Companies. Posted on The Bank's intranet recently was this, to keep you from slitting your wrists at the thought of a whole Christmas weekend with the in-laws...

"Ten Tips for your Emotional Wellbeing. ABC Corp, one of our Employee Assistance Providers, has these top 10 tips for your Emotional Wellbeing:

1. Get Active! There is no better way to lift low mood than exercise. Any moderate to vigorous activity can enhance general well-being. Try dancing, walking, cycling. Don't forget to eat well and drink lots of water too!

2. Sing Your Heart Out! Recent research has shown that singing a favourite upbeat song increases positive states of mind.

3. Get The Balance Right. It has been proven many times that people with a reasonable work/life balance tend to be happier and healthier.

4. Let Go! People who 'live in the moment' not in the past are mentally more alert and relaxed. Try yoga or Tai Chi.

5. Volunteer. Get the 'feel good factor' – give to others – get involved in charitable causes.

6. Play It Forward. Positive anticipation has been proven to stimulate the brain to expect the best – this then translates into intentionally seeking the best for ourselves. Result – more pleasure, less stress.

7. Accentuate The Good Stuff. Psychological research suggests that reflecting on our achievements – no matter how small- can boost our mood.

8. Feel the fear – Do it anyway! Stepping outside our 'comfort zone' taking a risk every now and again is good for our wellbeing. A sense of achievement, fun and challenge boosts endorphins (our feel good hormones).

9. Find Your Passion. Throwing yourself into an activity, hobby or special interest has a very beneficial effect upon our mental health. Being totally absorbed in any activity reduces the stress hormones.

10. Nurture Your Social Network. Numerous studies have shown that people who spend fun time with family and friends are generally happier and healthier and live longer."

So there you are. Easy as that. What could be holding you back?

Happy Christmas.

(And in a post to follow in the New Year, I'll explain exactly what is silly about this...)

The Generations Game

It's been Diversity Week at The Bank. In common with all large institutional British companies, The Bank is pretty much British, white and middle-class, except for a handful of second-generation Indians and Chinese/Hong Kong/Japanese middle-class graduates, and the usual smattering of EC and ex-Colonial white middle-class graduates whose partners have real jobs in the City. You will search for a long long time before you see a West Indian or an African face in the Bank and even longer if you look in the ranks of "senior management" and above. Now this is partly because most of the British population is white (check the statistics - the rest of Britain is not like East London) and you need to be half-way numerate and literate, hence educated - or at least have a Business Studies degree - and hence middle-class, to work in banking. In other words, you're going to have a tough time demonstrating a lot of Diversity - compared with, say, an inner-London Local Council.

They did "Generational Diversity" and trotted out a graphic with Boomers, Generation Y and Generation X. It's a hoot. I've edited the graphic to protect my sources so you can chuckle away. For one thing, these are the US generations, not the UK ones, but that's really just a quibble.

The “Generations” idea isn’t serious psycho-sociology, or whatever discipline it should fall into. It’s a marketing device: you’d never heard of “The Greatest Generation” until “Saving Private Ryan”, “Band of Brothers” and all those other Second World War TV series and books. The idea that people will have similar attitudes and expectations just because they were born in the same (say) ten-year period is about as silly as astrology – except that astrology does a lot more detail. There was a spate of petty house-breakings in the early 1980’s: that had nothing to do with the weak moral fibre of the young men born twenty years previously, it was caused by the increased availability of cocaine and heroin combined with the availability of an easily stolen, easily-fenced high-value item: the video player. The disillusion of older people with corporations is not a function of when they were born: it’s how anyone would feel when they have seen all their friends and neighbours get dumped out of work because their employers are run by barely competent, socially irresponsible stock-market cronies. Career dynamics mean that you don’t see this happening to you and yours until you hit thirty-five or so. (But let’s not get into politics.) The attitudes of age-grouped people are due to their experiences, not their date of birth or even the circumstances of their birth. That puts politicians, bureaucrats and business managers on the hook for those attitudes – how much nicer to say it’s because there was no Internet when the disgruntled were born.

Not everyone is included in the “Generation”. Generation Y are supposed to have “multi-cultural ease”. Really? This applies to UK Indian boys who import village girls from back home because they find the Indian girls they went to school with too Westernised? How about the West Indians boys in Brixton who call anyone who aims to be a white-collar worker a “Coconut”? Or the young white lads in the National Front? Not so much. What it means is that nice middle-class graduate boys and girls of many ethnicities get on with each other and eat each other’s food – which is not surprising because it's not the ethnicity that's important but the middle-class graduate bit. Englishmen were marrying Indian women way back in the 1800’s. Attraction has always been ethnicity-free and it has always been culture-specific (smart people mix with smart people, cool people with cool people, outcasts with outcasts, normals with normals).

Remember, “Generations” is a marketing game, so the base population is the one your client can sell to. In the polarised world of post-modern capitalism, that tends to mean those nice middle-class graduate boys and girls of many ethnicities. They’re the ones with the money – outside the City. While we’re on the cultural thing, the “Generation” excludes people with strong morals (aka “religious beliefs”), other assorted outcasts and I’m not so sure it doesn’t exclude all the quiet apolitical people who do their jobs, raise their children to be reasonable people and have never been to an Apple Store or a steampunk event. Within whoever is left, some people will have had good luck, some bad luck, some were just born mess-ups and a few were born into money, contacts and influence. Even if they all went to the same school back in the day, they haven’t had the same lives and may have little in common with one another except a superannuated teenage pop culture.

Look at the details. Notice how "autonomy regarding work tasks" is a value for the older guys but not the younger? Actually, everyone wants that, but it's not so possible with young folk who do the junior and more process-bound roles. How convenient that they don't want it!

The question is why a serious company such as The Bank would go in for this twaddle. In this case, it's an easy way to tick a box no-one cares about anyway. And some people call me cynical.

Promotion As An Anti-Climax

I have done my share of bitching and moaning about The Bank. And I will do some more when they deserve it. But a couple of weeks ago something happened that, well, in cliche-land it would have taken me by surprise, but this is the real world.

Last summer I'd taken a job below my personal pay band because I had had a couple of bad appraisals (the justice of which were mixed), I didn't fit in with any of the jobs on my grade but nor did they want to lose me, and nor did I want to be unemployed. The rules gave me three years' salary protection, but there would be no pay rises. After that, HR could cut my salary back to match the grade if they so chose.
Absent that threat, I couldn't care about grades.

So I came back from a week's break and my new line manager took me aside and told me that they were prepared to offer me a senior analyst role that was in the same pay band as I am. They have been interviewing for a couple of months and the people with more skills than me won't take the job (not enough money, not CV-enhancing enough), whereas the people who will take the job are way short on my skills. Which I knew. I said "I should just shut and say thank you, shouldn't I?" Which was what I did. What I didn't do was feel a deep sense of relief, a sudden uprush of gratitude, a lightening of the spirit or any great urge to rush out and celebrate. I didn't even rush to tell my friends. I didn't even feel a I-told-you-so victory.

Instead, my back and shoulders locked up and became so painful I had to go see my osteopath on Harley Street. And that's where my emotions are: locked. I have no idea what I'm feeling at the moment. I've spent the last fifteen months under the threat of having my salary cut, and on an fifteen month job interview. You might unwind from that in an instant, but I can't.

I've felt lost since. Before I was someone trying to remove a threat to their salary. Now I'm not. Now I have to figure out what I do next. I have to keep up the same pace I've been doing to prove myself, and maybe even exceed it. I have two newbies to train over the next few months, which I can turn into a learning and CV-enhancing opportunity. But right now I feel lost. I don't know what I'm supposed to be doing. Not for The Bank, but for me.