"Senior Management"

A friend of mine was recently told they were part of “senior management”. Of a company, granted of seven-figure turnover, employing fewer than fifty people and with offices in the basement of a shop on a south-west London high street. Next to the fish shop. Oh. And they're a part-timer: three days a week.

In my book, a manager can hire-and-fire and spend on their own authority up to certain limits: approving expenses doesn't count. If you have to get approval to get on a plane, book a hotel and go to that industry show in Copenhagen, you are not a manager. You are a senior manager when you can do all that, sign contracts, effect re-organisations and spend quite sizeable sums either on your own authority or because the Board (not some other manager) said okay. If you didn't negotiate the terms of your contract of employment, and not just the salary, then you are not a senior manager.

Needless to say, my friend could not do any of that. What struck me as silly, pretentious or both was the idea of a small company having “senior management”. It's even more daft than the idea that a school has “senior management” - and they do, you know (the Head and his / her cronies, I mean, team). The idea of "senior management" in local government is equally risible. It's sheer pandering to vanity and would be hilarious if these people weren't paid six-figure sums for underpaying and under-training their staff, whom they try to make as insecure as possible. 

How did the concept get so devalued? Why on earth do people want to be called “senior management” when they have none of the powers and perks? And if a bunch of men and women in open-neck shirts in an open-plan office are “senior” what do we call the guys with their own offices who can hire-and-fire?

Oh. Yes. They would be “Directors”. Not real directors whose names are down at Companies House and who have to approve the Annual Report and Accounts – but titular “Directors”.

Just who is fooling who here? I suspect the answer is that no-one is fooling anyone, but they all have to pretend that they believe.

Why would anyone impose that kind of psychic double-thinking idiocy on other people? Well, because they are fooling themselves as well as everyone else.

Which it turns out is exactly what my friend's employer was doing.

How To Spend - Sunday

Aside from the bit where I woke up at 6:45 – that's 06:45 in the morning and had finished the weeks ironing by 08:30. I had steak, toast and coffee for breakfast and set off driving into London at 10:45, parking just off Piccadilly at 11.20 (try doing that by public transport). The intention was to see Helen and then Little Ashes at the Apollo. A quick stop into the Royal Academy to look at the Kuniyoshi exhibition, which bounced right off my eyes this time: on the previous visit, I'd got it.

I spent an hour browsing among the gardening books at Waterstones, coming away with two that seemed to have the right balance of sensible advice in print and pretty pictures that might just be something you and I might just one day grow – as opposed to a roof garden on the Upper East Side. In the hour or so between the movies, I wandered into HMV and found the latest Seether CD and chanced across the Keith Jarrett Bremen / Lausanne Solo Concert, which I had on vinyl but hadn't rushed to get on CD. Silly me - it's two of the best piano concerts ever in the 2oth century. Follow the shopping by a Pizza Express (I told you it was a simple day) and then seeing this lot on my way back to the cinema.

Monday evening, I'm going to see Duplicity at the Empire Leicester Square.

Hell, if they're going to re-organise me out of a job, I'm going to have my idea of a good time right up until the moment the axe falls.

The Philosophy of Mistakes: Work In Progress Has No Mistakes

I have been thinking about mistakes recently. How I make them, why I make them and why I seem to make so many of them on spreadsheets, presentations and code. That would be me and you and everyone you know as well.

The guru of errors is Professor Raymond Panko at the University of Hawaii. His site, which is well worth a detailed read, contains many reassuring figures, amongst which is that even experts make mistakes in 22% of their SQL queries (on a text editor rather than a Access-style designer, I assume).

This sounds right. I start with a business problem and “write” the query. At this point I'm really thinking about what fields and calculations I want and what conditions I need in the WHERE and HAVING clauses. I am not thinking about SQL syntax and so what I've written is full of SQL solecisms, but I can't see them because I'm not looking for them, I'm looking at field names and dates and conditions and other content. I'm not looking for commas, un-paired brackets and other such things. Plus I forgot that “salesvalue” has an underscore “sales_value”. So I hit run and the complier hits me with all the solecisms, and the next time I get the 'can't group on an aggregate' and related errors. Damn. Left out the City name. So I add that and run the query – ooops, forgot to change the “group by” clause to include the new field.

What I'm really doing here is clarifying and then solving a business problem by writing an SQL query. As a result there are a lot of false starts, as I correct the syntax, then correct the content of the WHERE and HAVING clauses, then change the calculations for some of the aggregate fields I want, then realise I need more or different fields... and so on.

Of course, I was supposed to clarify the problem and then specify the query first, before cutting the code – but that just shifts the false starts to a scrap of paper. Plus I can guarantee that even when you do write the thought-through, specified query, there will still be a comma missing and you will realise you needed an extra field.

Now, while I'm in this loop, concentrating neither on the SQL syntax, nor on the correct spelling of fields names, nor on the content of the query, but flicking from one to the other, I'm in a work-in-progress. While it's a work in progress, there will always be stuff that is not done yet, mis-spelled, not formatted nice and badly coded. These aren't “mistakes” because you're not finished yet. Mistakes only exist in the release version – though there are people who will look at your work-in-progress and loudly announce all the things you haven't gotten round to yet as if you forgot them. (Those people are destined for a long time in the grey wastes of Purgatory.)

There may be no mistakes, but there can be a lot of frustration as I wonder why it's all taking so long for my poor, tired brain to cope with it. Which will be what the next post on this subject will be about.

What's Your Excel Party Trick?

The very wonderful Helen Kohr told me she had been asked this question when she had gone for an interview. Every industry will have a couple of Excel functions it really hammers: in telecoms it's VLOOKUP and some financial people told me their most used function was SUMPRODUCT (okay, they weren't really financial people, they just worked in a bank). Outside the Industry Party Trick and the usual SUM and IF, I don't think I'm exaggerating if I say that most people do not use the full suite of Excel functions frequently. I mean, just when would you use WEIBULL anyway? 

What the question admits is that learning Excel or Open Office Calc or Numbers is not something you can do in a week. These are huge programs, packed with features and facilities, the learning of which exceeds any one-semester course you and I did in maths, theoretical physics, electrical engineering or computer science. Start with the Excel object model – how many times have you seen people write code to write a recordset into a worksheet range? And then coo with delight as the numbers stream across the sheet. Well, there's a method in the Range object that does it so fast you can't see it and without re-calculating each time it writes in a number. No – you can look it up yourself. Now here's the catch – it only works if you declare the variable holding the recordset as a variant, not a recordset. And no, you won't find that in the manual, I had to to trawl the web forums before I found it. Or take the financial functions: you can pretty much figure out what NPV, IRR, RATE and PMT are for without knowing too much. How about NOMINAL? Or COUPDAYSNC? You'd have to know something about bonds before you could use them. And how about WEIBULL? It's safe to say that you are never going to learn about this unless you were hired in part for your experience in statistics. Learning about the functions means learning about the reasons you would use them: that isn't trivial.

Excel is used by business analysts and they are paid to be interested only in their business. Most commercial businesses use a handful of functions – hence the party-trick approach. Why would they pay their people to learn stuff they won't use and don't need?

Because the more your people know, the better they can solve your problems. They feel more confident, they will try different approaches to problems and maybe come up with smarter solutions. Learning this stuff is good for the brain. The company is paying these people to be smart: why would it encourage them to be dumb?

They Call Me The Snake

I know I'm not supposed to buy CD's from stalls in Camden Lock because it infringes copyright and kills music and reduces profits for the industry and... Yep, I don't buy that BS either. If the music industry doesn't want people buying dodgy CD's, it should keep its back catalogue open. That the two Saraya CD's (Saraya and When the Blackbird Sings) could possibly be out of catalogue is beyond me. But that wasn't what I found.

You know those blues albums you hear in cafes or clubs but you can never find in a record store? Funky, dirty, a thick guitar sound and a deep voice half-speaking, half-singing? The guitar licks kinda thrown away, flicked out between the vocal lines? An indisputable groove? Well, such is They Call Me The Snake by Luther 'Snake Boy' Johnson. You can find mp3 downloads on Amazon, but what I have is a double-CD. £10 – a bargain.

He's not to be confused with Luther 'Guitar Junior' Johnson (see You Tube for video) and there's a brief biography here on Answers.com - but no Wikipedia yet.

Swine flu - Scare Me Again

You don't believe in Swine flu. That is, you don't believe it is a full-on, population-decimating, world-circling pandemic. You'll never say so if a reporter asks you, and of course you'll nod along when the company stops you travelling, or makes you take your laptop home in case commuting is banned overnight, or when the headteacher closes your daughter's school... but you don't believe a word of it. It's the belief that dare not speak its name – that all these scares are hyped.

You have this vague feeling that if it really was that deadly, they'd only know what it was after the first eight thousand dead bodies had been buried; that the Mexican village where it started would have a population of three by now; that international flights would be cancelled. You've heard that new viruses start deadly but only survive if they turn less deadly, because if they stay deadly their host population dies too fast and takes the virus down with it. Since they know what this thing is, it must have reached the “less deadly” stage. You've heard of the 1919 flu outbreak, which killed more young men across the world in six months than World War One did in just over four years. That's a pandemic.

But editors have to sell newspapers (not that Swine flu is obliging them with headlines); pharmaceutical companies have to sell medicines; politicians and corporate honchos have to be seen to be saying “the right thing”; bureaucrats and scientists in the WHO, CDC and other health organisations get to look important and maybe protect their budgets for next year. And the one border the USA really, really, wants an excuse to control? Oh, right, that would be the one with, yep, Mexico. Sadly Swine flu isn't going to be a good enough scare.

At the back of your mind, you're saying “better safe than sorry”. Really? The flu is the only risk around? At the front of your mind, you're saying “who cares? It's not going to affect me, no-one believes it anyway and I don't pay it any attention.”

But it does affect you. You pay taxes to fund all these people. They are wasting that money on nonsense when they should be spending it on something useful. They are wasting their time on this rubbish, when they should be using that time on something useful. It's a distraction from the real work of those involved.

Here's Your Bonus - In Subordinated Debt

There are many reasons I'm glad I'm not a manager in a large British company. The fact I don't have to bullshit my staff is one of them. Bullshitting your people is as bad as lying to them and just like lying to them, it makes everyone hold each other and themselves in contempt. Everyone tells each other that of course they had no choice but to talk that nonsense: keepup  morale, stamp out gossip, sing from the same hymn sheet – but of course they did have an alternative: the truth.

Our Director broke the news about last year's bonus payments: 2008 bonuses will be paid in three tranches of subordinated debt starting in June 2010. This applies to anyone earning over £40,000 a year or head office middle managers and above, not to the retail staff and sales people. Since the bonuses are never more than £2,000, this means those who get them will get their last £700 in 2012, when it will be worth 15% less than it is now. And that's the debt instrument they'll get from 2010 to 2012, not the cash.

Hello? Subordinated debt? For four-figure bonuses? Did no-one hear themselves saying this and stop to wonder how silly it sounded?

He “delivered the message” because he's a pro and the message wasn't worthy of his delivery. It was twaddle about how the public thought bankers shouldn't be getting bonuses and this was responsible governance. Let's stay focused on the customer, it's really business as usual, we carry on with our day jobs and try not to let the Press and the rumours distract us from achieving our H1 objectives.

The truth is that the public know the difference between an ordinary mortgage-ridden middle-manager and a six-figure salary trader or seven-figure bonus Board member.

Why did the company do it? Never try to figure out why people do dumb things – you're trying to make sense where there is none.