Cool Movies

I have a DVD shelf (rather early 2000's, I know) with what I loosely catagorise as “Cool” Movies. Quo Vadis Baby, Ghost Dog, Heat, The Killer Elite, Basquiat, Dinner Rush, The Warriors, Constantine, Love and Human Remains, The Long Goodbye. What is it that makes a movie “cool”? For me?

The protagonist has to live alone but isn't lonely. They have friendships and maybe a relationship that's about sex, but no love and no commitments. And yet they have the possibility and hope, however disappointed by life, of love.

They need to have striking, watchable, intriguing looks – which Angela Baraldi and Forest Whitaker (Ghost Dog) have big time. This is Angela Baraldi in the trailer for Quo Vadis Baby.



They live in an edgy district and the place is either a tip (Elliot Gould's flat in The Long Goodbye) or spartan (de Niro's place in Heat). In practice they couldn't possibly afford it on whatever it is they're earning doing whatever it is they're doing. Whatever they are doing, it isn't a regular nine-to-five job: the protagonist of many cool movies is a private investigator. They can handle themselves, but aren't action heroes; they are smart, but not Sherlock Holmes; they are cynical, but for good reason.

The story can't quite make sense, because a cool movie isn't about the story, it's about the atmosphere, it's a way to show us the world of the story. Other than the protagonist, the people are at once individuals and stereotypes. The world doesn't quite make sense either, which is why only the Cool can engage with it and survive. You don't see many normal people in cool movies, except as contrast or to have something bad happen to them a few minutes later. When the protagonist has to visit the straight world, from a supermarket to their families, it is somehow unreal, slightly dishonest, and relies on illusion and dissumlation. In the cool world, people lie for a purpose: in the straight world they do it to stay sane.

The world doesn't quite make sense because our protagonist doesn't have the usual motives: wealth, fame, beautiful lovers, career, knowledge, power or reputation. Nor are they easing some inner demon - Lispeth Salander is not cool. There's an idea of finding a truth, or of living a truth (Ghost Dog, The Killer Elite), of being true to yourself or your vocation (both the protagonists in Heat). It doesn't matter what motivates the Bad Guys, because their actions mean they can't enjoy their success for long, so why would they do it? And there are no normal people with normal motives, except as ghosts in comparison to the vivid Cool People.

What I'm describing, of course, is a Raymond Chandler or a Dashiell Hammett novel, the spiritual forefathers of Jim Jarmusch and Robert Altman.

The Job Hunter's Decision Tree

The manager won't get approval to hire anyone.

If they do get approval, it will go to an internal candidate.

If it doesn't go to an internal candidate, it won't be advertised anywhere I see or be handled by any of my agents

If one my agents does call about it, I won't meet the basic criteria.

If I meet the basic criteria and apply, they won't reply.

If they reply, I won't get a first interview.

If I get a first interview, I won't get a second.

If I get the second, they will offer the other guy the job.

If the other guy turns them down, they will cancel the job.

If they don't cancel the job, they will re-organise it away within a month of me joining.

If it still exists a year later, the company will go broke.

If the company doesn't go broke, it will be sold and hundreds of us will be made redundant.

Why You Didn't Get The Job and Other Flannel

The other week a colleague and I interviewed someone for a job in my team - our manager was on holiday. The guy seemed to have a lot going for him, but there was something that said NO to me. It was one of those body-language, facial-expression things. This translates in recruiter-speak as "gut feel" and "not fitting the profile". We have to give him a reason. He had made a remark about being dropped into a role with no support or training and not liking that or appreciating getting a partially-met grading in the role. If he had joined our team, he wouldn't have got any support either. Also, I thought his career didn't quite make sense: why would anyone come from Credit, where the jobs are plentiful and the money reasonable (except at The Bank), into what is basically Sales MI, where the jobs are scarce as hen's teeth? Perhaps my suspicious mind thought that actually he hadn't done too well in each of those jobs and was moving sideways until he found somewhere congenial. I couldn't prove it, but as I write this, I realise that's what I was thinking.

So the reason we gave him was that we had heard his concern about support in a new role and could not offer him what he needed. It wouldn't be fair to drop him into a situation he didn't want to be in. That happens to be true, but the point is, if he hadn't said that, we would have just made something up.

My sister had a second interview for an office manager / accounting manager's job with a small telco whose main investor wanted to sell it on in a couple of years. They really liked her at the first interview, but the second was short and included the words "I think you'd just get bored". Candidates hate hearing this: my reaction is "pay me that and bore me, please!". My sister might have got bored and she might or might not have been able to deal with it, but I suspect it meant something else. This is a telco someone wants to flip. In this market. I suspect that the guy recognised that my sister is too independently-minded to do as she's told and misrepresent the profit as the guy will need to do.

There's a ton of legislation about not discriminating when hiring people, and some of it is right and proper: race, colour, creed, gender, sexual preference - these things should not disqualify you from working at The Bank (though now I look at it, there aren't many Africans working in the finance department, or anywhere. Indians, yes, Chinese, yes, colonials yes. Africans? Not so, any, actually.)  But hiring people is exactly about discriminating, and one of the key discriminants is the kind of person who will do the job effectively in the political and organisational circumstances. An interviewer is not looking for a reason to say NO. They are looking for a reason to say YES. (This does change if they need to hire two gross of call centre operators or Java programmers in a month.) That reason is the elusive "fit". You may have flunked the test or be over-qualified, but that's all just flannel: in the end, they found someone who fit and that was that.

Miscellaneous Stuff Part 215

My nephew didn't get the grades he needed. His coursework was graded A by his tutor and C by the examination board, and he got a D in one of his History essays. A number of the other students at his college were in a similar position, but an appeal makes no difference: entry is determined by the grades on the day. He's made the phone calls. So he's going through clearing and has put in for courses at Essex and Royal Holloway. Damn. I know this happens to thousands of people, but....

The water pressure suddenly went in the house this evening. Thames Water's site tells me it's a power outage at the pumping station - the second one recently. A little further down the page, I found this...

WC1A: Piccadilly Circus and Leicester Square
We have started work in the Piccadilly Circus and Leicester Square area to remove a large build up of cooking fat from the sewers that can cause nasty blockages and result in flooding if not dealt with.

We are sorry for any inconvenience this may cause and will carry this work out during the night time (from 10pm) to prevent traffic disruption.

Work started on 27 June and will take approximately 8 to 10 weeks to complete.

Wha? Cooking fat? This is one of those things you don't think about if you don't work in the industry, I guess.

The scrappy posts are because I'm having an emotion or three. It's so bad I even shared at a local meeting. The issues from this post still haven't gone away. Why would they? Nothing has changed. Normal service will be resumed shortly.

Fruity Thursday

My nephew has his A-level results due tomorrow. Three A's and he gets to go to Sheffield to study History. Back-up is Queen Mary College.

The photographers won't be taking pictures of him getting his results at the local FE College. They will be snapping the germ-free fruity eighteen-year olds at whichever Girls' School has let them in this year. And the Daily Telegraph will run the photos on the front page. Call it Fruity Thursday.

Do it with style

Any athlete will tell you that the better your style, the less effort you make for the same result. "Less weight, more style" is a familiar comment from a trainer in a weights room.

Style is not flourishes and flair, it isn’t a gestures and mannerisms. It’s not tricks. Style is doing it smoothly, quickly, efficiently, neatly, with a minimum of fuss, bother and clattering about. It’s also about catching the informed eye, with an understated something special.

You have to practice when the other kids are watching the latest hit TV show or having a great lads or lassies night out; you have to want to be good, not to impress the girls or the boss, but to satisfy yourself. You have to give up fantasising and live in the horrible here-and-now of your actual skills.

The original Zephyr skateboard team surfing and skating every hour they could; Eric Clapton practicing the blues eight hours a day before he was twenty; Kernighan and Ritchie developing the C programming language and showing the world what the phrase "tight code" really meant; fashion designers from Armani to Zoran obsessing over cut, colour and fabric; and every world-class athlete practising every day for hours… face it, style is just geeky.

You have to have taste as well, or you can’t recognise someone else’s good style and learn (or steal) from it. Taste is all a bit tricky: who says my judgement is better than yours? It takes humility to develop taste and it takes knowledge to exercise informed discrimination.

Once you shoot for style, you’re putting your work up to be judged and yourself as a craftsman up for judgement as well. That’s a tough one – especially when there were a hundred kids at university better than you.

That understated something special is going to pass the hoi-polloi right by. Style is for the cognoscenti. It’s undemocratic and elitist. Get over it. The pay-off is that you do more with less effort. Your work shines. You get into heaven because you chose to use the talent and ability you were born with. You get to be a person with an identity because you identified with something enough to be good at it.

Who's a Stakeholder?

I've just finished a two-day course on managing stakeholders run by The Bank - another of its non-prescriptive what-does-it-mean-to-you exercises. The idea of "stakeholders" was introduced in 1963 by the Stanford Research Institute and defined to be "those groups without whom the organisation would cease to exist". It's one of those ideas that works as long as you don't get too close to it. What it can't mean is "anyone who has an interest in what the organisation does", because if the organisation is big enough, that's just about everybody and the idea becomes just about empty.

I'm going to jump to my conclusion here: a stakeholder is anyone who has a legal, economic or other substantial relationship with you or your project and stands to have their life made worse if your project fails. Take the idea of "worse" seriously here. Employees are stakeholders because if the firm fails, they lose their jobs. Customers are sometimes stakeholders, such as when they are holidaymakers with a tour operator (what happens when the operator goes broke?), and sometimes not, if all they buy is a chocolate bar. Not being able to have your favourite chocolate bar does not make your life worse, though it may make it a little less sweet. Some patients in a hospital are stakeholders (if they are in for life-saving operations) and sometimes not (if they are in for cosmetic surgery). We are all, however, stakeholders in the Water and Sewage company - you want to think about how much worse your life is going to get without potable running water and with blocked sewers? Some things don't have any stakeholders at all - like the local car boot sale or the next episode of some cheap reality TV show.

Within a company, who are your stakeholders? Your Line Manager, who will get their ass kicked if you screw up. Maybe their boss as well. How about the people who do the work? If your project fails, what happens to them? Not much, unless they were hired specifically to work on the project and are fired if it's not there anymore. The full-timers still have jobs: failed projects make work for the working man to do as much as successful ones. There may be people waiting for you to finish your project so they can do theirs, but if you fail, they will find another way of getting started. Their lives are a little more difficult, but "more difficult" does not mean "worse". So not them. The suppliers are happy-ish because they still got paid for all that stuff that no-one is going to use now. They may have to find another customer to replace the business the successful project would have given them, but having to find new business doesn't make their life worse, just a little more difficult. If the project was going to provide many new jobs to the area, those people who now won't have those jobs and can't find others, they turn our to be stakeholders.

So what are all the other people who are working on the project and / or looking forward to its success, but whose lives won't end if it fails? In the loose parlance of modern business, these are "stakeholders", but they have nothing at stake, so they aren't. They are what they always were: suppliers, contractors and employees, doing their job. You need to "manage" them: you need them to give you time and perhaps money; you need them to do the work to schedule; you need them to not obstruct you; you need to keep them informed and keep informed by them. You need to stroke egos and keep the high muck-a-mucks informed. You need to do all that stuff, but that's not "managing stakeholders", it's "dealing with the people you need to work with." Or, work, as it's otherwise known.

Does it matter? Yes. Because once you know this is really about "managing the people you need to make your project work", it all gets much more specific and, well, you could almost be prescriptive. It's also because it creates the illusion that everyone depends on everyone else - "we are all stakeholders" - when in fact your project could die a wheezing death and nobody would notice, care or be one jot worse off. Which is what actually happens.