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.

On Authenticity

During the Team Leadership course, the tutor mentioned the management guru idea of "authentic leadership". What did we think that meant? (These courses are a lot like Teacher Training - there's a lot of breaking into groups and discussing things.)

The usual definition is that you're being authentic when you are acting in accordance to your inner, desires, talents and needs, rather than those imposed on you by parents, peers, schools and work. There are all sorts of problems with that definition, starting with how you identify your inner needs, moving on to what happens if meeting those needs involves illegality or gross moral turpitude, and ending somewhere around what you do if you can't make money following your bliss.

It's a tricky idea, and there's no doubt that the management guru who swiped it was indulging in some semantic inflation when he used it. "Authenticity" is a technical term of existentialist philosophy. What the management guru means is "sincerity", "honesty", "independence of mind", and "lack of hypocrisy". Doesn't sound as sexy though. So what is it?

Well, as a start and to borrow an idea from J L Austin, "authenticity" is not a trouser-word: the concept of authenticity doesn't do the work, which is done by the associated negative concepts: fake, false, dissembling, put-on, made-up, forgery, going-through-the-motions and a hundred others. When we say something is authentic, we mean it's not any of the many varieties of fake. Attempts to describe authenticity in positive terms tends to vanish into hand-waving or tautology (such as "being authentic is being real"). So in a way, I rightly had no idea what they were all talking about, because the word has no positive meaning of its own. And a good honest plain English answer that is too.

Then I read a passage in Karl Jaspers' Philosophy of Existence: "what I myself am...always remains a question... My authentic self can never become my possession; it remains my potentiality. If I knew it, I would no longer be it, since I become inwardly aware of myself...only as a task." The last bit is easy: you are not a to-do list, nor the project manager of your life. You are more than that, even if you can't say what more. It was the first bit that was really interesting.

Suppose authenticity consisted in doing U, V, W, X, Y and Z. Suppose that those are well-described actions or dispositions (rather than vague, waffly hand-wavy gestures in words), so that you could learn how to do them. Then you can learn to do them whether you mean it or not. In other words, now you can fake authenticity. Errr, oops. Contradiction. So there must be something about authenticity that can't be well-described, some extra ingredient that can't be said, but only sensed or perhaps judged. Perhaps it's an attitude, a state of mind and a disposition of behaviour. None of which are things you can learn as a trick.

Authenticity isn't about some struggle between you and the rest of the world for the righteousness of your soul. I don't see why you can't be a graduate of Eton-Oxford-McKinsey and authentic at the same time. Nor do I see that being an unemployed dropout from some dysfunctional East London secondary school makes you any automatically authentic. It should be as possible for an accountant to be authentic as for a conceptual artist. It should also be possible to be an authentic asshole as well as an authentic Good Guy.

You are being authentic when you think, feel and act as a subject rather treat yourself as an object. Roughly. Acting like a subject means that your actions and reactions are based on what you need, want and desire, and how you think, feel and intuit at the time. Treating yourself as an object means that you deliberately check and filter your immediate reactions and urges and replace them with ones that will meet the approval of others, or will project or maintain an image of yourself you wish to project. Because you are not a psychopath or a borderline, one of the things you want is that you should not hurt or upset others needlessly: manners and tact are not in-authentic. This is the balancing act of authenticity: too little guard on your responses and you're being tactless and gauche; too much tact and self-management and you're being misleading, opaque and very possibly insincere. Similarly, too little planning and you're living in directionless chaos, too much and you're being your own to-do list. Authenticity is the constant struggle to resist falling into conventional response, managed behaviour and a daily routine on one side, and the chaos of immediate impulse on the other.

Authenticity requires self-knowledge and honesty. This makes it difficult for people who have been raised in dysfunctional families to be authentic, as they simply don't know enough about themselves. It is also difficult for people who have been brought up with grade inflation and politically-correct praise to be authentic, as they have an utterly unrealistic idea of their skills and knowledge.

A wife who feels attracted to a man she meets but does not sleep with him is not being in-authentic: she is keeping her marriage vows. If she denies to herself she wanted to shag him senseless, she's in denial, and denial is never authentic; but if she denies it to her husband, she's being tactful. Good corporate drones live in a state of perpetual bad faith, and the guy in the video store working on his film script crosses the line between hope (authentic) and delusion (inauthentic) hourly. Anyone who takes a job where they have to apply rules and can say "it's not me, it's the job" is as inauthentic as a seven-pound note. And Clairol Balsam Golden Blonde always crosses the line. After all, if you're going to lie about your hair colour, what else are you going to lie about?

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.