Communal Living

I wonder how many people have sat down and explored the notion of communal living in Australia. Probably thousands if not millions over the years.

I wonder how many people think of living in an apartment that is part of a Strata Plan as communal living?

What's involved, what are the interactions like, how does governance work? Are the rules know and internalised?

These and other fascinating questions have been exercising my mind recently and I would of course very much like to hear from others who are wondering about the same things!

Write and let me know

Face Lift

Yes folks it had to happen. All of my bogs have had a face lift and are now using the new 'interface' provided by Google. On the one hand I was pleased to integrate my various services, sad to lose the "look" that I cultivated for some time and have mixed feelings about the new management interface that I think is designed for people who can't even try and master HTML or Java.

On the other hand it is FAST!

So if you are pleased, horrified or have some other points of view about not only the content but the look and feel - do let me know.

"Bosses keen to CULL low performing staff"

That's the headline in an article from Management Issues.com

It turns out, when you read the article that the word "CULL" is actually something that was 'borrowed' from a comment by Steve Ballmer (Microsoft CEO) that he culls one in every fifteen of his company's employees.

A former head of General Electric is reputed to have said that "if you've got 16 employees, at least two are turkeys."

I was little disturbed that the views of at least two of the most senior and highly paid executives in the world is associated with thinking of their staff as some form of animal or poultry.

What is being referred to is not to "cull" people in the same way that a herd or a flock may be culled, but to simply fire them if they are under performing.

I have to admit to having some mixed views about this idea.

On the one hand I accept fully that getting rid of under performing employees is in everyone's interests.

A long association with industrial relations would suggest that unless this is underpinned by due process and a fair and equitable system by means of which people are identified as under performers and given at least one chance to improve their performance it should not happen.

Without implying any possible malicious motive to any manager, let's just say that the power imbalance between employers and employees is such that abuse can and probably does happen.

With all that aside I wonder whether those who teach organisational practice could consider adding into their text books some reference to the fact that employees are fellow human beings and NOT lower forms of life.

While the comments may well have been made as a colloquial reference it does make you wonder whether the changes to industrial laws in this country recently emanate from a view that workers are like animals.

If that attitude by senior executives is not changed it could spell some troubled times ahead for the world.

High Fliers

Hand's up all those people who think the following is ABSOLUTELY TRUE!

From Management Issues.com

High flyers - those who reach a senior management position in a relatively short space of time - are more broad thinking, challenging of norms, open to doing things in new ways and more capable of understanding themselves and their colleagues emotions, than their senior management peers.

That's the conclusion of research by Troy Jensen of Kaisen Consulting, who assessed 800 senior managers with known career paths using psychometric tests on a range of personality traits including openness, conscientiousness and extraversion.

Managers were considered to be 'high flyers' if they had reached a senior management position within eight years of starting their career.

My experience of high fliers (alas the researcher did not even bother to use a spell checker) confirms this research - albeit not exactly the way I think it was meant to be read.

In my experience, if high fliers are "broad thinking", then they are usually male and the types of "broads" they are thinking about are NOT what is referred to in this article.

"Challenging the norms" can only refer to challenging people who are like the proverbial "Norm" in those old adverts sitting on a couch sipping a beer, with a huge beer belly and being a total sloth. High fliers do take umbrage at seeing others sitting around, especially if they are NOT doing their bidding!

"Open to doing things in new ways" sure - this is true, but conditionally so.

If for example the new way of doing things has been thought of by someone whose favour they are currying THEN they are open to doing things in new ways.

Any really original thinker in the organisation is fair game - his (0r her) ideas are generally welcomed and then stolen, marketed brilliantly and sold to the powers that be as the high flier's own.

The high flier under NO circumstances sticks around long enough to actually finish doing any of the work. This is usually left to the poor sod who had the idea.

If it works out, the high flier claims all the credit. If it fails then the high flier blames the implementation and tells everyone he (or she) meets, that if ONLY they had been "allowed" to implement the idea things would have been different!

What is exceptionally true in this research is that high fliers are more capable of understanding themselves and their colleagues emotions.

Their understanding is simple - "As a high flier I am out for all I can get and the devil with the hindmost and anyone who stands in my way needs to be discredited, maligned or in some other way gotten out of the road!"

THAT folks is my experience of high fliers and most of the more recent crop are truly around for such a little time that they have no idea how anything works or why.

However they have a WONDERFUL line of management jargon that they peddle to anyone who will listen and then hope like crazy that someone in their new fiefdom actually KNOWS what has to be done by whom and by when.

My advice? Take these management research articles with more than a grain of salt!

Water water everywhere and all too much to drink.

You know the Bible says something like "A little wine for thy stomach's sake"

We have all heard about the benefits of the antioxidants in wine - especially the red kind.

We have also read many stories about people who are simply unable to stop at a "little' and unfortunately become alcoholics.

More to the point we have read about the damage that can be caused by excessive alcohol consumption, the damage that it can do to your kidneys, liver, brain and other parts of the anatomy.

Alas, we have also heard about those poor unfortunates that manage to do irreparable harm to their systems and end up dying from the consumption of too much alcohol.

Well it seems that excess is the major health issue.

Let all recovering alcoholics beware - even water can be dangerous to your health!

Just in from the BBC is the following:

A Californian woman who took part in a water-drinking contest to win a video game system has died of water intoxication, tests have shown.

Jennifer Strange had taken part in the "Hold Your Wee for a Wii" game run by KDND 107.9 radio in Sacramento, which promised the winner a Nintendo Wii.

A work colleague said Ms Strange had reported her head was hurting hours after the contest and was going home.

Ms Strange, 28, was found dead on Friday at her house in Rancho Cordova.

Health warning

Local assistant coroner Ed Smith said initial tests showed death was "consistent with water intoxication".

Some may look at the surname of the poor deceased, and make some unpardonable pun. Not this author.

Others could make tasteless remarks about H2O hangovers, not this author.

The reality is that water in excess appears to be DANGEROUS!

Considering that over 90% of our body mass is made up of water and that in reality we are really giant water bags on legs - it does make you think, doesn't it.

Not only is it no longer safe to leave the family home, not only is it only safe in the family home if it is fortified like Fort Knox, but simply turning on the tap and taking that refreshing libation of fresh water may also be dangerous to your health - unless taken in moderation.

Israel names first Arab minister

FROM THE BBC

"Israel's Labour party leader has appointed Raleb Majadele as science and technology minister - making him the first Arab Muslim in Israel's cabinet.
Amir Peretz said the "historic" appointment would improve relationships among different groups in Israel.

Pete's Points

I suspect that this is actually a more important appointment than people realise. Think about it - "science and technology" minister. Israel has been at the forefront of technological innovations in a variety of areas and this new minister will not only have access to, but control of, those aspects of the Israeli economy and research that are at the leading edge of it's ability to deal with civilian and military issues.

With this appointment, the Israelis can demonstrate that someone who is a Muslim can be trusted with its leading edge technological and scientific advantages. What a powerful message to its opponents.

This appointment harkens back to an era in which great Muslim leaders of the past were aware of the advantages of making the best use of the skills of the people that they governed regardless of their religious background.

Let's just hope that the appointment can remind people of a time when Jews, Muslims and other religious groups managed to coexist peacefully. Let's hope it can catch on elsewhere in the world as well.

Management Information - Yeah Right!

From Management Issues

"Many managers are unable to get their jobs done properly because they find it easier to get hold of information about their competitors than they do information about their own organisations.

That's according to a new survey by Accenture of more than 1,000 middle managers in large companies in the United States and United Kingdom which examined the way managers gather, use and analyze information.

It found that middle managers spend more than a quarter of their time - up to two hours a day - just looking for the information they need to do their jobs, and when they do find it, more than half of it is wrong or of no value to them.

As a consequence of this, almost six out of 10 said that they miss information that might be valuable to their jobs almost every day because it exists somewhere else in the company and they just can't find it."

Pete's Points:

Yeah, well that's what they tell you when you interview them. Of course it is also in the interest of the company undertaking the interviews to highlight this "fact" - after all it feeds their business.

The reality may be very different.

For example, many managers are totally incompetent in the use of the Internet and their computer systems and so would not be able to find anything even if it was signposted and marked with bright fluorescent lighting!

Then there is the lack of adequate record keeping knowledge, training and practice in most organisations that started with the IT revolution as early as the middle 1980s.

"Stuff" is placed on line by a multitude of staff members - each equally eager to bring themselves to attention for their 'brilliant' contribution to the corporate well being. Given the fact that disk storage these days is so cheap that Google, for example can afford to give away (for free) over two gigabytes of hard disk space to ANYONE (and everyone) in the world who wishes to sign up, these staff members DO spend a lot of their time doing useless time wasting typing up stuff they have begged borrowed or in some cases stolen from others and stuffing up into the corporate intranet space. Thereby even further clogging the corporate systems.

Corporations these days no longer talk about megabytes or even gigabytes. Even the Terabyte is beginning to be too small a unit to refer to meaningfully as many individuals seem to want to have terabytes of storage space on their home PC 'networks'.

Hundreds of companies make a living - and a good living at that, convincing people that without their invaluable contribution of indexing and cross referencing tool suites or their invaluable statistical tools or their intelligent search engines based on proprietary algorithms etc a company would either go bankrupt or simply be unable to find stuff.

The question really is do we really NEED all this stuff? In a day to day operation when your staff costs are among the highest expenditures of your firm can you really afford to have people spending more than a quarter of their day fruitlessly searching for stuff? More to the point, do they need to?

Do organisations really need to have many more of their staff spending the best part of their day putting stuff on line that someone somewhere obviously thinks others need to read?

The reality is that too many people in too many organisations spend too much time trying to learn how to use the technology and not enough time doing the work that is required. The reality is that too few staff understand anything about information management. The reality is that too many staff spend hours of time paid for by end consumers, surfing the net or putting useless crap on to corporate systems that no one wants, can find or actually use. Finally, the reality is that so much crap now exists on corporate systems that it is not only difficult to find anything, but it is almost impossible to distinguish between the stuff that is useful and the stuff that is the garbage left over from years of neglected non record keeping!

I suspect that most managers with any sense at all, have one or more trusted acolytes surrounding them (usually personal assistants) or people who are totally skilled up in the use of the modern computing tools and it is these people whose entire job in life is to make the boss look good, regardless of the job description who perform the hard yakka of getting the information the boss needs, analysing it, presenting conclusions and suggestions and for THIS work, being protected, coddled and at least reasonably well paid.

All the time of course, the boss who literally would not be able to find his own index finger unless it was wagging in someones face is getting paid the BIG bucks for being smart and probably shopping on the Internet or chatting to friends, also in high places or making those executive lunches count while they schmooze their way to their next job or should I say 'career opportunity'.