Ice cream castles in the air
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So day 5 of the Ashbo arrives and there is still not a plane to be seen in the skies, well unless you include the one with Willie Walsh on proving that not only is he happy to take on Unite, but he also fancies having a go at the Gods too. With time passing, the jokes are coming thick and fast too,
Q: “What’s the difference between Eyjafyoll and Cheryl Cole?”
And of course the frenzy of journalism is building to a crescendo with talks of Dunkirk spirit abound.
I’m sorry for anyone trapped, I really am. But quite frankly I wouldn’t bat an eyelid if I never saw an aeroplane again……ever.
I can do without bananas, I don’t need to travel far to see beautiful countryside and I think the medium term impact on the economy would be a wholly good thing. And that is before I touch on the carbon emissions and environment benefits.
But it looks like I’m in a minority so instead of pissing in the wind on yet another subject, I started to wonder which things in life I couldn’t do without (other than friends and family which go without saying). And I came up with this, in no particular order
– Cheese and Wine
– Music
– The internet
Which worryingly sums up my life…..!
Your thoughts?
P.S.
A: “Eyjafyoll is still blowing Ash”
Start up, Close down
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You only have to walk down the average high street or watch any episode of Dragons’ Den to know that a lot of small businesses just aren’t what they say they are. Sure they’re small, but there is no business. The guy who likes comic books so decides to open a comic book shop. The couple that like antiques so open an antique store. Whilst running a business needs passion, having a passion doesn’t make a business.
Conventional wisdom has it that 50% of small businesses fail within the first year and up to 95% in the subsequent years. And whilst I’m sure this is for a myriad of reasons, I can’t help thinking that a lot of it will be this confusion between enjoying and being interested in something and seeing a really business opportunity. I’ve never run my own business, but I’ve been involved in the start-up of a lot of new channels and operations within large organisations. We only ever did it where we thought knew we could make a return.
When I look at the proliferation of Social Media consultancies within business I think the same. How many of these are in it because they can demonstrate clear blue water between themselves and their competitors? How many of them have developed a genuine USP (Note here: just because you say it is a USP doesn’t necessarily make it one)? How many of them can prove (and I mean prove) ROI? And how many are in it because they find social media cool and fun and they want to mess around with Twitter all day?
I’m not trying to knock anyone here and I am sure there are a whole host of decent individuals and organisations out there doing great things. But based on the amount of emails that I receive each day there seems to be a disproportionate amount of providers to the size of business available. I would never wish ill on anyone following their dream to set up their own business, but I have to wonder how many will still be in place in 2012?
This one goes out to the one I love
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I want to tell you about an amazing event happened this day in 2002. My little daughter was born. I say little, but to be honest she is firmly on the way to turning into a fine young lady. I don’t normally talk about my family, except in passing, but I’m going to make an exception here. I want to tell you about my daughter and I want to tell you what she has taught me about myself and about my views on other people.
I’m blessed to have two fantastic children, and as any parent I am proud as punch. My son is two years older than his sis and has always been very close to me. In a lot of ways we are very alike. He is studious, he is quiet, reserved and he is quite emotional. All, believe it or not are traits that I recognise in myself. If he has homework from school generally he will settle down to it and get it done. If he has a meal he eats the vegetables first to make sure they are done with. I could extol his virtues all day, but I’m not here to speak about him.
My daughter is everything that takes me out of my comfort zone. At school she is fair to middling. But she doesn’t mind. She told me that she was on the second lowest table for maths. “Are you ok with that?” I asked. “Yep” she replied, “It’s good, it means I don’t have to do the hard stuff”. A little while ago she came up to see me, “Dad” she said, “What’s a rectangle?” (at this time she was 7!), “Umm……its a shape a bit like a square” I replied nervously, “Thanks Dad, you’re right, I forgot”. I’ll be honest there were lots of times when I felt angst. There were worried conversations with my parents as I fretted about whether she would ever learn to spell the basic connectives. This wasn’t the sort of kid that I knew or understood. And I am so ashamed to say, that at times I thought I had failed.
But as time has gone on I have discovered a magic that she has, that has opened my eyes. Leave her alone and she will happily play, making up games, creating new worlds and adventures. Put her in a room with other kids and she will have a whole series of friends within minutes. A few years ago on holiday she became inseparable from two little Dutch girls despite the fact that they had no language in common. Another time one of the parents of another child that had become attached asked me, “Do kids always stick to her like this?” and the truth is they do. Someone gets hurt she is there picking them up, dusting them down and getting them back on their feet.
She is true to herself, she is about as “authentic” as you will ever get. When she gets dressed sometimes it looks like she has dived into a drawer and come out wearing whatever stuck to her, but somehow she still manages to pull it off. She is dippy and dozy and sure she isn’t the brightest kid in the class. But what she does have is charisma, charm and a huge, huge heart. She goes about life her way, she does things how she likes and she ploughs her own furrow in this world. I know she is still young, but I hope that she will always continue to do so.
I used to think to get on in life you had to fulfil a set pattern, that you had to follow the steps to success. I used to think that there were those who did well in school and therefore life, and those that didn’t. I used to think that if you weren’t good at something then you could and should get better just by working harder. I used to think you could compare people and work out who was best.
And now I realise how naive I was, how stupid I was to think that in any way she was a failure. My little one proved me wrong. And I can’t begin to tell you what a lesson this has been and how much I’m a better person for having her in my life.
Happy Birthday x
Brain freeze
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So you want to save money in a large organisation? A large people centred organisation? Without wanting to look like the bad boy?
Easy, right? You instigate a recruitment freeze. No nasty redundancies, slowly bring the cost base down, lose those people who either weren’t committed or ideally were coming up to retirement. Jobs a good’un. That’s what David Cameron has announced this week as part of his plans to generate up to £2bn savings in the Public Sector should he be elected as the next Prime Minister.
I’m somewhat of a veteran of recruitment freezes, my last organisation was to recruitment freezes what Ben and Jerry are to….cream….freezes (Note to self: cut out the dairy based comedy). When I joined my current firm, just before the onslaught of the recession, at one of my first board meetings we were discussing potential responses to a declining market, someone suggested a recruitment freeze. Whether it was the tears, the foaming at the mouth, or the staple gun held to the CEO’s temple I somehow managed to persuade them this was not the right way to go.
You see, they just don’t work. Let me try to explain why. I’m guessing that a large amount of your household disposable income goes on everyday groceries, right? So, I’m going to help you save a little money, because I’m good like that, we’re going to have a groceries freeze…….
“Dad, the toothpaste has run out!”
“Don’t worry son, there is some soap in the soap dish”
“Honey, have you seen the shoe polish? The kids’ shoes are filthy”
“Hmm, we ran out…how about bleach?”
“God, I’ve had a terrible day, work was mad and no-one commented on my blog. Where is the wine?”
“Finished it. We have some ketchup?”
You get what I’m saying? The idea of a recruitment freeze makes a number of assumptions, that all roles are equal, that all roles are interchangeable and that the right people will leave. And that just doesn’t happen. You either stick dogmatically to the freeze to the detriment of the service and the health and well-being of those that remain, or you have to exercise a degree of judgement. We became adept at renaming the freezes as slowdowns, restrictions even chills….that was my choice but no-one found it funny. Everyone has an argument about why their specific vacancy is “critical” and some poor sucker has to wade through the pile of requests and exercise the judgment of Solomon.
I wish it were this easy, if it were well hell we’d all be doing it and redundancies would be thing of the past. It isn’t, they aren’t. Nice try, but no cigar.
Crossing the line
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So after the hiatus that was last week, we….I need to get back to some sense of normality. All this excitement isn’t good for the old blood pressure and as my consultant kindly pointed out, it will get me one day, the question is just how long. If she wasn’t such a “Hot Doc”, I might have been upset… so to calm me down and reduce the excitement levels, I thought I’d talk about religion.
Specifically I want to talk about the case of Shirley Chaplin. Chaplin is a nurse at the Royal Devon and Exeter NHS Trust. She is also a Christian. And as in many of the Christian faith, she choses to wear a crucifix around her neck. The problem came when the Trust issues new guidance indicating that necklaces (per se) were a health and safety risk when working with elderly patients who were often confused and sometimes grabbed out in panic or distress. Chaplin argued that the ban prevented her expressing her religious beliefs and refused to remove the crucifix. When she was then moved into an administrative function, she made a claim for discrimination on the grounds of religious belief.
I am not religious, as you might have worked out by now (either that or I have a SERIOUSLY long confession to make) but I can only think that cases like don’t do a whole heap to help those that are. Chaplin described the ruling as a “poor day” for Christians and said that, “the law doesn’t appear to be on the side of Christians”. Some of the press coverage has been frankly hysterical and scant on facts, namely:
– All necklaces were banned, not just crucifixes
– Chaplin was advised that she could wear a crucifix, but not around her neck. She was even told that they would consider her wearing it on a shorter chain
– As part of the same uniform code, Sikhs were required to remove any bangles whilst working and Muslims were asked to wear tighter sport-like hijab
For once a Tribunal came to a reasonable conclusion, finding that any damage was “slight” and that, “the evidence we have is that there is no mandatory requirement of the Christian faith that a Christian should wear a crucifix”. Yep that will be the one. Persecuting anyone on the grounds of the religious beliefs (or lack of beliefs) is wrong. But trying to create a crusade based on stubbornness and misplaced convictions is worse.
Open Letter to Bill Boorman
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Dear Bill,
I thought long and hard about writing this, but in the end I decided that I had to. I’m an HR pro and I spend my time telling people to challenge bullying and inappropriate behaviour. It would be hypocritical not to do so myself.
On Friday I read a blog post by you (you can find that post here). I didn’t agree with either your original post or some of the comments that were made in response so I made comments on the post to that effect. Later I wrote a post stating my own views, (you can find that here) because I was angry about seeing another introverted self-defiling post on an HR blog, I think I referred to the debate on twitter as “more of the same bollocks”. I didn’t make any reference to you or your post on my blog, because I don’t know you and would in no way wish, through the association with my post, to cast aspersions about you or your level of intellectual prowess or propensity for whingeing.
Unfortunately you, on the back of this, for some incomprehensible reason, felt the need to make what I believe were intended to be disparaging remarks on Twitter. To be precise you said “reading @TheHRD and realising that there is only one @lruettimann of @punkrockHR”. If being compared to Laurie (even negatively) weren’t a compliment I might have been upset. But why you felt you needed to send this to your 4,000+ followers and also mention Laurie and Punkrock HR – another 15,000 people, I cannot understand. Although, I suppose as they say, there is no such thing as bad publicity.
But to cut to the chase, it’s not the actually phrasing of your message that I question, if you’d paid any attention you’d know that on many occasions Laurie and I have disagreed, but we have managed to express our views openly and honestly and I hope without any bad blood. Indeed I don’t think that I have anything but good relationships with any other blogger. What I struggle to understand Bill is why you sent an intended insult to 20,000 people rather than engage in debate? At the bottom of my post was a section entitled comments, you could have put your views forward, we could have had a discussion. Alternatively, you could have responded to my comment on your blog. You chose to do neither. If it was simply that you don’t like my blog…..don’t read it.
I’m small fry, a Z list blogger. I do this for fun. If you look around my site you will see no adverts, I’m not trying to sell anything or gain customers or attendees to a (un)conference. I write as I think and I write as I speak. People that know me will testify to that. I’m real and authentic Bill, I’m sorry if that unsettles you. If you had a beef with me, you should have addressed that directly. Trying to involve another blogger in it, was just frankly pathetic. It reminds me of the bully boy at school that beats up on a smaller kid to try to get in with the in-crowd.
We all have enough to do without people playing stupid games Bill, you chose to make this personal and public. On your website for the TruConferences you state, “You are actively encouraged to disagree, argue, debate and question, all we ask is that you respect one another”. Is that what you believe Bill? In which case, can you explain why you did what you did? If you are about encouraging blogging and social media, how does this sort of behaviour fit? Or is this a question of do as I say, not as I do? Brands take a long time to build, but moments to erode…..you should really be careful.
Next time, please feel free to comment, or alternatively to email me. As I replied in my tweet to you, there is no need to make these things personal. Perhaps you want to give me a shout? Let’s go and have a beer and you can maybe get to know me as a person, before you start grand standing and throwing your weight around. That is what a grown up would do Bill.
I’ve left the comments open, so that you can have the opportunity to respond, although I would ask anyone who comments to do with the utmost respect to others. I don’t want to row Bill, we are a small and disparate enough community as it is, let’s not go beating up on one another.
With best wishes,
TheHRD
Shut it up
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I’ve said it many times before but I am going to say it again. I’d love it to be the last time (as I am sure you would to) but that is about as likely as me getting called up to the advisory board of the CIPD (read UK version of SHRM). So let us be clear:
– It doen’t matter what you call yourselves – be it Personnel Officers or HR Jedis….it’s what you do that matters
– It doesn’t matter how you structure yourselves – be it centralised or decentralised……it’s what you do that matters
– It doesn’t matter if you talk about talent, talk about resourcing, talk about anything….it’s what you do that matters
Shut up the noise, shut up the stupid fucking blog posts about whether HR has a future. Shut up whingeing about how you deserve to be taken seriously. Shut up the in fighting the bitching and the back stabbing.
Get the fuck out of the corner. Get on and do, be great, be the best you can be.
That is the only way you will rock this world. The End.
Affairs of the HeaRt
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I was having a conversation about infidelity and adultery yesterday (as one does in one’s position don”t you know) and the conversation eventually progressed onto workplace affairs. The lady in question asked me what my take on this was and my instinctive reaction was BAD. As in not good……..as in wrong. I should point out at this stage that she doesn’t work with me…..so I don’t think it was a come-on…..although I have been known to be wrong and she is pretty hot…..
Anyway……. I’ve been blogging for a while now and I’ve seen this subject discussed any number of times. For those of you that have been hanging around here for a while I also talked about it with my “naughty boy”. But then I got to thinking, what if I’ve got this wrong? What if this is typical “HR behaviour”? What if the reasons that we are against this are,
a) We are uptight
b) We aren’t getting any
c) They haven’t completed the appropriate forms in duplicate and got them countersigned by their line manager
I mean, ok you can make an argument against infidelity per se. Sure there is a moral argument to be had there. But why is it ok to shag the vicar but not your co-worker? What if we have this completely the wrong way around? I’m thinking there are loads of benefits to encouraging a bit of the old horizontal monkey dance…….a little bone smugglin’ in the workplace?
There are of course improved opportunities for networking, the chance for cross departmental cooperation, there is a clear link with reduction in stress and an undeniable correlation with employee engagement. Not to mention continual personal development and the use of social media to share the……..”outputs”!
Plus….we in HR get to become the “Sex Police“, we get to create competency models, assess performance and design development programmes…..
I’m not asking you to talk about your own personal circumstances….that would be wrong. But what do you think? It’s got legs, right?
Turn and face the strain
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There we have it, UK Plc is about to choose a new CEO. We’ve been expecting it for a while and all we have left if four more weeks to endure before the verdict is announced. On Friday 7 May we will know for certain unless we get a hung parliament (steady girls that’s no as exciting as it sounds)….in which case it could be months……
There are a billion bloggers out there that will cover this with much greater prowess than I will ever have and who possess a greater attention span than I w
Where was I?
Yep, I remember Lionel Messi……
My point….my point is this, UK Plc has a GDP just shy of $3 trillion, it employs 62 million people and has about 26 million locations. That is one hell of an organisation. If you were looking for someone to run that organisation would you choose this man.
Because it looks like a lot of people will. I’m not going to make a party political point here, but if you were recruiting to the organisation above, would you put in place someone who’s only real experience in life is six years as the Head of Corporate Affairs for Carlton Communications. In real speak this means he was the PR man for a TV company, kind of equivalent to having Homer’s Personal Trainer on your CV. Given that before that he went to Eton (which costs about £30,000 per year to attend) and then Brasenose College Oxford…..well he is a true man of the people.
If I hear another mention of the phrase “time for a change” (bearing in mind this is the first day of campaigning) I may have to turn the usage of my Magimix into a dark art on a couple of random strangers just to make a point.
Change is what you do to your paint colour when bored, change is what you do when you go to one boozer rather than another, change is what I hope you do to your underwear weekly. Change alone is not enough reason to hand the worlds sixth largest economy into the hands of a posh, ill experienced, airbrushed politician who is constantly trying to be “down with kids”.
Convince me on the policies for sure, argue with me on the facts. But for pity’s sake, please do not propagate this crock of shit about change.
PS. myzenisotherpeople lasted a day…….it was described as “gay”…..way to go PC bird….
Stranger in paradise
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One of the things that sets our species apart from others is our level of sociability and social interaction. For the large part we are sociable creatures…..most of us at least. As we progress through life we come across people, sometimes for short periods of time, sometimes for longer periods of time. We build relationships, we break relationships, we learn from one another, we love one another and we hurt one another. But without those relationships, without those interactions we would be half the people we are and this world would be half the place that it is.
After my stupid “shameful, ego inflating behaviour” last week (thanks @AnnaYoshica for that feedback!) I was genuinely touched by the amount of positive feedback that I received, so much so that I actually came clean on the prank earlier than I intended because I was feeling a little ashamed. A lot of the warm and supportive comments came from people who I had spent only a few hours with at most and many from people who I have never even met for real. The fact that people would be so nice to someone who really doesn’t deserve it is mind-blowing.
This weekend I played football with a friend of mine and our respective children. We have known each other for just over 30 years now. We met when we were six. And despite both of us moving hundreds of miles from our homes, leading very separate and different lives, losing contact, regaining contact again. We get on. Our families get on. Remarkably really, after all that time. A totally different type of relationship to the ones above, but no less mind-blowing.
Despite the title of this blog, I am constantly amazed by people (but it doesn’t mean I have to like them ok!) the interactions we have, the relationships that we form and how they ebb and flow. I’ve been told I’m a tough guy to get to know, I’m cold, I can be aloof. Sometimes I’m slow to value the friendship that people offer me. There is no one way to have a friendship, there is no one type of relationship that is acceptable. When someone offers their hand, we should always accept it. Sure there are risks that entail (I remind you of the story of Easter) but there are also massive benefits to be had.
For those that have extended the hand of friendship to me, I thank you. For those that I have shunned or rejected, I apologise wholeheartedly (apart from you, yes you….at the back there….yes that’s right, no not him there is not use in pointing at him….you).
For those that I’m just getting to know…….well……if you can get past the cold aloof bit, I think I’m an alright guy…and as loyal as a Labrador…. just maybe not as cute……
My Hell is Other People 
