In the ongoing war against pomposity and bullshit, some anonymous people at cynicalbastards.com offer the wankometer as a service. This web site lets site authors discover the amount of management wank in their prose or on their sites. …
Trains & Phones &……things
Railtrack used to have a great service. I could personalise the menu with routes of interest over the web and then make a next journey query using the phone as I dashed towards Waterloo station. It’d give me the timetabled departure, so I knew whether to panic or not! (Of course, an alternative was to remember the timetable). It was useful, but disappeared in the corporate transition from Railtrack to Network Rail. …
Shrinking the Beamer
Boy, I wish I could junk my laptop and replace it with a new age phone with a decent screen. The iceing on the cake would be a pocket projecter with bluetooth connection, so I could use the wall as my visual display. How much would it take to shrink the beamer to pocket size? I own credit card sized torches!
This would really jump start multi-media over the wireless, I’ve played a playstation game on a projected screen 8ft x 5ft and it was awesome. …
Sugar & Spice
In the UK, we’ve just had two reality TV series where school kids have been put through a 1950’s style education. There have been two series, one following kids into a 50’s grammar school and the second has been about a Secondary Modern. …
Musings on wireless information
I’m not one who believed that WAP (Wireless Access Protocol) was going to take over the world; the phone screen is too small to deliver useful content. How long this will remain true is questionable. I went down the shops recently to get a couple of phones and while the screens seem no larger, they are now multi-coloured. (You need to bear in mind, that I’ve just started to use glasses, …
UNIX Consolidation – Top tips for right sizing
There remain some good ideas in this article, which talked about Sun UK’s consolidation planning methodology but it is now mainly interesting as a then contemporary comment. See my comment. DFL 9 Jan 2015 …
Maximising Creativity
For various reasons, I decided to see if one of the early people motivation theories was still currently in use. This is the “Theory X, Theory Y” model. It was first stated in the “Human Side of Enterprise” by Douglas McGregor, published in 1960. This is listed on Amazon as out of print, but they do quote a price and shipment date, and has been reviewed in the last year by Sheila Ale. The top “Google, search site” offers http://www.businessballs.com, which holds an article about the Theory XY model here….
The model poses two forms of management behaviour, one is hard arse (X), the other enabling (Y). Theory X can be characterised as a directorial approach based upon a deep cynicism about staff (or people), which is described in the businessballs article, as based upon the view that people don’t want to work and have to be “forced” to do so. Theory Y was first described to me as “if you look after your people, they’ll look after you”. Again quoting the businessballs article “The capacity to use a high degree of imagination, ingenuity and creativity in solving organisational problems is widely, not narrowly, distributed in the population”.
I find it interesting in that once one reduces Theory X to its minimal components, it comes as no surprise that only underachieving enterprises permit Theory X to be the dominant management culture. Belief in your staff leads to competitive performance, it is this which is the essential part of the theory. For top performance, believe in, enable and liberate your people; we no longer live in a production line economy.
ooOOOoo
…In simplistic terms, I suspect that Theory Y only works when people are enjoying what they do. If they’re not, then Theory X might be the only way to get any productivity. When someone’s in the wrong job, Theory Y gives leeway for taking advantage of the organisation’s culture.
Posted by Sylvia on December 13, 2004 at 01:17 AM PST
Australia & England, a sporting rivalry!
In the Guardian, a journalist quoted an Australian Olympic sportsman as saying “You ****** poms, you can only win medals in sports where you sit down”. Looking at the Great Britain’s medal tally, he had a point. Sailing, Cycling, Rowing, Canoeing & Riding.
It does ignore Kelly Holmes winning the women’s middle distance races, but its a great piece of abuse, with enough truth to make it hard to ignore. I love Australians! …
In Memorium
I didn’t intend to do any politics on this blog but the events in Southern Russia are so appalling. There’s not much to be said, but I wish the survivors and the bereaved my best wishes for the future. …
More about managing the professional services firm
This is an article I original wrote as at the date posted and brought across to this blog in Nov 2015. It is a review, and maybe a development of some ideas published by Geoffrey Moore in an article entitled “Just Shoot Me!”, which was published in Under the Buzz, Nov 2002. The article was subtitled “Managing the Services Function inside a Products Company”. The article was sent to me by a colleague, Mike Habek after reading my previous article. It astonishes me how useful it remains, eleven years after first reading it and thirteen after its initial publication.
Moore believes that the service functions of product companies are trapped inside a life cycle inimicable to optimal service strategies, but that by understanding the cyclical nature of these factors, management can build valuable and valued service delivery companies. In 2015, I’d add that his model offers insight to both data centre architects and consultancy strategists looking to avoid areas that lead to the conflicts Moore describes as endemic in product attached consultancy. …