Don't Compromise!

It’s not often we encounter ‘evidence’ and ‘values’ in the same paragraph, so Charles Jacobs posting Values Investing caught my attention (with apologies to him for taking since April to get to reading it.)  While leaders, managers and learning & development professionals have long held that values matter, it can tempting for many of us to just see them as being of the same ilk as school mottos – something we can vaguely aspire to living by when we haven’t got too many deadlines bearing down on us. Yet it seems Jacobs, Peter Drucker and the Bishop of London share some common ground.

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Two very different ‘crackers’ to bring to you today – nuggets from around the web we think deserve a wider audience (for the full catalogue, see our Crackers page).

Deadline: an object lesson in just what you can achieve in a large number of hours if you are immensely disciplined, use enormous quantities of post-it notes, and have an ironic approach to the concept of deadlines. If you’re rationed to one smile or chuckle a week, this is a contender.

Socrates Versus the Apes: although Charles Jacobs is writing here about writing – in his otherwise interesting Management Rewired blog – he has an interesting point about human behaviour, communication, and the development of arguments and opinions. If your colleagues’ behaviour alternates between rock-throwing, hooting and conciliatory grooming, Jacob’s insights may help you to lure them down from the trees.

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What do all the following people have in common? Rudy Guiliani; Roger Scruton; Conrad Black; Diana Ross; George Lucas; Rutger Hauer; Jerry Springer; Kiri Te Kanawa; Robert Powell; Jeff Beck; Erno Rubik? So far in 2009, they have all turned 65. Accordingly, they have reached retirement age, and are – by extension of this ‘logic’ – no longer required. They can hang up their boots, plectrums, cubes, frocks and microphones: their abilities have left the auditorium. Speaking purely personally, I could live without a couple of them, but surely our attitude to arbitrary ‘best before dates’ on our fellow human beings needs a rethink?

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I’d hardly call myself a natural Daily Mail reader, but – if you’ve ever accused it of being the paper that knows the price of everything and the value of nothing (rather like Yes, Prime Minister, which described it as being “read by the wives of the people who run the country”), one article yesterday might change your mind. We’re not bowled over by the scientific accuracy – asking 1000 people to compare 50 life events to the pleasure of winning the lottery – but the answers are certainly interesting. It might not tell business leaders how to value their staff, but it certainly tells them what their staff are really valuing.

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He may – in many ways – belong more logically in a review of IT or of knowledge management, but Vannevar Bush surely deserves a few paragraphs in any history of leadership. Yet oddly for a man whose lifetime was filled with achievements (his Wikipedia entry gives you just a hint), he is remembered today for being the – possibly unintentional – godfather of the Web. This is largely due to an essay published in The Atlantic Monthly in July 1945, called As We May Think, which influenced many crucially important figures in computing in the 1960s, 70s and 80s. This one single legacy would make Bush an interesting figure, but it’s some of the other content of that original article that makes the biggest impression on me.

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It’s National Laughter Week. You didn’t know? Your office wasn’t rocked with mirth and rent asunder with guffaws? Shame on you. As you obviously need them, here are some suggestions as to how to mark the occasion, together with a clear injunction:

Be a leader. Start the laughter.”

What, you missed that line on the job profile? Gaiety? Merriment? – oh, where will these dread responsibilities ever end!

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Measurement is an inescapable element of many aspects of our lives. To assess failure or success, we must first measure. Unfortunately, the resulting yardstick can often become either something to beat something else with, or something to grasp the wrong end of. So how can we get the measure of measurement?

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Sometimes that which makes you titter quietly can be unexpectedly informative. I recently inadvertently eavesdropped one end of a phone conversation that not only underlined just how much bad customer service there is in the world, but made me think a little too. What I heard was:

The acting manager? Why would I want to speak to the acting manager? Are the singing manager and the dancing manager too busy to answer the ****** phone?” 

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