Don't Compromise!

Shaving bears and having fun at work. Please note these posts are otherwise unrelated. (For more snippets from around the web, see the full Crackers list.)

Bear shaving: solving the problem starts with naming – if not shaming – the problem. As Seth Godin implies, the longer you keep ‘shaving the bear’ (read the article, it will make more sense), the bigger the elephant in the corner will get.

Work as Play: Stephen Stills once sang above loving the one you’re with. Leo Babauta, writer of the zenhabits blog, thinks we might try the same approach to work and that ‘fun is forbidden’ isn’t a mindset that improves the workplace. He’s in Guam, and we’re wondering if he has any vacancies … 

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ITV is in a fair amount of trouble. The media – including the BBC, hardly surprisingly – are enjoying mentioning the poor investment that Friends Reunited has proved to be: the website lost £105m in the last six months, and in selling it off, ITV has lost a further £145m compared to the purchase price. Not a display of wise judgement from a major media outlet. Against a backdrop of increasing competition from an ever wider choice of channels and drops in TV advertising revenue (although ITV has outperformed compared to the average drop), major losses – of £2.73bn – for ITV were not entirely a shock. What might be a broader lesson for them is one reason for its difficulties.

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There’s nothing like an attention grabbing headline to get people reading, which – of course- is why people write them. (I plead guilty too, although perhaps not in this case.) Charles Jennings’ post at the Training Zone website, Who needs learning objectives? (which you’ll need to complete a free subscription to read in full), certainly qualifies, but – like some of his commenters – I’m not sure I agree. What’s more, I think he may have missed his own point. Let me see if I can explain it clearly without first listing what you’ll understand in a few paragraphs time.

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My link with Esther Rantzen, who has now confirmed her intention to stand as MP for Luton South, is tenuous. Consisting mostly of lace, elastic and a little wire, it’s mostly memorable for being absent. Way back in the early 1970s, she vox popped (if Lynne Truss will forgive the verb) my grandmother about bra-burning. Gran was a feisty old stick, and proudly told the cameras (and thereby approximately 18 million people) she “hadn’t worn one in years, dear”. Once we’ve got back on our chairs – Gran hadn’t mentioned this before it aired – we asked her why she’d admitted it on the telly. Beyond a little devilment (to which she was not adverse), Gran was a proud campaigner: marching on Parliament for pensioners’ rights at an age when a walk to the Co-op was enough exercise. Although, like the century, she was also in her early 70s, she felt women of her age had a say on feminism too. And from their brief conversation, it seems she’d decided Esther was “a reasonably sound sort”.

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