Month: May 2010

Random Thoughts for the Bank Holiday Weekend

I try to put together a well constructed post with something meaty to it at least once a week, but this week hasn’t been one of those weeks, so here are some random thoughts and stories:

  • Twitter on the BlackBerryAfter spending most of a day in a room with no light and very poor air-conditioning I again realised how destructive the working environment can be to productivity.
  • Team dynamics are constantly in play. Just because you’re “performing” in one place doesn’t mean you aren’t “storming” in another.
  • After sitting in a freezing cold office with the desk that backs onto a window I again realised how destructive the working environment can be to productivity.
  • Power and heating are still huge issues for IT. Many a fancy gadget is ruined by the need to carry around a power supply.
  • There are still far too many places without good mobile network coverage. It cannot be assumed that everyone, everywhere has, or can have network access. And in some of them you can’t even make a phone call.
  • The topics I think are going to be contentious – often aren’t. It’s the things I think are simple and straight forward that always catch me out.
  • Some things have annoyed me for more than 20 years.
  • After starting a group on Facebook for a reunion I realised the power of visual memories once I posted some old, old pictures.
  • I still hit ; when I mean ‘ far too many times.
  • Twitter is good for simple responses, but terrible for a conversation. This was made evident when two conversations overlapped with hilarious consequences – were we talking about underpants or Chrome?
  • It’s very difficult to type on a BlackBerry when your thumb is bandaged.
  • After reading a set of documents that didn’t answer a single one of the questions that we being asked I realised that people will spend days and weeks doing anything, rather than go through the agony of asking for help.
  • Having been misquoted by a number of people I was reminded, again, that people don’t always hear what is being said.
  • When being asked for my advice I know that on many occasions people are really asking me to take a decision for them, even when it’s their responsibility to answer the question.
  • One of my many faults is that I always expect people to know what I know. It’s irrational, I know, but it’s something that I do.
  • And finally for today, here’s a little experiment for you. If you draw the capital letter Q on your forehead leaving you finger where you finished. The side of your forehead where your finger ended up tells you something about how you see the world – I’ll let other explain.

Book Review: The Search for God and Guinness

I wasn’t sure how I was going to get on with this book, I’m not a Guinness drinker and wondered whether that lack of connection would hinder the reading, but it didn’t. I really enjoyed it.

This book is subtitled “A Biography of the Beer that Changed the World” which is true, but this book is also a biography of a family, the biography of a company and to a certain extent the biography of a country.

I used to do some work for Diageo who now own the Guinness brand so was interested to understand the history of the company. Like many of the great brands it turns out that Guinness was born out of the vision of one man and maintained through a number of generations, each of them holding true to an overall philosophy.

Speaking as a product of my age, who only knows beer as a highly commercialised product, I was surprised by the ancient history of beer which is covered as an introduction to the book. I particularly liked the idea that St. Patrick won over many an Irish tribal chief with his tasty beer.

Arthur Guinness the founder of Guinness sounds like a fascinating person – forward looking and practical. Reading about Arthur I’m drawn to a man of action and of principle. Many companies talk about Corporate Responsibility, it’s a current trend, and Guinness stands as a historic example that few come close to.

It’s fascinating to read, though, about a family that continues on through the generations with the same set of high principles inspired by Arthur. It seems that there are only two career choices for Guinness’s – brewing or the clergy. Their influences read like a who’s who of western Christianity – Wesley, Whitfield, Barnardo, Hudson Taylor, Spurgeon, Moody, Booth, Shaftsbury.

My favourite of the family has to be Rupert Guinness who, having received £5 million as wedding gift decided that he’s going to move into a slum and to use the money to improve the community where he was living.

The book also goes on to talk about the more modern company that is Guinness and in particular their use of advertising. Imagine releasing tens of thousands of bottles of Guinness into the seas as an advertising gimmick these days – but that’s exactly what they did in 1954 and 1959, and these bottles are still being found.

I enjoy biography most of the time, and this book was no exception. It’s a great mix of history, biography and story. It’s also immensely challenging to see what one family can achieve.

Amazon: The Search for God and Guinness.

(This is the first book review I’ve done, but I think I’ll do some more of them. Let me know what you think.)

Tension Headaches: My Journey So Far

A few years ago I went away for the weekend. This wasn’t one of those weekends when you sit around all of the time, it was one where you get the delights of cooking for a load of people so that they can have a good time.

Jimmy and Granddad try to push a mouse aroundOn the Friday evening I started to feel a bit of a headache coming on, this wasn’t an unusual thing, what was unusual was that it didn’t go away. I took a few paracetamol as pain killers, but the pain carried on. It carried on all of the way through Saturday, but I wasn’t going to stop, I had things to do, meals to cook, menus to organise – and more painkillers.

I was reasonably late to bed Saturday night and then up early on Sunday to get breakfast ready. At this point I would have been quite happy with anyone who had offered to remove my head and replace it with something that actually fitted.

By Sunday mid-morning on Sunday I was worse than ever. My head felt like someone had put a vice on it and was squeezing it tighter and tighter. My eyes became blurry, and my nose started to run. Just before lunch I wave of nausea turned into vomiting. I took some more pain killers and took to my bed leaving everything in something of a muddle.

A few hours later and after chaos had ensued in the kitchen I awoke with a felling I can only describe as being punch drunk.

Being a rational and intelligent human being I went to see the doctor – except I didn’t. I figured that this was a one off, it was probably a virus or something. This wasn’t a fear-of-doctors thing, I just didn’t want to make a fuss.

A while later it happened again and this time I decided upon some self diagnosis. This must be a migraine I thought, so went to the chemist and bought some painkillers suitable for migraines. Migraines, after all, can’t be cured, so I just need to make sure I know where I can get some medication.

That’s it sort I thought, but if anything, the number of occurrences just increased. The medication would take away the symptoms, but I was never comfortable with the amount of times I would have to resort to them. I’d even get a bit neurotic about having something with me.

Eventually I did the rational thing – I went to see the doctor. Over two years later after the first big episode.

Dale Head ViewsAs with much self diagnosis I was wrong; these weren’t migraines at all. The characteristic of a migraine are very different to the symptoms I was experiencing. My problem, it turns out, were tension headaches, or tension-type headaches.

So what causes tension-type headaches – well it’s muscle tension tightening around the head. This tightening is precipitated by a number of things, all of which are part of my day-to-day existence: stress, poor posture, late nights, early mornings, lack of exercise, irregular eating.

The vice feeling I had been experiencing was exactly what was happening – the muscles in my head where emanating from my neck were putting head into a vice-like grip.

My problems, being muscular, meant that although the medication had been masking the symptoms, I was taking the wrong stuff and also there were things that could be done to prevent them from occurring. I needed to take medication that would alleviate this tension in the muscles not just reduce the pain.

It’s been a couple of months since I first went to see the doctor and since then I’ve been taking a muscle relaxant before going to bed. This has, in general, significantly improved the volume of severe headaches that I’ve been experiencing. I still get them occasionally and still have a bit of a way to go before I think I’m really there. This medication isn’t meant to be a long term answer and I need to do something about the precipitating factors too.

So why am I telling you this? Well, recently I’ve been in conversation with a number of people who are suffering similar things to me. I’m not trying to diagnose their situation because I’m not qualified, but I did want to share my experience.

Stress and Information Addiction

I read an interesting definition of occupational stress yesterday which was in a summary of a book called Brain Rules:

Jimmy and Granddad Twittering on the BlackBerryThree things matter in determining whether a workplace
is stressful: the type of stress, a balance between
occupational stimulation and boredom, and the condition
of the employee’s home life. The perfect storm of
occupational stress appears to be a combination of two
malignant facts: a) a great deal is expected of you and b)
you have no control over whether you will perform
well.

I suspect that, to some extent, information addiction is born out of people wanting to control stress by trying to stay one-step-ahead. But if you look at the definition for perfect storm for occupational stress it’s more likely that information addiction will cause stress rather than alleviate it.

Let me explain what I mean.

Stress results from high expectations with no control over outcomes.

I’m sitting at my desk and checking my email every few minutes and every few minutes another email comes in and gives me something to deal with. Each one of these emails represents an expectation.

I’m available on my IM client and it keep flashing with another new message. Each flashing message is a another expectation.

I’ve now got more than enough expectation for anyone to deal with.

Here’s where the definition comes in.

My behaviour towards the messages means that I am far less likely to deal with the expectations in an effective way and soon I will have lost any control over the outcome.

It’s a bit like trying to move water by filling a bucket from running tap. The most efficient way of moving the water is to turn the tap on, fill a whole bucket, turn the tap off and then transport the bucket to the place where it’s going. The least efficient way of moving the water is to put the bucket under the tap and then to keep turning it on and off; transporting little bits between the turns. Following the little bits method we will soon feel out of control.

All of us know how to deal with the water, so why don’t we do it with the messages.

We all know that messing about with the bucket just leads to stress.

(Incidentally, the extract was from “Rule #8: Stressed Brains Don’t Learn the Same Way” which outlines how bad stress is.)

(Through a scheme at work I have access to the summaries from www.summary.com, it’s a great way of understanding the essence of a document without having to read the whole thing.)

Statistically Predicting the World Cup

Apparently you can predict the outcome of the world cup on the basis of GDP:

I really like infographs, even if I think this one owes a little too much to statistical analysis of random situations.

There’s always a chance that they are right, especially as it came out with one of the safe answers for overall winner – Brazil 🙂

Story, Biography and Metaphor

I’m looking through a document today that is 744 pages long and i know one thing for sure, I’m never going to read this document.

Surveying the landAt home I have another book that I am reading, it’s quite a long document. I am definitely going to read this document.

What’s the difference between the two: story.

One is a business document talking about repositories, artefacts, entities, capability and continuum.

The other is a biography of Guinness, that’s right a biography of the Dublin based brew. It’s a story of the founder Arthur Guinness, about his children and their impact on an organisation and the broader Irish society.

I’ll wrestle with one of these documents to get to the valuable lessons that it needs to teach me; the other book will teach me things without me even knowing it.

I was watching Griff Rhys Jones in Hong Kong on ITV’s “Griff’s Greatest Cities” last night (before turning over for “Outnumbered”). He was sitting in a class doing complicated mental maths in the blink of an eye. He was staggered by the speed that these kids could add and subtract complex number strings. What was the secret of their success, it was the teaching method. Their teacher had brought them up to use a special kind of abacus. Over time the teacher had removed the abacus and told the kids to imagine it. When doing their maths the kinds just pictured the abacus and read out the answer that it gave them. He had found a very powerful metaphor and the kids were exploiting it to great effect.

The other night I noticed a book on the bookshelf that I hadn’t read in a long time. It was a set of stories about a bear. This bear has taught me a number of lessons about life. This is a bear who says that he has very little brain, but there is wisdom to be found in his dealings with the other characters.

I spend most of my life simplifying things so that people can comprehend the essence of them and sometimes it’s to help them to subscribe to the vision that is being painted. I try my hardest to find a a story, a biography or a metaphor to communicate. These analogies have two very powerful results, they allow people to comprehend, but they also live on in peoples thoughts, they allow people to explore beyond the simple into the more complex. They can venture to the end of the metaphor, even if it breaks at that point, they’ve learnt something, if it doesn’t they can venture further. It’s a bit like a seed starting to germinate, as the leaves grow skyward, so the roots grow down into the ground.

I have one simple request, lets stop writing 744 page documents of business speak, let’s tell more stories.

Blessings #150 – Heaven’s Spotlights

I love walking at this time of year, actually, if I’m honest, I love walking at any time of year. One of the things that I particularly like about walking in the spring time is what I’ve come to think of as heaven’s spotlights.

Dale Head ViewsHeaven’s spotlights are those flashes of brilliance that light up sections of the countryside for a few moments and then move onto somewhere else.

As I was walking in the English Lake District over the weekend it was prime heaven’s spotlight time. The clouds where high in the sky and quite sparse as I walked my way up Dale Head turning around every now and again to survey the view of Great Gable and the Scafell range of mountains the scene would be ever changing (Actually, most of the time I was turning around to catch my breath, but that doesn’t sound as philosophical).

Sometimes the spotlights were radiating light from the few patches of snow that were still resident on the north side of Scafell. At other times the spotlight would be eliminating one of the lesser hills making it stand proud while being overlooked by it’s larger neighbours. Then the spotlights would make there way down into a valley picking out some of the detail there, perhaps a  river, or a house, or a wood.

Sometimes the spotlights would scan across a ridge highlighting it’s undulations. Occasionally the spotlights would merge together in a florescent dance.

I love it that this changing light seems to make the countryside come alive in a way that it just isn’t on a grey dank day. The light gives it life.

Sometimes I stand in a crowd and look around and I get a similar feeling. I see conversations that are in spotlights. I’m not talking about real light, I’m talking about something that is happening in the conversation that even from a distance seems to make it shine.

I can see other conversations that are just ordinary almost dull looking, but these conversations seem to me to be iridescent. The conversation, not just the people, seems to be alive.

We all have too many conversations that are just a passing of information and have no life in them at all. But I know when I’ve experienced a conversations that is full of life, making me fell more alive too. These conversations are like spotlights from heaven.

Sometimes I’m sure that we create our own version of a dark dank day by not bringing everything we have to our interactions with others, we make them grey. When we bring ourselves then we bring the light, and that light makes us more alive.

If you click on the image below and view it in large see how many different heaven’s spotlights you can see, it’s not just one or two. If you look really closely you’ll see that one of the spotlights is lighting up the sea in the distance:Dale Head Panoramic

Perhaps if we tried to bring more light we’d get more life in return, or perhaps it’s the other way around?