Calm seas - why listening to your people might save you from the tsunami

Photo by Ben Terrett

I've been reminded this week of how important it is to take care of the little things. The little things are the things that, if you don't keep an eye on them can become very big things. That tiny pebble thrown into the sea that becomes a tsunami - and in business these tiny pebbles are everywhere. Getting the little things right matters.

Much business education is based around planning - and the creation of business plans, marketing plans, financial plans is something that forms a core part of most business school (or management education of other kind) syllabi - but what often seems to happen is that plans are created because they are a requirement, a box to be ticked, a funding bid, an audit trail. These plans are, of course, difficult to produce. Predicting the future is hard, and although past experiences can be useful, last year is another time and tomorrow will, necessarily, be different. This often results in plans that remain vague and superficial - and in some businesses planning can end up being a process that simply plays lip service to an organisational system but bears little relation to the reality of organisational activity.

Of course there has, over the years, been much discussion of the benefits of planning amongst both practitioners, theorists and (best of all) the practitioner/theorists. The benefits of planning have been called into question by the complexity theorists and a quasi-planned approach has been suggested by those who believe strategies should emerge based on an adaptation to current conditions. I agree that there can be considerable benefits to these approaches.

However, I also believe in that, particularly at an operational level, there are many businesses who fail to plan the small things well. They forget about the tiny pebbles and look to the horizon.

BT, for example, are dealing with huge volumes of customers. This means an individual customer appears low-value to them. So, they feel happy to subcontract out their repair services and create complex, frustrating customer services processes that suit their need to 'manage the herd'. I've recently experienced BT's monopolistic attitudes and lack of customer care and was shocked that they feel able to get away with it. They appear willing to forget that each customer is a human being, and that those human beings each have an influence on their business whether large or small.  Whilst some may switch suppliers and have a very small negative effect, there are others in that large pool who may be able to have a dramatic impact on their business. BT don't know if they are upsetting a Watchdog journalist, the son/daughter of the CEO of one of their major business contracts, a tech blogger with a massive audience - all these people can create a crisis for the company if they receive poor service. But don't get me wrong, I don't think BT should treat these people any differently to any customer - rather I believe they should take into account the danger that poor customer service poses to their organisation and make sure it simply doesn't happen - for any customer.

So, how do they get it right? Involving the right people in planning is crucial when it comes to getting the detail right. Senior Managers who have worked their way up from the bottom of an organisation, or who take/make the time to get to know the challenges and successes of every job role in their organisation are clearly in a better position to make decisions. This, however, may simply not be possible in a large organisation or where senior managers are recruited from outside. This is why listening is so crucial.

If you can provide a channel through which every member of staff in your organisation can flag up potential problems or opportunities, if you give them access to strategic plans and the right and responsibility to comment on them and contribute to their development, you may find that the tiny thing you overlooked, that one missing or problematic detail in your plan, the ripple-effect of which could become a tsunami, could be prevented before you even get started.

Calm seas are so much more pleasant to sail on.

Who Says You Can't Develop Theories and Models when the 'Theory of Can't' says you can?

I've spent some time today scribbling diagrams on the backs of envelopes (no cliche - I really did use envelopes - there are no cigarette packets or beer mats at my place).  The reason?  I've been creating a model of 'can't'.

Ok, I'm going to rewind a little here (Wodehousian difficulty in starting my story at the right point).  I'm writing an editorial piece on why business theory is important, and this has led me to think about the mythology that surrounds 'theory' in general.  For many, theory is synonymous with abstraction, complexity and inaction.  It is thinking, not doing - divorced from reality - a closeted world which excludes those who don't know the lingo.

For some students theory is the stuff in books that you need to know to pass exams.  It's a matrix, a Venn diagram or a pyramid with labelled sections and a surname attached.  What a sad little paradox it is when the very things designed to simplify, explain and provide help are also the things that seem most complex, inexplicable and like a barrier to the achievement of success.

This is where I got to in my thinking for the article, before I asked myself the following question:

'Have we lost touch with theory - or does theory just have a marketing problem?'

'Maybe' (still talking to myself - not out loud, of course) 'we need to take a broader perspective on the role of theory, and particularly how we communicate it and how we teach it - who is doing this?  I'm sure there must be people out there doing this.'

Ok, now I have a little rule for myself that if I'm thinking about something I try to form an opinion or take a position before I read the opinions, arguments, statistics, research presented by others.    This, I realise, is not the way most people work - but I like to find my instinctive position, a sort of anchor point before letting the barrage of others' opinions hit me with their best shots.  In reality I often change my opinion when I learn more, but that's all part of the learning.

What I'm getting to, is that I ignored everyone else's view on this, and decided to go with my first idea.   My first idea went something like this...

'I know, I'll take a concept, generate some theory and create a model, (probably on the back of an envelope) today, for something everyday, just so I can demonstrate how easy it is.'  I create little diagrams quite often when I'm trying to work things out, but today I did it with a sort of meta-consciousness to see how I went about it and what made it work/not work.

So, I have modelled the concept 'can't'.  'Can't' is pretty simple isn't it?  If you're unable to do something, you can't do it.   Well I can confirm that 'can't' is more complex than that, but only a little, a four quadrant matrix is enough to create a pretty good model of it (if I do say so myself). So, where's the model?  Well I'm not going to show you mine...mine is mine and yours will be yours. So I'd rather you had a go for yourself.

A lot of students think they 'can't' generate a theory or a model.  This term, I'm planning to see if my first years can model 'can't' for me...because my theory of 'can't' says they can...and I'd quite like to test it...

OK, that's enough for now...I'm off to work on my theory of 'can'.  This one's gonna look like a Rubix Cube...

What do we need when the dust settles? Critical thinking, and above all, philosophy.

Image source: Will Lion

Why is this happening to our society?  Everyone seems to be asking that question, and many are filling in the pause after it with their own interpretative explanation.   I don't have an answer, and wouldn't presume to be able to explain it, but what I do have is a series of thoughts on what I've seen and heard (as represented by a media under question), and these thoughts have led me to question my own position on fundamental aspects of human nature and society.  Morality, ethics and the role of the government  are the things people are talking about on our streets today, and I'm glad. Glad that people are thinking, glad that they are arguing, questioning, giving their opinions.  This is what enables our society to balance itself, and it's this critical, multi-perspective thinking that I and my colleagues in higher education seek to help our students develop.  This, is philosophy, and we need it now more than ever.

Perhaps seemingly counter-intuitively, in order to illustrate the importance of breadth and depth of critical thinking,  I'm going to start with a reference to science. Events taking place in our cities have particularly reminded me of the work of Milgram, who, in the 1960s, conducted a series of experiments aimed at determining how willing individuals would be to inflict pain on others when instructed to do so by authority figures.  Very willing was the overwhelming answer, to the shock and disgust of many of those involved and the wider public when the results were published.  

Milgram's work suggests that when placed in a situation where we consider ourselves to be subordinate to a perceived authority figure, we 'switch off' our moral compass and do as we're told, no matter how unpalatable the consequences.  This, along with the Asch experiments of the 1950s on group conformity (which showed the willingness of people to consciously give an erroneous response to questions in order to conform to the responses of the wider group), seem to me to provide some superficial insight into the behaviours we have been seeing in our cities in recent days.  Are we seeing an extreme negative example of  Janis's 'Groupthink' here - where group pressures lead to questionable decision making?  Group conformity, the exploitation of this by organised criminals and gang hierarchies, and this removal of a sense of morality through the ability to rationalise the activity as a response to 'social problems' blamed on government, the police and other authority figures are, it seems to me, all in the mix here.

I could, of course, also refer to the rather obvious example of  Golding's Lord of the Flies. Like the experiments above, this was first published in that post-war period of questioning and attempts to understand the horrors of war and the senseless destruction of human life in the Holocaust, and with this in mind there are all sorts of directions in which this particular comparison could lead us...the involvement of children in these activities, the underlying influences (socio-economic, cultural, political, or individual), and in a broader sense, the question of how this reflects our own place in history (the shock of 9/11 and other terrorist acts, the tumbling dictatorships of the Middle East, the loss of confidence in our political and economic leadership, loss of faith in the media and the police) are all relevant here.

Do these events create a situation in which we are more likely to behave in destructive and negative ways?  Are we all seeking a sense of direction, order and leadership amongst the chaos?  Can chaos in fact lead to its own form of stability through self-organisation?   For example yesterday saw citizens organising themselves to clean up their neighbourhoods after the damage of the previous night.  Is this what Kant meant when he referred to self-organization?  Is this a complex, self-organising system which, in the absence of leadership and direction, is achieving a balance by itself?

Questions, questions...but who will answer them?

I could continue here ad infinitum, trying to get to grips with this myself - twisting and turning this complexity over, but this would be mere speculation, and with respect to those positivists out there, and to the empirical research to which I refer above, I'm not going to continue without evidence...

What I do believe, however, is that this highlights the importance of one thing, and it's something that's currently under threat from cuts to higher education and a lack of engagement with the topic. Right now, we need philosophy and philosophers.   What we are seeing relates to the fundamental questions philosophers have been asking for milennia, about ethics, politics and logic, and so our society needs people to read, think, reflect and debate these problems we are facing, so we can make the right decisions on how to act - and not just those from a small section of society for whom philosophy is an open book.   We need people from all backgrounds and communities to value, nurture and respect the role of philosophy in our society, and to do this we need to engage more young people with the subject and above all keep philosophy departments in Universities open.

If you are reading about these issues, watching them on the news, and discussing them, you are already engaging in philosophy as well as politics.  And just like politics, philosophy should be something for the massess not just for the elite. 

Birds, Bums and Betfair - why do we do it to ourselves?

Last year I blogged about Betfair's triumphant ambush marketing campaign at the Ryder Cup, where their ingenuity in employing trained birds of prey to display their messages made rival company Paddy Power's failed attempts to erect a giant 'hollywood style' sign on a neighbouring hillside look amateurish. Today, however, I am not so enamoured of the company's tactics, as I discover they have agreed a sponsorship deal with the UK women's beach volleyball team which will see QR codes printed on the backs of their bikini bottoms and punters encouraged to scan them to visit a special promotional website.
Andy Lulham from Betfair happily discusses what he considers a fantastic idea:

“There is huge interest in beach volleyball and we want to ensure that our advertising campaign is seen and remembered by as many sports-fans as possible.  As far as we’re aware this is the first time QR codes have been used in in-play sports advertising and what better way to test its effectiveness than by putting them on one of the places that is likely to get photographed the most”  (Source: Marketing Week ). There is even the suggestion that this campaign might appear during the Olympic games (surely this would contravene the supposedly watertight sponsorship arrangements but I guess we'll have to see). Indeed, every article I read in the media about this seems to suggest it is a fantastic idea.  Am I, therefore, the only one who thinks this is the ultimate in degradation?  Just when I thought we'd started to break down some of the attitudes that result in naturally beautiful women like Julia Roberts being airbrushed in a misleading make-up ad I find that no, nothing has changed.  And the worst of it is, these sportswomen, elite athletes dedicated to reaching the top in their chosen field (or at least their governing body), appear to be complicit in it.  Why, oh why, do we do it to ourselves?  Well, clearly there are likely to be financial pay-offs for any commercial sponsorship deal, which begs the question of whether the sport is funded well enough if players have to resort to such deals in order to make a living. I know what you're thinking (well some of you anyway), get off your high horse, it's just a bit of fun.  Well, maybe it is, but how about sexual objectification (by both women and men)?  How about unrealistic examples of perfection? How about rape, sexual assault, domestic violence, self-harm, eating disorders?  Are they fun?  No, they're not fun, and however dramatic this sounds it's my personal belief that they're all likely to be more prevalent in a society where sexual objectification is considered acceptable by all gender groups.

I have no wish to oversimplify what is, quite clearly, a complex web of economic and social issues. But I will make it clear that I believe it's not just women being treated badly here, it's a cross-gender problem, and something we all seem quite happy to participate in in one way or another.  What a shame we can't have more self-respect, and what a shame Betfair and Beach Volleyball have had to resort to 'sex sells' to get some column inches.  Come on you creative marketers, surely you can do better than that...

Curiosity and Schrodinger's cat...what happens to democracy when the trust is gone.

What a summer it has been so far.  I'm sure the media would have been glad to have something to write about this 'silly season', if only the story wasn't about them...

Whatever you think about the sequence of events sparked off by the revelation of phone-hacking practices at the News of the World, there has been no getting away from either the scandal itself, or the seemingly endless web of questionable behaviour surrounding it that has emerged in recent weeks.  The police service, senior business people, the media and even the government have been implicated in a sequence events that has certainly caused me to question the integrity of those at the heart of our democracy, and I wonder if it has done the same for you?

It's this integrity that we rely on as individuals to maintain the foundations of our 'civilised ' society, so what happens when we discover that those foundations are insecure, unstable and being compromised?

Well it's my view that the very cornerstone of this is trust, and when trust disappears in any relationship, whether it is personal, professional, or with those in authority the resulting initial reactions tend to manifest as a range of negative emotions and actions which may include anger, fear, violence, disappointment, despondency and self-protection.   In a society where there is a distrust of those we collectively place in positions of authority (through the electoral process) and furthermore a distrust of those appointed to positions of responsibility and trusted by our elected officials to act in the best interests of this society,  democracy itself is under threat.  This is the position we find ourselves in today.

I liken this situation to the famous (and rather cruel) experiment in quantum mechanics devised by physicist Edwin Schrodinger in the 1930s where a cat is placed in a sealed steel box and through a process related to the 50:50 likelihood of the decay of a radioactive atom over the period of 1 hour a poison may or may not be released into the box, resulting in either the death of the cat or its survival (see the video at the end of this blog for more).  Is the cat dead?  We don't know until we open the box do we?  So, is it dead or alive when it's in the box?  Is it either until we know for sure? Can we just accept that we don't know? 

Image via: XKCD

The same could be said for our individual understanding of the political, economic and justice systems within our own country.  We have been living with our own steel box, not knowing what's inside, for a long, long time.  Going about our daily business, relatively unconcerned with the possibility of what could be going on in there; happy in our belief that the democratic cat could be alive and living quite happily in its secure little home.  What the phone-hacking scandal has done is prise open the box and force us to look inside to finally discover that actually, the cat is dead.

So, what happens next?  When you find out the ugly truth you had been hiding from for so long?  When forced to, you have to deal with it, and this is what our society (on both a local and global scale) is trying to make sense of at the moment.

I believe we are starting to see the consequences of this loss of trust play out in all sorts of ways and in all sorts of places, on both a global and local scale.   For example, we have seen the financial markets once again lose confidence in recent weeks as the US dithered and bickered over its debt crisis, and the 'emerging' superpowers, quite rightly, questioned their ability to keep their house in order.  Add to this the Mediterranean meltdowns in Greece, Italy and Spain, and you've got a new depth of economic crisis which will leave no nation untouched.  The economy runs on confidence, and confidence is built on trust.  So, when trust is removed in one part of public life, it affects all elements of public life, including the economy.

Even closer to home, there have been riots in North London in protest at a police shooting of a local person, students have been taking to the streets to protest against tuition fee rises, strike action is on the increase and the government's recently re-launched 'e-petitions' facility has been unable to cope with the levels of activity.

This level of instability and lack of confidence is clearly worrying people as it shakes our social norms and beliefs to the core, and forces us to question the capability of those in whom we place our trust.  But I'd argue it is necessary; it's right that we should question those who lead, it's right that we should take an active interest in how our society is governed and run, and it's right that our voices should be heard in a democracy as these are the very principles on which our society claims to be built (although I in no way support the violent action undertaken by some protesters). But we've all grown so sluggish, apathetic and drugged up on easy credit and the comforting sugar-rush of conspicuous consumption, that we've forgotten how to take part, act, have our say.

There will, undoubtedly, be a rocky period ahead while go through our own little 'cold-turkey' process, but it can only be for the good of our democracy in the long run.   Activism and a renewed interest in politics and the role of the media, the examination of our own roles in building these towers of Babel, and a sense of responsibility for the impacts of our personal roles as actors in the economy are all possible positive consequences of this crisis.



A brief video on Schrodinger's cat experiment:

Nature, nurture and nepotism - success isn't in your genes, it's in your mind...

Success is a funny thing isn't it? Everyone seems to want it.  I certainly do (in my own way), and perhaps you do too?

Come on, admit it, you want to be successful in life as much as anyone else does.  But what is success exactly?  My definition is likely to be very different from yours, unless we locate it in its abstract sense of the cognitive and emotional outcomes of success (things like a sense of achievement, happiness, security; Maslow territory).

However, there are certain individuals whom I'm sure many of us would agree to consider successful on the basis that they have achieved high status within a particular profession, discipline or area of activity. Political figures, artists, sportspeople, business people etc. etc.

My thinking on this was sparked by an article on the BBC website this morning which attempts to unpick and explain the  success of the Freud family following the recent death of the painter Lucian Freud.  This one family has produced a disproportionate number of individuals who have made an impact on culture and society; from Sigmund's difficult childhood emerged a thinker who gained international notoriety (with, notably, an approach that advocated the encouragement of independent thought in children), and successive generations of the Freud family have consistently achieved highly acclaimed positions in the arts and politics.  So, is this all down to 'good genes'?  Or are there other factors, such as Sigmund's nurturing of independent thought, at play?

Well, we can certainly identify many great dynasties in influential fields such as politics and the arts (the Kennedys and the  Redgraves being obvious examples) which might suggest that family has some influence, but there are, equally, many others who achieve wonderful feats without a family name.  So, does it help to have the name tag?  I can't help but think it does in one area in particular - and this may sound obvious, but it's in the achievement of fame.

There is clearly a combination of social, economic, genetic and cultural capital that the Freud family have (to continue the example), and to which others may not have access. I believe this makes them more likely to achieve celebrated positions - and I say celebrated positions advisedly, because I do not necessarily equate celebrity with success.  Having a famous ancestor or family member is, I believe, more likely to make you famous, but your own definition of success would have to be located in celebrity for this to equal the achievement of it.  Bianca Gascoigne, for example, is a young woman who has appeared on numerous reality TV shows without apparently having achieved significance in any particular field. Why?  Because the ex-footballer Paul Gascoigne is her father.  Does this make her successful?  If she defines the particular kind of celebrity status she has gained as success, then yes. For me, however, this is not success, it's just fame through nepotism.  As with most things in life, it really is all down to your personal view, and the realisation that your view is likely to be very different from the views of others.

Social capital (when you consider it in terms of the connections you have), is of course going to enable those who have it to be in the running for positions to which others may not have access, whether that's a booking for a reality TV show or an internship at an organisation in the field you want to be in (I'm deliberately not touching on acceptance into educational institutions here...).  However, there are very few people who can get away with poor performance in a field which requires skill and/or talent for too long.   Prince William was born into privilege, but I'm pretty sure they wouldn't let him fly a Sea King rescue helicopter unless he knew what he was doing...at least I hope not...

So, is there nepotism involved in achieving the most senior positions in our society?  Yes, probably.

Does it matter?  Well, it annoys the hell out of me when it means that talented people don't have the opportunity to make the world better.  But fame?  No thanks.  It's not compatible with my 'live light, learn lots, then pass it on' definition of success...

Murdoch the Megalodon: The Ethics and Economics of 'Sorry'

Ad by Murdoch in The Guardian 16/07/11

I'd decided to stay away from the phone-hacking scandal here, simply because everyone else is saying so much and saying it so well that it seemed unnecessary to add to the outpouring of outrage.  However, today's  full page ads in the national press, paid for by Murdoch, and with the message 'We are sorry',  have tempted me into some comment on the whys and wherefores of this move.

I'm not so interested in the timing (the day after two of his most senior executives resigned), or the overall motivations (damage limitation), but I am interested in the choice of medium and method.  Why take out full page ads in competitor papers? Is this just a reflex action for someone in the newspaper business?  Well, clearly newspaper readers are an important target market for Murdoch, so it would make sense to reach them in this way, and by having a presence in the other papers there is at least an element of 'having his say' when all others are criticising his company.  It strikes me, however, that there is also an element here of the dinosaur, doing what it has always done and ignoring the meteoric changes to media practices and culture that have made it possible for this scandal to emerge from the murk of the newsmedia's underworld.

Yes, Nick Davies at The Guardian played an enormous role in bringing this all to light, but it was through social media, citizen journalists, and the sheer weight of public opinion - opinion that can now be expressed, published and disseminated freely and easily - that the story gained enough momentum to bring down the News of the World.  Murdoch has largely ignored this, and instead focused his efforts on the press.

The decision to buy advertising space sums up this dinosaur attitude for me.  The very idea that you can buy your way to forgiveness, that in fact you can buy anything you want, smacks of the worst kind of hubris.  In a world where so much information is freely available and shared online, this approach seems a desperate attempt to maintain control through the channels Murdoch knows.  He is, quite simply, out of touch, and is also, quite rightly, in danger of extinction. 

The other niggling question I have, however, is one for those who are generally thought to have high ethical standards. Should newspapers like The Guardian have sold him the space?  And, if so, where should the money go?  Ethics in the media is an issue for everyone, not just today's whipping boy...