Parting is such bitter sweet sorrow

“[…] that I should say good-night until it be ‘morrow.” Shakespeare, of course: neither the words nor the sentiment were very likely to be those of a football manager. In a sport – and a major business – that inspires such passion, ‘love’ – at least for the manager – can leave the stadium faster than a rock star fleeing the teenybopper crush. At the end of the day, Brian (the words that should start all expressions of football philosophy), it’s all about the numbers. A string of poor performances by the men on the pitch (or, as Charlie Brooker sees them, “22 millionaires ruining a lawn”), and the man who only stands on the pitch for PR opportunities is history. The love may not be lost, but it might be rudely tossed in a plastic sack in the boot of the departing Jag fairly pronto. (Any team managers reading please note: it’s acceptable for departing female Prime Ministers to wave tearfully through the rear window, but footie managers should be prepared for possible ridicule.)

Football, however, seems out of the norm for business. If nothing else, most industries would struggle to survive the churn rate (which does raise the question about where responsibility for team performance ultimately lies, and makes the manager/coach relationship one that might be instructive as a parallel to that between senior leaders and HR – have a read of an early article here about Brian Clough and his relationship with Peter Taylor, for example). Leaving the stage is always unavoidably personal for the individual doing the leaving: the art of the elegant departure lies largely in remembering the bigger picture, and letting go in the way that best serves the interests of those who will remain. This is the thorny issue of legacies, and who they are for: we’ve explored the topic before, commenting at the time:

Your legacy is fundamentally about those you leave it to, rather than about you (which is why the media were less than supportive of Tony Blair’s public concern about his): focus not on being a giant, but on having shoulders that will bear the weight of those that follow.”

 

“Nice work if you can get it”: popular song or something to campaign for?

From some recent posts, you might think we were either consistently sceptical about the Chartered Institute for Personnel and Development (CIPD) or picking on them for some social media kudos. We do understand the merits of keeping our fingers on the zeitgeist and cutting a certain profile, even if we haven’t necessarily mastered it (a quick ‘back of a calculator’ moment indicates we’re 9,250 hours short of the mythically required 10,000 hours), so today we are going to use the ‘f’ word in the opening paragraph. Yes, fairness. And we’re going to applaud John Philpott, CIPD’s Chief Economist. You might want to sit down.

At CIPD’s Annual Conference in Manchester, delegates heard employment minister Chris Grayling calling for employers – and their HR functions – to support the government in providing ‘good work’ and to support the Government’s Work Programme. (As you would imagine, there’s been commentary: here and here, for example.)

 

Be careful what you wish for: the problem of blind faith

For an intelligent species, we’re not always terribly bright at reflecting accurately on what is shaping our lives. Considering its popularity as a childhood game, you’d think we’d be better at playing Consequences by now, wouldn’t you? Dan Pink highlighted a quote from George Orwell yesterday which put it neatly:

People can foresee the future only when it coincides with their own wishes, and the most grossly obvious facts can be ignored when they are unwelcome.”

I’d thought something similar watching the BBC’s wonderful The Secret Life of the National Grid, as vintage footage showed a black and white version of a golden couple, clad in the designer swimwear of the day and strolling hand in hand along a beach. They were representing a vintage version of the future, where electricity had automated and sped up so much of the world around us that the age of leisure had arrived and their most pressing problem was how to spend all those sun-kissed hours. Victims of their own tendency to project the future based on the recent past – the ‘current trends indicate’ school of thinking’ – the biggest threats they would face would actually turn out to be a) dismissal for poor workplace attendance, b) hypothermia, and c) ridicule from the fashion police.

Our dreams and longings often have a nasty tendency to produce unintended consequences; on closer inspection – and sharpened by the crystal-clear focus of hindsight – wishful thinking can turn out to have placed far too much emphasis on the wishing and far too little on the thinking. The tendency to crave our own Utopia is understandable – I’d imagine one reason for the widespread popularity of alcohol is the widespread intermittent dislike of reality.

 

Book review: Dave and Wendy Ulrich – The Why of Work

Dave Ulrich is, without question, an HR guru: as with any guru, it’s difficult to know whether to approach them on bended knee or with a degree of trepidation. Having read “The Why of Work”, the best approach is with an open mind, a small pinch of salt – and with sufficient time to take on board what Ulrich (writing with his wife, Wendy, a psychologist) has to say. There is much of immense value here, and much that has the potential to enable leaders and organisations to generate immense value in more than one sense for themselves (and, importantly, both their customers and their shareholders). Like many of the best books in the ‘how to manage business better’ arena, my biggest qualm is that those who stand to gain most from reading it are those least likely to read it.

 

No more heroes? A question of slick performance

… or to quote another pop song from the now seemingly innocent days of punk, “Accidents Will Happen”. Elvis Costello was, of course, singing (well, after a fashion) about romance: the accident that is pre-occupying many of us currently is a less happy topic. As the pun-loving Mr Costello might have put it, we’re all in Deepwater now. But the Louisiana oil-spill is providing some fascinating examples of how the modern world sees leadership, contemporary thoughts on ‘responsibility’, and of how and when we consider ourselves to be ‘victims’.

As several million gallons of crude oil cause serious damage to the coastlands of the Gulf of Mexico, there is endless press coverage. What is strikingly odd about this is that very little of it appears to be about the coastlands, or those in the region whose livelihoods are under serious threat. Instead, we’re witnessing a political and media storm focusing on President Obama, BP CEO Tony Hayward, and – reminding us of the historic importance of alien substances in American waters – the Tea Party. In this strange version of the world, BP has become ‘British Petroleum’, a name it stopped using in 2001: the tagline it adopted at the time – and still uses – has, however, acquired an aura of prescience: ‘Beyond Petroleum’. Reaction and commentary on the consequences of the Deepwater Horizon rig explosion have certainly spread with the same depressing scope as the oil. It would be odious to draw comparisons (and recent references to 9/11 seemed to be willingly misread to stir just such a sense of odium), but the spheres affected by the verbal and political response are also being damaged.

 

Lie still and pretend to be a mound of earth: the best position to avoid thinking

There are innumerable pop-psychology quizzes to play with on the Internet: endless opportunities to classify yourself as one type or other of something you’ve probably never even contemplated before or would only undergo with a trained psychotherapist and a flask of hot sweet tea on stand-by. I’ve just completed several that offered to enlighten me as to my animal personality. Despite one or two friends having pointed out I’m essentially an otter (a reference that you either will or won’t understand), the Internet assures me that I’m a grizzly bear. Or a dolphin. Even a unicorn. All good, clean fun, albeit in a rather silly way. But surely, if we were to ask the right questions, we’d find out that a large percentage of us in our working lives are more like ostriches than anything else?

 

God bless your mad parade: remembering Malcolm McLaren

A line from a song, of course: The Sex Pistol’s “God Save The Queen”, still provocative all these years on. And a line written by John Lydon, although it was hard not to think of it watching the television coverage of the funeral of Malcolm McLaren, his former manager and the human catalyst that brought punk to the streets of London in the Queen’s Silver Jubilee year. For most people, that’s probably McLaren’s legacy in a nutshell: ripped t-shirts, Her Majesty with unusual nasal jewellery on a poster, and all the other little visual icons of that summer that you can still, remarkably, buy on postcards in many parts of London. But even at just a level of fashion, he left a bigger mark: describe someone as ‘punky looking’, as most of us have a pretty clear visual picture of what you mean. Not a bad achievement for a man with one little shop at the wrong end of the King’s Road. But there was more to McLaren than that: for good and bad, there are plenty of reasons to spend a few minutes looking back at his life now that it has ended.

 

Providing insight or hidden by pillars? The future role of HR

A couple of weeks ago, we published a posting – Chinese whispers and the Captain’s Table – that looked at the potential implications of HR being downgraded within an organisation, or losing its own voice. Like so much else in the wake of a major financial crisis (and the speculative vacuum that is the run up to a General Election that may – or may not – bring a substantial change of socio-economic tone and context), the future role of HR is up for debate. CIPD – through its Next Generation HR research and its People Management magazine – certainly seem to believe so.