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Cracking codes and getting the secrets – a day in the life of JB
They meet in a quiet office overlooking the restricted area. Security guards with fearsome dogs patrol behind razor wire topped fences. She knows why JB is there. They waste no time on small talk; she slides a single sheet of A4 paper across the desk to him. He glances down the two columns typed upon it and nods. He puts the page into his briefcase, they shake hands and he leaves. Read more…
there’s a gunman! – another day on the facilities front line
The clatter of the helicopter blasted through the room, the windows wide open to seek respite from the sticky heat of early afternoon allowing the sound to penetrate what had been another quiet session in the office for our facilities management team.
Ten feet away Phil, my maintenance manager had picked up the phone and was crouched forward over his desk, one hand clamped to his ear as he tried to listen. He was duty manager that day, as evidenced by the words emblazoned on the hi-vis waistcoat slipped over the back of his chair. This was our HQ from which we ran 27 sites across the UK of which this was by far the largest with a perimeter of almost 2 kilometres.
Phil banged down the phone and motioned me out into the corridor. There we could talk. “It’s the police chopper” he told me, “they’ve had a report of a gunman”.
This was a few days after the Columbine murders in the US, and the memories of Hungerford, just up the road, were still very fresh for most of us. “The incident team are on their way” he said, and the sirens were audible in amongst the helicopter noise.
We grabbed our radios and Phil went to the main gate to meet the police and I went to reception to use the tannoy. We had around 1300 people on the site with over an hour before any workers were due to be finishing for the day, but there would be the inevitable delivery vehicles and visitors who might want to get on or off site to be dealt with and we had a well oiled process to put in place.
Having briefed heads of departments to keep people inside and away from windows as best as we could I went out to meet Phil and get the story. A passing motorist, reckoned to be a reliable witness by the police, had called in from his car phone to say that he had seen a youngish male in camouflage trousers kneeling and pointing a handgun at a pedestrian exit gate down at the south west corner of the site.
The police had the situation in hand with armed response units, dog handlers and others dealing with the situation outside of our perimeter. The helicopter had thermal imaging gear and was still cruising low over the site.
I left Phil to work with our security team to monitor the situation and liaise with the police. If we were dealing with a handgun we were fairly safe indoors because of the distances. Our only weak spot was the main exit which was an automatic barrier, but there was some cover for a potential gunman and a risk that an employee might decide to sneak out early. I laugh about it now, but I put on as many layers of clothes as I could and made my way down to the gate to make sure no-one tried to leave.
After an hour we were stood down with no gunman found, but it could have been real; we had had violent domestic disputes before including someone wielding a knife to deal with.
The moral? A well drilled facilities management team working professionally with the police handled something a bit out of the ordinary. These things come out of ordinary days at the office. Leadership and teamwork, knowing your processes and systems, mean you handle the mundane day to day stuff at the top of your game and allow your people to handle such extraordinary occasions with aplomb. Just another day at the office.
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working from home – my 10 tips
I first worked from home in the early 1980s and I’ve now been doing it full time for 8 years. My ten top tips for survival are:
1 – Have a timetable. I’m an early riser, and usually working around 0600. I make a point of going no later that 0800 before getting upstairs for a shave, shower and get some clothes on; at least smart casual – going native is not clever. If you’re smart and looking ready for work, you’ll think like work: Behave like a slob and it’ll show in your work,
2 – Schedule your day in whatever way works for you, but take breaks. I don’t do more that 90 minutes on the computer without stopping to do something different. A brisk walk round the block a couple of times a day is good. It gets the blood flowing and that gets oxygen into the brain. Other 15 minute distractions I’ll use include time in the garden doing a little weeding or pruning or to do some prep work on tonight’s dinner.
3 – Set yourself deadlines and monitor progress. Plan to get x number of calls made, write x hundred words or to finish certain tasks (or make a start on them). Use a desk diary or put it on Outlook or your phone or whatever, but do have a plan for the day/week/month.
4 – It’s easy to forget to eat and drink properly and neither omission will do you any good. Avoid too much caffeine, and eat sensible foods. One way of taking a break I use is to prepare a decent lunch. I take my food break at the dining table as well, sat up properly to aid digestion. Always aim to take your refreshment breaks at regular times.
5 – Try to have a working area set up in the home so that you do, if effect, go to the office and leave the office. It is an important psychological break point. If you don’t have a separate area and have to use the couch or the dining table then have a couple of stacking crates that you keep your files and working stuff in so that you can pack away and put the boxes in the corner. You have to maintain separate home and office regimes.
6 – One of my cyber pals talks about life – work harmony. He doesn’t like the term Balance in this context and I think that he’s right. It is more about harmony in your life and ensuring that you, and the other people in your life, feel good about your lifestyle.
7 – Replace those water cooler moments with some other form of business contact. For me that’s a business club. What you need is a couple of hours every couple of weeks where you can relax and chat with fellow business people from a variety of functions. If there are presentations you’ll learn from them and get the chance to do your own which practices another skill.
8 – Don’t feel guilty about time shifting your hours. If you want to use daylight or weekdays for something personal, as long as you hit your deadlines, do it, but try to make the time in advance by putting the evening or weekend hours in first: It’s hard to play catch up.
9 – Stay safe: Take care with cables and extension leads even if you are the only one home. Keep information and equipment secure, and do your back ups. It’s your office.
10 – Have fun – otherwise there’s no point.
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what goes where
I started this blog with no clear idea of what I was doing. Social networking was new to me and I just wanted to get started.
Today I’ve put into place the thoughts that have been coming together thanks to the input of others around cyberspace that have helped me.
This blog will now become my area for blogging thoughts on leadership and team building together with sharing my own experiences so that others can, I hope, benefit from my failures and successes.
John J Bowen’s blog will take the more random thoughts that I sometimes come up with and be a bit more of a personal blog.
Gulfhaven News will blog updates from my primary business identity.
Links to the other blogs are over on the right of this blog page and, when I’ve worked through the mill later today all three blogs will have links to each other and my various web sites.
You’ll also find links here on this page to some of the other business sites and blogs that I find useful.
Thanks for dropping by, or following me, and I’ll try and keep it interesting and relevant. Let me know what you think.
clients going bust – a leadership challenge
I got back from the US last week to find that one of my clients hadn’t paid me for the previous month’s invoice. My initial reaction was “here we go again”; some clients do have to be chased. My work with this one was on cost cutting, but not paying people isn’t one of my recommendations!
As they were on my route the next day I thought I’d call in for a chat, but got there to find the premises vacant and with a To Let sign outside. Enquiries since have revealed that they had ceased business the day I flew out to America (and the day on which I had posted my second invoice).
At first I felt anger for myself. They owe me a decent sum and I can ill afford to lose it (I will be a long way down the list of creditors). But then I thought of the people who had worked there: 90 or so decent people who came in day after day and did their best and I wondered how they were going to cope, out of a job a month before Christmas, bills hard to pay and jobs hard to find.
I have put aside any feelings of sorrow for my own position; I’m big enough, old enough and ugly enough (check my photo) to survive losing what I am owed and just feel sad for those who have lost their sole source of income. Do I blame the company? To a degree, but they did at least try to do something in hiring me. Too late though, as they had barely started to put my initial proposals in place before the plug was pulled.
What can I do? Could I have saved them? I’m not going to claim that I could have, but what I can do is try to make sure that what I provide for my clients is the very best that I can. Whilst, as a consultant, I may not have executive responsibility when at a client’s site, I am still a leader, and have a leader’s responsibility to stand up and be counted, to challenge what is wrong and to show what is right.
Whilst over in the USA I was reminded of a quote that I believe came from Martin Luther King; “The ultimate measure of a man is not where he stands in moments of comfort, but where he stands at times of challenge and controversy”.
These are trying times still, and the world needs its leaders, at all levels, to show their mettle. Whoever that quote comes from, let us all try to live up to it.
it’s about the people
I’ve said elsewhere here in one of my rants that companies run on people, not staff, and I’m pained to see some of the actions that managers and leaders are taking at the moment. Yes, times are hard and tough decisions have to be made, many of which mean that people will earn less or stop earning. That’s life, but there are ways and means of doing things and, at the heart of it all, is that you have to recognise that making anything happen depends on people.
I have a passion for people; for treating them fairly and enabling them to get the best out of themselves. This is not some overnight revalation. It is the result of having experienced both sides (being a person and dealing with people). I’ve seen the good and I’ve seen the bad. I know which is the right way and, having got this off my chest, I’m going out to put some of it into practice.
Have a great day!
Having Fun
I claim to have been having fun for 25 years whilst making things happen. I’ll explain more in future posts here, but having fun at work is essential. If you’re not enjoying it you won’t be giving the job what it needs or deserves, so you are letting down your customers, your co-workers, your boss and everyone else around you including yourself.
These are hard times for finding a new job, so maybe you just have to stick it out. I’ve been there and it is hard, but it was in those exact circumstances 25 years ago that I had the revelation about having fun, and I haven’t looked back.
For me it was learning not to take myself so seriously. Yes the job was important, but you can be more serious about your job if you lighten up personally. I learned to laugh at myself and not be such a pompous ****. As people laughed with me the office became somewhere I started to look forward to being at.
So make today the day you find something to laugh at, and remember, it’s better to make fun of yourself than someone else. Life is short – enjoy it.
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