Archive
developing the second place; more thoughts on the office of the future
Continuing last week’s thinking about the workplace, but here using the definitions of First, Second and Third places as defined by Ray Oldenburg, with the First Place being home, Second being where we work and the Third Place as being somewhere between the two as Mr Oldenburg describes. (Celebrating the Third Place: Inspiring Stories about the “Great Good Places” at the Heart of Our Communities. New York: Marlowe & Company. ISBN 978-1-56924-612-2). Read more…
mid week musings around the water cooler @tomorrrowsfm
Check out my contribution to the Water Cooler debate in Tomorrow’s FM talking about London2012 and the G4S security provision controvesy.
where will we work in the future?
Is the office dead? No, not that TV show, the real place that many of us have worked in over the years. Read more…
supporting the front line doesn’t mean holding it up
I have been very lucky over the years in that I have been able to be part of some massive changes in the businesses for whom I have worked, from small parts in the early years through to influence and then responsibility. These days my role is usually one of influence because that is what mentors and consultants do (I can’t recall who said it, but I love the line about a consultant being like a castrated bull; he can only advise), but I do love the opportunity to get back into the trenches and do something. Read more…
should consultants be fussy about who they work for?
It is 2012 AD as far as earth years are concerned, but on the planet Skaro the Dalek council is in session. Before them they have a quivering PR team of humans whose latest slide show presentation of demographics, media hits and market penetration media management speak has failed to impress. Read more…
asset management; a hard lesson
Asset management is very much at the forefront of my thinking at the moment, and in a very personal sense. It was about 4 weeks ago that I took a long look in the mirror and decided that I needed to apply some first principles to my main asset; myself. Read more…
you have what you’ve got: use it well and more will come
This wasn’t written with the financial crisis in mind, but, in proof reading it, it could well have been. My thoughts were more on developing teams and, because teams are made up of them, individuals.
If you lived in that ideal world of fluffy bunnies and blue skies then you could always pick your own team. Fortunately, at least for me, we don’t live there. It wouldn’ be much fun anyway as there would be no challenges, and so back here in the real world we will, as leaders, have to make something of what we have. Read more…
learning from crisis management
Last month our fridge-freezer had a glitch just as we hit that warm spell. The fridge wasn’t cool enough and the freezer stopped freezing. The auto-defrost had iced up and we had to write off some of the contents, but I found a cure and we got it working again, and over the weeks since some weekly maintenance had kept it working well. Read more…
the joys(?) of cold calling
Last Thursday I blogged about a marketing company who would not stop cold calling me.
I am no stranger to cold calling; it was something that I, along with almost everyone else in sales in those days, did a lot of back in the 1970s. I did some more as recently as 2007 when trying to revive the fortunes of the business unit that I was attached to for nine months or so. Cold calling is a fact of life and it does, sometimes, work. Read more…
it began with a closed deserted diner, and a man too long without sleep
It had been a long day. The client meeting at a multi occupier office complex on a business park in the North East had been the usual bloodbath, but his ruse of putting the reallocation of car parking spaces onto the agenda had ensured that all of the big guns turned up instead of sending a minion. As a result he had managed to get his budget plans agreed, but it had been well after 5pm before he got away and the drive home was a six hour run if he could make it non-stop.
The early stages had gone well; just some heavy rain as he crossed into Leicestershire, but then warnings of overnight lane closures on the motorway had seen him switch to an old favourite cross country route that followed the approximate line of an ancient Roman road. Read more…
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