A Fabulous Insight Into Real Relationships...

.... well in my opinion anyway.

I rarely re-blog anything, but this appeared on my LinkedIn page today and when I read it there was huge resonance.

I did not decide to re-blog it immediately, but on reflection think that this is worthy so please read and enjoy this blog from Gretchen Rubin, bestselling author and blogger at www.happiness-project.com. She wrote about marriage and her relationship with her husband, but I think you can apply this to many relationships and switch gender too.

5 Mistakes I Continue To Make in My Marriage

One theme of my happier-at-home project is marriage.

I have five particular problem areas in my marriage. Here they are, along with the strategies I try to use to address them, though they remain challenging:

1. Demanding gold stars. I'm a gold-star junkie, and my husband just isn’t very good at handing out gold stars--and that makes me feel angry and unappreciated.
In response, I now think more about doing things for myself. I used to tell myself I was doing nice things for him – “He’ll be so happy to see that I put all the books away,” “He’ll be so pleased that I fixed the schedule” etc. – then I’d be mad when he wasn’t appreciative. Now I tell myself that I’m doing these things for me. “I’m so organized to have bought all the supplies in advance!” Because I do things for myself, I don’t expect him to respond in any particular way.

2. Using a snappish tone. I have a very short fuse – but my husband doesn’t like it when I snap at him. He’s funny that way. Many of my resolutions help me keep my temper in check. I don’t let myself get too hungry or too cold (I fall into these states very easily); I try to maintain reasonable order, because clutter makes me crabby; I try to control my voice to keep it light and cheery instead of accusatory and impatient; I try not to make my (supposedly terrifying) mean face. Confession: I’ve worked on this issue relentlessly for years, and I fly into brief-but-hot rage at least once a week. At least.

3. Not showing enough consideration. Studies show that married people treat each other with less civility than they show to other people — definitely true for me. I’m working hard on basic consideration, such as not reading my emails while talking to him on the phone. Very basic, I know.

4. Score-keeping. I’m a score-keeper, always calculating who has done what. “I cleaned up the kitchen, so you have to run to the store” — that sort of thing. I’ve found two ways to try to deal with this tendency.
First, I remind myself of unconscious over-claiming; i.e., we unconsciously overestimate our contributions relative to other people’s. This makes sense, because of course we’re far more aware of what we do than what other people do. I complain about the time I spend paying bills, but I overlook the time my husband spends dealing with our car.
Second, I remind myself of the words of my spiritual master, St. Therese of Lisieux: “When one loves, one does not calculate.”

5. Taking my husband for granted. Just as I find it easy to overlook chores done by my husband (see #4), it’s easy to forget to appreciate his many virtues and instead focus on his flaws. For example, although I find it hard to resist using an irritable tone, my husband almost never speaks harshly, and that’s really a wonderful trait. I try to stay alert to all the things I love about him, and let go of my petty annoyances.

What are some mistakes you make in your marriage or long-term relationship? Have you found any useful strategies for addressing them?

--Speaking of relationships, if you'd like to make your relationship more loving and warm, join the 21 Day Relationship Challenge. Learn more here. In just three weeks, you can take concrete, manageable steps to deepen your relatioships.
(Photo: Driek, Flickr)

I hope you found this interesting?

Was there any need?

Last night's episode of "Elementary", the US adaptation of the Sherlock Holmes story contained a blatant and contrived piece of product placement for the Microsoft Surface tablet.

Having previously used desktop PCs and plenty of use of smartphones, when Sherlock wanted to check something on the Internet he reached out and picked up a Surface and related keyboard, snapping them together before clearly demonstrating the flip out prop and ability to use the Surface like a laptop.

This was to me eyes so gratuitous and out of place to scream product placement.

Was there any need? I don't think so and wonder how much Microsoft paid for it? I will be interested to see if it is used again?


- Posted using BlogPress from my iPad

The “BIG” tripwire and the “halflife” of data

Over my working career a number of prefixes have been hyped by consultants and suppliers as the next big thing. In the 80’s it seemed that everything that was good was prefixed with “global”. In the 90’s the prefix was “hyper” and in the 00’s we just added “e”. There was and still is some merit in these words that act as amplifiers, but most have been found to have a double edge to them. They are still used, but more judiciously.

It seems that the prefix for the 10’s may well be “big”. We have heard that scale is good and that some banks have been viewed more favourably post-crisis when it was judged that they were too “Big” to fail. More accurately they are probably too big to be allowed to fail as the consequences would be unthinkable.

We also hear a lot about “big data” or should that be “BIIIIIIIIIIIIG data”. This seems to be the latest thing that the IT Industry is telling us we should be thinking about and turn into value for our businesses. Cynically this does not seem to be anything new, but rather a marketing tag line.

I was reflecting on this word “big” and find that I am more inclined to use in it terms of too big to run or too big to fix in terms of banks. While far from alone, the example of HSBC’s much publicised fine for money laundering comes to mind. From listening to knowledgeable radio commentators and a little personal insight HSBC appears to have a few issues.

HSBC by its own claim had a good crisis, mainly because it was far more fragmented and less joined up than other banks of similar size and reach. Its model for growth up to the crisis could be typified as that of buying distressed banks in many countries, closing them Friday under one name and opening them Monday under the HSBC name, logo and letterhead and a high level management layer, but limited infrastructural integration. In the intervening years there have been limited attempts to effect further  integration. This fragmented nature has been typified by the enormous number of “Global  heads of this or that”; roles that were often built around an individual rather than on sound organisational design.

When one reads about the trouble with money laundering it suggests HSBC struggled to embed the UK ethics of knowing your customer (KYC) or anti money laundering (AML)  in Mexico and raises hairs on my neck. I do feel a good deal of sympathy with those currently charged with standardising and ensuring proper KYC and AML across something like 89 (from recollection) countries and cultures. Is this actually too big to fix? And is HSBC alone? Pesonally I suspect the answers are “”Yes” and “No” respectively.

My other thoughts about “big” relate to the data question and start almost 20 years ago. That was when I accepted the challenge to re-engineer and build a global reference data function for an investment bank. The organisational and process architects had done their stuff in some rarified atmosphere and decided that in order to provide the single investment bank back office with high “straight through processing” (STP) capability the reference data function needed to have available a complete universe of relevant tradable (note tradable, not just traded) instruments that were maintained at 100% accuracy and available immediately. That was my initial brief.

It soon became apparent that the cost of sourcing a complete tradable universe, well as much as was available, would be extortionate. Adding the extra data for new issues and gaps would be substantial and the process for maintaining it all at 100% accuracy would be horrendous. And that was all before building the distribution capability to the various systems that would need it….immediately. This was nonsense when in truth our traders and brokers only traded a small, moving percentage of the instrument universe. I use the word moving as the percentage might stay the same but the components could and would change.

In resolving this I led a complete rethink about the approach to be taken, the processes required and the management of the service to end-users. It will be no surprise that we did not provide “big” data in the end, but rather what was needed in a quick and efficient way. The business could not have carried the cost implicit in the original design.

I have seen similar, more recent attempts to supply this nirvana of instrument data stumble on many of the same issues. In these cases, even twenty years on, “big” is probably still too big.

The cost of maintaining big data crossed my mind again the other day when I was listening to a talk by Gerry Pennell, CIO to the 2012 London Olympics. He was asked if LOCOG had done anything with the “big data” it had collected on all the visitors to the games and users of their applications and websites. I forget the actual numbers but he quoted the data collected and stored during the games in terms of petabytes (1 petabyte  = 1000 terabytes, etc). His answer was “no” primarily because the duration of the games was so short and their focus was on the smooth operating of core systems.

What he did say was that there were efforts to leverage the ticketing data with other sporting bodies in order to target interested parties in future events. But here we encounter the issue of data degradation, ie data becomes less accurate and less useful over time. This is not because some computer gremlin goes in and changes things, but rather that people change, the move address, the change their phone number, they get married, they even die. As time passes more of the data you collected at a point in time becomes reduced in value.

In science there is the concept of the half-life of a radioactive element. This is the time it takes for half of the starting material to decay. I am sure there is or should be a similar concept in data. The measure of half or 50% is probably too high but it would be interesting to know/estimate how long before 10% of the data collected at a point is then inaccurate. Is it a year? Or ten years? That will change my perception of the data and my ambition for it.

I have living evidence in my wife’s work. She is employed by a company that supplies mailing lists for people with commercial real estate for sale or let. The clients buy a set of details that meet a criteria of location, size, function, but more than that they are guaranteed to be good contacts ie someone like my wife calls up every name on the initial list to confirm, correct or delete every name, address and email. Only this was is the data of real value.

So what? So, my advice is when you feel that you might be seduced by anything prefixed in marketing speak with the term “BIG”, think hard about who is promoting it and why and then be very clear if it is really  in your interest to embrace the idea, or alternatively to think who you might better achieve the same result?

Remember how fortunate you have been.....

.....rather than concentrate on negativities.

It is part of human nature to grasp tighter to the bad things, the things that are wrong, than to remember and appreciate the good things. This is certainly true in the more difficult times in which we live so maybe now as Christmas approaches and another year ends it is a good time to constructively reflect.

The second thing is that as one gets older one forgets more, in part because one has more to forget. In a recent episode of "Elemental", the US series based on Sherlock Holmes, the lead character posits that there is only so much his mind can hold and unless he ignores and drops the trivial stuff we won't have space for that which matters.

Scientifically, I don't believe that to be true, but practically there is something to it.

This year, for a number of reasons, we did not have a family holiday - the first time for us - and it generated a few moans from my wife and daughter (though she did have a remarkable trip to India with her school). I made the point to my wife that while we had not travelled this year, we had been fortunate in out life and visited many interesting places. I started listing them in my head and found that I would finish and then add another. Many of the places were ones I had not thought of for a long while, yet contained good experiences and positive memories.

I decided to write things down and started a mindmap. The first three quarters was pretty easy, but I have found myself adding things for a few weeks. There were no rules, other than those I decided. I tended to list countries I had visited, but in places like the US also added states and cities. It is on my iPad and I add to it as thoughts cross my mind.

 

Originally, I had forgotten about my trip to Malta and Albania, but now they are there too. For me this has been a good exercise and reminds me how fortunate I have been. It also helps my naturally ailing memory cells.

I am now doing a similar exercise for the music acts I have seen live. There are plenty there that I had forgotten too!!

My suggestion is that you pick something that has brought you pleasure and stimulation and try and make a similar list or lists. It could be plays you have seen, books you have read, galleries you have visited. If you are anywhere as old as I am, I am pretty sure there will be instances that you have forgotten, that when reflected upon bring you pelasure again and can give perspective to your current situation.

Just try it.

What a difference a day makes

The original Web

Yesterday I added some interesting picture of ice crystals on my hedge. Usually in the UK we see a quick thaw and it all starts again....at some point. This time though the temperatures stayed well below zero and this morning instead of a web I found this "shield" outline in the hedge.



24 hours later

Either the weight of the ice and/or the leaf that seems to be entangled at the botton caused a major but not complete structural failure, yet the crystal on the boundary thread have survived.

I wonder what I will find tomorrow?



Cardiac workouts before the Christmas party

Today is the prime Christmas party day in the City, the last Thursday close enough to Christmas, but not actually right up close. As a result the trains today have seen extra luggage!!!

I have watched a number of woman pulling along suitcases that should be sufficient for a family's two week summer holiday. I offered to help one carry her's up some stairs, but she was intent to manage it alone. The additional articles made the trains feel twice as full and put a rosey glow on the ladies' cheeks.

While one case did run along with that hollow, largely empty sound, I suspect most contain a choice of clothes and shoes, maybe three, back up articles in case of catastrophe and a beauty set that would grace a Hollywood film set. And I bet many still find they have forgotten something.

As a man I can recognise this, yet not participate. I am going out in black tie this evening and my bag containing all I need (yes, a full change!) was slung over my shoulder.

I am sure the end results of these ladies' efforts will be well worthwhile and I hope their colleagues show full appreciation, but I wonder if they will have the energy to last the night and enjoy it having started the day with a major cardiac workout. I do hope so.

A beautiful start to the day.

 

We had a heavy frozen fog last night and when I walked out of my door this meeting I was greeted by rather magical sight. Ice crystals had "grown" on much of my hedge, but most prolifically and stunningly on the points of the holly leaves .

I don't recall seeing anything quite like this before so I grabbed my phone an took a couple of snaps. I am sure that with a better camera I might have achieved a better focus or depth of field, but then I might have missed the moment too.

There were also plenty of ice-encrusted spider's webs so I captured one of the best.

The last photo was of the "ice flowers" based on a set of ivy berries that created by the fog.

As I photographed these, two people (a dogwalker and a driver) stopped to admire and comment on the display. What a way to start the day?

Fair play to my Ford Garage

Yesterday I put my car in for annual service with my local Ford dealer. I had bought it part used from the same dealership and taken a two year service plan with it. In truth I did not read all the small print at the time, but new that it would save me money.

Not only did I get an amazingly early call from the garage that all was complete - I am more used to that 4:15 call from garages - when I picked the car up there was NOTHING to pay. Instead I was just given the paperwork and keys and straight out to the car.

Now this may not sound like much, but after thirty years of motoring with new and used cars I am totally familiar with the list of "extras" that get added to the service, eg screen wash, oil disposal fee, etc.

In this case there was nothing, which as both a surprise and a pleasure......a deal which does what it says on the tin!

If I have a small complaint it is that in this client oriented, service culture, the service centre only stays open until 5:30 pm which is rather inconvenient for a commuter like me. I have to leave work early to get there, just in time. 6:30pm would be so much better!

Despite that, as I said.....

Fair Play!

Is Dodd Frank worth $10 billion each and every year?

Earlier today I came across the "Dodd Frank Burden Tracker" and was gobsmacked at what I read.

The tracker can be found on the website of the US House of Representatives Committee on Financial Services.

It appears that any rule published on the Federal Register muct also include an estimate of the labour (labor in the US) hours neede by affected entities to fulfill the new requirements.

This particular tracker follows the 400 rules included in Dodd Frank, of which only 224 or 56% have been written so far. According to the data on the website these 224 rules will "cost" a shade under 20 million labour hours to implement and then cost a shade over 24 million per annum to maintain compliance.

Now let's extrapolate and say that the estimate will double and round it up to 50 million hours for the full 400 rules. While not arithmetically perfect this allows for a degree of initial underestimation.

Now I am going to assume, I think reasonably, that while the site says the estimates cover the "affected entities", this does not include all the non-US entities outside of the US. This is a far larger field so the impact there will be less; as a result I will use a working approximation of another set of work equivalent to the US ie let's double 50 million hours per annum to 100 million hours per annum.

That is fine, but makes more impact as a financial number. I will guess that there will be a disproportionate number of expensive people involved eg lawyers, compliance staff, etc so let's use a working figure of US$100 per hour.

This suggests that the annual global cost of fulfilling the 400 Dodd Frank requirements will be of the order of US$10 billion.

Oh yes, I forget the other G20 countries that are also implementing different rules and regulations with the same intent of controlling and de-risking (at least to a degree) the world of OTC derivatives. We may well double that estimate again!!!

I wonder if that is considered an acceptable cost (acceptable by whom?) to bring hoped for safety to the world of financial services?

The great unspoken

I have just come from a talk by Gerry Pennell, CIO of LOCOG, organisers of the 2012 Olympics, at an event organised by La Fosse Associates. There is always a limit to what one can say at events like this and Gerry focused on the delivery of the results data, he acknowledged the significance of the infrastructure, enterprise systems (it was a business after all) and communications, but reckoned that what was different about London over Beijing four years earlier was the volume of mobile device access. Some of the numbers were truly staggering and the success of his team is unquestioned.

Gerry fielded a good number and it was at this point I found myself more interested. In part it was his acknowledgement that his team were incredibly focused and motivated accepting the fixed deadline and that their roles old end. He reported that he had little need to motivate them, but instead could focus on managing stakeholders. This rather confirms experience elsewhere but is still a useful example.

He also reported that there is little recycling of IT staff from London to Rio and cited the language difference as a major factor that would limit contribution. Again a truism from running global, internationally diversified teams.

It was also interesting to see a master at work. He fielded some expected and loaded questions. As an observer, he answered many with a safe or anodyne single sentence response which left you feeling there was much more left unsaid. In other instances he embarked on a longer, but rather deflecting answer. An honest analysis would probably conclude that he really said very little and certainly nothing at all controversial.

I don't mean that he was dishonest, but just very clever; as I said a "pro" at work.

He did say that he did not know his next role, but "politician" came to mind, but he might be too good to make it in the current UK set up :) .

As he said the biggest legacy he and his team left behind is the demonstration that the British IT industry works!


- Posted using BlogPress from my iPad

Keys to success?

Last night I was being asked my advice about how to succeed in the world of financial services. The lady asking the question was coming at the subject from the point of view of needing to know and understand the environment one is one and adapting. She seemed surprised when I too a contrary view.

Of course if one needs to change something in the world of self vs (working) environment, then it is obviously easy to change oneself, even if that requires you to start working out of your comfort or preferred zone. But that assumes that one cannot change the combination of self and environment. One of the things that has long been true and is increasingly and more widely true in the modern world of employment, is the variety of potential employers and the lower barriers to change. There were over 300 banks in the City of London. I could work for any of them with moving house or even my commute; instead I might have to turn right rather than left or walk 200m rather than 100m.

In that world I learnt that it is better to understand oneself and strive to find a compatible and suitable environment to work. With the range of different types and sizes of company, cultural backgrounds and maturity there is a broad range of environments. My contention drawn from personal experience is that if one is in an environment that suits you and you enjoy, doing a role that excites you and you enjoy then your performance lifts exponentially and it is from this that personal success is derived.

In essence, by all means look to adpat in the short term, but if you are always adapting and finding yourself twisted out of shape it is far better to lift yourself out and into a different and better environment.

I think I made myself understood in the end.

I am soooo "old school" and not asahmed of it.

Last night I attended a book launch at the London Business School. Apparently it is the third produced in partnership with a publisher aimed at bringing their academics' work to a wider audience.

The topic was an interesting one ie After America, exploring a new world order and the book was "Era of global transition: crisis and opportunities in a new world" by Dr Robert Davies. It questions if the western model for economic growth is the right one and suggesting that the old world order shaped by the US is fading and a new untested multipolar one awaits; one involving not only nation states and the financial system, but also social movements and interest groups ( I think I got that right?)

The format was a short presentation by the author and then a panel discussion including Q&As.

The theory sounded fine and it was contended that democracy if it does exist is often quite readily sacrificed, but to my mind the proposition(s) failed the "so what?" test. In the questions I asked where they thought the leaders for this new world, given that many of the issues seem to be big for a single brain, that the tenure of leaders is ever shorter and mismatched to the problems and that many of the leaders political and business are so wealthy that it is hard to see how their decisions will not be biased to protecting their position.

I half expected the answer that it was the intelligentsia and academics that were best suited to leading this new world. Instead I was shot down in flames, damned as being caught in an old paradigm and that the new world would not seek leaders, but that they would emerge for the socila networks and interest groups. A comfortable academic on the panel stated that she thought governments were irrelevant as they had no impact on her personal life.

I did feel there was a touch of hypocrisy there as she looked to be persoanlly comfortable, in an academic post that would not exist without the government she obviously reviled.

A number of members of the audience picked up the leadership angle while others challenged her dismissal of government. She was resolute and even supportive of the idea thatr anarchy was preferable to government.

I left the event slightly stimulated, but largely disappointed. I think the most disturbing thought was rendered by an old friend who suggested that history shows that leaders appear at times of crisis so IF and I mean IF these academics are right and we are heading to a new world of interest groups, social networks and green economics, we will have to wait for and face another crisis before we find our new leaders.

Personally I would prefer to be proactive and strive to avoid the crisis, for my own sake and that of those I love, but that is a thought not shared by everyone. Now that is a scarey thought!!!

Season's Greetings 2012

On the 29th February this year a friend, Doug Shaw, encouraged a group of us to use their extra/bonus day to do something new or different. I joined him and others and learnt some of the rudiments of drawing and painting with watercolours (not since schooldays!!). I then found a clever drawing app on the iPad called "Paper" by Fiftythree and have been doodling sketching on and off since.

 

In previous years I have produced Christmas ecards that used some of my photography or computer graphic creations. This year I decided to use my limited drawing and painting so please meet a festive Poppy, our Yorkie.

I wish hope this finds you and your loved ones well, that you enjoy the holiday season and that 2013 is kind to us all.