Grounds for Partnership

Last night I gave the opening speech for a conference of IT Directors. My intent was to provoke some thought and discussion and maybe open the way for wider discussions today, the second day. At the risk of upsetting some friends I decided to explore the holy grail that most businesses seek which is a partnership between business and IT. My grounds were that I have been sitting in meetings discussing this topic for well over ten years, yet we seem no further forward, so maybe we are looking for the wrong thing. Indeed I think it was Confucious who said that the definition of insanity is to keep doing the same thing and expect a different result.

Cutting a long story short and not repeating the speech, it seemed to go pretty welll, quite a few wry grins and nods in the right places. Further to that around a dozen people have approached me since and said they enjoyed the speech and a number of them have asked for copies of the slides, which I have gladly dispatched.

The piece that I thought I would add here was a single slide that seems to have resonated with many and might be of use to more. It was a slide I put together as a way to check and see if a partnership exists or is viable. With a lack of originality I used the initials in the word "partner" as the key.

Briefly:-

• There is a need for a common purpose. Sort of obvious, but in many instance you find that the parties have different and diverging agendas; it is hard to build a partnership on this;
• The union should be apposite. I chose this as the definition I found was "significantly appropriate". I am not sure "good enough" is in fact good enough for partnership;
• Reward is about the balanced sharing of spoils and pain. In projects onemight see that IT bear the burden of failure while the business enjoy the success. This is not balanced and will drive non-partnership behaviours;
• Trust, well I trust (pun intended) that this is self evident;
• "n" as in a number of alternatives. If there is no alternative then it will become something like a forced marriage ie might be successful, but evidence suggests that more often than not, it is not;
• Empathy. Again I hope self evident, but a union of technologists and commerce is not an easy one, especially when the going gets tough; and lastly
• Responsibility ie each and every party sharing joint responsibility and fulfilling their own role properly.

My contention is that partnership is hard to build and sustain if even one of these is missing and certainly when two or more are absent or weak. The challenge to the audience (and the reader) was to look at the aspects of business where they think they have or need partnership and use this checklist to assess it.

The speech did cover other aspects, but this is enough for this post.

Forgive me Father.....

.....for I have not blogged in a while. That said I did state at the oustet that I would blog when I found things that interested me. Well like buses interesting things come together and I now have a few on draft form. that said I thought It better to break myself back in with this a sort compendium of items. If you can discern a pattern then I salute you.

In no particular order here they are:

Portfolio Employment

I seem to be running into more and more people who seem to be considering a working life that may have two or three components running together. This seems to be a practical response to the employment situation where finding a significant role that one likes seems to be more difficult. It is also a pragmatic response to the pension debacle we face. Many of us will have to supplement meagre pensions with additional income from earnings that may have to stretch into out seventies.

I sense it may also have something to do with how even companies who say they care for their staff are no treating most of us as commodities, offering no real security and little care; so we look after ourselves and spread the risk.

Now I am not sure if this is a true trend or a measure of the different circles I am starting to circulate in as I consider a number of interesting possibilities.

I had long realized that our children's generation would be the first to be worse off than their parents. What I had not realized was that it would affect me, but for many of us who have lost final salary pensions we find ourselves on that cusp. Our retirement will be less comfortable than our parents.

Parents have no musical taste

As father to a teenager I have been increasingly ridiculed should I show any appreciation for modern music. I have always had a fairly eclectic taste in music so why not enjoy elements of today's music?

Last year my daughter almost fell off her chair when I knew that Scouting For Girls sang "she's so luvverly". She just about coped this year on as our family holiday songs became "Billionaire" by Travie Mccoy feat. Bruno Mars and "California Girls" by Katy Perry (..... daisy dukes, bikini on top....), but when I start talking about the Sky 1 series "Must be the music" it is all too much! She is horrified I like a Brit Pop band from Braintree called Missing Andy - just search on Youtube.

For an unsigned band they have some great songs and some very professional videos. They wow'ed the TV judges with "Made this way (Made in England)" and the video is very clever. The video for "Call to Arms" is also very well made, but I found it rather disturbing. On the face of it the video is something of a gorefest, but I sense an undercurrent. I will leave you make your own judgement, but I wonder if the band will come to rue releasing that video. As it is now on the Internet it will always be available somewhere, but it is likely to spook any record company with even a modicum of risk aversion.

Marmite XO

I am probably behind the times again, but in the supermarket today I found(!) Marmite XO. It claims to be a longer matured and stronger version of Marmite. I just had to buy some.

I have long been in the 'love it' camp in regards to Marmite and struggle to think how you can improve it. The sad side of me will come out when I run a comparative taste test in the next few days - watch out for the results.


Well that is probably enough - I do have three more posts forming plus a Marmite feedback so maybe the next week will be a little more productive.


- Posted using BlogPress from my iPad

String theory, psychometrics and all that!

Today The Times published extracts from Stephen Hawking’s new book. The headline is that God did not create the universe, but rather we/it/everything are the inevitable consequence of the Law of Gravity, leaving no room and no need for God.

Luckily for you , the reader, I don’t plan to discuss that aspect of it, but rather something that cropped up towards the end of the article. Hawking predicts that physics is close to writing:

“a theory of everything, a single framework that can entirely explain the properties of Nature. Such a theory has been the holy grail for physicists since the time of Einstein, but until now it has been impossible to reconcile quantum theory, which explains the sub-atomic world, with gravity, which explains how objects interact on the cosmological scale.”

He expects that M-Theory, a form of string theory, will achieve this goal. Luckily I do not profess to understand or be able to explain string theory, but would pick out the following

“Rather than being a single master equation, Professor Hawking, suggests that M-theory will be a “whole family” of theories existing within a consistent theoretical framework. Much like the way different maps — political, geographical, topological — can map a single region without contradicting each other, M-theory will map different aspects of the material world.”

This resonates deeply with something else that has been on my mind ie the many frameworks and tools we, as managers and modern workers, are faced with in trying to explain human relations and motivations in the search for ultimate personal and corporate performance.

Over the years, through MBA study and corporate training I have come across a multitude of theories, frameworks, assessment tools and approaches (see below for a representative, but not exhaustive list). Most recently, as reported before, while on holiday I took up and read “Neuro Linguistic Programming for Dummies”. What struck me was how much of it seemed to either draw upon or feed other things I have come across, so much so that I was left not sure what is the root and what the derivative and craving some unified/unifying framework that would help me understand it all and make use of it.

I realise that various elements come from psychometrics, psychology and even philosophy, and I have often witnessed competitive streaks and discord between different practitioners, but yet it seems that they all attempt to explain the workings of human beings and how to influence them. As a physicist myself (albeit way back) I look for simplicity and elegance and intuitively feel that it should exist here too. Instead I feel I am left to pick the jewels from each and try and create my own tool kit.

The question I have is, is anyone trying to unify this? Or instead is it easier for each to ply their own theory/tool/trade and leave the consumers divided and confused?


Various tools/frameworks I can recall using or being trained in:

Dale Carnegie
Meyers-Briggs

DISC
Belbin

Judgement
Index Maslow

Neuro Linguistic Programming
LIFO

Deep Democracy

A letter from America - or "Food Drink and Music"

Well, I am back from two weeks in America and have some thoughts to share. We experienced a few "first's" and some "best of's". I also spotted had a couple of interesting insights (well I thought they were interesting - you can judge for yourself).

Let's start with the "best of's". These I think all related to food. Dealing with mine first, I had most definitely the best beef burger in my life at Bahama Breeze on International Drive. As usual, with American portions it was large, and we were talking as a family. I was three bites into my wood grilled Angus burger before I realised that I did not recall eating or chewing anything. So more aware I took a fourth bite and found that the burger just melted in my mouth - it needed no chewing. Now I di have my burgers rare so that helps, but even so, I have never had one like this before. Trust me, I then savoured every bite left in it. It is hard to liken it to anything, but the best I can do is relate it to when you place a lump of butter on your tongue and close your mouth. The butter melts and you get a spectrum of taste and texture sensations. Well, it was like that.
In fact, it was exceptional and when we visited another restaurant in the chain later in the holiday, I was scared to order it again as I doubted it could match up - instead I had very good shrimps on linguine.

The second "best of" was when we visited an italian restaurant that had featured on Gordon Ramsay's USA Kitchen Nightmares. This one was called Anna Vincenzo's in Boca Raton. We were unsure whether to go, but did so out of curiosity and were not comforted when we arrived at 9 to find barely a half a dozen other diners. All of the other diners left within 10 minutes of us arriving, leaving just three of us and a distinct feeling that we were keeping them from closing; though they did say they were open until 10. To be fair this is (very) low season for that area and that explains, at least in part, the poor patronage. We decided to stay and ordered three dishes. The pick was the Quattro Fromaggio pizza that my wife ordered. She can be a hard customer to please, but reckons that, having had similar plates many times before in different places, this was by far the best she had ever tasted and even complemented the chef.

The last one I will report was the best tuna melt ever according to my daughter. She had this at the Boca Breakfast Club. She also claimed that Quattro Frommaggio pizza she had at Il Bellagio in West Palm Beach was the best ever, but I decided just to let it run and not try and differentiate between the two.

As to firsts, well the "Cloister Deluxe" room that we had at the Boca Resort and Club, a Waldorf Astoria/Hilton establishment now, was the first room that A) my wife was totally delighted in from the start and B) would happily go back to. This was a pucker establishment that we almost had to ourselves with it being off season and at all at a very reasonable rate. It had an attached beach club that we looked at, but decided that we preferred the slightly more traditional environment of the original hotel. It was so nice to have a choice of (and not fight for) loungers or sun shades at any time of the day, to have Key lime cooler on tap, literally for most of the day, and to have many interesting places in the resort to wander around and relax in. I do wonder what it is like at peak season if even a fraction of it 20,000 membership turned up, but for us in July it was idyllic.

On the day, we left my wife commented how nice it was not to have even seen let alone been close to the usual holiday melee of blow up dinghy's, fishing rods and loud fashion. We do not usually holiday at cheap resorts, but it is hard to get away from the rampant commercialism these days; somehow Boca Raton seems to have managed it. In part it may be to do with the fact it was pretty much purpose built, starting almost 100 years ago. Another factor is the "money" that lives there, which does not need the commercial aspects and indeed probably seeks to avoid them. I suspect this is changing as this was Bernie Madoff territory, and many people have lost a lot of money. There was considerable talk around of downsizing, many top end restaurants are suffering, and indeed the resort has dropped its joining fee from $40,000 to $20,000! Who knows what it will look like in a couple of years, but right now it works for us?

Another first, and back to food again, is that in the full fourteen days we were there every evening meal was a good one. We only repeated two chain restaurants, but different locations in each instance. This all helped to make a good holiday.

Now I promised some things I found interesting. The main one was related to beer and seems to be a field where the US is following our trend, rather than the other way around. A few years ago all you seemed to be able to find, other than small, local micro distilleries were the extremely cold, very fizzy, bland and almost indistinguishable beers from Coors, Millers, Anheuser-Busch and the like. However, as with the UK when CAMRA led a campaign away from the mega brewery anonymous beers of the 70's, it seems that America is finding its taste buds and its sense of humour. The latter element seems to go with the territory and relates to the naming of brews - I guess we blame the marketing suits for that, eh?

Well, this year we found a lot of Blue Moon on tap, in the bottle and in cans. This is brewed with coriander and orange and served with a garnish of an orange slice. It is a wheat beer very passable as a summer tipple. We also found "Shock Top", "White Rascal" and something called "Monk in the Trunk", though I did not get to sample this last one. Many of these are wheat beers, but all had some character and flavour; the other mass beers seemed far less prominent.

The last item for this post comes from a geeky aspect. My vacation reading was "NeuroLinguistic Programming for Dummies". I will leave you to decide which part of that title is most apt for me, but suffice it to say there were some aspects I found interesting and will most likely blog on soon. The bit that struck me related to using music as a mood alternating state. On one level this is self evident, and I use music thus when I work and when I drive. The bit that stuck was a reference to Baroque music being very good, though I confess at "what" did not stick. That is until the flight home. Usually I am very good at sleeping on overnight flights and this time I sat down, plugged in my iPod and pulled up an album of classical, mainly baroque pieces. The odd thing was, that although I could relax, I could not sleep. More than that I was very aware of my mind self navigating and coming up with some interesting ideas and linkages that I had not been seeking, but just seemed to flow. This probably lasted 90 - 120 minutes before I gave up trying to sleep. I was truly surprised that I could not sleep at that point, but also that I did not sleep for the rest of the flight either.
I have since gone back to the book and seen that Baroque music is considered good for creating an alpha state; clear calm and relaxed. It evidently worked for me, but I will remember not to use that music as an aid to sleeping on airplanes in the future.

Well the annual holiday is over for another year, but in the history of vacations this was a good one! 

PS: I learnt a new word: docent. We were shown around the Flagler museum by one. This beautiful house is known as the White House of the South and is worth a visit.  A docent is a person who is a knowledgeable guide, esp. one who conducts visitors through a museum and delivers a commentary on the exhibitions.