Clever management phrases When I was a graduate trainee I had a manager who loved to say: “Do not come to me with problems, come with solutions” He believed it was a clever and motivational sort of thing to say. It would make me more creative, I would start to think ahead and develop my own solutions, and — […]
Ignorance and the Hippo
Hidden Problems Ernesto Sirolli tells a lovely story in his book Ripples from the Zambezi: In the 1970’s he worked for an Italian NGO that provided aid for the people of Zambia. One of their projects was to teach the Zambians about agriculture and how to cultivate food. Ernesto tells how they arrived in a […]
World Class Rhetoric
The other day I was sent a report. It went a little like this… (The names have been changed to protect the guilty) World Class Performance It has been implied that our performance could be improved. All available data suggests that this cannot be the case Market Context We have the highest satisfaction […]
How do you Make a Pencil?
In 1958 Leonard E Read wrote an essay about making pencils. He described: The growing of trees The work of a lumberjack The operation of the saw mill The making of the saw The transportation of the logs The mining of the graphite The production of the rubber The mixing of the paint The sourcing […]
Dogmatic Ignorance
I had an interesting conversation today with an auditor. I asked him why auditors don’t see the blindingly obvious, why they don’t dig into problems, why they are so easily hoodwinked, (go on, admit it, you have pulled the wool over an auditors eyes), why they are, frankly, so stupid. I didn’t put it quite […]