OT: Swedish Elections

CCL goes bust occasionally. On one occasion that lead to CCL being bought by ADL, and becoming a (very hands off) offshoot.

Oh yes. I read that book several times when it came out, and alternately liked and disliked it.

I liked it because it focused on more than the traditional bottom-line assessments of companies, and managed to capture some of their soul.

I disliked it because it took 400 pages to note that one of the common best practices was to condense memos to 1 page long :)

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Not a lot of their soul.

came rather closer, and reminded me of aspects of my time at EMI Central Re search, which had a similar feel.

Tom Peters didn't know a thing about technology, but he did pick one point that I rather liked, which was that the more nearly excellent firms let the engineers talk to selected customers.

In the UK marketing was scared silly of engineers talking to customers - ra tionalised on the basis that the engineers might tell the customers about i ncipient new products, killing the scales of the current product.

I hated it because I always had the feeling that marketing always told us t hat the customers always wanted more of what we were already giving them, w hen the customers might have liked what the technology could have allowed u s to give them, if they'd known it was on offer.

I always thought that that was concession to the Trump-like defects of most British management. Their attention span was limited to a single page of t ext, and you could exploit it hiding the dodgy bits on the second page.

I haven't read that, but Peters' book was about far more than tech companies.

Yes indeed.

I've never worked in a company where I felt that was an issue - which says more about my choice of companies than about general company behaviour.

Oh, dog yes. In spades.

Peters' book wasn't much about UK business.

I think it is reasonable to summarise the decision on one page, provided there is a nod to the dodgy bits and that the rationale is available somewhere.

It's a pretty arbitrary limit. It does encourage everybody to drill down to the fundamentals, but a lot of baby gets thrown out with the bathwater, and it does excuse gross over-simplification.

I entirely agree about the limit being arbitrary, and in that sense it is aspirational.

I've never been afraid to bust the limit by up to a factor of (say) two, and never seen anybody else that was afraid. However, that is in the knowledge that 1) any other options have been investigated and rejected for stated reasons 2) those statements are available, if necessary 3) the people summarising/proposing are sound and are trusted (but if not, why is anybody reading the memo!)

Anybody that takes the "1 page only" as a religious rule is probably someone that thinks following a process is /sufficient/ to guarantee a good result. And such people should be ignored!

e UK

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True. "

As usual he knows nothing. Companies work WITH TRADE unions, LABOR unions a re their enemy. The ones that protect the lazy and incompetent. In a TRADE union you maintain standards for quality and quantity of work or you are ou t of the union which means you have to work for assholes.

How to tell the difference ? Usually you are required to join a labor union after so many days on the job, while you have to be sponsored in to a trad e union. That means a company must intend to hire you because you MUST work your apprenticeship usually with them and you usually go to school one day a week and the company pays you for that time.

But such things are not on the media so I don't expect foreigners to know, whether they think they do or not.

the UK

are their enemy. The ones that protect the lazy and incompetent. In a TRAD E union you maintain standards for quality and quantity of work or you are out of the union which means you have to work for assholes.

This may be a US distinction, probably invented by employers. It doesn't se em to exist outside of the US.

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It looks as if US usage distinguishes between individual trade unions, and their collective bargaining agent when they combine to negotiate with a par ticular employer or group of employers. The labour union would then be a co llection of trade unions where each trade union would represent a specific trade.

on after so many days on the job, while you have to be sponsored in to a tr ade union. That means a company must intend to hire you because you MUST wo rk your apprenticeship usually with them and you usually go to school one d ay a week and the company pays you for that time.

, whether they think they do or not.

Some trade unions do represent specific trades, and you have to have done a n apprenticeship to be allowed to practice that trade.

I was talking about the situation in the UK where I did work, and was a mem ber of a trade union (and even got dragooned into being a low level trade u nion representative at one point - during run-up to the winter of disconten t

when our wages fell out of line with the - then high - rate of inflation in the UK pound, which had hit 26.9% in 1975).

Jurb wouldn't know about that, though I have posted about that here.