Not another meeting

I have never much enjoyed internal meetings, whether management, business development, risk management, department, start the week, or whatever. When I was more closely involved in the day-to-day management of my practice they were the bane of my life. It was very refreshing reading Luke Johnson’s take on them in his FT column yesterday,

I am constantly astonished by managers in large organisations who obsessively attend internal meetings. Often these grey affairs have a dozen or more participants, each feeling they must make a contribution to justify their existence. It is my idea of corporate hell. It astonishes me to meet middle-ranking figures who have such bookings stretching not just for months ahead, but perhaps even into next year. What is it that goes on in all these crucial gatherings?

Committees almost by definition are a black hole into which time is sucked. Usually, they are planned months in advance, looming on the horizon on a Monday morning, primed to bore you to death. They are dominated by minutes, agendas, protocol and other matters of ultimate tedium. I rather admire those outfits that hold sessions where everyone has to stand up. It gives the event a real sense of urgency, I suspect. In these straitened times, such a stripped-down attitude feels rather appropriate – along with a genuinely flexible attitude to how you spend your day.

Holding on to optimism

A very good public lecture at the University of Exeter yesterday evening on Building the Energy Future, given by James Smith, Chairman of Shell UK.

Very upbeat (“we need to hold on to our optimism, but realise that optimism alone is not enough”) and honest. And this morning Stefan Stern in the FT on why Managing the mood is crucial,

Leaders have to be resilient. At the moment the bad news is coming not single spies, but in battalions. Tough trading conditions like these test character as much as business acumen. Your physical and emotional response to these challenges is just as important as the decisions you actually take.

If James Smith’s performance last night is typical of the man (and I am sure it is) then Shell UK must be a great place to work.

P.S. Note to Steve Smith (University of Exeter VC) ~ these lectures are too good to miss: there should be a podcast.

The darker side of George

Following on from earlier, an excellent post by Oliver Kamm this morning, Galloway’s Heroes.

There’s a tendency among commentators to assume that Galloway, for all his bombast and rhetorical excess, is a colourful character who adds to the quality of public life. The truth is much darker.

And so say all of us.

Our Chief of men

A knowledge of history is clearly not an employment requirement for government service in Canada, if the remarks of Alykhan Velshi, Jason Kenney’s spokesman, are anything to go by. Referring to the decision to ban George Galloway from Canada, Velshi is reported as saying

“We’re going to uphold the law, not give special treatment to this infamous street-corner Cromwell.”

I have some sympathy with the Canadians, as Galloway is a far from likeable character, but a Cromwell? Hardly. For the real Cromwell you can do no better than Blair Worden’s summary in The English Civil Wars 1640 – 1660

His later victories, inside and outside England, were still more remarkable [than his exploits at Marston Moor and Naseby]. Through them, but also through willpower and political dexterity, a provincial gentleman-farmer, an obscure figure until his forties, rose to conquer three nations and to awe the courts of Europe.

Whither Plymouth?

I have just finished reading Justin Webb’s Have a Nice Day. In it the BBC’s North America Editor gives us a very different take on the US from the one we often get. It made me want to go on-line immediately and book our next holiday in the States. Read it.

Early on, in his Introduction, Webb quotes the Guardian journalist Jonathan Freedland on what he calls the culture question,

That sense that Americans believe they are masters of their own destiny, responsible for their own country, town, village etc., that sense is still largely missing in Britain. It’s better than it was – there is more of a can do culture, partly fostered by the cult of business and enterprise etc. – but the semi-feudal passivity remains, I fear. You see it in the habit of looking upward, waiting for those in charge to sort things out.

The news last week that Paul Carroll is to leave Plymouth, and the Plymouth CDC, at the end of April had me wondering whether our failure to understand what makes Americans tick had anything to do with what the Western Morning News headlined as a ‘Bitter blow’ for the city’s revival.

One thing for certain is that despite the fighting talk by James Brent, CDC’s chairman, that “We have every intention that the CDC will survive and flourish and execute the work plan”, it will be that much more difficult without that American drive brought to Plymouth by Paul Carroll.