Category: Modern Life

20,000 leagues and all that

Perhaps I should have kept up to speed with the feeds on my Netvibes page. Had I done so, I would have read Alex Barker yesterday afternoon, and his post Hunt for Red October and the sub-nuclear crash. He posted that

The New York Times raises the intriguing prospect that the submarine crash in the mid-Atlantic was actually the result of a war game.

But then finished with

Sadly, officials tell me this wonderful theory is completely untrue. Improbable as it may seem, the submarines really did just bump into each other.

I am still not sure I believe that.

Martin Lukes, where are you?

As always, a thought provoking article by Stefan Stern in the FT this morning on the trials, tribulations and place of HR. My eye was caught by this,

Also attending the meeting was Patrick Wright, professor at Cornell university’s school of industrial and labour relations, in the US. In his many discussions with business leaders he has found that there are concerns about the way ethical issues can get downplayed, or even completely ignored, because nobody else in a senior role will raise them. Guess who gets volunteered to do so? “The HR director is told: ‘You need to get this on the table’,” he says. Not easy – especially when you have little idea how much public support you will receive from your colleagues.

Perhaps, Prof Wright suggests, the HR director needs to become a kind of “chief integrity officer”, who could avoid being penalised if the chief executive’s appetite for integrity turns out to be limited.

It’s a very short step from here to Integethics™.

Submarine grandmother’s footsteps

Much has been made of the fact that the British and French nuclear submarines that collided in the Atlantic sometime last month were somehow unaware of each other’s presence.  The FT this morning reported that

One defence insider suggested the French were genuinely unaware that Le Triomphant hit a British submarine until a routine information exchange with the Royal Navy.

Isn’t it more likely that one was stalking the other? If Sandy Woodward in The Independent is right that the chances of a collision such as this happening are the same as winning the lottery four times in a week, then it wasn’t chance. Equally, however, actually touching each other probably wasn’t by design either.

I rather doubt that we will ever find out, despite political calls for an explanation.

Can it get any worse?

Not the economy (it will) but this endless parade of insincerity. Watching the RBS and HBoS bankers yesterday was hardly an edifying experience. Humbled they weren’t. The coverage has been extensive, but two posts to read.

The first from Matthew Taylor yesterday, in which he argues that

Perhaps it’s time to take a more systematic approach to apologies. After all, not all ‘sorries’ are worth much. When I worked in Number Ten, Tony Blair used occasionally to admit he’d made a mistake but only when he wished he had listened to himself earlier!

A distinction to start with when grading apologies is between apologising for the act and apologising for the consequences. Insincere apologies will tend to be weak on one or other side; either ‘I’m sorry for what happened but there was nothing I could have done about it’, or ‘I made a mistake but I’m not responsible for what happened as a result’.

The second from Martin Bright

Now word reaches The Bright Stuff that the man who has never knowingly apologised for anything is preparing his very own “mea culpa”. I am told that Whitehall officials have been ordered to make a compilation DVD of Obama’s various apologies to the American TV networks to be studied by the Prime Minister.

The idea of Gordon Brown practising a humble self-deprecating manner in front of the mirror based on what he has seen on his training DVD doesn’t bear thinking about. But then again… maybe it does.