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.

Change is coming

And just before I get down to the day job, if you want to read an excellent review of Richard Susskind’s “The End of Lawyers” although I would urge you to read the book itself, you will do no better than Bruce MacEwen in Adam Smith, Esq. MacEwen has the telling quote from the book,

“I predict that lawyers who are unwilling to change their working prcatices and extend their range of services will, in the coming decade, struggle to survive. Meanwhile, those who embrace new technologies and novel ways of sourcing legal work are likely to trade successfully for many years yet, even if they are not occupied with the law jobs that most law schools currently anticipate for their graduates.”

Pulling up my socks

I always look forward to Monday mornings as it means another piece by Lucy Kellaway in the FT. This morning’s Only the smart will survive, so pull up your socks is well up to the usual standard, but somewhat disheartening, as today finds me in a very fetching (or so I thought) pair of royal blue socks with pink and yellow lozenges.

Tomorrow will find me back in the usual black socks (but long ~ just below the knee! There is nothing worse than English short socks, except sock suspenders!)