|
31/01/2010 11:34:49
|
NeilWarren
Posts 645
|
Most of you will have noticed the shocking headlines around yet another case of brutality in apparently feral parts of our society, resulting in sub-animal behaviour amongst some of our children, often reflecting the same behaviours in their parents (if “parent” is an appropriate word).
David Cameron’s response of “Broken Britain” then brings the equally depressing round of replies that seek to defend our plucky troops, policemen/women or, in this case, social workers, with a sub-text argument that “It’s not that bad” and that such examples are, in fact, isolated cases or few and far between.
I do begin to think that Britain might be more seriously broken than even Dave is suggesting though, when I get to articles like these, in The Sunday Times…
This Social Work by Computer System is Protecting No One – by Jenni Russell
…featuring such mind-boggling claims as...
Twenty years ago 30% of their time was spent with families; now it is just 11%
...or...
Worse still, the computer system discourages staff from changing their minds. Altering the initial assessment means staff must re-enter the entire 40 pages again
...from a start-point where, anyway...
Those with multiple problems are now so numerous that only the most complex cases are looked at; and they are hard for her to judge.
continued...
|
|
31/01/2010 11:36:27
|
NeilWarren
Posts 645
|
...continued
Policing is no better, where a bit of late night TV “Street Wars” will be enough to convince anyone that the last thing any beat officer actually wants to do is to haul some rowdy drunk into the cells, to then create 2 days worth of reports, court attendance and so on. So maybe our “best in the world” armed forces are doing better then? Apparently not, if this Sunday Times Think Tank – New Ideas for the 21st Century are anything to go by…
Our Most Devastating Weapon is Agility – Michael Clarke
…where this line is particular…
Big-ticket equipment programmes for state-of-the-art tank fleets, jets, ships and submarines not only soak up a lot of defence cash, but tend to drive the structure of the rest of the force.
…reminded me of Bob Apollo’s observations on Corporate IT/CRM spend plummets and also that these points…
Smart command is more important than smart weapons in almost any military operation.
At the other end of the scale, the skills and training of the personnel — the soldiers, the sailors, the airmen and women — are also critical to “transformative” forces. Their ability to adapt and maintain their high professionalism and dedication in a range of roles and with a variety of technologies is key to playing to British strengths. The challenge is to produce military units that can master the integration of systems, make the most of civil technologies and restructure their own organisations flexibly, as occasion demands.
Not least, “transformative” armed forces should be backed up by excellent intelligence. All military commanders want good tactical intelligence to give them the greatest advantage. A bigger national challenge is to invest in better strategic intelligence to detect shifts in Britain’s security environment in Europe, the Middle East and elsewhere. Raw information is not intelligence. The intelligence picture must be expertly interpreted and then acted upon. The most transformative military in the world cannot rescue a defence policy that is not politically sensitive to its own neighbourhood.
…have direct parallels with what we need to do to make UK PLC commercially (as far as selling is concerned), as well as socially, militarily and politically, successful.
LESS command & control, bureaucratic, centralised, tickboxing, (covered-my-ass-anyway), big-brother, nanny state, red tape nonsense, and…
MORE individual people, empowering systems, efficient contact and communication, better education/knowledge/intelligence and the freedom to respond (e.g. I see no point in being capable enough to put a Community Police Officer at a gravel pit when a child is drowning, if Health & Safety then rule that the thing to do is take notes!).
Symptoms to watch out for, in selling, will be the unused CRM system in front of you, KPI’s (Key Performance Indicators) like “number of telephone lifts” or “number of visits” that have absolutely no relationship to your success or revenues and “targets” that are so meaningless, out of date, or fantasy-land that the most use they are to you is for entertainment, as you laugh in the pub afterwards about the stupidity of your bosses.
|
|
03/02/2010 11:09:23
|
NeilWarren
Posts 645
|
And here's another thing that's "broke"...
Econsultancy - It's 2010 - Do You Know Where Your Email Is?
...with one idea of a way round it!
|
|
17/02/2010 10:59:02
|
NeilWarren
Posts 645
|
Yet another example, which particularly struck me because the headline picks up on £750,000 spent on a “folly” – literally…
Times Online - Quango spends £750,000 on bridge to nowhere
…without seeming to raise too much of an eyebrow about the absolute madness, let alone folly, of setting up a bunch of bureaucratic police “higher-ups” and accountants, I assume, with a £550,000,000 budget to have a look at whether the total £9 billion police budget was being wisely spent. So…
269 Acre Estate in Hampshire – no problem
£2 million to re-do the driveway – no problem
“Consultants” on £2,000 - £3,000 (A DAY!) – no problem
£31,000 for a nice din-dins for the boys – no problem
…never mind fixing the damned bridge and pond.
I’ve picked up a theme from discussions with some very senior and in-touch leaders and trainers in the sales profession in the ModernSelling.com – LinkedIn Group – noting that a majority reply from sales team leaders is that they don’t see anything that is “broke”, so don’t expect to want or need to fix it. Other than by maybe spending a bit of Train to Gain tax on some tickboxing “sales training”.
And I guess if you were sitting in the equivalent of this Hampshire mansion and sweating on whether the drive was going to be up to scratch, you perhaps wouldn’t think there was too much wrong either. But I only have to picture some of the mega-contracts fuelling those endless health, telephony or legal service telephone calls that plague my day, or consider what it might cost to keep 300,000 sales people sitting in traffic jams making how many visits, did you say… 6?, 4? – try 2, or 1 – and I start to cry.
We cannot afford this kind of public sector/private sector imbalance in the first place, let alone then running the private part of it in as equally shambolic a way as the public. Running UK PLC down like this is going to affect us all, sooner or later – is doing so already in fact. So “doesn’t affect me” as an excuse or cop-out (good pun) is, equally, not an answer – because we know where you live!
|
|
07/03/2010 13:00:42
|
NeilWarren
Posts 645
|
I seem to be collecting these – or is it that they are cropping up on every article I read?
Anyway, to a couple of consecutive weeks of articles from Harriet Sergeant writing in The Sunday Times – kinda hammers some more nails in the coffin…
Schools are churning out the unemployable
Snippets…
Harlem New York 14 year olds were doing better at making a first impression than…"52 Graduates, all educated at state school…three As at A-level and a 2:1 degree….Of the 52 applicants, half arrived late. Only three…walked up to the Managing Director, looked him in the eye, shook his hand and said ‘Good Morning’…..first six months…check all emails for spelling and grammar…5.30 on the dot they left the office.”
“Of the 1.7 million jobs created since 1997, 81% have gone to foreign workers”
Or
The state sector’s big evil: it does not sack
Snippets…
“Sir Stanley Kalms, the former head of Dixons and one of the more unlikely past chairmen of a National Health Service hospital, discovered how extensive is the culture of job security — and at whose expense — when he threw a tea party. He had decided that staff who had served for more than 25 years deserved a reward. It proved a revelation. Neither he nor anyone in the hospital had ever seen the majority who turned up. Some were ill, others grotesquely overweight, “all no longer fit and proper people to be in a hospital”. But they were still on the payroll.”
“Failure to pull up lazy or arrogant staff demoralises those who work hard and care about their job.”
“One teacher in an inner-city school dismissed half the staff as failing. ‘I would hate them teaching my children,’ he said. Yet they were never censured. Indeed, they were sometimes better rewarded than those teachers who worked hard to inspire their pupils, arranged after-school clubs and stayed late....As the tutor remarked bitterly: ‘Your students can go on failing but as long as you can justify it, as long as you create a folder of evidence for your continuing professional development, you move smoothly on to the next pay level.’”
That looks very broke, to my eye - but can professional sales people help to fix it?
|
|
pages:
1 |
|---|