Corporate Ponderings…

There was a story in the newspaper last week about prison vans being ordered at vast expense, only for the powers that be to discover that they are too large for most courthouse entrances. Really. You could be forgiven for thinking that it was an extravagant (VERY extravagant, like £900 million, I mean how can a few tall buses with blacked out windows cost that much?) April Fool. Of all the people in the world in whose shoes you would not want to be, the project manager of that particular project probably tops the list.

Of course, we all know what happened here. Lots of people, probably dressed in suits, have got together, done a whole lot of talking and very little listening, and have probably come up with a list of proposals, which have then been circulated around a whole lot of other people who either weren’t invited to the original meeting, or were vital to the meeting but couldn’t be arsed to attend, and who thus have done even less listening, and they have prioritised the proposals, and then someone completely different who actually controls the money has had a look at the list and rejected the first 5 items because they are too expensive. So number 6 has been duly selected, but because it was number 6 no one in either of the original parties did any form of due diligence about the viability of the proposal because they only checked proposals 1 through 5. And absolutely no one thought to get their measuring tape out and check the dimensions of a courtroom’s approach roads against the proportions of the vans being ordered. This is because number 6 ticked pretty much none of the boxes, and thus was never really intended to be a serious proposal in the first place.

People have not been singing off the same song sheet. Their ducks have not been placed in a row. Have you ever seen ducks in a row? I have only ever seen ducks in a line, and it’s usually quite a dishevelled and quite frankly a bit stinky line too. If this is a standard analogy in the human world for being well-organised, is it really any wonder that the flipping trucks don’t fit through the gates?

Corporate speak is a shifting landscape though. We are seeing a whole new generation of words and phrases entering common usage, so out goes brain-storming, thinking outside the box and blue sky thinking, and in comes collaboration, transformation and optimisation. At the risk of this becoming a rant (I mean, we wouldn’t want that now would we), here are a few other favourites of mine

• You can’t polish a turd: this means that a group of people, in full recognition of the fact that some situation is poor and unfixable, are meeting nonetheless, probably at vast corporate expense, to discuss how poor and unfixable it is. Rarely will anything be resolved.
• Strategic: Neat, slick, expensive. Never going to happen.
• Tactical: Messy, manual, also expensive but in people hours rather than computer development. Almost always the favoured option. No one ever seems to worry about people hours.
• Collaboration pod: a slightly posher than normal, well-furnished meeting room containing a phone, a set of microphones and a computer with a web camera and a network connection, which usually doesn’t work. In special cases, there may even be an interactive whiteboard which no one knows how to use, and a video link, ditto. Usually there’s a flip chart in the corner. In almost all cases, the door has the words “Collaboration Pod” written in unsteady capitals on the door, not always spelt correctly.
• End-to-end thinking: intended to ensure that the rambling, disjointed route a customer transaction takes through all the different internal parts of a business is invisible to the customer, who just experiences slick, efficient, customer-oriented pleasantness. In reality, each part of the business only considers its own boundaries and doesn’t give a crap if those boundaries don’t interface properly (or indeed at all) with the boundaries of the next part of the business. So the customer experiences a total shambles, and rarely does it end well. (Obviously this is a sweeping generalisation. There are many examples out there of businesses which do end-to-end thinking very well. But I cannot rant about them…)
  

There’s a lot to be said for dictatorship then, you would think. One person makes the decision, there’s no discussion or argument, and anyone who makes a mess gets flogged, so there’s a much greater incentive to succeed. Simple!

The Art of Familial Communications

My sister, let’s call her Little Vulture, is my friend, I am pleased to note. I do hope she agrees. It has become apparent over the years with my dealings with others who have siblings that this is most definitely not a given. She is usually able to finish my sentences for me, which is lucky since these days I have often forgotten by the end of the sentence what I originally intended the end of the sentence to be.  She appears to have forgiven me for the systematic destruction of her felt tip pens circa 1973 whilst she was safely at primary school and I had the run of her toys. I have almost forgiven her for persuading me to tell her what I was giving her for Christmas BEFORE Christmas every year until I finally woke up to her little game (last year), and for always making me have the train at Granny’s house which didn’t wind up and quite frankly wasn’t even an engine if we’re being absolutely honest about it, whilst she swanned around the track with the lovely green wind-up engine.  When things are emotional, Engineer sighs in a long-suffering, resigned way, and gets his umbrella out, as when Little Vulture weeps, I weep, and vice versa. Even talking about the fact that we make each other weep makes us weep. Quod erat demonstrandum (or rather quod esset demonstrandum, let’s make it a conditional rather than a sure thing, even though we all know it’s actually the latter). Apologies to all you fluent Latin speakers out there if my tenses are a bit off. I haven’t had to go there since about 1982, and I haven’t missed it AT ALL.

Engineer has about 152 siblings. Or it might be just 12, but I lose count after the first 6 TBH. Judge and Boxer have (at the last count) 29 first cousins, 2 big sisters (we agree to abandon the qualifiers “half” and “step” a long time ago, as the latter implies fairy tale evilness and the former is just plain silly. How can you be half a sister?), a niece and a nephew, and an expanding plethora of other assorted less immediate relatives. They are a close family. How they manage to transmit information between themselves with the sort of efficiency one normally associates only with ants or bees, and definitely not with anything in the human world, without duplication or distortion, occasionally looping in sisters-in-law / step-mothers on a need-to-know basis, is a constant source of amazement to me.

Little Vulture and I are amateurs in comparison, viz:

Little Vulture: “Well, of course, you know after the papier mache balloon / exploding curry / non-swimming pigs / veering under a motor vehicle / ducklings for dog food (delete as applicable) incident (these are all real incidents, by the way, in case you were wondering)…”

Me: “What papier mache balloon / exploding curry / non-swimming pigs / veering under a motor vehicle / ducklings for dog food (delete as applicable) incident??”

Little Vulture: “You know? What we were talking about at the cinema the other day?”

Me: “You went to the cinema with Fred / Wilma.”

Little Vulture: “Oh. So I did. Well, anyway….”

The presence of our cousins, Lioness and Bear, who to all intents and purposes count as siblings, further exacerbates the problem. They cry, we cry. It’s exhausting. Communication between us all is further complicated by vast geographical distances and the fact that each link in the four-way chain has a different preferred method of communication. Lioness and I prefer instant messaging – this way there is far less chance that we will make each other cry, and it enables us to communicate during our manically busy working days. Bear and Little Vulture favour good old-fashioned telephone chat. This way Bear can make calls from his car on the way to or from yet another comedy encounter with his in-laws, and Little Vulture can enjoy the update with her feet up on the sofa and an appropriate refreshment. This means that things get communicated 3 or 4 times, or not at all, and many things get lost in translation:

Me: “Lioness texted – apparently Bear’s blah ran away with a fishcake!” (incidentally, this is not a real scenario because that would be a bit silly)

Little Vulture: “Yes, Bear just called…it was actually a fish finger…” I think you see the problem.

Of course, SMS communication comes with its own specific set of issues, mainly related either to the vagaries of predictive texting, auto-correct or the fat finger problems which occur as a result of touch screen technology. Thus “sorry will be l8, plane stuck in dog” and other such unwittingly hilarious messages only serve to add to the difficulties of clear communication.

In my twenties, I lived about a stone’s throw from Little Vulture’s front door. Such are our hapless communication skills that we would on a regular basis become annoyed with each other because the other’s phone line was engaged, rather than make the 50 yard journey along the road, safe in the knowledge that the other was in. Well, either that or there was a very garrulous burglar in the house.  

Face to face. It’s the only way.

Bad Grammar. Init?

Right then, the first thing to point out is that since I am not English, and coupled with the fact that I was the only person in my year at school who did not study English Higher, I am almost certainly not qualified to talk about bad English grammar or spelling. Thus, this blog is like a one-legged, rhythmically-challenged, tone-deaf person criticising the tap-dancing skills of others.

Be that as it may, it does not stop bad grammar being something which makes me screw up my eyes, grit my teeth, wince and recoil, shaking my head. You just experimented with that sequence of expressions, didn’t you. My absolute nemesis is the badly placed or completely spurious apostrophe. Clearly, the decision to go vocal about this is a risky one, as it becomes more critical than normal for me to check that there are none of the afore-mentioned offenders putting in an appearance somewhere in the text. How ironic would that be?? 

For me, there are different categories of poorly-used apostrophes, verging from acceptable to just plain wrong. Some I can understand because the rules are thoroughly confusing, and remind me of the rules which did the email rounds a few years ago, the basic premise of which was that if the people who make the rules suspect that the rest of us have figured any or all of them out, they are at liberty to change any or all them immediately and without notice. Some English grammar rules remind me somewhat of the minefield of the random German plural, the two virtually interchangeable varieties of French past tense and the vagaries of the key of C# Major. I may have ranted about this latter item before. Sadly this is Beethoven’s fault, for writing my favourite piece of piano music in my least favourite key (and then insisting upon sharpening a sharp thus making it a natural…I mean, come on Ludwig, I understand that becoming deaf was a career-threatening development for a composer, but it wasn’t really OUR fault as such so there was really no need to take it out on us). Note the correctly positioned apostrophe in that last sentence. Ha!

Falling into this category is the wrangle about where to put the apostrophe denoting ownership by a plural entity, for example the toys belonging to the children. I’ll admit, that’s not clear cut, very annoying and just flipping typical of the English language, TBH. Thus anyone who gets this wrong in future correspondence with me will avoid public criticism, mainly because I will either not notice it, or notice it and assume the version you have chosen is the correct one, since I don’t actually know any better. I think it should be “the children’s toys”, since it denotes the toys belonging to the children. But I don’t know for sure and I’m definitely not brave enough to place a bet on it.

Others are far less forgivable, for instance if I had written that as “other’s”… Just, NO. Particularly annoying are the ones where a standard plural is apostrophised. I mean, why?? “Who let the dog’s out?” The dog is out of what? It reduces the whole meaning of the sentence to rubble.

One of the things I have learned, as the mother of children who are just starting to grapple with the written English word, is that English is not logical. An apostrophe marks a missing letter, unless of course it’s one of the exceptions to this rule (for instance when we shorten road to Rd or Saint to St). An apostrophe denotes ownership. Except for personal pronouns of course (yours, theirs etc). An apostrophe can be used to indicate the structure of unusual words. Except when it isn’t. You see? So basically, I’m ok with a misplaced apostrophe as long as I don’t know it’s misplaced. Oblivion, that’s the key.