Sitting in judgement

In case you haven't noticed we are in the middle of the awards season that bridges the Christmas period and runs well in to the New Year.

I'm not sure why, but I'm a sucker for awards panels and have sat on quite a few, including the CBI's Human Resources Awards, the Recruitment and Employment Confederation's individual recruiter awards and the Work Foundation's Workworld Media awards.

I was judging this last one earlier this week. It's good to look at journalism with a more critical eye rather that simply reading a story or feature for its news, information or entertainment value.

Another good thing about awards judging is that you get to hear all kinds of juicy gossip but because this is picked up in what has to be a confidential discussion I don't get to repeat it anywhere (except in other gossipy behind-doors exchanges). That's the thing about gossip - everyone loves it but no-one likes to see it attributed to them, particularly since, by it's very nature,it lacks detail and sometimes accuracy. But what it loses in accuracy, it gains in emotional content. When people relax and chat together you get to understand how they feel about things.

Without going in to detail, it was clear from our conversations yesterday that there are worries about standards, not just among journalists but also in business. One of my fellow judges complained that newspapers were not holding chief executives to account for business failures.

I was surprised as I thought business leaders had come in for a hard time in the press recently. Not hard enough, it seems, but there is plenty of time for that. This week's "loan shares" scandal involving David Ross, the co-founder of Carphone Warehouse is just the tip, I suspect, of a very big iceberg (it's no big deal, says Luke Johnson). By this time next year we might even need a "financial scandal of the year award." Expect some fierce competition.

Seeing eye-to-eye at Cisco

I visited Cisco's UK headquarters in Feltham today to try out its TelePresence conferencing system. It really was as good as I had heard it was.

All the things that have dogged video conferencing systems in the past - lack of eye contact, voice delays, detached voices - have been put right in this system. Yes, It's expensive at more than $300,000 for the top end of the range but competition will bring the price down over time.

Also I think this system is ideal for the rental market and can imagine pay-per-use conferencing facilities popping up all over the world.

Using this system in Cisco requires some time discipline because of its popularity. Demand is so high that meetings are booked by the hour. This means that there is an incentive to get on with the business in hand.

Technology works best when you hardly notice it and you soon forget that you are not sharing the same room with everyone else in the meeting. Indeed the sound quality is so good you can engage with people in just the same way as you would face-to-face.

Yes you still need to book a meeting just as you would arrange any meeting but the savings in air travel are such that it wouldn't take much use in a big company to justify the expense.

This system and other systems like it have enormous potential for remote working. This is just the beginning. While faster and cheaper air travel helped bring the world together, there was a price to pay in fuel and fatigue. Today we're coming together without leaving our offices. Tomorrow we'll do so without leaving our homes.

The new world of work

I broke away from research work the other week to contribute some thinking for this FT project on The New World of Work.

Problem solving brilliance on the net

Writing about officer selection in the Army I was struck by the lasting influence of problem solving exercises that have not changed very much in fifty years. Now I have found similar exercises on the web.

This one, Splitter, is brand new and brilliant. It's one of thousands of cheaply made flash games that are fascinating me just now through the work of my son, Robert Donkin, featured on the web site here and discussed in this blog here.

One of the great things about Splitter is that there is no single solution to the problems. The game, or exercise, could hardly be simpler but there's a time sensitive element too so you need to move quickly.

Companies are spending small fortunes on creativity training and consultants to try and stimulate so called "out of the box" thinking. Yet it's all here - for free. Catch staff playing this in office time, however, and you will probably conclude they are wasting their time. You might be right, but what's the difference between this kind of informal problem solving and creativity training? Nothing but the cost.

Workplace bullying

I was in London yesterday speaking at an annual gathering called the Battle of Ideas at the Royal College of Art.

We didn't get too many at our session debating bullying in the workplace, a great pity as there were some interesting opinions. What makes these sessions much more stimulating than most seminars is the sharp, often challenging contributions from the audience so that you have a real debate, not just a platform presentation.

Another surprise was the way that audience responses led me to think and say things and head down intellectual avenues, even to the point of defending uncomfortable ideas, that I could not have anticipated beforehand.

Free from the kind of restraints I impose on myself when writing for a corporate audience in the FT, I found myself attacking many of the HR ideas that I have taken for granted over the past few years such as performance management, talent management and employee appraisals.

A distaste of what in an FT column I called the "Vote off society," led me to speculate that perhaps we are all capable of bullying behaviour in certain contexts. As an example I quoted the Stanley Milgram obedience experiment, using electric shocks, discussed here.

There are links here with the kind of dominance and mob behaviour explored by William Golding in "The Lord of the Flies." Bullying in the workplace was discussed by Robert Sutton in his book, The No Asshole Rule, mentioned here. But not enough work has been done to highlight the workplace environments that promote an atmosphere of bullying.

Perhaps there will always be "assholes" in the workplace. But when I started work, when trade unions still had some power, you really could say "you don't get me, I'm part of the union" - the lyrics of the old Strawbs song. I'm not sure we can say that anymore.

BlackBerry's big London adventure

The BlackBerry trial (see previous blog) has stalled somewhat. I took it with me to London today and decided to consult its map section when I realised I had forgotten my little black book which has old fashioned maps on paper.

I had to speak at a seminar at the London Stock Exchange but was running on a mental programme installed during the 1980s which required a tube trip to Bank Station. Realising the exchange had moved, but forgetting the new location, I couldn't get the BlackBerry map to help me so resorted to that feeble non-digital standby of asking someone the way. It worked a treat.

Once installed at the venue with a bacon sandwich in hand I decided to look at some emails but the batteries were down so the seminar host offered to lend me his charger lead, plugged in to a floor socket. "But I might forget it there," I said.

"Don't worry, I will need to get my lead at the end," he said. An hour-and-a-half later we both took off in separate directions leaving the BlackBerry bleeping away contentedly all by itself, secure in the knowledge that its self-contained GPS system knew its exact position on the planet.

I had hopped on a bus, meanwhile, where I spent the next 10 minutes making faces to a toddler who was munching on half a Rich Tea biscuit. Switching buses I decided to check my emails. No BlackBerry. I believe now it is in the post, probably with my host's cable which I will need to mail back to him.

"You're not fit to have one of those," said Gill. I think she has a point.

Where's the "any" key?

I suppose it had to happen at some stage. One of BlackBerry's public relations people got wind of some work I was doing on the changing workplace and, since BlackBerry, understandably, believes it is part of that change, she offered me a month's free trial of one of their devices when she discovered I didn't have one.

I don't have a BlackBerry because I haven't yet felt the need for one and I'm wary about their "crackberry" reputation, not to mention the cost of use. I notice that nearly all those people I see with them are salaried staff. Their companies give them BlackBerries to help them do their work.

"They're great," said Neil Buckley in the pub last night. Neil is one of the FT's Lex team. He was running the Moscow bureau but came back to the UK partly so that his wife, Emma Simpson, a BBC broadcast journalist, could resume her career.

I have known Neil a long time, ever since he joined the FT as a graduate. He's a fine journalist and, quite rightly, values his family life as much as anyone. So it was a bit of a shock to the system, he confessed, when he discovered he needed to attend early morning Lex meetings at 8 am every day with demands to file the first Lex notes for the web at noon.

More evidence, then, of workplace change. When I started my career at the FT there was no requirement to come in to work before 11 am. The working hours, protected by trade union agreement, were 11 am to 7pm.

Lex material could be gathered throughout the day in discussions with companies and analysts usually after the publication of some company news or results announcement.

Now notes have to be composed swiftly, often when analysts are too busy filing their own reports to handle queries from journalists. Everyone is indulging in a mad scramble to be first. Of course the FT wants to be first and it wants to be right but the faster you move the easier it is to make mistakes.

Another thing is that the "day after" news was always supposed to be considered analysis and that too is more difficult in the heat of an event. Neil was showing me an "FT Reader" service, available on the BlackBerry device, that lists stories by sector. Neil is a very "grounded" individual, another northerner who doesn't have time for flim flam so his recommendation means something. But he too need not worry about the cost.

It's a clever little gadget I'm thinking, but is it for me? When I was discussing the merits of the BlackBerry with Gill, my wife, I argued that I would be able to check emails in "dead time" on the train.

"But what about looking out of the window?" she said. And what about the other things I do on trains - reading books, newspapers, making notes, thinking, and sometimes, as happened last night for the first time in ages, chatting with a fellow passenger.

By the time I was home the BlackBerry had arrived, the box had been opened by two of my boys and they were busy caressing it, proclaiming it "cool" and reading the instructions. Then one of them did the stuff needed to set it up. So it was all out of my hands.

I didn't look at it until this morning when it took me about 20 minutes to find the "on" button. I shared the confusion of Homer Simpson when asked to press any key on his computer and he said: "But where's the 'any' key?"

Then I looked at some emails in tiny writing and replied to one. The situation lacked authenticity since I was sitting next to my laptop at the time which had my emails open in brilliant technicolour with keys I could use without trying to stub minuscule squares of plastic. I checked the reply on my laptop and found it hadn't sent my mailing address. I suppose I have to programme that in - more work, not good. This meant I had to send another email with the address from my laptop - duplication, not good.

The thing is that I couldn't give a bugger whether the BlackBerry is cool or not. I want to know just how important it is to be in touch with my emails and the web when I'm travelling and unable to use a lap top(which is not all that often). I want to know how easy it is to use. And, unlike all those company employees who use them, I want to know how much it costs to run.

Hang about, it's flashing now. There's an email from the FT. They want me to do a feature. But I'm writing a book. I suppose I can do both. So this is how it works and I'm still asking the question: is this a good thing?