Cook off, says the FT

I notice that the Financial Times canteen is having a competition among its chefs this lunchtime billed as a "cook off." Several of its editorial staff, meanwhile, have been asked merely to leave.

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.

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.

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?

Recruitment just became sexy

Everyone, it seems, had an opinion on the latest series of The Apprentice. Suddenly we all have something to say on recruitment. After 14 years my patch has just become sexy. It's been a long wait.

After reading many of the comments I decided the subject had been flogged to death so have avoided it in my upcoming Thursday FT column which, instead, will have more to say on social networking.

I do, however, have some sympathy with the comments on CV cheating in this item on the Recruitment and Employment Confederation website. It doesn't say much for the recruitment industry when one of their own is caught out in this way.

Christmas cards and the man from Del Monte

Should we mourn the passing of the corporate Christmas card? Those big, posh, glossy cards bearing the signatures of half-a-dozen people you have never met are becoming as rare as pixie dust. I still get a few but their number is dwindling every year, replaced by emails, messages about donations or simply nothing at all.

I remember the days when the office secretaries at the Financial Times would dust down their lists and ask if we had any names to add. Most years the FT cards looked pretty swish with scenes of old London until one year we had one with a commercial-looking Santa that triggered an editorial protest led by the then banking editor, David Lascelles.

After that, David became the FT's Christmas card "man from Del Monte" until one year the cards did not appear - gone in the seasonal economy drives that began with the diaries.

In the 1970s and 1980s you knew you had arrived in the executive suite when you received one of the big black desk diaries with a gold embossed FT on the front and an atlas in the back.

I would get half-a-dozen to hand out to favoured contacts (or relatives, since there were no questions asked). The problem was that giving a diary to the same people every year created an expectation after the initial pleasure of receiving one had died away.

First they (faceless management) cut the quota down, then the diary allocation disappeared altogether. But the Christmas cards continued until they too made way for a charity donation.

The same thing happened to the boozy expense-account lunch. Of course, they still continue among a few stalwarts, but nothing like they were and some will say this is a good thing. Much better to stay at your screen, messaging your Facebook friends than sharing a plate of cheese and a glass of wine with a colleague. What does this old fool know? He's nothing more than a ghost of Christmas Past.