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.

Human Resources - a necessary evil?

People have been asking me if I have a view on the remarks made by Luke Johnson in the Financial Times over a week ago. He described human resources management as a "necessary evil" among other things.

I suppose his gratuitous one-sided views filled a few column inches and drew some praise and criticism in equal measure to the FT web site. It usually has that effect when you say something controversial. But it was a bit silly to use the kind of language that, if you were of a mind, you could apply to all kinds of business functions.

You could say that entrepreneurs were a necessary evil. The world might be a lot more pleasant without some of the misfits that start businesses. You could say employees were a necessary evil. Who wants to experience the pain of employing someone? Then you might have a rant about government, taxation or benefits culture and you could go on in the same ridiculous vein to moan about every difficult aspect of your business.

The problem with making things or providing services is that it involves work, often more work than can be achieved by a single individual. Once people are employed collectively in large numbers there is a need to administer a whole bundle of things: recruitment, pay, holidays, sickness, training, working conditions, health and safety, work space, equipment, discipline, employment law. The list gets longer. Entrepreneurs are not very good at this.

I can see why people such as Mr Johnson grow frustrated. But the answer is not to shoot the administrator. What really saddened me about this attack is that it is given house room in a newspaper that prides itself on providing balanced argument.

Mervyn Davies, chairman of Standard Chartered bank last week described the comments as "pathetic". "The guy doesn't know what he's talking about. The reality is that we're in a people industry where talent is an increasingly scarce commodity," he said.

I really do think there needs to be a debate about the role of HRM and its relationship with other management disciplines. But I don't plan to get my information from Mr Johnson's personal dragon's den. If anyone is looking for my support for this kind of narrow rant I will say no more than the TV entrepreneurs: "I'm out."

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.

People, work and management

It's difficult to cover workplace, management and leadership issues as fully as I would like in my various newspaper and magazine columns. This new blog is designed to cover opinions and news items that I think are worth considering for human resources professionals and anyone else who takes an interest in the way that people develop their careers.

The aim is to separate the writing on such issues that appears in Donkin Life so that those concerned only with management issues need not worry about the other musings that invade my daily life.

In Sunday newspaper parlance I am "sectionalising" my offerings enabling you to look only at those bits that interest you. I hope this does not prove as much an annoyance for you as all those bits of Sunday papers have proved for me. If you don't like this new approach, please tell me and I will have a rethink.

Every week I have about three or four ideas for my Financial Times column and only one of them makes it. This can disappoint some people - writers, consultants, companies, PR people - who all think that their stuff is most worthy of coverage. Some of this material is indeed interesting although there is a lot of tripe out there and I consider it part of my job to offer a measure of protection from such rubbish to those who take the time to stop here.

That is not to say you will never read rubbish in this blog. But if you do so, I sincerely hope that it will be my rubbish.

If, in the meantime, you're wondering what inspired this coming Thursday's column in the FT, I would urge you to visit this site that introduces Randy Pausch. More about this on RichardDonkin.com later this week, or read my Thursday column.