People, work and management - Richard Donkin

Denver says goodbye to its oldest working CEO

noreply@blogger.com (Richard Donkin) — Thu, 14 Aug 2008 15:22:00 +0000

The next time you're thinking of calling for early retirements you might think about this man. Retirement is a state of mind that we should all try to avoid.

Out with the strongest link - a big mistake

noreply@blogger.com (Richard Donkin) — Mon, 28 Jul 2008 11:11:00 +0000

Carol Vorderman is leaving the Channel 4 TV quiz show, Countdown, after 26 years after being told she would have to take a 90 per cent pay cut if she wanted to stay with the programme. The game's originator, Marcel Stellman is now threatening to remove the rights from ITV Productions which makes the show.

An angry Stellman praised her loyalty and so he should. I'm glad that the originator of the show is sticking by his "talent." Times may be getting hard in the TV industry but I can't imagine the BBC treating Anne Robinson, presenter of its Weakest Link quiz,in such a cavalier fashion. But the Weakest Link gets a much higher billing than the more intellectually demanding Countdown which fills the daytime schedules.

Countdown is much the better quiz programme. Unlike The Weakest Link it demands a bit of effort from viewers. I suspect too that Vorderman has the sharper intellect. Robinson is no slouch but I bet she would flounder trying to do one of Carol's speedy calculations.

The creative people in business must stick together and fight the bean-counters wherever they can. Countdown didn't need financial cutbacks; it needed better scheduling and promotion. It's one of TV's little gems that deserves better. Countdown has just said goodbye to its strongest link and that can't be right.

I wonder how Carol Vorderman responded to the reduced pay offer? At a guess: "Consonant, vowel, consonant, consonant, vowel, consonant, consonant?" Or perhaps she suggested the management view the odd rerun.

Give her a break

noreply@blogger.com (Richard Donkin) — Fri, 27 Jun 2008 10:41:00 +0000

Gill, my wife, works as a locum pharmacist. The other day she arrived at one of the large supermarkets (J Sainsbury) where she sometimes works, to find that the pharmacy kettle had disappeared. She found it in a cupboard with a tape stuck over it saying "do not use."

There was a note explaining that all electrical equipment in the store needed to be checked before it could be used. A check would cost £200 and, since new kettles were on sale in the store at £20, the management had withdrawn the kettle from use. Staff were being asked to use the canteen instead.

All well and good if you have breaks built in to your work. But this isn't the deal with locum pharmacists. If they take a break the pharmacy must shut down - since the presence of a pharmacist is a legal requirement - and the supermarket, which has a contract to provide 100 hours a week pharmacy cover, doesn't want that to happen.

So Gill must work the whole shift without a break and now, it seems, without a cup of tea. She used the kettle all the same. What else can you do when faced with such ridiculous measures?

These are the sort of everyday issues in the workplace that never come to the attention of the boardroom. They were the sort of "petty" things that led to strikes in the past when unions were stronger. Except they are not petty. These are basic issues that matter to people. Every employee should have an opportunity for a break

Recruitment just became sexy

noreply@blogger.com (Richard Donkin) — Mon, 16 Jun 2008 21:48:00 +0000

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.

A curse on work or an online aid to collaboration?

noreply@blogger.com (Richard Donkin) — Mon, 16 Jun 2008 21:02:00 +0000

I don't know much about Zappos.com except that it is an online shoe retailer and that every member of the Zappos staff has a presence on Twitter.com, a social networking site. Why, you may ask? Social networking sites burn time among company employees. They must be banned.

If you have time to switch channels for a minute to the Donkin Life blog you can see the raw product of some discussion after my first attempts at twittering (although some may argue I've been practicing all my life). Jon Ingham and David Creelman make some interesting points. Note Jon's point that the Zappo twitterers (or tweaters) also include customers. Imagine the power of constant customer-employee dialogue. Just like it used to be before companies discovered the economies of online business.

Life and Music

noreply@blogger.com (Richard Donkin) — Thu, 29 May 2008 16:26:00 +0000

You may be familiar with the work of Trey Parker and Matt Stone in their South Park cartoon creation. I'm not a fan of South Park but I do like the way that Parker and Stone have used their animation skills to illuminate these short passages from the lectures of Zen guru Alan Watts.

The first of these, Life and Music, is particularly thought provoking if you are following a career in the City. It's worth thinking about.

Ending the "sickie" culture - investing in health

noreply@blogger.com (Richard Donkin) — Wed, 14 May 2008 15:34:00 +0000

I seem to be writing quite a lot on health just now. It has become what HR people like to call a "hot topic." To keep up with developments I went along this morning to a conference called Healthy workplaces: building staff morale and measuring the impact on your bottom line" co sponsored by the Confederation of British Industry and AXA PPP Healthcare.

Susan Anderson, the CBI's HR policy director,had the latest results from the annual CBI AXA absence and labour turnover survey for 2007. The figures are very similar to those the previous year.

While absence fell on average from 7 days a year in 2006 to 6.7 days in 2007 the reality is that, for all the added attention given to absence management in the last few years, average absence levels in the UK are now only about a day and a half lower than they were 20 years ago. The public sector average is 9 days. All this adds up to a direct cost to the economy of £13.2 billion and indirect costs (including resulting loss of customers, goodwill etc) of around £20m.

Crap jobs

Susan noted that there was a disproportionate amount of absences on Mondays and Fridays - the days that are attached to the weekend, leading to suspicions that some people feign sickness in order to have a long weekend off work.

So what's to be done about it? I doubt that much will change until employers begin to get at the root of the problem. What is the problem? My own analysis is pretty simple: too many crap jobs, too much bad management.

Good mangers care about the people they work with. They care about workloads, they care about job content, they care if someone is troubled by something and they notice. It's called empathy.

Bad managers

Bad managers care only about their own agenda, meeting their budgets and sucking up to their immediate boss in order to get a promotion and more money. They think that nit-picking and micro-management is sensible.

Susan asked the conference delegates if anyone had ever "pulled a sickie." Not many hands went up but among those who did own up was Dudley Lusted, head of corporate healthcare development at AXA.

He recalled a time early in his career when, after the clocks went forward in the spring, he found it difficult to get to work on time. His boss was not pleased and after it happened a third time in the same week told him that any further lateness would result in his dismissal. Lusted slept in again the next day and, not wanting to lose his job, called in sick.

Why work sucks

Funnily enough I had read almost the same story in a book I am mentioning in my FT employment column this week. The book, Why Work Sucks And How To Fix It (yes, it's American) promotes the novel idea that people should be rewarded for their results rather than the time they spend at their desks.

If that were the case then a lot of these absence statistics would be a nonsense. Who would care if you were at work or not, so long as your work was completed?

I left full time employment seven years ago. In that time I have been ill a few times but I have managed to juggle my work commitments and deadlines around my illnesses. Am I lucky? Not entirely. I invest in my health through undertaking regular gym sessions.

Delegates were asked how much they spent on employee health annually? Only one of them knew - Lusted again: some £100,000 a year among 2,000 employees. That comes to an annual spend of £50 per employee.

Fit for work

In my business - that's me - I spend £500 per employee: me again. That's roughly the amount I pay to undertake regular gym sessions in order to stay fit and that means fit for work. This is important to me because I aim to play the long game in work. I don't like the thought of retirement. It should be noted that this is an investment in time as well as money. Since my time is expensive it's a big investment but it's non-negotiable. I consider it an essential business cost.

Lord McKenzie of Luton, Parliamentary under secretary of state at the Department of Work and Pensions was also speaking, much of it related to support for Dame Carol Black's recent report calling for "fit notes" from General Practitioners among other things.

I asked him why, when some people invested in their own fitness to ensure they could work and contribute to the economy, could they not set their fitness expenditure against tax? Why, if employers subsidise gym membership for their employees, is this contribution treated by HM Revenue and Customs as a "benefit in kind," in other words, a taxable perk?

Lord McKenzie's reply was disappointing, something about lines needing to be drawn, but he thought there might be scope for better tax treatment for those using a gym for rehabilitation.

This is just the kind of outdated thinking that ignores the need to transfer our health system from one that is focused on cures to one that focuses instead on prevention.

Managing creative people

noreply@blogger.com (Richard Donkin) — Thu, 10 Apr 2008 19:06:00 +0000

I receive a lot of management books in the post and the quality is generally poor. Some are simply promoting a consulting business and others are dense or badly written with the kind of diagrams that have more arrows than a Roy Rogers film.

But this week I found a book that was so good it could have produced two columns. Gordon Torr's new book, Managing Creative People, discussed in this column, is well written and stimulating.

Reading his description of genuinely creative people I began to think that they are so much a part of the awkward squad that they would be too hot to handle for the kind of management that exists in most companies today.

Mickey Mouse

He doesn't have too many kind words for the Disney corporation, the supposed home for so many creative types, other than the subversive revelation that Micky Mouse smokes Marlboroughs.

Overall, he left me feeling pessimistic about the possibilities for truly creative people in big companies. I agree with his comment that "There is hardly anything in this world as offensive to most people as an idea they haven't thought of themselves." I've had ideas and I've seen this in reality.

Just occasionally, however, someone likes an idea, and, even better, is prepared to run with it. But the creative individual should never interpret this enthusiasm as "loyalty to self." It is loyalty to the idea. Torr describes this relationship well. It's not cuddly. Sometimes its cruel, but making ideas happen is a tough business. Those that succeed, perhaps, were meant to suffer.

Rare breed

I once spent an illuminating couple of hours chatting with Sir James Dyson at his home in London. After all his success with the Dyson vacuum cleaner he was still angry at the memory of all the difficulties he had to overcome. He is a rare breed, an inventor who is also a businessman. He brought his products to market through sheer persistence and will, negotiating the minefield of patent law and facing down the kind of competition that would gladly have seen his ideas strangled at birth.

Could I have imagined Dyson as a trainee at Hoover? Never in a month of Sundays. They couldn't have contained him, and that's the real issue for creative people, because most managers, shaped by their company cultures and structures will run a mile from great ideas.

Companies say they want to be more innovative, that they want people to "think outside of the box." No they don't. That's what factories and offices are for - they're boxes for people and generally have little more scope for self-expression than a goldfish bowl. Ideas go in the suggestions box. You're supposed to feel privileged that someone will look at your idea.

That's no way to handle creative people. If you know you're brimming with creative talent, take my advice, go your own way.

Processed lives

noreply@blogger.com (Richard Donkin) — Sat, 22 Mar 2008 18:36:00 +0000

Two views of office work. I notice that one of the labels refers to Chiswick Park, a complex I featured here.

Rotten to the core?

noreply@blogger.com (Richard Donkin) — Fri, 21 Mar 2008 11:44:00 +0000

For two days now I have been reading of the damaging speculation that has hit the UK's high street banks such as HBOS in midweek. The bank saw 17 per cent knocked off its share price due to rumour mongering explicitly designed to drive down the share price so that traders shorting the stocks could make a killing.

One hedge fund is believed to have made £100m on such trades in a single day. Such market manipulation is illegal but will anyone be convicted down the line? I very much doubt it.

This kind of trade today is international. What hope does the Financial Services Authority have of collaring a so-called "rogue trader" in Singapore, where some of the manipulation is alleged to have taken place? Precious little is the answer, but you are unlikely to hear that from anyone among the regulators.

Some have described this kind of manipulation as a "modern day bank robbery" but you don't get treated like Ronnie Biggs when you wear sharp suits and work in a City trading room.

Indeed there are some former City crooks - such as Ernest Saunders - who have never accepted that what they did was in any way illegal. Saunders, you may remember, made medical history when he recovered completely from the debilitating effects of pre-senile dementia, a condition that secured his early release from prison. Not since the New Testament has anyone made such a Lazarus-like recovery.

Such is the City's willingness to look after its own that Saunders was able to find consulting work, once his mind had recovered its former sharpness.

So don't be fooled by the "bank robber" headlines. They are designed to shock the ordinary mortals who have building society deposits, not to put the slightest fear in to the hedge fund manipulators.

While we might talk of rogue traders, as if these people are in a minority, we should accept that there has always been something roguish about a system that allows its market to be run as a race-course betting operation.

Yes, something needs to be done. But that's what is always said after every financial crisis and every downturn when the worms are shaken out of the rotten apples. But the gamblers, the manipulators and the rogues will always find a way to beat the system.

The reality is that these people are ever present and in the good times they are tolerated, indeed they are highly rewarded. If you don't believe me, just read the Alex cartoon every day in the Daily Telegraph which is never short of material for its cynical representation of the City. The point is that we laugh with Alex. Only today it doesn't seem so funny.

Why women mean business, why men don't get it

noreply@blogger.com (Richard Donkin) — Thu, 28 Feb 2008 17:43:00 +0000

My latest FT column takes a look at some of the big changes in attitudes that are needed to pave the way for genuinely equal opportunities. I chose to focus on the car industry because this must remain one of the strongest bastions of male dominance.

If you don't believe me just take a look at this blog entry by the president of a Japanese car exporter. The blog sounds promising when you read the words but the picture says it all.

Snooping on Facebook - right or wrong?

noreply@blogger.com (Richard Donkin) — Thu, 28 Feb 2008 11:55:00 +0000

As an employer should you be snooping in to the kind of things people are saying about themselves on social networking sites? As an employee, should you be worried about the things you put there?

My answer to the first question would be "no." Not that my views are going to influence either question because we know that employers are looking at these sites, often disapprovingly, and that employees, therefore, should be cautious about what they say there.

I don't thing it is any more of an employer's business wandering uninvited on to a social networking page as it is in to an employee's home. If I want to have a dartboard on my wall with a photograph of my boss attached to it, that should be my choice.

Wig and garters

Equally if I'm a high court Judge and I find that wearing my wig and garters enlivens the experience in my bedchamber then that too is my business.

Today, however, I am reading about a police officer who has been refused promotion because of the information he posted about his gay lifestyle on the Facebook social networking site.

The police officer, Inspector Chris Dreyfus (a little bit of irony here), was denied a promotion when it was discovered he had been warned about the Facebook content by his current bosses, the British Transport Police.

I noticed that the Daily Telegraph report mentioned that he said on the site he was interested in men and looking for "whatever I can get." To the dozing Telegraph reader, most of whom will have never been anywhere near Facebook, that revelation might sound alarming.

In fact the "looking for" item is a category in the profile section and "whatever I can get" is one option in a multiple choice although I notice that option seems to have been recently removed.

Multiple choice

Equally there is something there that allows you to mention your political persuasions. Oddly the multiple choice options do not include "socialist." So my political views are listed as "other." If you think that these revelations tell you anything about me, think again. I hate the idea of backing the party of government which is why I often vote Liberal although I have given advice to the Conservative Party and thought Gordon Brown was a good chancellor. If there was a box entitled "queer stick" I would probably tick that, and no, that does not mean "gay."

In the box marked religion I had nothing much to say and so much to say at the same time. Baptised C of E, married in church, didn't have kids Christened, blames religion for most of the problems in this world, thinks, however, there is much that is good in the teachings of Christ and in other religions. My Facebook entry on religion, therefore, was "Dudeist" for many months. Now it is: "Orthodox Dudeist." Thank God (whoever he or she may be) that I don't have an employer.

Should these ramblings, or those of Inspector Dreyfus, be presented as a reason for denying us the right to practice our professions? Does it say something about our professional judgement? Not one bit. Professional judgement has nothing to do with personal opinions.

Fluorescent pink jerkins

Were I the editor of the Daily Telegraph, for example, the readers would get all the right wing prejudice-filled coverage they needed and more. My journalists would be blasting away at the cabinet from every vantage point. Parish councils and women's institutes across the land would sleep safely in their shires.

I would campaign for civil liberties while offering my DNA for a voluntary register. I would stand up for rural plot-lines in the Archers, the Countryside Alliance, village post offices and Delia Smith. And I would defend the right of gay policemen to wear fluorescent pink jerkins if that is their want.

Snooping on employees in this way is tacky and discriminatory. Promote Inspector Dreyfus and judge him on his abilities to enforce the law as a senior policeman. That's what really matters.

For more on social networking sites and employment read this.

People and the bottom line

noreply@blogger.com (Richard Donkin) — Thu, 21 Feb 2008 21:37:00 +0000

My FT column this week is highlighting a new report - People and the Bottom Line - that has been produced after more than a year of research. The Human Capital Standards Group, a group that I was instrumental in putting together and which met a number of times at the London offices of Investors in People, had some input in to the research, suggesting various areas that could be covered by human capital metrics.

The outcome of the research is interesting but I do think that employers should view the list of 12 metrics recommended in the report with some caution. The list reflects a series of measures that the researches are able to say with some confidence can make a difference to business performance.

This is not to say that there are not better measures available to companies. Some areas of measurement could not be tested because the surveyed companies were not undertaking such work. Other metrics were so ubiquitous that they could not be used to establish any potential performance advantage.

For this reason I believe some companies who may be approaching the use of HR metrics for the first time, should read this paper that I prepared some time ago but which has not been published hitherto outside the Human Capital Standards Group.

The suggested metrics in the paper owe their origins to various influences, including discussions among the group. The formulas for profit per employee and turnover per employee, for example, are measures used by Saratoga, part of PricewaterhouseCoopers.

Unlike the Gallup Q12 questionnaire , claimed by its originators to be protected by copyright, the engagement questions proposed here have not been subjected to rigorous testing. But there is no desire to impose copyright limitations. The rationale for this is spelled out in the paper.

I doubt very much that copyright could be attached to a single question since establishing the origins of that question would be extremely difficult. Besides, what is knowledge without questions? It may, on the other hand, be possible to pursue an action against anyone using a set a questions such as the Q12 without permission. Whether those who brought the action could make it stick is another matter. For this reason, however, I have avoided any organisation that seeks to secure ownership over their metrics.

The question asking how likely someone may be to recommend their employer to a potential recruit is one that was strongly advocated by Fred Reichheld and discussed within this column.

I think, incidentally, that proprietary thinking is misguided. Measurement should be boundaryless. It is too important to be in the perview of any particular organisation. Imagine if the French were to licence the use of the metric system, or if the British were to claim sovereignty over certain imperial measurements.

Measures find their own meaning through regular and widespread use. In that sense I would not wish to deter anyone from using the Gallup measures which I am sure are excellent. It is the proprietorial fences that some organisions try to draw around metrics that troubles me.

You will notice that quite a few measures in the paper are designed to establish people's attitudes or opinions. I believe that asking people to rate the quality of management (and leadership) in their organisation is an honest approach to measuring leadership and management effectiveness. Such an approach would build meaning if used consistently over time. Equally it would mean relatively little if the question were asked only once for the very reason that measurement must be related to something (as in the rule of thumb)to carry meaning.

You only know what cold is if you have experienced warmth. Equally what we might describe as "cold" in summer could pass for "mild" in winter. Context and comparison is vital for meaning in measurement.

As a rule I would say that no measure should be used alone, particularly when looking at people. As Gillian Stamp, director of the Bioss Foundation said in a presentation to the HR Society today, people are messy. I'm confident that human beings are far too complex animals to be perfectly measurable. That is as it ought to be. On the other hand, if measurement can be used as an aid to understanding, why should we avoid it?

It's difficult to make a case for sets of measures that are not widely used. If they have not been tested there can be no claim for their performance effectiveness. But the measures I have outlined in the paper represent the kind of focus I would adopt in my own business if I ran one.

I welcome the new report for taking us another step on the way to a better understanding of the principles of human capital discussed in this series of articles. But it is just one step and there is still a long way to go.

Temporary work - a rock and a hard place

noreply@blogger.com (Richard Donkin) — Fri, 15 Feb 2008 14:03:00 +0000

There is trouble brewing for the Labour government in the widespread support - more than a 100 Labour MPs - gathered behind a private member's bill seeking to improve the employment rights for the UK's 1.4m temporary workers.

Gordon Brown, the prime minister, is trying to appease party members and trade unions by offering to set up a commission that will look in to the rights of temporary workers.

He is caught between a rock and a hard place. Lined up in favour of better conditions are the trade unions and many in his own party. But opposing the move is the Confederation of British Industry and most of the UK staffing industry.

Just to complicate the picture, whether or not the private member's bill of Andrew Miller, Labour MP for Ellesmere Port, succeeds, many of the same provisions in his bill are also included in the Agency Workers Directive that has been in and out of the European Council for a number of years.

The directive was back on the agenda last December but was not put to a vote. There are signs, however, that the opposing block of countries - the UK, Germany, Malta, Ireland, Poland and Denmark - could be crumbling.

The French are expected to make a renewed push to implement the directive when they get the presidency later this year, tying in a bit of horse trading involving the working time directive.

In some European employment sectors, it should be remembered, the directive will be establishing temporary working where it does not exist at present. But among UK agencies who are paid for providing temporary workers, the proposed legal change is seen as a step backwards.

What about the temporary workers themselves? My eldest son happens to be one. He was ill the other week and missed a day's work for which he was not paid. His full time colleagues, in similar circumstances get sick pay. That does not seem fair.

On the other hand I too am a kind of temporary worker with arrangements working for various clients. I charge them separately for each piece of work. If I don't work I don't get paid. Even worse, I could be sued for breach of contract. That's business. I don't have a problem with that.

Any legislation must balance the need for fairness - which is a real issue - with the desire of many people and employers to negotiate flexible working arrangements. An employee's rights sometimes equate to an employer's costs. It is not usually so black and white, however.

An employer who loses an employee through maternity leave, say, may be amply rewarded by that same employee over time. On the other hand the employer may sometimes be left in the lurch when a mother decides to leave for good after holding out the possibility of returning to her job for the full statutory term. Employers could be forgiven some bitterness when that happens.

There will need to be some give and take over this legislation. At present the directive envisages that full employment rights would come in to play after six weeks with any employer. That period may need to be extended.

Human Resources - a necessary evil?

noreply@blogger.com (Richard Donkin) — Sun, 10 Feb 2008 21:25:00 +0000

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."

Ghost of a job

noreply@blogger.com (Richard Donkin) — Tue, 05 Feb 2008 08:19:00 +0000

Talking to Kevin Kelly, chief executive of Heidrick & Struggles, the headhunters, before writing my column last week, I was wondering how he found the time to write within the busy daily schedule he had outlined in his new book, CEO, The Low-down on the Top Job.

"I didn't," he said very matter of factly, "He did," pointing across the room towards Stuart Crainer, one half of the management writing business Crainerdearlove. Stuart Crainer and Des Dearlove have been working together in a successful journalists' partnership for some years now.

Ghost writers are not given enough credit in writing management books. Yes, they are well paid, but I think that there should be a publishing convention of mentioning their name on the cover, not merely in the acknowledgements where typically they are thanked for their "help" often when they have written the whole book.

Writers like Crainer and Dearlove who have accumulated a good working knowledge of management theory are thin on the ground. It's much easier to find a chief executive.

Don't mock the Mac

noreply@blogger.com (Richard Donkin) — Wed, 30 Jan 2008 14:48:00 +0000

Why shouldn't McDonald's award A-levels? Whether or not you support its products, this is a company that is good at what it does.

Yet McDonald's has been the butt of every pocket cartoonist in the land since the Qualifications and Curriculum Authority (QCA) announced this week that it had authorised McDonalds, Network Rail and Flybe to award qualifications to staff.

McDonalds will train staff in customer services, marketing, hygiene and human resources, awarding them with qualifications equivalent to GCSEs or A-levels. Employees at Network Rail will be able to access training in track engineering equivalent to a PhD.

Daily Telegraph readers were particularly scathing in the newspaper's letters page but that says more about Telegraph readers than it does about McDonalds.

Perhaps I should come clean at this point and declare my sometime consulting role at McDonald's as a member of its European Stakeholder Group. Does this mean I refrain from criticising the company? Far from it.

There are a lot of things I don't like about McDonalds. Mostly it's the little plastic toys and the horrid clown. Then there's the product - the burgers and the salty chips. But how many of us can say we have never succumbed at times of stress?

But if you take away the product(that's what you do with a McDonald's hamburger isn't it?) there is a lot of good stuff lurking within the McEmpire. The staff training would put to shame a lot of the so-called academic offerings in schools.

You might learn how to bake a cake in domestic science lessons at school, but at McDonald's you learn about nutrition, not just about making hamburgers. It's true that McDonald's has not yet learned how to switch on the world's children to healthy eating. But neither has Jamie Oliver.

Then again Jamie Oliver is not responsible for this alarming map. I'm not sure McDonald's could be absolved in the same way. As the Daddy of fast food merchants it should not be surprised to find itself in the dock on obesity.

But it is on the case. Unfortunately McDonald's, like the tobacco, soft drinks and confectionery companies, is in the addiction business. Almost all of us eat too much sugar and companies like McDonald's have created attractive and efficient delivery systems. Now as their markets become more socially aware they face a conflict between their business aims - selling lots of hamburgers - and promoting a healthy society.

It's going to be a long road but we need to be realistic. McDonald's is not going to go away. But it can reform itself and I think it is reforming, although in some areas more slowly than others. In its employing approach I believe it has more than reformed. Much of its training, pay and conditions are first class in its sector.

Its social awareness is exemplary. McDonalds hasn't turned its back on the poor as some more elitist businesses have done. It is down town, lighting up parts of cities that have been deserted by other businesses. It is working with communities, serving cheap but well cooked food to people who don't earn much and giving jobs to people who might struggle otherwise to find work. But these aren't any old jobs, they are jobs that have prospects, where people can rise up within the company.

David Fairhurst, McDonald's UK head of HR (his full job title would take you longer than it does to eat a burger) has challenged the term McJob as a pejorative, and rightly so. He wants it's definition as an unstimulating job with few prospects removing from the dictionary.

A McJob is a real job and a McA-level will be a real A-level as worthy as anything in History or Geography and probably a little more useful. So don't mock the mac. It's trying hard and deserves our support. It has mine.

And the winner is......

noreply@blogger.com (Richard Donkin) — Wed, 30 Jan 2008 14:41:00 +0000

Yes it’s that time of year when people and companies get awards. I hate awards. You don’t say no to one and it’s always nice to get one, but they are so subjective and many of them are not fully representative of their industries.

Frankly if you can’t put “award winning” before whatever piece of self-marketing you are preparing these days you might as well go home. Award winning has become so ubiquitous that it is losing its meaning as a result.

In my own case you might as well talk about Richard Donkin, the “air breathing” journalist. The awards I won were such a long time ago, reflecting a time of my life when I was slightly less cynical. I’m still proud of them, but they sit there on the CV like old medals that are rarely taken out of the drawer.

These days I get to sample the other side of the process as a judge in both The Work Foundation's Workworld Awards for journalists and the Confederation of British Industry’s Human Capital Awards.

Why do I do it? Two reasons: Firstly, it’s nice that someone thinks you are experienced enough to recognise quality when you see it; secondly, it helps to keep you in touch with who is doing good stuff.

I know from experience, then, how much of a lottery they are. I have seen how a seemingly runaway winner can be overtaken on the rails by a back marker whipped to the front by a powerful advocate among the judges.

Another thing I don’t like about most of the awards is that you are required to enter them. Many people and companies simply don’t bother. Either they are too busy to enter, they’re fed up of losing or they won last year and are suffering from “award fatigue.” This means that a lot of good people and companies are overlooked.

Then there are awards themselves. How many of them exist as a genuine form of recognition and how many are inspired by the marketing department of a particular organisation? Let’s not kid ourselves. The main reason there are so many awards is that they are about marketing and promotion.

In human resources there are so many. Personnel Today magazine has them. Human Resources Magazine has them and the Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development (CIPD) and People Management has its People Management Award. Then there’s the CBI awards that I have already mentioned.

There ought to be an awards bunker for those who want to avoid all those dickie-bow events at Grosvenor House in London. At least the HR people maintain a reasonable sense of decorum, unlike a minority who attend journalists’ awards that often degenerate in to a bun fight among the tabloids.

Perhaps there should be an award for the most professional awards ceremony.

Age management

noreply@blogger.com (Richard Donkin) — Tue, 08 Jan 2008 14:30:00 +0000

I'm working up a column on "age management," A concept I picked up from TAEN, the Age and Employment Network. I'm not sure what it means but I think it has something to do with finding what TAEN calls "good work for older people."

On the other hand, you could apply the concept to all age groups, matching the right kind of work to to the age group best suited to do it.

One problem with age in the workplace is that attitudes to age change just as we age. George Carlin puts it in a nutshell here. My thanks to Reg Starkey for that link. Reg has campaigned for years to end age-stereotyping in the advertising industry. I think we share the same sense of humour.

There are some other great George Carlin sayings here.

Christmas cards and the man from Del Monte

noreply@blogger.com (Richard Donkin) — Fri, 21 Dec 2007 13:07:00 +0000

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.

Some principles for living

noreply@blogger.com (Richard Donkin) — Fri, 14 Dec 2007 11:22:00 +0000

Having just written a magazine article on how businesses can maintain success when they achieve it, I was asked by the commissioning editor if I could give him 10 bullet points for achieving personal success.

I pulled Stephen Covey's The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People off my bookshelf (over 10 million sold it says on the cover) but couldn't find much inspiration there. His first habit was: be proactive. That's not a bad habit if you can handle such a horrible word. But it seemed a bit obvious, as did habit number three: put first things first. As for habit two: begin with the end in mind, I'm just not sure about that. When I started writing a children's book I had no idea where it would end and that was part of the fun.

Habit four: think win/win is very American. Habit five: seek first to understand, then to be understood is not bad, but habit six: synergise is pretty meaningless and habit seven: sharpen the saw sounds very motherhood and apple pie.

So I put together my own list and, if I say so myself, I'm pretty pleased with it and want to share it with you. On reflection I would regard these as pointers, not so much on how to be successful, but on how to live well. It's how I try to live my life anyway. Will these habits bring success? It very much depends on how you define it and measure it. I'm sure there are many better habits than mine - I love Mahatma Gandhi's aphorism: be the change you want to see - but these are the ones that underpin the things I do.

I haven't managed to stick to every one of these lessons - I don't always learn from my mistakes - so I might hang on to this note as a reminder. In no particular order:

1. Know yourself, be yourself and trust yourself.
2. Learn from every experience and every mistake.
3. Collect great people, work with those you respect and stay loyal to friends, colleagues and family.
4. Play the long game.
5. View every change in life as an opportunity.
6. Always listen to advice, then make your own choices.
7. Don’t be afraid to trust people.
8. Never walk over others to get where you want to go.
9. Always take the road less travelled.
10. Have fun, don’t take yourself too seriously and enjoy today for tomorrow it’s history.

The list could be longer and it doesn't work for every occasion. Sometimes, when I'm down I need to read Rudyard Kipling's poem, If. It works like a tonic.

People, work and management

noreply@blogger.com (Richard Donkin) — Tue, 11 Dec 2007 20:21:00 +0000

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.