Caught In the Skills Gap

You know how sometimes you hear a word or an expression for the first time and then suddenly it is everywhere you look? Well that is how it seems to be with the phrases skill shortage and skills gap lately. They aren't new expressions, we've been hearing them for some time, but just this last week they seem to be coming to greater prominence through a variety of different media and from a variety of different sources.

A Skill Gap is the difference between the skills required to perform a job and the actual skills possessed by the employees; a Skill Shortage refers to a situation where there are not enough people with a particular skill to meet demand. At present it appears that employers in the UK (and in the rest of the world for that matter) are complaining about both. Although a Skill Gap and a Skill Shortage are quite different things, the distinction does seem to be blurring somewhat.

It has been said frequently in recent years that there has been a Skill Shortage in the UK, particularly in what one might term the practical trades, like plumbing; the expression "Polish plumber" has been something of a cliché going back to the middle of the last decade, and it tends to refer not just to plumbing but the movement throughout the EU of cheap, manual labour. In some respects it has been about the cost of labour as much as skills; the free movement of labour has enabled UK employers to recruit workers from other parts of the EU as cheaply, or cheaper, than they could in Britain.

McKinsey management consultants report that European employers are finding it difficult to fill vacancies but at the same time over 5.6 million people under the age of twenty-five are unemployed in the EU. The Federation of Small Businesses says that many school leavers lack literacy and numeracy skills and do not even know how to dress properly for work. Something isn't adding up here. I know that there have been grumblings about falling education standards, but school leavers who are illiterate and innumerate? With "A" level grades improving year on year it is difficult to believe that anything other than a tiny minority of school leavers fall into that category. With the level of youth unemployment being what it is surely employers can find sufficient numbers of school leavers who can read, write and add two and two? Employers often say that new entrants are unprepared for work but since when did schools prepare students for the world of work? They didn't when I was at school and they don't now.

If A level grades are improving, why do employers report that new entrants are so poorly prepared for work?

Where I see the issue, and this is partly responsible for this perceived skills gap, is that both employers and prospective employees (especially the young) have unrealistic expectations. Many companies have off-shored or outsourced their more mundane functions and automation has replaced many of the more routine jobs. Thus a great many of the entry level positions are no longer available to be filled by school leavers. The bottom rung in many organisations who have vacancies in this country is now several levels above what it was ten or twenty years ago, thus many of the positions being advertised may actually be beyond what an employer can realistically expect of a school leaver, unless they tailor the role accordingly, providing guidance and training. Meanwhile many job seekers probably have unrealistic expectations of where within an organisation's hierarchy they can expect to start anyway. Employment minister Esther McVey raised a few hackles recently when she said that young people should be applying for entry level jobs, particularly when she suggested the Costa Coffee chain and especially when Costa recently had 1,700 people apply for eight jobs at their Nottingham store, but she has a point.

Employment Minister Esther McVey suggested that people start with a job with Costa Coffee... 

...over 200 people applied for each of the jobs available.

As "A" level grades constantly improve, it appears that ever increasing numbers of people leave school with the expectation of going straight into their dream job; this strikes me as overly optimistic. Employment is in many ways similar to the property market; the first step is the hardest and just as most people begin with a modest house or flat and then trade up, so even the best qualified school leaver ought to expect to begin employment in a junior capacity and work their way up. Not of course that I am underestimating the task of obtaining any sort of gainful employment; I do not envy today's school leavers the challenge.

 What doesn't help is employers who demand experience, even in their entry level jobs; how can a school leaver gain experience if no one will employ him or her? For many employers, faced with the choice between a fresh faced school leaver with no experience and a middle aged person, newly redundant and with over twenty years experience, the choice is probably easy and these days there are enough people falling in the latter category applying for jobs that traditionally might have been the preserve of the school leaver.

It is all very well for employers to complain that school leavers are ill prepared for work but actually it is pretty much a given that many of them will be; employers have to treat their new recruits as an investment. They should provide them with adequate, relevant training; it is no use expecting someone fresh out of school to walk into a busy office (or factory, or anywhere else for that matter) and hit the ground running, working as well as colleagues who have been there years.

Then there are the job adverts. Even the most mundane of positions now comes complete with a Job Profile and Personal Specification that would put off experienced people, let alone a school leaver. Several years ago I saw an advertisement for a position in the box office at my local cinema; having read it I felt that I would have been insufficiently qualified had I applied. Before I left work I had to write my own Job Profile and having followed the required formula concluded that were my own job to be advertised I would too intimidated to apply for it.

The strange thing is that the Skills Gap and Skills Shortage are not solely UK phenomena; they appear to be worldwide, with reports of Gaps and Shortages in North America, Australasia, India and Europe. Surely not all of these countries have nothing but illiterate and innumerate school leavers without the social skills required to enter the world of work? A pertinent question would be, what are the specific gaps? Googling a variety of phrases around skills gap generates any number of results about the existence of a skills gap but remarkably few about what skills employers have identified as being deficient in job applicants. One I did find referred  to a study by Adecco Staffing US, who said that 45% of senior executives in the United States identified soft skills, such as communication, critical thinking, creativity and collaboration, as areas where the gap existed. The same report suggested that in the area of technical skills, the gap was much less pronounced.

The Federation of Small Businesses may bemoan the standard of school leavers readin', writin' and 'rithmatic, but rather than simply wring their hands in dismay, perhaps they should be working in partnership with The Department of Education, even possibly with individual schools so that students leave school better equipped. Soft skills such as those identified by the Adecco study tend to be acquired through experience; if employers are not prepared to recruit people with the potential to acquire these skills and allow them the opportunity to acquire them by experience then they will perpetuate the very gap they complain about. 

The Bank of Miliband

Over one hundred banks operate in the UK, however Labour party leader Ed Miliband believes that the ills of the UK economy in general and the banking sector in particular can be cured by the creation of two more. In his speech last Friday, Mr Miliband, when saying that banks had been poor servants to ordinary families and firms, was referring to the so called Big Five banks, in whom he believes too much power is concentrated. His desire is to see two new institutions to challenge the likes of RBS, Lloyds, Barclays, HSBC and Santander. In addition to the Big Five the UK has The Co-operative Bank, TSB (having separated themselves from Lloyds) while Williams & Glyn are to make a comeback on our High Streets, plus any number of building societies, credit unions and the like, such as Metro Bank, Virgin Money, Sainsburys Bank, Tesco Bank et al. It is not as though the public don't already have plenty of choice in financial service providers; the fact that these cannot apparently compete with the Big Five in a free-market economy is something which Mr Miliband believes a future Labour administration should address.

"There are five Big Banks; I know, cos I've counted 'em!"

 Should Labour win the next election, Mr Miliband says that he would instruct the Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) to report what limit of the market each bank should share and to prepare a time-table for the sale of bank branches, to be completed by 2020. The CMA  is responsible for strengthening business competition and preventing and reducing anti-competitive activities and Mr Miliband will ask them to decide upon "a threshold for the market share any one bank can have of personal accounts and small business lending." Banks exceeding this threshold would be forced to sell off branches.

Ed Miliband's inspiration for a cap on market share appears to be the system in place in the USA, but the US banking system is very different from the UK's. There are over 20,000 different banks in America, most are local, few are nationwide. For instance Alabama has over one hundred and eighty banks; New York state has over five hundred. The cap which Mr Miliband refers to relates only to deposits and is relevant only during proposed mergers; comparing the US and UK banking sectors is akin to comparing apples and pears. UK banks have been contracting their branch networks in recent years; the total UK branch network fell to 11,365 by December 2012, from 11,713 a year earlier. The banks have received heavy criticism for their programmes of branch closures, these proposals will enable banks to continue or accelerate doing so, immune from criticism on the grounds that they are merely complying with government policy. Despite what many people may believe, retail banking is expensive to maintain and not as profitable as other parts of the banks' business. Banks may see this as an opportunity to offload low quality or loss making accounts; in a worst case scenario these customers may find themselves unable to open accounts elsewhere.

Mr Miliband's speech was short on the specifics of how the five major banks (who hold 85% of small business lending) would actually reduce their customer base to meet these caps or how they would maintain their customer base having met the cap. Will banks be forced to close accounts? Presumably the idea is that the customers who hold their accounts at the branches that are to be sold will be encouraged to migrate to whoever buys them. Will banks, having had quotas imposed on them, have to turn customers away? If so it is difficult to see how this will improve competitiveness; customers will be faced with less choice and potentially be unable to open accounts at a bank they choose, but merely at one which has not yet reached its cap. The new Current Account Switch service, introduced to make it easier for customers to move from one bank to another, may become redundant if customers cannot move to their bank of choice.

 

Barclays have the most branches (1,593) in the UK

The challenger banks (Virgin Money, Metro Bank and the like), may not be the answer anyway. When Lloyds were trying to sell off TSB they ended up with two bidders. The Co-op won but pulled out after finding a large capital deficit. Who will bid for the branches that the Big Five are forced to sell? Tesco, if they are inclined to offer face to face retail banking, already have a potential network; their supermarkets. They have not built banking halls in their stores so how likely would they be to bid for excess branches that HSBC or Barclays are forced to offload? Virgin Money, although they bought out Northern Rock, are likely to prefer other banking channels (phone and internet banking) although they do have what they like to call Virgin Money Lounges; well, they have three, in Edinburgh, Manchester and Norwich. There has hardly been a stampede of foreign banks eager to enter the UK retail banking market, Citibank (the world's largest bank) and Handelsbanken have a limited presence.It may not be as easy as to find buyers as Mr Miliband believes.

If all else fails, bank branches can always be sold to JD Wetherspoon

Having proposed a cap on energy price rises and now announced his proposals for the banking sector, Mr Miliband has undoubtedly scored some popularity points with many of the electorate frustrated by above inflation price rises for their gas and electricity and, in the case of many small enterprises, similarly frustrated by the banks' reluctance to support their businesses. It remains to be seen whether, should Labour win the next election, they will carry these through. Every party, when in opposition announces grand plans for what it will do once it is elected; frequently these are significantly watered down (or quietly dropped altogether) once an election is won.

The Department for Business Innovation and Skills report that since 2008 SME's have found bank finance more difficult to obtain. Key reasons for applications being rejected include higher credit risk rating, previous financial delinquency and lower sales levels, i.e. the traditional reasons why banks refuse loan or overdraft applications. That said, it is sadly true these days that the traditional image of the bank manager who is able to make autonomous lending decisions is long gone and those decisions, especially for smaller businesses, smaller loans, are made by computer credit scoring models, not human beings.  As laudable as Mr Miliband's intentions to stimulate lending to SME's may be, the challenger banks would probably apply similar criteria to applications they receive. If they were to be encouraged by a Labour government to be less stringent they may find themselves with significant levels of bad debt, a situation I am sure Mr Miliband would wish to avoid, particularly if it resulted in some sort of government support being required to bail out the businesses or the banks; after all haven't we been in that position before?

In targeting the banks and before them the energy providers, Mr Miliband may have struck a chord with many who despise them both, but the City acted with the expected dismay. The major energy companies and the two banks who remain under state support (Lloyds and RBS) saw significant falls in the value of their shares following his announcements. The Institute of Directors, Business Secretary Vince Cable and Bank of England governor Mark Carney have all been critical of Labour's banking proposals and while Shadow Business Secretary Chuka Umunna implied that Mr Carney should not involve himself in political matters, it would be strange given his role as governor of the bankers' bank if he (Mr Carney) did not have an opinion on the matter; stranger still if he did not voice it.

Time will tell whether the banking reforms proceed and if they do, whether they achieve Mr Miliband's aims. First and foremost for Labour however, there is the little matter of winning the next election.  

Elementary, My Dear Batman

Who is fiction’s greatest detective? Miss Marple or Sam Spade? Hercule Poirot or Philip Marlowe? Inspector Morse or Lieutenant Columbo? Batman or Sherlock Holmes? Hang on, Batman a detective? Well, yes actually. Apart from being dubbed The Caped Crusader and The Dark Knight, Batman was also known as “the world’s greatest detective,” [1] a title that has equally been applied to Sherlock Holmes. Whether you consider Batman a detective or not, he and Holmes are the most enduring and most successful crime fighters that fiction has produced.

Both Batman and Holmes have been reimagined frequently and had their stories rebooted over the years and of all of those reboots it is probably the most recent that have been the most successful. Certainly both have received great critical acclaim and commercial success. Christopher Nolan’s Dark Knight trilogy has grossed US$1.1billion; The Dark Knight and The Dark Knight Rises are two of the top three top grossing superhero films of all time.  Meanwhile Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s famous detective has been updated for the 21^st century in not one but two series, Sherlock, produced by the BBC and, in the US, Elementary produced by CBS. The BBC version has retained the essence of Conan Doyle's character, cleverly reworked the stories and embraced 21st century technology without resorting to gimmicks. I can't speak for Elementary as I have not seen it.

There are many parallels between Batman and Holmes; not all are coincidental. While Holmes has Dr. Watson, Batman has Robin (in the comic books at least. Perhaps wisely, Christopher Nolan eschewed Robin in his films) and Batman’s creator, Bob Kane acknowledges that Robin was consciously based on Dr. Watson. Batman has Alfred Pennyworth; Holmes has Mrs. Hudson while the relationship between Batman and Commissioner Jim Gordon is similar to Holmes’ relationship with Inspector Lestrade.  While Batman may have his cape and his gizmos, Holmes is associated with the dearstalker hat, although Doyle never described him as wearing such. The writers of Sherlock made merry with this, having Holmes wear such a hat purely by chance. There is however, something of the Batman cape in Benedict Cumberbatch’s Holmes overcoat; indeed in an episode in Series Three, as Holmes leaves John and Mary Watson’s wedding, he dons his coat with a swirl and a swagger that suggests a cape.

Both Holmes and Batman are outsiders, Holmes because of his intellect; in Sherlock he says to Watson and Lestrade, “Dear God. What is it like in your funny little brains? It must be so boring,” while Batman is that most dangerous and misunderstood of good men, the vigilante. Equally, among their successes, both have their failings, their character flaws, their moments of doubt. Indeed in the stories as chronicled by Dr Watson, there are cases which Holmes admits not to have cracked.

Both are freaks in their way, Batman is feared by a society that does not fully understand him; Joker says of Batman, “You’re just a freak, like me!”  and Holmes is misunderstood by society and the police, some of whom actively mistrust him. In the first series of Sherlock, Sergeant Donaldson openly refers to Holmes as “freak” to his face.

Finally, and most importantly both Batman and Sherlock Holmes each have their nemesis, Joker in Batman’s case and for Holmes, Professor James Moriarty. The strength of these villains’ characters is key to the success of the Batman and Holmes canons, even though they may not appear in all of the stories. Moriarty in fact only appears directly in two of Doyle’s stories but enjoys much greater prominence in films and in Sherlock.

Like the heroes, the villains have their similarities too and none more so in their relationships with the heroes, which border on the symbiotic. Holmes and Moriarty, and Batman and Joker are incomplete without one another. In The Dark Knight, when Batman asks if Joker wants to kill him, Joker replies “I don’t want to kill you! What would I do without you? Go back to ripping off mob dealers? No, no, NO! No. You… you… complete me.” In The Reichenbach Fall, the Sherlock episode based on Doyle’s The Final Problem, Moriarty says, “You need me, or you're nothing. Because we're just alike, you and I. Except you're boring. You're on the side of the angels.”

"Did you miss me?"

Moriarty’s rooftop monologue in The Reichenbach Fall  echoes Joker’s lines. Moriarty says: “All my life I've been searching for distractions. And you were the best distraction and now I don't even have you. Because I've beaten you. And you know what? In the end it was easy. It was easy. Now I've got to go back to playing with the ordinary people.” Moriarty’s ordinary people are Joker’s mob dealers.

Heroes and villains, having fascinated man since he first began storytelling, come no larger than Holmes/Batman and Moriarty/Joker; how we associate with them depends in no small part to the actors who play them. It is in this respect that both Sherlock and The Dark Knight films have been so successful.

Christian Bale’s Batman has menace but with the comic book characteristics that one expects, but his Bruce Wayne outshines others who have taken the role. Whereas Michael Keaton as Wayne was somewhat comic and otherworldly at times, Bale’s Wayne is a sophisticated, grown up businessman, as hard-nosed as his alter ego. Holmes, as played by Dominic Cumberbatch, is described by The Guardian as “cold, techie, slightly Aspergerish,” and while Holmes has never been a character who suffers fools gladly, Cumberbatch’s Holmes turns that up a notch or two.

The late Heath Ledger’s bravura performance in The Dark Knight was rightly recognised with an Oscar as Best Supporting Actor; Andrew Scott won a similar BAFTA playing Moriarty. Scott, who looks like Declan Donnelly and sounds like Graham Norton, is mesmeric as Moriarty; completely unhinged, like Joker, eminently plausible, reasonable almost, but totally bonkers.

The second series of Sherlock ended with the apparent death of both Moriarty and Holmes. Series three brought Sherlock Holmes back from the dead to foil a plot to blow up the Houses of Parliament. The series ends with the suggestion that Moriarty too survived the episode atop the roof of St Bart’s Hospital, despite the fact that it appeared that he blew his own head off; we await the explanation when Series Four hits our screens, although given the fact that the actors and writers now have such busy schedules it remains to be seen when this will happen.

"Why so serious?"

The success of both Holmes and Batman has much to do with the fact that the stories of both feature charismatic criminals, criminals who are worthy adversaries for our heroes and no matter how much we expect Batman and Holmes to triumph, it is not without some respect and admiration for such charismatic bad guys like Joker and Moriarty.

 Without villains there is no point in having heroes; without the threat of defeat then victory is cheap.

---

[1] Fleisher, Michael L. The Encyclopedia of Comic Book Heroes Volume 1 Batman Collier Books 1976

Customer Service - It's Not Rocket Science

Providing good customer service isn’t rocket science is it? Yet so often we are all frustrated and disappointed when we have to deal with companies and organisations when we have a query or a complaint.  When customers are vulnerable, or angry, or simply confused, companies should be on top of their game; sadly many are not. Since Christmas, Val and I have seen the Good, the Bad and the Indifferent sides of customer service because unfortunately three of the presents that we bought for our daughter, Sarah, had faults and had to go back to the shops.

The Good

Take a bow, Jack Wills! The iPad cover that we bought had a security tag stuck to a leather part of the case and when trying to remove it, the leather began to peel away. The assistant at Jack Wills’ Bluewater store replaced it immediately and without any quibble and because the item was now in their sale, refunded the difference between the original price and the sale price. We were in and out of the shop in five minutes, walked away happy and would recommend Jack Wills as a good place to shop.

Jack Wills - Top of the class for customer service this Christmas.

The Indifferent

We bought some Benefit cosmetics in Boots. There were supposed to be three separate items in the box but when Sarah opened it on Christmas morning, one was missing; so on Boxing Day Val went back to Boots. Now bear in mind that the shop had only been open for an hour or so when she went there, but the assistant from the Benefit concession was apparently on a tea-break. Could Val come back in forty five minutes? As it turns out, the Benefit assistant appeared and Val got her refund (the particular product was out of stock, so no replacement was available). What was striking about this was the all too common feeling that one gets as a customer (especially when wanting after sales service rather than making a purchase) that you are an inconvenience. “We’re short staffed,” they say, or “Can you come back later?” as though their time is valuable but yours as the consumer is not and that their problems are actually your problems.

The Bad

Oh boy! Where to begin? We purchased some earrings from Pandora at Lakeside. One had a bent post, so rather than try and wear it Sarah decided that she would prefer to have a straight one. Off we went to Pandora to change the earrings. The assistant that we saw offered us a replacement pair of earrings; the posts on both of these were bent. She then said that because the earrings were hand-made, the bent post was a feature rather than a fault. On that basis a handmade chair with three straight legs and one bent would be acceptable, would it? No, thought not. We decided that, on reflection we would like a refund but apparently this was not possible; a credit note was offered, which we declined and an impasse was reached. Backwards and forwards we went for over an hour; eventually we left the store with a gift card for the value of the earrings, not what we wanted but by now it was getting late and we were losing the will to live. Now I know that many jewellers have a no refund policy on earrings, as Pandora do, and for hygiene reasons that is understandable, but they also say that this does not affect the customer’s statutory rights, one of which is a refund if goods are faulty.

The somewhat contradictory stance that Pandora took was that they were happy to accept the earrings back – they said that they would have them cleaned and resell them as the fault that we perceived was actually a feature (hmmm). They would give us an alternative product; they would give us a credit note but they would not give us a refund. Why not? Because it was “not their policy” to offer refunds for earrings; exchanges for refunds, credit notes for earrings, refunds for everything else because that was their policy. And that is really the nub of the matter; policy. For policy, read rules (and you know how I feel about rules). The staff in Pandora were inflexible, immovable; it wasn’t policy to give a refund so they were not going to, not because they could not but simply because they would not. As the store manager had gone home, we asked if the assistant could phone her for a second opinion. She didn’t want to “inconvenience” her manager she said, but relented when we pointed out that it was apparently alright to inconvenience the customer (us).

Oh the irony of the Pandora logo! We had over 60 unforgettable moments with them...

...and this is where we had them.

Now some of you may say that technically we were not entitled to a refund and ought to have accepted a repair or replacement, but the fact is that over the years we have developed a policy of our own; a policy of zero tolerance towards faulty goods and shoddy service. Accepting an offer of a repair, or of replacement goods to be delivered at some indeterminate time in the future (as was proposed with the earrings), just leads one to a slippery slope of frustration with events dragging on for weeks or even months. Once the initial transaction has gone sour, most consumers want no more to do with the goods (or the company) – we didn’t, and a wise retailer will be guided by their policies rather than adhere to them blindly. If they recognise that the customer is unhappy it is prudent to set those policies aside and give a refund.  I know of which I speak having worked in customer facing roles for many years; it is a matter of treating customers fairly. Sometimes it is a matter of saying that while the rules say one thing, the best course of action is to step in front of them and do something different. Obviously where the rules are in place to support a legal requirement then there is no leeway; where the rules are merely company policy, or where the procedures simply do not fit the circumstances then there should be sufficient discretion allowed to have those rules or procedures set aside. Now by no means am I saying that just because a customer makes a fuss, complains or whatever, companies should cave in and give them everything they want. What I am saying is that common sense, discretion and acting reasonably should be at the cornerstone of customer service.

One of the problems with staff in stores and other branches of customer service is that they seem to take matters personally. When customers return goods that are faulty they don’t usually have an axe to grind with the employee, yet so many go on the defensive (and sometimes become simultaneously aggressive) as though the matter is personal. Often they try to make absurd justifications for both faulty products and their inability (or disinclination) to do anything to correct the situation.

The upshot of this episode with Pandora was that Val and I were seriously annoyed; sufficiently annoyed to write to the company to complain (no response at the time of writing: if and when we do get one I am sure it will be some unsatisfactory waffle about “policy”) and sufficiently peeved to be determined never to shop at Pandora again. And of course I was suitably miffed by the experience to write this blog.

Would we recommend Pandora to friends and family? I think you know the answer to that.

Here In My Car, or Incidents and Accidents.

Learning to drive is something of a rite of passage, one which many people embark upon at the earliest opportunity. When I was a teenager many of my friends took driving lessons as soon as they were old enough and a great many of them were soon the proud owners of cars; some old, some not so old (none that were new); some in good condition, some in not such good condition. Learning to drive was not on my agenda, however. Perhaps in part this was because my parents did not drive and I was used to getting everywhere by public transport, but also (in an early example of my analysing something to the nth degree and seeing only the negatives) because I could see only the expense and worry attached to learning to drive, buying a car and then maintaining it. Believe it or not, I also worried about the consequences of any collision, accident or crash that may occur, be it my fault or anyone else's.

Years passed in which I relied either on public transport or was given lifts by friends, until I married for the first time in 1990 and June decided that it would be nice if we could share the driving rather than it all fall on her and to that end she bought me some driving lessons as a birthday present. This backed me into a bit of a corner because although I could see the advantages of being able to drive, I did not relish the prospect of actually learning, so we agreed that I would go through with the lessons on the proviso that we told no one that I was taking them until I had taken my test and secondly that if I failed I wouldn't feel obliged to re-take the test. I detested learning to drive; each day, when a lesson was scheduled for the evening, would put me in a foul mood, dreading the prospect of the lesson itself which, when it came, I would enjoy not at all.

Eventually the time came for me to take my test. Wisely, June went out for the day while I paced nervously up and down indoors waiting for two o'clock, the time of the test, to come. Two o'clock finally arrived and after twenty minutes of driving around Hornchurch we pulled up outside the test centre where the examiner asked a few desultory questions on The Highway Code (this being long before the theory test). "Mr Woods," he said, "I am pleased to tell you..." As soon as he said "pleased" I knew that I had passed, which was at once a relief, a surprise and a source of worry, the last because I would now have to drive unsupervised, without an instructor with a foot poised over the dual controls. Having passed I took a lesson in motorway driving, which I would thoroughly recommend to anyone, and then I was on my own (if not accompanied by June), and as one of my instructors had told me, this was when I really started to learn how to drive. Inevitably it was also when I was also most likely to be involved in an accident, although I managed to avoid any incidents or accidents for a couple of years.

The first time I was involved in a road traffic accident was not my fault but my car was a write-off.  The second time I was involved in a road traffic accident was not my fault but my car was a write-off. The third time I was involved in a road traffic accident was not my fault but my car was a write-off.

The first two accidents were fairly mundane; the third one was not. The first time occurred when I was passing through a set of traffic lights and a car coming in the opposite direction, turning right across me, failed to stop to let me pass. Apparently the driver thought that I had jumped the lights and that she had right of way (although even if she believed she had right of way I fail to understand why she completed the manoeuvre when she saw that I wasn't stopping). On the second occasion I was driving quite slowly along a side street when a car reversed off a drive way and straight into me; the result was a caved in wing and broken suspension. In fairness, I had owned the car for nearly thirteen years, but this is the only instance I have ever heard of where a car has reversed into another and written it off.

The third accident, which took place in 2008, was spectacular and when it happened I honestly thought that I was not going to survive it. We were driving to Plymouth to catch a ferry to Santander. We were in good time and rather than use only the motorways, were mixing the journey up and using some motorways and some A roads. We were on a single carriageway stretch of the A35 in Devon, going down a hill. A long line of relatively slow moving traffic was coming in the opposite direction. In the distance, heading towards me in my lane, I could see a fast moving vehicle, which turned out to be a Porsche. At first I thought that it was not going to stop or pull over; I had nowhere to go to avoid a collision, so I slowed down to a crawl. The Porsche pulled over, but was still travelling at high speed. It hit the rear of a Fiat and then time seemed to stand still. I was aware that the Fiat now had all four wheels off the ground and was heading straight for me; I genuinely thought that I was going to die. The Fiat hit my car just about at the point of the door mirror, bounced off and apparently rolled over a number of times, hit the car behind us and came to rest, the right way up, facing in the opposite direction to which it had been travelling.

The point of impact and subsequent trail of damage on my car can be seen clearly here.

 Miraculously, and the police officers who attended the scene were incredulous, no-one was seriously hurt; everyone walked away, although our younger daughter had to go to hospital to a have a small shard of glass removed from her eye. Then the fun began. We were in Exeter, nearly 250 miles from home on a Sunday evening; our luggage was still in the car, which was in another county. When we got home and tried to cook something (we hadn't eaten since breakfast) we found that the cooker had packed up. Having travelled home by train, instead of spending the next week in northern Spain, we spent it at home phoning insurers and arranging to have our luggage recovered. We had to have a bit of a row over the holiday insurance as the insurers could not understand why we had not taken the next ferry, despite the fact that it did not leave for three days and we had no luggage.

 

The Porsche can be seen on the far left of the picture. The Fiat is on the right, where it has come to rest after hitting my car and the Ford immediately behind.

The biggest issue though, was that the driver of the Porsche was uninsured; the insurance details he gave us at the scene were bogus and my insurance company had no luck in tracing him. Recovering the cost of my written off Nissan Note through my insurers was not too difficult, but my uninsured losses (train fares, freight costs to recover our luggage, etc) ran to several hundred pounds and although I managed to get some of it back through the MIB (that's the Motor Insurer's Bureau, not the Men in Black), I still ended up significantly out of pocket.

The MIB, not to be confused with...

...the MIB

Motor insurance is not cheap (especially for young drivers) and many people do not insure their vehicles because of the cost. My advice to you is that if you drive and you are insured, avoid uninsured drivers at all costs; the problem is that sometimes they may not avoid you!

Bloggin' All Over the World

I was in two minds as to whether or not to publish a blog this week; I’m sure that even the most enthusiastic followers of any blog (let alone mine), have enough on their plates this week to push reading a blog down their list of priorities. On the other hand though, as we are nearly at the end of the year it is as good a time as any to look back at my first year of blogging.

In one of my very early blogs, “It’s Life Jim, but not as we knew it,” (http://rulesfoolsandwisemen.blogspot.co.uk/2013/01/its-life-jim-but-not-as-we-know-it.html) I said that “One of the reasons for starting this blog is that I’ve always enjoyed writing, either for work or for fun, and it can be quite a cathartic process, even if no one else reads it. For better or for worse, I’m going to try adding to this blog once a week at least.” Now it remains true to say that I enjoy writing and it is cathartic at times and when the need has arisen, I’ve enjoyed digging around for information to include in my blog. But did I care if people read it or not? Of course I cared.

As far I can see, there is no accurate or reliable information on exactly how many blogs there are out there on the net, but earlier this year Tumblr.com had over 101.7 Million blogs, WordPress.com had in excess of 63 Million blogs, Livejournal reports 62.6 million blogs and Weebly over 12 million, and a quick look at the worldometers website (http://www.worldometers.info/blogs/) shows that nearly 1.2 billion blog posts have been written in 2013 so far. With that number of blogs competing for attention, any number of hits I got was going to be a bonus but I would be lying if I said that I would have carried on if I had not had some sort of readership.

What did surprise me (and gratify me too) was that each week when I published my blog there would be a respectable number of hits, and while I knew that a few friends would take a look, there were always some hits from outside the UK. As you might expect, the bulk of my audience appears to be in the UK, but the US, Spain, Germany, France, Russia and Poland also feature regularly, which is nice!

Sometimes the subject matter for my blog readily suggests itself, possibly because of some news item I have read or seen; alternatively it may be because I have done something particular that week. Then there are the subjects that I just think would be interesting. One such was A Midland Odyssey (http://rulesfoolsandwisemen.blogspot.co.uk/2013/11/a-midland-odyssey.html). Now when I say interesting, I have to admit that I thought of it as chiefly of interest to me (and possibly anyone who worked for or had worked for, Midland Bank or HSBC) but possibly not to many other people; I thought it might be a little self indulgent. To my surprise, this proved to be my most popular blog to date.

Like so many things associated with computing and the internet, blogging is so much easier than it was years ago; basically there is a template, you chose your design, decide on a name, type in your content and...well, that’s pretty much it really. The trickier thing is having some sort of inspiration as to what to write and the time to write it. The latter is of course far less of a problem if you aren’t holding down a full-time job. Before I actually started doing so I had hankered after the idea of writing a blog; there were a couple of false starts before I published anything. As with many things, I was uncertain as to how it would work and whether I could sustain the momentum, especially since it became clear that publishing every Thursday put a little pressure on.  But that has been a good thing; I’ve banged on about liking routine, so having to sit down once a week and write something and then publish it has been beneficial.

Having blogged for a year now I would thoroughly recommend it, so if you have been thinking about it and maybe putting it off, why not give it a go? It’s easy, it’s free and having people read what you have written is rewarding.

That’s it for 2013, thank you for reading!  Rules, Fools and Wise Men will return on January 2^nd, so until then, Happy New Year!

It's Beginning to look a lot like Christmas!

Less than a week to go then; less than  seven days until Christmas 2013, less than seven days until midnight mass, Christmas dinner, The Queen's Speech, Christmas Top of the Tops, visiting relatives, waiting to see if it's going to be a white Christmas, opening presents, pulling Christmas crackers, listening to cheesy Christmas songs, sleeping off (or walking off) Christmas dinner, too many Quality Street, mince pies, mulled wine, Christmas carols...and so on.

The more organised among you will have already bought and wrapped the Christmas presents, written and posted the cards, will have the Christmas lunch menu sorted, made arrangements to meet family and friends and will be looking forward to a stress free Christmas. Others among you may be rushing round in a blind panic in overcrowded shops trying to find that essential gift, realised there is only one more day until last posting day for Christmas, so those cards had better get written, and be wondering when the hell you will be able to do your food shopping while suddenly realising that having invited Auntie Mabel  over for Christmas dinner, someone has to go and collect her and where on earth is she going to sit because the dining table only seats six and you've invited ten.

Somewhere between the two extremes is me; most of the presents are bought, the cards have by and large been posted and the food shopping can wait till Monday in all probability. Having a small family no one is going to be exiled to the conservatory to eat their turkey and sprouts. Mind you that isn't to say there won't be a last minute crisis when I realise that I have forgotten to get something essential.

Yes it will probably be Monday when I will be wandering around a supermarket buying a turkey joint, potatoes, vegetables (including the inevitable sprouts) and trying not to overbuy. All around me there will doubtless be shoppers with trolleys laden with enough food and drink to feed the five thousand. I've mentioned this before (http://rulesfoolsandwisemen.blogspot.co.uk/2013/10/waste-not-want-not.html); the amount of food that is wasted in this country is scandalous and this is true at Christmas like no other time of the year. Unlike in the days when I was a child and the shops might be closed for three days, now they close their doors on Christmas Eve and open them again on Boxing Day. There really is no reason to buy as much as some people do. In this 24/7 world we live in there will even be some shops open on Christmas Day itself. No longer does the country shut down and sit in front of the television, stuffing its collective face with turkey and sprouts, nuts and chocolate...oh, wait a minute it does actually, just not for quite so long.

As enjoyable as Christmas is however, there are many people for whom Christmas is tinged with sadness. Anyone who has suffered a bereavement during the year will feel their loss most keenly at this time. I know from personal experience that the first Christmas after the death of a loved one is difficult; this Christmas there will be many people putting on a brave face while feeling sad and bereft inside. Then there are the lonely, those who live alone or who will not be seeing their families for whatever reason. I read an article last week about a man who has spent the last ten Christmases alone. This year, faced with only his own company yet again, he advertised for a companion to spent the day with him. Touchingly he has received a number of replies from people offering to spend time with him and he has received his first Christmas cards in years.  

Christmas dinner 2012 

Apart from the shops being open every day bar the big day itself, Christmas is different from when I was young in other ways too. Back in the days of my childhood it was always exciting to see what would be on the television on Christmas Day. The Morecambe and Wise Show, Christmas specials of all your favourite shows and of course the TV premiere of some blockbuster film. In those pre-DVD days it was always quite an event when the schedules were announced and as we had no way of recording anything, TV viewing had to be planned meticulously to make sure we didn't miss any of our favourites.  Not so these days; a quick glance at the festive schedules and there is nothing that falls into the "unmissable" category, at least not as far as I am concerned.

For those of you with young children, I have no doubt that Christmas is still as magical as ever. There is nothing quite like the anticipation of Christmas for a young child, even if it means that on Christmas Eve they become over excited. Most parents will remember (or be anticipating) the entry into their bedroom of a small child (or children) at some God foresaken hour and being asked if they can open their presents, to which the answer is usually, "No, it's only three o'clock! Go back to bed!" Cue exit of child or children, who will return and repeat their question continuously for the next three hours till their parents become too exhausted to refuse any longer.

"Has be been yet?"

Doubtless these days everyone is canny enough to check that any battery operated gifts contain the necessary batteries, or if they don't will have gone out and bought some, as most of us will remember from their youth one Christmas present that sat forlorn and unused until the shops opened and some batteries could be purchased. But never forget those dreaded presents that airily proclaim "some assembly required" on the box. I recall one year buying my elder daughter a Barbie camper van and having to spend most of Christmas morning on my hands and knees assembling it from its five hundred individual parts. Never again; a few years later a dolls house that was purchased was assembled a week in advance, thus avoiding any tantrums (mine or my daughter's).

The dreaded Barbie camper van!

One thing that doesn't change is that every year we wonder if we will have a white Christmas and every year we wake on Christmas morning, fling open the curtains and are greeted by grey skies and drizzle, or at best a sharp frost that at least provides the illusion of a white Christmas. I read somewhere once that it is more likely to snow at Easter than Christmas and I have to admit that I really can't recall snow on the day itself, not even in my childhood. Still, one year I suppose it might.

However you are spending Christmas, whoever you are spending it with, whether you will be at home, or visiting relatives and friends, or (as increasing numbers are doing these days) if you are spending Christmas at a hotel, in this country or abroad, I hope that your Christmas is a happy one. 

Happy Christmas Everyone!

There Is No "I" In Team

There have been times when people have accused me of being a cynic and in many ways I do not have much of a defence, although what others may see as cynicism I prefer to call healthy scepticism. There is probably no greater field of endeavour in which scepticism or cynicism is likely, nay inevitable, than at work and (in my experience), nowhere at work  more so than in the team building exercise or leadership courses.

I was reminded of this recently when Val and I went to watch a recording of the BBC radio comedy, Clare in the Community, which stars Sally Phillips as Clare, a social worker with all the right jargon, who likes to sort out other people's problems while ignoring her own. I am sure that we have all worked with people who know all the right jargon[1], all the right buzzwords and who are supremely confident that they are effective, efficient and productive when in fact they are generally pretty hopeless. Clare is a control freak who has lost control and what do you get when a control freak loses control? Yes, a freak.

Clare in the Community began life as a cartoon in The Guardian.

In the particular episode that we watched being recorded, Clare's team leader arranges a team building exercise. This being comedy, this exercise does not consist of paintballing or raft building (which the team were hoping for), but takes place in her flat. The location is unimportant, for what ensues is fairly typical of most team building/bonding exercises or leadership courses, principally that no one really wants to be there.

Over the years I went on any number of courses while at work. In the early years these were largely technical in nature, that is to say they taught you the nuts and bolts of the job. These tended to be quite rigidly structured; in many ways it was quite like being back at school. But, and this is an important but, by and large people came back from these courses with more technical knowledge of how to do their jobs and by extension usually became more effective or efficient. Gradually however, these courses began to include increasing elements of training in what may be called leadership or management skills until eventually there were no technical courses, only courses designed to make people better at working with other people or in managing them  without necessarily being able to do their core job any better.

Team building exercises tend to fall into two categories; the fun activity course and the earnest psycho babble course, but both have the same potential pitfalls. In the fun activity course everyone meets at an off-site location and a day of quad biking or clay pigeon shooting incorporating some subtle (or not so subtle) exercises in teamwork, you know the sort of thing. These may be fun and they may provide people with something to talk about at the coffee machine for a few weeks after the event, but do they make people more collaborative at work? Better team players? Better planners? Better managers? The artificial nature of the activities, the unreal setting and the fact that ultimately the outcomes on the day are pretty unimportant, means that it is unusual for anything worthwhile to be transferred back to the workplace. Anything beneficial that is learned tends to be eroded  quite quickly; everyone slips back into their normal patterns of behaviour sooner or later.

The outdoor life; team building walking on a rope.

The psycho babble course will generally take place indoors, albeit away from the workplace and will normally consist of the less outgoing members of the team desperately trying to avoid being picked out for some activity or another and hoping that one of their more gregarious colleagues will volunteer themselves. Personally I always disliked these types of courses and especially when the dreaded "role playing" exercise was on the agenda. Psycho babble courses may be run by other managers in the organisation and generally these courses are not so bad, at least the people running them usually have a certain sympathy with the participants. Worse though are the courses run by outside consultants; earnest young men and women, armed with motivational techniques and an apparently never ending supply of good humour, whose goal (unintentional though it may be) appears to be to encourage the participants to undertake activities with which they are uncomfortable to some degree or another.

The normal reaction to a team building seminar.

The greater incident of certain words and phrases, the greater the degree of babble included in a course, the greater the likelihood that the participants will tune out and, in inverse proportion, the greater likelihood that the course will have limited benefit. "Holistic," "empowerment," "leverage," "synergy;" these are all words that one comes to associate with these courses. Now there is nothing wrong with any of these words per se but they tend to be bandied about in courses with little relevance and thereby fall into disrepute. This can lead to the course organisers becoming annoyed as the participants appear not to be taking matters seriously, which may just be a defence mechanism on the part of the group members, particularly when they feel uncomfortable with whatever activity they are being asked to perform. Inevitably that old chestnut "There's no I in team," is trotted out, which means nothing to my mind; I am presumably part of "the team," so there is in fact an I in team.

In a perverse way these courses do sometimes work (although this is in spite of the content) by uniting the members of the group in their discontent and providing plenty of anecdotes once everyone has returned to their normal jobs.

It is possible that I am being overly critical, perhaps too sceptical, perhaps even cynical about this type of course or exercise. The last one in which I took part was actually quite enjoyable, if a little predictable, but it is doubtful if either I or any of my colleagues performed any better once we returned to the office as a result of taking part. The sting in the tail of that particular event was that we were given the task of taking away the lessons we had supposedly learned and applying them to performing some community based or charitable task. As a great many of the other teams decided to support one charity or another, including the immensely popular Help for Heroes, we decided that to avoid the inevitable compassion fatigue associated with the frequent demands on our colleagues'  finances, we would do something for the community. We linked up with the Bankside Open Spaces Trust (BOST)[2] to help clear a pond on Waterloo Green and later to install some raised flower beds at a school in Southwark so that the pupils could grow vegetables. Despite my misgivings about team building or leadership developing exercises, those tasks that we performed for BOST were immensely rewarding; they drew us all as participants closer together and enabled us to apply team working and leadership skills in an unfamiliar environment.

The pond on Waterloo Green.

Whether we would have done these things any differently, or any better, or any worse, had we not been on the course in the first place is moot.

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[1] Actually there is nothing wrong with jargon when used correctly although it has been given a bad name over the years. Jargon is special words or expressions used by a profession or group that are difficult for others, i.e. outsiders  to understand. If all parties understand what is meant then it is perfectly acceptable. Having said that I was once criticised for using "jargon" when using an expression that was fundamental to the business and which the listener should have understood; it said more about him than me, I felt.

[2] See their website here: http://www.bost.org.uk/