In pursuit of a sound-bite

When did being a company automatically make you evil?






I'll sidestep, for a moment, the local figure of hate: Tesco in favour of another example.

This evening's "Any Questions" on R4 turned its attention to the public sector industrial action this week and discussed whether it was reasonable to strike because of an enforced change in people's pensions.

The commentators included Billy Bragg who - and I'm paraphrasing now - indicated that private sector workers should be asking after their pensions too since their employers took funding holidays for years thereby boosting their profits at the expense of their employees' future well-being.

I guess Mr Bragg is talking about the pension glory-days of the 1980's and 90's

I can't claim to be a pension expert but in the 1980's I was busily running Final Salary Pension schemes for my employer.

It's true, many funds did have funding holidays but they didn't general do it for fun - they did it because the law changed.
This particular change reduced the funding margin that pension funds were allowed to run.

Prior to this change there was a really good incentive to heavily over-fund the pension scheme. The tax regime was such that an employer could count their pension contributions as allowable business expense and any increase in the value of the fund was tax free.
This sounds good, no?
A really good way to secure the future income for your employees and Inland Revenue blessing to do so.

Except that this was abused - you're shocked, aren't you?

A number of unscrupulous companies busily squirrelled away vast funds in the pension scheme for a number of years, making use of the tax incentives and the favourable ecomonic climate. After a few years, they liquidated the companies, laid off their employees after securing the absolute minimum paid up pension for them and swiped the rest of the pension fund. OK, the disbursement of the fund was then subject to tax but it still proved to be a good money spinner for them.
All this was perfectly legal.

At the time there was other legislation in place that made company pension schemes far from perfect in some cases...

There was the ability - possibly encouragement - to make the joining of the company pension scheme compulsory. So if the benefits that it provided were sub-standard (but legal) an employee could find themselves hobbled in a scheme that wouldn't really provide for the future.

At the time there were no such things as personal pensions, or stakeholder pensions so employees' choices were heavily limited anyway.

All this changed in the latter part of the 80's with so-called "Fowler" pensions legislation. Compulsion to join the company retirement plan was removed and individual pensions came into being, and were blessed with a favourable tax regime.

The idea was not to encourage people out of good pension schemes but to give them the option to set up their own where they didn't expect to be with an employer for very long, or when the company plan wasn't very good or where there was no company pension scheme.

Around the same time, the allowable funding margins were tightened to reduce the incentive for unscrupulous companies misbehaving.

What happened? Companies had to stop paying into pension schemes to reduce the over-funding because removing the excess from the fund would have lead to them being heavily taxed on the money removed, only for them have to reinvest eventually anyway.

Now pension providers turned their attention to sexy new personal pension products. There was a large population of un-pensioned people out there. So in order to encourage salesfolk to sell the new individual plans to a new audience rather than encourage the churning around the market of existing occupational plans they made the commission on these new arrangement very attractive.

What happened? The pensions mis-selling scandal, that's what. Instead of targeting the individual plans at the uninsured they applied a scatter-gun approach and sold to anyone and everyone.

So much for the pensions regime for a moment...let's come back to the evil that is the Corporation.

The second half of Mr Bragg's statement was that the evil coporporation took the reduction in the pension contribution to their "bottom line". Ummm...well, that's what companies are there to do. Make a profit. Actually, public limited companies have an obligation to their shareholders to maximise the return on their shares.

Now I can hear you saying that shareholders are also evil capitalists who are only there to screw the poor downtrodden worker into the ground.

I need you to come out of your Dickensian nay-saying for a second.

Who are the major shareholders in public limited companies? Large-scale investors...such as insurance companies, banks and pension funds.

So if you're wanting good levels of return on your building society account, or your unit-linked pension to provide you with a good income when you retire, or your Open Ended Investment Contract to return sufficient dividends to pay off your interest-only mortgage then you have a vested interest in PLCs making a profit.

Only when these companies make a profit can they declare a dividend on the shares you effectively own in them thereby paying you for the use of your money.

You see what I'm getting at?

I'm not for a second saying that the financial regime is perfect - it's not. It never has been. Each change in legislation removes some of the abuse at the expense of introducing some other abuse.

What I'm saying is that financial issues, like economics as a whole, can't be condensed into a couple of simple headlines.

As for Tesco - I'm not a big fan. I seldom shop there but them being good at turning a profit - providing they act within the law - is what they're there to do. And there's a reasonable chance that quite a few people reading this, as well as some of the people who protest against them, are financially better off because of this.

So please, Mr Bragg, stick to being a reasonable singer-songwriter...and leave the pensions to someone else, eh?

Travelling Precisely

You thought travel precision was simply about arriving at the right place at the right time, didn't you? I'm about to tell you how wrong you are.

I looked with a degree of incredulity at my friend and neighbour, MrB-H, when he told me that when he was in Japan he derived no small amount of satisfaction from tailoring his daily commute on the train to make his journey as step-perfect as possible.
I thought that this was just MrB-H being a little quirky and gave it no further thought.



Imagine, then, my surprise (well, that sounds so much better than 'horror', doesn't it?) when a trip with S from Hitchin to Brighton was peppered with precision requirements about where one gets on and off a train in order to faciliate the next leg of the journey.

I'm pretty easy-going with such things and took these minor things in my stride, but gave S a wry smile.

Since then I've made the journey to and from Hitchin a number of times and had to build in variations due to engineering works on London Underground.

Something happens when you make the same train journey a lot...especially when it involves travelling on the underground. You start to notice that where you get on the train affects how stressful the next leg of your journey will be.

You see the typical tube train is maybe 6 carriages long and there are several entrances and exits along the length of the platform.

For maximum potential space in the carriage the usual widsom says get on at one end or other of the platform - avoiding the mid train (and last minute joiner) crush. The only problem with that approach is that if you get on at the wrong end it can make your onward much more tricky.

By tricky I mean longer and with greater exposure to people moving VERY SLOWLY with wheelie cases. If you're in a rush to get across the city, then that can make a big difference.

On the Hammersmith and City platform at King's Cross St Pancras the choice of platform end means the potential of an extra 5 minutes of fabulously obfuscating signage and the probability of missing the next connection north.

So it was with a great deal of satifaction last Friday when I found the prime spot to get on my underground train on platform 16 at Paddington, making my egress at Kings Cross a pleasant, and stress-free experience. A mental note has been made.

It's filed away with the local knowledge that there's a sweet spot on Hitchin platform 1. You get on the train south (as long as the train is an 8 carriage job) from here and when you arrive at Finsbury Park you will find yourself right next to the steps that lead quickly and efficiently to the Victoria underground line. Get out first and you'll be on the tube with no queueing, no wheelie suitcases or bikes having attacked you.

Next time I make the journey I shall be turning my attention to the return journey transfer at Oxford Circus...

...what? Don't look at me like that - you would too...trust me.

Repeat after Me

DSC_1230 Rippled, a photo by Lillput on Flickr.

At last...after four years I'm reading again for fun.

I always used to be a reading fanatic but when the boy departed, so did my concentration.

Over Christmas, I asked S if he'd mind encouraging me to get reading a book whilst we were on holiday. I took one of my all-time favourites "The Midwich Cuckoos" by John Wyndham. A little archaic, perhaps, but short enough to seem achievable.

He also brought along a book and one afternoon, we sprawled in companionable silence on the comfy sofa with mugs of tea and read for a couple of hours. It might not have been a big deal for S...but it was for me.

...and Cuckoos is still spine chilling...

Then a few weeks ago, S sent me a book by the power of Amazon. As I mentioned in a post at the time, it's a great book all about the history of football tactics. Instead of a joint reading session, though, I read it at night, in bed, at home. It took me a couple of weeks, but I finished it.

So I decided that the time might be right to buy a few new books and see if I could keep the momentum up.

A couple of months back I went to see a production of "Jeffrey Bernard is Unwell" - which is brilliantly funny but with lingering pathos that left me quite moved.

It's based on a real-life journalist/writer and so I tried to find some of his writing.

I found it in "Reach for the Ground". It is a collection of some of his columns for the Spectator and so is effectively arranged into very short chapters.

I get the sense he's very much a man of his time and profession - although I might be wrong.

Some of his attitudes to women and alcohol, gambling and smoking seem quite shocking but I found him quite endearing and very funny.

He had very many failed and dysfunctional relationships with women but never stopped being entranced by them.

Even though he suffered from pancreatitis, pneumonia and diabetes - eventually having a leg amputated, and many falls and accidents he seems to keep his wit about him to the last.

As a result even the sad chapters are able to provoke a smile or two...sometimes a real laugh out loud moment for me.

So, in summary ...thank you Jeffrey Bernard for a splendid read and thank you S for pushing me gently back on the road to reading.

x

Renaissance woman or girl with ADHD? Discuss

Whilst typing this I'm simulataneously watching a live feed of a football match and writing emails about biomass.


You see, I'm not what you'd call a 'specialist'.

If I listed my interests, it would run to a couple of pages of A4 and would include things I haven't done for years, yet continue to retain an "interest" in (chemistry, for example).

If you started to tell me why you found the breeding of yaks so incredibly fascinating I would probably listen, totally entranced, then go and read up all there was on the internet on the subject and possibly even buy a couple of books.

I have a mind that just loves stuff.

It's usually easier to engage me in stuff I have a history with, or have encountered before. You ask S. You might remember from a previous blog entry that he took me to a home match a while ago. I loved every minute and now I find myself fretting ever so slightly about how Brighton & Hove Albion are going to manage the last few matches of the season and maintain their lead in League 1. Actually, that's why I'm watching the coverage of today's Huddersfield game - they're second and although they're a good few points behind the Albion...you can't take anything for granted, can you?

It extended slightly further when S sent me a book as a gift. I'm trying to get back into reading and so anything that will make me make time to read is a good thing. Many of my friends were slightly taken aback to learn it's a book called "Inverting the Pyramid" and that it's about the history of football tactics.

I know nothing of the technicalities of football (although I now know Inigo Calderon plays at right-back and I know where to find him on the field) but I sometimes have fun muttering about the "demise of the sweeper system" whilst not having any idea what it is. I like watching the game play out on the field and I like the macro game played out in the league table.

Back to the book - I'm not reading this just to ingratiate myself with S. I don't need to. We're good friends, and if I didn't want to read it I'm capable of thanking him for the gesture and not actually reading the book.

I'm about half-way in and I'm finding it extraordinarily interesting. I won't remember an awful lot of the detail and I have no frame of reference for some of the information in the book - but I'm enjoying the read. It's great learning something new.

And that's it with me...it's all about the learning - but it's also usually about the bonding over a subject with friends.

Photography, architecture, art (to an extent), history (on a good day, with a following wind), chemistry, football, HTML, Linux, Cookery, campanology (learning what Plain Bob Minor was was a real eye opener for me), beer...you name it...it's all interesting.

A while ago I even made CJ explain, in some detail, how PFI deals work for things like hospitals and then spent a happy hour or so arguing with him as to whether it's a good idea.

If I have to describe myself (and I've had to do that for various reasons over the last couple of years) then I tend to say that I'm not very good at anything other than being quite good at a lot of things. It sounds like a bit of a self-deprecation thing...and perhaps it is but it's true.

Over lunch with my friend, AB, yesterday we talked about this. He's very similar. He loves to learn new technical things but admits to losing interest once he's cracked it. I empathise.

It's not something that's particularly well rewarded in the job circuit so you have to make up for it by being disciplined and putting in extra graft.

So is it this personality trait that lead me to only ever be moderately successful in work? Yes, possibly, but the last 8 or so years of my insurance career saw me find my niche...project management.

Many project managers are specialists who fall into management. There's a comfort thing in this because they know the subject. People like me (and my ex-boss) are more the "PM of all trades" kinda folk.

We could argue the toss about whether a good PM can manage any project (I think they can but most specialists disagree) but stepping into managing the set up for a large beer festival a couple weeks ago has reminded me that I still have it.

I went into the room on the first day knowing literally nothing about the technicalities (and there are many). I had a list of jobs that needed to be done and I had an appreciation of the critical path.

Mostly I let people get on with their jobs...but when a decision needed to be made, I asked people to explain the technicalities of the decision to me and together we came to a conclusion.

So I now know how beer is racked, vented and tapped - and why you do each of those things. I have a better appreciation of the conditioning process of beer and how you can tell whether beer is ready to serve.
I even know why a hoist with fewer than four turns on a cable drum is not really fit for purpose but that the mass of the thing you're lifting, and the height you're lifting things to can play a part in your safety decision on whether to use it or not.

The jury's out as to whether I made a positive difference to the set up (I might find this out next week) but I realised that it's my basic curiosity that allows me to take on these sorts of tasks and get up to speed fairly quickly.

I'm afraid it also makes me go a little geeky and try to start to explain to anyone who'll stand still long enough to listen (and a few who attempt to run away) how the 2-3-5 formation pre-dates the passing game and how England's dogged attempt to continue to play W-M was so ill fated as they pitched against sides with more flair and flexibility.

Where are you going...come back...don't you want to hear about the flat four?

Persistence of Memory

Well, then...

Here we are.

First day of spring. First day of the rest of your life. First day of the fifth year of my life "After".

Loathe as I am to mark seemingly random waypoints in life - I always feel moved to acknowlege this one. One friend tells me it's because some events are simply strongly imprinted on our memories and, sadly, these events are typically not the nice times.

With that in mind I've been running over a list of the things that stay with me although he's now long gone. Overwhelmingly, these are good things.

These things shape who I am now and so even my friends who never met him actually experience a tiny part of the person who was the centre of my "before".

So - indulge me for a second - and when you see these things in me, you'll have an idea where they came from.

1. Philip Glass.
Repetitive, intense, distinctive music from one of the most prolific modern "classical" composers of the minimalist school.
You will have heard some Philip Glass music over the last month, of that I'm sure. He's been used in BBC documentaries, adverts, films and dramas.
I never really liked most of what he did - but we did agree on one set of music he composed. Amazon River.
Haunting, technically stunning and makes you listen on several levels.
You can count beats in the bar in many ways - 2, 3, 4, 6 and 12 and the way you experience the beats changes what you hear.
Give it try...

2. Beer
I moved from being a cider drinker to a beer drinker and was tutored by him.
First beer he ever gave me was Theakstons Old Peculiar.
His taste moved from dark to light beers whilst mine persisted around the mid-brown.
That was until the local pub started selling beer in four-pint jugs and he usually did the beer buying. Once converted to Bath Ales Spa, I've never really looked back from the hops.

3. Richard Feynman
Physics was never my thing at school. I didn't find the subject engaging and so mostly dismissed it out of hand once I didn't have to take an interest any more.
He handed my a copy of one of Feynman's books when I was bored one day and it brought me into the world of a man who not only loved the subject but wanted to make you love it too.

4. Curry
He took me for my first curry when he moved to Bristol. Ummm I had melon as my starter because the other things scared me.
Chicken tikka was a total revelation.
This weekend, after being inspired by another of my favourite people, I manufactured a curry from scratch, and made onion bhajis to feed houseguests.

5. Digital SLR cameras
He bought me mine after I repeated tried to use the one I'd bought him, and had fallen in love with.
That camera (Nikon D50) continues to live a useful life in the hands of my brother.
His camera (Nikon D70s) continues to live here with me - sometimes being pressed into service.
Photography kept me sane for a period of time I thought I would lose it completely.
Some of my favourite people - my lovely business partner TD, my fab Flickr friends DrP, DM, DrC, AB, MS, and all the others came into my life as a direct result of that camera.

6. Proper Coffee
My first trip to stay in Leeds was marked in my mind by a visit to a cafe (way before mass-market chain cafes were over-priced and over here). Cafe long gone now, sadly, and I can't remember precisely where it was.
In it you were served coffee in a cafetiere and it felt like the height of sophistication and extravagance.
His ever increasing quest for the perfect cup of coffee culminated in the purchase of a coffee roaster.
The legacy lives on because I now roast the coffee and grind the coffee and make the coffee with an espresso machine that needs 10 minutes warming-up time.
There is no instant fix of coffee in my place...

7 Home Cinema
Partly my fault, I'll admit. I brough home an LCD project from work to "mind" over a weekend's office move.
It was a calculated guess that the boy would have a little bit of fun with it over that weekend.
Six months later saw his 40th birthday and this was marked by the purchase of a projector, screen, new DVD player etc, etc

8 Space, the final front-ear
Both of us avid Star Trek watchers as kids...we experienced ST:TNG as a "couple" and have watched every episode countless times.

The start was always the same, though...As Kirk or Picard seriously intoned "Space, the final frontier" he mimed an ear in the middle of his forehead with his hand.

When alone and catching a sneaky episode on some junky cable channel - I still do it.

9 Klaatu barada nikto
From "The Day the Earth Stood Still" best of the 1950's B-movie sci-fi films. Nuff said.

10 Resistor colour codes
I can't even remember which colours they are, or how the knowledge of them turns into knowing what the rating of the resistor is.
But the mnenmonic persists...
Big Blondes Rip Off Your Garments Behind Vivid Grey Wagons.
He won 10p in physics class for that, I'll have you know.

I miss him dreadfully, of course, but there's nothing I can do about that.

And as I make tea in a teapot, listen to the Ting Tings, the Fall, or Maximum the Hormone, or read my books on the history of football tactics, or church architecture whilst remembering that Edward II was killed with a poker up his arse, or take pictures with my M8 and edit web-pages with a text editor I realise that the influences from people I like, love and admire continue.

Good innit?

x

Enlightenment

Funny, isn't it?

When I first started doing project management for a living I couldn't understand why you have to be trained in that stuff...and why people get it so badly wrong.

After all, it's just so much common sense, no? I do it naturally when I'm running things - surely everyone does.

I said as much to my boss, CNG, who was the epitome of the craft, as far as I was conerned. When he managed a project, it stayed managed.

"Shhhh...don't tell people that", says CNG, "I've been peddling common sense for nearly 20 years".

Nevertheless, the more work I managed the more I saw that, despite it mostly being common sense people mostly didn't do it. It's why poorly managed projects go over time, over budget and/or don't deliver what people expected.

Our company has excellent project management skills and excellent technical (architecture, landscape, design, construction) skills but we both agreed we're a bit under par on the selling ourselves front.

It's particularly important for us to be able to get our message over because we sell a service that most people don't even know they want.

We've been told that we talk engagingly on the subject and our enthusiasm defintely gets people on-side but we have a website that doesn't get the message across nearly as well as it should.

So, today, we attend a design/marketing workshop.

I was waiting for mind-blowing insight; big ideas that identified exactly where we've been going wrong.

So, after three hours or so, three discussion groups and some presentations did I have enlightenment?

Oh yes. Yes indeed.

What I learned was...ummm...common sense.

Each of the discussion groups broadly said the same thing as far as we were concerned.

1) Understand who your audience is
2) If you've got more than one group in your audience, make sure they get a tailored message.
3) Understand what your audience is looking for - and give it to them.

Well, duh...

I really don't understand why two intelligent, capable people couldn't aready have worked this out and put it into practice, but the fact is, we haven't.

We've been looking at our website for ages wanting to make it better and yet couldn't put our collective finger on what was wrong with it.

Now we've got a starting point to do our much overdue rewrite - but we're not starting with colour, fonts and pictures this time - we're starting with a strategy. And looking at it - it feels quite embarrassing that we needed to betold that by someone else.

But that's the thing, isn't it?

One man's common sense is another woman's revelation.

Due respect to all of us who peddle common sense...or, rather, not-so-common sense.

Aga Saga

A salutory reminder that nothing lasts for ever came whizzing into my life a couple of weeks ago.

A few months back I got a certain amount of satisfaction from replacing the elements in my oven myself.

How does my oven repay me for £70 worth of hardware and a couple of hours of my love and attention? It failed again.

I finally decided that my relationship with the cooker was over. Another tricky decision to make, another decision to make on my own. Not only that, I have very little enthusiasm for cooking for just myself. I still love cooking for friends but that's not a daily event.

I wasn't much in the mood to do research but I learned from the impulse purchase of the outgoing model and started to surf to look for alternatives.

What became clear is that cookers of the right size are not cheap.

When we'd had the "new" kitchen installed (about seven years ago, now) we'd investigated a top of the line range cooker but dismissed it on the grounds we couldn't really justify the extra expense when the cooker we had was working.

In my research I discovered that a local department store was having a sale of range cookers - so I decided to go and scratch and sniff and see if I could pick up a bargain.

I came out of the shop some fifteen minutes later quite a lot poorer but with a new cooker of the exact type that I'd yearned after. It was the display model and a third off and it ended up priced only a little more expensive than the other cookers I was grudgingly considering from my research on t'Internets.

I have to say that the delivery and fitting of the new cooker did, at times, seem to be like the punishment of Sisyphus. Then again, it only took exactly two weeks from choosing to having it working - albeit via a day of no heating, some delivery angst, blown electrics and a discovered electrical fault with the new device.

On the way I've learned:

That Mercury can be solid at room temperature - very solid indeed, in fact. You ask the poor buggers who delivered it

That an MCB is not the same thing as an RCD but both may trip at the same time when your cooker has a wire with stripped insulation.

That a modern gas cooker connector has a built-in cut off valve - you don't need 24hrs without hot water when you disconnect your old cooker

That I could have predicted my old cooker was going to blow elements on a regular basis - it's their USP, apparently

That the make of cooker recommended by the wonderful "Steve" (he who mended my new cooker) is Rangemaster. Remember that if you're shopping for cookers at the weekend.

That there are some bloody good workmen out there

I'm pretty chuffed at the whole episode, truth be told. Panic and angst were kept to a minimum for once.

...and most importantly, when I have houseguests in a couple of weeks, there's a better than reasonable chance I'll be able to cook for them.



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