Category: Organizations

Diamond Geezer touches upon a necessary skill for survival in the office jungle. I recall it well. Although I’m old enough to remember that the skill predates emails. I recollect quite a few memos went through the officespeak translator before being issued. And I remember seeing a copy of an apparently friendly and jovial memo sent by one manager to another that was spoken of in hushed tones as being the perfect example of the style. On reading it, the words and sentiments of "dear crabface" were plain to perceive without any need to be so obvious as to actually write them.

Like death and taxes, bank charges are inescapable. Some banks, e.g. the British bank of Abbey National, seem to want to make it as difficult as possible to find out what they charge you for their so-called services. NeOnbubble has the tale of woe.

I see that the news about the letter from the Royal Society to ExxonMobil has drawn a response from the Scientific Alliance. Luckily, Steven Poole is on hand to point out the unspeak in the response. Reading their web site, it doesn’t surprise me, it scores high on the Unspeak Meter (which I also like to think of as the Bullshit Meter).  

As Zune, Microsoft’s answer to Apple’s iPod, prepares to be launched, there’s a good overview on the likely impact on the digital music market in today’s Guardian.

 

Also in the article is a reference to a parody video that purports to show what happens when Microsoft’s designers stamp their branding on the iPod packaging. I’d seen the video before, and it’s worth seeing, because it is so very true. But what I hadn’t appreciated until now is that apparently it had been produced within Microsoft itself. An organisation that can laugh at itself can’t be all bad. 

I see that the Royal Society has taken a shot across the bows of the supertanker that is ExxonMobil – telling it to stop funding organisations that undermine research done on global warming. All very laudable, but supertankers take 20 miles to turn. My suspicion is that ExxonMobil will continue steaming ahead as usual.

…That this advertisement ever escaped from the ad agency (M&C Saatchi) that dreamed it up. My instant reaction was eeuwww…

… I can’t hear you… The US National Association of Manufacturers appears to have fingers stuck in its collective ears…

The UK arm of Microsoft commissioned a couple of training videos from Ricky Gervais and Stephen Merchant. Gervais is in his full-on cringeworthy David Brent character, while Merchant plays the increasingly embarrassed Microsoft employee.

 

Good stuff, but probably the humour is lost on many non-British speakers. And while Microsoft UK probably thought they were being really cool commissioning these videos, I have a sneaking suspicion that Gervais and Merchant end up subverting the whole idea of company values (video 1) and personal development reviews (video 2). Probably not what Microsoft would have wished for…

OK, so it’s 15 years since Tim Berners-Lee invented the World Wide Web. And, one would think, that commercial organisations would be pretty savvy on how to use it to get information out there to the likes of you and me.

 

Yesterday, as you probably know if you’ve been reading my blog meanderings, I went to watch the Amsterdam Canal Parade. Last year, Shell in the Netherlands took a chance and sponsored its GLBT (Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual and Transgender) employees’ network to put a boat in the parade. It was a great success, and yesterday as a result (I think) the Shell boat was joined by boats from employee networks in other major companies: IBM, ABN-AMRO Bank and the ING Bank.

 

I was curious to see how all these companies (Shell included) would handle the public message that they were comfortable with the fact that their employee networks were participating in the Canal Parade. So I went to each of their web sites and typed in "Canal Parade" into each of their search engines. And do you know what I found? Yes, you guessed: Zilch, nada, nothing…

 

What a missed opportunity! Now, it’s quite likely that these companies had some sort of press statement deep in their media relations offices, which they would refer to if they were approached by the mainstream media. But the fact that they couldn’t be bothered to get it out onto their public web site would seem to indicate that they are all still a long way from understanding the cluetrain manifesto. They need to wake up. The last time I saw this head in the sand approach to marketing your message was the Brent Spar fiasco of Shell. I’m disappointed that they at least do not seem to have learned a lesson from that bruising experience.

Mr. Duck points out that all is not well in this, the best of all possible worlds.

I have a few thousand photos up on Flickr at the moment. Occasionally one of them gets commented on. This was the comment that one of them received today:

 

Dear Ms/Sir:
How are you!
Having had your name and address from the Internet ,We have pleasure in establishing business ship with you and we would appreciate your pushing the sales on your market.
We are a factory including manufacturing and saling daily-used ceramics,also have the right to export .This yesr ,Our products possess many fashion and newest style and deco.which sale at a preferent price to let you compare.You can view our website which is xxx.xxx.com. Or you can add my MSN.
If you have any interesting in the business of ceramics,Please contact with us.
We look forward to hearing from you and I hope a glory future will be created by us.
TKS&B.RGDS
Your faithfully
RAY

 

Oh well, at least it wasn’t someone from Nigeria wanting to empty my bank account…

I know that poking fun at Disneyworld is a soft target, but it gives me enormous satisfaction – particularly when it is done so satisfyingly as in Tim Adams’ column in The Observer today. There’s something about the place that I found creepy, while at the same time I confess that I did enjoy some of the rides. I think it’s the constant artificial cheeriness of the place that made me feel as though the enamel was being stripped from my teeth.

Kodak has announced a new version of its logo. I suppose that I’ll get used to it, but it looks a bit odd to me. The effect of the new font on me is to make the whole word seem unfamiliar. At a stroke, all the ancillary brand associations have been lost to me. Surely this isn’t the intention?

It was just over a month ago that I was writing about the retirement of an ex-colleague of mine. Last night I was back at the Shell offices in The Hague to join the farewell celebrations of yet another well-liked and respected colleague. David was always quiet and unassuming, but he kept his head clear and got on with the job. He came into computing later in his career, but it seems to me that he has been intimately involved with most of the major developments in IT within Shell. He was a great colleague to work with.

 

It really does feel as though the old guard are fast disappearing. As the culture of an organisation is shaped by its people (and in turn the people are shaped by the culture), I do wonder how it will feel in a few years time when the next generation have entirely taken over the reins.

The news comes that Oxford Brookes University is planning to bestow an honorary degree on Jeremy Clarkson for his "contribution to learning and society". This strikes me as new definitions of the words "learning" and "society" that I have not heard before. The man’s a loudmouthed buffoon, surely?

Since I retired from the IT organisation in Shell just over a year ago, a number of my colleagues have followed suit. Last night I attended the farewell celebrations (a reception and then later a dinner) of one who was arguably the most liked and respected of them all.

 

To my mind, he epitomises the phrase: "a gentleman and a scholar".
 
Right from the start of my time in Shell in 1980, when I was in Shell Centre, and he was across the river Thames in ShellMex House, I always viewed him as my touchstone – the excellent example of the best sort of person in Shell, and the standard by which I would wish to be judged. And I’m sure I’m not alone in relishing his dry wit and irony.
 
The British philosopher and mathematician A. N. Whitehead is quoted as saying: "Intelligence is quickness to apprehend as distinct from ability, which is capacity to act wisely on the thing apprehended".
This man has the gifts of both intelligence and ability, and exercised them well during his Shell career.
 
Here’s to a long and happy retirement, Stephen – you deserve it.

 

Postscript: there were 20 of us at the dinner, and the old saw came up of "what’s the smallest number of people needed in a group before the chances of two of them having the same birthday is greater than evens?". Most people intuit that you need a very large number, because they don’t understand how probability works. The formula needed to work this out (where n is the number of people in the group) is:

and n works out to be 23. As it happens, even with the 20 in our group last night, there were two sharing a birthday… More background on this exercise in probability is here and here.

I’m pleased to be able to say that people from my old employer – Shell – had a boat in this year’s Canal Parade. While employees of Shell Oil (US) have participated in Houston’s Gay Pride for a number of years now, this was the first time that Shell employees in the Netherlands had a boat displaying the Shell brand in Amsterdam’s Canal Parade. They had the full support of Shell Nederland to do this, and the theme of the boat was support of diversity and inclusiveness.

 

Folks that I know from the GLBTN (Gay Lesbian Bisexual and Transgender Network) of Shell in the Netherlands, together with people from the other employee networks, such as the Women’s Network, worked hard to organise and decorate the boat. As well as the terrific singers and drummers on the boat, my husband was also asked to choreograph a short routine for the dance troupe drawn from the participants.

 

 

I mentioned last month that Tom Stafford had written to Elsevier asking them how their connections to the Arms Trade squared with the mission and values of the company. He’s since had a reply from Stephen J. Cowden, the General Counsel and Company Secretary of Reed Elsevier, but unsurprisingly, it’s left him feeling that some of his questions have not been answered…

Up until today, when I thought of Elsevier, I associated the name with books, in particular scientific journals and publications. However, Tom Stafford points out that the Reed-Elsevier Group also includes Spearhead Exhibitions Ltd. Amongst the variety of exhibitions that it is responsible for is something nasty in the woodshed: the DSEi arms fair – the largest arms fair in the world.

 

As Tom points out, organising international arms fairs seems totally at odds with Reed-Elsevier’s expressed aim to play ‘a positive role in our local and global communities’ (2003’s ‘Reed Elsevier Cares’ programme).