Geoff Coupe's Blog

Reflections on life at “De Witte Wand”…

Category: Organizations

  • Another Recruit to the Ranks

    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.

  • Surely You Jest?

    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?

  • The End of an Era

    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:
    365! / ((365-n)! * 365^n)
    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.

  • The Amsterdam Canal Parade – Part 2

    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.
     

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    You can see more photos of the Shell boat up on Flickr here.

     

  • Elsevier and the Arms Trade – Part II

    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…

  • Elsevier and the Arms Trade

    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).

  • A Bank with Ethics

    The Co-op Bank in the UK has asked an evangelical Christian group to close its account at the bank because of the group’s anti-homosexual views. The bank stated that the opinions of Christian Voice were incompatible with the bank’ stance on diversity and human rights.

    Good for them! Christian Voice is a very extreme organisation. Its director, Stephen Green, was interviewed on Radio 4 this morning.

    As Justin McKeating wrote on the Chicken Yoghurt blog today: "As cheering as it was to hear Stephen Green exposed as a whinnying fool yet again, I think it’s a little unfair that such a small unrepresentative group of yahoos are given all this airtime". True, but Green was given ample opportunity to show himself up as a bigot and an idiot, and he did not disappoint one iota. A link to the radio interview is on the Chicken Yoghurt blog. 

  • Consultant Culture

    There was an interesting article earlier this week in The Guardian about the consultancy firm of McKinsey, and the influence it is having on the UK government.

    There is no doubt that McKinsey has a very strong organisational culture – as the article states, McKinsey has nicknames such as The Brotherhood, The Firm, or the Jesuits of Capitalism. During my working life, I encountered McKinsey on a couple of occasions (and also their kin, Accenture, on more than a few occasions), and I can attest to the sense that I was working with people with a very particular worldview.

    The Guardian article questions whether in fact the McKinsey culture is a totally benign influence on the UK government, and of course we shouldn’t forget that Enron was regarded as "the house that McKinsey built". For my own part, I believe the influence of such a monoculture to be pretty baleful, and I have commented before on my impression that the Labour party of Blair has no soul, and disturbingly few principles that chime with me.

    I use the term monoculture, because that is the strongest impression that I have of McKinsey – you have to fit with the culture, or you’re out. I’m sure that they view this as a source of strength, but having a lack of diversity can be a weakness. In fact, there’s been work to demonstrate that diverse teams outperform monoculture teams, providing that the diversity can be managed properly.

    Dr. Carol Kovach has done research at the Graduate School of Management at UCLA that demonstrated that cultural diversity can have both positive and negative impacts on teams. Diversity has been shown to augment potential productivity, but it also increases the complexity of the processes that must occur for a team to reach its full potential. Highly productive teams differ from less productive teams in how they manage their diversity, not, as is commonly believed, in the presence or absence of diversity. When well managed, diversity becomes an asset and productive resource for the team. When ignored, diversity causes process problems that diminish a team’s productivity. This is illustrated in the simple diagram here.

    And I know from my own experience that the most exhillarating (as well as at times, the most frustrating) team I ever worked with was one that by design was set up to be as diverse as possible. When we learned how to manage our diversity, we were extremely productive, and came up with great results.