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Buzzwords and bingo - no.7

This happened to me in a meeting recently. I have to tell somebody.

I asked for the following:

"Within reason and where there is a clear case for doing so - we should be able to make changes in the build phase"

And this is what the project manager put in the final document:

"Following sign-off of this document, the Requirements will be baselined and subject to change control procedures. Small changes to these requirements which emerge during the development phase will be addressed collaboratively with the Business sponsors through a process of reprioritisation. This approach will protect delivery deadlines"

Why use two lines when you can use six? Is it me?

Lessons in brown-nosing (part two)

Carly, as well as being a top-notch brown-noser for adding to the blog on Christmas Day, is also missing a trick. Or is she pulling a fast one? I think we should be told, and I should get all the brownie points for being a clever-dick-swottie-pants. Assuming for a moment that butter would NOT melt in Carly's mouth, she should know how easy it is to write a posting, and then set a timer that sees it actually published at a later date. What easier way of impressing the boss by making it look as if you were working on Christmas Day when actually you were hard at it with the Chardonnay having pre-scribbled some old nonsense? Unless you are rumbled, of course.

And if you have been, you might be interested in this job spec. Tips galore for brown-nosing of a more successful variety. Ish.

PS I have posted this in "strategy" because I really am at work in the dog days between Christmas and New Year. And I am loving every minute of it. What a super idea of the boss to give me this fantiastic opportunity to leverage my own little brand to the greater good of our wonderful company and its inspired and generous leadership team. 

It's Christmas Day and I'm working

I don't have to save people's lives or keep vital infrastructure running but I'm still working today. Are you? And does this mean that it's time to join the 12-step programme at Workaholics Anonymous?

PS some of you may have noticed that I have categorised this post under "strategy". This is because I am doing this to impress my boss.

12 e-cards for Christmas

Environmentally-aware folks have ditched quill and ink in favour of e-cards this year. Here at Snakes and Ladders we have collected together our 12 favourites for you to enjoy:

How to deal with those pesky people at work

If it wasn't for people, it would be so easy to run an organisation. You'd run through your SWOT (strengths, weaknesses. opportunities and threats) analysis, design and create your product and put together your marketing and advertising strategy. Then press the button and bingo, you'd be top of the pile before you can say Jack Welch.

But you can never account for people. Despite your best laid plans, they always get in the way. There are always people who think they know better than you and will ignore you and your plans and choose to set off on some solo path far away from your original vision.

This is where you need Terry Tate, the office linebacker. Apologies to those in the US who are familiar with Terry - but for the rest of the world - here is the missing element on your career route to global domination.

The next time John in marketing commissions a creative that is diametrically opposed to your concept, don't get mad, get Terry Tate*.

* Don't try this at home.

What to buy the accountant in your life for Christmas

Finally, evidence that accountants are just like the rest of us: research by business-to-business publisher Sift Media found that bean-counters' favourite gadget is the Nintendo Wii. Small business owners want an iPod Touch while HR managers want the fancy new iPod AND an Xbox 360.

Read more about top tech toys in Carol's post from last month.

Your child can't draw

The Times' Arts Editor, Alex O'Connell, wrote a highly entertaining feature for T2 yesterday about Dan Crowe, former editor of the now-defunct literary magazine Zem-bla, who has set up a company, Kinbote’s Bespoke Art Commentary Service, which passes critical comments on the artistic works of children.

Apparently, parents e-mail him a j-peg of their child’s art work, the child answers a series of questions (What is the painting of? What are her aspirations? What does she like to do?) and Crowe returns a mini-essay that compliments and complements the picture. The daubings of Alex's own three-year-old daughter were deemed “highly sophisticated” and "rather Fauvist", and Snakes & Ladders would agree entirely.

But not everyone is so generous towards kiddie art. Here's someone who has been driven to distraction by pictures displayed by proud parents in offices. The site isn't brand new, but great art criticism, like great art, never dates. (Warning: the page contains strong language - don't click through if you're easily offended, or if you have an aversion to bright colours and scrawling...)

Buzzwords and bingo - no.6

Leadagement

"The basic principles of MANAGEMENT and those of LEADERSHIP practices are easily reducible to CONCEPTS that can become synthesised in the wholistic system of LEADAGEMENT, which hopefully indue course give us LEADAGERS: the dynamic Leader-Managers or Manager-Leaders of tomorrow," says BISIKAY director of the Global LEADAGEMENT Institute in London. (The capitals are all his, not mine)

Bisikay's comment is one of many, many, many comments on management guru Gary Hamel's recent blog entitled "What is management's moonshot?" by which he means "How would you reinvent management?"

Christmas is a (psychometric) testing time

We know that entrepreneurs and businesspeople plan to work right through Christmas (thanks, Carol) but what's perhaps less well-known is that plenty of everyday employees spend at least part of the 25th logged on to online job boards in search of new professional homes. (A recruitment consultant told me this a while ago, though for the life of me I can't remember his name so I can't give him credit - sorry).

Top lists for the rich, stupid and slack

Snakes and Ladders is bracing itself for a deluge of traffic this week after a survey showed that one in three employees have mentally switched off work in favour of logging on to the web.

Although technically at work, it appears many of you are counting down the days to Christmas by; shopping, indulging in long lunches and faffing around on the internet, rather than doing any real graft, according to a poll of 2,500 people by Teletext Holidays.

However, some particularly splendid faffing around by one of our colleagues (Thanks, Mike) has revealed two neat follow-ups to my post on ten totally stupid business ideas that made someone rich, which you may remember included such classics as Doggles and plastic wishbones.

Bring me my Machine Gun

I am not sure I know I great deal about politics, but I know a great mission statement when I see one. Step forward Jacob Zuma, would-be successor to Nelson Mandela's free South Africa, which, incidentally, must be one of the greatest management case histories of all time. Zuma's song goes by the title "Awuleth' Umshini Wami" or the rather less edfiyingly, but much more scarily, "Bring Me My Machine Gun." If that doesn't get the goodfornothings in accounts working harder, what will?

If you are having trouble formulating your mission statement, try this tool from Dilbert.

Is your computer smarter than you?

If you are one of those people who hates maths and last punched a calculator button in anger on the last day of school aged 15, then I suggest that you move swiftly on to the next post because what follows will make for grim reading. Yes, you may have moved into the creative industries to blot out the memories of those dreary double maths lessons on a Monday morning - but it seems that the geeks are about to inherit the Earth. Well that's the prediction in Professor Ian Ayres's fascinating new book, Super Crunchers. How Anything can be Predicted.

Why aren't there more woman business angels?

I'll let Sally Goodsell pick this one up. She's the CEO of Finance South East, which is a funding organisation that invests in around 85 new business each year, many of which are owned or part-owned by female entrepreneurs.

When the going gets tough...

A study published by the University of Chicago GSB this week suggests that tougher is better when it comes to making it as a CEO. A survey of more than 300 US private equity firm CEOs shows that speedy, aggressive, persistent CEO candidates are more likely to be hired than their good-at-listening, open-to-criticism, team-playing counterparts.

Top Trump

Following Carly's post about fictional and frugal billionaires, here is evidence of Donald Trump's largesse: a $10,000 tip on a bill for $82.27. I bet the waiter couldn't believe his luck. This isn't the first time the quiffed one (photo, left, from askmen.com) has been generous with his money, when he appeared on Deal or No Deal in the US a contestant won just $25 and Trump reportedly wrote a cheque for the contestant's son for $25,000. The Donald has even been know to hand greenbacks out on the street. Bizarrely some people are irritated by all this generosity and have voted him the most annoying money personality.

Top 10 most excruciating e-mail gaffes

My recent piece about workplace mortification made reference to a couple of famous e-mail gaffes and inspired Olivia Bennett, a young journalist working with The Times’ Business team, to compile a list of the most cringemaking examples. If there’s anything that'll inspire you into being more careful with those “reply all” and “forward” buttons, it's the following:

Buzzwords and bingo - no. 5

"Repurpose", indeed, is the buzzword du jour. But this piece of linguistic nonsense straight from the parallel universe that is adland goes one better. "We proudly present the first treatment of our new creative." Roughly translated I think this means "we've come up with some new marketing guff and we are just about to foist it on the world."

It is not to be confused with: "This is the new treatment of our first creative," which means either "we've reheated some old-but-moderately-successful marketing guff, but will bill you as if it is completely fresh," or "we know we are about to lose your account but we thought for appearance's sake we'd do as you said and re-think the horse-manure campaign presented last week."

Buzzwords and bingo - no. 4

Repurpose
As in "we will repurpose last week's pitch for tomorrow's meeting".
Why not be honest?  "We don't have time to do any new work so we're going to cut and paste stuff from the last report we did. We'll do a new introduction and maybe even add a couple more slides, assuming we can find someone here who knows how to do things in PowerPoint."

Get ahead at work: treat the CEO like a person

I have never walked into the office of the editor of The Times and asked him whether he had a nice weekend. I've never walked into his office for any other reason either, but if I was going to take up his time I'd make sure I had a hell of a scoop in my notebook first.

Mistletoe and (alcohol free) wine

What marks the start of Christmas for you? The first snowfall of the year? The bumper festive edition of the Radio Times? For me it only begins to feels like Christmas once I have seen a newspaper story about a borough council or corporation somewhere doing away with Christmas in the interests of diversity, or attempting to rename it “Winterfest” or “Winterval” for the apparent sake of racial harmony.

The usefulness of e-learning and blogs

This interweb marlarkey. Is it worth holding a candle to? I'll never forget the dog-eared poster in the (dashingly-advanced-for-its-time) computer room back at Reigate Grammar School, circa 1981. "A computer is a moron," it read. "We have to tell it everything." So I am not surprised to hear that e-learning is proving to be something of a damp squib. Research for the Chartered Management Institute finds that 72 per cent of employees reject it, prefering face-to-face contact. Teaching and learning is quintessentially personal. Web research can assist (by making it quicker and easier to find stuff out); but anyone who thought the internet would lead to the re-invention of training was deluded. And probably driven by the hope that costs, not corners, would be cut.

With the internet, life is a good deal more, er, computerised. Lots of things are quicker and easier too. But the trick, surely, is to assume that the internet has NOT altered much in really fundamental terms.

Among other things, the full report from the CMI suggests that only 16 per cent of junior managers use blogs or social networking sites and only 10 per cent of directors bother, which must, ahem, make all bloggists like me wonder whether they are doing anything but braying in the darkness. Still, only 67 per cent of employees spend 30 minutes or less using the internet or intranets to solve a problem. That leaves 33 per cent of you devouring all the wise words posted on The Times' Snakes and Ladders management blog.

The most successful fictional billionaires

I don't work in the city. I don't have a pension. Hell, I don't even have a foot on the property ladder. And now I find out that I can't even compete with fictional characters when it comes to professional success. This list of the ten wealthiest fictional characters has Daddy Warbucks at the top ($36.2 billion), C. Montgomery Burns ($16.8 billion) in second place and - the highest-placed Brit on the list - Scrooge McDuck in third ($10.9 billion).

Oh, and it seems that Batman did take that MBA after all, as Bruce Wayne is a solid seventh with $6.8 billion.

But I can at least console myself with the thought that, were I to become very rich, I might turn into a parsimonious fun-avoider who stopped wanting to have Krug for breakfast. One rich man profiled in ABC News's list of frugal billionaires - a professor who earnt a chunk of Google shares by introducing the founders to a venture capital firm - claims to reuse his teabags.

Appraisals are a waste of time. Right?

Investors in People, the workplace lobby group, is clearly alarmed that one in three workers who endure appraisals think the whole exercise is a waste of time. As is commonly the case, a better picture comes by turning the survey's observation on its head. Two in three think appraisals are worthwhile?  That is either astonishing to the point of incredulity or a major achievement.