Simon Kuper and the nature of demand in the workplace

June 13, 2011
simon kuper book

Simon Kuper has got us thinking. The bi-lingual, award-winning author suggests, in his FT Magazine column of last Saturday, that nowadays it is permissible for men in the professions to use their children as a way of avoiding pointless bits of work.

‘Sorry, I’d love to, but I’m too busy. I’ve got three little kids.’

Such is Kuper’s refrain, when tasked with the tiresome (having lunch, sitting on unpaid panels). He argues that in being able to advance his children as a bona fide reason not to do something work-related, a societal shift has occurred. Where once the master of the universe (as Tom Wolfe would have it) might have been too busy, per se, to attend a working breakfast, or quaff after-work drinks, now having children is seen as a badge of extra – and incontrovertible – status.

We are tempted to agree, though we must observe (as, to be fair, does Kuper) that the parental-excuse-zeitgeist only applies to one half of the population. Try being a woman and saying: ‘I’m sorry, but I can’t make that business lunch because I have to take one of my children to after-school club.’ But this is not what Kuper has made us reflect on. No, what he’s got us thinking about is the nature of demand in the workplace.

It seems to us that there are two types of people in the professions. On the one hand, there are those who have made it (like Kuper). They may not be CEOs, but they nevertheless occupy a certain position, one of power and command. As such, they are in demand. People contact them all the time, asking them to do things, to be available, to make time. On the other hand, there are those on the way up, the people who haven’t quite reached the same level. They are the ones who make the demands, who ask if someone is available, who propose that people sit on unpaid panels and attend lunches that don’t need to happen and spare a bit of their precious time.

The latter group could never get away with saying that they are too busy, still less that they are putting their kids first. Only those in the former category have this luxury. We say: good luck to them. (We don’t say: ‘would you care to take five minutes to answer this survey?’)

Pictured: Football Against The Enemy by Simon Kuper, winner of the William Hill Sports Book of the Year in 1994.

 

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If you’re Joey Barton, attack is not the best form of defence

May 17, 2012

Interesting times, these, in the life of Joey Barton.

If the violence displayed by the QPR captain at Manchester City last Sunday was remarkable, his subsequent conduct on Twitter has been astonishing. Barton appears to have radically reinterpreted the notion that attack is the best form of defence, lashing out at all and sundry via a series of tweets whose ultimate effect is entirely self-destructive.

In the past 24 hours, Barton has accepted one charge of violent conduct at the Etihad Stadium but denied another. The FA seems set to throw the book at him, and his club has declared that it will deal with the matter after the result of the FA investigation. Conspiracy theorists might conclude that QPR’s management team and board hope that the FA ban Barton for so long a period (four months and more) that their reported desire to rip up his contract can only be bolstered.

What, then, should Barton do? Should he:

(a) Keep his head down and say nothing, or

(b) Issue a sensible statement in which he acknowledges that both his conduct at the Etihad and subsequent tweets have brought QPR into disrepute, and

(c) Add an apology to said statement, or

(d) Go to Portugal, log onto Twitter and tweet that the world is against him but that he doesn’t care because everyone is a moron and he’s worked really hard to get where he is and if anyone is nasty to him again he is going to expose their secrets.

The answer is not (d).

The moral of the story is that if you’re a loose cannon, when you turn attack into defence there is a danger that you will blow yourself up.

Gunning foglessly for clarity

May 15, 2012

A fine piece, this, on Winston Churchill’s gift for language and the obscurantism that goes with so much corporate communication.

But wait, what’s this? Could this injunction have been phrased rather more successfully:

Be concrete, not abstract. Use metaphors to get your message across.

Metaphors are, by definition, not exactly concrete. But be that as it may: there is a lot of sound advice in Clare Lynch’s piece and a revelation, too. We had never heard of the Gunning Fog Index.  But it exists, and reveals the age at which someone would have to leave full-time education to understand given text.

We’re pleased to display our own Gunning Fog rating for the above words. That of the Churchill speech cited by Ms Lynch was 9.698.

The Gunning Fog index is 9.585

Spin at the Leveson Inquiry

May 9, 2012
Leveson witch hunt

The idea that Lord Justice Leveson and his Inquiry’s QC, Robert Jay, are in need of PR advice is intriguing.

Surely their respective tasks ought to be immune from spin? Then again, perhaps the way in which they execute them is deserving of some communications advice. Either way, times have changed. A similar inquiry from yesteryear (and such do exist) would surely not have been accompanied, albeit informally, by communications advice.

Pictured courtesy of this Flickr user: a portrait of the Leveson Inquiry.