Looking for our corporate values

As part of our recent rebranding, we were all sent this word search as the wallpaper for our PCs. It contains our new corporate values, can you find them?



You should have found "committed", "innovative" and "open", but did you also find "revenge"?

Obviously nobody involved in the production of the puzzle did (apart from the embittered employee in the agency who was, I presume, responsible for the prank) and this was rolled out to staff before it was spotted and quickly, and embarrassingly, replaced.

It just goes to show that even with something as simple as a little quiz it pays to do some checking.

LIKE 12 - No more consultants

LIKE leaped purposefully and confidently in to its second year with a talk facilitated by Chris Collison that took a gallop through some of the main points in his latest book, No more consultants.

My hopefully not too simplistic summary of his argument is that organisations too often turn to external consultants when they already have the required skills and knowledge within the company.

Of course, knowing that you have these skills and knowledge is one thing but finding them and exploiting them is another.

Chris covered this in as much detail as his 45 slot allowed and we had an instructive run through maturity models (decide what is important to you and ways to measure how good you are at it), the river model (which summarises each team's self assessment against the model) and some tips for getting those with the skills and knowledge to share with those who need it the most.

Chris' talk was rich in content, well paced and delivered with creditability (it was practice not theory) and it set the evening up nicely.

What followed was some food, more drink and lots of conversations. And I mean a lot of conversations.

The semi-official end of the meeting was 8pm but only a few left then and the debate was still going strong at 9pm.

And it was still going pretty well when I finally left around 10pm!

If you can judge the success of an individual LIKE meeting by the time that it ends then you can judge the success of the whole venture by the number of people left on the waiting list for the meetings and LIKE is now looking for a larger venue. Success indeed.

Lots of laughs in London Assurance

I tend to get my theatre fix from the Orange Tree locally but an offer through work tempted me to go and see London Assurance at the National Theatre on the mere premise that it is a comedy and had Richard Briers in it.

It has been a long three years since I last went to the NT (for Coram Boy) but I found it refreshingly familiar with its interesting and unusual spaces created between brutal but beautiful blocks of concrete and its many terraces offering views across South London and the Thames.

However, I had forgotten the layout of the Olivier Theatre where the steeply raked seats meant that the person in front's head was about the same level as my knees. No worries about being able to see here!

London Assurance is a simple comedy that revolves around late middle-aged Sir Harcourt Courtly who is engaged to the eighteen year old Grace Harkaway for purely commercial reasons.

The first complication comes from Sir Harcourt's son, Charles, who also falls for Grace and the second comes from the larger than life fox hunting demon Lady Gay Spanker who catches Sir Harcourt's eye.

Farcical elements are introduced through Charles adopting a (very faint) disguise and from a local lawyer who keeps stirring things up in the hope of earning a fee.

The play dates from 1841 and so a lot of the comedy arises from the familiar platforms of class and the contrasts between town and country. This still works well despite the lack of resonance with today's world. I wonder how long this will last before we have a generation who simply do not understand the world that is being portrayed.

The humour, and there is lots of it, comes both from script and the acting which deliberately verges on melodrama. I especially enjoyed Grace (Michelle Terry) playing hard to get so that we the audience all knew what was going on but poor Charles was left bemused.

London Assurance is a solid comedy that is well presented by the NT and while it is never spectacular it is never weak either and the combination of play and venue made it a thoroughly enjoyable night out.

Business Analysis: Theory and Practice

It had been quite a few years since I went to a British Computer Society meeting (my techie days are long behind me) but I was tempted to go to one on business transformation in local government.

It was a meeting in two halves and my reaction to these was quite different.

First up we had Debbie Paul giving us Business Analysis 101. This was a bit basic but was obviously useful to the techies, i.e. most people there, who are more used to dealing with boxes and code than business processes and people.

I had no real complaints over this part, as demonstrated by the lack of the usual derogatory comments in my notebook. I would argue that some of what was described crept from Business Analysis in to Business Consulting (this is where I think Business Change sits) but there is no point in arguing over imprecise terms so I was happy to let this ride.

In the second half of the talk James Archer gave a detailed explanation of a current project where some Business Analysis techniques were used.

There were some good parts to the story but it brought back too many bad memories from Lambeth of how bad local government is.

In particular, the project was not that ambitious, it was little more than a new web site, but it had still taken almost a year to get to the initial, and not yet working, release.

And secondly, the approach seemed to be well behind the latest thinking. For example, they had made the step of realising that they should describe their care homes in as much detail as their hostels but had completely missed that the current expectation is to include user feedback too. Sites like Amazon and Trip Advisor have done this for years and, frankly, this should be a minimum requirement these days.

The speaker was sincere, enthusiastic and knowledgeable but I felt that he was trapped in a small cage without seeing the bars.

The evening ended well with some networking over unexpected wine and nibbles which probably did just about enough to tempt me back to another BCS event if they ever stray into Business Consulting territory again.

Couch politics

I've not been on any marches or attended any political meetings recently but I quick tram through my in-box this weekend reminded me of just how many campaigns I am currently engaged in from the comfort of my IKEA Poang chair.

All of these campaigns exploit web2.0 technologies to reach people and enable them to join in my, for example, signing petitions and email their MPs.

The Libel Reform Campaign is defending free speech that are under serious threat from our draconian libel laws. These are being used well beyond their original intent to silence critics who do not have the financial mussel to stand up to the large corporations.

Simon Singh's fracas with the British Chiropractic Association is the public face of the issue currently but his is only a symptom of a much larger problem that now has international cases seeking to bring libel claims in the UK because the chances of winning and the benefits of doing so are so much greater.

Similarly, the Open Rights Group campaigns to defend freedom of expression, privacy, innovation, consumer rights and creativity on the internet.

One of their current campaigns is against the Digital Economy Bill that is currently going through Parliament.

As it stands now, the Bill, if passed into law, will allow disconnection, web blocking and could well see the death of open wifi.

The internet is such a great resource because of it's openness, this bill would try to reduce some of this and make us all poorer as a result.

The Robin Hood Tax is trying to do what it says on the tin - take money from the rich to give it to the poor.

In this case the rich are the banks who started the recession and required bailouts from the Government just to survive but, just a year later, are making vast sums of money and paying a lot of it to themselves in the form of bonuses.

The proposed tax on financial transactions would only be 0.05% but could raise 100bn a year to spend on the poor, here and abroad, and to develop solutions to climate change etc.

It's a simple idea and one whose time has come with the (justified) unpopularity of bankers and the need to address global issues like poverty.

The Conservatives are warm to the idea so this is one campaign that has a real chance of winning.

Vote for a Change is looking to make our politicians more accountable by changing the way that we vote for them.

Currently the majority of MPs have little or no real opposition, only a few seats are marginal, and they have abused this position as clearly demonstrated by the expenses scandal.

There are lots of arguments on precisely which form of voting system we should move to but any change has surely got to be a change for the better.

Greener upon Thames is a local environmental campaign on one simple issue - stop the use of disposable plastic shopping bags.

I am amazed at how many of these useless bags are given out in my local shops without either the retailers or customers paying them much attention or any regard for what they are doing to the environment.

Reusable bags are easy to get (I have lots!) but are nothing like as popular here as they are, say, Germany or Denmark.

This is an easy problem to solve, we just need to motivate politicians, retailers and the general public to do so.