A new toy

I finally plucked up the courage and sold the Sprite. Tomorrow I collect a Tiger Supercat. 168bhp of madness - that's about 270bhp per ton. Only fly in the ointment is that it has no hood and the weather forecast for the next week is rain which means I can't go and get it. How frustrating is that!

Communicators in Business

I was presenting and taking part in a panel session at the Communicators in Business conference at the Metropole in Brighton last week. It was quite an entertaining session and I was sharing the platform with Julie Howell from Fortune Cookie who presented a well argued case for renewing the focus on accessibility for social media tools, and David Burden of Daden Ltd who specialises in helping businesses with virtual worlds. I was particularly taken with David's arguments that virtual worlds may have a powerful role to play inside an organisation as they provide the 'experience' to complement the 'information' provided by the traditional and emerging web. I think I'll be following this up with him. The whole session was chaired by Louisa Preston, who did a great job.

What was most disappointing however was the level of engagement with social media amongst this group of people. It was a large room - over a hundred people I guess - all directly involved in the communications business. However, only about five in the room claimed to write a blog, and only two or three people had even heard of Twitter. I was very surprised! My conclusion is that traditional comms people are being marginalised - a very real danger for the discipline. Or maybe it's just that people in the social media world are still only talking to each other and haven't really broken into mainstream yet. Either way, I was surprised and disappointed!

Windows works!

What a result. I've had my Windows Vista PC for just over a year now and can honestly say that it has not once crashed since I've had it. Maybe that's because I don't work it hard enough, or I'm just lucky. Or maybe it's because the product has simply got better. I am religious about firewalls, anti-virus, software updates etc. which probably helps, but not much. In some ways I'm disappointed as the blue-screen had become a bit of a way of life with XP - both at work and at home. Not not any more.

So, thanks HP. And thanks Microsoft.

Brands Hatch Track Day

Many thanks to Vauxhall for organising an awesome track day at Brands Hatch. For £95 we got a very nice lunch, did some auto tests – including as a passenger in an Astra driven on two wheels by the legendary Paul Swift – and then spent the rest of the afternoon thrashing the entire Vauxhall VXR range round the fabulous Brands Hatch Indy circuit. My favourite cars were the Astra and the Corsa – both with really willing engines and handling to match. Well equipped and good looking too – although the Corsa is a little ‘boy-racer’, but then I guess that’s its market.

Highlight of the day for me was the couple of hot laps with Paul O’Neil. Amazing. Scary. And I still can’t believe he was driving the same Astra as the rest of us.

Thanks Vauxhall for a thoroughly enjoyable, superbly organised afternoon. I’m not looking for a new family car, but if I were it would probably be an Astra VXR.

Email and intimacy

I lead a fair size team at work and have always been very proud of my reputation as a good manager. So when I got the results of the latest employee attitude survey a couple of weeks ago I was deeply concerned that the results had deteriorated quite sharply. Was this a sign that my management skills are in decline? Not sure. Certainly hope not.

After discussion with some colleagues my conclusion is that this is not a reflection on me, but on the more general environment. And also the arrival of several people who came to me as part of a protracted reorganisation, from teams which had experienced a period of uncertainty.

Having said all that, whatever the reason for the feelings amongst team members, it is clear something needs to be done. One thing quite noticeable is that, as a flexible and distributed team, we have lost the feeling of intimacy that we used to have and that the sheer size of the team might work against this. Is this a natural part of the maturity path of a flexible working team? Or is it an indication that a flexible team has an optimum size and that we’ve got too big? Possibly. However, it has been pointed out to me (thanks Diane) that the way we use some of the tools is also not helping. In particular email.

We’re very dependent upon email. And it’s a great tool. It allows us to communicate with many people at the same time, and is asynchronous – we don’t need to be in the same geographic space, or time space, for it to work. However, it is very impersonal, tone of voice can be very hard to get right – particularly for a group of people who come from different backgrounds – and can often be used without any real thought to the alternatives. So from now on whenever I need to get a message to just one person, I’m going to pick up the telephone and only use email rarely. That'll be much more intimate.

I’ll let you know how it goes.

Boys and Toys

The Sprite has been sold. It’s lived in the miserable British weather for 40 years and is now off to Gibraltar which hopefully will be a better environment for a car which can be prone to rust and doesn’t like cold damp mornings. It’s been great fun over the past few years and I shall be sad to see it go, but speed beckons. I’ve decided a Tiger Super 6 or Tiger Cat is the most suitable replacement. Now I just need to find a good one.

Expecting to fail

Customer service generally has now become so bad that our first expectation whenever we contact a call centre is that we’re going to be let down. We expect that our call won’t be answered for ages, we’ll have to select from an endless series of options, or get transferred several times and then referred to the website. Not always it seems. I called the DVLA this morning with a couple of questions about car registration documents, exporting etc. I had to push only one button, then got straight through to a knowledgeable, helpful and eloquent person who answered all my questions immediately without referring me on to anyone else or putting me on hold.

Well done DVLA!

Sometimes marketing departments get it wrong

I've just come back from a week at the Sheraton Fuerteventura. I find it strange that a hotel group as large as Sheraton would choose to build a hotel in such a down market resort. Very strange. Nothing wrong with the hotel - except perhaps the service, but you can read more about that on tripadvisor.com if they finally publish my review -but you'll only enjoy the resort if watching football on a large screen TV in the 'pub' is your thing. Not that there's anything wrong with that, but I wouldn't have thought it was top of the list for the demographic Sheraton target.

Live and learn.

A week without technology

I took time out for a week on the beach last week. And I took a decision to try and leave the technology behind - well most of it anyway. So, no laptop, no Windows Mobile device. Just a mobile phone to be turned on in an emergency. Strangely, I experienced no withdrawal symptoms whatsoever. Only on one occasion, when I walked passed an internet cafe did I even think about it. What did I learn? Simply that it's real life and real people that are important and that provide real experiences. As the Musicians' Union used to say - "Keep It Live"! Or at least, let's use the technology to help us get on with our real lives, not as an end in itself.

Yet more blending

It seems it's not only me who talks about blending.... Here's an Ovum report about 'blended messaging'.