Monthly Archives: June 2008

Measuring compassion

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Simon Caulkin is the most perceptive writer on management in the UK. He’s also been a relentless critic of the Labour government’s obsession with ‘targets’ in the public services. This morning he excoriates the latest absurdity, namely

Alan Johnson’s inexpressibly depressing announcement the week before last of a ‘compassion index’, the results to be published on an official website, to show how kind hospitals are to their patients. This is so tragic that it’s hard to know where to begin (although I already have an idea of the ending). But let’s try.

The question is not whether compassion is desirable. It should go without saying that it is vital. For at least 50 years, it has been known that recovery from injury or illness is a delicate joint venture in which dedicated medical care and will and optimism on the part of the patient feed off and reinforce each other. A health service without compassion is therefore a contradiction in terms – compassion indeed figured among the important reasons the NHS was set up in the first place. In such a context, the question that needs answering is: how and why did compassion get lost that it now has to be inspected and audited in again?

The culprit is the dehumanising, Soviet-style regime of league tables, inspection and audit by which the UK public sector is now run…

The effect of targets is to create professions that are increasingly administrative rather than vocational.

First, simplistic targets (waiting times, exam results, detection rates) take away from professionals the duty to use independent judgment and make them accountable to inspectors, auditors and ministers rather than the citizens they are serving. Then, to deal with the mountainous bureaucracy that targets generate, the next step is to break the professions in two. As a Guardian blogger noted, over the last decade nursing has been turned into an academic and ‘managerial’ discipline, with wards turned over to managers and the basic caring component (bathing, feeding and comfort) hived off to less trained, lower-status heath care support workers. Exactly the same process of separating out the menial, ‘volume’ tasks from the rest can be seen at work in schools (classroom assistants) and the police (community police support officers), all in the vain quest for economies of scale.

Apré Billg

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This morning’s Observer column…

There’s been a lot of ‘end-of-an-era’ talk about the departure of Gates from the company he founded with Paul Allen in 1975. There have also been acres of speculation about ‘whither Microsoft after Gates?’ Both topics are, well, a bit passé. The eclipse of the Gates ‘era’ began with the arrival of Google 10 years ago. And the succession plan that he and Ballmer engineered nearly two years ago effectively handed direction of Microsoft to a triumvirate of Ballmer, Ray Ozzie and Craig Mundie. So let us dispense with the Kleenex and take a detached view of Mr Gates’s contribution to civilisation.

The headline is that he is the John D Rockefeller de nos jours in the sense that he shaped an emerging industry and revolutionised philanthropy. The big difference is that, unlike Rockefeller, Gates did not wait until the closing years of his career to engage in good works, and the $100bn endowment of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation will ensure that his name lives on…

The point I was trying to make about Microsoft is also taken up by the Economist in its piece about the end of the Gates era. The article includes this chart:

Hitler: the remix

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Speaking of bunkers, one of the most memorable acting performances I’ve ever seen is Bruno Ganz’s bravura rendition of Hitler in the film Downfall. One of the high points in the movie is when his generals finally reveal to their Fuhrer the military hopelessness of Germany’s position. So it’s a hoot to see how many times this scene is remixed using cod sub-titles to evoke contemporary events.

Here, for instance, is Hitler reacting to the news that upgrading to Windows Vista has screwed his PC. And now there’s a remix in which Hitler plays Irish Taoiseach (Prime Minister) reacting in fury to the news that the Irish have rejected the Lisbon Treaty. Here’s an excerpt from the Fuhrer’s harangue:

I’ve delivered one of the leading economies in Europe. On MY own! And this is the gratitude I get. And those useless pricks in Labour and Fine Gael… That stupid Fuckwit Kenny [Enda Kenny, Leader of Fine Gael, the main Opposition party] couldn’t even win his own constituency! Couldn’t even keep the No margin in the single digits. And those blubbering bastards over in Labour couldn’t even make a dent in the working-class vote, or bring over the unions. All they contributed was trendy, do-gooder Irish Times readers who think their shit smells better than everyone else’s. So much for the coalition system!

The nice thing was that I read about the remix in the aforementioned Irish Times!

(Which, btw, is abandoning its subscription model from next Monday. Get it at www.irishtimes.com. Thanks to Anne M for the news.)

Inside the bunker

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Extraordinary piece in today’s Financial Times about what it’s like inside the Downing Street bunker.

For Downing Street staff, the early morning e-mails from the prime minister can set the tone for the whole day. “People feel permanently under the cosh,” says one with experience of life in the Brown bunker. “It is not an efficient or happy place to work. Gordon’s working methods are chaotic and extremely demanding.”

When things are going badly, the atmosphere sours. Staff with bad news to break say they have developed a tactic to avoid a prime ministerial eruption. “If you go in and appear very angry yourself, the PM can be sympathetic,” says one. It is not just the backroom team who receive regular tongue-lashings. Ministers report being summoned in for a chat and leaving with their ears burning.

Mr Brown, according to his officials, has a particularly volatile relationship with staplers, on one occasion stapling his hand in a moment of rage. On other occasions they become missiles. These incidents suggest a prime minister living on the edge. Some aides fear there will be a “blow up” moment in front of a camera, exposing the prime minister they know in private to the world outside.

What’s amazing — if this account is accurate — is that Brown is maniacally obsessed with newspaper headlines. The article claims that he’s up at 4am, emailing staff about ways of countering the next day’s news. Thus,

The prime minister’s obsession with the daily news cycle demands that he comes up with initiatives at short notice. Hospitals have been called early in the morning to be informed Mr Brown would like to visit.

Whatever he announces may not be fully formed. Relevant ministers admit that even they know little of what Mr Brown intends to say, fuelling Labour MPs’ claims that he is putting tactics before long-term strategy.

Ministers report being woken at dawn by Mr Brown, urging them to get on the airwaves to address the story of the day. A stabbing in south London demands that Mr Brown convenes a “knife crime summit”. A fuel blockade requires an “oil summit”.

I’m genuinely astonished by this, mainly because I fell for the story that Brown, whatever his defects, was a long-term, strategic thinker. The FT portrays him instead as “a prime minister obsessed by the next day’s headlines, working hellish hours, prone to anger, micromanaging the detail of government and slow to take decisions”.

Facebook: Are you male, female or ‘other’? Squeak up

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Interesting post by Naoimi Gleit in the Facebook Blog.

Ever see a story about a friend who tagged “themself” in a photo? “Themself” isn’t even a real word. We’ve used that in place of “himself or herself”. We made that grammatical choice in order to respect people who haven’t, until now, selected their sex on their profile.

However, we’ve gotten feedback from translators and users in other countries that translations wind up being too confusing when people have not specified a sex on their profiles. People who haven’t selected what sex they are frequently get defaulted to the wrong sex entirely in Mini-Feed stories.

For this reason, we’ve decided to request that all Facebook users fill out this information on their profile. If you haven’t yet selected a sex, you will probably see a prompt to choose whether you want to be referred to as “him” or “her” in the coming weeks. When you make a selection, that will appear in Mini-Feed and News Feed stories about you, but it won’t be searchable or displayed in your Basic Information.

She goes on to say that they’ve “received pushback in the past from groups that find the male/female distinction too limiting.”

Eh???

Microsoft’s farewell to Gates

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From a a report of yesterday’s farewell event…

Gates waited behind a black curtain, arms crossed and pacing, as Ballmer introduced him. He walked in to a standing ovation, grinning, and introduced his wife, Melinda, and his children in the audience. He talked about the company’s history, including the “David and Goliath” battle against IBM, saying with a smile that he thinks that story came out the right way. He talked about the competitive landscape, saying that he thinks it’s still right for the company to focus on software.

“We have so many opportunities to surprise people,” he said.

He acknowledged that it won’t be easy to move on, given how natural it has become for him to work at the company over the past three decades. Sometimes, when he’s driving his children, Gates said, “If I forget and start thinking about work a little, I start driving to Microsoft. They say, ‘Dad, dad, what are we going to do at Microsoft?’ ”

[…]

Asked about his biggest mistake, Gates said the key thing in software is to accurately anticipate new bends in the road. He said Microsoft was ahead of the curve in areas like the graphical user interface, but he also acknowledged that it has been behind in other areas, such as Internet search and advertising: “When we miss a big change and we don’t get great people on it, that is the most dangerous thing for us,” Gates said. “It’s happened many times. It’s OK, but the less the better.”

The real Bill Gates

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Lest we get overcome by the warm bath of nostalgia engulfing Microsoft’s departing co-founder, here’s a a useful reminder of what it was like dealing with him. It’s an extended recollection by a Zilog executive for whom Gates wrote some buggy Z80 compiler code in 1979/80.

“After a couple of weeks of calling and getting the same message from Gates, I finally pulled out the listing and went through it. It was terrible code. Sloppy, poorly documented and generally not something that I would have allowed my developers to send out the door. But that was all I had, so I spent a few days going through it and finding the errors that appeared to be causing the troubles with the tests. I then called Bill again and explained what I had done and where would he like me to send a copy of the corrections.

“He didn’t want them, as he could fix it himself! I went ahead and told him the areas that needed to be modified, but he became more and more belligerent as I went through the changes. He said, again, that he’d look into it. I seem to have hit a nerve there as I believe that I mentioned, more than once, what a crappy piece of code this was.

“After that whenever I would call, Bill and I ended up shouting at one another over these modifications. After a total of about 3 months of calling at least once a week I finally gave up and went to our company lawyer. His solution was quite simple — Call Mr. Gates one last time and present him with the name and phone number of our lawyer and tell Gates that the lawyer would be calling him the next week. I did this (quite calmly as Bill began our conversation shouting at me) and told him that I wouldn’t be calling him again.

“We had the patched and working code before the lawyer ever got around to calling him the next week. Seems I was an early recipient of the Microsoft Business Model.”