“He has sadly become part of the problem. It is time for him to go”
Jo Swinson, Liberal Democrat MP, on the Speaker of the House of Commons. Quoted in today’s Observer.
Presumably s/he meant to say “Sadly, he has become part of the problem.”
Bah!
Meetings 2.0
I must be getting old: I find myself agreeing with Steve Ballmer. There’s a terrific interview with him in today’s NYT. I particularly like this bit:
Q. What’s it like to be in a meeting run by Steve Ballmer?
A. I’ve changed that, really in the last couple years. The mode of Microsoft meetings used to be: You come with something we haven’t seen in a slide deck or presentation. You deliver the presentation. You probably take what I will call “the long and winding road.” You take the listener through your path of discovery and exploration, and you arrive at a conclusion.
That’s kind of the way I used to like to do it, and the way Bill [Gates] used to kind of like to do it. And it seemed like the best way to do it, because if you went to the conclusion first, you’d get: “What about this? Have you thought about this?” So people naturally tried to tell you all the things that supported the decision, and then tell you the decision.
I decided that’s not what I want to do anymore. I don’t think it’s productive. I don’t think it’s efficient. I get impatient. So most meetings nowadays, you send me the materials and I read them in advance. And I can come in and say: “I’ve got the following four questions. Please don’t present the deck.” That lets us go, whether they’ve organized it that way or not, to the recommendation. And if I have questions about the long and winding road and the data and the supporting evidence, I can ask them. But it gives us greater focus.
I’d go further. When I’m Supreme Leader all the chairs will be removed from committee meeting rooms.
The serious point behind Ballmer’s Meetings 2.0 is not so much that it’s efficient (which it is) but that it means that each meeting adds value or moves things on. And, in a way, that’s the whole point of our networked information ecosystem. One can often assume nowadays that anyone who’s prepared to put in a little effort can be as well informed as you are. So the question then becomes: how can s/he or we add value and move us on?
I tried to make this point in my seminar last week at the Reuters Institute in Oxford. I said I was sick and tired of seeing an expensive TV journalist being filmed outside the door of 10 Downing Street telling me stuff that I already know. I want him or her to move the story on, not waste airtime and bandwidth in useless summary or colourful waffle.
The other really interesting point to emerge from the Ballmer interview is that his favourite ‘management’ book is Bill Collins ‘Built to Last’
Networked news
This morning’s Observer column.
As newspapers fold, the hunt is on for a workable business model for online news. Lots of things are being tried, but none of them provides the revenue growth needed to offset the income siphoned off by changes in media consumption patterns and the diversion of advertising revenues to the web.
Things have got so bad that Rupert Murdoch has tasked a team with finding a way of charging for News Corp content. This is the “make the bastards pay” school of thought. Another group of fantasists speculate about ways of extorting money from Google, which they portray as a parasitic feeder on their hallowed produce. And recently a few desperadoes have made the pilgrimage to Capitol Hill seeking legislative assistance and/or federal bailouts for newspapers.
It’s difficult to keep one's head when all about one people are losing theirs, but let us have a go…
Coincidentally, there have been (at least) two other pieces on this general theme this week — an uncharacteristically Daily Mail-type rant by Bryan Appleyard in the Sunday Times, and an excellent, balanced article in the Economist.
And I’ve been Slashdotted! In the old days, that would mean that the Observer’s servers would fall over.
Later: This is probably all due to Cory blogging the column in BoingBoing. And the biggest irony is that the piece didn’t appear in today’s paper edition of the Observer. No idea why, but I suspect a glitch in the paper’s content management system.
Coming soon: the Global Approximation System
From Good Morning Silicon Valley.
If the Air Force and its contractors don’t get their act together pretty quickly, in a couple of years your car’s navigation system may be giving you instructions like “In a mile or so, turn right” or “You have reached your destination, more or less.” The Air Force is responsible for maintaining and modernizing the network of satellites that provides GPS service, but according to a new Government Accountability Office report, technical problems, leadership lapses and contractor woes have combined to put things way behind schedule. “As a result,” said the report, “the current IIF satellite program has overrun its original cost estimate by about $870 million and the launch of its first satellite has been delayed to November 2009 — almost three years late.”
The problem is that the GPS system needs a constellation of at least 24 satellites to deliver complete coverage and accurate results, and some of the birds now flying have been up there almost 20 years. If they start to fail before replacements are up, GPS accuracy will start to deteriorate. As things stand, the report concluded, “it is uncertain whether the Air Force will be able to acquire new satellites in time to maintain current GPS service without interruption. If not, some military operations and some civilian users could be adversely affected.”
Bah! And just when I was getting to rely on it for getting to Norham Gardens.
More Celtic Donkey news
From the every-cloud-has-a-silver-lining department. This from the front page of today’s Irish Times.
In an unforgiving recession that has led to a collapse in demand for many trappings of the luxury lifestyle, Ireland’s best-known helicopter company has ceased its charter service.
Celtic Helicopters, controlled by businessman Ciarán Haughey, returned its air operations certificate to aviation regulators yesterday.
The firm now plans to focus on hangaring services for helicopter owners who are mothballing aircraft to curtail their day-to-day outgoings.
The firm offered business travel and aerial photography services, as well as pleasure trips, golf tours and transfers to race meetings.
Although helicopter trips became a symbol of spectacular wealth accumulation in the boom times, they are no longer in vogue. The chopper, for example, was a favoured mode of transportation among property developers. Now many members of that community are under considerable fiscal strain. Celtic is making five staff redundant as a result of the decision to halt charter services, but it will continue to employ another eight.
Knowledgeable readers will recall that Celtic’s owner is the son of Charlie Haughey, the disgraced gangster who was, for a time, Ireland’s Taoiseach (Prime Minister). Celtic Aviation prospered during his reign — and of course during the boom.
Who says Twitter is frivolous?
Heh! Here’s something to make the Twitter-deniers choke on their muesli. The Herschel-Planck space mission is now well on its way. Needless to say, it has a good website. The mission has launched two spacecraft. Herschel is the largest, most powerful infrared telescope ever flown in space. Planck is
Named after the German Nobel laureate Max Planck 1858-1947, ESA’s Planck mission will be the first European space observatory whose main goal is the study of the Cosmic Microwave Background – the relic radiation from the Big Bang.
Observing at microwave wavelengths, ESA’s Planck observatory is the third space mission of its kind. It will measure tiny fluctuations in the CMB with unprecedented accuracy, providing the sharpest picture ever of the young Universe — when it was only 380 000 years old — and zeroing-in on theories that describe its birth and evolution.
Planck will measure the fluctuations of the CMB with an accuracy set by fundamental astrophysical limits.
But now comes the really neat bit: Planck has a Twitter feed! It curently has 360 followers — and, understandably, isn’t following anyone. Probably has enough to do as it hurtles through space.
(Yeah, yeah, I know: the Tweets are done by some geek in ESA. But still… A friend of mine’s husband is one of the leading scientists behind the project. He was a bit miffed when she sent him a message this morning telling him that some complex manoeuvre had been successfully completed. She knew before he did, because she’s a Twitterer and he’s not).
Straw drops secret inquest plans
Hooray! According to BBC NEWS,
The government is dropping plans to hold secret inquests without juries, Justice Secretary Jack Straw has said.
In a Commons written statement, Mr Straw said the move did not command the necessary cross-party support, despite earlier government concessions.
It was included in the Coroners and Justice Bill earlier this year to cover cases involving sensitive information.
Civil liberties groups who feared cases like that of Jean Charles de Menezes would be affected, welcomed the move.
The government had argued that in some cases inquests should be held in private for national security, crime prevention or diplomatic reasons.
Financial epiphanies
From Nick Paumgarten’s piece on the decline of high finance in the current New Yorker…
A private-equity executive I talked to said that he sensed the jig was up when his cleaning woman — “from Nicaragua or El Salvador of wherever the fuck she’s from” — took out a subprime loan to buy a house in Virginia. She drove down with her husband every weekend from New York, six hours each way, to fix it up for resale. They cleared sixty-five thousand dollars on the deal, in a matter of months. To many, this would have been proof that America is a land of opportunity, but to him it signalled a fatal imbalance between obligation and means.
One could find many similar stories from the UK ‘buy-to-let’ bubble. At the height of the bubble, British buy-to-let speculators didn’t really care whether they had tenants for their properties because the capital value was escalating so quickly that renting didn’t seem worth the hassle — or the agency fees.
WSJ’s new code of conduct for journalists
Partial list reads:
* Consult your editor before ‘connecting’ to or ‘friending’ any reporting contacts who may need to be treated as confidential sources. Openly ‘friending’ sources is akin to publicly publishing your Rolodex.
* Let our coverage speak for itself, and don’t detail how an article was reported, written or edited.
* Don’t discuss articles that haven’t been published, meetings you’ve attended or plan to attend with staff or sources, or interviews that you’ve conducted.
* Don’t disparage the work of colleagues or competitors or aggressively promote your coverage.
* Don’t engage in any impolite dialogue with those who may challenge your work — no matter how rude or provocative they may seem.
* Avoid giving highly-tailored, specific advice to any individual on Dow Jones sites. Phrases such as “Travel agents are saying the best deals are X and Y…” are acceptable while counseling a reader “You should choose X…” is not. Giving generalized advice is the best approach.
* All postings on Dow Jones sites that may be controversial or that deal with sensitive subjects need to be cleared with your editor before posting.
* Business and pleasure should not be mixed on services like Twitter. Common sense should prevail, but if you are in doubt about the appropriateness of a Tweet or posting, discuss it with your editor before sending.
So that’s the end of networked journalism, then.
[Source]
‘Honourable’ Members?
I’m temperamentally suspicious of the British press when it’s in self-righteous mode — as it is currently about MPs’ expenses. (I’m with Macaulay on that one. “We know no spectacle so ridiculous”, he wrote, “as the British public in one of its periodical fits of morality”.) And I suspect that behind at least some of the apparently outrageous claims there is probably a sensible explanation.
But the thing that really bugs me is the incessant invocation of the mantra that any expense claimed, no matter how bizarre, was “within the rules”. We had the same thing a while back when a very senior Irish bank executive was shamed into resigning when it was revealed that he had been ‘warehousing’ huge personal loans for nearly a decade to keep them off his bank’s balance sheet at the end of each financial year. As he crashed in flames, he issued a statement saying that while his actions may have been ‘inappropriate’, nevertheless they were within the law.
What was missing in his case — and is clearly missing in some British MPs — is any sense of honourable behaviour. His actions were clearly designed to keep the truth of his financial dealings with the bank he ran from being known. Most of us who are lucky enough to be in employment are entitled to claim legitimate expenses. But most of us have a sense of what’s reasonable and what’s not. For example, if I go to London on university business it’s obviously reasonable to claim for any rail, tube and/or taxi fares needed to get me to and from my destination. But is it reasonable to claim for the Americano that I would have had anyway, travelling or not? Obviously not.
And the irony is that Parliamentary etiquette still insists that the shysters who have been exploiting the expenses system should be referred to as “Honourable Members”. Perhaps the best revenge would be to refer henceforth to the most blatant claimers as Dishonourable Members.
As ever, sunlight is the best disinfectant. When in doubt ask yourself: How would this look if it were presented in evidence in court? Or published in the report of a committee of inquiry? And then decide what to do.