Weights and Measures

In my quest for complete scientific knowledge I have inadvertently discovered a new system for weighing things that I believe will revolutionise business everywhere. Indeed I think it will create a measurement system that guarantees extra profit for all commercial enterprises that use it.

It is called the ‘ryankilo’ and is already in use by celebrated money-making machine and part time airline Ryanair. A ryankilo is equivalent to 1.1 metric kilos. This is how it works. If you take a bag on a British Airways flight and it weighs 15.6 kilos you will find that the exact same bag with the exact same contents will weigh 16.8 kilos with Ryanair. With a hold limit of 15 kilos per person (which in effect means up to 16 kilos) Ryanair is able to charge you for the extra kilo. In my lifelong search to find the perfect route to money-making even I could make money out of that. And so could you.

Just imagine what this will do for shops. A 10% saving for the seller on anything you buy that needs weighing – Woolies ‘pick n’ mix for example.

There is one place where it won’t work though. The dieting industry.

What are Human Resources?

Thought for the day:

I have always thought that only a Human Resources department could come up with the phrase ‘human resource’. Let’s make machines out of people! It’s the way human resource department insists on things like ‘competency matrices’ that gets to me. And then they wonder why they end up recruiting the merely competent rather than the potentially great. The frame of reference is so narrow. For example, look at any recruitment ad now and you see an identikit formula for recruitment – good team player, ability to work under pressure etc. ‘Good team player’ is such a wide and meaningless phrase and even if we could agree what this meant would we want everyone in the team to share these characteristics? Surely teams are meant to have a wide diversity of souls, brains, emotions, and perspectives.

In the words of the great management guru Tom Peters – ‘I have met many human beings before but I have never met a human resource’. And I bet he hopes he never will…

I hear people can now get degrees in Human Resource Management. I just do not see where human resources add value to any business and that must be the criteria for the existence of any department. The best definition I ever heard of organisational effectiveness was a raison d’etre that seeks to ‘cut out systems and procedures that don’t add value in the eyes of the customer’. I need a lot of convincing that HR adds any value at all. They have even swallowed up training departments and this has been disastrous for training in organisations in the UK. The genesis of HR was the old payroll department. Isn’t it about time they reverted to that?

Romantic Love

I saw two people last week. One I guess in their mid fifties (male) whom I know well and one slightly younger and female who I know less well. They have been together for more than fifteen years. I have been thinking a lot about romantic love recently and when I saw these two together I realsied what it was. They touched each comfortably though not explicitly and I could feel the charge that existed between them. Never was the two magnets metaphor more appropriate. They were very comfortable commenting on each others vulnerabilities in the most direct ways but were able to divorce their own egos from the critisising. You have to be very sure of each other to do that. And yet, even though this certainty existed, I felt that they still reserved a part of their reactions to each other as one does when you are in the early stages of a relationship. In other words even though they were fifteen years into a relationship they still found each others words interesting and worthy of their time. I enjoyed observing them.

And as I observed them I wondered how many who are in long term relationships or marriage manage to remain romantically in love with their partners in the way they did in the first year of two of their relationship. Do you listen to your partner? do always have time for them first? Do you still get a little thrill if you are away for a day or two and then come back? Is criticism fun and playful rather than biting and nasty? And do you at least get the feeling that occassionally at least you want to take them to bed and have three or four hours of rampant nookie? That is to say that you still find them physically attractive.

Is there anything more important than this? Than real romantic love?

USB

I had an enjoyable drink with some IT wonks here in Kosovo last night - my last night. A really international group - Kosovars, Romanians, Canadians, Turks, Thais. We talked about the takeover of the computer as a communication tool but also as an energy source and more than that as the central hub in our home. The clinching moment in the discussion came when one of the group informed everyone that he got an email today advertising the first USB Fridge. You plug it into your USB and off you go. It holds one can of coke but it cannot be long before we run household fridges, cookers, microwaves (I am proud to say I have never owned one of these) and so on. One of the key household devices - music systems - are being utilised more and more in this way and the next logical step will be to power the home through this central source.

With Bill Gates announcing yesterday that a key Microsoft development in the next year or two is the removal of traditional computer interaction devices such as the mouse and the keyboard where does the imagination take you? Using voice and touch to communicate with the hub (what we currently call a computer) to direct all activities in the home. Billing through one source that monitors everything in your domestic environment.