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Monthly Archives: May 2017

Hear’say in the Heart of Manchester

26 Friday May 2017

Posted by Burning Manager in Uncategorized

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7/7, 9/11, hear'say, Isle of the Seas, Lockerbie, Lockerbie bombing, Manchester, Manchester Arena, Pan Am, Ric Elias, terrorism, Twin Towers, Windows on the World

Manchester-Town

My daughter went to her first concert at the Manchester Arena (MEN Arena back then). I remember it well. It was Hear’say, a manufactured band on a TV show called Popstars, a forerunner to the Idol franchises. Your daughter’s first concert is a big deal. She’s growing up….she likes music ‘yay’ hopefully she will grow up and like the Indie stuff…fingers crossed. So it was those emotions that welled up when I first heard of the Manchester bombing and saw the photos. It was an outrageous and heinous act, but for me the impact comes not from my initial visceral response to this act committed by someone deluded by the wrong notions and quite possibly manipulated by zealots for whom the exercise of power must be equally satiating as their distorted view of their religion. Rather it is the subtle impact of it a day or so after that has slipped behind my emotional guard.

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As a parent I reflect on the lost potential of the lives lost. For those who survived to go from the rapture of the moment to a living nightmare will be life-defining. This wasn’t an act that caught people out in the street, it was deliberately perpetrated to target young people enjoying themselves, many for their first concert like my daughter all those years before.

This had me reflecting about my other subtle connections to acts of terror. I first travelled internationally on what turned out to be a 15 year migration to the UK. From Los Angeles to New York we flew on Pan Am and I clearly remember the words painted large on the plane as we were boarding – ‘Isle of the Seas’. That very plane crashed some time later torn apart by a bomb on board over the town of Lockerbie in north Scotland.

My wife and I eloped and married in New York. On our wedding night we went to a restaurant overlooking Manhattan and made a call to our parents. They brought a telephone to our table. I think I had seen that done in the movies. The view was spectacular; one of the best in the world. Ten years later that very restaurant was the scene of some of the most chilling live television ever to be watched as people ‘opted’ to jump from the blazing and falling Windows on the World restaurant in the Twin Towers on 9/11.

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Before we migrated again, this time to Australia, I was working for a company whose offices were in the British Medical Association building in Tavistock Square in London. My local tube stop was Russell Square where many of the survivors emerged dazed and confused on that day in July 2005. The bomb on the bus exploded outside what was my office block.

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The recent terrible deaths outside the Houses of Parliament in London happened right where I had many years before had the privilege to be in the crowded press gallery in the House of Commons when Prime Minister Tony Blair debated Britain’s entry into the Iraq war after already giving it the green light. Some may say that in some small way the terror we see today can be traced back to that fateful decision. It in no way provides it any succor or justification. Many Australians would have felt the same pull of emotions when watching those dreadful scenes on our TVs.

Events like what happened in my much-loved old home town of Manchester bring back thoughts of how lucky one can be, and for some, how in a moment their lives are changed forever. My time in that wonderful bruised and resilient city was thankfully not marked by the stain of terror but great warmth and wonderful memories. Communities come together in times like this and Manchester despite its tough exterior is something of a beacon to the world with faith communities joining in solidarity and support. Ultimately religious arguments, within and between faiths, boil down to wanting to be right. My book is the truth yours isn’t. My faith is righteous yours isn’t. My values are pure yours aren’t. This way madness lies.

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Coincidentally I viewed a TED Talk today delivered by Ric Elias who was on Flight 1549 that landed in the Hudson River in 2009. Contemplating what he thought was his certain death he was able to distill three core lessons for life. The one that resonates most for me, and I think is germane in this world where terrorism permeates our lives in both outrageous and subtle ways, is this.

‘I no longer choose to be right….I choose to be happy’

If we learn one lesson from the outrages that are perpetrated on our world by the delusional it is that we should prioritise happiness above all else.

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In a nostalgic mood I Googled Hear’Say and watched their clip ‘Pure and Simple’ which was their first single and a runaway success. It transported me back to more innocent days, but I am thankful my daughter  has expanded her musical repertoire making her Dad even prouder.

 

Conversing @ Colvinius

12 Friday May 2017

Posted by Burning Manager in Uncategorized

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ABC, Australian Broadcasting Corporation, BBC, British Broadcasting Corporation, buzzfeed, Colvinius, Donald Trump, Facebook, Fairfax, fake news, Fran Kelly, Google, Jeremy Paxman, Leigh Sales, linkedin, Mark Colvin, Maxine McKew, Patricia Karvelas, Phillip Adams, Skimm, The Apprentice, Tony Jones, Virginia Trioli, Waleed Ali

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I got a tweet yesterday from someone who had just died. It simply said ‘It’s all been bloody marvellous.’ It was none other than Mark Colvin, the longstanding journalist from the ABC (Australian Broadcasting Corporation). The death of Mark is a blow to quality journalism and his passing is made even more salient by the fact that quality journalism is under attack like never before. There are three threats to the fourth estate. Traditional media is under pressure from falling advertising revenue, social media is skewing newsfeeds, citizen journalism is in many cases reducing the quality of the message and furthermore Trump, ostensibly the leader of the free world, has been doing his damnedest to undermine the role that the media plays in filtering out fact from fiction.

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I was no early listener to Mark Colvin whose career spanned some 40 years with the ABC. I was in the UK enjoying arguably the best quality radio, television and print media journalism in the world. The BBC remains, I think, the best news organisation across radio, television and digital platforms. So on my migration to Australia I was bracing myself for a bit of a culture shock from ‘nation speaking peace unto nation’ to laid-back news ditties interspersed by surfing forecasts. Imagine my surprise when I tuned into the ABC and listened to the likes of Fran Kelly, Waleed Ali, PK, Phillip Adams, Virginia Trioli, Leigh Sales, Maxine McKew, Tony Jones and of course Mark Colvin. I realised pretty quickly that my highbrow bias was totally off beam. Mark though, stood out for me partly I think because of his radio voice which appeared to have a tinge of British accent. He had a very direct approach, not quite Jeremy Paxman, but one that had an edge suggesting he had little tolerance for BS. He never got upset or talked over his interviewee and what was abundantly clear was that he didn’t work from scripts. His second question always seemed to be seamlessly linked to the previous answer; a clear mark of an accomplished journalist and interviewer.

Why is the passing of Mark Colvin, aka known by twitter handle ‘Colvinius’, so important? Possibly like no other time in modern history has the freedom of the press been so much at risk. There is the Trump effect. He believes that if you say it is so then it is so. This is mainly true if you run a Corporation. This is patently true if you host The Apprentice. This is clearly not the case if you are in public office and especially if you are running a country. It’s people like Mark Colvin who have kept and keep on holding such individuals to account.

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Secondly there is the worrying aspect of falling advertising revenues to the traditional media platforms of radio, TV and print. We have a very recent example of this in Australia on, of all days, World Press Freedom Day, with the notification of over 100 redundancies of journalists from the Fairfax Group. This means quality journalists committed to keeping our politicians, those in public service and corporations honest. Democracy is kept alive through the constant application of scrutiny. Those who do so are increasingly targeted as ‘un-American’ or ‘un-Australian’ etc. when nothing could be further from the truth. Those who place the spotlight on our freedoms are surely the great defenders of it which comes out of patriotism and not hatred. As Burt Cohen would attest, to lose quality journalists means our ability to actually undertake some of the long-form journalism or investigative journalism is seriously compromised. Denying media freedom is something we would not tolerate in the free world, but allowing it to be starved through lack of quality personnel seems to be something we sit idly by and allow.

There is the argument of course that alternative platforms, including digital, are taking the place of traditional forms of media and we should just suck it up and get on with it. Besides the young people are accessing their media that way aren’t they? All well and good but the questions you have to ask yourself are whether Facebook, Google, Skimm or Buzzfeed etc. would have had the tenacity and prowess to uncover the Watergate scandal if they had been around then? I strongly suspect not.

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Digital platforms, especially social media, have underlying algorithms allowing social media sites to garner an incredible amount of information about individual eyeball owners. Behaviours and patterns are the primary focus here because advertising revenue is what underpins these companies. This isn’t the world of the first wave of internet companies which were based on ‘fluff’ with no underpinning business model. The business model for the likes of Facebook, Linkedin etc. is well established and it is advertising. We know from FeedVis, developed by the Northeastern University and the University of Michigan, that social media news is actually curated for us. This has caused the New Scientist to claim that ‘in the history of mass media people were in control of what you saw. That’s not true anymore.’ We have every right to be alarmed by this. Our news is likely reflecting our current biases both conscious and unconscious. We know from neuroscience that our ego-brain is constantly seeking confirmation of our particular view of the world. Such self-affirming ‘proof’ delivered to our news feed daily, if not hourly, cannot be healthy from a knowledge, growth or democratic perspective.

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That said, not all digital news delivery is bad. I love keeping abreast of breaking news via Twitter. So did Mark Colvin by the way. What’s remarkable about Mark is that while he embraced the technology, he also embraced the polar opposite of Twitter and its 140 character limit with a breadth across an amazing range of issues that often had his colleagues breathless in admiration.

So I’ve received his last ever tweet. Those who listened to Mark on PM on a regular basis will know what I mean when I say that when I got his last tweet I held on for a further one, after a suitable, almost awkward pause, that simply said….’goodnight.’

It’s Not SIYLI to SBNRR

05 Friday May 2017

Posted by Burning Manager in Uncategorized

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Google, meditation, mindfulness, procrastaworking, reflection, reflective practice, SBNRR, Search Inside Yourself, Search Inside Yourself Learning Institute, SIYLI

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In management, the traits of preparation and planning are generally highly regarded. Knowing what your week ahead involves and being prepared and in the right frame of mind are essential ingredients to manoeuvring yourself through what are becoming busy and demanding working weeks. I admire those people whose desks still look as pristine as they did on the day they arrived. Mine, at times, looks like the aftermath of a medieval banquet. I don’t seem to finish a task in one fell swoop and will often put things aside to come back to when I hope further enlightenment will ensue. That’s putting a positive spin on it. Quite possibly it’s good old procrastaworking.

So it was no surprise a few weeks back when I found myself in Sydney rocking up to a course that I had booked in a fit of enthusiasm some six months previously, with not a great notion of what was in store for me. I know it was designed for Google and something to do with leadership so trusted my instincts that it was probably worthwhile. The only research I had done was the event location and start time. I had no idea about who was presenting or what it was really all about, or if I did have when I booked I had clearly forgotten.

Well you can imagine my surprise and delight to come away realising I had attended one of the best two day courses of my not inconsiderable time in the workforce. It wasn’t because I had no expectations going in – it was genuinely that good!

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It was a course called Search Inside Yourself conducted by SIYLI (Search Inside Yourself Learning Institute pronounced ‘silly’) and focused on mindfulness in the workplace with a significant emphasis on meditation. To boil it down it was two days of different types of meditation designed to improve emotional intelligence and leadership in the workplace. Sounds daunting? Hell yes. Sounds boring as bat shit? Hell no. While I have been meditating for quite some time this course expanded my meditation repertoire. Not all meditation tools will I use and this was the beauty of the course exposing you to a range allowing you to decide which feel like a good fit.

My personal favourite was SBNRR which if it became widespread practice, the world of business and politics would be so much better. I’ve so taken it to heart I have put it alongside the Resuscitation Chart at work. It’s an acronym that may well save your life one breath at a time.

S for STOP

B for Breathe

N for Notice

R for Reflect

R for Respond

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This simple technique of catching yourself when you feel your trigger being pulled is such an invaluable tool. It should be taught in schools if it isn’t already. Imagine the volume of flame mails, vicious tweets and critical posts that could be avoided through the simple application of pausing, breathing in, then noticing the responses of our body (our age-old reptilian brain defence mechanism) and moderating our response through some simple reflection.

The folks at Google are smart. They realise that a mindful workforce is kinder, more creative and productive and their investment in the Search Inside Yourself course was money well spent. My advice to any aspiring managers looking to advance their careers through education and training is to do this course before running head-first into an MBA. Very few modern MBAs are playing in this space and it will create a very solid sub-soil in which those technical skills can flourish. So next time you stop and breathe, instead of reacting without thinking, you may find the outcome is anything but silly.

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