Still haven't got it

I am beginning to feel a little left out. I still haven't managed to "get" Twitter. I know I ought to throw myself into it to be able to really benefit. But I can't. It just seems to demand too much time. And I can't just leave it on in the background as it starts to annoy me like a television left on in a room when you are having an interesting conversation.

I like RSS. I like the fact that I can make time to read things that I am interested in without extraneous noise.

Occasionally I'll spot something go by on the Twitter Gadget on my iGoogle home page and follow the link. But generally I go to Reader first. I like the more considered pieces rather than the instantaneous.

I will accept that Twitter is good for asking questions that are not answered by search engines.

Maybe it's me. But Twitter just strikes me as too needy...

How not to run a bank

Today we launched a new learning programme for Bankers called SMART CB. Together with the Chartered Institute of Bankers in Scotland, we are offering a fast track route for senior managers to obtain Chartered Banker status. Below is an excerpt from my speech at the launch event.

"I should like to tell you a little story to underline the importance of professional standards in banking that is a little closer to home than you might expect.

I want to tell you about my great-great-grandfather, George.

From the early 19th century the Greenways were bankers in Warwick. Although initially very successful, the bank was taken over by my great-great-great-uncle Kelynge Greenway after the death of his father. Under the terms of his father's will, £25,000 in capital was removed from the bank leaving just seven pounds to the remaining partners. That the bank survived the withdrawal of £25k at all, is a testament to its strength up to this point. What happened next is an object lesson in how NOT to run a bank.

Kelynge asked his brothers, Thomas (a Colonel in the army), George (a solicitor and my great-great- grandfather) and Charles (an architect) to join him in the bank. Now, you would have thought that with only seven pounds to their name, they would take the opportunity to recapitalise the bank.

But no, they decided instead to run the bank with NO CAPITAL WHATSOEVER! According to the British Banking History Society in December 1886 of the banks £278,000 of assets, £210,000 were the partners' overdrawn accounts and this included extensive tramway speculation (grandpa George was also the Chairman of the Magdeburg Tramway Company).

The bank failed on September 6th 1887 after their agents in London, Glynns, refused to honour their cheques and the trial of the partners began on October 27th. George was sentenced to five years' penal servitude and Kelynge to 12 months' hard labour, Thomas escaped sentence due to his "almost complete ignorance of banking" and Charles had died five years previously.

My grandfather Walter told me that his father Cate (who had been 11 at the time of the crash) never spoke of the affair. One can only speculate on the impact it would have had on a young boy but he overcame it, rising to the rank of Lieutenant Colonel in the army, serving in India and China ultimately winning the DSO at Gallipoli. Indeed you will be glad to hear, my family has steered clear of banking since; sticking almost exclusively to the things it knows about namely teaching and the military.

I think it is safe to say that neither George, Thomas or Charles knew of the canons of lending; still less of how to properly assess credit risk. It is clear they knew absolutely nothing of best practice in capital ratios.

I think it is also safe to say that my family knows the fundamental importance of professional standards in banking.

Mark Twain once said, "History never repeats itself but it often rhymes". I don't think you need me to point out the parallels between my ancestors' short-comings as bankers and the factors which contributed to our current economic situation.

There is a wealth of knowledge in the path to Chartered Banker and knowledge is, I believe, the only long term way to profit. I hope it is a path that you join us on."

I thought I'd share this here as it was only through working with CIOBS that I found out about this element of my family history.

Objectives

Janaury blog posts are often about resolutions. Big, sweeping, ambitious pieces. But I haven't made any resolutions this year. I shall simply state two objectives:

1. To simplify wherever possible
2. To have fun. Or more specifically, since I don't think one can simply will happiness to exist, to try not to miss opportunities for enjoyment

That latter one sent me on an enjoyable five minute diversion. I was sure that there is a Samuel Johnson quote about happiness along the lines of, "Any plan for merriment seems doomed by its own nature". I eventually found it as:

"Nothing is more hopeless than a scheme for merriment."

But not before I had throughly enjoyed his wit and 'resolved' (eek) to try and read more of him.

Compression ratios and spinning plates

I wrote a piece for the Training Journal last month on appraisals (if you're interested back issues of my articles can be found here). In short, I suggested that one of the reasons that appraisals are such unproductive affairs is the compression ratio - trying to squeeze a year's feedback into one hour or sometimes one word. A very interesting conversation yesterday further refined the thought.

I made two suggestions in my article. First, rather than provide feedback once a year for sixty minutes, try to provide the opportunity for feedback sixty times a year for one minute. Second rather than focusing on the reducing the negatives, look to grow the positives.

So a frequent, positive and light touch...

Anyone see the parallels with plate spinning?

E'en such is time...

Scooting into work this morning reflecting on the reasons that stop people engaging in self-teaching through social learning - and inwardly screaming at bus drivers who completely ignore the rules of the road - a penny dropped.

Learning should be fun.

I know. Duh! We've all known this for years. But if you look at the difference between e-mail and RSS feeds there is something here. We have no control over our email. Once someone or indeed something (spamming engines for example) has got hold of your email address they can send you emails whenever they like about whatever they like.

Many is the time that I have returned from holiday to confront the hundreds of unread email and my mouse has hovered over the 'Delete all' button as I silently wished to myself, "If only". I say to myself that if something is really that important, someone will pick up the phone. But then I never do. I scan and delete as efficiently as I can; I file and forget resenting every second.

I have long postulated a theory of business tasks:

The importance of a task is inversely proportional to the time you need to ignore it to render it moot. For example something bone-crushingly urgent can be ignored for five minutes and is no longer a problem but some trivial tasks can be ignored for months and still need to be done.

But with RSS feeds (or tweets for that matter) it is completely different. Of course, at first it felt the same. I would come back from holiday to confront hundreds of unread feeds and feel as oppressed by Google reader as I do by Lotus Notes. But then I deleted all for the first time and everything was OK. The world didn't stop spinning on its axis. Because I asked for these feeds, I control them. They don't get upset if I don't read them because I'm a little busy today. Consequently, I probably pay more attention to them than a lot of my emails.

I think it is essential to get this across to those daunted by the sheer volume and scale of information on the net.

1. Read what you want to read when you want to read
2. It's OK to delete everything and start again
3. If you miss a meme another one will be along in a minute

Then when you get past this you can start to reflect on what you chose to read... But that is for another post.

It's all in the name

Further reflection on my post earlier this month on learning and risk suggests that by using the word, "risk" I might be missing the point. This reflection was prompted by Peter's comment on my post and some interesting conversations with other learning professionals. The best of these yielded this gem of a quote attributed to a brigadier in the British army,

"Often the wrong idea executed with extreme violence turns out to be the right idea"

The trouble with the term "risk" is that it means too many different things to too many people. Moreover, it is perhaps against the zeitgeist of the credit crunch to exhort people to take more risks so that they can learn more. That was, of course, not what I was trying to say but I can see how it might be understood this way.

I proffer "attitude to uncertainty" as an alternative. Less pithy, I know, but perhaps a tighter definition.

Is our attitude to uncertainty the thing which best defines our ability to learn? You can have fun with the word uncertainty. The future is uncertain but when you come to think of it so is the past. We only think we know things.

"It ain't so much the things we don't know that get us into trouble. It's the things we know that ain't so. " Artemus Ward [found on Peter Edstrom's blog for which thanks]

Wild Friday Thought

I have just finished reading The World in Six Songs by Daniel Levitin, which was a birthday present from a friend that I highly recommend.

[note to self: is the fact that all of my birthday presents were either books or malt whiskey something I should be concerned by or proud of?]

In it Levitin examines the evolution of music alongside the evolution of human consciousness. This sounds terribly dry but is in fact compelling and fun in his hands he marries it to a dissection of the music of The Beatles, Paul Simon, Neil Young to Arcade Fire, Sting and Johnny Cash.

In any case towards the end of the book he talks about systems displaying evidence of consciousness. An individual ant in an any colony is no more aware of the actions of the whole than an individual neuron in the brain is aware of taste or thought or dreams.

This made me think about Michael Wesch's YouTube film "The Machine is Us" from a year of so back. Millions of people sorting, sifting the web, creating and collaborating...

I am sure I am very late to have this thought. We are the ants or the neurons. And it has only just occurred to me that the next big step is when the web attains consciousness!