David Layzelle
Monday, 7 March 2016
Thursday, 30 October 2014
Thought Management – Non-Thinking for Losers!
The thing with writing for a living
is that you notice little shifts in the business paradigm as new notions start
to emerge and take hold. One month
clients are queuing up for Mind Mapping articles, the next it’s Team Auditing,
or Ice Berg Thinking, or Management through drum beats or whatever principle
some supposed Business Guru is telling you to use. Generally you need no
qualification beyond sticking your nose in where it’s not really wanted to be a
self-certified Business leader. It helps
if you have a colour printer so that you can make bogus certificates for others
with less brain than you to fawn over, but if you can regularly state the
bleedin’ obvious and make it sound like some new-fangled principle, those
sporting less perception than you will lap it up on spades. This month, everyone has jumped on the
Thought Management train, and boy is that chuffing along at full throttle!
The principle is that you leave all
non-project specific thoughts you may have at the meeting room door and focus
only on the requirements in hand I.E the project. So when Geoff from Design is telling you why
his part of the project is going to be late (nb, it’s because his team’s
rubbish and he has no control over them, in case you were wondering), you
should listen to his every tortured metaphor with full attention, rather than
hope that Melody is going to make that rather lovely grillé poitrine de perdrix avec du piment et
sauce à l'orange that you enjoy so much for supper, or wonder
if Geoff’s wife ever remarks on the excessive amount of nostril hair he chooses
to sport. So every thought must be filtered
to remove anything that detracts from whatever it is that you are supposed to
be thinking about.
Let’s just think about that for a moment……….can
you imagine how hard it is not to think about all the other stuff ? What’s for lunch, how yummy lunch was, does
that new secretary in Sales take it up the a*se – you know, really thoughtful
stuff. Can you really imagine not having
those thoughts anymore, and just spending you time focussing on the hairy
tendrils spouting from Geoff’s ears and nostrils ? Naaaa, me neither.
Thought Management is the kind of toss bought
to you from the same minds that conjoured up Mind Mapping and One-Minute
Management. I had a One-Miniute Manager
once – one minute he was a twat, and the next minute and oily arse.
Business trends have been around ever since
it became apparent that management is actually pretty easy, and those in the
job sought to make it seem more difficult than it is. Since then, we have had all manner of
business smoke and mirrors, with most of it designed by people who have never
led in their lives and have no idea what team leadership really is. Therefore, they concoct new fangled ideas which
the effet manager laps up and regurgitates as fact.
The Peter Principle is alive and well in
much of industry, and it uses notions such as Thought Management as its fodder.
Wednesday, 29 October 2014
Glue? I'd Rather Watch Paint Dry!!
Someone asked me the other day if
I was watching Glue, the latest British by-the-numbers crime drama. I replied ‘no’ curtly quickly moving the
conversation on lest I damage their sensibilities with a diatribe about how formulaic
and predictable television drama has become and putting them off me for life.
Not that such a thing bothers me – I like to see people’s faces scrunch up when
I enter a room, or hear that they have left the country to avoid me, but in
this instance I was prepared to spare their feelings. You see, TV schedulers seem to be under the
impression that we are all obsessed with the antics of teenagers, and how they
are some kind of social barometer for all of us.
I can see why some might get
caught up in the maelstrom and start believing it, having been spoon fed a diet
of Beverly Hills 90210 (which has
since dropped the Beverly Hills bit, as it sounded too grown up), Dawson’s Creek, Buffy, and countless Australian mental-fodder shows, all of which deign
to show adolescents as righteous, upright citizens rather than the solvent
sniffing, murderous, thieving scumbags that many are. Don’t get me wrong; I’m not saying that all
teenagers are like that, but a large majority are, and endless reruns of Gilmore Girls or Little House on the Prairie aren’t going to make them any better.
The one mould-breaker is the
British offering, Hollyoaks which portrays
life north of Liverpool in a realistic documentary kinda way rather than adding
an overly sweet icing. I have a kind of
fascination with Hollyoaks – the only
show on TV where everyone’s parents were only ten years old when they had their
own kids and two generations occupy just 28 years age space. I can actually believe this as I’m told that
most people north of Watford (it’s a place in England) leaves school at 11 and immediately
go on to have several snot-nosed offspring which they then abandon, only to
return eighteen years later in the hope of forgivness, but only to become a
thorn in their children’s side. Actually
I can imagine that last bit is not only true, but de rigour in Northern England,
where barmaids eat their young.
And now we have teen drama
infesting post-watershed time in the form of a whodunit set in idyllic countryside. Personally, I couldn’t give a damn which one
of the whiney, self-obsessed teenagers murder which other one, and the whole
thing won’t impact on my life, but apparently the show has hit the rating, just
proving that there are plenty around less discerning than me, so the networks
are likely to be searching for more of this kind of dross to fill their
allotted hours with, which is bad news for all of us.
Glue? I really would
rather be watching paint dry!
Thursday, 23 October 2014
I think I'm Paranoid......
I have a new job, writing about
conspiracy theories…..or do I? Maybe it’s
actually that I have been selected to do it by The Illuminati, that well known
international group of world-domineers, who want to get me off the scene in
case I ask too many awkward questions. Perhaps
the job was put up only on my version of the Freelance website- must be pretty
easy to do with known IP addresses – so that I pick it up and not look too
closely at the fact that the World is owned by The Illuminati……! Perhaps I’m just paranoid.
In doing the job I obviously got to do
a bit of research since I don’t know it all, despite what people may tell you,
and do have to look stuff up sometimes. Unfortunately, in a mental version of Pandora’s
Box, I now cannot forget what I have seen, and it is indelibly burnt into my
previously rational brain. I now firmly
believe that there are frozen Nazis hibernating in a secret base in Antarctica
– a base actually owned by a race of humanoid lizards, no less – and that the
American HAARP system is controlling our weather and enslaving us with plenty
rainfall and hurricanes. Furthermore, I
am now convinced that the 2004 Tsunami was caused by a subterranean nuclear
bomb test carried out by India, and that the Pearl Harbour attack was actually
orchestrated by the US Government to ease America’s involvement in the Second
World War.
I have to say that none of the above
actually sounds that convincing, though I was rather taken by the notion that
the British Royal Family – who we all know are related to some kind of lizard
monster thingy, possibly the same ones tending to frozen Third Reichers in Antarctica
– murdered Princess Dianna in Paris to prevent renowned Muslim Dodi Fayad from
marrying her and getting close to the core of the British Establishment. It somehow just sounds credible…in fact, my
science-trained brain can take it a step further and I can imagine Prince
Philip himself actually at the wheel of the white Fiat Panda that apparently
bounced a ton and a half of Mercedes Benz off the road and into a support
structure in the Parisian Pont D'Alma
tunnel. And then drove off unscathed. It
just makes sense and I even have a photo of it.
Of course the very nature of conspiracy theories is to
make you paranoid and like a dose of Ebola – which was supposedly manufactured
by the CIA as a means of population control – sweeping through a West African
township; once they gain hold in your brain, it doesn’t take long for infection
to be total. A recent study has found the
proposition that belief in conspiracies is usually the result of some deep
rooted psychological malfunction within a person ignores the clear fact that
over 50% of the American population believes in the Roswell conspiracy, and up
to 20% in moon landing conspiracy. These are simply too big percentages to
consider it to be a disorder.
Furthermore, there is no real cognitive
difference between the belief that the U.S. government faked moon landing –
which is apparently false - and that the government faked evidence of WMD in
Iraq – which is apparently true.
Conspiracies reflect a rather
deep distrust in information coming from the worlds governments and scientists,
based on known examples of false information, such as WMD’s, and how these
bodies of apparent authority failed to respond to it. And that doesn’t make me
paranoid.
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