On Friday I was watching "Have I got News from you" a satiric program on the BBC where comedians comments on weekly event. For the ones not based in UK, at the moment there is a big "scandal" regarding English MP claiming allowances in an allegedly improper way (the program can be watched on the iplayer for the ones in UK http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/b00kq2lq/Have_I_Got_News_for_You_Series_37_Episode_6/ ). I loved the description given "people have been pis..ing in the pool, hence pools are bad, we must ban pools". It reminds me of the logic of so many decision both in work and in life... As a parent, when the children have a little accident because of improper use of a toy, we tend to take the toy away, if they chase the cat around relentlessly for 10 minutes and cat scratches the kids, we start to think, the cat is dangerous is aggressive (BTW the cat is still at home!). Needless to say that it happens in the work environment as well (Can you give examples from your own experience? I think it might make a very interesting reading....) abuse of any company property/process/system, often ends up with the property/process/system be banned/restricted/controlled also for the vast majority who is using it properly and correctly...

We tend to get the causes (even when there are simple causes) completely wrong, I really do not understand why...
If there is wee in the swimming pool, swimming pool are still OK... Just get people not to wee in it. Indeed in most public swimming pool they have some stuff which reacts with urine, to make it turn red. A good example of managing the boundaries in a way that does not impact the majority of users... We should learn from public swimming pools….

Luca

On the train to London today for some internal meetings… I must say I do not share Dave “love for trains”… Specially the ones to London…. The journey always takes longer than planned, the tube is one of the worst places you will see in UK. Most people are stressed out, nobody is talking to anybody else. It seems to be that the non verbal communication says, I really do not want to be here, but I am because I have to!! Not sure if I am reading too much into this. Just stopped in Reading and getting “funny” looks from a couple of guys, as saying, you are sitting in MY sit, I come here every day and you just show up and take my sit (or is it me giving funny looks to people)! We are territorial beings. This is MY sit now….

I did like trains, when I was younger I would travel with InteRail in the summer in Europe. I loved it, I liked the “discovery” related to travelling to places you have not be before, and with the freedom to stop where you like when you like, sometime simply because you like the look of the town. But this journey (and many of the ones I currently do for business) have lost that component. It is simply getting there as soon as you can, and do what you have too….

I got back from London late last night… Too tired to blog again. London is a really “strange” place. London could be everywhere, I mean it is a city with no real ethnicity as far as I can tell, the restaurants, the people, the nationalities, the languages spoken. Even at Paddington train station you can find, a Sushi bar, a salad bar, a pizzeria, French bread, bagels place and the list goes on and on and on… Whereas when I have been in Paris, Paris is unconditionally French (a bit like Rome is unconditionally Italian), people will speak French, will eat French (I have had the best meal of my life in Paris), drink French. And I actually like that!!! I am not a great fan of choices at the cost of character…. I like to feel the place with all of their history… And I guess, it is better to have choices is you live there. But if you are visiting I am not really sure.

I just finished reading the Road by Cormac McCarthy, actually I just finished listening to it, as I bought it as an audio-book. I found it absolutely brilliant. I never read anything from McCarthy before (I only watched no country for Old man, which I found a little weird…). But the road is really an exceptional book. The love between the father and the son is completely unconditional; I particularly liked it because it is not “sweet”, it describe a potential reality in all of its ugliness and the little hope that can be found even in the darkest moments. It shows that life has huge difficulties, and sometime, it is very difficult to see a way out, but it is important to teach your children that it is important to keep on going (even it is a difficult and unpalatable message), not to have self pity. It describes the tension which is often present between a parent and a child in a world which at time, you feel, does not help you…. I guess if I did not have any children, I probably I would have not liked it, but I do (I have two) I really enjoyed it….

What is wrong with us….

This is just an un-believable story… http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/england/west_midlands/8084972.stmI do not know if these kind of things have always happened... But it seems horrible to starve 7 year old to death, and nobody noticing in a country where there is a tendency to measure everything, to control everything to put video cameras everywhere… Does measurement works? Not in her case....

Luca

Sorry for the silence at the week end…. It was actually a quite difficult week-end as my son (who has epilepsy) had a seizure on Saturday afternoon, which lasted a quite long time and we ended up in hospital until 11 pm. As they wanted to ensure that he was OK give the length of the seizure… Now he is OK.

Unfortunately we have been in E&A department several times over the past few years… and I have come to the conclusion that the E&A doctors are a very interesting category. When you end up in A&E (specially with something acute), first the medical staff will stabilize you. I guess this is a difficult but standard procedure (I guess they monitor basic biological functions to ensure that everything is OK, and if is not, they use drugs). Then start the investigation work to understand the causes (or relationships I guess). It is also a very interesting context as the patient or the relatives of the patients (at least I do) actually want answers (preferably reassuring ones) quick. And the doctors need to try to give you an answer, understanding the context, but not necessarily understand the history (when they walk in the room the first time).
I remember last year, when my wife had a lung problems (another week-end in the hospital), we had a student coming in (I suspect it was part of his training), and my feeling were, I really do not want you to train on my loved ones… Just go away and play with your ball (I did not feel that friendly, I must admit) !!! But then it is clear that they need to be trained to deal with such complex situation (and you would hope they are properly supervised)!! You cannot just read a book about this… The medical profession must be an ideal test bed for complexity ideas….

Has any of you worked with HNS or its equivalent? I would be very curious to know what has been done.

Luca

Today I have been house bound as I have the flu (or a really bad cold, not sure how you can tell the difference)… So the lack of activity and being on m own has forced some thinking… My thoughts have drifted towards my parents, who after 41 years have separated few months ago, my mum is now living in England (BTW she does not speak English) and my dad has left the apartment where we grew up to live closer to his sisters. I had never had the privilege of discussing such a difficult choice with people who are close to me. The thing, which surprises me, is the amount of resentment they have towards each other for things which have happen more than 20 years ago. Now the question from me to them was, why not getting divorced 20/30 years ago where you can create a new life for yourself?
My mum answer was that she did not walk out because of me and my brother and simply she did not come from a time and a place where one walks out for lack of happiness. My answer to that she created a hell for herself, which was somewhat pointless as both me and my brother felt the enormous tension at home and left at the first opportunity. My dad answer is, well everybody got problems…. Now my mum is living a second youth, going for week-end in London, going to the theatre (which she always liked), enjoying the gran children.

I can mainly draw two lessons from this, It is important not to walk away at the first sign of difficulty, whatever you do. But it is also important to realize when that effort is pointless and one has to walk away and try something different.

Luca

This morning I have taken the plane to Aberdeen for work. Airports are just such strange places, are the places of ultimate “classification”.

First you are a potential criminal: You are pushed through all the security and checking like a piece of meat, an almost certanly dangerous piece of meat. Everything around you tells you that actually you are just a number, nobody cares what you think/want and that actually you have paid the full price of a ticket to almost strip naked because you might have something dangerous in your belt or in your shoes!!! You have to be checkes because you are dangerous and so is the person before you, and the one after that, and the one after that....

And of course, you cannot take water with you…. Too dangerous. Once they ensure that you are not too much of a criminal, then you go in the “waiting areas”

This is the best devised class system I have came across.
The business lounges are very the top dogs go, everything there is smooth and shiny. Things are free, you eat, drink, read as much as you like; nobody tells you off or looks at your strangely. And then you have the “plebs”, where nothing is shiny, but nevertheless quite expensive. It is mostly crowded and when you finally find a place where to sit to eat your overpriced Panini (Italian for sandwich!!), it is really uncomfortable. The best part is that the environment is designed so the two worlds meet as little as possible, if you are in the lounge you might never know that the dirty world of the plebs actually exists. You can not see them/smell them interact with them.

Then you get on the plane. The class system continues… First Class – Business class – Others… treated like a king – land owner – plebs. The thing which always makes me wonder, is when they close these little curtains (on small planes) between the business class and the cattle class… The poor one cannot even look at the people in business class for fear of infecting them?

Then there is the service on the plane, at the front of the plane one is offered nice drinks, perfectly baked little cakes and juicy steaks. At the other end of the plane, well I guess most of you know what kind of food is served…

But then you get off the plane, and almost everybody is criminal again, you are pushed through passport control, and everybody is treated with the same contempt and almost disregard of human dignity and when you get out of the airport you can be yourself again. I guess there aren’t that many places in which you can be a potential terrorist, a first class passenger to pamper and a potential terrorist again within few hours….

Luca

I am not English as many of you know, but I have been living in UK for the best part of 13 years now. I think the current political climate in UK needs some reflection. The Labour party is crumbling down. On that point, I just want to digress for a second, Tony Blair timing has always amazed me. Within 12 months of him living, the world seems to come to an end (political, economical social crises of unprecedented scale happened as soon as he left the PM job), not I cannot understand how that happened…. I cannot believe it is simply luck. I think, he just felt that things were not going to go his way any longer and he left (a bit like the great investors who get out just at the right time, they can “sense” the environment and profit from it). Now enough with the digression

I really take objection (even though I cannot vote) to have a PM who is not elected and claims to be the right man for the job, on absolutely no grounds. I also think that the “victory|” of parties like the BNP should really give politicians some food for thoughts. How bad can things be, if people do vote for the BNP. I guess UK would need an Obama, a figure who is capable to voice the people concerns, express and connect, in other words a good story tellers, who tells story people want to listen to…. The issue with UK politics is that the stories are simply not worth listening to…. Let’s hope somebody will come out of the crisis to help UK out of the current hole it is in (often crisis are very good in this….)

Luca

It is my last day as a guest blog. Also this has been my first blogging experience… I found it much more difficult to blog than I originally envisaged. I was always struggling to find the right reflective spirit (at the correct time) and to correct way to express the ideas once I had them… I think I will try to blog a little more and see what comes of it. After reading Outliners, I need to give it at least 10000 hours before becoming an expert, so still 9998 hours to go…

Also I was also a little hesitant to talk about some personal stuff (I guess I would have liked to talk more about my family and our children and our fights with the educational systems), not sure why, often I have deleted some personal blogs after writing them, I am not capable of writing in the right way, specially personal stuff (I guess if I was I would be writing “The Road”). All in all it has been a very good experience and I have really enjoyed. And I think I will give it a real go at it…

Yours
Luca

I started my first blog end of March last year. As a market researcher I’m obsessed with figures. As a co founder of MarketResponse, a market research and consultancy in the Netherlands I discovered at that time that on the first of February next year, my company will celebrate its 25th birthday. Now as I started to write blog I found out two things. First of all that the countdown to the previously mentioned birthday was 666 days. Well, that is a message in itself isn’t it? Great coincidence or some bad guidance from hell? I did not know until I wrote down the birthday in figures (in Dutch annotation: 01022010. A Palindrome