January 2004

Thinking or doing

My favourite weblog entry of the past few weeks quotes this story, pointed out to me by Piers Young.

The ceramics teacher announced on opening day that he was dividing the class into two groups. All those on the left side of the studio, he said, would be graded solely on the quantity of work they produced, all those on the right solely on its quality. His procedure was simple: on the final day of class he would bring in his bathroom scales and weigh the work of the quantity group: fifty pound of pots rated an A, forty pounds a B, and so on. Those being graded on quality, however, needed to produce only one pot -albeit a perfect one - to get an A. Well, came grading time and a curious fact emerged: the works of highest quality were all produced by the group being graded for quantity. It seems that while the quantity group was busily churning out piles of work - and learning from their mistakes - the quality group had sat theorizing about perfection, and in the end had little more to show for their efforts than grandiose theories and a pile of dead clay.

More comment on this here.

Article on getting real in communication

Argent, the journal of the Financial Services Forum, has just published my article on this theme:

Marketing fails us as businesses trying to sell things, as customers trying to buy things and as investors trying to get a decent return. Nowhere is this more apparent than in financial marketing, where the greed and lack of imagination of the players is veiled least skilfully of all.

You can download the full article here (pdf file).

Quotes

Three quotes I've enjoyed picking up recently:

"You can discover more about a person in an hour of play than in a year of conversation." - Plato

"Anything on earth you want to do is play. Anything on earth you have to do is work. Play will never kill you, work will. I never worked a day in my life." - Dr. Leila Denmark, 100, USA's oldest practicing physician

"Life can only be understood backward--but we must live it forward - Soren Kierkegaard"

Engaged or not?

According to Gallup,

"More than 80% of British workers lack any real commitment to their jobs, and a quarter of those are "actively disengaged," or truly disaffected with their workplaces....

Why are so many British employees disengaged? Poor management is the problem, according to the Employee Engagement Index survey. Workers say they don’t know what is expected of them, their managers don’t care about them as people, their jobs aren’t a good fit for their talents, and their views count for little. The survey also found that employees feel they are far more productive if their supervisor focuses on their strengths and positive characteristics rather than their weaknesses.

Another worrying trend: Employees who have been with their companies for a long time are more likely than those with shorter tenures to be "not engaged" or "actively disengaged." So human assets that should increase in value with training and development instead depreciate as managers and companies fail to maximize this investment.

Gallup have been producing these findings in the USA for some time. They come as little surprise. I think they are a sad measure of the failure of marketing to create genuine engagement for stakeholders in organisations. What hope is there of a brand engaging customers if it can't engage it's own workers?