[managers] treading a fine line

The most successful small companies in this part of the world are those with strong managers who act with vision and according to sound business practice but are known for their open-door policy and frequent planning meetings. They therefore have to tread a fine line between managerialism and fiasco.

Yet it’s in the interests of any manager worth his salt to listen, digest and to adopt, to initiate discussions and to give weight to what is put forward and this is the hardest task with the hands-on, start-up type of free-wheelers who manage companies over here. Divisional and sub managers can certainly contribute – that’s what they’re paid to do – but would they assume personal liability for any company action? In small companies, one man takes the rap and only has himself to blame, so best practice and the free flow of ideas are in his own best interests.

If staff feel they are appreciated for their input, this is far more important than making decisions by enforced democratic vote. As Alec Issigonis said: ‘A camel is a horse designed by a committee.’ If a staff member can have room to move in his particular specialization and if he can see the result of his input reflected in company policy, then why would he want to be the one with his head directly on the block? Indirectly, he still stands or falls by his decisions and the thing has a tendency to self-actualization.

It’s a fine line. Unfortunately, many get it wrong and the result is dysfunction. Like a car with an engine that can't fire on all cylinders, a business that's dysfunctional may move forward for a while. But eventually it stops running. Companies don't start out maladjusted, of course. It just tends to happen over time.

"The hallmark of a dysfunctional organization is a gap between reality and rhetoric," says Ben Dattner, a New York organizational psychologist. Once diagnosed, the corrosive effects of such problems can be corrected. But make no mistake: It's neither easy nor immediate. Joanna Krotz, of Marketing Intelligence, identifies three signs of dysfunction.

Read on …

[worst movie ever] competition details

There's something fascinating about an atrocious movie. That's why this blog is currently running a 'Worst Movie of all Time' competition [I know, I know it's been done ad nauseam]. Rules are:

1] it must have been made for cinematic release, not as a garage movie;

2] they can’t have set out to make a bad movie. This last criterion would seem to put out Attack of the Killer Tomatoes which was intended as trash but ended up being quite a cult flick;

3] you must include a blurb and link;

4] pic would help.

First four nominations from you good people are here:

1 ... 2 ... 3 ... 4

[the big three] shift in the hegemony

“The West's international oil majors are in real trouble as regards the collapsing of their control over global energy reserves and face a global wave of nationalization, forced renegotiation of existing agreements, inability to get access to new exploration and production acreage and rising taxes. It is a caustic mix that is dissolving the glue that holds together the US-backed oil order.”

It must be pretty clear to all who observe that there’s a three way struggle for global pre-eminence. America’s hegemony, based on its undisputed financial clout is very much under threat from the might of China with all its convoluted alliances and questionable agenda and methods.

While America remains oil dependent, Russia and Saudi also hold very strong hands and Russia, for one, is fully aware of it and playing hardball. The rejection of Exxon-Mobil’s and Shell’s advances over Sakhalin are a case in point. Reluctantly, America is paying greater attention to exploring bio-fuels and the Mexican gulf but it’s certainly a slap in the face nonetheless. America will never be weak because of the very nature of its competitive instinct and the willingness of its people to spend and yet … and yet …

Iraq is a perfect example of how to bleed America dry – not to cripple it, of course but to weaken it enough for China and the Muslim Alliance to take centre stage and set the agenda, with Russia still strong for another 30 years at least. The following article, from www.GeoStrategyMap.com, addresses Russia itself.

Read it here ...

[hollywood nativity] of movies and spirituality

Very interesting article in the Globe and Mail which I reproduce in abridged form below. The thing is that the humanists will be uneasy by definition but it would be perhaps harder to see how a Christian could be equally uneasy. Surely this is precisely the break they’ve been looking for.

Er … no. First the article:

Two years after Mel Gibson's The Passion of the Christ, a film rejected by every major studio, earned more than $600-million (U.S.) worldwide, Hollywood is finally beginning to believe in the possibility of a Christian audience.

Earlier this year, executives at New Line Cinema — the Time-Warner subsidiary that first came to fame with slasher flicks in the eighties, and achieved major studio status by producing The Lord of the Rings trilogy — sat down in a Los Angeles screening room and were given a class in what they dubbed “Christianity 101.” The teachers included a Pauline nun who doubles as a film critic, an evangelical preacher and a Presbyterian minister.

Continued here …

[blogfocus saturday] creative initiatives

As the title suggests, this Blogfocus concerns those with a new, novel, creative initiative or way of looking at a particular issue which has not been done a thousand times before. Hope you enjoy it.
1

Bryan Appleyard specializes in extra-terrestrial explanations for the origins of life and this is no exception: Panspermia - the theory that life on earth was seeded from space - finds support from the discovery of hollow spheres in meteorites. These could have rained organic molecules onto the surface and got the whole show on the road. In fact, panspermia does not seem to explain very much, but it's a theory of which I have always been fond. To my mind, it implies that we are the alien invaders of earth, which is exactly what it feels like early in the morning on the Norfolk saltmarshes. Atmospheric.

2

The similarly atmospheric look of Outside Story’s blog does not prepare us for his piece on the CBI: Wat Tyler’s summing up of the CBI: If the first rule of journalism is "never let the facts get in the way of a good story" then the first rule of think tank economists must be "never let the sums get in the way of a good idea". Unfortunately Wat has done just that and found the Citizens Basic Income (a version of Friedman's negative income tax) comes up short.

He then offers some food for thought: Perhaps there is some way of cutting benefits in half and scrapping council tax altogether. This would be an obvious administrative saving because the two activities would cancel each other out - so the government would be doing nothing at all. It's something to think about at least.

Another 12 bloggers here …

[england] will they win and is warne finished

Paul Collingwood

Have to smile, really. When I put up the little poll in the right sidebar, England were crashing out to ignominy in the 1st Test. I was the one who posted the 'draw' vote for the series. All others posted 'lose'. Now England is in command of the 2nd Test, the situation has radically changed in the poll. As for Warne, is he finished or not?

[protection] how long must the container be

German researchers are developing a type of spray can into which the man inserts Percy, then latex is sprayed on from nozzles on all sides - a bit like a car wash, as they put it, all within about five seconds. However, before it can be sold in shops, the firm who’ll make it must ensure that the latex is evenly spread when sprayed, as well as optimizing the vulcanisation process.

They hope it will be available in different strengths and colours and on the market by 2008. The spray can would likely cost about 20 euros as a one-off purchase. The latex cartridges - sufficient for up to 20 applications - would cost roughly 10 euros.

So – what do you think? Personally it sounds quite good but the fear of emasculation by a guillotine type malfunction might put many off. And what if you weren't ... er ... excited at the point of application?

[semantics] christmas trees lit in iceland today

The lights of the Christmas tree in Midbakki in Reykjavík harbor will be turned on today at 5 pm. The tree in Akureyri town center will start glowing at 4 pm. The Christmas tree in Reykjavík is a gift from Hamburg in Germany. This is the 41st year Hamburg has given Christmas trees to Reykjavík out of gratitude to Icelandic seamen who brought food to children in Hamburg after WWII. Fréttabladid reports.

Quiz Question 1: What is the most unusual thing about this otherwise mundane story?
Answer: It actually gratuitously uses the word Christmas in four places.

This is enough to make a godless leftie fume. After all the hard work getting into positions of power and influence over the last few decades, after rewriting all the schoolbooks, after expunging any references to THAT superstitious myth and after educating the common man in the cold, materialistic humanistic light, these throwbacks in Iceland still insist on using the correct name for the tree. What hope is there for the world?

Here's the oldest trick in the book:

1] You want to normalize and make acceptable an unacceptable concept;
2] You group some other generally accepted concepts together and lump this one in with them;
3] You then concentrate on or attack something else altogether and mention this group of concepts in passing, thereby never opening them to question but assuming they’re taken as read.

The Chinese are good at this. They speak of THE three enemies of society, for instance: Crime, Drugs and Careless Speech or the three eternal verities: The Family, Hard Work and the State Leadership.

In the same way, the Labour Party gave us this one:

''Whether the barrier is their background, their race, religion or sexual orientation, the Labour party has always been prepared to take the decisions to open up opportunity for all.''

Except that the first two are equal and different but the third, cleverly tacked on at the end, is simply deviance from the biological roles of the higher animal kingdom. It is no more a choice than paedophilia. It’s deviance from the norm.

The cleverest part of it is that people will be so incensed by Labour’s claims in the last five words that the real aberration will get through unchallenged. They've been very clever about it.

[icelandic logic] food prices down, alcohol up

Here’s a perfect example of the type of government interference which makes Tim Worstall and Chris Dillow fume, only this time in Iceland:

Minister of Finance Árni M. Mathiesen submitted a bill yesterday aimed at lowering food prices after 1 March next year. If passed, the price of alcoholic beverages would rise. The bill includes the abolishment of excise taxes on food products and the lowering of VAT to 7 percent. As a consequence, the VAT of alcohol will also go down to seven percent, automatically lowering the price of alcohol as well. Fréttabladid reports.

Mathiesen said the purpose with the bill had been to lower food prices, not alcohol prices, as the tax decrease on alcohol would deprive the state budget of an income of several ISK billions (ISK 1 billion = EUR 11 million, USD 15 million). To prevent that, the government has decided to raise the price of alcoholic beverages. The cost of some brands of beer could go up by 17 percent. The Federation of Trade & Services and The Icelandic Travel Industry Association have objected to the government’s plans.

At least the government is being honest about it. They didn’t try to claim it was to prevent the spread of alcoholism or to protect children – they admitted it was to rake in the kroner.

[litvinenko] one or two developments

Although tests have been conducted on dozens of people who came into contact with Litvinenko after he fell ill — including the doctors who treated him — an Italian investigator named Mario Scaramella is so far the only one to show more than a negligible amount of radiation in his body. Scaramella has said all along that he felt fine. The health agency would not say how much radiation he had ingested, only that he had "a significant quantity."

Scaramella was a consultant for a parliamentary commission in Italy looking into reported connections between the KGB and Italian politicians. In the process, the group — the Mitrokhin Commission, created during the tenure of former Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi — created dossiers on a number of opponents of Berlusconi, including the present prime minister, Romano Prodi. It was disbanded earlier this year.

Litvinenko also worked for the Mitrokhin Commission, Goldfarb said. The two met regularly in London. Their last meeting took place at the Piccadilly branch of the Itsu sushi restaurant on Nov. 1, the day Litvinenko became sick. The Health Protection Agency also said Thursday that someone who could only have been Litvinenko’s wife "had tested positive for low levels of radiation exposure. "

Scaramella told reporters that during the meeting he presented Litvinenko with e-mailed documents showing their names on a list of people whose lives were in danger from Russian criminals. Scaramella said the same criminals had killed Anna Politkovskaya, a well-known Russian investigative journalist, in October.

Meanwhile, the 2008 question is getting closer and closer and so far there don’t appear to be any credible alternatives to Putin in the offing. A quick scan of today’s Russian news sources reveals nothing new except opinion pieces and that is truly the state of play. Countless journos are offering up opinion but the only ones who seem to have some of the facts at hand are the British investigators. As my contact said on Thursday, better to wait and see what happens.

That, of course, does not satisfy the need for a daily fix of shocking revelations and following this blog's withdrawal from the Litvinenko/Politskaya issue on Thursday came an immediate drop in site visitors. Perhaps it was just coincidence.