Author: Penny

As the title of my blog suggests, I am a freelance PR working mainly in the public and voluntary sectors, on projects from small scale copywriting to big social marketing projects. In my time I've worked for government departments, the BBC and a range of other organisations of various stages of dysfunctionality. Now I'm trying to get to grips with the world of the micro-business and facing up to the recession with a fair bit of trepidation.

03.16am

 “I’ve always envied people who sleep easily. Their brains must be cleaner, the floorboards of the skull well swept, all the little monsters closed up in a steamer trunk at the foot of the bed.”— David Benioff (City of Thieves)

 

 “Insomnia is a variant of Tourette’s–the waking brain races, sampling the world after the world has turned away, touching it everywhere, refusing to settle, to join the collective nod. The insomniac brain is a sort of conspiracy theorist as well, believing too much in its own paranoiac importance–as though if it were to blink, then doze, the world might be overrun by some encroaching calamity, which its obsessive musings are somehow fending off.” — Jonathan Lethem (Motherless Brooklyn)

Here are 42 tips for curing it.  And if all else fails:  

If you can’t sleep, then get up and do something instead of lying there worrying.  It’s the worry that gets you, not the lack of sleep.  – Dale Carnegie

On the outside looking in…

… at the people on the inside looking out.

I’ve been hearing a lot from friends still inside the civil service recently.  They generally echo the Observer’s  secret diarist who noted a slump in morale and a Wacky Races -style race for the exits in his piece on Sunday.  Those who can (the able ones,  the ones with a good shot of getting a job elsewhere – the ones you wouldn’t want to lose) are moving hell and high water to get a job on the outside before the real unpleasantness starts and the competition becomes  more intense.  They are astonished by the speed and the scale of the policy changes that are being introduced and the cavalier way that they are being announced.

There are lots of reasons why civil servants might be feeling bruised – a pay freeze, cuts to redundancy packages and pension entitlements, job losses reckoned in the hundreds of thousands, being asked to impose big cuts on programmes they have worked for years on and often care passionately about.  No wonder that no-one wants to stick around.  The timing’s terrible though.  A strong civil service is vital if proposed  changes in health, education,  the criminal justice system, the administration of benefits and all the rest are going to be introduced effectively.

Let’s hope the Observer’s Man from the Ministry is wrong when he says:   A brain drain has begun and our brightest graduates have got the message that this is not a good place to be. The implications will not be felt for some time, but the results will be devastating to our society and our economy.

This also, of course, represents a challenge for the internal (and external) comms and HR functions of government departments.  Managing change on this scale while keeping all the regular plates spinning  is a highly skilled job.  I wonder if they’re going to be strengthening those teams  to help them do it?  Oh yeah, I forgot.

Men, boys and washing machines

I was commenting on this  post about introducing boys  to the concept of housework without  nagging or bribery when I realised that my comment was longer than the post so I brought it over here.  Do go there (when you’ve read this)  – it’s a site I really like.

Our children have  had chores to do  since they were old enough to do them – washing up, laying and clearing tables, nothing extreme. My daughter does the ironing for a bit of extra pocket money.  My son has been known to clean shoes.  It sometimes feels a bit Dickensian round here, with one covered in boot polish and the other up to her elbows in  suds, but at least they appreciate that the house doesn’t run itself, even though they complain bitterly about tidying their rooms.  I wish my parents had done the same, then perhaps I wouldn’t be so domestically useless.  Thank god I married a man who can cook.

I was struck by the fact that there’s little mention of fathers in the original post,  other than a comment from another reader that men won’t help because they don’t  see housework as their responsibility.   (So, shrug, what can you do?)  The idea that boys’ attitudes to women and housework are up to us and we can’t expect any help from our partners  is incredibly depressing.  It infantilises men and dooms us to a role as perpetual mummies.  More importantly it  means nothing ever changes.

I met up with a friend the other day who’s just finished one contract and is stitching together bits of work to make ends meet while he looks for the next one.  His wife works full-time so he’s  in charge of housework and childcare.  He’s developed a better relationship with their son, a mother-in-law-approved technique for cleaning the loo and a local network of other fathers picking up children at the school gate, presumably there for the same reason that he is. He may have a stereotypically male  attitude to housework – best gadgets researched, new products scientifically compared, time and motion studies on the optimum time to Hoover the stairs – but he’s getting it done and  his son is watching…

Maybe this could be a welcome spin-off from  new ways of working – or an unexpected  silver lining to the recession. When the  norm is either parent at home for part or all of the week – unemployed, self-employed, flexibly working in virtual offices – while the other is at work, perhaps cleaning the bath will cease to be a gender issue and start being something that just gets done.  To speed the revolution along in the meantime, teach your sons to wash their own clothes.  Their future girlfriends will thank you.  They might too.

In search of plan B

Flickr: Ms.Tea

I was talking to a friend who is packing up her London home and buying a Christmas tree farm in Sussex – presumably on the grounds that of all the types of farm she could possibly have this one will need least in the way of  feeding, breeding or early morning milking.  Part of her motivation is a vision of the future so apocalyptic that she wants to make herself  self-sufficient before the Second Great Depression hits  (she’s planning to grow veg and keep chickens as well, I don’t think she just wants to be self-sufficient in Christmas trees).

It struck me as I listened to her that  I need a plan B, too.  My own Christmas-Tree-farm-equivalent which I can pour some energy into while the economy implodes and the bits reform into something recognisable again.  Now all I have to do is work out what it is…

Building schools for whose future?

I loved the idea of Building Schools for the Future (BSF) long before I had school-age children who might  benefit from it, and not just because someone needed to (literally) fix the school roof.

The public sector’s realm used to be ugly, grimy, cheap and second-rate.  Asked to think about the public sector in the 1980s and chances are you pictured  schools with leaky roofs, outside loos and children taught in pre-fab  huts which were inhumanly hot in summer and deathly cold in winter.  NHS hospitals were painted  grey and sludge-green and the lino on the floor was cracked.  There were plastic chairs chained to sticky grey carpet tiles and staff behind protective  barriers in council offices and job centres.  Those mental images, I’m sure, helped undermine confidence in the whole value of the public sector.  Public was for losers who couldn’t  haul themselves into the promised land of Private.

The notion of BSF was a welcome vote of confidence in Public.  It was a philosophical Trojan horse  which didn’t just make a practical point – that children couldn’t learn and teachers couldn’t teach in those conditions; but  introduced the idea that people who used the public sector should be treated well and deserved excellence.  That Public could be as good as Private.

For all its problems of slowness and bureaucracy, you’ll have guessed that I’m not overly chuffed  at the news that Michael Gove is halting investment in BSF; especially as rumours persist that part of the savings from this and other cuts to the education budget are to be used to fund free schools and the dash to academies which are not exactly uncontroversial.

Still, as the man said don’t mourn, organise.  I’m not sure what can be done to save school building, but here’s a campaign to try to secure parental consultation before schools can opt for academy status; here’s info about another campaign in support of local schools, and here’s the Department for Education case for and the anti-academies alliance argument against – for those who want to see both sides …

High Anxiety

Evidently training to be a Zen Master, my nine-year old son has declared that I should stop worrying so much by ” removing the meaning and feelings of worry from your mind”.

That’s easy for him to say. 

I come from a long line of pessimists and worriers and was brought up from an early age to  “hope for the best and expect the worst – that way you’re never disappointed”  Much as I’d love to be one, I just don’t understand optimists.  Don’t they realise that unless you worry about everything, constantly, even in your sleep, something terrible might happen and you won’t be prepared for it?

 

What’s a government for?

Intrigued by reports of Tony Blair’s “lessons I have learned from being in g0vernment speech to the Institute of Government the other day.

It’s a strikingly managerial account of  government – as you’d  expect from a philosophy-lite PM who believed that “what matters is what works” .  The ten lessons are:

  1. Governance is a debate about efficiency rather than transparency
  2. We are operating in a post-ideological politics
  3. People want an empowering, not controlling state
  4. The centre needs to drive, but not deliver, systemic change
  5. Departments should be smaller, strategic and oriented around delivery
  6. Systemic change is essential in today’s world – as the private sector demonstrates
  7. The best change and delivery begins with the right conceptual analysis
  8. The best analysis is based on facts and interaction with the front line
  9. The people you appoint matter dramatically – private sector skillsets are needed
  10. Countries can learn from each other

“good politics boils down to good policy – to ‘a serious intellectual business’ of conceptual and technical analysis of the problem, and competent and efficient delivery of the solution.”

And so it does.  The mantra of evidence-based policy will be  familiar to anyone who worked in Whitehall over the past few years and it’s evidently right.  It’s sad that the evidence was so often bent to fit a political timetable, with initiatives piled upon each other to catch a headline and maintain an impression of dynamism, rather than because the evidence dictated them.  If only he’d stuck to his guns (on reflection possibly not the best choice of words…)

Social change  takes a long time.  Even gathering the evidence of where the problems are, to start indicating what to do about them, takes longer than political parties are willing to wait.  It takes even longer to see results.  So Labour didn’t wait, and while they had lots of good instincts and some of the right answers, it was a lack of patience, a shortage of managerial skill and a fatal habit of over-promising and under-delivering that did for them in the end.

I wouldn’t disagree with anything on Blair’s list between numbers 3 and 10.  But Lord what a depressing picture is conjured up by 1 and 2.    Governance is a debate about efficiency rather than transparency.  Really?  I’m  not even sure I know what that means – it’s more important to be efficient than honest?  It’s more important to be efficient than fair?  Whatever happened to the idea of politics as a moral crusade?   What I’d really like to hear from the Labour leadership hopefuls  is an intellectually coherent, passionate argument for what they believe in.   What do they want to do with power when/if they get it back?  Otherwise we might just as well hand the country over to McKinsey (not that we can afford them).

A pedant writes

I’ve been doing a lot of editing recently – it’s annual report season and the hills are alive with the sound of management-speak being committed to paper.

Don’t get me wrong – I’m very glad of the work.  And I do appreciate that great managers aren’t necessarily good writers too.  But in the interests of the English language and my own sanity, can I request that the person who wrote “we are fully committed to embedding and mainstreaming equality and diversity in all our management processes” is sent to the corner wearing a  very large dunce’s cap and left to contemplate the error of his ways (or her ways – I am, of course,  fully committed to…)

A pox on embedding and mainstreaming; on the random use of transparent, robust and sustainable to make simple things sound grander than they need to be; on  capturing learnings and sharing them at learning events; on the direction of travel and ongoing commitment and outcome focused engagement activity.

This whole editing process  reminds me of skills I used to take  pride in, which are now about as useful  as knowing how to ride a pennyfarthing or where to apply the leeches to cure dropsy. I used to be  able to lay out a page of newsprint, using a series of  mathematical formulae which told the printer exactly where and at what size to place the words and pictures.  I knew how to put together documents for print by cutting in alterations from a block of set type with a scalpel.  I could correct a proof using the right set of editor’s marks.  (Yes I know.  I’m older than God) .

Now editing and proofing is an entirely on-screen process which is infinitely easier and much less satisfying than it used to be.   Who knew you could feel nostalgic for the feel of printers’ proofs?

The sole trader’s dilemma

Being always in the market for advice that might net me a million, I read Robert Craven’s digest of what separates the successful business from the also-ran avidly.  I really liked the tip for business owners to  “work ON and not IN” the business.  It’s something  I’ve said myself to people I’ve worked with when they’re getting bogged down in day to day delivery when they should be  focusing on business strategy and development.

The problem is that for really small businesses – like sole traders – like me – the advice is hard to apply.  I have to do the day to day delivery else there’s nothing to bill people for.  And I have to do the business development, else there’s no need to worry about the day to day because there’s nothing to deliver. (And I have to do the wrangling with the accountant, sorting out the printer, paying the bills and (occasionally) patting myself on my own back too, but that’s another issue).

What happens (and I bet  I’m not alone in this) is that business development gets thought about in fits and starts, gets put on hold when it generates actual business and then fires up again in between contracts.  There must be a smoother,  less nerve-jangling and more productive way of doing things.  And yes I’ve heard the advice about consistently dedicating one day a week to business development no matter what; but try telling a client with a deadline that you can’t finish their report because you need to think about prospecting for new work and see how long you last.

Fortunately I’ve been doing this for long enough that I now have a large enough network of good clients to ensure that there’s a pretty constant stream of work coming my way, so this is less of an issue than it was in the beginning.  But even with years of experience to go on, it’s still a tricky balancing act.

The big society – a work in progress

Overheard while queueing to get into the Lido at London Fields on the hottest day of the year.  Young Man (mid-20s?), young boy in tow, on mobile phone:

YM:  No, I forgot the sun-cream  He’ll be all right.  He’ll just have to keep his t-shirt on in the pool… (pause)… I am NOT going to ask a complete stranger for sun-cream… (pause)… I’m NOT GOING TO ASK… (pause)… Because all they’ll do is tell me to go and get my own fucking sun-cream… (pause)… Because that’s what I’d say if a complete stranger asked me.