Letting off steam about public services…

Sometimes I just blog to get things off my chest.  You are excused reading this if you don’t want to, this one’s really for my benefit.  If you stick with it there may be a moral at the end.

So, here we go.

Last week I tweeted light-heartedly about how ridiculous it was to need three forms of ID to get Tower Hamlets council to condescend to sell me a  parking permit for outside my house.  Especially as, despite having my council tax bill with me as ID, the computer insisted that my house wasn’t a residential property so wasn’t eligible for resident’s parking (so can I have the tax back?)   Leave it a couple of days, I was told, come back at the end of the week.  We’ll have found your house by then and we’ll sell you what you want.

Went back on Saturday because the form downloaded from TH’s website told me they were open all morning – to find the office locked and a closed until Monday sign swinging in the door.

Went back today.  Computer has found my house.  Sadly none of the three forms of ID I have with me (including the utility bill and the council tax bill they ask for), have my first name as well as surname and address  on them, and the things that do – library card (issued by TH council) bank cards – they won’t accept as valid forms of ID.

So they won’t let me apply to buy a parking permit.

And I swept out in high dudgeon.

And the moral of the story is

  • Life would be easier if we had one form of ID accepted as standard proof everywhere.  Thanks to the mis-handling of ID cards by the last government this is unlikely to happen in my lifetime (which may be considerably shortened by the hike I experience in my blood pressure every time I need a parking permit.)
  •  Customer service matters. Tower Hamlet’s council does a good job on the big stuff.  If asked as I left the office this morning, however, I would unhesitatingly have voted for it to be overthrown in a bloodless coup (can you vote for a coup?) on the grounds of  extreme jobsworthy-ness.   Doesn’t matter how efficient the back office functions of a business are; if the points at which customers come into contact with it don’t work then the business is undermined.  This is great customer service.  Repeatedly telling a frustrated customer that you won’t sell her something because she hasn’t brought her passport with her, is not.

According to their complaints procedure, TH welcomes complaints from residents aged 5 upwards because it helps them improve their service.  But of course I won’t complain.  This is not the kind of thing people complain about. It isn’t a major injustice, it doesn’t affect my children’s schooling or the care of elderly relatives, it’s just another minor irritant to be dealt with so that my sister can park when she visits.

Thank you for listening.  That feels much better.

Does blogging drive business?

Boozy lunch last weekend with an old friend who is just dipping a toe into online promotion for his construction business.  He’s getting his first website up and running soon and is thinking about a blog – though he’s not really sure why he might need one.  My answer to the question – so why have you got  a blog? –  may not have helped:

  • I enjoy writing it – especially now I’ve been writing for a while and there’s an archive of stuff to look back on.  I don’t feel as strongly about writing as Caitlin Moran, who confesses to salivating at the thought of sitting at the keyboard, but it’s definitely in my top five list of favourite things to do.
  • It acts as a shop window for me.  Part of what I offer clients is my ability as a copywriter, the blog lets them see me in action, writing on lots of different subjects.
  • It gives me a space to think.  It’s somewhere to gather advice and information about business and my particular sector, weight it up and tease issues into shape in my head through the process of writing about them (there are lots of posts which have been deleted unpublished because I realised half way through that I was barking up entirely the wrong tree).

I think having the blog helps my business enormously – although none of the reasons I do it are directly aimed at increasing turnover.  There are lots of other ways of driving business online.  I’m tempted to agree with whoever it was who said that if you blog you do it for yourself.  If anyone else reads it, it’s a bonus.

4 ways to win business from the Olympics

Apparently 72% of business contracts for the Olympics have gone to SMEs;  22% to micro-businesses with fewer than 10 employees.  No, me neither.  So I was intrigued by this week’s ELSBC event to talk about how local businesses can get some of the action.  The opportunities are astounding, though they need a bit of creative thinking if you’re not in one of the obvious sectors like construction or accommodation.  From memory here are some key things to think about – of which easily the most important is the first:

  • Register for free with Compete For– Olympic-related contracts are posted here, as  are opportunities with Crossrail, Transport for London and the Met Police.  The big Tier One contractors with the huge building and supply contracts post sub-contracts here and they’re required to offer a proportion of them to SMEs.  From the end of June the Met will be posting all contracts worth between £500 and £50,000 here too.
  • Find out who’s won contracts in your field.  Could your competitors need a bit of extra capacity from you?  Are they going to be dropping smaller contracts that you could pick up while they concentrate on the Olympics?
  • Look out for other Olympic-related opportunities.   There will be a number of National Houses set up by different countries to showcase themselves (I like the sound of Jamaica’s nine-day party in Finsbury Park).  As well as the Olympic village itself, there will be training camps and support camps all over the place (the American team will run its operations from a base at University of East London, for example).  There will be big events at the O2 (renamed the North Greenwich arena for the Olympics). They’ll all need supplying with stuff from transport to security, catering to printing, couriers to cleaning services.  More information about new procurement opportunities on the London 2012 site and the London Business Network
  • Think about after the Games – the athletes’ village will be turned into homes for east Londoners and a new school is being built in the park, so there’s plenty more work in construction, and other opportunities too.  Keep an eye on Compete For and the Olympic Park Legacy Company

There are ony 58 weeks to go.  What are you waiting for?

The 1948 show – a bloomin’ bit of all right

I love everything about this 1948 COI film about the NHS.  The message – of course – but the look and the music too.  As a piece of animation it’s  energetic and engaging – quite right that it’s introduced by the COI equivalent of the MGM lion, and carries its own music, design and director credits.

It’s packed with social detail about class and family.  Watch the high street shops that Charley cycles past, for example. Charley’s doll-faced missus sits happily darning his sock while he eats his dinner and only gets animated when she has to rescue the baby from the coal-scuttle and give him a (tin) bath.  The voiceover is Mr Cholmondeley-Warner at his most patronising, but the film is clear and informative and, at 8′ 37, much longer than a modern attention span would be deemed able to cope with.  (In those pre-TV days it must have been intended for cinema screening, so I guess had a captive audience.)

Compare and contrast with this, government communications fans…

Same approach – animation with voiceover, illustrating illness by animating what’s happening inside a body –  but no-one with an accent like that would have got anywhere near a film studio in 1948, unless they were going to sweep it.  Accents aside, I really prefer the old one  – which may be just the charm and strangeness lent by its age.  Charley’s insides samba to a sassy beat and magical medicines hover around his bed.  Change 4 Life’s faceless plasticine blobs just get gunged up with internal cotton wool and expire early on their faceless high street.  It’s just as patronising in its own way, too.

I’d be intrigued to see what an equivalent film introducing Andrew Lansley’s new model of the NHS would look like.  What would clinician led commissioning, Foundation Trusts and a new role for Monitor look like?   Could it be done in less than 8 minutes?  Would Charley and his missus think it was still a bit of all right?

The wishy washy liberal’s guide to the sexual politics of clothes

Brave New World (1931), shows there’s nothing new in panics about the sexualisation of the young.  Huxley had a vision of a government kept in power because  people were so sated with drugs, sex and sport that they hadn’t the energy to care how they were being governed.  I wonder if Reg Bailey’s a fan?

Is banning kids’ clothes just protecting parents?

I sympathise with the Mothers’ Union report fronted by Bailey, criticising the sexualisation of children through the sale of inappropriate clothing and remorselessly sexual  advertising.  But I have a sneaking feeling that I oppose these things because they make me uncomfortable rather than because of the effect they have on children (which is in any case unproven).

I remember an anxious wait on a packed bus in a traffic jam praying that my  son, aged 6 or 7,  wouldn’t notice the billboard we were waiting next to and ask what Want to get it up and keep it up all night? meant.   I’m sure the ad man who draped a naked Sophie Dahl over a velvet couch to advertise perfume  never had to explain to a child on the tube why she didn’t have any clothes on.

I’ve come to accept, though, that me not liking things –  baseball caps, black tights with white shoes, reality TV – isn’t, sadly, enough for them to be banned.   Not everyone looking at adverts is a child (or a parent).  The world can’t be shaped just to protect the  young.  I’d like popular culture not to be so boringly obsessed with sex, but no-one’s forcing me to watch.  My children, raised amidst the sexualised culture, seem pretty well adjusted.  Padded bras for 8-year olds are weird, but if no-one bought them they’d stop making them.  Parents should take responsibility for their children and protect them from this stuff if they’re worried about it.  Manufacturers and advertisers are just  following the money.

Sluts and Bunnies

So while I’m uncomfortable but not outraged by 8-year olds in bikinis – wish they didn’t exist, don’t want to ban them – I’m more torn about the sexual politics of clothing as the 8-year olds grow up.  That’s the problem with being trained to see both sides of an argument,  you can see both sides of the argument.

Things I am both for and against…

  • I support the principle behind the Slut Walk –  a woman has an absolute right to wear what the hell she wants  when she’s out on the streets.
  • I would rather  my daughter covered up when she went out, because I know that  she’ll attract less unwanted attention that way.
  • I back the eff off Hef campaign to stop the opening of a new Playboy Club, believing that bunny costumes insult and degrade women.
  • I back the rights of women to earn a living however they want.
  • I’d rather young people put off having sex until they are emotionally as well as physically able to cope with it.
  • I’m definitely not in favour of the Nadine Dorries school of abstinence (for girls).  In this subject more than any other openness is important, ignorance is not bliss.  It can be dangerous.Oh, and
  • Openness about sexual issues includes the right of men to have information about erectile dysfunction.
  • I really don’t want to see the ads.

I got a text from my daughter as I was writing this.  There is going to be a slut walk on sat can i go?  I said yes.  And restrained the impulse to add but let’s talk about what you’re going to wear.

Clerihew – for Richard, with a resigned air

When April showers come your way/ They bring the flowers that bloom in May.

If May’s rain all falls in June/It brings a leak in your bathroom.

Making money out of the old and sick

I ran a workshop for the management team of a chain of private care homes a few years ago.  They were concerned about their internal communications. They had a number of homes scattered across a wide area of the North East with a staff of workers technically described as unskilled, though Lord knows I couldn’t do the job.  The staff worked irregular shifts, many had English as their second language, almost none had access to a computer.  The standard internal techniques were obviously not going to work so we spent some time looking at  creative alternatives.

I was struck by the huge pride the staff took in the quality of the care they offered and by how beleaguered they felt as an industry.  They believed they were demonised as heartless profit-seekers,  maximising income by grabbing  granny’s life savings and offering her workhouse conditions cared for by untrained staff on minimum wage.

My workshoppers evidently didn’t fit that pattern.  They cared enough about their staff to spend time and money thinking about how to communicate with and train them.  They were proud of the  standard of care in their homes.  I went away chastened that I had bought into the stereotype too.

I’ve  thought of them again recently: when the debate started about whether the public sector should bail out the failing private provider Southern Cross; when the row over the private Castlebeck  home blew up; and when I read an interview with the magnificent Diana Athill in today’s Guardian under the heading “You can’t make money out of old people“.

Athill has lived in a care home she describes as “a dream” for more than a year and it does sound idyllic.  Crucially, in her opinion, her home is run as a not for profit Trust rather than a business required to clear a profit for shareholders.

You can believe as I do, and as my workshop showed, that not all private care homes are Castlebecks, that not everyone who works in the private sector  is a rapacious monster, and not everyone who works in the public sector is a selfless angel.  You can argue that the cost of providing high quality care for a rapidly aging population is  too high to be met out of general taxation alone.  But if your prime concern is to ensure that older people have a dignified, safe, comfortable home in which to see out their final years it’s hard to argue with Athill when she says:

You don’t set up an old people’s home as a private company unless you think you’re going to make a profit.  You can’t make a profit out of old people … Where need is serviced by the third sector it is civilised.  When it’s serviced by people trying to turn a profit, it’s not … If life is miserable in the main tranche of care homes, it is because the private sector is unsuited to this work.

He Came, He Saw, He Conquered

Power is very rarely limited to the pure exercise of brute force…. [T]he Roman state bolstered its authority and legitimacy with the trappings of ceremonial –cloaking the actualities of power beneath a display of wealth, the sanction of tradition, and the spectacle of insuperable resources….Power is a far more complex and mysterious quality than any apparently simple manifestation of it would appear. It is as much a matter of impression, of theatre, of persuading those over whom authority is wielded to collude in their subjugation. Insofar as power is a matter of presentation, its cultural currency in antiquity (and still today) was the creation, manipulation, and display of images.

The grown-up’s guide to rejection

The mantra that a good consultant “tells people what they need to know not what they want to hear” is a cliché, but it still sums up a basic truth about the consultant/client relationship.

There’s no point in you hiring me if you’re already convinced you know what needs to be done and just want me to tell you that you’re right.

There’s no satisfaction for me in buckling down to do what you want if I think it’s wrong.  If we can’t come to an agreement about the way forward, the grown-up response is for everyone to agree that the relationship won’t work and walk away from it.

I’ve never found being grown-up that easy, though.

I met a prospective client last week.  A small voluntary sector body, with big ambitions to change the world by… well … anyway, it was going to be great and all that was holding them back was the failure of the world to realise what a great thing it would be if …

Their problem was they couldn’t explain to me exactly what it was they wanted to do – other than repeating “we’re in the business of changing people’s lives”.  My problem was that I couldn’t stop asking awkward questions like, “how are you planning to do that?”   I  don’t think we could have worked together.  I liked them a lot – idealists and optimists are fantastic to be around –  but eventually you need some realism in there too or else nothing gets done.  They said they liked me too, but my attempts to bring the conversation round to practicalities wasn’t what they wanted to hear.  There’s a lesson in there for next time.

Despite knowing that it wouldn’t have worked,  I’m left with a sense of frustration that I couldn’t persuade them to harness their vision to my pragmatism and see what happened.  At which moment, in stepped Seth Godin, with exactly the blog post I needed:

“Don’t take it personally.”

This is tough advice. Am I supposed to take it like a chair? Sometimes it seems as though the only way to take it is personally. That customer who doesn’t like your product (your best work) or that running buddy who doesn’t want to run with you any longer…

Here’s the thing: it’s never personal. It’s never about you. How could it be? That person doesn’t truly know you, understand what you want or hear the voices in your head. All they know is themselves.

When someone moves on, when she walks away or even badmouths you or your work, it’s not personal about you. It’s personal about her. Her agenda, her decisions, her story.

Do your work, the best way you know how. Is there any other option?