The Union Jack has been in the news a lot recently, and not for vexillological reasons. Fun with Flags, you might say, but there’s something serious going on here. National symbols, love of country and loyalty to it - these aren’t trivial issues. They pertain to the very fabric of our or any other nation. [...]
While there are plenty of other videoconferencing applications out there, it’s Zoom, like Hoover, that has so emphatically entered the language that it’s been promoted from noun to verb. Hence the title (and the third in my triptych of EM Forster puns, for which I apologise). But videoconferencing in general is my theme. Against the [...]
I was asked on Twitter for my thoughts on how to succeed in job interviews, particularly Civil Service ones, and thought a blog the best way of responding. So here goes. Let’s get one thing clear at the outset: no-one is always successful in job interviews. That’s because there's no guaranteed formula. Someone with a [...]
Hands up who wants to make bad decisions? No-one, of course. But then, they do still keep getting made. What’s going on? Individuals slip up - of course they do. But sometimes they’re trapped in an organisational culture where the chances of slipping up are significantly higher. There might be a number of factors in [...]
A central principle of a working life - or, at least, of my working life - is that anything non-urgent can be put off until retirement. The folders full of paperwork, the stacked boxes of VHS and cassette tapes, the mid-1980s cheque book stubs, the vast collection of keys long dissociated from the locks in [...]
There - an object lesson in how to grip an audience with a title. But bear with me. Behind the wordy headline there might be a few nuggets worth reading, not least because I’ve done extensive background research (15 minutes online, which I understand is sufficient these days to support a firmly-held opinion). From this [...]
Football is, of course, the beautiful game. I’ve been entranced by it since my youngest days. It provides a common, almost universal language. And whether you like the game or not, it runs through our national culture like letters through a stick of rock. My team is Charlton Athletic. I started supporting Charlton not long [...]
In parts 1 and 2 of this series of blogs, I discussed the need for leaders to engage with their people, and to have a realisable vision of the future by being what I called a ‘time traveller’. They need to be able both to lead people and to deliver. This time I’d like to [...]
Too early to start thinking about a post-Covid public inquiry? Maybe so - everyone and everything is maxed out. Those working night and day to contain and improve the situation have better things to think about. And yet. And yet. Even in the midst of a crisis, establishing an audit trail is important. Why? Because [...]
My previous blog, about being a British European, led to an extended conversation on Twitter about my contention that the European Union has made a major contribution to peace in Europe since 1945. I welcome the challenge, because it made me explore even more deeply my thinking on the subject. My Twitter correspondent couldn’t see [...]
