Is This Sense For Somerset?
It would appear that the report commissioned by the government is going to recommend a barrage of the River Parrett downstream from Bridgwater, according to reports like this one on the BBC.
Over forty years ago, my modelling software Speed was used by the now-superseded Water Resources Board to model water flows in river basins. I’m sure that these days, scientists and engineers could do much better, but then a scientifically correct solution often ignores powerful interests like farmers, the RSPB and politicians, who know a cause to get themselves re-elected.
The only thing I will predict with certainly, is that there will be a large argument over what is to be done.
They should do what Network Rail seem to doing at Dawlish. And that appears to be getting the job done as quick as possible using every possible method. The BBC is now stating that the line will open on April the 4th. So it would appear that the engineers are winning!
My one time neighbour in Suffolk, a past Colonel in an Engineering Regiment in the British Army, said that in case of war, you burn all Rule Books. He did say, that you keep the Instruction Manuals.
It’s certainly a war our there against the floods!
Mick Gives A Lesson In Motivation
This report of an interview on BBC Suffolk of Mick McCarthy is a classic and shows how to motivate your remaining strikers, so that one steps into the big shoes of David McGoldrick. Here’s an extract.
“All the ones that think they should be playing every week – Paul Taylor, Sylvan Ebanks-Blake, Frank Nouble – opportunity knocks for one of them,” McCarthy told BBC Radio Suffolk.
I would assume that gentle tactics like this didn’t appeal to Roy Keane.
Vincent Tan Is 66-1 To Be The Next Cardiff Manager
This is according to Match of the Day.
The big question is, could he work with the owner of the club?
Bonkers Management
Not my phrase, but that of Rachel Burden on BBC Radio 5 to describe the style of management at Cardiff City, under the ownership of Vincent Tan.
I do wonder how some of these people made their money, as in my view you can’t make money without having some skill or sense. I wonder if you read his entry on Wikipedia, you’ll come to the same conclusions as I have.
A Must Read Opinion In The Sunday Times
Camilla Caendish’s opinion in the Sunday Ties today is very much worth reading. The title says a lot.
Tribal tensions on the ward are putting patients at risk
And it starts like this.
Managers bullying staff into fiddling cancer figures. Whistleblowers gagged with pay-offs. A&E doctors coping with patients who should have been seen by the GP. And that’s just last week’s headlines. With so many of the staff at loggerheads, it’s not surprising the National Health Service sometimes seems to forget about the patients.
It is full of nuggets that apply to any company or organisation. Like this one!
Hinchingbrooke Hospital in Cambridge has borrowed a programme from Toyota called Stop the Line. This lets any member of staff halt a procedure if they think the patient may be at risk. In one recent case, a patient was about to be stitched up after surgery when two theatre nurses found a swab was missing and “stopped the line”. An x-ray showed the swab in the patient’s abdomen. It was removed, saving the patient from harm and the hospital from heaven knows what kind of negligence claim.
If you can find the article, read it!
Who Will Be The Next Manchester United Manager?
Just watch the betting!
Years ago, I had a friend, who’s since died, who told me that some heavy punters have a direct line to what goes on at Manchester United.
At the moment David Moyes is well ahead on Betfair.
Don’t Use Highbury And Islington Station
This post is to remind me not to, until they finish the current works!
I used it on Tuesday and found that the down escalator was under maintenance, so I had to walk down.
Highbury And Islington Down Escalator Under Maintenance
That wasn’t too much of a pain, but I like to avoid it if I can.
This morning, when I wanted to get to Oxford Circus, I found that the whole entry was choked and so I decided to walk to Holloway Road instead.
The latter was suggested by one of station staff, who obviously thought I could walk it.
So that must have been some sort of back-handed compliment.
incidentally, Highbury and Islington station is one of those with three escalator positions and only two escalators. I wonder if in the next few months, they do the sensible thing and install the third escalator.
If they do, surely they should have done that before taking the down escalator out of action for several months.
Thanks! But No Thanks!
Sean O’Driscoll has been sacked as Nottingham Forest manager, despite a high league position and winning 4-2 today. It’s all here on the BBC.
Sounds like Forest have got themselves owners with more money than sense.
Where have we seen that before? How about Portsmouth, Blackburn, Crystal Palace, Wolves, Hearts and Darlington for a start! But not Glasgow Rangers, as I don’t think they had any of either!
A Life Hanging Around Banking
I first worked for a bank in about 1971, as a consultant programmer on a system that worked out how much various actions cost them to do. It was a rather clever system, that took all of the bank’s costs and numbers like the number of cheques cashed and worked out for each branch how much things actually cost. The system had been designed by Bob, the bank’s Chief Management Accountant, a man with an encyclopedic knowledge of accountancy and banking, and with whom I became firm friends over the next few years. Over the time, we consumed several bottles of good wine, notably in a restaurant called Mother Bunches near St. Paul’s. Sadly, in about 1978, Bob died and I lost a good friend.I was a scruffy man in those days and one memory stands out. I was painting the flat in the Barbican and Bob phoned and asked me to run the software to calculate costs for the last quarter. It was only because his assistant was on holiday. So I cycled to Time Sharing in Gt. Portland Street and did the run. Bob then phoned me at Time Sharing and asked that I bring the results to the bank and give it to the usher at the door. But when I got to the bank it was closed and on ringing the bell, the massive bronze door opened and the usher in full morning suit and top hat, asked if I had comuter output for Bob. I said yes and he replied that Bob had asked to see me. I protested because of my appearance and I was firmly ushered inside and told to go to the fourth floor. When I met Bob for the first time in his office, I apologised for my appearance and he just smiled, took the computer output and started checking the answers. Before I returned to the Barbican, we had more than a few good glasses of wine.
Before I leave Bob and the system I programmed, I’ll put in a few observations.
- Bob always reckoned bankers were likely to be called John. A boring name for someone expected to be boring at work. Perhaps with all the banks’ problems, these days, they could improve their profile by hiring a few more Johns.
- I didn’t have any access to the banks main computer system, as I didn’t need to, but I got the impression, that they had hardly changed the design since the system had been first-written and only had a limited number of places to store information on customers. So consequently, their summary statistics on their customers wasn’t very good at all. I’d love to know, whether they are any better now.
- A lot of fundamental pieces of information on the bank’s costs were almost impossible to find. Bob had come from a major FTSE 500 company and put it down to the fact that they were a bank therefore cost control wasn’t a problem.
- A very dominant factor in the costs of a branch was property and who in particular owned the building. The bank actually owned most of the branches themselves, but where they rented a branch building costs were a lot higher.
- But the most important factor in the costs, was inevitably hanky-panky, where a manager was giving loans for sexual favours. I suppose that these days, where you never meet your bank manager has cured that problem, even if it has introduced a lot more.
- One of the design rules, Bob put into the system, actually ended up in Artemis. If say you split a sum of money into several fields in a database, then just to round the figures to the neatest penny wasn’t good enough, as although it might be correct, the pence column might not add to the original value. So any error was lost in the largest value, just as it was in Artemis. The reason was because bankers in those days, always checked the answers by adding them up and woe betide if they didn’t agree.
- It must have been a good system, as it was still running fifteen years later. Although by that time Time Sharing had long since gone, so they ran it on one of the last PDP-10s somewhere in the United States.
At the time, I was banking with Barclays and wasn’t very pleased with them. So I asked the people, who I worked with to set me up with a new branch. After all, if I was doing business with a bank, it might not be a bad idea to bank with them.
I don’t know whether it was chance or whether I was setup by the people I worked with. A few days later, I turned up in the branch of the bank by the Barbican and met David for the first time. I’d actually been working late on the bank’s cost accountancy system and I was rather surprised, that David knew about it. He did disclose that he’d been on the committee that had decided that Bob should develop the system. I remember that day, that David and I were scheduled to meet at ten and I finally got back to the flat at one.
It was the start of a life-long friendship, that only stopped on David’s death within a few days of that of my wife in 2007.
I can remember a lunch in an expensive City restaurant, where at four after a long lunch, his second-in-command came in, saying that the branch needed to be signed off. In some versions of this tale, I say that he said to his number two to forge his signature, but I suspect it was more that he should have had the right to sign-off the branch. If it was the latter, that would fit David’s character, as I know from other things he said, that he believed very much in delegation.
He also introduced me to some of his customers, who had got the Miss World-that-wasn’t, Helen Morgan to open their new shop. David kept a signed photograph of the Welsh model on his desk for many years. David never did anything inappropriate concerning the ladies during his banking career.
David got further into my business life, when we started Metier. The company needed a good bank manager and I introduced David to one of my partners. I remember we all met over lunch in the Honourable Artillery Company.
soon after, David was promoted to a bigger branch in the West End. It wasn’t a planned promotion, but one that was necessitated by an early retirement of the manager there. To say it was a mess, would be a very large understatement. But David was the sort of person, who rose to challenges using any legal method.
One thing that illustrated his competence, was when we presented him with one of the first computerised spreadsheets, the bank had ever received, he immediately passed it to his area manager on his Area Manager’s first day in the job. Many would have ducked that challenge. They used it to educate themselves, and we got the funding we needed. In fact, David told me some years later, that he reckoned we weren’t asking for enough and got the clearance for more on that very first spreadsheet.
Getting The Wife On The Board
We all know that we need more women on the board of both public and private companies. But is Volkswagen Chairman Ferdinand Piech taking this a bit too far, by getting his wife, Ursula, on the board, as reported here on Bloomberg?
I’ve served on committees with board husband and wife on them and they are a nightmare. You spend all the meeting trying to get a concensus and wo-betide you, if the wife has been outvoted by the group including her husband. She will then spend all night changing his mind, so you have to go through the process all over again.
So do Volkswagen know what they are getting themselves into?
Surely, there must be another woman in Germany, who would do a better job than the Chairman’s wife!
The Anonymous Widower 