The nanny state or good business practice?

Daily Mail readers will certainly be familiar with the idea that in the UK we live in a nanny state where there are ridiculous levels of health and safety red tape that business owners must comply with. Fire regulations for buildings and businesses, first aid requirements, safe working condition regulations, personal protective equipment legislation, hazardous substances legislation and so on ad infinitum. It can seem like an absolute minefield of complex rules and regulations that as a business owner you ignore at your peril, but is this necessarily the case? There are very few business owners who don’t feel an implicit duty of care to their staff, and generally those who don’t, don’t stay in business for very long. The penalties for not looking after staff and employees are severe up to and including jail time for more serious offences, but is health and safety the nightmare that it can at first appear?

In broad terms I think the answer to this is a resounding and emphatic no! I guess that having made such a bold statement I need to back it up, so here goes. The vast majority of health and safety is a combination of common sense and good basic business practice. It relates to making sure that the workplace environment is safe for people to move about, and carry out their tasks in. Things like tidying up to avoid trip hazards, wearing the correct safety equipment when using dangerous equipment, making sure that potentially dangerous machinery is properly guarded and so on are just common sense. Why would any business not follow these principles? The fact that an inspector can call round at any time shouldn’t make the slightest bit of difference if you are keeping on top of day to day chores.

The same principle applies to fire safety and first aid. If your staff don’t know what to do in the event of fire then you should be asking yourself why not! If you don’t have anyone on staff who can give emergency first aid you already know that you should. It isn’t a difficult process to take a first aid course. St John Ambulance will sort you out very reasonably with very little effort on your part. You may ask why you should do this when you have never had a fire or a requirement for first aid, but these are the same questions you could ask about insurance, and most business owners wouldn’t think about not being insured, the risks are simply too great.

The other excuse I hear is that it is too expensive, but to my mind this is absolute nonsense. Most businesses can comply with health and safety requirements with very little input from expensive consultants. Talk to your staff, ask them what concerns them in the workplace. Look around yourself. If you are sharp enough to run a business you should be easily sharp enough to spot potential risks and do something about them. Above all, whatever measures you have to take I can guarantee that they will be a heck of a lot cheaper than a lawsuit for negligence of worse still corporate manslaughter! So to any business owner out there with a mindset that health and safety is the nanny state gone mad I would say just one thing. Imagine that rather than a staff member it was a family member who was at risk in your business…..I’m pretty sure you’d do something about the risk then, and that is how you should be thinking about your staff….Just a thought….

War Metal – Settling in

Entering Lord Alexanders camp was something of an eye opener to say the least. Bear in mind that we had come from a camp of two hundred people, and now here we were in what felt like thousands and thousands. We later found out that the camp population was six thousand five hundred but it was still more people than we had ever seen in one place, and the whole structure of the camp was beyond anything we had imagined. The perimeter walls were built up with workshops whilst accommodation was in mud-brick structures rather than the tents that we were used to. The central block which I took to be the equivalent of our command centre was a five story building, much larger than ours. There were wind turbines around the camp generating power and the whole area was impressive.

We parked up and disembarked, and were led over to the command centre, passing through heavy steel security doors into a large open space easily big enough to hold our entire group as well as what seemed like most of the population of the camp. Lord Alexander himself strode forward to meet us, shaking Sirius’ hand before addressing our group.

“We’ve laid on food and drink for you all, take the opportunity to refresh yourselves. If you have any questions, just ask any of my people, we want you to feel welcome here. We’ve also set up accommodation for you and my adjutants Jax and Vic will show you where to go.”

He turned to Sirius, Natasha, Anastasia and me and said

“You had better come with me I think, we need a debrief and I need to tell you about what has been going on locally here. Please follow me.”

We looked at each other a little shocked I guess but as Lord Alexander turned away we followed him across the open area to a wide staircase rising through a mezzanine level to floors above. We walked through a warren of corridors, past offices where we could see people hunched over monitor screens intent on their tasks. Eventually we arrived at a large room with two armed guards outside.

“Welcome to my inner sanctum, I run the camp and the surrounding area from here. We have an area of a thousand square miles with thirty or so camps scattered through it. All of the camps are linked by microwave transmitter and the perimeter of our area is patrolled and monitored. Each camp is autonomous and self governing but each reports back to my central hub.” Lord Alexander informed us.

Sirius glanced around the room and replied

“You’ve got this pretty well organised, I can see that. How have you managed to develop those drones we saw, and more importantly, what else have you developed and how can we help?”

“I thought you might ask that. I’ve prepared a little tour for you, but before that I need to appraise you of our situation. You can probably see that our environment is quite different to the one you are used to. No desert up here, so your military tactics will need to be modified to cope with our climatic conditions. We also have to talk about the challenges that we face. We haven’t seen the Wyrms that you have down South and we are unlikely to given our swamp conditions. They aren’t suitable for the Wyrms to make their tunnels, but as I told you we have our own issues. These Hatchling Swarms that have been attacking our camps are only one of our problems. My researchers have asked the question, if these are indeed eggs, what is laying them?”

“That’s got to be pretty worrying. Whatever it is is going to be tougher to beat than the Hatchlings I’m sure!”

“That’s what we think, and it’s why we are working to bolster our defenses and to try to find more effective weapons with which to take on these threats. Come with me, and I’ll show you some of the things we are working on.”

We trooped out of the room and started down the staircase, passing the entrance floor and continuing down for what seemed like an eternity before reaching a set of the most massive blast doors I had ever seen. What could possibly warrant such heavy protection?

Thoughts on dealing with depression….

Ok, big subject I know, and by its nature the very word “Depression” covers a multitude of states, but here I am thinking of what would perhaps be better termed clinical depression, that is a mental state that can be diagnosed by a clinician rather than a more general feeling of mental dis-ease that many people experience at some point but that doesn’t require any external intervention from medical professionals. There are a number of causes of depression but broadly these can be broken down into two camps, depression with an external cause i.e. something outside the individual that has a significant detrimental effect on mental health, and those with an internal cause i.e. depression caused by changes in brain chemistry or brain function. Each type of case can be further subdivided but at this point the technical differences become rather semantic for a blog of this type. In essence the consequence of this categorization is that there are a range of treatments available, and given the divergence between potential causes, it should be clear that it is unlikely that a one size fits all solution will be appropriate.

The problem is that often it is just such a one size fits all solution that is offered in the first instance. Often this is in the form of one of the more popular depression medications frequently of the Serotonin receptor reuptake inhibitor class of anti-depressants, and these may or may not make a difference, but whether they do or not, they often have side effects which can worsen of complicate the original condition. It should also be noted that if the cause of the depression is not of a type that is treatable with these medications then the medication may simply be masking the underlying condition. It is often argued that the first step in treating depression, and particularly severe depression is to alleviate some of the symptoms as this can allow the patient a little freedom to begin to address the underlying condition. This may well be the case in some instances but is by no means guaranteed, and in the case of a patient experiencing side effects can in reality make the situation much worse.

This position is not helped by the systems in place within healthcare in the UK. One of the little reported issues with depression is that those with depression are highly likely to miss medication, or to take too much, through poor time awareness, poor self esteem, forgetfulness or lack of co-ordination. It would seem obvious that a patient under medication for depression would at the very least be monitored in terms of missed repeat prescriptions as these are easy indicators of poor medication regime, but this does not happen. The implications of coming off anti-depressant medication unsupervised can be very serious indeed, and it seems incredible that patients are not more carefully monitored. My personal preference would be for initially weekly checkups, with blood tests to monitor chemical levels within the blood and the accuracy of medication consumption. I suspect that this would be laughed at as impractical by the majority of doctors in General Practice but it feels like a minimum to me.

Beyond this start point there should be a more coordinated response between the primary medical practitioner, usually the GP and the mental health support team as there will almost certainly, as the patient moves beyond the crisis stage, a need for more reconstructive support. In an ideal world this support would extend to the immediate family, and most pertinently to a designated carer who would be properly supported in providing specialist support to the patient. Of course by this time anyone in mental health care reading this will be unable to see through the tears of laughter running down their faces, and questioning in what reality there would be a budget for this, but as with intervention for eating dis-orders, alcohol abuse, drug abuse and similar conditions, isn’t there a case that any costs at an early intervention stage are more than recouped in the reduction of costs later when the patient has deteriorated to the point that intervention becomes essential rather than preferable.

It would be interesting to see some analysis of this but of course, it is very difficult to put an accurate cost on how much an individuals treatment would be in five or ten years compared to how much a less complex treatment is now. I guess short-termism is as prevalent in health care as it is in every other walk of modern life….

UK Rioters were protesting against the police….

Oh really? A survey has been carried out, it was announced today, that found that the majority of those arrested for the Summer disturbances claim to have been involved as part of a protest against police tactics and methods. This strikes me as being a little odd. There was some talk at the time that the trigger for the disturbances being the shooting of a London youth by armed police officers, no names, no pack drill, they are pretty much irrelevant. It is pretty much accepted that the reason we don’t have armed police officers as a matter of course is that it tends to lead to shooting incidents like this one. There is a lot of discussion around whether the youth was armed, and it seems unlikely, and whether he was part of a known local gang, and this again is up for debate. The details of the incident may never be fully established but this is largely irrelevant. We already know that our police service is not completely without blame at all times. We also know that mistakes are made, often on a daily basis. But we also know that there are procedures in place to deal with these mistakes and problems.

I can’t help but feel that using an incident like this as an excuse for the disturbances that followed is firstly to do a disservice to the family of the youth concerned and to his memory, particularly given that the family asked for calm and a reasoned response and secondly to cloud the investigation of the incident by creating mayhem around it and distracting the media spotlight, reducing the chance of finding out what really happened. It seems fairly clear to me that this is being used as an excuse. The police have, of late had a reasonable track record of being accountable for their actions. If we look at the Jean Charles Jimenez case we see the police being heavily chastised for their error. I am reasonably confident that justice would have been reached in the natural course of things but this is unlikely now given everything else that happened.

I make it clear that I am no apologist for the police or for government, but I feel that for the media to accept this report in the way that they have is to miss an opportunity to question the whole industry of surveys and opinion polls, which have for some considerable time been questioned as to their validity. Of course, the role of the media does not appear any longer to be to report the news, but to sell newspaper, magazines and television programmes and consequently sell advertising space. The higher the readership or viewership, the higher the advertising revenue. We saw this, to an extent in the phone hacking stories through the Summer whereby it appears that journalists were instructed to do whatever it took to get stories that would sell papers regardless of the ethics and scruples of the methodology used. I’m pretty certain that this is an area where the truth will never fully be revealed, but I also think that it is pretty clear that such practices were endemic within not just News International but other media groups.

I just wish we could find a way to get to a situation whereby news was reported for the sake of reporting rather than because it is sensational, and that we could get away from the reliance of spurious data from research groups with vested interests and the pointless vox pop culture that seems to assume that any opinion is valid…..

Does social networking work for business?

It seems that anyone who is anyone these days has a presence on Facebook, Twitter, Google+ and the various other social networking sites. Many of the assiduously update their status’ and tweet and post about all sorts of stuff to do with their business, but is all this effort really worthwhile? Sure you can build up a large, and if you are smart, loyal following of many thousands of people. You can make your brand recognizable around the World to internet users everywhere, but what proportion of those people following you have any interest in what you actually do as a business? In percentage terms, how many customers are you going to find through social networking? The argument has always been that this is not the point. The point of social networking is to drive traffic to your site because more traffic equates to more ranking points on the search engines, but even this is questionable. Yes, search engines like sites with lots of traffic, but if you look at the algorithm carefully you’ll see that they also like sites that get genuine traffic, i.e. traffic that stays on your site for a few minutes and maybe clicks a couple of pages.

Search engine algorithm programmers are not stupid. They know that there are all sorts of ways of getting people to bounce through your site registering as hits. They also know how to spot the ones that have no relevance to your sites real purpose and they modify your rank score accordingly. It is an update to the old backlinking story. It used to be a game of who could get the most backlinks from high ranking sites to their own site. Then the search engines twigged that a brand new site that suddenly appeared with sixty thousand live backlinks probably hadn’t developed them in an ethical and organic fashion. They had almost certainly bought them from one of the many backlink farms that had been set up to boost websites. This was broadly considered to be a little bit iffy by the search engines and the algorithms were modified so that this type of unethical practice no longer paid the dividends it had. Exactly the same is true of social network driven traffic.

Now, don’t get me wrong, a well organised and targeted social networking campaign can be tremendously effective. There is a little sweet shop in Walsall that does a lt of its marketing through Facebook. Most of the people who follow their page are customers and it is great cost effective way of broadcasting new arrivals of sweets and keeping people who like to know about such things abreast of how the shop is doing. They aren’t looking for thousands of followers from across the World and consequently the Facebook page acts as a form of e-mail marketing to a properly resourced list of potential service users. It is effective and very easy to manage. You can put updates up on Facebook from a mobile phone, anytime, anywhere. Compare this to a little Balti restaurant I know. They have a couple of thousand followers on Facebook and Twitter from all over the World, the vast majority of whom, I would estimate 98.7% just based on geographical location will never go to this restaurant. In essence, whatever time they spent updating Facebook and Twitter, which they do daily, is largely wasted and could be better spend on a leaflet campaign locally as an example.

So, why all this hype around social networking? It is only my opinion, but it seems to me once again to be a way for web design companies and particularly SEO companies to get money from businesses by baffling them with technical jargon rather than by actively understanding the needs of the business and tailoring a more appropriate solution. It smacks of unethical practice, something that has been the bane of the internet ever since it became a marketing rather than an information tool. I’m quite certain this post won’t win me any friends amongst internet marketers, but come on guys, be honest…..since when did any sort of marketing have anything more than a nodding acquaintance with truth and ethics?

To any business owners reading this and considering engaging and SEO or web design company for “Social networking” just ask them the question….”How will this marketing be targeted to my specific business needs?” and if they tell you that it will drive traffic to your site follow it up by asking “What benefit does that bring?” then act according to how these questions are answered……

Brain training for business leaders….

There was a huge buzz a couple of years ago around “Brain Training” games on portable gaming devices. These largely took the form of fairly simply mathematical and reasoning challenges that gradually became more complex as the game progressed. The media jumped firmly on the bandwagon and the hype was incredible, but research demonstrated that they were of limited benefit in terms of increasing brain performance or intelligence and the hype gradually lessened as the zeitgeist moved on. However, one area in which they did seem to make a difference was in increasing speed and ability to complete specific related tasks. There is some good evidence that they increased activity in very specific parts of the brain to do with mental arithmetic and special awareness as well as hand to eye co-ordination. This led me to speculate that the possibility exists that a sufficiently well tailored training game focusing on the core skills required by business leaders could bring similar benefits.

Now, there are a couple of issues with such a game. Firstly there is the problem of defining what the core skills of a business leader are, and then of course finding simple, quick tasks that cam translate into engaging game play on portable device. The first of these has been the subject of heated debate for years, and a quick review of a tv show such as The Apprentice will give some insight into the difficulty of spotting what makes a good or successful business leader. In the main there are thought to be a combination of skills that are required, starting with drive and ambition in order to be able to drive others effectively, moving through vision and decision making ability to be able to spot an opportunity and then act upon it quickly and effectively enough through to entrepreneurial ability to take that drive and vision and make something successful happen. These are fairly well established core skills but even within these there are debates over what they actually mean and how they are effective. Drive for example is pointless without focus and direction, and what exactly is entrepreneurial ability anyway.

So perhaps it is not simply the acquisition of these skills as individual abilities but the way in which they are integrated together that is at the heart of a successful business leader. In which case a suitable game would have to not simply encourage these skills but integrate them in the correct proportions and at the correct stages in order to be effective. Too much drive to early could lead to mistakes and failures that could be discouraging. To much vision without drive could lead to frustration. So how would we go about tailoring a suitable game? It would need to begin with establishing a clear end point or goal. This is at the core of business planning and decision making. Perhaps it could start with multiple end points and the player has to select the one that he or she feels is most appropriate. There would be no way of the player establishing if their decision had been correct until later in the game and this would need to be made clear to the player. This would encourage reasoned decision making. It would have to be time critical, putting pressure on the player from the outset. Perhaps a screen with four scenarios and five minutes to make a choice. This choice would then lead into the game proper.

Perhaps the most accurate platform would be a variant of the classic Football Management game combined with the format of the Civilization style games of Sid Meier. Having established a start point the player would be presented with decisions to be made and consequences of those decisions. At each stage there would be an opportunity for the player to respond to in-game prompts for justifications of decision, perhaps in the manner of boardroom conflicts or staff activity. Throughout the game there would be monitoring of the speed and accuracy of input from the player and addition pressure being brought in through time limits for actions. This would encourage a refinement in the decision making process but would need to be teamed with something within the game play that made the whole experience more than simply a game.

The idea that leaps to mind is to use the previously mentioned format of The Apprentice. You would have a monthly league table of players globally divisions separating players by experience so that new entrants to the game were competing against other new entrants rather than hardened veterans. The pay-off would then be that the very best players were offered positions within the organizational structure of the gaming company, or the game platform company. In my vision this would give the company behind the game an excellent way of analyzing potential candidates through psychometric profiling as well as giving players a clearly defined goal to strive for. The infrastructure is already in place as are the gaming platforms and I think this could be a strong route forward for bringing the historically child and adolescent focused game environment firmly into the mainstream. It might also serve to encourage strategic thinking and research in players if structured in the right way.

The applications for this style of gaming could go beyond business into education although this is a more ethically challenging area……

Does Paganism fit comfortably into modern life?

I sometimes find it difficult to reconcile my Pagan beliefs with my day to day existence. There, I’ve said it, I’ve admitted that I am not Uber-Pagan, not some kind of green suited, tree dwelling half elf at one with the birds and plants and animals. I live in a society where in order to exist I need food, fuel, shelter, healthcare, transport and so on. I need to work to live. I need to shop for some things I can’t produce myself. I am probably never going to be in a position to be self sufficient. So, the question is, to what extent can I live a “Pagan” life within the constraints of a modern Western urban setting? For me this comes down to a question of awareness and an understanding of limitations, coupled with a constant process of self-challenge to try to make the fit more complete. My Pagan beliefs are that I should tread as lightly as possible on Mother Earth, leaving as little impact as possible whilst maintaining myself as one of her creatures in the best way I can, physically, emotionally, mentally and spiritually.

To take living lightly as a start point, what does this actually mean to me? I understand that almost everything I do leaves a mark on the Mother. The house I live in is built from her skin. The furniture I use is made from her children of the forest. The roads that I use to get around prevent water from seeping into her pores. Every time I turn on a light or get on a bus I am consuming energy that was part of the fabric of her garments and polluting the air that she breaths. The food that I eat is produced in ways that defy nature rather than working with her and the clothes that I wear are questionable in provenance. And that is just the start point, the issues run far deeper into banking practices, governance, education, health, defence, energy and so on. Some of these I can influence directly, some are more of a challenge being outside my immediate control. It can sometimes seem overwhelming to think about what difference I as an individual can make given the vast consumer base of the Western World. It took me a long while to accept that my decisions had value, had worth and made any difference at all, but I reached a point whereby I had to live according to my beliefs, or give up my beliefs. The disconnect between the two states becoming too damaging to me psychologically.

I made the decision to understand each of my purchasing decisions, and to understand which could be modified, and in what way they could be modified. The start point was to establish a habit of analysis about every decision, in such a way that the analysis process did not remove my ability to make decisions. This was quite a tricky balancing act to begin with and there were times when I found it impossible to make a decision within a timeframe that was acceptable, leading to some frustration on my part and quite a lot of brow beating. Over time the process became easier as I established a more secure framework within which to make decisions, but it has been a slow and at times painful process. I’m not in any sense suggesting this as a requirement of a Pagan path, just something that was specific to me, but I did find that taking the extra step of analyzing my decision making process and reaching an understanding of the difference between wants and needs, and the personal necessity of understanding how flexible my personal ethics are and to what extent I am prepared to compromise. It has been an interesting process for me, and I wonder to what extent other people have modified their activities, or their beliefs, or both to fit their Paganism into their day to day life?