Meeting behaviour in a recession

Martin Vogel

By Martin Vogel

difficult meeting

As a practitioner in medialand, I learned the value of creative behaviours – ways to open up thinking and new ideas in order to develop better products.  I particularly admired a book called Sticky Wisdom by ?What If!, a group of consultants who – while challenged with punctuation – cut through the fog regarding innovation.  Sticky Wisdom demonstrates that creativity needn’t be the preserve of a particularly talented cadre of employees.  It can be cultivated through techniques and exercises to encourage freshness of thinking, open mindedness, and a determination to incubate abstract proposals to tangible reality.

The book seems to point to a more attractive way of being in organisations.  It provides ways to challenge the bureaucratic reflex which closes down ideas with criticism before they have even had a chance to develop, and it shows how to facilitate behaviours which display respect to one another.  So it is perhaps not surprising that organisations have drawn on creative behaviours and tried to apply them more widely.  As a freelance consultant, I have been struck to find the ?What If! model and others like it being adopted as templates for meeting behaviours in general.

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Barack Obama: new model leader

Martin Vogel3 Comments

By Martin Vogel

Barack Obama at Jefferson Jackson Dinner, Des Moines, Iowa
Barack Obama, Iowa, November 2007

When Barack Obama is inaugurated as US President on Tuesday he will usher in not just a break with the eight years of the Bush Administration, but a distincitively modern humanistic style of leadership which has never been tested at this level. If his presidency is a success, it will have a profound impact on how leaders everywhere perceive themselves and how to be effective in the 21st Century.

One of Obama’s most striking chracteristics is the way he draws on ways of being as a leader which have been advocated as best practice for thirty years or more, but which he synthesises into a style which seems strikingly authentic and demonstrably impactful. He comes across as a man who is grounded, at ease with himself, totally focussed, and able to connect with people with integrity.

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Another crisis in public service broadcasting

Martin Vogel

By Martin Vogel

Another crisis in public service broadcasting
Lord Reith.

Goodness gracious, what would Reith have thought?

Lord Reith, the founder of the BBC, would certainly not have shared the bemusement that many have felt at the extent of media coverage and public outrage focussed on the Sachsgate scandal.  He would have viscerally appreciated why the national conversation has been dominated by reaction to two boorish entertainers, handsomely paid by the public purse, using the public airwaves to humiliate a young woman in obscene phone calls to her grandfather, a much-loved actor.

The clarity of Reith’s original mission for the BBC to inform, educate and entertain pointed to some degree of moral purpose which still shapes people’s expectations of the organisation.  Since the last renewal of the BBC’s charter at the beginning of 2007, the Reithian mission has given way to six, rather more mushy, “public purposes“.  These could justify almost any activity the BBC chooses to undertake – and, inside the BBC, they do, if we are to judge by Russell Brand’s and Jonathan Ross’s antics and the tardiness of the management’s response.

What is strange is that this is still the case, given everything that has happened in recent years: Hutton, Queengate and the phone-in scandals.  Last week’s events are an object lesson in how an organisation in reputational crisis fails to learn the lessons of its previous mistakes.  Banks, take note.

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Sources of inspiration: Alan Johnston

Martin Vogel

By Martin Vogel

Alan Johnston
Alan Johnston

A year ago this week, I was listening to a radio programme which made such an impression on me that my thoughts have returned to it many times since.  It was a 30-minute essay by the BBC reporter, Alan Johnston, in which he described his experience of being kidnapped and held hostage in Gaza.  He’d been seized by Palestinian militants in March 2007, and held for nearly four months.

As a BBC employee at the time, and a former journalist, I’d naturally taken a great interest in his story and shared the relief and joy that coursed through the organisation when he was released.  I didn’t know Alan Johnston personally, but recognised the integrity and courage of his journalism.  In describing his ordeal, he showed characteristic decency as his narrative combined understanding of his tormentors with great insight into his personal condition.

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Libraries are needed now more than ever

Martin Vogel

By Martin Vogel

West End Lane, NW6 – home to a dozen cafes and a library

Camden Council in north London, where I live, is considering changing the ethos of its libraries – to allow people to bring in food and drink and use their mobile phones.  The intention is to make libraries more appealing to young people.

As both a library user and the parent of a young person, this strikes me as an unfortunate and misguided idea.  Libraries are one of the few public spaces in the inner city to which people can turn for quiet.  Swiss Cottage, in the borough, hosts one of the best public libraries in the capital.  Young people constitute a significant proportion of the users.  They go there to find space where they can give unashamed attention to learning.  It’s a place of thought, study and contemplation.  It is wholly unsuited to be a stage for mobile phone conversations or snacking.  Urban life provides an abundance of venues for these activities.  The library offers an alternative realm.

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Thoughts on getting through turbulent times

Martin Vogel1 Comment

By Martin Vogel

Lehman Brothers staff, London, 16 September 2008

When I talk to people in the financial sector, I understand the meaning of the current turmoil being a crisis unprecedented in our lifetimes.  The experience of redundancy is  unlike that any of us are likely to have come across before.  With banking institutions disappearing at a rate of knots, others laying off staff in their thousands and many of the remainder uninterested in hiring, the impression of alternative options rapidly closing down throughout the world can only compound the sense of shock for those who have suddenly lost their jobs.

I’ve seen plenty of advice to bankers along the lines of: polish up your CV and interviewing skills, tap into your network and be prepared to move.  There may be a place for these tried and tested career tactics.  But I wonder whether it is adequate to the moment to rely wholly on this approach.  When people suffer a shocking loss, they typically go through experiences such as denial, anger and depression before they feel able to accept the situation and engage with it constructively.  The slightly frenetic character of well-intentioned advice on job search skills seems to me to risk encouraging people into activities which – for some of them, at least – may be counter-productive.

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The meaning of cycle rage

Martin Vogel2 Comments

By Martin Vogel

Cyclist, Theobald’s Road

My trusted advisor tells me my blog posts are “very eclectic”.  I don’t thinks she intends this as positive feedback.  She’ll be unimpressed, then, by this tangent into the world of cycling.  Bear with me.  It’s a tale of incivility, self-delusion and reluctance to accept responsibility.  An exploration, if you will, of the banes of modern life.

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Theory and practice in living well

Martin Vogel

By Martin Vogel

Rodin’s ‘The Thinker’

As part of my continuance professional development as a coach, I try to immerse myself in the psychological perspectives that inform the profession.  But recently I’ve turned as much to philosophical and social theory to make sense of the challenges that people face in their lives.  So it was with some interest that I found Julian Baggini writing in The Guardian this week on the contribution philosophy can make to helping us live well.

Baggini was reviewing a new series of books – called The Art of Living – which aims to give the general reader an overview of philosophical insights into our age.  He finds that the books’ authors have interesting and thought-provoking things to say about such subjects as illness, hunger or even fashion.  But they tend to reach conclusions that others commonly reach without recourse to the likes of Aristotle or Heidegger.

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Never to get lost is not to live

Martin Vogel

By Martin Vogel

Loch Lomond, Scotland

Book review: A Field Guide to Getting Lost by Rebecca Solnit

Rebecca Solnit writes non-fiction as if it were a work of poetry. A Field Guide to Getting Lost is part cultural history, part philosophy: a meditation on loss and being lost.

The meaning of these experiences – the familiar falling away and the unfamiliar appearing – is different today than it was in the past.  19th century travellers thought nothing of being off course for days at a time; for us, anxiety sets in within minutes of losing our way.  People had the skills to navigate the natural landscape and with this came a sense of optimism about their ability to find their way and survive.  Today,  even those who walk in the wilderness lack this familiarity with the landscape and rely on mobile phones to get them out of trouble.

For Rebecca Solnit, to live this way is to miss something of the very essence of life: “Never to get lost is not to live.”  Indeed, her theme is less the hazards of getting lost and more a hymn to losing oneself – the life of discovery that comes with living with uncertainty.

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Why do people turn to the arts?

Martin Vogel

By Martin Vogel

The Angel of the North, Gateshead

Arts companies seem to be developing a healthy interest in the intrinsic benefits of the arts, if this week’s annual conference of the Arts Marketing Association is a guide. This seems slightly counter-intuitive. At a time when many companies are feeling the loss of public funding, you might expect the arts to intensify their focus on the public policy objectives which secure grants – such as their economic impact. Possibly, the more challenging financial environment is freeing the sector to think outside the box.

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How local councils are surprised by things which seem obvious to the rest of us

Martin Vogel

By Martin Vogel

Perrin’s Court, Hampstead, where cobbles were covered over with tarmac

Close to where I live in north London, Camden Council’s road maintenance team have upset residents by resurfacing part of an 18th century cobbled street with tarmac.  Perrin’s Court in Hampstead is a quiet, semi-pedestrianised alley with pavement cafés.  People while away a pleasant hour here in what’s something of an oasis from the heavy traffic which cuts through the rest of the neighbourhood.  It’s no surprise then that they should turn apoplectic at the desecration of a charming environment.

No surprise, that is, except to the bureaucrats in Camden town hall whose sense of empathy failed them.

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