Take a risk …

… recruit chimps not graduates, letting go and wandering about.

The new boss of the Health and Safety Commission, Judith Hackitt, has said that she wants an end to an over-cautious approach to H&S matters. Apparently she is in the habit of writing to local authorities and others to ‘warn’ them not to take an over-zealous approach to protecting the public or their employees. As she rightly points out, there is a serious job to be done in improving safety in the workplace and avoiding unnecessary or excessive risk. But banning playground games of conkers or requiring Father Christmas to wear a hard hat in case a decoration falls off the Christmas Tree is unnecessary and not helpful to the cause. Well done Judith!

A Japanese study has shown that young chimpanzees have better memories than university students. Probably because they spend less time in the students’ union bar I would think. I wonder if old chimps get to the top of the tree and then can’t remember why they are there?

My excuse for a faltering memory is that there is just so much in there that the ‘hard drive’ is getting a bit full. I read two interesting articles today. The first suggested that having a to do list might not be that helpful. We tend to clutter these lists with things that we would like to do or that we feel we should do rather than just listing the things we must do. As a result we are likely to suffer the ‘can’t see the wood for the trees’ syndrome. It was suggested that we should have a let go list alongside the to do list. On it we should identify what doesn’t really need doing or what could be delegated.

Once we have cleared most of the stuff off our to do list we will then have time to look around and to see what is going on in our business, in the businesses of our competitors and with our customers. Yes, the second article reminded us of the benefits of wandering about, of talking to people, watching people, looking at how processes work in reality as opposed to in theory. By listening and watching we will truly understand what is going on in a way that we never will if we remain in our offices.

Going back a good few years, when I worked in the motor industry, I had to go to a meeting near Dusseldorf. I drove there. My marketing colleagues flew there, as did delegates from Paris, Munich and even Brussels I think. They seemed amazed that I should have driven. OK, so I was out of the office for a little longer, but that drive brought home to me the differences between driving on one of our motorways or the French and Belgian autoroutes and the German autobahns. The speed differentials experienced in Germany just do not exist in other parts of Europe. I then fully understood why our German sales company put such an emphasis on high speed stability and brake performance. Finding a large Mercedes, BMW or a Porsche going 30 or 40 miles an hour faster boring down on you tends to make you dive for cover into a gap in the traffic in the slow lane. The only snag is that the truck that defines the front of the gap is going 40mph slower than you. Given good stability and excellent brakes you might survive. The warning signs along the autobahn suggest that plenty don’t.

You can read about these things, you can be told about them, but there is nothing like experiencing them first hand to appreciate the significance. So whether you get out and about on foot or by other means, do get out and find what life’s like outside of the confines of the office.


David Wike