Was I the last to know that most of the big charities make more money by “trading” than they do from donations.   So if I look at a few :

• Leonard Cheshire - 92% of income from Charitable Activities 7.5% from donations
• Action for Children  – 90.8%  of income from Charitable Activities  7.7% from donations
• BARNARDO’S  -64 % of income from Charitable Activities 17.8% from donations

Many do rely on donations:

• Help for Heroes  – 14% from Charitable Activities and 79.7% from donations
• NSPCC – 15% of income from Charitable Activities 76% from donations
• ALZHEIMER’S SOCIETY – 34.9% of income from Charitable Activities 54.2% from donations

You can find all of this information from the Charity Commission web site.

Should the corporate response be the same for those both groups?  Perhaps businesses should provide more support to those that rely on donations.

I am often  asked for recommendations for restaurants in London.   The best place for a business lunch or a pre or post theatre dinner.  If you need to find and or reserve a table, try www.hardens.com or www.toptable.com. 

These are not the best in London just the ones that I like at the moment

Business Lunch or Dinner:  (Important that it is relatively quite) I would think about:

• Cinnamon Club – great for breakfast
• The Thomas Cubitt – Upstairs
• Boisdale’s  – in the old dining room (can be noisy in main area if there is live Jazz)

Pre or Post Theatre (can be a bit noisy)

• Busaba Eathai – Various  + Wardour Street and Store Street
• Wahaca  – Various, Wardour Street is a great location
• Inimo  Soho– very cool ordering system good place to take teenage offspring

Out East

• St John’s Bread and Wine  – Shoreditch
• Franco Manca in Brixton
• Tayyabs in Shoreditch

Our West

• Indian Zing in Hammersmith
• Franco Manca in Chiswick
• Princess Victoria  -  Shepherds Bush  – great for Sunday Lunch

South of the River

• Bangalore Express  – Waterloo (try up  ladder … you will know what I mean when you get there)
• Skylon  – table near the Window
• Oxo Tower  if you must

When I listened beyond the rhetoric and read between the lines (thanks to the King’s Fund for teaching me how to do it)  I discovered:

1. Frances Maude blames the Civil Service for all the poor procurement, delivery and funding issues in Government today.

2. The Civil Service blames the suppliers for all the poor procurement, delivery and funding issues in Government today.

3. Civil Servants working in Government ICT blame Microsoft, Oracle, SAP, IBM, HP, BT, the “big 4”, and anyone in IT for all the poor procurement, delivery and funding issues in Government today.

4. Anyone working in Government would prefer to mention a US digital company… like Twitter or Facebook long before they mention a British firm like ARM or Huddle.

5. Left on their own Civil Servants will look after themselves first, look no further than MyCSP (My Civil Service Pension), the first Social Enterprise to come out of the Cabinet Office.

6. No one in the Civil Service seems to know what a Social Enterprise is… one senior leader in Civil Service said … “oh yes all the Twitter and Facebook stuff… oh very good”… words fail me!

7. In talking about New Business Models for delivery of public services Civil Servants  can only talk in terms of the old ways.

8. When discussing the leadership of change they refer to civil servants changing their jobs; never losing their jobs… there is a difference.

9. Most Civil Service leaders I met at the conference gave the impression that it is impossible the think about or visualise the future, and they seem to have no knowledge of the Popcorn Institute , IDEO, Imperial College or UCL or anyone that has a track record of doing just that.

10. And finally I learnt never to go to one of these things again.

If you feel that the Buck stops above you then you are not a leader. 

It strikes me that Civil Servants in the UK want all the benefits of having their cake and eating it.  They want to be seen as leaders, with all the trappings that come with such a position.    But when their leadership fails they want to pass the buck and be protected.   Too easily they  use the language of a victim rather than that of a leader, collapsing into self pity and recrimination.

So if you find yourself managing complexity then you are a manager.   If you are managing change then you are a leader.  Professor John Kotter has been explaining this for years.   It was Rudyard Kipling that really nailed this in his poem If.   The shortest essay on leadership I know.

Oh and given that he was born in Bombay, I wonder if the UK Border Agency would have let him into the UK.   

What number were you?  Find out at the BBC

I love this.

Hat tip to Tom Studdes at http://www.forimpact.org/

The MPA of the Cabinet Office have published their report into National Programme for IT in England.  Well, I was hoping for something better, I don’t mind the spelling mistakes, I guess they are using some new open source document software.   I don’t mind the errors of fact, I really don’t mind that fact that it is dull and badly written.  

I object to the months of rhetoric from the MPA that they are the experts… a Regimental Sergeant Major once told me… “you know what an expert is don’t you Sir… X the unknown quantity and spurt.. a drip under pressure”. 

The first error is in Para 1, the statement  it is not true and there is no point in belittling Consultants… they are the ones that are going to have to lead the NHS out of the blind alley that NPfIT and most of the report writers have taken it in the first place.  Second issue is also with the paragraph 1 … it is about the only mention of Primary Care in the whole document… what were they thinking?

So my recommendation is… read it, you need to realise how bad things have got not; only with  NHS IT but also the MPA’s ability to explain why things went so wrong. 

I genuinely feel that the Cabinet Office  think that no one could ever run an effective ICT project… so their answer is “don’t commission ICT projects”.  The answers lies in having  sufficient, capable and motivated ICT staff in Government…. sadly that may be  more complex than the Gordian Knot…. and bold cuts will not solve this problem.

I won’t be writing  my comments with a fountain pen on the report and sending it back to them.

I was sitting in the Chapel of the Royal Military Academy Sandhurst a couple of  Sundays ago.  It is a place of profound peace.  Standing at the lectern was Major-General Patrick Marriott CBE.  He was talking about the moral aspect to leadership.  He quotes Viscount Alanbrooke and Viscount Slim and the importance of having a strong moral compass.We listened intently.

As we walked out of the Chapel into the square at the back of Old College my mind ran to the death in custody of prisoners during the Iraq War, that was a clear lack of leadership,  but  also to the lack of moral leadership in business today.   Many business leaders  seem not to think out the broader consequences of their actions, the lack of attention to detail (UBS) the booze culture (IT Industry), profit before people (Southern Cross).

I am pretty sure that without strong moral leadership,  a well defined social aspect to the standards, values and business purpose,  a  “for profit” commercial enterprise will struggle to retain its place in the market in the next 10 years.   It is now more important than at anytime in the past to think more broadly than just profit.

There is a wonderful feature in Outlook (PC or Mac). You can ignore all emails by conversation or email alias. There are 5 people in my current organisation that my inbox rules routinely place in a special folder… a folder I rarely look at… and my life is better for it.

Today, however, marks a new first.. I now routinely screen all mails to a special folder from one whole business department. The constant and thoughtless communications from this lot have been getting in the way of the day job… so marked with the Black Spot they be.

Recently I have attended a number of meetings to  discuss public service reform, it has been a theme that has come up over coffee, Sunday lunch and at the pub as well as these more formal gatherings.

In most of these discussion we seemed to reiterate all the old themes.. with the odd politicians stoutly defending the status quo while seeming to talk a new reality.  And when the old guard were present they saluted the unfathomable issues and nod to the half-truths used to explain the impossibility of thinking anything different.   While I agree with Hume that truth only exists in a discussion between friends I doubt that  much truth was agreed in any of our discussions. 

The quick polarisation to Ryan Air and “I don’t like the Easy Jet web site” show that no one wants to know that if Central Government took Easy Jet’s approach to ICT then Central Government would save £15Bn a year in ICT costs…. Yes that is £15Bn,  no really £15Bn a year .. yeah I know….

There has been no chance of thinking that the 3^rd sector might play a role or god forbid that the private sector might be better at anything… whenever the subject of  private education raised it is quickly  is glossed over as being unimportant or irrelevant by the  civil servants present.    Maybe I am meeting the wrong Civil Servants…. I am sue I am asking the wrong questions.

To my mind there was an elephant standing close to these conversations, the silent civil servant majority, the saboteurs, as someone said during one of these round trips to the eventual Blinding Glimpse of the Obvious.   People, that for the last few years have been the butt of all that is “wrong” with the Public Sector.   Expect that  they are the building blocks of the huge state bureaucracies that support the careers of the senior civil servants.  The issue is Leadership not the workers… shocking that anyone would think otherwise.  Honestly, why does the each Government Department need a CTO for goodness sake.  .

My real concern is that if we are to reform  public services then inviting the Public Sector to discuss it is worthwhile but it not THE answer, you need to get; Peter Holbrook,  Patrick Lewis, Julia Grant, Nick Bosanquet, Charles Midenahall and Ceri Jones in a room… listen to them you will hear the new reality,yet again  the future is here it is still poorly distributed.