Picture credit: keenahn

How long will it be before we have truly dynamic and personalised soundtracks for our lives?

Movies have long had soundtrack music carefully chosen to enrich the scenery and to complement the action. The music affects our interpretation of the situations, consciously and sub-consciously.

Meanwhile many people routinely use portable players to listen to music as they go about their daily lives.

We carry 3G ‘phones and Wifi devices that make network connectivity almost ubiquitous.

We have web services, such as spotify and blip.fm, that provide us with access to infinitely expandable jukeboxes.

So how long will it be before we have truly dynamic and personalised soundtracks for our lives, delivered through technology mash-ups?

The dynamic playlists could be random, profiled for preferences/context/ time of day, sponsored and interesting.

If you could profile your soundtrack for life, what would it  look like?

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Picture credit: doortoriver

The productivity of workers in France continues to lead the Western world, despite a well-deserved reputation for leisurely lunch-breaks and incredibly frequent holidays.

So should we all be taking lessons from the French? I think so.

We probably all recognise the familiar Gallic stereotype of workers, even in the high-tech industries, with a very relaxed attitude to life; frequently expressing their indifference to trying circumstances with a casual shrug of the shoulders, a tilted head and a pouting lower lip noisily expressing a non-existent fruit pip.

It never ceases to amaze highly stressed-out and highly driven countries such as the UK, with an allegedly superior Anglo-Saxon work ethic, how people with such a laid-back attitude can ever achieve anything worthwhile. But they do.

delivering Big Change

The French have a strong track record in successfully delivering large public projects and we could do far worse than taking a closer look at the French way of managing. We might well learn some very useful lessons about delivering Big Change.

For example, you only have to look at the sustained litany of struggling government IT projects in the UK and wonder if we will ever make things easier for ourselves; or if we are forever condemned to a future where we always fail to keep the project cost, quality and timescale plates spinning harmoniously – at tremendous expense to our pockets and national reputation.

look behind the mask

Don’t be fooled by the superficial, devil-may-care  appearance of the French. Behind their carefully groomed façade of insouciance, they are really closet bureaucrats par excellence.

Admittedly their desire for orderliness may seem to the untrained eye more like bloody-mindedness but I think that closer investigation is merited, particularly given our own challenged circumstances and deteriorating track record.

A word of caution, however, before you book the next available train/ plane in search of the Holy Grail. Don’t bother going to France until September because one of the first lessons we can learn from the French is that they know how to have a proper break in August.

get some Summer sun

They don’t trade their Summer sunshine for a project plan doomed to inexorable slippage caused by the frequent and random absences of key players at critical points, which is what all too often happens with UK projects scheduled to run through the Summer months.

Why don’t we declare a closed season for major works during months without an “R” in their name?

Maybe we too should adopt the simple approach of starting major projects in September, rather than April, and see what that can do for our productivity and performance.

Just think, we might end up with better projects, better outcomes and a bit of sun on our backs, instead of unexpected cost, delay and disappointment.

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Picture credit: virginmedia

Would you ever go to work completely naked? Would you be comfortable if your colleagues stripped off too and you all went about the daily routine in your business birthday suits? And, if the proceedings were filmed for TV broadcast?

Well that’s exactly what David Taylor (aka the Naked Leader) expected some unsuspecting brave workers to do recently.

He eventually persuaded the staff of a small Newcastle advertising agency that their journey towards business improvement depended on them all stripping off for the day.

This was not so much a dress-down Friday as a don’t-dress-at-all Friday and it takes balls to carry off such an exercise without becoming completely tacky.

I have known David Taylor since 1999 and occasionally shared a platform at IT events so watching his programme The Naked Office was an interesting opportunity for me to observe his coaching approach in a very, very different context.

Although the dénouement was quite different, the basic format of the show was very familiar: business guru helps struggling company to self-realisation. No surprise that improving team-work and communication would be the most likely outcomes of the exercise.

I appreciate that, in the interests of ‘good telly,’ much of any truly insightful footage ended up on the cutting-room floor rather than in the finished programme. Nevertheless I would have preferred to see more of the subsequent business upturn that followed the big bare day.

The end credits reeled off some impressive details about how fortunes have changed for onebestway which would seem to indicate a very successful intervention by David Taylor; but it would have been good to see the participants reflect on how they are now working differently since getting their kit off.

And, of course, the really big unresolved issue is: why did The Naked Leader remain fully clothed throughout, doesn’t David believe in eating his own dog chow?

Here’s how Fox TV News reacted to the show:

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