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Of course there is. But how do you tell the difference between an excuse and a reason?

Well an excuse is generally our way of  trying to excuse our behaviour: to justify ourselves in a bad situation – before, during or after the event.

Whereas a reason is more straightforward: it’s the cause (direct or indirect) of the event.

A measure of our integrity is the balance we strike between giving excuses and reasons.

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It’s a very difficult situation for him, because he was using YouTube as the sole repository of his video output. So without his account, he has lost access to a back-catalogue of valuable stuff.

I am sure that Google and Youtube are within their rights and I can’t really comment on the details of the case.

But setting aside the nature of the disputed copyright violation content for a moment, there are a couple of observations that might be drawn as lessons for others:

Firstly, the YouTube “Three Strikes” policy seems to have been invoked without a prior warning.

Secondly, committing clearly valuable content (unique business video creations) to a non-contractual provider in the cloud, without backup provision, is a clear risk – albeit a risk that many of us routinely ignore, either wittingly or unwittingly.

Mark has my commiserations for his predicament and I do hope he can reach a settlement with Google/ YouTube, even if they only re-instate his account on a “final warning” basis.

Of course the real lesson is: what Google giveth, Google may taketh away.

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Hmm, not many of you waving. Perhaps because transformational change programmes are as widely-strewn as litter at a confetti-manufacturers’ convention.

And yet genuine business transformation is rarely achieved by such initiatives.

So why do we persist in using the T word?

Do we really believe that our fortunes will be transformed, or is the T word just a higher tog-rated comfort blanket for those of us who would like things to be better?

The over-use of the word Transformation devalues its own currency because the eventual outcomes are only rarely truly transformational.

For sure Transformation becomes even more attractive during difficult times. But, maybe, for the sake of integrity, we should hold a moratorium on the use of the T word and have the honesty to dub our initiatives properly: as Business Improvement.

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We don’t, however, spend so much time thinking about real team-building – i.e. creating new teams, from scratch. Which is a pity. Of course such opportunities don’t present quite as often, because most organizations usually have well-established teams.

Nevertheless, new teams and departments are sometimes created, either by mergers and acquisitions activity, or by our old friend: “corporate re-organization;” that’s when we usually get the chance to design a new team, even if some of the members are simply being shuffled about.

One of the big problems with such team-building is that it usually has to be done quickly, we may not be allowed the luxury of deliberating the pros and cons of our team design.

Which is perhaps why we have to re-organize so often, to correct hasty design faults.

How could this be different?

Well, off the top of my head, I can think of a couple of ways: firstly by making more time for team design when we actually do have to build; secondly by occasionally thinking, speculatively, about how we would re-design our current team, if we had to do so now – try it, the exercise is always thought-provoking.

But every new team has to start somewhere so here is the killer question: which role is first on your new team-sheet and why?

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