Simple sign removal with big implications...

"Barnet Homes, a north London social landlord is going to consign ‘no ball games’ signs on its estates to history through a new campaign. Barnet Homes will be removing all ‘no ball games’ signs and other 'authoritarian' signage from its council estates in what it believes to be the first campaign of its kind by any social landlord in the UK. The signs will not be replaced unless there is evidence of significant demand from local residents"
 Well done Barnet Homes!!   These signs are symbols of a paternalistic, authoritarian regime and not of landlord that empowers its tenants. And yes there may be friction between different sections of the community about whether they want ball games (and a few broken windows!  people might have to choose where to park more carefully)  but that should be about mediation and not blanket prohibition. It's about being part of the community not expecting the authorities to solve all our problems.
Would you want to live somewhere where ball games were prohibited?
If this initiative spread and we could get lots more kids playing football (with a real ball and not in a virtual world of PS or X Box)... what might happen to the state of English football.. childhood obesity... .. the new conversations between generations and cultures...

Curious... coincidence or not? The knife nick

Earlier in the week I read a newspaper article about a woman who stabbed herself with a knife whilst slicing an avocado. Next day she is on the operating table with some potentially fatal infection and gets a plaster cast for her pains. Seemed pretty amazing to me (and her) that a little nick with a knife could do so much damage. Apparently she nicked the tendon sheath.....

So should I have been surprised when yesterday i sliced through my finger nail with a knife? Different injury, different activity (bacon not avocado) but still a knife.

I know that when we identify something as interesting or important then our brain stops that deleting trick it has and starts paying attention...but this is silly. Surely my brain should have been  paying attention to not slicing my finger?


I don't know the answer. I just know it hurts and is really making my typing inaccurate and slow.
Still I think the phrase 'be careful what you wish for....' should maybes be 'be careful what you think about...'

I'll be better tomorrow.

Casserole was nice when we eventually got it!

Conference season starts, sharpen up your networking skills

This week marks the National Housing Federation Conference and the start of the season.  Gathered together in Birmingham will be hundreds of people all with common interest of social housing. They will chat, listen to speeches, go to workshops and  they will justify attendance and the hours spent in the bar by ‘networking’.  There will be lots of suppliers, some with stands at the exhibitions and some without; all hoping to raise their profile with the buyers and develop more new business. They will be sponsoring drinks and dinners and entertainment. These behaviours  will be repeated at  sector conferences and party conferences across the land for the next few months.

These conferences should to be fantastic learning opportunities; the sessions should be stimulating the workshops engaging and the networking fruitful.

But networking, even in professional circles is not always easy. From an early age we are taught not to talk to strangers, many of us are shy about encounters with someone we don’t know. Different personalities have different levels of comfort with the whole concept of meeting strangers, some feeling much more threatened than others.  Some people feel affronted by people who are overly chummy or who share information really quickly. Entering a room full of people you don’t know is probably the second most terrifying experience in business, the first would be  having to make a presentation to them! So how do you make the networking more fruitful?

Have a goal. Decide what it is you want from this opportunity to network. Setting yourself a goal will increase your motivation.  Is there a key topic that you would like to find information about? Why are you networking? In what way do you want to expand your network? Maybe you want to capture  funny stories to amuse an audience with or ask people for the most innovative thing their organisation has done this year.

Don’t just talk to the people you already know. That’s rather obvious and sometimes talking to people you know and re-connecting with those you have not seen for a while is the great strategy, but you may be kidding yourself; there is a room full of opportunities to be had. You may want to read the delegate list and identify a couple of people you really want to meet. Work out where you can come up against them.

Get into conversations. Even if you have gone to the conference with other people, try sitting separately at the sessions and at the tea breaks. The easiest people to get into conversations with are those on their own. They are probably really keen for someone to join them.  Watch the body language of groups identify people in twos or threes whose body language suggests they are open to joiners (facing slightly outwards, scanning the room) rather than deep in a huddle and closed.  Avoid bigger groups unless you know someone in the group who can ease you in.

Be ready with your introductory chat. You can try ‘do you come here often?’ but it may not be the most suitable. Be ready to introduce yourself with a brief about what you do so that your listener will be able to put you in context. Shake their hand firmly, look them in the eye and be glad to meet them.  Be ready with a first question for them. At a conference you can ask about what they thought about the last session. Listen more than talk and use all the techniques you know about building rapport. Nod, smile, mirror their body language, use their metaphors. Keep being interested and ask questions.

Find out how what problems they are wrestling with. Connect them to someone who can help. Be a problem solver. Give information as well as asking. If you are networking with a purpose, tell them what your knowledge quest is and get them to introduce you to others who may help you. An introduction confers some status.

Share your business card and seek theirs. Make sure you note who you have talked to and what about.  Keeping records, particularly if your memory is shaky will enable you to pick up on shared topics when you meet again and it will enable you to connect other people who have the same need.

Follow up. If you want to build a relationship from your encounter you have to follow up. By giving them something they were looking for. So if you set yourself the challenge of identifying organisations that run mentoring schemes; share the list with those you talked to. You may well get remembered as ‘the mentoring guy’, but that’s better than not being remembered at all. Don’t do the business at the event, make a date to meet after, or agree to phone to make a date and do it. Get yourself a reputation for reliability and follow through. And do it promptly after the event.

And what will you get out of all this effort that hiding in the corner reading a magazine won’t get you?

48% of people find new jobs through people they know. Strategic partnerships can be formed through the discovery of common goals, common problems or common solutions.  Friendships can be made and support garnered.  Just knowing that others are facing the same challenges can be invigorating.

So off to conference with the goal identify, and the preparation done – enjoy yourself anfd have a fruitful networking time!

Is your name helping or hindering your career?

LinkedIn, the world's largest professional network with more than 100 million members worldwide, today released LinkedInsights data that reveal interesting findings about the top names of CEOs. The LinkedInsights data also showed surprising correlations among the lengths of names that dominate certain fields. For instance, CEOs in the United States often have four letter names (like Jack and Fred). According to the LinkedInsights data, the top five names for male CEOs globally are:

1. Peter
2. Bob
3. Jack
4. Bruce
5. Fred

The top five names for female CEOs globally are:

1. Deborah
2. Sally
3. Debra
4. Cynthia
5. Carolyn

“It’s no secret that people often associate their title, employer and even their education as part of what defines them and their professional brand,” said Monica Rogati, LinkedIn’s senior data scientist. “What’s interesting about this data is that we were able to discover a correlation between a professional’s name and the industry or functional area in which they work.” For instance, in the U.S., there’s an interesting relationship between the amount of letters and top names for professionals in certain functional areas. Sales professionals tend to have short names, around four letters (like Chip, Todd and Trey), while engineers tend to have longer names, around six letters (like Rajesh, Jeremy and Andrew). U.S. professionals in the food and restaurant industry tend to have longer French names (like Thierry, Philippe and Laurent). “Typically hypocorisms, the shorter form of a given name, are used in intimate situations as a nickname or a term of endearment,” said Dr. Frank Nuessel, the editor of NAMES: A Journal of Onomastics (a publication of the American Name Society) and a professor of classical and modern languages at the University of Louisville. “It’s possible that sales professionals in the U.S. and male CEOs around the world use these shortened versions of their name as a way to be more approachable and accessible to potential clients. Interestingly enough, female CEOs appear to prefer to use their full names and not nicknames, which could signify that they want to be taken more seriously and want co-workers to think of them in a more professional light.”
So what Linked In are saying is, think about your name and what you call yourself to others in your profile.. it is giving off signals you might not have considered.
But don't foget this is global research with a  US bias.
BUT Bruce, really? are there lots of CEO's called Bruce? Apologies to you if you are called Bruce.......

Is customer led housing design ending family life?

I'm not an expert in housing, I'm an expert in career planning and coaching but that does not stop me having thoughts and opinions. Doesn't stop me from worrying or wanting to sound off. So sorry if my facts are wrong.. happy to be corrected but here are some of those thoughts.
The other night the three members of my family were all sat in separate rooms on separate computers. Family life eh? Well it's easy. We don't argue, we don't relate, we don't have tension or communication or affection or all the roller coaster that the phrase 'family life' implies.
As i write there is a TV programme about how little time parents spend with children, how families don't eat together and children don't learn how to eat. And we are not a workless family on a sink estate.
So thinking of this sceanrio I was reminded of a comment said to a friend who went to look at a new build house. She commented that the living room was rather small for a four bed house. Ah said the sales person, people don't want big lounges cos they don't sit in them as a family anymore, the kids are all in their bedrooms [on their computers, TVs etc] So the customer wants space in the bedrooms not in communal areas. So customer feedback had led to shifts in design of the homes we are going to live in.
Those of you that re familiar witrh the history of social housing and town planning ; or who saw the excellent BBC documentary on the hsitory of social housing will know that in an earlier age planners and architects had no qualms about engineering the size and shape of properties to produce certain social outcomes. The invention of the kitchen diner (rather than small scullery)  was to get families to be together.
So the philosophy of meeting customer needs has surplanted the 'we know best' of the authorities. But has this been at a cost?
I worry that my family find it hard to play together, sit together, watch together (we do eat together and we have lots of vigorous debates.. last night it was on membership of the EU a good or bad thing.. and the boy is only 14!) But if we can't live as a community than what hope is there for wider social cohesion and community? Bedrooms with braodband may be what our customers want but maybe the consequences will not be ones that society as a whole needs?
All of this has nothing to do with my expertise but I can't blog about how to do a good interview or how to write your Cv all the time.. i'd be bored too! Visit my website, blog and twitter for more of all those things!

Where will future leaders come from?

Graduates shun public sector

An online survey by Totaljobs reveals that fewer than one in ten (9%) graduates would choose to work in the public sector in preference to the private or charity sectors, with nearly half of them (47%) put off by job cuts.  (This is despite the fact that a fifth (20%) of recent graduates claim to have been looking for work for over a year, with almost a third (31%) saying they’d take any job that came along.)  If these intentions are borne out, the resulting gap in the talent pipeline could be a big problem for the sector in the future.
Totaljobs’ graduate director Mike Fetters (pictured) says “We all know that the graduate market is tough at the moment with further public-sector job cuts looming, but it’s surprising to see so few would choose to work in the public sector.  Only a few years ago the public sector was a top graduate job destination and, despite the cuts, there are still positions available, all of which provide good training, career progression and, despite reports, a wide range of employee benefits.  With this in mind, it’s really important for graduates to at least dip their toe in and look into this diverse sector and the opportunities it has to offer.”
The survey also indicated that confidence among graduate job-seekers continues to decrease, with 82% believing they’re in a tougher jobs market than that of two years ago (at the height of the recession).  However, the research also revealed that almost a quarter (24%) of respondents spend less than an hour on applying for a job, while nearly half (49%) spend only 1-2 hours on a single application.
“Graduates should be reassured that work is out there for those who are willing, but it is important that they spend time on each application,” adds Mike.  “Graduates must be extra vigilant to ensure that each application is tailored to the employer they are applying to, as well as being absolutely sure it is free from errors to allow themselves the best possible chance of securing an interview.”
With confidence low, wage expectations among those questioned are also on the decline.  At the start of their courses, over half thought they’d be earning £20,000 a year or more in their first graduate role.  But now, only 45% of those still studying think they’ll get £20,000 or more, with the majority (55%) anticipating less than £19,000.

family life..makes me think

Family life, three people, three computers, three rooms. Who says technology connects? We could all be living in, we are all living in separate realities. (On the other hand i had a lovley msn chat with a friend in Sweden earlier)

Apparently houses are now built with small living rooms because families don't spend time together. Individual space is the order of the day. Council houses were  built in 1930s  with large 'dining kitchens' to encourage family life, now we are undoing good work in the intersts of customer design requirements.

Makes me think, if we don't have a sesne of community in a small family unit then how can we create a wider sense of community across a street, village, town or city?

A parenting campaign on the scale of 'five a day' is not going to change the behaviours in this house, I can't get them to eat fruit and veg either!