How to behave at work

Image by itatton via Flickr

Do you know how to behave at work? Common-sense right?

Someone once said, “Common-sense is anything but common.” Answers on a postcard please.

Those of you on twitter will have seen a number of people mentioning that they have completed their BCG. This is not an injection. This is education, a reminder, a nudge. This is Business Conduct Guidelines. This is the heavy heavy monster sound. (sorry I had to)

“The guidelines provide general guidance for resolving a variety of legal and ethical questions for employees of IBM, including its subsidiaries and affiliates. These guidelines clarify long-standing expectations of how members of IBM’s worldwide community will conduct themselves in their business activities.”

If we step back and look at what happens in many companies and I’ll take those of my family and friends. Management is constantly “reminding people” through emails, meetings and memos, “can people please refrain from doing x,y and z while at work.” This is time consuming. This distracts people from work, from being productive and it demotivates people.

Actions of a small minority end up punishing the majority and as a result things seem a lot worse than they really are. I know, I get the phone calls.

When I joined IBM I was given a huge folder of stuff, I mean massive. We have the web now so thankfully all that has changed but within that pile were the BCGs.  Reading them I was a little terrified to be honest. “Never had anything like this before!” I thought.

But after a while you realise this is good. It means you have a definitive (well almost) answer to situations you may face. Some are more complex than you may imagine and I couldn’t imagine most of the scenarios in the education videos.

The BCGs draw a line in the sand, they tell you what is acceptable – actually they go further than that I would say, they tell you what is expected, what is the right thing to do.

Based around our company values the BCGs have also help IBM become more active in social media (did you wonder when I would mention that?) of which the social computing guidelines are a subsection. This year we also saw a section in the education module related just to social media.

To sum up, in my mind, the BCGs form the basis of what we do. They provide that common-sense, the line in the sand, the common ground from where we all start. If someone goes beyond those then the majority doesn’t get punished, the individual does and they can’t say they hadn’t been told.

Stuff I’m doing today

No idea why you would be interested but this is what I’m doing/done today.

• Created some graphics for an intranet page
• Plan and organise a bunch of execs to record in a podcast
• Set-up a briefing with other comms people in the business to make them aware of an event
• EcoJamming
• Design a poster
• w3 editors meeting “special edition”
• Thinking about what to talk about for 10 mins on the subject of “Interactive Information systems we use to communicate internally & with clients” Wendy Tarr is doing the bit on clients

But now, I must get a coffee.

Internal communications, social media & IBM

Thanks to Mark Hillary for taking this video of me in IBM South Bank a week ago for his new blog, The SocialITe, for ComputerWeekly.com.

I have to say it is odd being on the other side of the camera, I’ve stuck a few cameras and mics in front of people in my time but also well aware how hard it is to be the subject. As a kid I never liked my photo being taken, unlike my kids that seem to love it.

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The smarts start with people.. of all kinds

This morning IBM was named the top gay friendly employer in the UK, for the second time in (I think) four years.

When I tweeted this today I added the tag #smarterplanet, to which @bjfletcher asked me why. I have to say at first I didn’t know, to me instinctively it felt right, so I just did it. Act first, think later… ok not a good policy.  But on reflection and while trying to come up with an answer it is very obvious.

Last night Sam Pamlisano, CEO and Chairman, spoke last night at Chatham House under the heading of  “Welcome to the Decade of Smart.” During the event someone asked the question about the digital divide. The answer that came back was the need for us (society) to educate people for future jobs, not past jobs.

Getting the right people for the job means being able to attract the right people, smart people. Smart people (like those less smart people) come in all shapes, sizes, colours and with a range of preferences. If you alienate any of those, you risk not attracting the best people to make your business successful. You also discourage a large number of people from being involved with your organisation, either through collaboration or buying the things and services you make.

Another question was about security. The systems we have today are pretty secure but the weakness is always the people. Having the right people and the right culture is imperative in making smarter solutions work. People will trust you to gather data and use it wisely and carefully. If you policy is one of trust and acceptance AND that policy is played out in real life by real people who genuinely believe in what they are doing magic starts to happen.

So in all what does this mean? Is being the top gay friendly organisation in the UK part of smarter planet? Sure. Every business starts with its people. An organisation that can become smart needs to value, trust and respect each other. That is obviously a cultural thing. Once you get that right you can engage people in innovative ideas, because they trust you and have the clever people that create year after year of record breaking nunber of  patent registrations and perhaps welcome this decade of smart.

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The time to act is..erm, today

Image via Wikipedia

Why did I cycle up to London on a cold and dark morning in January on icy roads when I could have stayed in bed an hour longer?

Simply this:

Today we have Sam Palmisano, Chairman and Chief Executive, IBM, in London talking at Chatham House, “Building a Smarter Planet: The Time to Act is Now.”

I should be there as @ibmevents and myself, @ragtag with a few tweets on what is being said. It will consist of a speech followed by a Q&A session with the audience.

The event doesn’t kick-off until 5:30pm GMT and finishes at 7pm. No idea what time I’ll get home! Thankfully no snow is forecast. Wondering now, that probably means we will have snow.

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Where are my files?

Image by AndyRob via Flickr

Seems the Pimsleur files were the wrong ones, I found the Danish set not the Chinese set.

Anyway, day 2 and I’m not only totally unaware of what is happening on #CBB7 but keeping up with the meditation and reading. The snow put an end to sorting out the language course with the eldest at home today. Not only because she was about the house but as she always tells me not to talk Chinese as I’m English and only her and mummy are allowed to talk Chinese. Bless, she is only 4 and has a better grasp of Mandarin than I probably do of English.

The meditation is surprising me, I found an old cd “Insight Meditation” and playing that to start with, it’s a nice way to ease back into it. Actually finding I want to continue after 30 mins but decide not to as it’s best to leave it while it is still enjoyable.  It helps to have a nice space at home as before the only place I could really relax was in the temple.

So like everyone else we had a load of snow, as I said before, the kids were off school today – we made a snowman and saw a fox in the garden – he looked very healthy in his bushy winter coat.  Often see his footprints around  here and much easier to spot in the snow. I think he was enjoying the relative peace and quiet the snow has brought with it.

It’s nice to slow down a bit and have a proper winter.

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Update on my 2010 objectives

After a quick virtual prod by @thomasj and a peek at a blog post he sent me I decided to actually write down so quantifiable goals around my objectives that I wrote earlier today.

Image by ragtagman via Flickr

Very realistic ones too. After reading the wonderful said post by @penelopetrunk they had to be. Taking my lead from point one “think small” these are something I know (may be I hope) I will complete with a little effort and so change my behaviour in a real way over the long-term, much like someone that needs to change eating habits.

So, here they are, although I can really think of a good goal for being more organised. Well not yet…

1. Reading: 10 pages of a book every day – after meditation

2. Chinese: 30 mins a day, one section of Pimsleur.

3. Be more organised..?? if you have an idea for a goal here, let me know.

4.  Meditation: 25 mins each evening after kids go to bed

Day one is a success, apart from the Chinese as I couldn’t find the files, I have now, but I’m writing this. Have to say it is nice to sit down in peace and quiet for half an hour and do nothing (or try to). I read 20 pages in a few minutes before realising that the boiler outlet had frozen so had to go outside to knock off the ice.. yes, it’s that cold.

Will keep this up until the end of the month, see how well I have done and possible bore both of my readers senseless with tales of reading books and meditation – but in Chinese. Yeah right.

Objectives for 2010

I hate  doing new year resolutions, to me it seems any day is a good day to try and improve one’s self.

Image by ragtagman via Flickr

Having said that here I go with a few things that come to mind which if I put down on paper I may well get round to actually doing them.

1. Read more books: need to take time out away from the screen. I have a few that I picked up before Christmas and really just need to set aside reading time each day.

2. Learn more Chinese: now this has been going on for ages, as soon as I get into a pattern something happens and I fall out of the habit of practising – I’m aiming for a trip to Taiwan in the summer so hopefully by then I should be at a decent level, but don’t place any bets.

3. Be a bit more organised: part of this will be culling some networks and tools that I use. At them moment I feel like I’m spread all over the place and need to have a more focused approach to what I’m doing in and outside of work. So, one place for my to do’s, actually while I think about it, I better start a to do list, as I don’t and never have had one.

4. Think more positively about the future: often I think the worst about the future, just because that’s the way I am. At times this has been incredibly painful for me but in recent years I feel that has improved somewhat – but still plenty of improvement to be made. Part of this will be to meditate again. As it says, you can’t easily change the world, but you can change yourself to understand yourself and the world better and then help others.

So I think as a set of Personal Improvement Commitments (PIC) four is enough. I also aim to be less restrained on this blog, sometimes I think too much about what I’m writing which isn’t good in this format. It stops me writing and without practice the damn thing is never going to improve.

We want your details first

Image by Will Lion via Flickr

I hate it when I see a link for a “free” paper only to be asked for my personal details again and again so that a marketing department can follow up with me and someone, somewhere can see the sort of people that are downloading the material.

After a chat on Twitter with @dianarailton about this it seems many people on both sides of the fence struggle with the idea of asking for details from downloaders. Having worked in Marketing Communications for a while on the IBM Global Services website I had similar conversations with people. Not being a traditionally brought up marketer I tend to reject most of what people take as the norm. I take experience from being on the other end. Now this may not always be right but the current thinking is just as wrong.

There are many problems with these registration forms that need to be filled out prior to downloading a paper:

• Filling it out a form prior to downloading and reading the actual paper is just nuts
• May be I’m just not that interested and will move on
• I always tick no further contact, thank you very much
• I’m quite capable of deciding if I want to know more, I’ll contact you after reading
• From a co’s pov, the conversion rate on these tactics is incredibly low

What this clearly exposes in most cases that many papers are nothing. Literally full of nothing. Nothing new or useful. They are plainly marketing instruments designed to get your details onto a database, which I have to trust you with, never having met you or your company. Then you will send me crap, lots of it. In a worse case, my details will be sold off or even lost.

Sod that.

So now if you have a registration form on your site I don’t download it.  If I’m quite interested in the possible content I’ll do a quick search on the Internet and see if I can get it somewhere else. Often you can.  Take the CIO Study from IBM for example. I heard colleagues complaining about the fact that it could be downloaded from a number of places on the web outside of ibm.com. Well, what do you expect? The technology is there and the way of using this sort of information is changing.

The IBM CIO study is actually a substantial piece of work but getting it to the right people takes more than just using a static website, it takes a lot of people that don’t work for you, that may comment and share the document through various channels, such as email, twitter, blogs and linkedin. And while you are at it, why not put it as a download on your blog, where people can comment on it, discuss it, rate it and not have to hand over personal contact details. All these activities also get picked up by search engines, increasing the possible reach.

Improve the way that these papers can get to the right people, provide mechanism for feedback and conversation – at least add a clickable link within the pdf… it’s not hard.

May be I’m just bolshie, but I and others certainly feel that there should be and are available new ways of doing this.

*These are my own opinions and do not represent that of my employer – just so you are really clear on that on

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My new Bluemotion Golf

I’ve had it a week now and even though it is missing one of the factory fitted options I requested so far so good.

Image via VW

Last week my company car, a VW Golf TDi 1.6 Bluemotion SE arrived without the parking assist, which led to a number of phone calls to the supplying garage and the leasing company. At the time I thought it was missing two options, even the hapless delivery driver who tried to pass himself off as something more thought it was missing the rear view camera (I later found that it was installed) but one thing I can’t seem to work out, apart from the fact it made it to my door with out the parking assist, is that the rear view camera only appears as an option WITH the parking sensors and parking assist.  Someone somewhere cocked up.

Why all these fancy gadgets? Well my wife is learning to drive and takes her test soon, so hopefully she will be able to use the car when I’m not here as I often cycle to work. Parking a new car can be difficult so these little things will give her confidence.

Anyway, driving the car is fun, smooth and quiet. Much quieter than the previous Golf which sounded like a tractor with a broken exhaust.

Inside the layout is almost entirely the same but with a few tweaks here and there. The quality of the interior plastics and coverings is better in my opinion, softer and more shiny. I also opted for a multi-function leather steering wheel which is a hundred times better than the standard plastic rubbish one which is made from old carrier bags. Also I’ve added sat nav with integrated HDD (16GB), DVD player and SD card reader – this will be really handy for downloading podcasts and such like to listen on the way home from Hurlsey.

Sat Nav is never a perfect thing and this one is no exception. It has trouble at roundabouts, always telling you to keep left even when you are driving round further than 180 degrees. However, that is the only problem I’ve found. The built in traffic updates re-route you quickly and painlessly. We opted to use it on the way to see my Mum for Christmas, it took us through London rather than round it. we made it up to Northants much quicker, so it gets to be trusted again.

So what is the Bluemotion stuff all about? Well it means a low tax band for one, as it only pumps out 107 g/km and lower fuel consumption.  This is done through having longer gears, some aerodynamic tweaks to the front and underside of the body. They also add low rolling resistance tyres. The regular Golf TDi is pretty good on the fuel consumption as it is but the lower emissions take the Bluemotion down a category.

Another way in which fuel is conserved is with the Auto Stop-Start feature that has been advertised as being on all new Audis. This turns off the engine when you come to a stop and take your foot off the clutch. Then when you replace your foot, engine starts up again – this will only work when the engine is at a reasonable working temperature and not when you are trying to park. Don’t ask me how it knows, it just does – which is also freaky when the headlight configuration changes when your arrive home and park.

The battery is kept topped up by regenerative breaking – something I think will be on all cars very soon. The lowered and more sporty suspension means that there is less roll in the corners too, but surprisingly little difference in comfort when driving over potholes and bumps. The Golf, is if nothing else, a solid car. It feels strong safe and

In all I’m happy with the car but not with whomever forgot my option. I’m hoping a new car will arrive at some point but wonder how long I can hold out that sort of hope.

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