The Financial Times had a very interesting article in their weekend edition called Sweet Child of Mine. The article discussed the transition of the way children are being perceived today compared to centuries past. Children from the age of 5-6 used to work around the home, later they would search for employment in mines and factories, from an economical point of view “children made sense”.
Today “children are worse than useless. Far from making any economic contribution to the familiy life…they loaf around at school all day…”

The writer, Richard Tomkins, goes on that now that children “no longer generate cash, the whole of their value lay in the emotional gratification they brought”. Thus this shift has resulted in parents who approach child-rearing by being obsessivily worried about “health, safety and academic achievement”.

Even though parents “embark on a programme of enhancing…cognitive, motor and social skills…further learning, organized sports and cultural enricing activities…none of it makes a scrap of difference to the way the children turn out…[as] about half the variation in a person’s personality comes directly from their parent’s genes and the rest is shaped by the forces outside the home.”

So why post this here? What does this have to do with WorkVitamins? One of the fundamental issues regarding the implementation of WorkVitamins is a greater emphasis that individuals place on themselves, all of which have an effect on how we look at the work environment. Companies not only compete for business, but will increasingly compete for staff as well. Finacial benefits alone will not get you the best staff, but emotional benefits might. I see the shift between companies who see their staff as purely financial commodities to those who tread their staff as a sweet child of theirs. Thus the importance of the design of the work environment, the continuous training and the “soft” benefits.

“NASA spent 8 years and billions developing a pen that could write in space. It needed to be able to work in zero gravity, at a range of temperatures, and be able to write on any surface. The Russians used a pencil.”

It seems that the pen took only 2 years and 2 million to develop, but it is a great story that is true for many products.

This reminds me of term for useless inventions coined by Kenji Kawakami: chindogu, more here and here. Some of these inventions are hilariously funny, however, I suspect that car companies stumbled accros the the Softdrink Holder and thought it wasn’t such a useless idea after all.

Portable office tie.

On 22nd of June I attended an ACCJ event “Sustained innovation: knowledge-based leadership the P&G way” by Ravi Chaturvedi, president of P&G Far East. Mr Chaturvedi talked about:

“the P&G ideal known as “knowledge-based leadership,” a systemic, cultural approach to enabling employee fulfillment. Basically, it puts the power in the hands of the people, which allows each employee to control his or her own destiny and not be dependent on the hierarchical leadership in the company to win in the market.”

P&G’s basically hires their staff at entry level and trains them inside the company. Mr Chaturvedi told the audience that he puts a great emphasis on empowering his staff and creating an environment where work is fun. He mentioned the word “fun” at least a dozen times during his presentation. I spoke with him after his talk about WorkVitamins and mentioned the crucial factor of the work enviroment in being able to create a basis for the staff to have fun. “I had a difficulty convincing the architect about the colours of our current office in Tokyo” Mr Chaturvedi told me, ” the architect wanted to use black, white and grey, which I thought was going to make the office very boring. In the end we decided to use colours to make the place more fun”

People will come up with very ingenious solutions in the office, such as this picture I took at a client’s office. The owner of this office has hung his jacket on the glass. The jacket blocks the view into the room and it also indicates that the owner is in.

Privacy is almost always an issue in projects we work on. Privacy and the private office, associated with it, is often a status factor. Somehow the request for greater privacy has evaded the rest of the office as well, resulting in a maze of cubicles. In the movie office space we can see workers sitting in these 1.6 meter high cubicles communicating with each other over the phone, eventhough they are sitting next to each other. We have worked on a project that the staff described as “the silent office”. Most of the staff would read and check documents faxing the results back to head office, resulting that very few telephones calls were made. The office consisted of cubicles as the argument was that the work required concentration and privacy for all of the staff was needed. When someone had to make the occassional telephone call it felt like the whole office was listening in, creating a very uneasy atmosphere, “like a library” as one of the staff described it.

We got rid of the cubicles and went completely open plan and provided internal meeting spaces nearby that could be used for the occasional telephone call that requires “privacy”.

The Financial Times has been featuring various articles and comments on the effect of football on office productivity such as this one:

“Sir, You quote the Centre for Economics and Business Research as saying that the impact of the World Cup on UK productivity should be limited, since most of England’s matches will not be in working hours (”Analysts have a field day with ’soccernomic’ predictions”, June 1).

However, we calculate that lost productivity could still top £1bn in value. We assumed 25 per cent of workers would follow the World Cup avidly, and that each would lose on average (say) 7 hours productivity through absenteeism, distraction, chit-chat and so on over the World Cup. At an average output value of £24 an hour (UK gross domestic product of £5bn per working day, divided by 30m workers, divided by (say) 7 hours per working day) this comes to £1.26bn.

Maurice Fitzpatrick,

Senior Tax Manager,

Grant Thornton UK”

“If I don’t know I know, I think I don’t know” R.D.Laing

This book is fantastic. I have always loved catalogues, dictionaries, encyclopedias, and this book with over 500 pages of ideas, quotes and drawings has the non-linearity of an encyclopedia. Not that you could not read it from cover to cover reading all the 533 pages, but I guess that is not how it was intended. Fletcher: “this book is no thesis…has no beginning, middle or end. It’s a journey without a destination”

And what a journey, the book is organized around the 72 chapters and is an amazing mix of art, mathematics, economics, philosophy, anecdotes, drift wood. In music there is a term for this: plunderphonics. Even though the book itself is structured around chapters, the texts are all organized on a single page or sometimes the graphics spill over to the other side. There is a page that explains about collage, montage, frottage and other painterly techniques used in the art of chance. Another page in the chapter on Skill has quotes from John Wayne, Lee Trevino, Vivienne Westwood and George Burns next to a drawing on how to tie an bow tie. There is a page on the Turin Shroud, another on Fractals, one on dowsers, on Feng-Shui and one on an abstract Botswana pattern called “urine trail of the bull”.

Favourite quote: “If your mind is too open people can throw all sort of rubbish into.”

I am in Hong Kong at the moment, a very brief visit to meet a client today and leave again early tomorrow. It’s not the first time to be here, but everytime I am here it always feels like Hong Kong is shrouded in clouds, I guess that’s why very tall buildings are called skyscrapers.