Out of office. Out of order.

Well it would seem the ‘Out of office’ function on your trusty email is now well and truly redundant. There is now never any excuse to be out of the office. With the Internet, Blackberry, iPhone or virtual private network you are linked to the office with a digital umbilical cord that can never be severed.

We are told this is fantastic news and that productivity can jump to record levels, whilst each employee is contactable and fruitfully employed at a moments notice. Any time of day. Anywhere in the world. Brilliant.

But hang on. Aren’t we forgetting something? Oh yes; we are human fucking beings, and we don’t necessarily want to be working 24 hours a day, putting our jobs before time with our families, and never having a moment to switch off and relax. Even machines need maintenance.

I am abroad on a work trip at the moment. Away from the bosom of my family in the back end of nowhere. A stranger in a strange town. Another embarrassing English victim of that damn ivory tower, but away nevertheless, overseeing quite a tricky project. So imagine my unadulterated delight when an email dropped into my inbox requesting that I just do a little job that will take no more than quite a lot of hours. 

‘Just fit it in if you have any down time, or perhaps do it tonight. If you run out of time, I will try and reorganise it so that you can work on it tomorrow night as well.’ 

Oh, will you really? Well thank you very much. Thank you very fucking much indeed. It’s not as if I need to concentrate on what I’m doing here, I’m just sat around with my thumb up my arse, singing along to the smash hits of John Denver whilst trying to decorate my shoes imaginatively. And once I’ve finished I can think of nothing I would like to do more than go back to my soulless hotel room and do some more work. Tell you what; why not send over a couple of new briefs for me to look at while I’m at it? And heaven forbid I should stop working before midnight, but if I do I will attempt to learn the art of sword swallowing whilst juggling squirrels to entertain the rest of the staff at the Christmas party. How’s that?

Surely things were better when work was work, home was home and evenings and weekends were our own? Is it really that productive to have employees splitting their time so much that no one job gets the attention it warrants, and the employee ends up less motivated, less engaged and less effective?

I suggest we bring back the ‘out of office’ function, and when we’re out, we stay out.

White Collar Pikeyness

Following on the the previous post 'Ignorance isn't bliss', here is a slightly different take on the subject that I put together.
A nightmare vision, when two worlds collide. 
The white collar buzz word bonkers business man and the pig ignorant pikey. 
Could it happen? Surely not. Pray to God it doesn't.

Ignorance isn’t bliss

Have you noticed that there are some seemingly very clever people who appear incredibly stupid?  And how strange it is that certain people get more stupid the more they read. They leaf through the right magazines, the right books and the right online articles and all it does is give them a whole host of phrases they can trot out at will, without having the first idea what they’re talking about.

We are left with a whole generation of pseudo intellectual sheep bleating along with the latest buzz phrase or hot topic.

“Hey John, let’s take a helicopter view of our enterprise skill set?”

“Baaaaa.”

“I like it John, a goal orientated resource repurposing structure is a great idea. I’ll set up some face time.”

“Baaaaa.”

But it’s only the white-collar set that feels the need to hide common sense in a stew of bullshit. You don’t get your local mechanic telling you they’ve had some blue sky thinking and they’re pretty sure your gear box has failed it’s performance management appraisal.  The local fish and chip shop doesn’t ask if you’d like to downsize your cod. So why does business feel the need to wrap everything up in gibberish?

The other day I heard somebody say they that they were trying to humanise analytics. Humanise analytics? What the bloody hell does that mean? Absolutely nothing, that’s what it means. In an act of constructive criticism I immediately set fire to him. Apparently this is wrong, but I was only trying to humanise pyrotechnics! What’s the problem?

So why is there this need to replace original thinking and simple, solid ideas with nonsense? Do we really need to lock ourselves away in the ‘Conception Lab’ to hypothesise about distributed possibilities, or do some empathic research into products suffering from featuritis?

Personally, I would like to see a paradigm shift away from the globalization of knowledge process outsourcing, and a return to a proactive sea change that can only be empowered by traditional out of the box thinking and inevitably lead to a long tail, circle back, next level, state of the art, value added, upstream, win-win scenario.

And I don’t think I can be any clearer than that.