Human Moves Business Moves

Dodgy Microsoft Advert in IE8

I just installed release candidate 1 of Internet Explorer 8. Shortly thereafter, a funny thing happened. Zonealarm said "IE wants to act as a server". I couldn't think why but I allowed it temporarily. Immediately, a Microsoft advert appeared on the web page I was viewing and whizzed through an animation. I'm not sure if it was Flash or Silverlight. I wonder what that was all about - did IE8 tell some server that I don't have the software that the ad was trying to sell me installed?

Michael Alec Bryant

6th March 2009

Top 10 Tips for Dealing With Trade Unions

1. Do not attempt to deal from a position of superiority. Trade unions send their members on training courses. They are probably better trained in employment law and may be better trained in negotiating than you and your team.
2. Have regular meetings with your trade union representatives even, and indeed especially, when things are going well and you have no disputes to resolve. Like the rest of your employees, trade union representatives appreciate being spoken to with respect, being kept informed about the business and being consulted on key changes. Lighten up the meetings - try a little humour and a spot of lunch.
3. The law of unintended consequences. Unions have long memories - be aware that your decisions may set a precedent that you will be honour bound to apply in future.
4. Be flexible and treat people decently. Never say "no" just for the sake of it and never lie when you can tell the truth. Don't shout and bang the table and don't put up with others doing this. Walk away and make it clear you will come back only when you can have a civilised discussion. Keep your powder dry - allowing a little anger to show through your normally placid facade can be much more effective than constant overt aggression.
5. Don't cry wolf. Trade unions in British manufacturing companies have heard the old line "if we don't do this the factory may have to close" so many times it ceases to be believed and just depresses morale. If it's true you have to say it, but don't abuse it.
6. If you put the squeeze on pay during the bad times, make sure you relax it when business is good. You cannot squeeze people all the time and if they are truly your greatest resource and your key success factor, they deserve to share in the success of the business.
7. Cultivate your union's area and national officials. If an issue arises that you cannot resolve in local discussions and the union needs to get someone in from outside the business, you will find it much easier to deal with someone whom you have previously met over coffee or lunch. One proviso - sometimes you may find them playing power games, like summoning you to an "urgent" meeting that turns out to be a waste of time. Don't stand for it and make it clear that you won't. Your dealings must be from a position of mutual respect.
8. Your local officials and shop stewards are between a rock and a hard place. Do not undermine them - their job will be much easier if they have the respect of their members and of management. Perhaps surprisingly, if their job is easier, yours will be too.
9. Don't let your managers defer decisions to union officials. It is not their job to make line decisions.
10. Don't talk outside negotiations except in terms of agreed messages. Ask your union officials to respect this too. You must not allow your managers and union officials to feed mixed messages to the workforce (or the media!) whilst negotiations are in progress.

Remember – communicate, communicate, communicate; respect, respect, respect!

Michael Alec Bryant
25th February 2008

Suffering Fools Gladly

"He doesn't suffer fools gladly" - this is a sentiment I despise. I don't suffer gladly people who claim not to suffer fools gladly. If you are running a business one of most useful ways for you to spend your time is in speaking to the people at the bottom of your leadership hierarchy. You will usually find a mixture of  talents ranging from the highly intelligent to the mildly challenged, but they all have opinions worth hearing and some of their observations and insights will rock you. People who "don't suffer fools gladly" betray an intellectual arrogance and a tendency to rash judgement. They may be intelligent, but there is always someone smarter out there, and one thing is undeniable - no one can claim any credit for the IQ they were born with. My greatest respect goes to those who use what gifts they have to the full. A person of average intelligence who reads widely and acquires skills is of more value to me than someone with a high native IQ who doesn't use it. Of course, intelligence is a hugely valuable resource and I always encourage people to hire the most gifted employees they can afford. But look for excellence tempered with a little humility and a willingness to learn. And speak kindly to fools occasionally - you might learn something.

Michael Alec Bryant
23rd February 2008

Business Rumours

I've just added a Truemors business feed to the Business Rumours page. Enjoy.

Michael Alec Bryant
27th November 2007

Excel Flunks Maths Test

Speaking of Excel... try this sum in Excel 2007:
=77.1*850
The answer you'll get is 100,000. The correct answer is 65,535 (=2^16-1).

Click here to see Microsoft's response. 

They claim that it's a display issue and that any sums derived from the result cell will be correct. This is not so. Taking the result cell and ,multiplying by 2 does indeed return 131,070 (as they state), but multiplying it by 1 still gives 100,000. Adding 1 to the result gives 100,001 whilst deducting 1 gives 65,534. 

This is very bad news if your budget or forecast happens to include 65,535 or 65,536. 

Elsewhere on the web people are claiiming that similar problems have existed in all versions of Excel although some are repeating the party line that it's confined to Excel 2007. I am not in a position to check.

I do know, however, that this is totally unsatisfactory. If MS spent more time getting the basics right and less time  bloating their software with non-features  (anyone remember the flight simulator in Excel?)  they'd get a bit more respect as a company.

Michael Alec Bryant
19th November 2007

Irrational Numbers Irrational People

A day is not completely wasted if you learn something. Today I learnt something that I don't think they taught me at school.

Irrational numbers are those numbers like PI that can only be expressed with an infinite and unrepeating sequence of digits after the decimal point. PI, for example is 3.141592654 etc. etc. ad infinitum without repeat or pattern. Other numbers, such as 3.3333333..., are rational numbers because there is a pattern to the digits after the decimal. I always thought - and this is the bit I don't recall from school -  that irrational numbers were so called because they seem to defy common sense. Not so. They are called irrational simply because they cannot be expressed as a ratio of two integers. The ratio (fraction) 22/7 is a pretty close approximation to PI, but it is not PI. In fact, according to Excel, it bottoms out at 3.14285714285714 (followed by an infite series of zeroes). There is no ratio of integers that is exactly equivalent to any irrational number.

Pythagoras was a world class thinker who reputedly first worked out that the square of the hypoteneuse of a right angled triangle is equal to the sum of the squares on the other two sides (Pythagoras' theorem). This might not seem important to the average Joe in C21 armed with his PC and calculator, but it's pretty important of you're trying to design a building, measure the height of a mountain or fence a farm. Pythagoras' followers were called Pythagoreans and they got in a bit of a tizz over irrational numbers when they first discovered them. Thitherto they had thought that all numbers formed an uninterrupted continuum, any point of which can be defined as an integer or the ratio of two integers. So, for example, the series from 1 to 5 can be  subdivied into 1, 1½ (=3/2), 2, 2½ (=5/2) 3, 3½ (=7/2), 4, 4½ (=9/2), 5, and the series can be subdivided ad infinitum using ever smaller fractions to  fill in the gaps between the integers. All well and good, but where do the irrational numbers fit in? The answer is somewhere between the fractions. PI fits in between 3 and 4 just below 22/7, but as there is an infinite number of fractions we appear to have a bigger infinite number if we also include irrational numbers. This was pretty devastating to the Pythagoreans who treated it as heresy, having imbued their number system with religious significance. They may even have tried initially to conceal the existence of irrational numbers because they had no place in their conception of reality. The suppression of inconvenient mathematical truths has been going on ever since. Copernicus knew it, Galileo knew it and even as late as 1897 the US State of Indiana enacted legislation that, inter alia, redefined PI as 16/4 (=3.2).   

Mathematical and scientific heresies still exist today. If you disagree with me, try claiming that there is no proven causal link between smoking and cancer in humans or between carbon emissions and increases in mean world temperature. There isn't; there is powerfully persuasive correlational evidence but no proof of causality. Nevertheless, if you have a voice, and you say it, you'll be pilloried in the press.

Thanks to

I used this site to look up details of the Indiana PI Bill:

- The Indiana PI Bill 1897

This is a link to the book by Michael Guillen in which I read the essay about irrational numbers:

- Bridges to Infinity: The Human Side of Mathematics

Michael Alec Bryant
18th November 2007

 

feralmale.com

A quick plug for Nectarine Ltd's new retail website www.feralmale.com.
We're selling men's jewellery and accessories and gifts for men. Here's some examples:

Steel and Wood Bracelet by SteelX:

Black polished steel Cross by SteelX:

Gold Cufflinks by denisonboston:

 

Michael Alec Bryant
10th November 2007

Health & Safety Gone Mad

It's fashionable in the UK to knock Health and Safety as a symptom of bureaucratic creep or political correctness. As the leader of a manufacturing business I'd like to make a small plea in favour of health and safety as something that, well, isn't a bad idea really. I have seen the emphasis on increased health and safety consciousness raise survival rates in my industry. I have seen wilful ignoring of H&S by individuals nearly kill several people in a workplace I was responsible for (thankfully only nearly), and known deaths occur at plants I knew well. Most people I would guess have heard of a serious industrial accident or fatality amongst their friends, family, acquaintances or workmates. The decline in manufacturing as it migrates  towards the sunrise has reduced, and will continue to reduce the hazards to the UK workforce, but let's not forget generations of our ancestors for whom risking their life for a pittance was the daily grind. And let's not forget the poor saps who make our £10 jeans in the Far East for tuppence a day who aren't protected by unions, legislation or free media.

I do draw the line at chopping down healthy conker trees and other such absurdities, but the problem isn't Health and Safety. The problem is bored journalists looking for non-stories, job creation in the public sector to massage unemployment figures and the fact that the political system is designed to attract megalomaniacs and village idiots.

Michael Alec Bryant
6th June 2007

Putin Posturing

Scary news - Putin threatens to target the EU with missiles. Why didn't he threaten to target the US as it's their missile defence system to which he appears to object? One question - who are the missiles currently pointed at? Shall we all move there?

Michael Alec Bryant
3rd June 2007

Venture Capital and Startup Businesses

Whatever happened to First Tuesday? This was a weekly event in London that brought together entrepreneurs and investors during the heady days of the late 1990s' dotcom boom. Bizarrely, googling for First Tuesday now brings up a South African website with international affiliations that notably exclude the UK. The UK equivalent seems to be Second Chance Tuesday. As I find out more I'll report it here. In the meantime I've started a "VC Links" list on this blog where I'll list people and websites of interest to investors and startup entrepreneurs.

Michael Alec Bryant
27th May 2007

RTFA - Read the F!*!*!*!*! Agreement

There is a saying among geeks - RTFM, or Read the F!*!*!*!*! Manual. An instruction invariably aimed at non-geeks, because no self respecting geek would ever deign to read a manual. Working it out by trial and error is the geekly way.

Legal contracts are even duller than user manuals. Recently, I signed up with a widget publisher for this blog. They provide adverts; I earn paltry sums if you click on the adverts. On the sign-up page there was a link to their user agreement, but the link was broken. I emailed their support desk and they came back with an apology and assurance that the link was now fixed. They also said that I was the only user ever to have queried it, so presumably the only user ever to have read the legal agreement. Think about that for a moment - presumably hundreds of people have entered into an agreement that they have not even looked at. They could owe the company millions of dollars. The agreement could say that the fee for using the widget is the deeds to the user's home.

Some time ago I read about a couple who bought a house from a lawyer. The lawyer offered to act as their representative in the transaction to save them money. I assume this is illegal now as it creates a conflict of interest, but it evidently was not then. The lawyer wrote a clause into the contract that said he could buy the house back for the same price as he had sold it to them any time he pleased. Twenty years later he did. Mr and Mrs Devo, who had not bothered to read the agreement, lost their house and twenty years worth of capital gains. The court supported the lawyer.

Take my advice. RTFA - Read the F!*!*!*!*! Agreement. Even if you are a geek.

Michael Alec Bryant
26th May 2007

Negotiation - Top 10 Tips

Ten tips for anyone who ever has to negotiate anything. That means all of us.

1. Practise negotiating. Learn from children - they compensate for their powerless state by honing their negotiation skills.
2. Practise your negotiation skills every time you buy something. You will never get a discount if you don't ask. You will nearly always get a discount if you do. Make it your mission never to pay the asking price.
3. Plan important negotiations as you would plan a battle. Choose the time and place, choose your allies, plan your opening, plan your end game. Go in armed with the facts and knowing what you want to achieve.
4. Make a list of your "Yields" and "Shields".
5. "Shields" are things you won't give up during the negotiation. For example, if you're selling a house, set your minimum selling price and don't be persuaded to change your decision in the heat of the moment. You advertised the house at £200k but your shield price is £180k and you won't accept less. You shield it at all costs.
6. "Yields" are concessions you are prepared to make during the negotiation. For example, you may be prepared to include the carpets in any deal to sell your house.
7. Never yield anything unless the person you are negotiating with also yields something.  Give nothing away for free. If you are a seller and your buyer wants a 2% discount, you can agree if it's on your yield list, but get something back. For example, you could agree so long as your buyer agrees to pay cash in advance.
8. Try to find out what is on your opponent's Yield/Shield list. Unguarded comments and body language can give away plenty if you pay attention. 
9. Raise the bar. Ask for the earth and you won't get it, but you'll get more than  someone who asks for nothing. Ask for a 50% discount then settle at 10%. If you start at 10% you'll settle at less.
10. Have fun. Business is a game and negotiation is a key business skill.

The author gratefully acknowledges the negotiation skills training he received from Bill Garcia.

See www.negotiationtraining.com for details of Bill's organisation.

Michael Alec Bryant
21st May 2007

Mars bars get veggie status back

Customers don't like change - unless it's their idea. The Coca Cola Company discovered that when it tried to ditch its venerable and legendary recipe. Now Mars has incurred the wrath of the Veggie community by lacing its chocolate with animal by-products. Bad news all round you might think, but both companies found there is also a lot of great publicity to be had from reversing such decisions. A cynic might suppose it was all set up by marketing droids. Surely not...

read more | digg story

Michael Alec Bryant
21st May 2007

Don't wait to become a great man - be a great boy.

This quote is unattributed but I first heard it in a movie. Trouble is, I can't recall which one. I thought it was Dead Poets' Society but I appear to be mistaken. Nevertheless, it's a great sentiment and here is the perfect illustration.

http://venturebeat.com/2007/05/19/elementeos-13-year-old-ceo-highlight-of-tiecon/

Later: my super-powered but organically-slow memory is now dredging up a reference. Could it have been a quote from Ghost Story by Peter Straub? The excellent boook I mean, not the execrable film.

Michael Alec Bryant
20th May 2007