Planet of the Apps

Greetings.

Cicero is still here and has come back for yet another week to share education, enlightenment and enjoyment. It is pleasing to note that many seem to have missed your weekly dose of such sentiments. Again my profound apologies but hopefully you will over the coming weeks see and receive the benefits arising from the previous long absence of this page.

And to satisfy those of you still complaining let us see if we can be a wee bit more controversial this week. And in doing so hopefully too these words will not be too cerebral for many of you. Another oft repeated complaint from last week.

In previous weeks Cicero has not been averse to complaining about the pointlessness Of Apple apps. We even held a competition to identify the most useful and useless.
On further reflection Cicero was wrong and after prolonged consideration through the summer recess, and having himself acquired an iThingymybob, it is clear that the Apple model has much to offer to the Apparatchiks Class as they struggle to come to terms with the spending dictats of the Two Caesars. Indeed it might also point a way forward for those of us toiling away generating the wealth required to keep the Apparatchiks in the style to which they have become accustomed and to pay for the spending priorities of the Two Caesars.

Get this right and we can change the way we generate wealth and deliver public services in this country forever. Now there’s an incentive.

Now let us be clear, Cicero has absolutely no idea what makes an iThingymybob work in the way it does but he does greatly admire the model whereby a cottage industry has grown up cheaply developing a range of useful and useless apps for use on said device based on open access to the knowledge, information and codes required for said apps to work.

Why can’t this thinking be applied to the Apparatchik sector?

Let me give you an example. Why does government need to use taxpayer for expensive and glossy ‘quit smoking’ advertising? If we apply the Apple model the government would open up to anyone who wanted to know, all the data and insight it had on people who smoke, why they smoke, what stops them from stopping smoking, and letting others use the insight to develop strategies, programmes or ‘apps’ to encourage smokers to quit. We could easily envisage companies that make patches and nicotine replacement products picking up the baton and developing effective programmes and products for this market. Everyone a winner. Charities and other self help support mechanisms could also be developed to fill this space. And so we begat the Big Society.

A similar approach is already being applied in education. Why does the State have to run schools? Where is this decreed? What is wrong with the State providing open access to the all the information, standards and protocols they require from schools and letting anyone who wants to set up and run a school? How is this so vastly different from the Apple model?

And on we go. Surely this thinking can be applied to all the nooks and crannies of our Apparatchik run bureaucracy to work out where it is more cost effective, efficient and viable to provide the services on the Apple app model and where it can only be done by the State, with examples of this being minimised and limited? All it takes is imaginative and creative thinking and a willingness to let go of State-sponsored, taxpayer-funded sacred cows and contrary to popular belief such attitudes and capabilities do exist in the VTSSBs.

And why stop there?

Such thinking can also be applied to those creating wealth. Too often those of us working in business think we have to come up with the next great idea, the next best selling product, the next fantastic idea to reduce costs.

Why?

Sure we employ consultants and agencies and other third parties from time to time to do our thinking for us but why not change the model. Make our data, our insight, our problems and challenges more freely available and encourage anyone out there to develop income generating or cost reduction apps which can be applied in our businesses. Why do we think that only those who work in the business have the ideas and the brains? Let’s use the virtually combined brain power of the world population to come up with the next great idea. Surely it will be possible to create a community of interested people to generate money spinning or cost reducing apps for our business.

It might be a batty idea and it might require more thinking to be done, but it might just be a brilliant idea.

They say an apple a day keeps the doctor away but thinking like Apple could well keep the Chancellor or our business banking manager away too.

Is it only me..........but we are not made of money.

As you will no doubt have gleaned if you are addicted to and follow avidly all the latest news, the time is fast approaching when the Two Caesars will announce how they are going to spend a lot less of our money. And for the record it is worth pointing that the terminology used by the media is constantly wrong. It is not about ‘cuts’ which is what everyone bangs on and on and on about but reducing the amount of our money they spend on our behalf. Surely far less emotive than the C word which is henceforth banned from these pages.

And are you equally fed up with the whining and moaning and groaning from Apparatchiks fearful about jobs? We could fill these pages with comment on Apparatchiks whining about the indispensability of their jobs. Maybe we might have more sympathy if said whining Apparatchiks focused more on outcomes affected than their own employment situation. We do not pay our taxes to keep Apparatchiks in jobs. Get over it. We pay our taxes for services which deliver meaningful and substantive service outcomes and this is where the debate should be focused.
But this is not the main gripe this week though this is surely a topic to which we will return in the coming weeks as the Apparatchiks become ever more whining the closer we get to the two Caesars announcing how they are going to reduce the amount of our money, and that of international lenders, they think it prudent to spend.
Earlier in week Cicero had the great pleasure of attending a business dinner to celebrate examples of successful capitalism in ‘The City of a Thousands Trades’. The dinner was a joyous and pleasant enough event but something struck Cicero when there and it niggled.

The dinner was sponsored as is the wont of these occasions and the venue was festooned with the logos of those businesses that had paid to have their names in lights. In total there must have been about 10 logos prominently displayed, 8 of whom were from the public sector. In other words there were only three real sponsors-two real businesses and us, the taxpayer.

Now is it only me but quite frankly we do not pay our hard earned taxes to subsidise the troughing of well fed business folk, do we? What in God’s name motivated a collection of taxpayer funder Apparatchiks to think it was a bright idea, when we are on cusp of a re-balancing of the levels of money sneaked from our pay packets, to think this was a good idea?

Ideas and thoughts please on this most welcome.

Was that controversial enough for you this week?

Have a great week.

Sis felix. Et sis fortunatus.

How conscious are you?

Cicero is well and truly back.

And for those of you agitating and worrying about the lack of presence from Him, sorry. The time off stretched on a wee bit longer than planned. Hopefully you were able to cope.

As you know the VTSSB and its Apparatchiks have by now been left far to stern although Cicero still retains a special affection for the people left behind there and wishes them all well as they deal with the Two Caesars. Good luck.

Anyway it is good to be back and for the past few weeks Cicero has been collecting many new experiences and developing many new ideas and thoughts to share with you.

So let’s get started.......we have no time to waste......we have a lot of catching up to do.

We are going to start with a little exercise.

We will start by signing our names. Go on, do it. Yes, you. Do it now.
Good. Now how long did that take? Not long. No doubt you did it in less than the blink of an eyelid. Nor was it especially painful. You will have expended less than one hand’s worth of brain cells doing it. Correct? In essence you signed your name without even thinking about it. Aren’t you clever?

Now swap hands and repeat the exercise.

How difficult was that? It is surmised that, unless you are ambidextrous, that took a lot longer, was far more painful and you had to think long and hard before making any move with your pen on the paper. Correct? And no doubt too your new autograph is far less legible than the one you scrawled with your natural hand.

And therein lies today’s lesson. For you have just demonstrated the difference between being consciously incompetent and unconsciously competent and such understanding is of vital importance and a critical concern to any leader in any business.

Most of us for most of the time are unconsciously competent. We know what we are doing. We do it well and without fuss and without thinking about it. Just like signing our name with our writing hand. And in this state we are no problem, not an issue.

But sometimes some of us can be unconsciously incompetent. We don’t know we are doing a bad job, unaware that we could be doing things better or differently. This is worse than writing our autographs with our non writing hand.

As leaders we cannot ignore this state. It is our job to point this out to our people and to root out unconscious incompetence. Incompetence at this level if unchecked drags down the performance of the team and saps the morale and motivation of our star performers. It must be checked to stop the spread of incompetence through the team.

In taking action we move our unconscious incompetent to being consciously incompetent. We now know that we could be doing better, that we are under-performing compared to peers and to the standard of the job. In this state the leader can take action and move to the next level when our incompetent is transformed into being consciously competent. The work is taking a time to be completed but the quality is good and improving though much effort and concentration is being applied to make sure the job is being done right.

And then we reach nirvana, a heavenly state of peace and tranquillity. We have arrived at unconsciously competent. We can do the job to a high standard without thinking about it. We don’t think about how we sign our name, how to breathe, how to drive our cars, we just do it. We have arrived at our destination.

In this journey it is our role as leaders to move our people from unconsciously incompetent to unconsciously competent as quickly and as painlessly as possible. There have been many times in past few weeks when Yours Truly has felt hopelessly incompetent (yes that is difficult to believe) but with the help and support of some great leaders, you would be amazed in how many new areas Cicero is now unconsciously competent.

So just how conscious are you? Let us know.

Is it only me......but paper cuts can be good.

As you may know Cicero treats his body as a temple and he works hard to keep it young looking and in good shape through regular exercise at a local gymnasium. A few days back Cicero headed off there to refresh, renew and re-invigorate his ageing, though well toned, body, only to be told that he had to renew his membership and hand over some sesterces before he might exercise to ensure sano in corpore et sano in mente. Not a problem.

What was a problem however was the insistence that before he might renew his membership he had to re-complete an application form and hand over exactly the same details that had been supplied previously. Cicero was not chuffed and made his feelings known. Given that Cicero’s details were already held on the system, Cicero wanted to know why these had to be re-provided.

‘I appreciate what you are saying but nothing to do with me. Its Head Office’, was the reply. Grrrrrrrrrrrrr. The kind of response that Cicero just hates. Do some organisations require staff to have frontal lobotomies on joining to render thinking and the application of common sense redundant?

Now it might only be me but it is time that in businesses across the land, in TSSBs and VTSSBs, we made a stand to get paper out of the system. Paper clogs up our processes and adds cost where cost is unnecessary. What happens to all the bits of paper which are only backing up information held on computers? Do we employ someone just to file them away just in case?

And have we considered the environmental impact of all this paper we needlessly produce? As you know Cicero is big on the environment and is concerned about the de-forestation effects of pointless paper.

So from now on Cicero has a new mission in life-to rid state and private sector bureaucracies of pointless paper. Will you join him?

It is great to be back.

Have a great week.

Sis felix. Et sis fortunatus.