Too busy to blog this week!

Looking forward to a weekend with some old college buddies (one of whom is getting ordained!) and my folks - barbeque!

Why work when you can have a meeting?!

I have been in some awfully boring and unproductive meetings. I think some of the worse reasons are:

• People like to blow their own trumpet - there are always people who enjoy the sound of their own voice more than actually getting things done.


• Implied responsibility transfer - I worked on a project a few years ago where the customer's project manager would get all the subcontractors together once a week and for hours (really - often four hours or more!) every trade had to explain what they'd done that week and how it impact the project. I think he hoped that any conflicts would magically be resolved because everyone would in part be responsible. The only outcome was that the only people who attended were those who weren't working hard on the site!


• If, like me, you're not very vocal with people who's discipline isn't yours (broadcast electronics in my case) then meetings are a terrible way to transfer knowledge. I end up not saying much (when perhaps I should) and the manager/bean-counter/sales-person talks a lot more and nobody gets the info they need.

Anyway - some of this is covered superbly in Oliver Burkeman's column from today's Guardian.

Almost everyone hates meetings, and yet the idea of doing away with them is seen as revolutionary, or ridiculous. Jim Buckmaster, chief executive of the hugely successful website Craigslist, has a simple policy - "No meetings, ever" - but if you're a manager, you're probably already thinking of reasons why you couldn't do the same. An important new book, Why Work Sucks And How To Fix It, proposes a total shift in how we think about office life, but one part is considered so startling, it's singled out on the cover: "No meetings." Senior executives find at least half of all meetings unproductive, studies show. Yet still they happen. "Meetings," writes the humorist Dave Barry, "are an addictive, highly self-indulgent activity that corporations and other large organisations habitually engage in only because they cannot actually masturbate."

Why Work Sucks And How To Fix It reports on an experiment I mentioned here during its earlier stages, at the US electronics chain BestBuy: a "results-only work environment", in which staff could work where and when they liked, so long as their jobs got done. The first casualty was meetings. "Why do we spend so much of our business life talking about the business we need to take care of?" the authors write.

There are several reasons why meetings don't work. They move, in the words of the career coach Dale Dauten, "at the pace of the slowest mind in the room", so that "all but one participant will be bored, all but one mind underused". A key purpose of meetings is information transfer, but they're based on the assumption that people absorb information best by hearing it, rather than reading it or discussing it over email, whereas in fact, only a minority of us are "auditory learners". PowerPoint presentations may be worse. The investigation into the 2003 Columbia space shuttle disaster, caused by a fuel tank problem, suggested that Nasa engineers might have been hampered in addressing it sooner because it was presented on PowerPoint slides, forcing the information into hierarchical lists of bullet points, ill-suited to how most brains work.

The key question for distinguishing a worthwhile meeting from a worthless one seems to be this: is it a "status-report" meeting, designed for employees to tell each other things? If so, it's probably better handled on email or paper. That leaves a minority of "good" meetings, whose value lies in the meeting of minds itself, for example, a well-run brainstorming session.

Countless books advise managers on how to motivate staff. But motivation isn't the problem. Generally, people want to work; they gripe when things like meetings stop them doing so. Indeed, a 2006 study showed there's only one group of people who say meetings enhance their wellbeing - those who also score low on "accomplishment striving". In other words: people who enjoy meetings are those who don't like getting things done.

Advice to the young at heart

In the fifteen years since I left the Beeb I've employed & supervised a dozen engineers and a couple of runners/work experience types. Some of them have blown me away with how keen they are and other have totally underwhelmed me with their eagerness! If I had any advice then it would fall into a few categories

• Timekeeping - the difference between being a few minutes early and a bit late equates to maybe ten minutes extra in bed but from your supervisor's point of view it is a world of difference. Are you serious about what you do or are you just showing up so that you get your pay cheque? The Micawber principle applies. Also - the people who I've known who are easy about their timekeeping at the start of the working day tend to be sticklers come the end of it.
  
• Are you aiming to give your best or merely doing as little as you can get away with? I know modern employment law encourages the latter - all this business of verbal and then several written warnings means that lazy people can gauge where the bar is and then stay just above it. The irony is that people who set out to impress the boss with how hard they work invariably enjoy their labour more and the day flies by.
• Do you try and better yourself during the quiet periods - if you're an engineer then no doubt there are areas where you know little and knowing more would make you a better, more rounded individual. In my line (broadcast engineering) I've known lots of people who do what they do and nothing else - vision engineers who never stray into the workshop to do some equipment maintenance, Avid support engineers who never take an interest in systems design etc. If you call yourself a television engineer then you should (as a matter of course) be able to (or at least aiming yourself towards) rack a studio camera, build and configure an Avid/FCP workstation from scratch, re-head and align a VTR, calibrate a grade-1 monitor and configure a variety of internet routers and firewalls. Specialisation is for insects.
  
• Take your employer's IT seriously - I knew one engineer who religiously backed-up his pr0n and illegal MP3 collection but never bothered with his work - when his laptop's drive died we lost a load of customer data, but at least the filth and music was safe! After all - someone else is paying for the computer and bandwidth and if you're doing more personal stuff on work time than actual work then something is wrong. Also - if you're serious get to know all three modern OSes - knowing Linux as well as the MacOS and Windows inside out can only make you better at IT in general. Those engineers I know who have bothered to move out of their Windows comfort zone are all the better for it.
  
• Spread all you learn around - trying to cultivate a guru status makes no sense - do you really want to be the only engineer who gets the call at three AM?!
• Take electrical, chemical and mechanical safety very seriously. If you're responsible for PAT testing a system do it twice. If you can test something both by measuring it and then using the system it's intended for then do it - nobody likes to have to return to a system that should have been left working.
  
• Finally - don't view anything as being beneath you - if something needs doing and you can then you'll be all the better for getting it done. Have you got a couple of hours to kill and the workshop needs sweeping - I do it.
  

Busy, busy

I've been really bad at blogging recently - I am snowed under with work as I currently have four decent sized project running simultaneously. Although I had the weekend of Simon's wedding off I have pretty much worked every other weekend going all the way back to the start of July.

I did manage to get yesterday off and I spent a couple of hours helping Joe (my eldest, fourteen) with a new programming project. He's getting into DarkBasic which is procedural language that can be interpreted or compiled and has a bunch of libraries for addressing DirectX functionality. Yesterday we were writing a converter to go between UK, European and US shows sizes - not a hard project but he's just getting use to integer, real and string types so it's all good.

Anyhow - here are just a few notes from the last week or so;

• The new BBC1 sitcom Outnumbered is very funny.
  
• I'm forty today and was very pleased that my Mum sent me the complete Faulty Towers (amongst other things!)
  
• The BBC's new iPlayer application is so DRM laden and buggy that I'll stick with UKNova - until they make it that easy and pleasant to use they're onto a looser!
  
• The new iPods - the iPod Touch is nearly what I'd like! The only thing missing is being able to sync content over the WiFi - I know you can buy tunes over the 802.11g connection but I like to copy podcasts onto my device while I'm having my porridge.
• Version 3.5 of Skype don't work with my MacBook/Vista combo - had to downgrade to 3.2
  

From the sublime to the ridiculous

We've been doing an install at a Soho facility and as ever Tony and the wiremen do a superb job - neat and accurate. The right-hand image shows our cabling on the top cable tray and the previous systems integrators efforts below; Un-numbered cables that have been just thrown in. They've attempted to run HD-SDi over skinny coax and fibre channel over long pre-made tight-buffered optical cable. By contrast we do all video on Vision 1000 and all fibre on kevlar-armoured loose-tube cable. I'm amazed that previous company had the cheek to submit an invoice!