takin' care of business

Start with the end in mind, is one of Stephen Covey's Seven Habits of Highly Effective People. A suggestion that v v b might well bear in mind, except for the fact that v v b just blogs and publishes, rather than going away, drafting and polishing and thinking about the end, before the 'go' button gets pressed. But it's Covey and his ilk that concerns us tonight, and indeed exactly how effective we might want to become.

Here at v v b we're endlessly fascinated by the world of leadership and management, or actually make that worlds, plural. We've done some training and an awful lot of reading - and a lot of awful reading - some of which has stuck and some less so.

The prompt for having an online rumination this time came from last week's Boss magazine. In particular there was an article about the corporatisation, for want of a better term, of raising kids. It pointed to both parents working, increasingly longer/more intensive hours and the trend towards outsourcing many of the traditional parenting functions to paid, organised activities. Nothing new there as I have certainly read several similar articles in the past. One interesting element in the article was a perceived trend towards ensuing kids obeyed authority. This was ascribed to concern amongst some parents about declining moral standards, which some parents sought to counter by enrolling children in "authoritarian religious" schools: this from a book, "The War for Children's Minds" by Stephen Law. Law apparently comes down strongly in favour of a "truly liberal approach", wherein kids are encouraged to critically evaluate morals within a rational framework. I know one reader at least will be whipping out to get Law.

In the end the article doesn't come out with any amazing insights, unless you count "a healthy democracy needs citizens to judge independently", within the current environment where democracy is under threat. Go Barnaby, you good thing...

Most of the rest of Boss is devoted to interviews with various successful business people as well as the four current female secretaries of government departments in Canberra. That article provides no blinding insights, particularly to anyone who's spent any amount of time in the public service. The conditions are more conducive and relatively transparent selection procedures do, on average, reward merit.

There's a knock-off piece on alpha males and a relatively interesting one on why people with scientific and engineering qualifications seem to rise to the top. This is put down to better understanding of scientific method, ability to project manage at a large scale and long term, and a prediliction to logic and systems thinking. I would conur with these broad findings from my experience of working with people from that sort of background.

Hanging about with people with these sorts of backgrounds is always mind blowing as they seem to be able to keep evertyhing in mind, get it all in a conceptual framework and then work through to conclusions seemingly without effort. Without having the actual training or experience, it's a matter of look and learn I guess, but that's very second best.

One thing that often strikes me about these types of articles, and perhaps even moreso the books on leadership and/or management, is the implicit suggestion that there's a simple mantra, maybe even one single thing, that you need to do to become successful. Such an assumption of course flies in face of reason and experience, or call it common sense if you will. But while I find myself drawn to continuing study of the genre, I try to remember that it's all cumulative. Keep reading, keep practicing, keep thinking.

Meanwhile, back at the ranch...someone said to me today if Beazley had had the guts to oppose the invasion of Iraq at the time, then:
(a) Labor probably would have taken a bigger hit in that election;
(b) but they were never going to win it anyway; and
(c) he'd be looking pretty good now.

Benefit of hindsight, or something else?

Well, we started with the end in mind but ended up with a different end. Because we are not a scientist. And isn't "Boss" a wanky alpha-male name anyway?