Fashion - a glimpse of the past

Fashion - a glimpse of the past

I have been reading a few fashion blogs lately - ya know, the ones with the pretty pictures - in particular, The Sartorialist. Like most women, I care about what I put on, but until recent times I have never been particularly interested in "farshion" as we call it in my house. To be an utter bore, I will bring up that Daniel Pink book yet again. I am wondering whether my increased interest in aesthetics has something to do with my right brain looking for a bit of action. A new found desire for good design also has implications for our house renovation. We are spending enough on it now to warrant moving into a home in a better area. But we love the idea of a well thought out home, designed with our family in mind. So we stays put.

Getting back to farshion, I marvel at all the beautiful young things on these blogs (another interesting one is Face Hunter). An Aunt recently had a photo posted on facebook of her with her ex in the 60s. She looked like a beauty queen. She commented that all young people seem beautiful through the filter of age. It makes me think of myself 15 years ago. I was 17 and embarrassed at being small and thin. Being a uni student in the days of grunge meant I could cover up with baggy jeans, work boots and vintage men's shirts and (cringe) pyjama tops picked up from the op shop. I curse myself for not embracing my youth when I could have been more adventurous with clothing.

Anways, the point of this blog was post a few more family photos (many from my father's cousin's mother's side - no blood relation to me, but they were the best dressed in the pile!). I love how years ago dress was so much more formal. Impractical, but lovely to look at.

Once upon a time, dressing up didn't mean wearing a dress, or jacket - you did that anyway. Dressing up meant donning your furs:


When one picnicked, one slouched around in vests, bowties, and jackets:


When one dressed as a hobo, one simply wore one's suit askew:


How embarrassing! One has been photographed in one's bathers!


I love how dapper the man on the left looks:



I think these ladies are playing at dress-ups with the vintage wear of the day - the point gets lost through time however!


My grandparents were factory workers. Granny had to make most of her own clothes. Here she is, 20 or 21, pregnant and two kids in tow. What an effort it must have been to turn herself out so well (being so young must have helped):


I included this because my father (left) looks like he could have flown home using those protrusions on his head - bless his little knitted jumper:

Big picture thinking

Big picture thinking

At the risk of banging on a bit too much about this Daniel Pink book, he has had my head cogs working overtime, and I can't resist another A Whole New Mind post. I have had one of those wonderful "eureka" moments that he talks about in his book, when seemingly disparate ideas and/or experiences work together and you come to a realisation. Hopefully that realisation will be the solution to what you thought was an intractable problem, or perhaps it will be some incredible business idea. This time around my "aha!" moment is simply an answer to a niggling question I had about another book I read recently, which I will give some attention to here as I quite enjoyed it.

The book is another business paperback that my husband ordered through Amazon, John Seddon's Systems Thinking in the Public Sector, which provides what I think is a fascinating insight into how systems thinking can benefit these service organisations. While this sounds dry, his style is very plain speaking, and even quite emotive at times. His approach to improving systems is so simple, elegant, and brimming with common sense that, for me, it borders on genius.

Even I find it a little odd that a full time mum reads and finds a book of this title interesting, but bear with me. When I lived in Sydney, I worked in a large call centre for a financial services company. They had a new fandangled call management system based around targets for productivity and quality. The quality aspect was really just about ticking the boxes with each call you received. Did you answer the call in the proscribed manner? Did you ask all the right questions? Were you efficient at retrieving information? Did you sign off in the correct manner? The productivity measures were where I felt something had gone really wrong for the business. Eighty five percent of all calls needed to be answered within 15 seconds, and to achieve "job mastery" a call centre worker needed to field 80 or more calls a shift. Some customer service representatives answered upwards of 100 calls daily.

(PS: if you have made it this far and are bored out of your brain, read the post under this one - it is all touchy feely and lovely)

An important part of our role was follow up work from calls - checking on requests to the redemptions team, passing on complaints, finding documents, faxing out information that and been requested, etc. However, we were not and could not be measured on this work. Those, like myself, who cared about the customer (I am not immune to a bit of self-aggrandisement from time to time ;-)) would make sure this work was completed, but it took us away from answering calls and we struggled to meet the productivity targets. Others in the call centre met their productivity and quality targets consistently every fortnight, which I think had something to do with them not spending much time on follow up work. Another trick mastered by the crafty was to hang up on a call the moment it beeped through - of course all that meant was that the poor sod who had been waiting in the call queue had to call back again, but at least the call centre rep was one call closer to his or her daily target. Unsurprisingly, a lot of calls I fielded pertained to work that should have been, but didn't get done, and I spent a lot of the day dealing with angry and frustrated financial advisors and their assistants. Fed up with the mutual exclusivity of providing good customer service and meeting targets, I quit the job after nine months. Looking back, it always bothered me.

Seddon, in his book, brought home to me the reasons why this system didn't work - it was because we were there to serve the targets, not the customer. The first question that Seddon would ask is - What is the purpose of the organisation? If the purpose is to provide financial instruments through which people can invest, grow their assets and then redeem their investment when the time is right, then we need to ask whether or not this purpose is being achieved by the current system. If I were to just look at the redemption aspect of the system, I would say it was not a satisfactory service. There were long delays in redeeming funds and anxious customers would make several calls to follow up on progress. The problem, according to systems thinkers like Seddon, is that targets institutionalise waste - ie they create massive amounts of rework. Many of the calls put through the centre would not have been made if a request (such as for a redemption) had been resolved at first point of contact. In effect calls like these are the waste of service industry. And every unnecessary call brings with a load of follow up work - more waste. If we had focused on achieving purpose with our system instead of achieving targets, the waste could have been stripped out, and a more efficient system could have emerged.


Another aspect of the Systems Thinking approach that hit the mark with me was the idea that customer service and administration did not necessarily need to be separated. Why not give service reps the power to complete the most common admin tasks and resolve as many requests as possible at first point of contact? Infrequent and very complex requests can still be passed on to specialists.

I am probably delving into it a bit too much now - if you find this vaguely intriguing, I recommend reading the book. I am no specialist, yet found it a great read, and honked with laughter at some of the ridiculous aspects of public sector services provision in the UK (which I am sure you can find carbon copies of here in NZ).

But there was one thing about this book that niggled and niggled at me - it all seemed so bloody obvious - why didn't managers in the organisations he spoke of see where they were going wrong and right the course? (Actually, as Seddon points out, it is usually the underlings that have a firmer grasp on system failings). The other niggle I had was why could I not define purpose for each of the projects he spoke of so succinctly as he could.

This brings me back to Pink's book. As I have mentioned in a previous post, people who are good right brain thinkers can contextualise well and see the "big picture". Big picture thinkers don't get mired in the detail. They are like giraffes, poking their heads over the tree canopy, looking out for landmarks, and getting a good understanding of where they are heading. I think Seddon is one of those very good big picture thinkers. I would hazard to guess that with his years of experience, identifying purpose, and what is needed to achieve purpose has become second nature to him. I also think that his ability to write a book that makes his solutions seem so blindingly obvious is a testament to his superior grasp of the big picture - he just makes it seem so simple.

To contrast with this, I was reading a post today by a technology guy who was essentially arguing a similar point to Seddon - that good solutions require systems thinking. Good solutions are elegant, purposeful and not necessarily about complex document and content management systems that can impede a worker's ability to "join the dots". But, my God! His blog was opaque and mired in detail. It barely communicated his point. He is smart and has a lot of information in his head - but he doesn't see the big picture clearly, and I suspect he believes the important stuff is tied up somewhere in the mess of extraneous information he provides (I can't believe that she of the rambling post dares to charge another with such a crime!).

My husband lies somewhere on the continuum between the blogger and Seddon (closer to Seddon). I have noticed that over the years he has developed into a good big picture thinker. His thinking has changed to the extent that he has become frustrated with the constraints of his organisation, which is very traditional in its approach - apply technology to a problem, stir, and simmer for 12-24 months. I sincerely hope that this does not dispirit him too much - he does a great job! Love you darling :-)

Righto - my next blog will be less dry.

That warm, fuzzy feeling

That warm, fuzzy feeling

On Wednesday night I joined about 160 others for a viewing of "Smart People", a movie I liked much to my surprise, given the lacklustre reviews. The movie session was arranged as a fund raiser for an acquaintance who at 32 has a terminal illness, and who could do with some extra cash to cover her medical and other expenses. She doesn't know about it yet. A few friends will be going to her place tomorrow to let her know that around $4000 has been raised for her, with more to follow if plans for an auction take off. Originally they were nervous about selling 100 tickets, to generate profit of $1000. But around 200 tickets were snapped up very quickly, and donations rolled in. I am touched by the generosity and empathy displayed by people, including those that have never known her. Some days I feel a bit cynical about the world. There are so many negative stories out there, it is hard not to. Wednesday night was a good antidote.

Three of the donations came from women on my father's side of the family - his sister, a cousin and her daughter. I picked the donations up from the mailbox after I had been out grocery shopping with two ratty toddlers who had worn me thin (they were tired). The kindness of these woman to a stranger gave me a lift that carried me through the rest of the day. Coincidentally, also in mail was a CD full of over 300 old family photos that had been compiled by another cousin of my father's (the brother of one of the women) and his son. Every photo had been carefully retouched and many of them date back over a century. The photos had been passed down the generations, and added to in an album until technology made it possible to easily distribute the images amongst every member of the family. What an incredible gift. And another blow to my cynicism.

My father is lucky to have come from a family full of very caring and empathetic people, on both his mother's and father's side. My grandmother is a soft touch, and I remember her often in tears over the TV commercials during the Ethiopian famine in the 80's. Her daughter, Eileen, is one of the kindest, gentlest, and most generous people I know. A grandmother herself now, she devotes a lot of time to helping to care for her eight grandchildren. My father's cousin who compiled the CD, Athol, lost his mother and father (my grandfather's brother) when he was in his teens/early 20s. They died five years apart, both of heart failure (I think).

Athol included a memorial notice for his parents in the CD:

Twenty years have gone by,
Many times we have wished you would walk through the door,
Forever held close in our hearts, mum and dad.

He, his brother, John, and his sister, Noelene (who donated the money) were also devastated when their sister, Raewyn, died of a sudden stroke several years ago.

I think this goes some way to explaining why they have treasured their family heirlooms and taken care to distribute photos to the family. The importance of what you have is magnified by what you have lost.

Getting back to my broken cynicism, I gave a friend a lift home from the movie the other night. She is a very talented person, with a real can-do attitude - I have always admired her zest for life and new experiences. She told me that she was teaching blind children about musical instruments once a week, the last session being on the bongo. "I didn't know you knew how to play the bongo", I said. "I can't", she said, "but it is not so hard - all you do is bang it in different places to make different sounds." She is introducing them string instruments in the next session. And that warm fuzzy feeling keeps on rolling.



(The picture at the top is L-R - my grandmother, Eileen, my grandfather's sister, Dorothy, My Grandfather, Ray, and Athol's parents, Kathleen and Jack. The picture above is my grandfather as a baby with his twin brother, Tom, and his other siblings, the twins, Jack and Vera, and Dorothy (centre).)

Upload, Metaphor and whatever...

Upload, Metaphor and whatever...

It occurs to me that this blog is all over the place like a mad woman's knitting. I now have a possible reason why. I am a mummy and in US parlance, I have a "Mommy blog". Bud Weiser in his review of Pre-Wife on The Rising Blogger (too many links..making me dizzy...) makes the following comment:

"This blog is a bit all over the place in the way a “Mommy’s Blog” can be. We mean that every event the author finds note worthy and posts about is not always fascinating. But, when he is amusing he can be very funny."

When I read that I had a self reflective cringe moment. But, you gotta box on. I am waaay too undisciplined at the moment to create a theme for this blog, although at one point I did teeter on the brink of the "childhood stories to slit your wrists to" theme. Actually, there will be more on that later when I get back into writing my piece-meal memoir of a 30 something. (It must be incredibly irritating to people who have lived a long life to hear a sentence like that. I read a profile recently on Diana Athill who has recently had another volume of memoir published at 90, and is a best seller. Death and old age sell nowadays - for some reason that makes me feel warm and fuzzy. If you do read the profile, perhaps you, like I, will find the gawping and wide-eyed wonderment at her 'temerity' to shag black men, somewhat jarring.

But getting back to the point, I am going to resist a theme for a little while yet. And I will flow with any tangent that goes.

I have read a little further on into that Daniel Pink book A Whole New Mind and I just read the part about the rising importance of "Metaphor" as a conduit to understanding. I had a momentary lapse into self congratulatory back slapping (in the metaphorical sense only - I find it very hard to actually slap my back having been born with what I am sure are abnormally short tendons and ligaments - the only way I can explain how someone so skinny can't bend in half - oh I am loving these tangents today). I recently posted a rambling "Letter to a Friend" in which I used the metaphor of a car as a way to revisit some of her major life events and to understand her trouble in sorting some stuff out. Using a car as a metaphor for life is pretty cliche and "old hat" (snort!) but I think I made good use of it in this particular instance. The superstitious blip in the back of my mind (atheists shouldn't really be superstitious) is waiting for lightning to strike me down now, or for my pants to split when I next attempt to touch my toes, without bending my knees.

Pink talked about metaphor in the context of how "Symphony", or the "ability to put together pieces" as he puts it, are skills that are becoming increasingly valued - "...recognising patterns, crossing boundaries to uncover hidden connections, and making bold leaps of imagination." And as he later states "Modern life's glut of options and stimuli can be so overwhelming that those with the ability to see the big picture - to sort out what really matters - have a decided advantage in their pursuit of personal well-being." I like that. In fact I like a lot of what he says in this book. It makes a scatty person like me feel that my scattyness has some point - I am making "connections" due to having my interests spread over a "broad range of disciplines". I suppose other people would still just call me scatty and unfocused. If only they could see that I am riding a brilliant wave of right brained symphonic inspiration flashes, while crossing skills boundaries and grasping relationships between relationships in a single bound. I am like "Gloria White-Hammond, a pastor and pediatrician in Boston; Todd Machover, who composes operas and builds high tech music equipment."

In case it is not clear to those in the back who are talking and chewing gum, I am being mildly ironic. My hubris does not take me quite this far.

As a small postscript, I have been trying to upload images onto this site, but our upload speeds on our broadband plan are in the vicinity of 2M per year. Maybe one day I'll get there and you will have something prettier than text to look at.

Hemispheres and Mini Sagas

Hemispheres and Mini Sagas

My husband has an addiction. A perfectly worthy one mind you. He expands his mind through compulsive book buying from Amazon. He is a consultant and tries to keep on top of what is going on in the world of business boffin book writers. Fortunately for me, the truly dry and esoteric tomes he reads are borrowed from dry and esoteric people (Competing on Analytics never really took off in our household), and get pushed out the door soon enough. The volumes that adorn our bookshelf tend to be quite interesting 'flavour of the month' material, and I have found many of them adequate for end of the day reading. But I do have some quibbles with 'business lite' writing. Some books seem to be one idea stretched out a couple of hundred pages more than was necessary by having small pages, lots of pictures, and plenty of repetition (Dan Roam's The Back of the Napkin, an engaging and insightful book, could have got its point across on the back of the napkin, perhaps two). And some books probably could have benefited from a bit more rigour.

A Whole New Mind by Daniel H. Pink falls into the latter category. To be fair, I am only halfway through. The book is about moving away from analytical left brain dominated thinking to more creative right brain dominated thinking. With that in mind, perhaps it is appropriate that his approach is not particularly academic. And I must 'fess up to finding this book, like others of its type, eminently readable and persuasive. As I said, it was just a quibble.

For his narrative, Pink relies on the hemispheres of the brain as a metaphorical device to explain where the economies of the developed world are heading. Pink argues we are moving away from what he terms the L-Directed Thinking of the Information Age, that is, thinking characteristic of the left brain "sequential, literal, functional, textual, and analytic." Our destination is R-Directed Thinking, which is, you guessed it, characteristic of the right brain "simultaneous, metaphorical aesthetic, contextual and synthetic (in the 'synthesis' sense of the word, not the 'artificial' sense)." He is not, however, arguing that one hemisphere is becoming redundant as the other becomes ascendant, after all he is envisaging a whole new mind.

Key to Pink's argument are the effects in the developed world of Abundance, Automation and Asia. Abundance has satisfied our material needs, "boosting the significance of beauty and emotion and accelerating the individual's search for meaning" - steering us towards right hemisphere satisfactions. Concurrently, as happened with manual labour last century, automation and outsourcing to Asia have relieved white collar drones of logic and analysis work - reducing the economic value of those left hemisphere skills. (If you are interested in this topic, you should also read Rolf Jensen's Dream Society. Jensen is a futurist who wrote his book a few years prior to Pink. He comes at it from a different angle but his vision for the future is similar).

Pink provides tips on developing your skills for this future economy. I have just read the part of the book where he provides advice on how to enhance your story telling ability (a skill hitherto under appreciated in the modern economy). Being lazy by nature, I was particularly taken by his suggestion of writing mini-sagas. A mini-saga is a particularly short piece of flash fiction told in 50 words or less. (I prefer this to the very difficult challenge of writing a story in 6 words - who could top Hemingway's poignant "For sale: baby shoes, never worn.")

I thought I would give a fifty worder a bash:

As the moon's reflection shimmered on the glassy surface of the sea, and the water gently lapped at her milky white shoulders, Harriet came to the realisation that the incoming tide had stolen away her chance of retaining any semblance of modesty when she walked back to Christian camp.

It is a bit rubbish really - all one sentence. Send me your better offerings. It will give me a thrill. I will post them too.

Oo er

The US olympic team is on a high and news services are abuzz with the US winning the 4 x 100m swimming relay, and breaking a record in the process. But...ummm...where are Michael Phelps' budgie smugglers?

Yes, yes, I am tacky and superficial. But televised sport bores the pants off me (snort!) I need more.