A little humour to start the year. Heard today. You couldn’t make it up.
Two ladies of ‘a certain age’ were talking. A small amount of drink had been consumed.
Lady 1: You remember uncle Dennis, he died 40 years ago, choked on a piece of steak.
Lady 2: Why didn’t uncle Michael give him the Heineken manoeuvre?
🙂
Happy New Year.
I mentioned in a previous post how the teachers and mentors you have in your younger years have a major influence on how you develop as an individual. I think that’s also true of your managers and your working life. With that in mind, and continuing this week’s theme of paying people back with thanks during the holiday season, I share with you here the great managers I’ve had in my 15 years in the tech sector.
There’s a saying that you should never manage anyone who’s older than you. Many of the ones below have successfully debunked that myth.
In more or less chronological order:
– Jim Maher, former CEO of Allfinanz. A man who knew how to take the right risks, and was never afraid of walking away from a bad deal, Jim took a gamble on a guy untested in the tech space. I think he feels it was worth the risk.
– Jonathan Gale, formerly Sales VP of MessageLabs, now part of the behemoth that is Symantec. Extremely able head of sales who took me on to manage a new service – and a new departure – for the company. Now heading up New Voice Media.
– Stephen Millard, formerly Marketing VP of MessageLabs. Stephen started my career in product marketing. An excellent manager who understood intimately that management was about finding the right balance between delegating and guiding.
– Gary Thomassen, formerly Direct of Product Management and Marketing at MessageLabs. Another first-rate manager and that rare breed who understood that you can pretty much leave specialists to themselves when they’re armed with their objectives.
– Donal Daly, founder and CEO of The TAS Group. There is pretty much nothing that this chap can’t do better than you in your own field of expertise within his business. Sickeningly gifted and visionary.
– York Baur, formerly CMO at The TAS Group. Immensely knowledgeable across a panoply of subjects, and infinitely patient and gracious on the regular occasions that his decision was a better one than yours. A huge fan of NASCAR, but hey, no-one’s perfect.
– Paul Watson, formerly CEO at Star Technology Group. Living proof that nice guys do finish first, Paul has managed a number of projects that I helped him with as a consultant. Another extremely shrewd guy who excels at getting the best – which is not the same as the most – out of his people.
– Andrew Norman, Director of Sales and Marketing at eSellerPro. With a dauntingly broad remit, Norms still finds the time to be a superb manager of people, whether they are staff, contractors or partners. One to look out for.
There’s eight of the best for you. Â If you too have worked for one of them, you’ll know what I mean.
At this time of thankfulness and good cheer – yes, we non-Americans sometimes do our thanking, and thinking, at Christmas rather than late November – I want to reflect on the importance of teachers, guides and guardians who complement our parents in helping to shape who we are in our formative years.
I was not one of those brilliant kids who had it all figured out. I needed adults to show me the way and make me aware of how I could become a better person. A lot of the people I’m calling out are a generation older than me – obviously – and since I’m no spring chicken there’s a good chance they are pretty elderly. Perhaps, therefore, this isn’t the best medium for doing it, but certainly one of the easier ones.
So, in kind of chronological order, here are the teachers and influencers I would like to thank. In most cases I only list their surnames, because I only knew their surnames.
– Mrs Batty, my primary school teacher who set me up to pass my 11-plus exam. Â Mrs B hardly ever lost her temper with me, which is no mean achievement. I last saw her about 5 years go, and even though she must be about 234 years old by now, she remembered me and still had that twinkle in her eye.
– Mr Thomas, my maths teacher, who allowed my parents to prevail upon him that even though I hadn’t scored well enough to get into the fast stream for O levels, I was worth a shot. Teachers, take note: it’s good to be flexible and bend the rules once in a while.
– Mr Jeffries, my fast stream maths teacher, who made maths easy, again no mean achievement. Â He also played in the same table tennis team as me, which made him Mr Jeffries by day and Tony in the evening. He once entered the classroom as I was getting to the punchline of a ‘bottom’ joke involving the planet Uranus and effortlessly eased into a comment that we should all sit down on the other polite word for our rear ends. Â My American friends: in England we pronounce the planet with the accent on the second syllable. Â When you’re 14/15, this is about as funny as it gets.
– Mr Harvey, my table tennis coach, who sacrificed perhaps 1,000 hours over a decade teaching me the finer points of competitive sport. For any sport to thrive, you need great facilities and great coaches. Â He was a great coach, and a Wolverhampton Wanderers fan too. Legend.
– Pete Knight, my table tennis tennis team mate, manager, driver and mentor. Always Pete, sometimes Pedro, or Pietro. I dread to think how many cups of tea he and his lovely wife Jan have made me over the years. I think it’s around 1,135. They are the only 2 people in my home town I stay in touch with.
– Mr Carter and Mr McNeill, my two Latin and Greek A level teachers. The 3rd member of the classics teaching triumvirate was Mr Taylor, who had left in the summer after my A levels for another school. I stayed on an extra term after A levels to study for and sit the Cambridge entrance exams. Messrs Carter and McNeill gave me extra, unscheduled hours every week to help prepare me. Yes, I know, for those of you under 40, teachers did put in extra hours for their students’ edification back then. Unthinkable now.
– Mr CR Whittaker, Dick to his students, my Director of Studies at Churchill College. Sadly no longer with us, and appropriately remembered by his peers and former students at a dinner a few years ago. Tolerant of my appalling abilities in Roman history, in which he was a world authority, and of my frequent minimal studying due to the demands of being student union president of the college, he still managed to steer me to an over-achieving 2.1 degree, and all of it with a smile that would have put a crocodile to shame.
To those who made a difference to my life, I thank you, in the rather inadequate form of a blog post. You all made a difference, a good one, and I would like to remind you that as teachers and mentors you are incredibly influential in terms of the paths we take in life. Â I literally wouldn’t be where I am today without you.
Some of you made a bad difference. You were old school, with pun intended, and you don’t get a mention.
I’ve touched on our troubles with apostrophes in a previous post. Sometimes these rogue apostrophes appear in content without reason. Lest we forget, apostrophes can only be used for 2 principal reasons:
1) To signify possession, as in Paul’s house is rather small
2) To signify a missing letter, as in Paul’s a rather small man
As I’ve touched on in the previous post, you don’t need one when you’re using plurals with nothing possessed. The trees were swaying, for example. But you do see apostrophes with nouns, so the confusion is perhaps understandable.
Not so when you see the howler of an apostrophe with a verb. Just the other day I was reading a press release from a company I admire, and presumably it was written by someone who writes for a living. It began as follows: “Today see’s the launch of …”
What?! On what planet does that make sense? Hell’s bell’s … 🙂
Are you a stickler for the correct grammar, spelling and punctuation in your text-based conversations? What about abbreviations? Expedience and convenience over accuracy?
I suspect this boils down to which generation we fall into; whether we were born into a mobile texting generation or were adults before their advent.
I remember being slightly horrified when I texted the babysitter to see if she was available to look after the little angels one night a few years ago. She replied back ‘Ye dats fine.’ I remember wondering if she wrote her schoolwork that way. For her I suspect it was just a case of adopting the shorthand of the high frequency texter.
I send a few more texts than I used to, but I still feel that even though it’s a conversational medium I’m being judged on the output of its written counterpart. I might even be the only person that uses a semi-colon when it’s called for.
Wots ur vew?
This could be post-titled ‘part 1 of several’, but anyway…
A little humour to get your week moving. How many of us have sent an email that features an embarrassing typo? Sometimes it’s just fat finger syndrome, sometimes it’s an unfortunate autocorrect that you miss. And sometimes you think you depress a key and it’s a milligram less than required and you lose your letter.
Here’s one of mine from a couple of weeks ago.
[His email] Do you need anything from me on this?
[My email] No, I’m god, thanks.
Overplaying my importance a touch, methinks. Â :-).
PS For those so put off by my blasphemy that they can’t see straight, I meant to type ‘good’.
Why oh why, dear reader, do folks put an apostrophe before the ‘s’ in your common-or-garden plural?
As we’ve talked about before, an apostrophe only ever signifies possession, as in the dog’s bone, or a missing letter or letters, as in the dog’s got a bone which is short for the dog has got a bone. But to start a sentence with ‘The teacher’s taught the pupils’ betrays an alarming lack of knowledge of that simple rule.
While we’re on the subject of plurals and apostrophes, let me just remind those unsure of how the possessives work with singular and plural nouns. The apostrophe goes immediately after the thing or things doing the possessing. So we write the dog’s bone, but the parents’ association. Where it gets confusing is where the thing doing the possessing has a built-in plural. So, we say the children’s toys, the and the couple’s daughter, but the couples’ children when it’s more than one couple doing the possessing :-). And then we get onto ‘folk’, from the German word volk, meaning people. Some people prefer to say folk, some say folks, so where do you put the apostrophe then? Wherever you like in my view.
Like I say, folk’s punctuation drives me mad…
In an earlier post I talked about the differences between American English and British English. One area the two homes of English speaking differ markedly is in pronunciation. Â For example, I might say missile, they say ‘missle’.
When you get to polysyllable words, then you’ll often hear the differences. I might say controversy, they might say controversy. I definitely say laboratory, whereas our American friends prefer to put the accent on the first syllable and let the others trail behind like the links of a chain dragged along the ground.
Wherever you choose to place your accent, be aware that it’s a real differentiator, and not just between these two countries. When you get it wrong altogether it signals that the language is not your first choice. ‘It’s really important,’ as a former boss of mine is fond of saying, ‘to put the emphasis on the right syllable.’
At this time of year marketers like to bring out the cues that tap into our past, as we tend to get all nostalgic and reach for our wallets in a feel-good fog of warm fuzziness.
These cues can be visual, but the one cue that really strikes a chord and brings the memories flooding back is the musical cue. A few bars of the right ditty can bring you back to a precise time and place like very little else.
It’s not just the sounds constructed by composers that bring you back. It can also be sounds constructed by product designers.
We have one of those indestructible kettles in our kitchen. Sick of forking out every year for an electric kettle that seemed programmed to last a month beyond the guarantee period before conking out, Mrs D opted for a more traditional version. It takes a while to boil on a gas hob – and probably uses more energy than an electric plug kettle – and when it boils it emits a gradually more insistent high-pitched whistle that takes me back to my grandmother’s house from a long time ago. In fact, there’s nothing like a kitchen to draw on all 5 of our senses.
The online marketers have the same challenges as television advertisers: you can only rely on sight and sound to evoke the right feeling. The medium of radio can only rely on one sense. That’s an advantage that physical stores have over the remote media: smell, taste and touch. The smell of cinnamon in home and garden stores in December. The taste of the sample turkey food at the supermarket. The all-important squeeze of the avocado or the apple to indicate whether it’s the right time to buy.
Maybe that’s why, when we say ‘I’m getting a sense of deja vu,’ which means ‘already seen’, we often mean any sense of our senses. Â For me it’s the sense of sound that brings me back the most strongly.
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