The Trickiness of German Genders

January 27, 2014 //

Those of you for whom English is a first language will know the challenges of wrestling with your maiden second language, because the chances are it embraces the whole new world of gender. We speakers of English only really come across gender in words like waiter/waitress, actor/actress and master/mistress.

To my mind this is just a vocab thing, since our pronouns – ‘the’, ‘a’ and so on – and adjectives – big, small, you know the deal – don’t have to ‘agree’ with the noun – tree, house, stop me if I’m going too slowly here. Besides, our US friends have largely abandoned the female forms of these words anyway.

Your romance languages introduce the notion of gender as reflected in the noun, like le fils, la fille, and in any adjectives or verb parts related to those nouns, as in Il a sauvé la petite fille blessée – he saved the little injured girl. Sorry, a bit macabre, but all I think of on the hoof. Then there’s German, not content with 2 genders, which introduces the 3rd gender of neuter, not to be confused with a recent German initiative to introduce a 3rd gender for humans – and don’t ask me how your adjectives and verbal adjectives are going to deal with that conundrum.

Remembering and using the right genders with the tens of thousands of words in the language is a tall order even for those schooled in it from birth, never mind us folks shambling through a sentence or two in the hope we get served the right drink, meal or hotel room. As a case in point, I offer you the German for knife, fork and spoon.

Now knife, fork and spoon for me fall into a natural notional group – eating implements. So in the interests of facilitating the speaking of the language they should all have the same gender signifier in my view. Is that the case in practice? No. Far too easy.

Knife is Das Messer, neuter. Fork is Die Gabel, feminine. Spoon is Der Löffel, masculine. Go figure. You see, it appears that German doesn’t follow a natural ‘genderising’ process for its words. For example, ‘Wo ist das Mädchen? Es ist sehr klein’. ‘Where is the girl? She is very little.’ The word for girl is neuter, hence the words Das, Es – which also means it – and the neuter adjective klein. As a poor speaker of German, I’m indebted to this book for putting me right on this vexing topic.

Tricky one, huh? It almost militates against the natural growth of the language. At least we don’t have to worry too much in a world governed – for now – by business Americanish.

Tags gender, German, language

Categories Language

Banks: Too Big to Fail and Too Big to Serve You Properly

January 24, 2014 //

The size of a company seems to be inversely proportional to the quality of service it provides. As markets mature you get consolidation, resulting – in the opinion of this writer – in less choice for the customer and more chance of being lost in the system.

As a case in point I offer you my recent experiences trying to set up online banking for an account I’ve not used in a while. I’ll spare you the details and give you the shorthand. First I had to wait two weeks while they changed one letter – a typo – in the address details they had on file, which of course required a written letter. That done, the website didn’t recognise my bank details so I couldn’t apply online.

So I applied using good old fashioned snail mail, filling in an application form and posting it. A week later, a letter arrived which I expected to be my activation letter. No, it was a letter saying my paper application had been rejected because the address I supplied didn’t match the one on file. Two calls to the bank revealed that – no – the addresses did match, and they would look into it and call me back. The back and forth so far has been between at least 5 different divisions of the bank.

I should mention that this an account I have had for over a decade and which I originally set up over the phone.

Passing my local branch the other day, I decided to pop in and see if they could help. Lo and behold, the system they accessed showed an address that I haven’t lived at for six years, even though I’ve been getting statements to my current address for the entire subsequent period. While the bank hasn’t yet sorted out my online access, my view is that the problem lies with a defunct account I might have had that was with a previously independent bank that the behemoth bank has acquired.

Can you imagine what the back end systems and customer information are like after a generation of M & A activity? It’s hard to imagine how many gremlins are lurking among the mainframes. In this era of multi-channel dealing, where we may choose to interact with suppliers through a variety of media and devices – witness my current issue which I have tried to address by paper, face-to-face, phone, web and chat – they don’t have a cat in hell’s chance of catching up and competing.

Tags Bank, Big

Categories Customers, Strategy, Technology

There’s a Time and a Place for Everything

January 22, 2014 //

The title of this post is one of those phrases that seems to have been around for ages. It’s the sort of thing your Granny might have said to encourage you to have more patience. ‘All in its own good time’ is another beauty that people trot out.

Well of course there’s a time and a place for everything, otherwise it wouldn’t exist! What the phrase means for me is that the time and place has to be right for it to have its full effect. It has to be the right intersection of the two dimensions – temporal and spatial.

At the same time, this all feels a bit passive, defeatist almost. It’s as if you can’t control your destiny, you just have to wait for the gods or ducks to be aligned before something good happens. Do you want to be someone who makes things happen, or someone that things happen to?

As the business gurus are fond of saying: if you can’t predict the future, create it. And there’s definitely a time and a place for that. Yours.

Tags place, time

Categories Communication, General

Age Is Just A Number

January 20, 2014 //

Don’t you hate it when someone younger than you tells you that?

Of course age is just a number, but it’s also an indication of wear and tear, capacity to do work, and recuperative ability. You can’t escape its inexorable march. You can stay in shape and retard the ravages of time, but you ain’t gonna stop the bus.

The other day I was at the gym, participating in a 6-week program to inject some variety into my regime. One of the routines was a lung-bursting blast for 3 agonising minutes. ‘Do you know how old I am?’ I said to the instructor. With a full head’s height advantage, and probably two decades of credit on me, he looked down and smiled, ‘Age is just a number Paul.’

‘True,’ I offered, ‘but in my case it’s a bloody big number.’

He remained unmoved, and we did the drill.

That’s the trouble with youth. Wasted on the young.

Tags Age

Categories General

The Nirvana of Perfectly Efficient Connections

January 17, 2014 //

When I sit on a London-bound train and don’t want to shut the world away and write, like I’m doing right now, I like to soak up the ambience of my train carriage and home in on some of the mobile conversations that the less discrete business people tend to have after their meetings in the UK’s capital.

As well as the standard business shorthand phrases like ‘food for thought’, ‘keep moving forward’, ‘in this together’ etc. I usually have this unexplainable – as opposed to inexplicable – feeling of sadness wash over me. Not because I want to work where they work, but because of the inherent unproductiveness of big society where a mass of people mills around like atoms in a pan of boiling water.

All these people travel together with strangers into the big city, head to their specific meeting with their customer, partner or supplier, conduct their business, scurry back to their travel hub and head back home. They use the journey back for follow-up calls, post mortems, problems, solutions and actions, all within earshot and sight of another band of strangers.

And that, for me, is the modern big city: a vast collection of people on the move, in between things, trying desperately to minimise their A to B time and expenses. Whole industries built around a state of perpetual transience.

The promise of the Internet is that it can bring us together in ways that the phone never could do. Despite the advantages that the face to face element of Skype and video conferencing delivers, nothing has yet replaced the physical meeting as the pinnacle of human interaction and collaboration.

And hence the sadness. We crave interaction from our fellow humans, yet meeting them is all so inefficient. Teleportation would be extremely handy, but in the absence of that, I always wonder if there is a better way to co-ordinate these millions of criss-crossing journeys.

I think when I get back to my home office I’m going to stew on that and not come out until I have fixed it. Or in case someone wants to see me for a meeting…

Tags Meeting, Travel

Categories Communication, Customers, General, Marketing, Sales, Technology

Two Jokes You Can Tell Grandma

January 13, 2014 //

I was visiting my uncle the other day. He’s about 143 and frail but his mind is razor sharp and he has locked away about a thousand jokes that he draws from regularly. Here are two of them.

Number 1

Patient: Doctor, give me the bad news then the good news.

Doctor: There’s only bad news and worse news.

Patient: OK, I’ll take the bad news then the worse news.

Doctor: The bad news is you’ve 24 hours to live. The worse news is I forgot to tell you yesterday…

Number 2

Friend 1: See these yellow pills? I’ve got to take 1 a day for the rest of my life.

Friend 2: That’s not so bad, is it?

Friend 1: They’ve only given me 3…

🙂

Tags Humour, Joke

Categories General

It’s a Monday-Wednesday-Friday Thing

January 10, 2014 //

For me, dear reader, the natural cadence of this blog is a post every Monday, Wednesday and Friday. It’s what I’ve stuck to since the first post.

My posts are fairly short and take a minute or two to read at most. Three times during the working week feels like the right balance between intrusion into your productive time and making enough of a regular connection. Consistency is one of the my key tenets, and I don’t know about you but I find wading through a monster of a post once a week a bit of an ordeal. Plus, you get the weekend off for good behaviour.

Three posts a week is something that I feel I can continue to commit to as my part of the bargain. I don’t feel I can stretch to the daily dose of epic content that Mr Seth Godin has been bestowing upon us for more than a handful of years. I’m not a full-time writer, nowhere near as brilliant, and I don’t have the resources.

It doesn’t really matter what I think though. It’s your view that counts, since you’re consuming the output. Otherwise I might just as well paint a masterpiece and lock it in my basement.

I’d be delighted to hear how you feel about the frequency of posts, privately or via the blog. And the content of them for that matter.

Thanks for reading :-).

Tags Blog, Consistency, Frequency, Posting, Seth Godin

Categories Communication, General

I’m Not Getting Old, I’m Simply in Q3

January 8, 2014 //

When in our business or working lives are we at our most productive?

Is it in our 20’s when we’re single and can travel the world? Is it in our 30’s when we have the energy and the focus? Is it in our 40’s when we have the experience to work smart? What about in our 50’s when we have the seniority and gravitas?

In most working environments we tend to be – or are at the very east hoping to be – tapering our work commitments and efforts in our 60’s, yet as is well documented, a constantly increasing section of the global population is working for longer. As the population shifts and it becomes increasingly unsustainable for the younger working people to support the funds that the older retired people draw from, so the retirement age increases and the state pension reduces.

For my generation, with the exception of those who have won the lotto, hit the jackpot, or robbed a bank, the equation is obvious. Take slightly older parents of kids who will probably go to college, add a couple doses of pension fund and property value collapses, and you have a retirement age of at least 70. Ouch.

As a man whose father retired at 50, it comes to me as something of a shock, I don’t mind telling you.

What this means is that the bell curve of productivity is going to have to move significantly to the right – where age is on the x axis – in order for the macro sums to add up. In terms of our age, just like in business, this means that our personal Q3 is going to have to be a big one. Even our Q4 too, if we live that long. What we have against us of course is our age and our dwindling physical and mental capacities. Failing this fairly crude maths coming up trumps, something fundamental is going to have to change in society and how we work.

I’m not downbeat though. I think technology will continue to help us save time, save energy, and reduce distances. It will change the game, invent new paradigms, banish the old ways of doing things, and any other cliché you can’t think of.

I don’t know how it will, but it will, it has to. If I did know, I’d be retiring in Q2…

Tags Age, Old, Productivity, Work/life

Categories General, Strategy, Technology

When the Present Is All You Have

January 6, 2014 //

Our American friends are very good at making every moment count. Far from wallowing in the past or wishing their lives away until some happy event in the future, they encourage us to capitalise on what is current. Hence the familiar phrases like ‘being in the moment’ and ‘living for now’. This resonates in sports and is also especially true for business these days, when the emphasis is, quite rightly, on execution. You can only execute on the present tense; you can’t execute in the past or future.

That said, imagine what kind of a world it is for those people for whom there is only the present tense. There are millions of people with varying conditions of what is essentially an eternal limbo. Long term memory is OK for many, but for the majority the short term memory evaporates. Think about what this means.

There is no recent past. The couple of grand you spent on last week’s holiday, or yesterday’s dinner with friends, or this afternoon’s sports match are gone, as if they never happened. There is no future. You’re not looking forward to the weekend, because within a few minutes of being reminded of the delights in store, you’ve forgotten them.

You are literally in the moment, constantly, fleetingly, living from moment to moment. Do you even try to enjoy every moment to its fullest? Probably not, because you have to remember to do that…

I don’t have any wisdom or answers to offer here. But I do have a question:

If the present really was all you had, would you execute better on your work lives, social lives and family lives? Would you check out, or would you do your best every time? Here’s to option 2…

Tags Execution, Now, Present, Relationship, Respect

Categories Communication, General, Marketing