20 east

Tomorrow is Children’s Day in Poland, something that is taken very seriously. For some reason, even though the day itself is also not a workday, most of the action was happening today. Here’s what we got up to –

The morning was devoted a ‘festyn’ organised by Zosia’s playschool. They have three schools and children and families from all three were invited. They took over the grounds and sports hall of a local proper school for the day and organised events both outside and in the hall. The weather was fantastic today, up to 29C and non stop sunshine, so it went down very well.

Dancing outside was fun

Indoors, the best display was from the karate squad (boys and girls)!

Zosia decided to join the proud-parents-paparazzi for most of it

After that we moved on to Arkadia shopping centre to buy Zosia a toy for Kids Day and get something to eat. The most interesting photo opportunity was this (not the people, the sign behind them)

We then shot off across the river to the M1 centre at Targowek to pay for a new bed and they had a whole kids entertainment thing going on outside with colourful butterflies

being chased by a black&white bad guy with a net.

They also had people blowing the most enormous bubbles

That done, we headed home only to find that in the park opposite they had yet another event going on so we parked the car and wandered over. The band “DAAB” were playing;

(Apologies for not getting the sax and trumpet guys in the shot but they were on the other side of the set)

According to the unofficial website, “Zespół DAAB jest najpopularniejszym polskim zespołem reggea’owym” (DAAB are Poland’s most popular reggae band) and they did a fine job, I must say.

The park was full of the usual stuff including, of course, a set of bouncy castles (tigers actually), ball pools and all that jazz.

Just before heading home we did what all Poles do on such occasions and got ourselves a gofry (waffle)

I’m not sure why Zosia is looking so scared about this gofry, can she be worried about calories at age five? Perhaps she thought daddy was going to splat it in her face, like he always does!

That was about it, a day of non-stop kids activities. Didn’t take Zosia long to fall asleep!

One final notable picture was this, grabbed at the junction of JPII and Solidarności. A massive Nikon advert in the process of being installed on the face of a building. As if this city doesn’t already have enough of this trash!

If the lights hadn’t changed I was about to pop up there and cut his rope!

Sad news last Wednesday that Beryl Cook, painter, died (aged 81). I can’t claim to be the world’s biggest Beryl Cook fan but I always found her work to be down-to-earth, honest (unpretentious), colourful and amusing (if a bit samey). It is always refreshing to find good honest work amongst all the dross.

I’d love to have one of her works hanging on the wall but no doubt their price is far beyond our reach. We do have a painting by a Polish artist, Mrozek, which comes close. This one could easily be a self-portrait!

This idea is being marketed by Cali & Jody (and a finer set of teeth you’re not likely to find!). Two ladies about to, if not already, very wealthy. They say about ROWE

Now Cali and Jody are leading a dramatic, global movement to change the activity formerly known as “work.” Their vision: to create a workplace where nothing matters except great results.

Their message: there is a better way. People across the planet want better lives; employers want better results; neither side has to compromise. Cali and Jody are leading the movement to make this dream a reality.

Clearly, this is one of the latest business/management crazes to come out of the USA and from what I see so far, aside from all the American hype, it has my complete approval. That’s not easily given as I’m not a businessman who’s bookshelves are full of the works of Tom Peters, Peter Drucker & Co, I don’t read about time management, searching for excellence, power or decision making. It all seems just like common sense with flashing neon lights around it, they might as well be saying “And don’t forget to breathe!”. Like all these things, I’m sure it will be in fashion for a while and then there will be reports about how it didn’t work too well at XYZ Corp and then a new craze will arrive and so ROWE will crawl off to that smoking room reserved for expired management tools to die quietly.

But I do like this idea, it certainly fits well with my own management philosophy, style if you like. The nine-to-five idea really is very old fashioned and utterly pointless in any business except those requiring you to be at a certain place during “opening hours”. Much of what I have to do can be done, and is done, at strange times – early mornings, late evenings, weekends, whatever fits with the rest of my life and does not impact client service – and I think being given the ability to do this does move a step closer to a more humane work-life balance.

I’ve worked very much in this way years ago back in the UK when I was living there but responsible for loads of places around Europe/Middle East. Which office I was in, or even if I was in an office at all, was irrelevant and so my home became the office. I found this worked well, especially when dealing with all the time zones meant my ‘clients’ business days spanned almost the entire 24hrs of my day! Everything got done as well, if not better, than it would if I had slogged my way from Guildford to Uxbridge every day. However, where this method falls down is with the lack of “face-time” with colleagues and particularly with superiors. Sadly, many superiors have a tendency to believe that if they don’t see you around then you’re obviously not working hard enough, despite what results may be being delivered. The results are obviously a happy accident, not the fruit of any hard work on your part.

My time at Marks & Spencer was what truly brought this home to me. I was there for four years. The first couple of years I concentrated on trying to get the job done and was spending most of my time “at the coal face”. This was wholeheartedly not appreciated, to the point that my annual review was not altogether complimentary, especially as regards my apparent desire to put service ahead of process. I changed my tack midway in my career there and decided to try doing all the things everyone else was doing. This involved four very important points;

1. Get into Baker Street office at about 07:00 and sit around having coffee with people.
2. Play golf
3. Join the Masons
4. Spend most of my time doing paperwork

For a laugh I did all four. The golf was actually a great idea and I thank them for that. The Masons lasted a year or so until I found I just couldn’t roll up my trouser leg any more without laughing my head off. I’m still waiting for my tongue to be cut out and left on a beach at low tide, or whatever the punishment is supposed to be for leaving! The 07:00 start was tough, especially as I lived in St Albans at the time, but I managed it and the paperwork was dull, dull, dull. But guess what? My next review was glowing, I had transformed myself from zero to hero in just 12 months. Now all I had to do was wait for an entire management structure to get old and die and perhaps there might be a promotion in it!

M&S was extreme, but this attitude of doing the right things as opposed to doing the job well is still there today and that is why I would welcome a global outbreak of ROWE fever. Focus on results, not on what time people get into or leave the office. We all know the games that are played. Get in the office on time, be seen, then go out for a coffee with your mates, bugger around on the internet, long lunch, dentist appointment and before you know it you’ve been seen as doing a good job but not actually done any productive work.

This Telegraph article pretty much hits the nail on the head for me.

“We’re still locked into a 1930s mind set,” says Ressler.

“In the US, we owe the 40-hour working week to the Fair Labor Standards [Act] of 1938. The idea was to make [working practices] uniform back when companies had too much control over workers’ lives. But somehow the 40-hour working week morphed into the gold standard for competency, efficiency and effectiveness.”

And if you think ROWE sounds New-Agey, think again.

“We’ve cleared out some teams completely,” says Ressler. “ROWE is performance orientated. Anyone not delivering is weeded out of the system.”

I’m not sure the break-loving, clock-watching Europeans will want to jump on this bandwagon. For some, showing up at work and looking at Facebook all day is a holiday. Why rock the boat?

I’ll just make one comment on that last quote there. Just because most Americans have chosen an obscene system of two weeks annual holiday and a high pressure work environment does not mean that we Europeans are lazy, break-loving, clock-watching SOBs. Many of us happen to be just as hard working and roughly twice as effective as our friends across the Atlantic. So, I like your idea but lets not start insulting each other, okay!

If anyone was thinking of visiting Warsaw, now might be a very good time to do so!

Here’s the weather forecast for Warsaw for the next five days:

From what I saw on the TV yesterday, parts of Poland will be getting up to 30C this weekend! Phew, what a scorcher!!

While you’re here you might want to take in the Sinead O’Connor concert on Saturday evening? Or perhaps a concert of film music tomorrow night? I have some snaps of the stage being built but thanks to the total crapness of the new and exciting Adobe Photoshop Express, combined with temporary problems at pBase I am unable to bring them to you right now so here’s a link to the website.

Talking about Sinead O’Connor. Is it just my imagination or is Poland only a destination for ‘B’ or ‘C’ list celebs? I’m talking about international artists of course but when was the last time, if ever, that an ‘A’ list celeb visited Poland or gave a concert here? I mean someone really hot and happening who’s not Polish or being given one of those false awards like – “The entire nation of Poland would like to award Mr Elton John the Order of the Polish Garter”…and so on. Any country can tempt the odd superstar by offering part of the kingdom as a prize, but how many want to come here without the promise of a knighthood?

Seems to me that the stars that do visit here are either has-beens (Sinead) or ever-greens (Stones, and many others). There’s the odd exception, such as George Michael and Sting perhaps, but even they are not exactly topping the hit-parade these days. Here’s George -

I was reading this BBC article on the plight of the English football team manager, an Italian of course, who is facing lower and lower numbers of English players to choose from in the Premier League. You must realise that articles such as this will be all over the press in the coming months because England failed to qualify for Euro 2008 and they have to have a sort of national navel-gazing contest until the tournament is over!

The table they included…

…shows just how bad the situation is with the “big four”, Man U, L’Arse, Chelski & Liverpool only averaging 2.64 (out of 11) English players per match. Hats off to Man U, winners of both the Premier and Champions Leagues this season as they did the best of that bunch with 4.28. Ya-boo-sucks to L’Arse with a pitiful 0.34 per game, which must be Theo Walcott playing the odd game when someone else in injured!

The club to keep the most faith with British talent with a whopping 6.61 is, of course, West Ham United. Such an English team in so many ways. Last team to win the FA Cup with an all English starting XI (1975), only 11 managers since 1901 and all English (well, apart from Lou Macari, a Scotsman, but that was only a very short-lived (1989-1990) mistake), the best football academy in the country turning out English talent year on year (many of whom played in the recent Champions League final), the team that provided most of the 1966 World Cup winning team….and so on. A big hurrah for the Hammers then! Not far behind are Aston Villa with 6.42 and then a big gap to the also-rans. Looking at those top two, one has to wonder if the colour of the teams strip, claret & blue in both cases, is having a sort of ‘Feng shui’ affect on the amount of English talent attracted to the clubs??

West Ham

Aston Villa