nickshanagher

A friend bought a copy of the One Minute Manager by Kenneth Blanchard and Spencer Johnson in the 1990s and kept it by his desk. I have often been told about the book and judged its relevance by the problems my friend had hitting his targets and motivating his team. When he moved on, he left the book to me and for a year it has sat in my in-tray. As a raving fan of Gung Ho!, I believed that I should read One Minute Manager and I read the first half without great enthusiasm. The business fable of a young executive setting out to find how to manage and the people that he met seems a bit forced. The concept of one minute goals, one minute praisings and one minute reprimands seems like a cheat. I was ready to sneer... I had two issues with the book. Firstly, managers need to have domain knowledge before their reports will give them the credibility to be one minute managers. Secondly, the idea of managers having lots of spare time seemed like a cheat. This book will mess lots of people ...

  I found this photograph lurking in my draft box. I liked this advertisement because it projected a complex market proposition in a simple way. The design uses crossing out and naif lettering and numbers, which makes it look home made. Is this a local shop speaking or the giant corporation that is Tesco? Local retailers should be able to steal some of the ideas for their posters and marketing materials. Remember, this advertisement is not slap dash. It is calculatedly casual. Let me know if it works for you.

 The Tobacco Atlas , published by the American Cancer Society and the World Lung Foundation, lists the chemicals in tobacco smoke. They include arsenic, DDT and lead. So reported Michael Skapinker in an FT article that suggested that tobacco products should not be given to people. It was interesting to read in the Guardian last weekend of another substance that is causing health concerns and contains arsenic, DDT and lead. It also contains PCBs, trichloroethylene, perchlorate, dibenzofurans, mercury, and benzene. What is it? Breast milk. Perhaps the moral of this is that the more scientists investigate, the more everything is dangerous.