Mid-life crisis

Male mid-life crisis is going to die out, or at the very least become a lot less common.

A few decades ago, it was a cliche that in his late thirties or early forties, a man would grow a pony-tail behind his bald spot, start wearing leather trousers, buy a sports car and have an affair with a younger woman, all in a bid to recapture something he felt he’d lost or missed out on. This was understandable, because men in those days generally left home in their teens and put away “childish things”, either to go to work or university, and never went home again. They entered the world of work, marriage, fatherhood and responsibility, and wouldn’t question it at first because everyone else would be doing it. Then at some point, when they’d been doing it for about 20 years, a number of things would happen at once. They’d reach a plateau in their career and see no prospect of further advancement, their hair would start going grey or falling out, and their parents would begin needing their help to do things. It would be brought home to them forcefully that this, their one and only life, was slipping away from them, and they’d react badly.

But the world has changed. Consumerism and advertising has extended adolescence well into the thirties – it’s more socially acceptable to simply play around. In the 1980s the concept of a videogame with an 18 certificate would have been ridiculed, whereas now such things are commonplace, indeed, bestsellers. Meanwhile rampant house price inflation sees men in their twenties and thirties still living with their parents. With no jobs for life, the idea of a career plateau is laughable. People in their forties are less likely nowadays to be worrying about whether to put their parents in a home, and more likely to be trying to keep up with their tweets from Thailand or Canada or Spain.

Mid-life crisis was something that happened to men who had been forced by society to grow up quickly. But society doesn’t do that to men any more. If anything, it encourages them to behave like teenagers until they’re physically incapable of continuing. On that basis, I predict that the incidence of mid-life crisis will fall dramatically over the next decade. Bad news if you’re a Porsche dealer…

Shall we try again? All I want to do is post a line of justified text. Let’s see if the posting engine can cope with that or whether it will do what it’s done before and simply make the text into the world’s widest column until I press carriage return as though this incredibly complex and expensive machine was a Smith-Corona typewriter circa 1922.

Management, Japanese style

I had an interesting conversation with a Japanese colleague the other day, regarding the differences between our behaviour in the corporate environment, and theirs. It’s the British way to plan, to some degree, what we do, discuss the plan, refine it, and eventually, after a lot of blather, to start to execute.

It seems the Japanese way is a bit different. Someone up high says “Is this possible?”, and because they’re culturally conditioned never to say “No”, they say “Yes”. “Good,” comes the answer, “Have it done by August.”

The British response would be “There’s no realistic prospect of finishing the design by August, much less procurement, installation, commissioning and handover. March next year if you’re very lucky.” And then the stops would be pulled out and it would get delivered by January.

The Japanese response is “OK.”, and then everyone runs round in circles like headless chickens duplicating work and doing 18 hour days… and the project gets delivered the following May, because of the inefficiencies of the process.

Apparently, the Japanese idea is “think while running”. This is to say, given a task, they start work first, THEN work out what they’re going to do.

I’d love to see an orienteering competition in Japan…

And here’s another. Gantt charts work like this…
Here is today’s date. Here’s the start of the project.
Now we guess how long it will take for:
Development, design, bid document preparation, bidding, selection, detailed design, procurement, installation, commissioning, handover and startup. That gets you an estimated end date. Then you start working out how you can pull the end date so it’s closer to today.

The Japanese do it differently.
Here’s the day we need the product – a day in the future.
Working backwards from there… commissioning, installation, procurement, detailed design, bidding, bid document, design, development… ah. The plan indicates we should have completed the detailed design phase last week… How do we complete the detailed design by the end of this week, given that we don’t even have a developed process or an outline design today?

Hello world

I’ve never seen much point in one of these things before, but I’ve been browsing the blog of a friend and realised that it’s a lot of self-indulgent trossachs, so I’m thinking I’ll have me a bit of that. I doubt I’ll post here much, but we’ll see.

 For now, this is supposed to be some sort of online diary or description of my deepest thoughts or something, so here it is:

 Right now, my problem is motivation. I have stress paralysis. I have too many things to do, not enough time to do them in, I know they have to be done but I can’t even decide how to start thinking about what order they need to be done in, let alone actually doing them. Usually what it takes to get me out of this mental state is a sudden, seriously stressful event. Given that it was a sudden, seriously stressful event that put me in this state in the first place, I’m not sure whether the normal rules apply.

But enough of that. More later if I can be bothered.