Nov 27, 2014
I think it is truly wonderful that three pensioners from the Royal Hospital Chelsea in London, should travel a little over three thousand miles to attend an act of remembrance with us here in Bahrain. As someone who has served, remembrance parades and services gives many of us the opportunity to remember those old comrades and those unknown soldiers who gave their lives and to reflect on those who are still giving their lives, so that we might live in a better place today.
Remembrance Day is widely observed on 11 November to recall the end of the hostilities of World War I on that date in 1918, when the fighting formally ended “at the 11th hour of the 11th day of the 11th month”, with the signing of the Armistice. I remember my grandfather telling me how strange it was when the guns fell silent to be followed by the men cheering in their trenches. The Red poppy has become the symbol of remembrance since these poppies bloomed across the battlefields of Flanders and their bright red colour has become symbolic of the blood shed during wars.
Wikipedia
Whenever I hear of Flanders, my mind is taken back to my days at Sandhurst, where my training Company was Ypres, which is a town located in the west of Belgium that has a poignant significance in the First World War. There were five battles for Ypres, the first (1914) halted the German drive to the channel ports, the famous 2nd battle which saw the first effective use of poison gas against enemy troops. For the record, the French were the first to deploy gas against the enemy (1), but this was in the form of tear gas grenades and was designed as an irritant to disorient the enemy, not to kill them. In reality, the use of poison gas did not result in a significant loss of life compared to other casualty statistics, but the psychological effect was significant. The third battle of Ypres was the famous Battle of Passchendaele (1917) where nearly half a million soldiers lost their lives over the course of three months and six days. The fourth battle was the battle of Lys (1918) and the fifth battle of Ypres was the advance of Flanders (1918) that eventually secured Ypres with the armistice being signed a little over a month later.
I sometimes wonder how difficult it must have been!
I spent several years commanding troops and I know from experience how difficult it is to operate in the rain soaked terrain of Western Europe. But compared with today, these guys didn’t have many vehicles and they didn’t have the technology that we take for granted today. Air support didn’t exist until later in the war, neither did tank support – so soldiers marched as units along with all their kit. Soldiers cannot fight without rations, equipment and munitions and the Army Service Corps was one of the great military achievements of the First World War – Supply Chain Logistics was invented here.
Today, we live in a society where we expect food and drinks to be fresh and to have been kept refrigerated with sell by dates and tracking to ensure the foods suitability for consumption. A hundred years ago, the troops in the trenches were lucky to get bully beef and vegetable stew from the cooking shelter and they also had to contend with rats, flies, flooding, smelly latrines, cold during the winter and of course the enemy shooting at them. It has been estimated that bread could take up to eight days to reach the front-line and if the enemy shelled the supply lines, they didn’t get any rations for days on end.
Communication was another significant problem. You can only shout so far and the other noises on a battle field can render this method of communications ineffective. Signs need to be seen and understood, whistle blasts and sirens have to have a meaning, usually attack, retreat and gas attack or all clear. How did they communicate their ration, equipment and Ammunition requirements? They used the Company Runner, who would brave bullets, shells, mayhem and muck to move messages both forwards and backwards to forward and rear operations positions. They also used telephones, but invariably this form of communications suffered from the lines being disrupted by shellfire and the signals lineman had to brave a storm of bullets and shrapnel in order to restore the broken lines. Both sides also used pigeons and dogs to carry messages, most usually in dire circumstances and not always successfully although some statistics suggest an above 90% success rate.
At the beginning of the war, wireless transmitters were mainly cumbersome unreliable spark transmitters, but towards the end of the war, radio was developed to a point where its use was more commonplace on the battlefields, although still heavy, prone to failure and reliant upon a good operator. That being said, many of my fellow Signals Officers firmly believe that the advent of wireless communications on the battlefield significantly enabled resource management principles and therefore inadvertently contributed to the demise of trench warfare.
Today, One hundred years later, you can pick up a mobile phone that is about the size of a packet of playing cards, but thinner and weighing on average between 100 and 150 grams with which you can talk to your family and friends in a far distant land you call home and not even wonder at how ubiquitous this technology has become.
Please take a moment to reflect the immortal words of Binyon’s classic poem, “For the Fallen”,
Image – http://www.sparklebox.co.uk/4541-4550/sb4548.html#.VHr7MskXKO8
For all those serving…. I salute you!
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- “Poison Gas and World War One”. HistoryLearningSite.co.uk. 2014. Web.
Oct 2, 2014
The Banking Challenge – Cashless Society
As a young programmer I worked for the Italian International Bank in London, who were owned by the Banca Monte dei Paschi di Siena reputedly, the oldest surviving bank in the world having been operational since 1472. As an employee, I was steeped in the traditions and values of such a venerated institution and I was often subjected to a rhetorical narration of the banks genealogy and associated history of banking culminating in how our new systems and technology will take us into the future!
Please make allowances for my extended years with the understandable abstraction that has occurred over time, and permit me to recall a few key points with you.
Roman grain store loans
The story starts way back in pre-Roman times with grain store loans and we know of archaeological evidence of loans and money exchange with coins being transacted during Roman times, but banking did not really become truly recognisable until the twelfth century Crusades when the need to transfer large sums of money was met by the Templars and Hospitallers, who’s practice it was to take in local currency, for which a demand note would be given that would be good at any of their castles across Europe, allowing movement of money and reducing the usual risk of robbery whilst traveling.
A significant issue at these times was Usury (defined as lending at unreasonably higher rates of interest) which was forbidden by the predominant Christian and Muslim faiths and which allowed Jewish traders, who had no religious restrictions around usury and who had settled in Italy, to make advanced payments against crops and against future delivery of grain shipped to foreign ports. These merchant’s “benches” (the word bank is derived from the Italian for bench, BANCA, as in a counter) developed into centres for holding money against a bill (billette, a type of negotiable instrument which can be considered a forerunner of the promissory notes we know today).
Negotiable Instruments
Not to be outdone, the Christians and Muslims quickly devised negotiable instruments that avoided or disguised usury. One such method was to lend money without interest, but also require that the loan is insured against possible loss or injury, and/or delays in repayment. The laws of the time were also “adjusted” to make a distinction between things that were consumable (such as food and fuel) and those that were not, with usury permitted on loans that involved the latter.
The Modern banking practice and the issue of banknotes emerged in the 17th century with the Bank of England being the first in 1695. At this time, wealthy merchants began to store their gold with the goldsmiths of London, who possessed private vaults and charged a fee for their service. In exchange for each deposit of precious metal, the goldsmiths issued receipts certifying the quantity and purity of the metal they held as a bailee; these receipts could not be assigned and only the original depositor could collect the goods stored.
The next step was for the goldsmith-bankers to issue the receipts as payable to the bearer of the document rather than the original depositor. This meant that the bill could be used as a form of currency based on the security deposited with the goldsmith. The bankers also began issuing a greater value of notes than the total value of their physical reserves in the form of loans, on the assumption that they wouldn’t have to redeem all of their issued banknotes at the same time.
Banknotes
This simple shift in the use of promissory notes (a promise to pay the bearer in coins, usually copper, silver or gold), enabled banks to make out fixed denomination notes for use as money and the modern banknote was born, as was Fractional Reserve Banking and the associated Central banks.
In the UK, commercial banks were generally able to issue their own banknotes until the mid-nineteenth century, when the Bank Charter Act of 1844 restricted authorisation to issue new banknotes to the Bank of England and served to restrict the supply of new notes reaching circulation giving the Bank of England an effective monopoly on the printing of new notes.
In 1959, many banks agreed on the standard for Machine Readable characters which allowed cheques to be machine read. This was followed by the first Automated Teller Machines and the early 1970’s saw the establishment of the international payments system known as SWIFT. I was involved with the team that developed the BACS direct debit module in the IBIS systems in the early 1990’s, and also with the Certificates of Deposit module.
The entry of other non-banking financial institutions into the market at the turn of the century gave rise to a proliferation of technical negotiable instruments that could be traded worldwide and this along with various other factors contributed to the Global financial crisis of 2008 and the realisation that banking was an essential part of the fabric of our society and could not be allowed to fail.
These days we are starting to see innovative ideas such as paypal, the use of mobile phones in Africa for financial transactions, micro loans and of course, Bitcoin continue to gain acceptance. My particular thoughts centre on the fact that the acceptance of phone and Internet technology has in many ways negated the need to carry notes and coins. These days, we recognise that our machines are more intelligent and much more reliable than human systems and more and more of our transactions are routinely handled by computer systems.
Challenge
So my question is; Why not do away with bank notes and coins?
Bahrain is a small island with a population around 1.3 Million souls and given that many Telecoms use Bahrain to field trial many of their new mobile phone technologies here, there is already an abundance of tech savvy people and a good infrastructure. Let’s consider Bahrain as a potentially excellent opportunity for developing a cashless banking system and field trialling it here?
Such innovation could be a great way to put Bahrain back in the driving seat of banking in the Middle East and of course, Bahraini computer technicians would be widely sought after having been exposed to such an innovative venture. The Central Bank are used to innovation and are not so caught up in their own self-importance to not seek help from outside and given Bahrain’s excellent relationship with the UK and America, I am sure several deals could be developed with Banking institutions, Universities and training institutes to develop and support such an idea.
As an executive coach, many of my customers seek to be involved in creating meaningful change and in leaving a legacy to future generations.
Do you want the “Icebox challenge” and take a cold shower or do you want to innovate and change history? – What do you say?
Aug 30, 2014
www.readinghorizons.com
I love to read
George R. R. Martin, the American author of the epic fantasy series A Song of Ice and Fire, probably known better to you as Game of Thrones wrote, “A reader lives a thousand lives before he dies, said Jojen. The man who never reads lives only one.”
― George R. R. Martin, A dance with Dragons (2011).
I have to admit it, I love reading books – good old fashioned hardback books. They appeal to my senses – they‘re tactile, they rustle when you turn the pages and they smell like a book, which is more than can be said for a tablet or an electronic reader. They are a way to escape, to use your imagination, to love, cry and also to learn, to gain new knowledge and they can transport you to places in the past or in the future as a monk or as a detective space ranger!
Books influence our thinking!
I am humbled by the immensity of some of the minds that have influenced me such as Carl Sagan, Isaac Asimov, Wilbur Smith, Homer, and many, many more! I have been on ships fighting the Greeks and I have fought the empire as a member of the foundation! As a young scholar I remember reading about the burning of the Bibliotheca at Alexandria and how many historians use this to represent an irretrievable loss of a body of collective knowledge. Another book that made me think about losing knowledge and different ideas was Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury, where books are burned to control the spread of different or alternative ideas and one often hears the truism associated with Winston Churchill, “History is written by the victors!”
The thought of losing a body knowledge like that struck a deep chord in me as tragic, take a moment to consider some of the things that have been lost over the years ……..Ulfberht metal, how to build Pyramids, Roman Cement, Damascus steel, Greek fire and a variety of ancient plant drugs that could have enormous medical value to name just a few.
The Bibliotheca at Alexandria was a great centre for learning for 600 years before it burned down sometime during the 3rd century. In those days, the writing medium was papyrus or parchment which was expensive and difficult to come by and there was also the problem of employing someone capable of writing down the wisdoms of the day coupled with the inevitable loss of meaning in translation.
130 million books in the world
These days the Internet technology provides us with a much bigger bibliotheca! My friend Professor Google informs me that there are some 130 million books in the world. But, it is not just books! We have progressed to the point where any literate person may add to the body of knowledge or more often, simply express their opinions. We can tweet, text, add stuff to our Facebook pages and the plethora of other numerous social personas, all using the associated mediums of digital electronics and the current trend seems to be the need to write and publish an e-book.
Does this really benefit anyone?
“If you don’t have time to read, you don’t have the time (or the tools) to write. Simple as that.” – Stephen King. On Writing (2000).
Actually, I think it does have a benefit! I’m not talking about detailing your life on Facebook, although this seems to occupy and fascinate many but I am talking about writing a short article or an essay or even a simple personal journal. Put your experience and knowledge down on paper, tell us your story, share your inner thoughts and help me understand how I can make something or how I can do something better!
I am telling you that writing is essentially good for you!
It enables self-expression and if you are writing for an audience it causes you to rise above the mundane trivia and work harder to frame your arguments in order to get your point across. This has proven positive effects on self-esteem (O’Connor, 2011), it helps to improve your attention span and can be incredibly cathartic whilst providing valuable insights to the real you, often with elements of humour, all of which can entertain and inspire others. Many meditation teachers state that writing can be used as a form of meditation because it can create a focused state similar to the meditative state (Brunette, 2013).
Emotional release
Why not have a go at writing an article about something you feel passionate about and see where it takes you? If you are feeling down or fed-up, write about the problem and how it makes you feel and then look for positive ways to address the problem and share it with a friend or a Coach and start working on clearing any negativity issues and debilitating emotions such as anger, jealousy, guilt and sadness.
Once you have written something, ask yourself if you want to share it? Is this for you or is it something you want to share with a wider audience? If it is for a wider audience, remember that before you publish yourself, proofread your work, check for jargon and make sure it is relevant and not selfishly about you – try to give your audience something to take away. Then share it with a couple of trusted “sounding boards” who will give you honest constructive feedback. Use their comments and feedback to revise and improve your article and once you have it finished, polished and ready for the world, put it out there for the world to see via a blogging forum, on a website or through your favourite social media.
Should you choose NOT to publish, remember that there is something innately therapeutic to describing a problem in writing to “get it off your chest” and I concur with some Eastern style philosophies that encourage individuals to write down their thoughts and concerns for the purpose of physically burning the papers, floating them away on a river or in a Chinese sky lantern or burying them – essentially enabling you to recognise the emotions and to then destroy them, so you can enable yourself to move on.
Try it – you will be amazed! Thank you for taking the time with me today, I really do hope that you craft something that works for you!
Mike Jackson is a practicing student prosateur totally immersed in the University of Life and loving every second of it! As a successful coach, he cherishes any opportunity to take people to new and wonderful places and helps them experience their life and work in a better way.
Executive Coaching is available by special arrangement. – Together, we make a difference!
Mike Jackson – Executive Leadership Coach and Action Effect-u-ator.
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References
O’Connor, D. B. (2011). Effects of written emotional disclosure on implicit self-esteem and body image. British Journal of Health Psychology.
Brunette, J. (2013). Hw to use writing as a meditation practice. Huffington Post .
Aug 28, 2014
We have all this modern technology, but ………………..
I love reading books – good old fashioned hardback books. They appeal to one’s senses – they‘re tactile, they rustle when you turn the pages and they smell like a book, which is more than can be said for an Ipad or kindle. As a young scholar I remember reading about the burning of the library at Alexandria and how many historians used this to represent an irretrievable loss of a body of collective knowledge. In those days, the writing medium was papyrus or parchment which was expensive and difficult to come by as were the people capable of writing down the wisdom of the day. The thought of losing a body knowledge like that struck me as tragic, look at what has been lost over the years ……..Damascus steel, Greek fire, Roman Cement and a variety of ancient plant drugs that had medicinal value to quote a few, but unlikely to happen in these more modern times.
These days technology has moved to the point where any literate person may add to the body of knowledge or more often, simply express their opinions. We can tweet, text, add stuff to our Facebook pages and update our other numerous social personas, but does it really benefit anyone? The current trend seems to be the need to write and publish an e-book and whilst I am not knocking people’s creativity, I prefer to read something that either makes you question a belief or makes you think and reflect, rather than rehashing known subject matter or telling me what your kids had for dinner!
I believe that Nuclear weapons provide sufficient deterrence to preclude major large scale war, but smaller conventional wars are therefore more likely and at time of writing this article, there are 10 wars and 8 serious armed conflicts documented. But we don’t hear much about the ongoing Cyber warfare that is happening.
Are we susceptible?
The Federal government of America has admitted its power grid is susceptible to cyberwarfare (Shiels) and many of us are aware of the Shamoon virus attack in 2012 on the Aramco servers (Infosecurity), so we know that the game is afoot and that cyber-attacks are probing various countries / businesses and testing their defences. As individuals we are subjected to reports of identity theft and cyber-scams. What would happen to your memories if someone infected or collapsed the cloud?
Remember what they said about the Bibliotheca at Alexandria!
Pace of Change
More concerning for me is the pace of change – keeping up with the formats that we use. How many of you remember the Betamax / VHS video formats war nearly forty years ago? We hardly use video tape these days. What about vinyl, cassette tapes and do you remember the different floppy disk formats for different computers like the Atari and the Commodore 64? Given the fact that we store large quantities of digital data in the cloud are any of you asking the question – How can we be sure that our trusted memories are going to be in a recoverable format and will I still be able to access it in twenty years?
Take Action
So there’s TWO reasons why you should take action to protect yourselves.
As a Project Management consultant with an interest in Business Continuity developed from my days during the millennium bug and subsequent banking implementations, I strongly advise that you take advantage of the relatively cheap costs of external hard drives and get yourselves backed-up. It doesn’t take long and you will feel much better in the knowledge that you have your contacts and personal pictures stored on an external device. Don’t forget to back-up your important e-mails and any important documents.
If you run a business, talk with your IT team and check the backup procedures and policies – get them to run back-up and restore exercises and check to see they can do it without any problems. Also get them to ensure that any long-term data storage, such as certificates, deeds, wills, testimonials, codices and financial records require by the governments, are in a format that is still supported. If it is not, get it converted while the opportunity exists.
Your data is your most important asset –care for it, protect it – ‘cos the next time your system crashes – well, normal service may NOT resume!
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References
- Shiels, Maggie. (9 April 2009) BBC: Spies ‘infiltrate US power grid’. BBC News.
- Infosecurity magazine (8 May 2014) Infosecurity Magazine Home » News » Saudi Aramco Cyber Attacks a ‘wake-up call’, Says Former NSA Boss
Worryingly, how can we be sure that what we write remains in its true form? There is an ongoing debate at the moment centred on the updates and changes of the Original 1978 STAR WARS and the subsequently updated and enhanced versions released. I am now led to believe that it is practically impossible to find the 1978 original anywhere! Mr. Lucas is entitled to want to revise and improve his creations, I just hope his motivation to enhance his films is based upon sound financial reasoning and artistic desire rather than some other more sinister intervention.
Aug 19, 2014
Adam and the Ants – Stand and Deliver Album Cover
Many years ago, “Stand and Deliver!” meant giving up your valuables or your life could be forfeit. Highwaymen were a common problem in England from around 1650 to 1800, where travel was already hazardous due to the lack of decent roads, no one rode alone without fear of being robbed. Often, people would group together or hire escorts to reduce the likelihood of attack and many travellers completed their wills before setting out on their journey.
Risk Management
This is an early example of risk management and some associated coping strategies. For instance, grouping together is an avoidance strategy based on the premise that the highwayman will not attack a larger group. Hiring escorts is a transfer strategy where the responsibility for action is transferred to the third party escort for a fee, writing a will could be construed as an acceptance strategy, by ensuring contingent measures for your family should you be unfortunate enough to not survive the ordeal and a mitigation strategy would be to adopt a completely different route.
In today’s world, “Stand and deliver!”, usually refers to a presentation, but let’s stay with the risk management concept for the moment.
As an experienced Project Manager, I have learned that good risk management is an important tool in the PM toolbox. Most PM methodologies now cite extended processes for identifying positive and negative risks, for analysing risks and for placing them into an organised Risk Register. These methodologies also suggest and recommend techniques for planning risk responses and even suggest strategic categories for dealing with negative risk such as avoidance, transference, mitigation and acceptance, whilst for positive risk there exists acceptance, enhancement, sharing and exploiting.
So, we follow these process and arrive at a well-crafted Risk Register that provides thought out details of the project risks, their probability, their likely impact and of course the coping strategies. Which the various methodologies also suggest should be part of the Project Management team’s current folders and should be regularly re-visited and updated.
But, rather like those expensive strategy reports produced by the big consultancies, how often do we really refer back to them? Maybe someone should take that up as a dissertation subject.
Newsflash – Risks change!
Issues are more often than not a risk that has become an issue or they are a risk that wasn’t captured that came up and bit you. For the unexpected issues, one has to think on your feet and deal with it as best you can, but for the known risks, there is a documented coping strategy for dealing with the risk and these may be equally applicable to the issue.
In reality, one should aim to avoid the issue by managing the risk appropriately, but sometimes it can’t be helped. We all know a case where the main expert on the project falls ill or is picked up for another “more important” task and you are expected to “Carry on!”.
A good programme manager will insist that all PM’s under their influence have regular risk meetings where the risk register is reviewed and updated. This means a serious review of the top 20% of the risks, a review of the watch list (a watch list is a list of risks with low probability / impact ratings which are monitored in case their probability changes), and a brainstorming session to identify any new risks not previously identified which might be sneaking up on you.
One of the support functions of a PMO should be to provide historical risk registers, so you can build a risk register that has relevant historical risk built into it and you can also see in the lessons learned what worked and what didn’t work so well. Lessons learned are another great resource that should be lodged with your PMO.
Shared Responsibility
The other point to note is that Risk management and coping strategies are a shared responsibility. If you are a stakeholder and you are identified as a risk owner, then you are responsible for doing something about your allocated risks. If you have to “pull” the expert, provide some time for a reasonable handover or keep them in an advisory capacity to the project, so as to give the PM some room to manage the impact.
By using historically successful examples and by working together, collaboratively whilst taking responsibility for our actions, we can develop risk management strategies that are effective and that mean the possibility of the project being impacted are much reduced.
These days, my daughter tells me that, “Stand and Deliver simply means ….it’s your turn on the Karaoke machine!”
As a seasoned Project Management Coach, I can help your teams see the historical benefits of good risk management and develop and embed modern proven techniques into your methodology. Should you need advice or assistance in dealing with risk management – contact me!
Now, Stand and Deliver by Adam and the Ants ……..where’s that microphone?
Aug 15, 2014
Telephones progress – Wikipedia
Comms have come a long way
As an ex British Army Signals Officer, I have spent some serious time tweaking antennae and radio dials whilst listening to crackling background noise trying to discern the nature of the message that was usually very faint and often intelligible. So, these days when I marvel to my kids at the ability of being able to speak to my Mum pushing a trolley around Sainsbury’s in Wilmslow (Manchester) whilst I am on a boat in the Persian Gulf, they look at me with sympathy, disbelief and just shake their heads.
Initially developed in the 1940’s, it wasn’t until the mid 1980’s that mobile phones became widely available and these days – well they have taken over. Professor Google informs me that there are nearly 7 Billion mobile subscriptions worldwide – which is equivalent to 95.5 percent of the world’s population. We can argue all day how these figures pan out with more developed countries having multiple subscriptions and areas of Africa having little take up yet, but that’s beside the point.
In today’s society of mobile phones, the Internet and all the related techie apps, why hasn’t someone come up with a method of disarming or disabling a phone in a particular zone?
Take my experience the other day -I am sitting in my local bank branch talking to a customer representative and her phone rings …….and she answers it?!?
What is going on here?
I am the customer, I made the effort to come down and sit patiently in line in a hot, tired, advertisement laden space, with a ticket machine to determine my place in the queuing system and when I do eventually get to speak to a representative, she takes the phone call instead.
What right does she have to waste my time taking a phone call, when I am sitting there opposite her, face to face, expecting her to deal with my problem?
If you need to make a call to clarify something then that is okay.
If you subsequently get a call back confirming something has been done – that is okay!
But answering a personal call and having a conversation whilst I sit and hum – WELL, THAT IS NOT OKAY!
Hence my thought, “Why hasn’t somebody designed a phone app that disables the phone?”.
Actually they have and it is our lack of control that prevents us from putting the phone into flight mode.
The Dutch Oil company SHELL encourage all their managers to tell people who dial in and who are driving that it is “Against the Shell Health and Safety policy and to please hang up” They are then required to report the incident as a near miss.
We should stop allowing this technology to rule your lives – We are in control and we have the choice to answer or not. I have a personal rule NOT to answer the phone whilst I am driving PERIOD. Make it a rule to turn it off or put the phone in flight mode before you turn on the car engine. Put it in your bag or suit pocket out of the way and concentrate on getting to where you need to go. Especially if you are running late!!
If you have to make calls and texts – get a taxi or share the vehicle and designate a driver and a texter!
FACT
The average person takes 5 seconds to create a text. At an average speed of 80 KPH (which is a little over 22 meters per second) – that’s almost a FOOTBALL pitch every 5 seconds.
Please make a concerted effort to stop this crazy habit! Don’t be the person who has to live with the regret of having killed another soul for the sake of a phone call or a text!
DRIVING AND TEXTING ARE MUTUALLY EXCLUSIVE ACTIVITIES PEOPLE!
Is your phone call or text more important than somebodies life? Take Action – You have a choice – make the right choice and turn it off!
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