Reverse Angle

In his book Breaking the Constraints to a World-class Performance , William Dettmer discusses conflict resolution. He observes that often what we call conflict is in fact confrontation - the expression of an emotional response to a deeper, subtle conflict which often goes unrecognised. He describes two types of conflict both as competing forces. Opposite Conditions are forces which push us both to do something and not to do something or to do its opposite at the same time. Different Alternatives are mutually exclusive conditions which attempt to coexist. Classically the conflict is resolved either by imposing a solution on one side by the other or by compromise. The Gulf War is an example of the first win-lose solution and serves as clear evidence that such a solution does not actually break the conflict. Compromise is a solution where neither side gets what they want. The cold war showed just how great the cost of this can be. The best solution is where both sides get what the...

I went to the recent IPTV World Forum 2008 show at Olympia. At least I went to the exhibition as the conference was quite expensive. As I walked in I was almost overwhelmed by the number of set top boxes on show. There were also a lot of head end server systems as well as myriad test tools and equipment. It reminded me of the IT trade shows I've been to. It seems to me that IPTV is hanging its hat on quality of service for TV distributed by ISPs like BT Vision whose model is so similar to broadcast as to be almost indistinguishable. One USP to the ISPs is that there are bundled facilities here to prevent churn - things like caller ID on your TV. My impression is that there are just too many players for the market to support. I think this for two reasons. First is that even if everyone deserts cable and satellite in favour of IPTV there are too many. But perhaps more significantly I think they have missed a trick. It's possible to get pretty much all of Freeview via the ...

The Quality Walk - Auditing the Production Workflow Just like a chubby little Brussels bureaucrat you’ve sat down and made comprehensive diagrams of all the important processes in your business. You’ve got Turtle diagrams wall to wall and now you’re wondering why you did it instead of the accounts, which are now overdue. Well, on their own, these diagrams are useful for training and when you’ve forgotten but not a lot else. But bear with me. If you want something to happen the same way every time then you have to accurately repeat the behaviour which produces what you want. That way you are likely to produce consistently. And, consistent results are what give you your reputation, So, if you’ve got a great way of doing things then it’s worth ensuring that the great way is what happens every time. And the way to do that? Auditing! Auditing is a horrible word. It implies dull and bureaucratic little fellows with bald heads and a Hitler moustache finding fault with everything a...

Process Mapping for Digital Production Workflow A paragraph hidden near the end of my last diatribe contained an exhortation to use a simple system. Define what you do, frequently check that you do what you say you do, fix what you did wrong and then check to make sure you don’t make that same mistake again. And the subject of this month’s piece lies in the first four words. To pick a contemporary issue budget crunch forms a central problem for production. Despite the proliferation of channels to the viewer there loads of limits on budgets. The pressure to get it right first time, every time has never been higher. And this is getting worse as the old production paradigms struggle to deliver quality at ever reducing resource levels. What McDonalds can do with teenagers the world over is nothing short of a miracle. In fact what they can do with all employees and suppliers is pretty damn good. Repeatably and reliably McDonalds produce substantially the same product anywhere ...

In every industry that I’ve had anything to do with the word ‘Quality’ gets backs up faster than just about anything else. Well, perhaps some parts of the automotive industry are amenable but then they largely invented the concept in the last century. Perhaps it would help to start off with a definition. After all, the word means many different things to many different people. But the meaning that I want to convey is about how well something that you do meets requirements. Quality cannot exist in isolation. It is impossible for a badly run business to consistently meet the requirements of its stakeholders. No, not just customers but suppliers, staff, neighbours, shareholders, competitors, local and national government as well as any deities deemed interested in the business. They're the stakeholders, they're all are concerned with it. For a business of any type to succeed it must satisfy a disparate group of entities that have a stake in it. And their objectives are all...

Since I returned to my first career I have become quite preoccupied by this thing called story. It's one of those things that everybody knows. We are so familiar with it yet when asked to define it a realisation grows that there is no universal standard definition. It's something that we take for granted, use and enjoy and yet know so little about. When I began to look into story I thought about what it means to me. And most of my perceptions of it seem to come from my childhood. I remember sitting on the floor with my sister in front of the fire listening to Children's Hour on my parents' old Bush wireless. Those valve warmed voices of the BBC's Home Service mingled with the loudly glowing logs and wonder and excitement became my own as the storyteller led me through countless adventures. Later, at boarding school, we sat in neat grey corduroy shorts around the library fireplace whilst a teacher read to us before hot milk and bed. It was where I first came acro...

As I walked in to the recent IPTV World Forum 2008 show at Olympia in London I was almost overwhelmed by the number of set top boxes on show. There were also a lot of head end server systems as well as myriad test tools and equipment. It reminded me of the IT trade shows I went to long ago. It seems to me that IPTV is hanging its hat on quality of service for TV distributed by ISPs like BT Vision whose model is so similar to broadcast as to be almost indistinguishable. One USP to the ISPs is that there are bundled facilities here to prevent churn - things like caller ID on your TV. My impression is that there are just too many players for the market to support. I think this for two reasons. First is that even if everyone deserts cable and satellite in favour of IPTV there are too many. But perhaps more significantly I think they have missed a trick. It's possible to get pretty much all of Freeview via the Internet now. If you add in all the other sources of TV then the choice fa...

How did I get here? After a very long time away from the industry I am returning to film making. My first career was in the BBC's cutting rooms where I was lucky to have been given BBC training. You never forget it. Well in 1989 I left the Beeb to do other things and even worked for the lies side on gameshows for a little while. But TV had lost its allure for me so I ran away to sea, navigated race yachts and became a delivery skipper. This was great fun but a financial low point so I swam ashore to seek my less salty fortune. The world was kind and the sun shone and I laboured at a variety of things, mostly of my own invention but I had some jobs as well. In 1998 I was employed by a dot com. It was a wonderful time for me. I was given a very long job title, a huge salary and was told to, well, do stuff. I did. And about a year later when investors around the world began to wonder exactly what it was they were investing in there was a small hiss and we began to implode. It tran...

What a very great deal I've not done to the boat in the last year. Actually I am in the process of getting her moved to another yard where an old friend of mine - a shipwright - can put her back into the sort of order she needs to be in. Most probably she'll go by road down to the west country and sit quietly by the sea while Bob sorts out my various sins of omission.

A Tree-Myth - Carbon sinks that don't work and what to do about it It occurred to me that it's all very well having someone plant a tree to offset your cheap flight to Florida. And for the first few years I can't argue. The tree breathes in the CO2 and turns it into wood. The carbon is scrubbed from the air and all looks fine and dandy. A few years later the tree dies - as all trees do. It could be cut down and used for firewood, it could just fade back gently into the forest or it could be turned into trendy modern furniture. For the first two options all the CO2 it locked up during its life is released back into the atmosphere again immediately. In the third option it is turned into several bits of furniture and spends the next few years keeping breakfast, lunch and dinner off the floor in a nice family house in the suburbs. Eventually its ability to break breakfast's fall is undermined when the new puppy chews one of its legs off. It then gets to follow either o...

I got called out to a customer recently. He called to say that the machine no longer showed websites and could I help? Computer repair in Southampton is what we do. I got round and quickly discovered that someone had set Norton to its most paranoid. It took all of five minutes to work this out and fix the problem. There was no password. Now I don't like the idea of charging for a full hour so I asked if there was anything else I could help with. The filing cabinet caught my eye. None of the drawers were in properly. A few minutes of fiddling later and the thing was working. I was offered coffee. As we talked it transpired that his wife was abroad and that the calls were really expensive. So I told him about Telediscount . He liked that, his calls are now about 2p per minute. Next came Skype. He liked that too and called me out again using Skype when his iPod jammed. I showed him a few useful sites on the Net and pretty soon the hour was up. The man couldn't get the money in...

DSCN0731 Originally uploaded by simon.morice . Now it's just a case of fine rubbing down and coating with varnish. Picture of finish to follow.

TopTwoBands Originally uploaded by simon.morice . How cruddy this looks. I prescribe stripping the standing and running rigging from the mast. Then scrape the old varnish and bleach with oxalic acid. After half an hour wash it off, neutralise the acid with ammonia solution and give it a good drench with water. Dry with cloths and leave.

DSCN0737 Originally uploaded by simon.morice . It took a couple of days what with sourcing and processing the timber. At the end of it a fine timber framework is there ready for the tarpaulin to be put over the top. Nik and I put it all up in three hours. Not long until we can start work in earnest...

I wrote this on paper while having a drink... It is Saturday the 7th of October and almost two weeks since we recovered the main and mizzen masts from where they declined for a couple of years. Girl Marion 's masts stayed at her old mooring whilst I moved her to a yard on another river - the Hamble. The number of available slipways in the Solent area have decreased massively over the last twenty years; old yards have failed as the modern fibreglass boat displaces her older wooden sisters. Girl Marion's long overdue refit is taking a lot more time and resource than I'd be proud of. I am ashamed to say that very few people expect it to be finished and that she has nothing but decay to look forward to. However... This is not how I have ever or do now intend things to be done. The reasons, good though they may be, are irrelevant and it is now time to get things going again. And so back to the masts. Girl Marion is a ketch blessed with a gaff rig. I say blessed because al...

Rich and I had an idea... The quality management systems business is slow to take off. I think that we're trying to sell the wrong thing. People don't warm to the notion of having an ISO system like 9001:2000 or 14001:2004; the idea seems to be alien to them. We take the point that our business should be all about gaining and keeping customers and ISO just isn't interesting to most businesses. Now we're really convinced about them. The reasons are clear like crystal to us. After all, can any business say that it doesn't need improvement? Can any business say it's not concerned about its competitors? Can any business say it knows it all? Just three questions from many. So we've set up a little computer repair business that uses big system tools from the like of Theory of Constraints, Six Sigma and Lean. The idea is to show that these tools can be used by quite tiny SME's. As time goes by we shall publish performance data to show that it works. Talkin...