THWAUMP....

Thats the noise of the amount of work I have to do hitting the floor as it slides out of my in-tray. Bugger.

Never mind. It's good... well, sort of. We've hit our first legal "bump" with the beast, earlier than I expected, and a naive invocation of a contract clause on their part too. It'll be interesting to see what we can do to fix this one. There are also signs that we may have nailed the next milestone, assuming the minor fact that some of the code doesn't work at all can be fixed.

The new group organisation, announced just as I went on hols is making an impact and I have now spoken to my Taiwan office representatives more in the last 24 hours than in the previous 24 months. Lots of new customers and a huge global workshop in the UK the week after next.

The Matrix...

I read this article back in July and I'm rather glad to find it online. 
The new organisation | Economist.com

My company was a classic global matrix born out of numerous aquisitions around the world.  Essentially there was a central holding company in Europe and a bunch of national P&L centres.  On top of that the management team had tried to "layer" a horizontal bunch of virtual organisations.

Quite simply put: this does not work.  As long as you have national P&L responsibility and national targets, you'll move heaven and earth to protect that position, quite often to the detriment of the global business.  To make this worse, we have a regionalised sales team not a global one.

We recently agreed to re-org away from this structure and to a proper global P&L with regional cost centres and central accounting.  This has already manifested itself in a huge upswing in intra-company co-operation and should lead to a huge increase in sales as we self organise to handle the customer engagements in the most effective way, rather than worrying about which part of the org gets the business.

It will be interesting to see how costs are addressed in the new order, but I am fairly bouyant that this is a great move for the business and a terrific boost to our customers.

A Weird View of Bookshops

Britain's rotten bookshops - again!

Britain's rotten bookshops - again! | Samizdata.net

This is a fun one.  Samizdata, the UKs leading Libertarian wank fest have regular slanging matches about the state of British bookshops.  They get annoyed because some estorteric or even popular history texts are hard to get in books shops but they can find lots of Michael Moore books.  The feeling is there is some vast left wing conspiracy to keep right thinking books out of public hands.

Can I say... Tosh.

Bollocks, rubbish, utter stuff and nonsense.  The simple fact is, which they above all others should appriciate, bookshops are a business and, in these days of chains and a mass market "Starbucks" approach to pretty much everything, all they want to do is make money.

You want a specialist book?  Go online or go to a specialist.  Sure, the manager of the Waterstones might beef up a section on a personal whim, Manchester used to have a great SF section, as did Southport until the manager left.  However, I suspect strongly that the sales of any particularly "passing trade" history book is a statistical rounding error on the sales of Rowling, Pratchett or Brown, which is what the stores want.

I like cruising bookshops myself, I enjoy picking up books.  Bought two on Wednesday actually, but I don't generally go to a bookshop if there is a book I want.  I order it online and get it delivered.  The internet is for shopping, bookshops are for pleasure.  How a Libertarian capitalist can get this wrong and turn into a conspiracy defeats me...

Oh, actually, I'm making that bit up.  Of course, it doesn't.

It's worth reading the comments section, if only for the following plea from the blogger of the piece: "but I refuse to believe that even the British are only interested in buying crap."

What does he mean?  We are masters at it!