Burn After Reading

Posted by adi on Oct 17, 2008 in Play

After a pretty long wait I finally managed to see the latest Coen brothers creation, Burn After Reading, today at a little cinema near Charing Cross.  It’s hard not to like Coen brother films and with recent staple George Clooney safely installed in what he has called the final of his idiot trilogy.

In many ways the film covers familar ground, with a tail of blackmail going wrong in a goofy fashion.  They had to resort to one or two gimmicks to pull the movie off, such as Brad Pitt’s hair, and it didn’t have me rolling around in the way O’Brother did.

It had a stellar cast and it’s kinda hard to go wrong with Malkovich and Clooney, and the film was typically dorkish to make it an entertaining enough way to spend 90 minutes, but I don’t think it hit the high spots of their other films.

Tags: Brad Pitt, Burn After Reading, Coen brothers, George Clooney, John Malkovich

When should you admit you were wrong?

Posted by adi on Oct 17, 2008 in Work

Image by Getty Images via Daylife

The current credit situation has seen our politicians and financial leaders on the tv and in the news on a daily basis.  The one thing that connects each and every opinion is that none of them ever admit to making a mistake, to doing anything whatsoever wrong.  It’s cringeworthy.  Even if they are caught on camera making the mistake, such as Gordon Brown declaring the end of boom and bust, they still try to wriggle out of it.  Is it any wonder that so few people have any faith in our politicians (this Home Office survey here pins the figure at around 25%).

So when is a good time to admit your mistakes?

Clearly it takes a degree of bravery and humility to admit ones mistakes, perhaps why so few do it, but is it beneficial to do so?  Apparently yes.  I read a piece of research by Fiona Lee, a social scientist, this morning that compared company’s that blame failures on internal issues came out ahead, both in terms of public perception and profitability than those that blamed external factors.  Ms Lee gave participants two annual reports, the first of which blamed a drop in earnings on strategic decisions the company had made and gave an explanation into them.  The second report blamed the external economic environment for the poor results (sound familiar Msrs Brown and Darling?).

Pretty much without fail the participants found report A to be favourable, largely because it appeared that the problems the company faced were both known and concquerable by the company themselves.  Company B by contrast seemed to be at the whim of externalities.

Where things get interesting however is when Ms Lee then goes back over hundreds of annual reports from years past.  They collected statements from 14 companies over 21 years.  Those like company A had higher share prices a year later than those company B’s.

If it’s so right, why do so few do it?

As mentioned at the beginning of this piece, it takes a brave person to admit their mistakes.  It’s far more common to try and divert blame to others than take it on the chin ourselves.  This research should provide ample evidence to support owning up, and if more were needed think about the trustworthyness of our politicians and consider whether you’d be happy to be lumped in with them.  If you make a mistake, own up to it and put in place a plan to rectify the situation.

Tags: Boom and bust, Economic, Gordon Brown, mistakes, Politics, trust

How often do you hold project post-mortems?

Posted by adi on Oct 17, 2008 in Work

I’m sure many of you have made mistakes in the workplace, or worked on projects that have failed for whatever reason.  But how many of you have subsequently conducted training on those mistakes, analysing what happened, why it happened and how the same mistakes can be prevented in future?

Obviously a key facet of knowledge management is the flow of information within an organisation, both good and bad.  Freedom of expression is key, but there seems to be a lack of regular dialogue concerning project failures, at least within the companies I have worked for.

As Einstein said, insanity is “doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.”

The reason for this blog was a study I read last night concerning the training given to a bunch of firemen in America.  The researchers wanted to determine whether training that focused on the mistakes others had made in the past worked better at minimising errors than training that focused on best practice.  Two groups were given case study based training, with one group receiving case studies of failed missions, and the other receiving case studies of successful missions.  When the data was analysed it was found that the firemen that received the training on failure had improved judgement on missions than those that didn’t.

In a corporate environment this is often tricky because by pinpointing failures it can feel as though an employee is being picked upon.  Perhaps in an individual setting this can be intensified, but if the project team are given the opportunity to analyse performance collectively and improvements made then it could go a long way to stopping those failures occurring again.

It would be good to hear from you.  Does your organisation conduct training on failed projects as well as successful ones?

Tags: Best practice, Case study, Education, Employment, improvement, Knowledge Management, mistakes, training