Surveilling the surveillance

Returning from my Christmas shopping travels in Norwich yesterday, I passed a GATSO speed camera on Ipswich Road (the one by City College if you know it). Last few times I was in Norwich, it had been put out of use by local hooligans/vandals/vigilantes/heroes (depending on your viewpoint - my personal view is that mobile police speed controls are fairer and more effective at reducing casualties on the road, and that speed is just one of many variables affecting road safety. But I digress). Now it has been reinstated - but what caught my attention was a yellow sign on the base of the camera, stating that the camera was subject to "24hr CCTV surveillance" - the surveillance has its own surveillance!

Strange times indeed. But I wonder: just who or what's watching the camera that's watching the camera?

Viral marketing done properly...

This Australian TV advert has been pulled from the airwaves and removed from Toyota's website. Yet the fact it's made news in the papers shows the power of viral marketing. Is all publicity good publicity?

And sorry for the lack of posting recently - the usual story of work, illness and assignments I'm afraid. Hopefully normal service shall be resumed by the new year.

Three cheers for Baroness Warsi...

I think she might just be bang on the mark...

Respect to her for engaging with someone who'd already lost the argument by throwing eggs. How old are those guys, 12?

The Green Cut

Nick Robinson voices his reservations about how effective a budget cut equivalent to the savings of 10% of Government's carbon emissions would be.

I'm in favour of reducing energy consumption (consumption in general, really), particularly in a business sense because it would usually indicate greater efficiency as well as an attempt to minimise the impact we place on the world around us. The problem with the idea (and Nick's analysis) is that a question needs to be asked: who will calculate the savings of a 10% carbon emissions cut?

If the answer is external consultants, be they auditors, quantity surveyors, or whoever, they will cost money and need information from within the organisation. There are also not many organisations big enough to audit government organisations. Those that are exist primarily (and sometimes solely) to service the needs of large organisations - are the findings of these organisations potentially compromised by their proximity to those they serve?

If the answer is that civil servants themselves will provide information on what they can save, it would naive to think that the Sir Humphries (or Ervin Burrells if that's more your thing) in the corridors of power won't be thinking up ways to massage the figures, sorry, "mitigate the survey impact". The only way round that seems to be suggesting the sorts of savings that can be made, in which case why worry to ask in the first place?

Hofstede's National Culture Research and Handy's Cultures

We covered organisation culture this evening. How cultures are made, the different types, how culture can (or can't) be changed, the kind of cultures people prefer and the ones they don't.

Geert Hofstede (I'm going to resist the urge to stick a "van" in there at exam time, it couldn't be more Dutch) conducted research in 1980 in the form of employee surveys across the international divisions of IBM to find out what cultural differences could be identified across the organisation. The four variables were:

Long Power Distance - Short Power Distance (how different are subordinates from their immediate superiors)
Individualism - Collectivism (how likely are employees likely to put collective interests before their own)
High Uncertainty Avoidance - Low Uncertainty Avoidance (how comfortable is a culture with taking on the unknown)
Masculine - Femine (How agressive, target driven and activist is a culture contrasted with its empathetic, responsible and measured characteristics)

Of course this is a hugely Western liberal capitalist classification of culture, and the quantifiable results are only applicable to IBM, not the rest of the world. Also, the world has changed hugely since 1980 (fax, internet, low cost air travel, satellite communication) so you could question whether discriminating culture as "nations" is a valid excercise when an organisation's workforce could be scattered all over the globe and 6 months later have changed completely again. It also ignores resource and political legacies and the different objectives a global organisation might have in different countries. But apparently it's a test that has endured the test of time.

We covered the Pluralist/Elitist/Unitary/Radical/Marxist descriptions of power - it's Mr Gardner's AS Level politics and Sheffield's POL103 all over again!

The other nugget I prised from the seam of this evening's lecture was Handy's four cultural descriptions of organisations, viz:

Role-based: Forms! Tick boxes! Policies! If the idea of any of those gives you a wet dream, that's you.
Power-based: The Cult of Personality (like the song) Charisma and domination prevail in the hands of a few.
People-based: People get together and act out of mutual self interest
Task-based: You get the job done, all else is peripheral.

Memories of Detroit

If our public finances feel a bit dire over here at the moment, spare a thought for the Motor City. The Times reports that "unburied bodies tell the tale... of a city in despair" - having used up the county budget for state-sponsored burials back in June, Detroit is unable to afford to bury unclaimed corpses. Meanwhile, the city budget faces a $300 million budget shortfall and cannot afford to run services such as schools and refuse collection.

(Above: the Book Cadillac before renovation and the centre of metro Detroit)

Detroit is a city that has fascinated me for a number of years now: the cliche of the dark side of the American Dream, of affluence, confidence and splendour tarnished by decay, social and political crisis and a perennially uncertain future. Buildings like the Book Cadillac hotel before it was refurbished, Michigan Central Station and the theatre they turned into a car park are icons of Detroit's past and present.

Lots has been written on Detroit elsewhere so I won't spend too much time reinventing the wheel, but instead draw on my experiences from when I visited Detroit two years ago. The Michigan State Legislature was experiencing political deadlock over passing its annual budget - all operations of the state were under threat of paralysis with public servants going unpaid and cash to pay for services unavailable. The local press was running a story about two senior police officers on trial for selling cocaine from the evidence room or something similar - it's difficult to be precise, a quick look back over Detroit's corruption cases in the last 2 years shows that these reports are quite common, with allegations of corruption going right through to the top of the City's administrations. (does this sound like another American city we know in fiction?)

The people I spoke to on my way through the rust belt in Pennsylvania and Michigan told me I was mad to want to visit Detroit, that it was polluted and falling apart physically and socially, that I would have my car stolen and would probably be shot. I have to say my experience was somewhat different - the people I spoke to there were friendly Americans in much the same way as they were in the rest of the country. Certainly there were miles of derelict factories, empty plots where houses once stood and what was left standing was in many cases going the same way, but then I saw that in Chicago and Cleveland too. The roads were choked with traffic - lots of old American classics and 18 wheeler semis trashing the heavily potholed asphalt of the freeways. But there were also gleaming factories in the suburbs, and rejuvanated plazas in the centre of the city where the offices like the Renaissance centre dominated the skyline, but nestled in next to some fantastic deco architecture from the 20s and 30s and some striking modern architecture from the 50s and 60s.



(Above: Thunderbirds architecture meets art deco, and the front entrance of Detroit's police headquarters)

I got the feeling back then even before the banking crisis was fully understood that America was living on borrowed time, and Michigan more than most: the local press was discussing Congress' new "restrictive" low emissions laws that would signal the end to the SUVs coming out of Michigan, Kansas and Kentucky. Michigan's economy was still hugely dependent on buoyant motor sales, and it was being reported that price reduction deals to buy new cars were actually outpricing the second hand market. Since I visited, unemployment has soared to 28%, Chrysler is now a foreign-owned and government subsidised company as is GM (if you count the Canadian government as "foreign", which I would imagine most Americans would).

I hope Detroit can reinvent itself. It was one of the most fascinating places I visited on my trip across the US and deserves to become a great city again.

So now we have a President...

Did today feel any different to you? Me either.

Back to Band of Brothers in HD.