A CEO gave this presentation to a company as a rescue briefing. WHAT?????

<^> - - [] [] The international emoticon for: Don't bother coming into work today, aliens are attacking the city.
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Did this make any sense? 


One upon a time, circa early 2011, there was a company that sold its goods online. It employed about 100 people and was not making a profit. To turn things around, its CEO got the 100 people together to talk to them about the company's strategy for the coming years. It took one and a half hours (at a cost of about £5,000 in wages).
Tell me, do you think that this counts as strategy? Was the £5,000 well spent? Will the CEO stay in place once the company is taken over by someone who knows what they're doing?


Editor says: Certainly a Value For Money Analysis was omitted for the presentation meeting. So now we get to what was presented to the employees... And i've changed the names, but the essence is there.

Alientrees.Com Spacestation 2011

What is the Spacestation 2011?
It is the business document that relays our strategy for the next 3 years
It is simple, easy to understand for everybody in the company
It explains what we will ALL be focusing on over the next 3 years
Finance
Exceed Sales plan

• Aim to beat all the sales and KPI targets we set our selves 
• Drive the business into profitability
• Do everything in our power to exceed the sales plan

Deliver target gross margin

• One key way to profitability is through gross margin
• The better the margin the more we have to play with

Control overheads

• Spend money wisely
• If we see a saving then we must act on it

Simpler, smarter, cheaper

• We must always look for ways of doing things simpler, taking out costs and complexity
• We must look at what we should stop doing, do more of, do less of (editor says this is confusing)
• Ask ourselves if it does not add value, why are we doing it?

People
Drive ownership and accountability

• We are all responsible for our own careers
• We must not sit back and wait for things to happen, we must be proactive
• We must not blame others, but accept responsibility ourselves and influence

Open and empowered culture

• We can make changes, we do not need others to do it for us
• We are empowered to do what is good for the business

Recruit and retain the best

• We have great people, we need to make sure we keep them
• Each individual can take advantage of what Alientrees has to offer

Develop our people

• Developing skills and behaviors starts with the individual, the company is there to help
• We offer training, coaching and development, make the most of it

Social responsibility

• We will treat people with integrity
• We will make sure we contribute to the community with our time and thought
• AlienLife principles is an important part of what we do

Operations
Cross selling opportunities

• We must make processes simple and efficient to cross sell
• We must embrace all cross selling opportunities

Turning technology invisible

• Technology must be an enabler

Provide business information

• We need to provide the business with robust, easy to read and analyse data
• We need to make business decisions around informed data

Outstanding product quality and design

• Product development is at the forefront of what we do
• We aim to provide our customers with the best

Customer
Outstanding customer service

• We must aim to give the best customer service to all of our customers
• Customer service must be at the centre of what we all do
• We must stick to our USP’s for customers

Customer experience

• We must be the best for customer experience
• Everything we do must make the customer experience better
• We must use new and innovative ways to make the customer experience better

Expansion into new markets (indeed that means planets)

• We must strive ahead with offering new products for customers
• We must move into new markets in order to grow as a business and retain customers

Drive own brand to 50% of sales

• The way to profitability is through own brand
• Own brand is what makes us different from our competitors
• Own brand gives us independence

Build the Alientree brand

• We are a lifestyle brand
• We must stick to our lifestyle brand values
• We must at all times adhere to our brand guidelines to enforce and build the brand

Cross selling into customers

• We have very loyal customers, but they buy too infrequently
• We must aim to give our customers the opportunity to buy other products
• Everything we do, must be about offering and selling additional desirable products

I must say as a rescue mission the above wasn't very employee friendly. It was a bit garbled. The Virtual Gherkin Understands what he was trying to say. But He didnt think - employees. Target Audience. Errr Theyre quite in limbo and want answers and not unpack a load of management speak.

Its not Whack a mole, It's Whack A Banker.

And This is awesome Academia! I recommend this as an understanding of why things are constantly Fucking Up.
Why indeed it is RIGHT to say BANKERS are WRONG.

Enjoy.





And its Thanks to a twitter contact @puffles2010 this is here.

My New Kettle

I first used the new kettle at 10.15am yesterday.
ON upacking it to actually use it -Initial thoughts was "where's the electric base?" then swiftly followed by "D'oh, its inside the kettle" 
It was to be First coffee to come from the water it boiled. Cleaning Cafetiere Was even necessary .......... The Coffee Helped me start the day.

The coffee, surprisingly, tasted like coffee. Didnt taste any different just cos it was a new kettle. Was secretly hoping it would taste all Super dooper and stuff cos of new kettle. Nope , it was same old, same old.

A Bit later on I had MORE coffee so I could distract dog with "But I still have coffee" before we were to trot out a bit later than usual (cos it DOES fool him) goodtrick. Cos the walk took us nicely to Dinner at a mates place.

The new kettle boils quicker than the old one. Is that significant? More? Or Less? electric used? I hope less.

And this morning I've *completely* forgotten the old kettle. My new kettle has its place now. and indeed it does boil remarkably quicker than the last.

How rapidly things change. Even in small details eh?

Fabulously Vogue!

Do you think its fair?

All these guys getting approvals and running companies and not paying taxes and making fortunes are dishonest.

CONTRAST:

I'm honest

And THIS:

2000 minutes (anytime, any network)

plus 5000 texts and

All-you-can eat Data

and 5000 Three-to-Three minutes

free Voicemail and 6 months Free Spotify Premium

contract at £35 a month for 24 months with a Nokia N8 phone,

BUT they WONT give me a credit contract. BUT I CAN AFFORD IT

THAT FUCKING SUCKS.

I should put a pic of a Nokia N8: <<< Here >>> BUT I WONT!

Three different parts of life, crashing into one blogposting..

Hmmmm Three parts? 


Number One


OH yeah. The neighbour on the landing. I have looked after his dog SEVERAL times in past, due to a couple/ few of the stays he's had in hospital. The other day I asked Him if he wouldnt mind walking my dog. He DID mind. I had BAD COLD. And was shattered. And so I walked my dog. I think there IS a thing that really shows what people are like. That was It I think. Also His dog It barks a lot. And he DOESNT acknowledge that either. ((Rant over))


Number two


There was this: 

Your name has been provided as the contact person for your organisation in relation to liaison for future ****** ***** events.

I am sorry the  list has taken slightly longer to draw together than anticipated but after the ******* ***** meeting on xx/xx/xx you can expect to be contacted to help plan the next event.

AND yup, you guessed it, No List was attached

Number three

pizza gets cold too quickly

Disappearance of a Nemesis

This Note contains strong language, 

well its strong for some. I only wrote this first bit incase you dont like the word fucking, or bastard. If you dont - please dont read on. 

Been looking a lot at various environmental area wide stuff, and yet this, though, is quite close to home.

At 10.40am this morning the final piece of the fucking conker tree I been trying to get gone? Went into the Grinding machine. The Conker Fucker is gone. Repeat gone.

3 fucking years that took me! 

1) It was dangerous slip hazards on a poorly lit path with leaves and husks for at least a third of the year, and hid light too when its canopy was fully leafed 

2) Bits kept Falling off it

3) Kids and Teenagers/young adults even lobbing stuff at it on a walkway path, PLUS lobbing conkers HARD at old and young alike, encouraging Very Antisocial Behaviour

Theres 2 other trees close by to go, and some "trimming" yet for the lads to do,  but I am so pleased that conker bastard has gone.

Was my nemesis was that tree. Now I need a new nemesis!

They did also do a bit of trimming to a Silver Birch too. (Minor in comparison!)

Secret of The Sands- In The Middle East. Can you Be Gay?

Sara Sheridan is an historical novelist. Her latest book ‘Secret of the Sands’ HarperCollins (£7.99) includes (among a host of others) an openly gay character in 1830s Muscat.

Sara Says: In the last couple of hundred years it’s almost as if there’s been cultural swap when it comes to attitudes towards homosexuality, between the West and the Middle East. As a huge, self-confessed swot I’m always interested in that kind of thing – cultural shifts are the meat and drink of understanding why we’ve ended up wherever we are. When Byron toured Turkey in the early 1800s he famously referred to the local bathing houses as ‘palaces of sherbet and sodomy’. These predilections continued further south into the Arabian Peninsula and in the same period another European traveller to Egypt wrote: ‘The inconceivable inclination which has dishonoured the Greeks and Persians of antiquity constitutes the delight, or, more properly speaking the infamy of the Egyptians... the contagion has seized the poor as well as the rich.; Later that century, Sir Richard Burton described in great detail a 'Sotadic Zone' (between the northern latitudes of 30 and 43 degrees) where same-sex activity was prevalent. I’m sure he thought it had something to do with the heat.
By comparison, homophobia was rife in 19th Century England and sodomy (or buggery as it is termed in the legal documents of the day) was punishable by hanging until 1861 and continued to carry a jail term until over a hundred years later (1967 in England and Wales, 1980 in Scotland, 1982 in N Ireland). These dates, it is often noted, broadly coincide with other liberal advances in human rights in anti-slavery legislation and the feminist movement, for example, and also the more general secularisation of our society.
In the Middle East the opposite movement has occurred and the general acceptance and tolerance noted by European travellers has disappeared. Last year this was highlighted in the UK press when a Saudi Prince murdered one of his servants, apparently in a bid to cover up their homosexual relationship. The homosexuality carried the death penalty and seemed as shocking to the Islamic press as the murder itself. As the coverage progressed it became clear that the fact that the Prince had lived abroad was also key. Homosexuality in the Middle East is viewed almost as a western disease. During the ‘Queen Boat’ case in Egypt in 2001, when 50 gay men were put on trial, the accused were reputed to have imported their ‘perverse’ practices from the west and from Israel. This ties in closely with the fact that many Arab nations have felt exploited by western powers ever since the abolition of slavery in post-Napoleonic Europe and the grappling for power and influence in the region that escalated when a use was discovered for Arabian oil. It’s easy to see that there is a prevalent view that only bad things come from abroad.
When I came to recreating the world of 1830s Muscat I wanted it to feel both louche and luxurious. In a society where the company of women is an entirely private affair (as it remains today in Arab cultures) it was socially acceptable to see men with their arms draped around each other. To this day, as in Europe, Arab men greet each other with kisses on the cheek. However, what has changed is the openness that was possible about the desire for same-sex relationships around 150 years ago. Historically, this still bears some caveats. For example, I’ve found no instances where men are recorded as being exclusively homosexual (though some, obviously, must have been) and most men were clearly expected to marry and produce children as part of their obligation to the family.
My main female character, Zena, is an Abyssinian slave girl and she is bought by a desperate father to tempt his gay son into some semblance of heterosexuality. Zena is put in ‘the master’s room’ like a pretty bird in a cage, and she immediately realises what is expected of her. Quickly she colludes with the master, arranging to sleep in his bed to keep his father happy. Later, he loses her at a game of backgammon (gambling being frowned on far more than buggery at that time in Oman) and she ends up travelling in the desert disguised as a slave boy. Later on that trip, when she is propositioned by a man, he is far more shocked by the fact that up close she is clearly a woman in disguise who is displaying an unheard of independent streak, than at any question of impropriety in coming onto a young boy. ‘Aren’t you married?’ Zena asks him. The man shrugs. This is, in his view, an entirely unrelated matter.
As in the Bible, there is very little in the Koran that condemns homosexuality and I hope that over time attitudes will change, not only with regard to homosexuality but also in terms of repression of women (of which there are and always have been horrifying examples) and slavery, or as it is today ‘indentured labour’ which remains rife in the region. There are a few chinks of light – not least the current unrest in Egypt (the first liberal revolution in the Middle East in my memory). Elsewhere, there is a movement in Arab states towards allowing women to vote (although not all have yet passed even this, very basic right). In Beirut in 2003, a handful openly gay people marched through the streets with a homemade rainbow flag in protest against the war in Iraq. It was the first time anything like that had happened in an Arab country. In another example, Lebanon now has an officially recognised gay and lesbian organisation known as Helem – again, the only one in an Arab country – as well as Barra, the first gay magazine in Arabic. I hope this marks a movement in the direction of tolerance and the possibility that people will be allowed to define their own personal morality rather than having to so cruelly imposed.




I Thank Sara for her insight into these things, and I hope that You will ALL read her Book.
This is stunning timing especially when Egypt is in such a state of rebellion of which many readers of this piece would obviously be fully up to Date with via all sorts of multimedia.
I wish you all well