Thereafter, the jokes continued to phone themselves through. These week’s challenge – delivered, please note, without any fanfare about its central importance to the economy or any other brouhaha – is to design, prototype and pitch an item of flatpack furniture, with a maximum RRP of £75. Before the phrase has left voice-over man’s lips, I am already thinking ‘yep, strictly two dimensional’ and ‘a child of five could do it’ (and the related jokes). But can 14 children aged between 22 and 39 do it? By the time you are reading this, all bets are off. Do not call now: you may still be charged and your opinion will be disregarded. (For those struggling with maths, the RRP limit is slightly more than half of the TV licence fee you have already paid to be seeing this.)

And so to the picking (on) of leaders. Natalie’s business idea focuses on manufacturing garments, so she’s a natural for cheap storage and steps up to the plate. Building on their failures in previous episodes (played two, lost two), the girls – as Karren points out – demonstrate once more that they are great talkers and terrible listeners. Everyone talks simultaneously, and a multi-functional cube soon becomes a stool, a table, a laptop desk, a wine rack, a cup holder, and other things that made me glaze over. Perhaps it’s a pair of stools with enough space for an idea to fall between them. Who knows? Beyond thinking how badly the wine would slosh about as you flicked the cube from one face to another, all I really noticed was that no-one wanted to let Rebecca speak. Possibly as she wanted to point out that this was a truly terrible idea. She also wanted team play and no bickering. Unless she grows a beard, changes her name to Russell and infiltrates the boys, this wish may not be fulfilled.

For the boys, Jordan the business analysist takes up the PM baton. (In the ‘relaxing at home sequence, we’d seen him having his toenails painted black by the girls, but hopefully Endeavour’s sudden lurch in metrosexuality won’t undermine their hirsute and manly resolve.) Kurt suggests a chair-cum-recycling-unit and sends Nick H’s facial tics into overdrive as he contemplates its possible contents. “Fishbones, tin cans smelling of such and such”, he grimaces like a be-suited version of one of Hinge and Bracket. I wonder what Kurt’s current chairs smell of, if this would be an improvement.  Alex (aka The One With The Eyebrows), who may have had a plan up his sleeve, suggests a chair that becomes a table with storage at the simple action of cunning release pin. And lo, the Foldo chair was born. Odd things are starting to happen: no-one is shouting down the PM, everyone is listening, and there’s a product idea that appears to have been thought-through.

Next up, the ritual of the market research exercise. The girls are told that people want legroom and storage,a contradiction that suggests only flatpack combat trousers. As it turns out, it matters not: Natalie – and, more loudly, Luisa – have already decided. Even if the public – or the sub-set of them available in Shoreditch furniture boutiques – really, really want a hostess trolly, they’re getting a multi-functional cube.  The camera cuts back and forward between an exasperated Sophie, who’s wondering why she bothers (and picking up empathy votes), and the ‘design team’, who are making the professional designers stroke their beards and see how far up their foreheads they can get their eyebrows. Someone says “It’s just a box with a lid, that’s what I’m afraid of”, but they plough on anyway. There are mildly fraught moments about construction: they want it to be assembled without tools (ie slotted) but to have rounded corners (can’t be done with slots). Several of them are now reminding me of Veruca Salt in Will Wonka and the Chocolate Factory, and I long for a crack team of vicious squirrels to appear and send them down a chute to a grisly end. While Uzma insists on patterning (grooves cut into the sides that have the feel of pie crust of perhaps trellis), Rebecca clacks round Homebase in her high heels buying castors and the smallest cushions available, pointing out she still doesn’t really know what the product is. She seems unaware she is in good company, at least in one regard.

Meanwhile, Alex explains the table-chair to the designers. There are detailed drawings and steel rulers, and things seem almost professionally considered. I blink and rub my eyes. Market research (Kurt, Zee and a thankfully betrousered Myles) isn’t entirely positive, although the rest of team overrule Justin and accept that an upholstered cushion will help the thing actually … you know, sell. In a further outbreak of metrosexuality, Zee picks a really lovely ‘clean fresh minty green’ fabric. Who knew Napoleon was such a wuss?

Measuring is then the verb of the moment. Justin measures a chair from every angle. Neil measure’s Alex’s inside leg. Someone measure’s Alex’s bottom. Jordan test-drives, only to be told “Not you Jordan: someone average sized”. As Nick H points out, Alex is being very pushy, possibly to the extent of forcing mistakes. Not everyone is that much taller than Jordan. Nick’s camel gag – a horse designed by a committee – doesn’t, however, quite work. Camels are very poor users of tape measures, and are hopeless with release pins. And no-one will ever mistake Alex for a committee. I’m always mindful of how heavily edited the programme is, but this looking like a walkover for the boys already.

The following morning, the girls feign excitement as their sample arrives. It is as alluring as a sample in a plastic bag could be, frankly.  “Tidy-sidey” also, despite the flatpack theme, arrives flly assembled. Half-baked, perhaps, but fully formed. It is a box on wheels, with a pillow on it. An un-upholstered cushion, from which one of them proceeds to rip some of the stuffing. Karren is sucking lemons with a zeal of a woman who desparately needs the g&t that should go with them, and is reduced – for the first time I can recall – to swearing on camera. Yes, the Tidy-Sidey really is that good.

Alex’s chair, disturbingly, is actually quite cool. Jason introduces the world to the world Clicketyboo and Nick H tries to make sour remarks about electric chairs and high-chairs for adults, but for a novel furniture item in 24 hours or less, it’s really not that bad. And the quick-change mechanism works perfectly. Even more remarkably, Neil is not shown taking the credit for something. Perhaps he wasn’t feeling well.

And so to the pitches. The chair’s one flaw – it’s a wee bit too tall – means Zee fails at his first pitch, although they like the concept. Jordan then sells 200 to a furniture chain, Kurt sells 12 and Jason 3. Zee scores two ducks, and is refused a third chance. Of all the boys, he and Myles – who thinks 16 year olds buy chairs in John Lewis (maybe in Monaco, sweetness, but not in Blighty) – are the only two really blot their copy books, although Myles will later be redeemed. Alex unthinkingly waves his considerable buttocks in the faces of the Argos buyers’ panel as he demonstrates his assembly technique, much to Nick H’s (rather too easily-triggered) horror, but will also be proved ‘right’ (note the quote marks) later.

The girls start at ‘a posh store’. The buyers’ eye movements recall Margaret Mountford as they politely point out the function is great, but the design is awful and it looks like a garden planter. Asked if it might be more appropriate somewhere other than the living room, they firmly suggest anywhere where it can’t be seen. Fair but brutal. Luisa pitches at Argos, who pitch back some googlies. “Why the colour?,” they ask politely. It’s one of those questions – like, for example, “So when did you stop beating your wife?” – that it’s probably best to simply not answer. Maximising their flirtatious girly charm, the other girls manage to sell 4, 20, 50 and 100 respectively in different retail outlets. The boys are marginally ahead, with the major retailer and catalogue buyers verdicts withheld overnight. If this weren’t about flatpack furniture and The Apprentice, I might even have been momentarily tense.

Momentarily spared such award-winning sales lines as “Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication”, it is, of course, Squeaky Bum Time. (© Sir Alex Ferguson, apparently. Who says grumpy old men can’t be innovators?) The girls manage to praise Natalie’s leadership, and Lord Sugar manages to praise the absence of tools. As ever, he speaks very literally. Rebecca’s dislike of the prototype is highlighted, and she exchanges a brief death-stare with Luisa. Natalie’s use of others to pitch to major (ie laid-on) buyers is queried, although she emphasises that she was there. There are smiling remarks about the criticality of managing creativity, but the figures stay up the advisors sleeves.

For the boys, Joran’s orderly and structured PM approach is praised (and with straight faces). Alex’s idea was well thought through, despite Lord S’s quips about an electric chair. If they’re about to lose, Jordan may be in difficulty for his decision to trust the others to handle the major pitches and to not attend. The tensions clicks up a notch (it’s easy: pull pin, adjust cushion, slide into place …)

And so to the numbers. The girls sold 174 units on the day, 0 to John Lewis and – despite Argos liking them and their pitch – a great big fat 0 to the catalogue. Because the product was mind-boggingly, head-scratchingly appalling, essentially.

The boys sold 216 on the day, 500 to John Lewis and 2,500 to Argos. Recognising the imperative of targeted reward practices, they get to wear boilersuits, clamber up the outside of the 02 on ropes and drink orange juice. Oh, and to bitch about the girls and that blaady box. They seem happy enough, but they also seem coherent. Almost like a real team. No doubt the producers will soon fix that – just not funny enough. I use the word funny loosely, of course.

In Episode 2 of Squeaky Bum Time™, the gloves come off. Phrases like ‘tidy-sidey, wishy-washy poxy-boxy’ and ‘1970s East Germany’ are used. Within seconds, a full-on blame-slinging festival is under way and the panel have to silence them a few times. It is soon evident that the girls wish to sacrifice Sophie (for failures in market research, the subject of her dissertation) and Uzma (for being Uzma, and making designer credential claims in the face of a grey plywood laundry basket on castors). Rebecca’s willingness – wasted though the effort was – to point out the product was a disaster zone is again highlighted. Which may stand her in higher stead with the panel than her team-mates. Well, I say ‘mates’ … Predictably, Natalie brings back Sophie and Uzma.

After the panel privately shake their heads, agree that Natalie PM’d badly, Sophie was disappointing and that Uzma seems to ‘have issues’, it’s time for the final grilling. Natalie says the other two are hiding from responsibility, and that Uzma was trusted to design and failed. She counters by asking why Natalie signed off a design she didn’t agree with. Sophie’s market research abilities are verbally shredded, while the PM’s ‘willingness to listen to it’ (spot the quote marks) goes unmentioned. Apart from by Sophie, who (fairly accurately) says she only listened to Luisa.  Squawk squawk squawk, blah blah blah, etc. Repeat. It would be a relief at this stage to heavily arm the panel and disable any qualms they might have about mass slaughter.

Uzma, whose showing has not been so grisly in previous fiascos, survives on the grounds of her strong credentials. Natalie, who managed mainly in the sense of ignoring the only person pointing out imminent disaster, also somehow survives. Sophie pays the price for being ‘the quiet one’ and finds herself in a cab, a victim of a combination of drawing the market research straw and the responses of Lord Sugar’s gut.

Neither a particularly informative episode – although the boys’ team were actually orderly, organised and structured and scored a huge win as a result (does that really count as a lesson? That bitchy chaos isn’t a winning approach?) – nor a funny one. The tiredness of the formula is showing through pretty badly now, and the programme’s ‘entertainment value’ depends entirely on the comedy of the participants’ attempts to do something fatuous in a ludicrous timescale. Essentially, this is It’s A Knockout without the giant Quasimodo costumes, the Joker and Eddie Waring. And even careful editing can’t conceal how even the patience of the ever-graceful Karren Brady is now also wearing thin.

Next week, perhaps they will invent a bio-active yoghurt drink for the man of a certain age. Or perhaps not. (They’re running farm shops. The trailer shows Alex holding a bunch of carrots and saying ‘What are these?’. Spare me …) I just dread to think what Myles is going to show us next. As long he doesn’t refer to it as his prowess, I may be past caring …

Ian, on the basis of his profile, has a long and successful track record in the corporate sphere, focusing largely on OD: he knows, we can safely assume, whereof he speaks. As he acknowledges, there are really two issues at play in the area he is currently addressing. The superficial problem – to use the wrong adjective, I admit, but to call it ‘the presenting problem’ would be to potentially confuse management speak with psychologists’ jargon – is how to gauge opinion, feeling and atmosphere amongst the human resources (or ‘people’, as we refer to them outside the office). But there is an underlying problem: the opinions and thoughts that most need to be swayed are those of the occupants of the C Suite, for whom measurement is a matter of firmness, definitiveness and bottom lines. They are not a group of individuals much moved by ‘data’ such as “We have had some informal feedback to the effect that …”

Ian is exploring the use of ‘sentiment analysis tools’: software that mines emails and other digital sources, helping OD professionals to pick through potential mountains of ‘data’ to recognise patterns of assent or dissent (or, perhaps worse, indifference or prevarication). The idea is certainly an interesting and intriguing one given his starting point: the frequent failure of merger and acquisition (M&A) activity to deliver on its potential promise, as ‘the same boat’ that everyone theoretically winds up sharing so often then runs aground on the metaphorical rocks of human difference and disagreement.

The tendency towards M&A failures and the reasons for them are something we’ve previously explored in this blog: Chris Rogers wrote on the topic in 2009, identifying seven main obstacles to success:

• impact on both businesses’ ability to sustain financial performance
• loss of productivity and distractions to business drivers as the merger  is rolled out
• a clash of cultures that drives negative behaviours and business loss
• push and pull factors that can lead to the loss of top talent
• positioning for power and a clash of management styles and/or egos
• lack of management understanding of the different dimensions of change and  how to enact change management
• failure to appreciate the need to synergise the changes of process and people
• poor understanding and/or communication of objectives.”

While this list may be different from Ian’s, our conclusions – that ‘soft’ issues and their skillful management lie at the heart of the matter – are in alignment. I confess, however, that I start to drift out of alignment with Ian as I consider the application of technology to ‘solve the problem’. Consider, for example, Ian’s following explanation of ‘sentiment analysis’:

It’s a software driven process that analyses text and identifies feelings, reflections, likes and dislikes. At its most sophisticated it can give you a very good temperature reading and a good sense of what peoples attitudes are to particular issues. It provides you with an understanding of the judgements people are making, their inclinations, passions and opinions.”

Like Ian, my background straddles both ‘soft’ areas and IT: I have worked in digital publishing, web and software development and managing the introduction of large-scale workflow automation systems. Automating, for example, the admissions system of a large, multi-site University, I could (had the tools been available at the time) run an analysis of the emails I received from academics and administrators across all the various Schools, Faculties and campuses. It might – or might not – have been enlightening: I have qualms, as someone who works primarily with language, about the ability of textual analysis to identify subtleties of human communication that include sarcasm and irony. (Our occasional misreading of emails, deprived as we are of non-verbal communication signals, should perhaps alert to the fact that software analysis ‘reads’ with only the emotions that it has been programmed to detect – the contextual basis is even smaller.)

But I think there are some different underlying issues – and they are for HR, managers and leaders. One of these is that ‘digitising the carpet’ – thinking of text as something electronic, although that may be a large part of the reality of internal communication in many organisations – can also digitise our tendency to sweep things under it. One of the reasons that inaccurate assumptions (including, of course, ‘the merger will go smoothly’) go unchallenged is that opinions go unsurfaced, or that varying points of view are not given opportunities to be voiced. Am I the only person sufficiently paranoid to think that the adoption of ‘sentiment analysis’ might, in itself, be somewhat inhibiting: “your emails and intranet postings will be analysed to identify your feelings and emotions” is a sentence that might make quite a number of people feel inclined to step away from the keyboard. (On the subject of online monitoring, paranoia and dissent, you might wish to have a look at our review of Evgeny Morozov’s The Net Delusion.)

Ian also makes passing reference to the likes of Trip Advisor, which raises another concern in my mind. Trip Advisor’s openness to ‘spoiler’ comments from rivals isn’t quite it – it’s more that it offers the flipside of the ‘Facebook ‘Like’’ coin that Morozov identified. While Facebook offers us the ability to ‘like’ something – without nuance – at a single-mouse click, other screen-based phenomenon make it equally easy to pour scorn or grievance on something. And I can’t help but think that passionate disapproval is more likely to tempt us to our keyboards than a mild but not especially pressing sense of approval. (The word ‘rant’ is, after all, hardly ever applied to an outpouring of praise.)

A third concern is, appropriately enough, somewhat more shadowy: lurking – the phenomenon of people reading online forums or social media but who never actively participate. From twenty years’ experience of online communities of all kinds, it’s a truism that most are dominating by the voices of only a small percentage of those either with access or actively reading. Although the rise of social media may lead us to think that the entire planet is now incessantly babbling, the distribution curve of babble-per-person is worth remembering. Despite the advent of Twitter, the majority of us have yet to express our opinions on any number of things. Perhaps this is a blessing, but any ‘sentiment analysis’ we might wish to undertake might be heavily skewed if this is not taken into account. (If an analogy helps, consider Yasman Alibhai Brown in today’s Independent: the much commented 24% of votes cast for UKIP in recent UK local elections is actually 24% of 32% – the percentage of those eligible who voted. 92% of the electorate did not cast a vote for UKIP, yet the party’s policy platform currently dominates political discussion. How accurately would a sentiment analysis of current online political discussion represent the spread of opinion across the whole electorate?)

To resurrect an ancient cliché, our tools have a tendency to shape us and our actions: when the purpose of a tool is to inform us, we should not be afraid to question the sources that a tool has drawn from in delivering its answers. Nor should we be afraid to remind ourselves that it is preferable that we use the tools rather than the other way around (and our tendency to be beguiled by technological breakthroughs should sound another note of caution).

And yet … all this is not to pour nothing but cold water on Ian’s idea. As he has clearly said, the main causes of disappointing results in M&A activity are down to ignoring human factors. A tool that encourages HR – if no-one else – to gauge opinion and to recognise the importance of doing so is a potentially useful addition to the arsenal (with the caveat that applies to most findings delivered by unseen algorithms – use them as levers for better questions rather than taking them as answers). But I think the rest of the HR quiver needs review here, and I offer them some further questions:

• Are you harvesting free-form ‘opinion’ or are you posing actual questions (a questionnaire gathers more structured responses)
• Are you checking the percentage and spread of the ‘electorate’ who are participating
• Are you guaranteeing anonymity of ‘sentiment analysis’ (there’s little point seeking to canvas honest opinion if there’s even a perceived threat of paying a price for expressing it)
• Are you talking regularly to line managers, and encouraging them to openly monitor the prevailing atmosphere and ‘morale’? Are they doing so? (Research suggests that the best leaders do so as a matter of course, rather than in response to a reminder from HR, but the latter is a start …)
• Are you automating something that you are neglecting to do ‘offline’ – the Internet may be referred to as its updated version, but it is not quite the water-cooler (and perhaps more an addition to it than a replacement for it)

But I think HR needs to ponder a bigger question? How can you change the contribution that you make to your organisation so that your opinion is valued to the extent that it is taken in board when it is expressed in anything other than ‘hard figures’? And how (often) do you analyse the sentiments of the C Suite – and then act on your findings?

It’s 6am in the Apprentimansion. Jason is wearing the kind of stripey jimjams that would make most viewers over a certain age (or of a certain disposition) think of Rock Hudson. Luisa’s Doris Day impersonation, meanwhile, is way off the mark. It’s the series’ habitual soft-porn/candidates-in-their-undergarments section, and the lads have got their tats out for the lasses. Myles impersonates an old Badedas bath foam advert for the cameraman’s benefit, but I’d have thought the chances of a seasoned film crew succumbing to his over-advertised charm at 6.02am were a little thin. Neil, episode 1’s gruellingly relentless back-seat driver, meanwhile reveals a physical quirk. Despite having one of those beards that disappears down his neck, his chest is as bald as his ambition. For at least one good reason, someone needs to deal with that man with a cut-throat razor.

All of which probably goes to show how engaged I was with the episode. The plucky 15 are whisked off to a pub that used to be part of the Bank of England to be told that they will be ‘inventing’ a flavoured beer. Flavoured beers, we are told as if it is breaking news, are the latest trends in British brewing. (I’ve been drinking Belgian fruit beers since I was 15 … oops, make that 18 … and I dearly wish I had a case on hand right now, but on with the programme, eh?) To invoke a pun the script somehow missed, Lord Sugar shakes up the teams to keep things sparkling and effervescent. Kurt, who may not have spoken yet but runs a drinks business, becomes Endeavour’s PM, while Tim is moved to Evolve to lead the girls. I think this is called putting the pigeon amongst the cats …

The boys are straight into discussing flavours. Chilli and caramel is the first suggestion, although Alex ponders the wisdom of chilli and suggests chocolate orange. Jordan chews (sadly only) the possibility of nettles, wondering if they’d sting his mouth. Not only has flavoured beer passed him by, but the ancient tradition of nettle tea hasn’t dawned on him either. And swollen mouths are hardly what any of them are lacking. Kurt swiftly reveals his PM style: chocolate orange it is and the manufacturing team will include Zee (forbidden alcohol on religious grounds), Jordan (doesn’t drink beer) and Jason (hates beer). As Kurt has already decided they will apply chocolate orange to amber bitter rather than stout, their input – that it’s far nicer with stout (all the chocolate beers I’ve ever encountered were based on stout, which seems like a hint) – will be (irresistible pun ahoy) fruitless in any case. Bizarrely, Neil appears to say nothing. Possibly a technical failure with a microphone …

Tim’s PM-ing style is completely different. “I’m a team player, not a lone ranger,” he tells us, and wants to avoid the team talking over each other. He’s diplomatic, charming and plainly awfully nice. I quietly hope that he’s more hirsute than Neil, as he could save time and just shave the word ‘Welcome’ into his chest now. As Karren is quickly pointing out, the team are all squawking over each other within minutes, and “decisions will depend on who has Tim’s ear”. Several of his team colleagues appear more than ready to slice it off for safe-keeping. Still, they eventually decide beer is a man’s drink (ooh, innovative pitching!), and that rhubarb and caramel is a winning taste sensation. Even more miraculously, they turn out to be right about both these things. And then, just when it’s looking promising, Uzma decides that a beer festival isn’t really their target market. As clever metaphors are beyond those around her, the early worm fails to get the bird …

As sub-teams are picked, Uzma takes charge of marketing. Luisa takes charge of sniping charmlessly over her right shoulder and of demonstrating how little she understands the mechanics of design. While sitting next to the professional designer who must suffer this for a few minutes free airtime. Having plumped for rhubarb and caramel bitter, Luisa is plainly hellbent on maximising the ‘barb’. Rhubarb is, we’re informed, a luxury, which will be great news for the population of Pontefract, and ‘Rhubarb and Riches’ it is. Well, they’re halfway there.

Over at the boys’ beer-christening/willy-waving fest, Neil has obviously woken up as he is now claiming responsibility for everything. A pale chocolate orange beer called ‘A Bitter This’ – well, we all have to plant our first flag somewhere, I suppose. “Behind every PM there’s a Neil Clough,” he tells a tactfully silent cameraman. Yep, little beardy twonk with a dagger in each hand: you can’t miss him …

Satisfied they’ve captured the best lines from the marketing efforts, the editors whisk us back to the factory where things are going swimmingly. Tim’s sub-team can’t add up or multiply for toffee – or exotic fruit-infused bevvies – and inject enough rhubarb flavouring into the first few casks that the man from the brewery a) declares the results ‘dangerous’ and b) probably wishes he’d worn his incontinence pants that morning. If only they’d known, they could have sold him some of that left-over cat litter. 30 litres of base ale down the drain, and £123 with it. Rebecca, the Cruella de Poppins of sales closure, will manage trade sales tomorrow, and it’s looking dubious as to whether they will have anything to show her but ashen faces and a giggling brewer. The boys are meantime high-fiving round their first bottled product, and nominating Alex to manage trade sales. They’re so excited they forget to actually give him a sample to take with him. Oh dear.

The following day, Neil, Kurt, Miles and Jordan sell orangey beer at St Albans beer festival for the highest price in the room while punters ask them why they didn’t go for a stout. Nick H manages to grimace without so much as tasting the product:I think that’s called foresight. Oddly, sales aren’t electrifying. Late in the day, still needing to sell three pints a minute, they decamp to the South Bank and sell their beer at first £2.50, then £2 and finally £1 a pint. It might not be the nicest beverage available, but at a pound a pint in central London you don’t need to depend on repeat custom. Neil barks at bystanders that he named this beer personally. As the camera focuses on him, we can’t see how impressed they are at this. The rest of the boys have a harder time with trade sales, not least as they turn up with an empty bottle at the first pitch. There after, they argue in front of potential customers, fail to provide pump clips and start shouting at each other in the street. Can’t hold their drink, some people.

For the girls, The Kent Beer Festival turns out to be a pub in Putney. Despite the initial tumbleweed scene, punters eventually arrive and the camera catches Tim being very Tigger-ish with a bunch of Morris Men. The team manage surprisingly well, flapping slightly less than the morris mens’ hankies, and the crowd are very complimentary about the beer (and at £3.60 a pint, they get the pricing about right too). Sadly, when sales slow, they decide to move on to a wine bar in Richmond. As Karren tells the long-suffering film crew, not somewhere that people – and a lot of them are also women – go to get their smackers round a poncey pint. Meanwhile, Rebecca shifts a few casks to pubs before, despite some faint praise from Uzma, she proceeds to break out into Apprentice Trope No 6: “Why are you undermining me all the time?” Why candidates do this remains a mystery. If you’re selling more than anyone else – as she is – you’re safe this early in the series. Showing ‘temperament’ is one of the fastest ways of getting your cards marked, yet Rebecca succumbs to the temptation. On our sofa, she is immediately re-christened as The Grim Weeper.

Finally – praise be – time is called and it’s time for the sober surroundings of the boardroom. From what we’ve been allowed to see, sales may be even-ish, but Evolve’s beer wastage in production has lost them this round?

Perhaps Lord S detects a little excess swagger amongst the boys: Alex is told to sit up straight (with those eyebrows? It might not be possible …) and Neil is forced to laugh jovially as his award-winning product name is pawed down sneeringly. The choice of a non-beer drinking team is monstered (although Kurt’s steam-rollering of opinion rendered that pointless anyway), pricing policy is laughed at, and the ‘sending them off with no samples’ element triggers some serious argy-bargy. It becomes ever clearer that the rest of the boys really don’t like Jason. Lucky for him he’s not been on a losing team yet, I suspect.

Over at Evolve, Tim’s ambition to run a drinks basis is flagged – mainly as a vulnerability. The team’s weakness – maths and location-choice – are also quickly flagged, and the girls’ claws are duly extended and pointed in Tim’s direction.

When the figures are resolved, Rebecca may have once again conquered all in terms of trade sales, but the boys’ ‘flog it cheap’ strategy gives them a winning margin of about £500. (Although they didn’t pour beer away during manufacture, they also managed to spend rather more.) As a treat, they are sent to Belgium for something professionally brewed. The girls, and Tim, skulk off to the café for something that – like them – has been left to stew slightly too long.

Returning to the boardroom, they find Lord S chewing a wasp. Which may be the best way to cleanse the palette after their fruity concoctions. Debate, such as it is, quickly turns to acrimony and Rebecca – who seems to feel her contributions should be mentioned only when they are advantageous to the team – descends once more into a seething mass of passive-aggression. Her role in location picking is plainly reflecting badly on her, but it triggers an outburst of reflecting badly on herself – much to Sugar’s chagrin. Even before the ‘final three’ moment, her card is marked – although the series’ format telegraphs that this means she will survive. (In broadcast arts, the audience must suspend disbelief, darling: it’s traditional.)

Tim brings her back, along with Francesca, whose multiplication skills threatened to poison half of West London and wipe out Morris Dancing as we know it. (Give that woman a prize, I say …) Tim has to defend himself against charges of being a doormat who got steam rollered, and plays the ‘I accept responsibility’ and ‘I’m a fast learner’ cards. Francesca failed her delegated task, and her contributions beyond this are subjected to a search party that returns empty-handed. Rebecca, meanwhile, eats humble pie through her own trumpet. Although Francesca should have gone and Rebecca should have been sent for counselling, the hapless Tim finds himself on the end of the finger.

The follow-up programme shows the audience mostly disagreed – Tim wasn’t entirely catastrophic, and displayed many attributes the other candidates could have usefully admired and learned from (possibly at the expense of viewing entertainment, but that depends on your interpretation of ‘entertainment’). But this isn’t a business programme about listening: this is a light-entertainment programme that’s about shrieking and losing all self-respect. And that’s just the audience …

Throughout Episodes 1 & 2 of Series 9 – and two episodes on consecutive nights really was in danger of being too much of a good thing – I often had an imaginary alternative soundtrack. “Don’t put your daughter on the stage, Mrs Worthington.” And if Mrs Ampaw-Farr was watching, you might want to pay more attention to Noel Coward than Lord Sugar next time opportunity knocks. Yes, here we are again with The Apprentice. 16 fresh hopefuls, spouting like a school of whales and as estranged from modesty as they are from understatement.

The BBC had been canny enough with the pre-publicity for this series to drop the hint that Episode 2 features an organisational challenge set in a brewery. And they tell me jokes don’t write themselves … Otherwise, what was new? Not a great deal, really. The visual difference was facial hair, thankfully confined to the men. We’ll come back to Neil’s neck later. One of the women looks awfully like Stella English, which rang an unfortunate note, but also served as a reminder that embarrassing press and widespread public scorn are no match for a Budding Entrepreneur! (Capitals and exclamation marks remain, sadly, de rigeur.) It’s going to take more than poor press to shut this lot up. Elsewhere, the footage editors have ramped up the foreshadowing technique at the expense of any sense of suspense. In the opening soundbites, before we’d even met the ‘hopefuls’, Lord Sugar was already telling us/them “You’re all a bloody waste of space”. Don’t you just hate spoilers?

And so, painkillers and pizza in hand, to Episode 1. It’s midnight in the boardroom. (Thankfully no-one overdubbed the horror movie strings, but the timing screamed ‘artifical tension’ regardless.) The plucky candidates are, in their self-effacing fashion, dressed for the dodgier kind of Moscow nightclub. Lord Sugar, meanwhile, is speaking for the nation when he says that he’s fed up with “All those usual clichés”. But he’s sadly undermined by his scriptwriter when he tells us that “Actions speak louder than words”. Not for the first time, I glance at my watch: we are 9 minutes in, and all we’ve had are words. Hundreds of them, and all as empty as outer space. Words were in plentiful stock, and only the BBC were buying them. In more ways than one.

In a radical departure from the ‘flogging a load of old tat’ formula, the first episode sees the candidates divided into ‘boys’ and ‘girls’ (the words used, btw: funny how they’re not ‘men’ and ‘women’, despite their average age being rather higher this year – perhaps the cold winter has meant entrepreneurs are ‘budding’ longer nowadays?) and each given a container of incongruous odds and sods to shift. The girls call themselves Evolve (optimism is an admirable quality, no?), while the boys go for Endeavour. Naming yourself after a ship scuttled by its owners far from home has the kind of resonance you look for in a branding initiative, right?

Jaz – think Scary Spice as a primary school teacher – has instantly volunteered to lead the ‘girls’, while Jason – a plummy PhD student who seems to be channelling both Benedict Cumberbatch and Harry Potter – is apparently in charge of the boys. You could have fooled me – and Karren Brady too, it seems. Bringing welcome top notes of both insight and understatement to the programme, Karren describes the boys as ‘a very vocal group’. Albeit one bereft of harmonies and arrangement. And possibly song-sheets. At least when Jason says ‘I’ve never been down the docks before’ it has a ring of truth: given some of the outfits, it was wise of the girls not to make the same boast. I notice another strategic difference: Jaz patronises her team, while Jason’s team patronise him. But which approach will win? I dig the fork deeper into my thigh and watch on …

The task – flogging bog rolls, bottled water, Chinese ‘lucky’ waving cats, leather jackets, hi-vis jackets and cat litter – unfolds in the usual litany of ill-advised decision making, although a few more jokes write themselves as it does so. Alex (Wales answer to Liberace, Dracula or both) manages to pass all the water in one go, while the girls – claws sharpened for the outset and in many cases full of crap – are left with a lot of cat litter. Maybe they have forseen the episode ending with them left deep in the poo? A crueller man than me would say it’s gone to a good home. Miles, who lives in Monaco and at least looks old enough to know better, undermines his ability to sell all the tacky plastic waving cats to a casino by offering to not just buy but install batteries. (Even the casino owner seemed a little thrown by this, and only Max’s rather oily charm saved him from a monstering from his colleagues after they spent several hours ramming AAAs into unsuspecting felines.)

Surpassing her wisdom in arriving in Chinatown two hours before it opens to flog Chinese retailer Chinese goods at Western prices, Jaz asks for feedback on her performance as a PM. Mmmm. Uzma tells a cameraman she’s not fazed by not being in the limelight, and I can’t help but think that she may need to either flex her preferences or sharpen her nails before the next episode. Although for a woman whose PM is traipsing up and down Oxford Street trying to sell random tat to till-minders without purchasing authority, she does demonstrate a sense of restraint. Over at Endeavour meanwhile, Neil manages to be a whining, carping back seat driver regardless of whether his team are in a vehicle or not at the time. His relentless energy is outdone only by Tim, who’s bounce is as dayglo as the hi-vis jerkins he manages to unload, plainly eager for some visibility himself. He’s so sweet you fear for his personal safety.

Mostly, however, it’s the usual drivel. Zee straight-facedly tells someone that he is “going to take you through exactly what we’re going to do for you” despite there being ample evidence that his audience have actually bought cat litter in bulk before and may not have found it that difficult a process to follow. Rebecca, who resembles an escapee from a rather darker version of Mary Poppins, meanwhile shifts bubble wrap and bog rolls as if kittens might be murdered if her price isn’t accepted. And as time finally runs out, Neil continues to criticise his team leader for all to hear. Over and over and over …

Back in the boardroom, things remain predictable although we get the best ironic joke. After Karren criticises the boys for all speaking all the time, Alex fails to correctly name Neil, who has been a serial offender throughout. Naturally, even this fails to silence him. There’s never a pistol and silencer when you need one, is there? For the girls, everyone agrees Jaz’s instant self-promotion as PM was a brave, bold and bird-brained move and then the knives come out. Sadly, Lord Sugar was right and actions do speak louder than words. The girls lose by £58, and both PMs were outsold by their sub-teams.

The boys whoop back to the luxury house in Holborn (where they still seem to sleep in dormitories – does no-one count the contestants before they phone the estate agent?), where a Fortnum’s chef cooks them dinner. The girls are left with a night to stew over in The Café of Shame, nailing Jaz as all patronising motivational blather and no competence. (Actually, they have a point. It’s the delivery they might want to work on.)

Back in the boardroom, the girls demonstrate what they have learned from Nick Hewer: melodramatic pouting and wincing. The ensuing cat-fight reveals little that wasn’t already obvious, except perhaps a few temperaments. The ‘s’ word – strategy – rears it head as it always does at this stage: the missing rebuke in most episodes is to remind candidates that strategy is what you start with, not what you beat each other with at the end. Despite a stirling self-defence for a lack of sales (in that she provided the logistical co-ordination that got them to within £58 of the boys total), Uzma is dragged back into the boardroom along with Sophie, whose alarm at selling Chinese cats to Chinese people (being half-Chinese) had been first ignored and then steamrollered by Natalie stealing the sale from under her nose.

The panel agree that Uzma should not be facing them, as logistics is an important and neglected role. Sophie’s lack of sales and readiness to criticise but not to accept feedback mark her card, but there’s no saving Jaz. A candidate who cannot save themselves and remains largely oblivious to others will find few leaping to their defence, and the first departure is sealed.

Meanwhile I sink back into the sofa, reflecting that the candidates seem older but no wiser – not just compared with previous series but with the start of this episode. The strongest showing is probably Rebecca’s sales capability, although the frosty exterior isn’t endearing. Uzma was unfairly dragged into the final catfight after a valid contribution, but the lack of sales will probably count against her in the longer run. Among the boys, Tim is endearing, Kurt was seemingly missing in action and Neil needed gagging. Despite where some of them thought the sun was lodged, no-one really shone.

Performance of the episode: Karren Brady. The only one present to demonstrate either insight or dignity, I longed for her to tell the ‘girls’ that they were disgracing their gender. But then it’s early days for Series 9 – I dare say the moment will arrive.

What had fired them to repost it was a combination of a) a sense of ambiguity over appropriateness and b) the social conundrum of an organisation – when all is said and done, an abstract entity – tweeting an emotional response. I’m not going to play ‘name and shame’ – it’s not entirely clear to me that shame is a word to be used – but it was an interesting point: how can something that might be a legal entity but isn’t an organic, living and breathing one feel the sense of sympathy that someone within it has chosen to use a social medium to express?

The company in question has a very active online presence, which is carefully pitched to cool, youthful, hip and touchy-feely. We all understand that this is a branding thing, even if the collective appeal of seeing Instagram snaps of someone else’s cupcakes and macarons does tend to lose its flavour over time. (Are pictures of food this year’s ‘dancing about architecture’?) They use words like ‘interactive’, ‘experience’, ‘yummy’ and ‘love’ a lot. Oh, and ‘community’. They are plainly sociable, sharing people. That’s all fine – I’m not especially in the market for their services, but their branding is both zeitgeisty and product-appropriate. If I was in their demographic, I’d doff my beret to them. But …

… over on the other social media platform, people who read a lot of tweets, status updates and the like are also people whose lives are sufficiently saturated in digital communication strategies that the intentions of the tweeting organisation were not greeted – or interpreted – as appropriate. Their overwhelming consensus was, to quote Euan Semple’s book title, Organisations don’t tweet, people do. (Although he did tweet a link to a Mashable article, Boston Police Schooled Us All on Social Media that deserves a read.) But that consensus contained a rainbow of shades of response:

• Terrorism is undeniably awful, but I don’t need to hear a potential supplier’s thoughts on it (frankly, the automatic assumption is that everyone thinks it appalling: some things don’t need to be said)
• Emotional responses to major news events, particularly of this kind, are understandable and human, but why not tweet them from personal accounts? – ie accounts clearly identified as being that of a person, not a collective entity (although exceptions can of course be made for heads of state and of government agencies involved in the incident response)
• Unless your organisation is directly engaged in some way (eg the location of the event, the ‘industry’), are you drawing attention to the event or to the organisation – even unintentionally, the strong consensus was that this was (at best) inappropriate.

One poster was blunter, pointing out that they typically avoid social media for a couple of days after such events as “social media is filled with grief junkies”.

There is also the non-unrelated angle of ‘what is news?’ The event, tragic or otherwise, is; using social media to alert the public to dangers, crowd-source evidence and quell rumour and speculation is news-ish. Tweeting your personal anguish probably isn’t. And for some people, tweeting your corporate anguish borders on bad taste. (Of course you’re upset at some level: we have already assumed that you are not sociopathic.)

The divisions between appropriate/inappropriate and news/not news are not the only ones that can be detected here, but perhaps the most pressing one is not to be found in the tweeted words – or in their absence. They are to be found in the people creating them.

A colleague pointed me to a blog by Xerox Chief Marketing Officer, Christa Carone, on her own experience of using social media. Two quotes in particular stood out for me, both at which illuminate aspects of the difference between the ‘corporate voice’ and the personal, human one:

Our executive team is proud of the Xerox brand presence in the social space, but we have a team-oriented, humble culture. I didn’t want to be seen as a chest-thumping “celebrity” executive who uses social media as a megaphone and whose personal brand can outshine their professional one.”

Although this is separated by several paragraphs in her blog posting, I couldn’t help but notice a more direct connection with a subsequent section:

Following a speech I delivered at an event in Philadelphia, a woman approached me and said, “I never thought I’d see the old brand Xerox represented by a woman in an orange dress who tweets and talks like she’s my next door neighbor. I thought Xerox was stodgy; now I can tell you’re not.” I wasn’t sure at first but I decided to take it as a compliment. We can’t all have “geniuses” representing our brand like Apple does, but never underestimate how brands can be personified by the simplest virtual and face-to-face social communication.”

I read this as indicating that she has understood that social media is a conversation like any other, but which takes place over wires and wi-fi networks rather than over a garden fence, a coffee table or a few carpet tiles in an office corridor. These new conversations may connect smartphones, tablets and laptops but that’s not really the point – they connect people.

And like any conversation, it tends to be more fruitful when you’re mindful not just of who you’re having the conversation with but of who they are having the conversation with. I would hope that we all know from our social experiences that a conversation with somebody who is talking with you rather than at you is one you’re more likely to extent or repeat.

Social media may happen on screens, but that doesn’t mean it is a form of television: it’s an invitation to dialogue, not broadcasting. And dialogue is something that we wish to have with a human voice, rather than the carefully scripted voice of a corporate brand: that, of course, has its place, but it is not ubiquitous.

Way back in 1997, Gerry McGovern wrote an article about one-to-one marketing – One to Robot? – and about how most of it was really no such thing. As he pointed out then, relationship marketing that forgets that relationships are involved misses its own point, but he also included a sentence that I have remembered for 16 years that we might adopt as a useful filter before tweeting:

 Don’t send out a robot to do a human’s job.”

Let me start with an illustration. No need to be alarmed – it will be purely verbal – though it would be fascinating to know how many find the idea shocking. But the illustrative point: all the members of the Royal Family use toilets. Not earth-shattering news, is it? Just a recognition of adult normality. (I could have said other things that would be entirely normal too.)

My point? How well we are handling the impact of social media. It’s a point that Mervyn Dinnen touches on in a blog post, Social Media, Judging Others and The 5 Year Rule. Social media, as people have pointed out, redraw the line between public and private. Not all of the impacts of this are instant headlines grabbers. In one way, this social change is forcing us to abandon a pretence or two: online, we can see all too clearly that accountants have social lives, mathematicians occasionally dance on tables, that a large number of people – many of them with names or even faces – really do fancy George Clooney. In short, the people around us – in offices, on commuter trains, buttoned into their office-wear in the neighbouring car in the stationary traffic cue – are adults, just like we are, and that they are complex and fallible and messy just like we know that we are (but try to not show too much in our own Facebook timelines).

But will the types of netiquette faux pas that Mervyn writes about cease to be a talking point in five years time because it’s just not ‘news’ any more, or because those kind of stories have stopped happening? Will we adjust to our lives being potentially open to far more people than has previously been the norm, and if so by behaving ‘better’ or by averting our eyes to different things? Will aspects of human behaviour we’ve tended to indulge in but keep quiet stop carrying their current social taboos? Or will we negotiate some medium path, where we arrive at new norms: some behaviours become public, some become almost more private than before. (Pause for thought: watching, monitoring and judging the escapades of others are also human behaviours. And often as habitual as the behaviours they are observing.)

We can’t tell how all this will play out, of course, as we are living at the beginning of this particular social experiment. But we can tell that things are changing. It is not just our individual lives that are taking on new shapes across this shifting private/public divide: our relationships and interactions are increasingly public too. (A point that Evgeny Morozov has commented on to telling – and sometimes chilling – effect.) What does it say about us as a species that this new found ability to track and remotely outline the shapes of lives is a daydream come true for occupations as seemingly disparate as advertising and covert surveillance that now seem somewhat closer in spirit? In space no-one can sell you ice-cream; in cyberspace, the advert for your favourite flavour, with a special deal on delivery, can appear automatically as you browse for CDs or a new step-ladder. It’s ok not to feel paranoid, but please accept that in some very real sense you are being followed and monitored. Wriggle out of being monitored too rigorously, and you may even arouse a different suspicion:

There is another angle on social media that deserves flagging: its increasing ubiquity creates a different type of new ‘norm’. Not being on Facebook, for example, will increasingly say something about you that it did not a few years ago. Like not having a television, not participating will become a statement rather than a simple choice. Your lack of public profile, no matter how squeaky clean, will say something about you. While it might simply say that you are either rather dull or particularly private, human nature is more likely to interpret it as ‘they have something to hide’. Stay firmly offline and you may well be assumed to be trying to remain under the radar for some reason: the assumption may well be that the reason is a dark one.

The Daily Mail – which some social media users have been forward enough to suggest is a veritable font of modern paranoias – published an article last year with the telling title: Is not joining Facebook a sign you’re a psychopath? Some employers and psychologists say staying away from social media is ‘suspicious’. To make sure the point wasn’t missed, they illustrated their argument with references to high-profile mass killers:

Psychologist Christopher Moeller told the magazine that using Facebook has become a sign of having a healthy social network.

Psychologists have noted that Holmes, along with several noted mass murderers, have lacked any real friends.

And this is what the argument boils down to: It’s the suspicion that not being on Facebook, which has become so normal among young adults, is a sign that you’re abnormal and dysfunctional, or even dangerous, ways.”

(Anyone now firmly believing that I have parted company with the plot should note that Forbes.com published similar remarks.)

Our lives are also increasingly not only leaking into the online world, but staying there as a matter of record. A verbal aside that, in context, was perhaps amusing but undeniably going a little too far will in most cases be forgotten within weeks, let alone years. (Few of us are really witty enough to be recounted by others verbatim months after the utterance left our lips.) But online is different: those 140 characters are out there, and out there they are likely to stay. (Am I the only one who has noticed a recent flurry of articles and services aimed at helping us purge our online personas?) Not only are we no longer truly private at least some of the time, but we are increasingly ‘for the record’ rather than ephemeral. As Mervyn points out:

Right now the next generation of public servants, low skilled service workers, MPs, doctors, journalists and bankers are saying what they damn well like on social media platforms. They’re dating on them, partying and sexting on them, and making people laugh on them.”

How we respond over time to this new scenario will be fascinating to watch, but I think we do need to accept that no amount of controls, filters, monitoring or the like are likely to turn back the tide. We can’t unrub the lamp and get the genie back in the bottle.

On one hand, we have the swivel-chair revolutionaries, urging us to man the digital barricades and overthrow the existing social order. Euan Semple’s recent email newsletter pointed me to Conversationblog, where Philippe Borremans was writing about those who are emotionally invested in tools that would ‘drastically impact traditional power structures in companies’. There are appeals to the anarchist spirit (use of bold from the original article):

That conviction was even strengthened at the time (we’re talking early 2003) because some people called me (and others like me) “Corporate Anarchists”. And I remember we took this as a compliment…

Immanuel Kant describes anarchy as “Law and Freedom without Force” – this idea combined with one school of thought of anarchism – where the focus is on non-hierarchical organizations – was to me a kind of ultimate long term result.

But today I see more and more “social business” projects that tend to have “better control” as an objective. Some of these project are just about adding a social layer to already flawed business processes and models.”

I was left remembering three quotes – all, of course, available via the Internet (even the thoughts of the dead now live on around us). Consider, for example, Ammon Hennacy’s definition:

An anarchist is someone who doesn’t need a cop to make him behave.”

A neat phrase, although it leaves what constitutes ‘behaving’ and who judges it as unresolved questions. By that definition, my father was also an anarchist: I’m glad he’s not here to break the news too – the shock might kill him afresh. A second quote, more applicable to Borremans’ argument, comes from American environmentalist Edward Abbey:

Anarchism is founded on the observation that since few men are wise enough to rule themselves, even fewer are wise enough to rule others.

Which still leaves the matter of who the few are, and whether wisdom will henceforth be seen as qualification or disqualification (Borremans argues the latter, but doesn’t seem to acknowledge that replacing one judgemental group with another is a coup d’etat rather than anarchism.)

Perhaps more appropriate is a Time Out review of a current Paris exhition about Guy Debord, one of the central figures of the ‘events’ of May 1968 in Paris. In the interim, Debord has shuffled off: society, meanwhile, has simply moved on. As the reviewer comments:

“[…] the whole evokes our contemporary anti-publicity graffiti in the corridors of the Métro, alternative flyers, parodic blogs and savage Twitter campaigns. This is where Debord appears to us now: in that which defines the anarchic creativity our own era, where fine art has disappeared but everyone is free to invest in the ruins.”

Borremans’ point that some companies particular embracings of social media are effectively a case of sticking a social media wrapper around old practices (rather than opening up the organisation) is undeniably true, but I suspect that time rather than surgery will be the healer of what he sees as some kind of disease or cancer.

Sharlyn Lauby (HR Bartender) commented recently about HR’s desire to join the top table – ie that the chair and the table will have ‘moved on by the time’ they get there, and they need to remember that – so we might perhaps think of companies (and particularly their HR departments) and social media in a similar way. In 10 years time, the people in HR who formulate practise on policy, on monitoring of applicants and so on will be the people who are currently at University, posting society-inappropriate but age-understandable Instagram pictures of themselves with a number of close friends, a crate of alcohol and a fluffy toy.

I commented before on how striking a name for a body ‘Business in the Community’ is, but I’ll repeat my point: “well, of course, wherever else could it happen?”. Social media have already started to change our use of language and our social behaviour; unless businesses divorce themselves entirely from the rest of human society, they will be changed and influenced by these developments – as will the people that compromise them. They will probably have learned either from example or experience that the freedom to blog, tweet, post statuses and tag things merrily comes with the same baggage as any other freedom – responsibilities – but they may also have taken an adult, mature moment to reflect on the sentiments of an old Cole Porter lyric.

Times have changed
And we’ve often rewound the clock
Since the Puritans got a shock
When they landed on Plymouth Rock.
If today
Any shock they should try to stem
‘Stead of landing on Plymouth Rock,
Plymouth Rock would land on them.”

As part of the first issue, we’re delighted to host a Q&A session with Sharlyn Lauby, author and editor of the HR Bartender blog.

In her own words, “an HR pro turned consultant”, Sharlyn created the blog so that “people would have a friendly place to discuss workplace issues”. We’re privileged to have the opportunity to pull up a bar-stool and seek the HR Bartender’s counsel.

Q1 In your recent blog posting, Knowing When To Retire a Theory, you talk about the need to remain open to updating or replacing conventional wisdom. How open do you think most organisations are to this issue, and how might more of them be helped to become so?

I believe organizations are very open to it. Over the past few years, companies have been forced to re-evaluate their status quo whether it was driven by the global economy or business competition. But this can’t be a forced activity. Questioning conventional wisdom needs to be a business standard. And people who can raise the question in a thoughtful way will be very valuable. Challenging the status quo cannot mean turning the building upside down every time.

It really comes down to permitting a culture where the conversation will be embraced. And giving individuals the tools to have the conversation in a productive way. I think companies are open to it. I don’t necessarily think that companies are open to the destruction that can occur at the same time.

Q2 A related point on conventional wisdom, but I’m thinking of your 2010 post Thinking Both/And. While it was written in a technological context, to me it has broader application in encouraging people to see beyond ideas being mutually exclusive. What other tropes or ideas or mantras do you think we might adopt to help us think both more freshly and more widely about work and organisations?

Yes, brilliant. The thinking both/and applies to so much more than technology. A big discussion happening in the U.S. right now is on the subject of flexible work schedules. Definitely a both/and discussion: achieving both our personal and professional goals, having balance between our work and home life. I don’t know that we’ve figured out all the answers but it’s clear employees want to have both a career and a life.

Q3 In the UK, there have been some heated online debates around the general theme of “HR: Friend or Foe?” in terms of the function’s relationship to employees. What’s your take on this, and on changes that HR might want or need to make?

HR walks a fine line. On one hand, they’re a member of the management team and need to be an active participant. They also need to provide information, advice, guidance, and services to employees.

For years, people have been talking about HR getting the proverbial “seat at the table” or being a “strategic business partner”. My concern is do we really know what that looks like? When the business world is moving quickly, everyone in the C-Suite is being asked to adapt. Including HR. If HR doesn’t have a seat at the table now, when they get one…what kind of seat will it be? The one they need today or the old one from 5 years ago.

Q4 When it comes to talent retention, we’ve always been aware of a mismatch between the expectations and hopes of employees and organisations’ assumptions as to what these might be. While listening – and asking the right questions – is one way to improve this situation, what changes do you see in the future? Our experience of work, issues of work-life balance, job security and so on all effect our lives, but how might they impact on employee-employer relationships?

I believe the notion of “work is work, home is home and the two shall never meet” is gone. Employees are willing to work hard and do a great job but they want to know when they have a personal issue the company will say “take care of it, we’ll cover for you”. It’s about building a relationship of trust and mutual respect.

Q5 Given that the job for life is now a museum piece and economic growth remains patchy (especially in Europe), is retention a lost cause? If recruitment is a buyer’s market, shouldn’t we expect employees to be more interested in selling themselves? What is the best organisational response – does the answer lie in talent strategy or in ‘softer’ culture aspects that promote a sense of belonging?

Organizations need to realize that at some point, employee retention turns into customer retention. It’s a business issue. For example, I used to work in a hotel. If I resign my position, the hotel still wants me to be a customer. They still want me to tell all my friends it’s a great hotel chain. If I leave on good terms, chances are I will remain a brand ambassador. If I don’t…well, people can figure it out.

Employees know this. They want to work for a company brand that they believe in. It doesn’t matter how long the employee works at the company. Because the connection lasts much longer than that.

Q6 You recently wrote an interesting piece, Unhappy Employees Are Not Disengaged Employees, which accepts that employees are human and therefore occasionally – and understandably – unhappy. I can see an even stronger argument: that you have to be engaged to some degree to care enough about the impact of something that you become unhappy as a result. The disengaged would, presumably, simply remain indifferent. Do we need to rethink ‘emotional intelligence’ to embrace this acceptance that unhappiness is natural? That EI doesn’t mean ‘grin and bear it’, but something more like ‘bare it and work towards grinning’?

I agree that unhappiness can be the result of being overly invested in a project or the company. It’s tough – we want employees to be invested. But then how do we stop it from becoming too much?

I’ve never really felt that emotional intelligence is a “grin and bear it” concept. But I can see how some might feel a way to express empathy is by saying “I understand your point. But we just have to grin and bear it.” That’s not really empathy either…but some people don’t know what else to say. I’m always amazed at the number of people who just don’t know what empathy is.

That’s where emotional intelligence can be redefined. We need to offer ways to connect when there might not be immediate common ground.

Q7 In the UK, People Management recently published a survey showing that HR professionals conclude that people lie to them on a regular basis (while, of course, being scrupulously honest themselves). While this obviously tells us something about how people respond to surveys, what would be your advice to an HR function as to how to encourage a culture and atmosphere in which honesty is not only more widespread, but a more attractive option to those engaging with them?

This definitely relates back to the first question. Organizations need to do a better job of teaching feedback. “No news is good news” is not a management philosophy. If we provide feedback on a regular basis. Good, specific feedback – not this “good job” stuff. Then it will permeate the culture. And I believe people will feel more comfortable about giving constructive feedback.

But if the only time people get feedback is when HR mandates it or when it’s negative, then employees will view it as punishment. It encourages the lie.

Q8 And finally … every bartender, HR or otherwise, deserves a little reward once in a while. If we granted you a magic lamp to rub, what would be your three wishes? Three things we could all try doing in our working lives that might make a positive difference for all of us?

1. Do what you say you’re going to do. If you can’t, renegotiate the commitment. – I can’t tell you how many people ruin their credibility because they agree to do something and then disappoint. We all know that perception is reality. What perception are you putting out there?
2. Find a way to say “no” that you’re comfortable with. – So many people are stressed out because they feel compelled to say “yes” when they should really say “no”.
3. Celebrate your successes. – I’m thrilled when I finish something on my “to-do” list. Set small goals and make them happen. Small goals = big accomplishments!

We’ll be posting ‘answers’ to other questions raised on the day shortly – follow us on Twitter for announcements, or subscribe to our blog to be notified of new posts by email. (And if you’d like to be notified of future events, please contact us.)

Q Boardroom scandals, backlash against large profit, high uni debts, how do we make business attractive to talent again?

A Individual responses may be influenced either by headlines – which set a mood – or by the detail press and media coverage – which may be more informative. While the unearthing of a seemingly endless stream of wrong-doing or amoral behaviour creates headlines that speak of decadence and gloom, it is easy to forget that the headlines are being generated as these issues are being highlighted – and, in many cases, tackled – rather than ignored. The first imperative for business is to be seen not just to house all the chickens that are coming back to roost, but to tackle the issues that have flown in with them.

Regardless of the socio-economic climate, any business needs to be keenly aware of the factors that attract and motivate – or repel – the talents they wish to both acquire and retain. The key skills here are to ask the right questions and to actively listen to the answers that they receive: many organisations’ assumptions about the factors that motivate and retain employees are only loose matches to their employees’ responses.

Effective talent strategies do not operate in a void – the climate of the times will always influence human behaviour and outlooks – but a clear set of values and a visible and defined working culture will help potential candidates to more accurately assess potential employers and encourage a better ‘initial fit’ during selection processes. But organisations must also authentically live this culture and demonstrate these values to ensure talents are retained. An engaged and committed employee may be motivated to stay with an employer they trust and value when their general view of business is more jaundiced, but allowing employees to too readily become sceptical about the organisation will tend to have a less happy outcome.

What approaches have you taken to ensure that your organisation remains attractive to talent?

Q How to build a coaching culture – top 5 tips

A Coaching is seen as an essential tool for driving organisational performance. In 2011, the Institute of Leadership and Management (ILM) found that 80% of organisations they surveyed had used or were using coaching, with a further 9% likely to use coaching in the next three years. Those surveyed believed that seismic shifts in their organisations’ performance would be possible if coaching were to be ingrained in their culture.

We believe that creating a coaching culture requires a new approach to change. What are our top 5 tips?

1. Link the development of a coaching culture to your core business strategy
2. “Seed” your organisation with leaders and managers who can role-model coaching approaches
3. Develop a selected community of appropriate external coaches and build an internal coaching capability
4. Coach senior leadership teams in creating culture change
5. Build coaching into all HR processes and metrics, including performance measurement.

Organisations wishing to create a coaching culture should ensure that coaching is supported at the very top of an organisation but not limited only to senior executives or those in a talent pool. Investing in coaching for the sake of it will never create a coaching culture unless it’s clearly linked to the business strategy and there are regular reviews of where the organisation is on the coaching culture journey.

What other tips do you have?

Q What criteria defines talent in an organisation?

A Talent is an abstract concept. A good starting point may be that all people in an organisation are talented: some at what they do now, some at a future point of potential. In order to attract, identify, develop, deploy and retain key individuals, you need to define what you mean by talent in line with your organisation’s strategy. What does the future of the business look like? And what are the required capabilities of the key people you need to deliver the business’s strategy? And by key people, who do you mean? Only Senior Executives or people at all levels? Or perhaps only those in specific ‘mission critical’ roles?

Ask yourself the question: “What diverse skills, knowledge, experience and attitudes are required for our organisation to deliver its strategy in (say) 3 years’ time?

Your organisation’s answer will be specific to its context and its vision of its own future: a generic answer isn’t likely to produce the best strategy. While there are many well-known indicators of potential – for example, attitude, values, breadth and depth of experience, behaviour, learning agility, emotional intelligence and resilience – your answer needs to be precise and specific rather than abstract and universal. Engage employees and key stakeholder to define what ‘talent’ means for your organisation (and there may be multiple answers) and be clear on this before designing any identification tools or processes.

How is ‘talent’ defined in your organisation and why?

Here’s a bit of fun: which of the following are US presidential campaign slogans and which are songs by Bon Jovi? Something to Believe in. Believe in America. Made in America. Another Reason to Believe. A Stronger America. Forward. Undivided. The Distance. Change. Taking it Back. Bring it On. We Can Do Better. Yes We Can. Because We Can. What About Now.”

(In case you’re wondering, songs/slogans 1,3, 4, 7, 8, 12 and 13 were Bon Jovi; 2 was Mitt Romney; 5 and 11 were John Kerry; 6, 9 and 13 were Barack Obama; and 12 was JF Kennedy. Perhaps Kerry and Obama have missed vocations as stadium rockers?)

Ms Mossman’s point was that ‘stadium rock employs the same nebulous, inspirational vocab as politics’, although she might well have substituted other nouns for ‘politics’. But my reaction was not, like her, to give recognition to Bon Jovi for ‘infusing John Doe with inspirational sentiment’ but to reflect more on that nagging similarity of vocabulary. And on the way that so many popular songs that, lyrically, expressed one sentiment have been appropriated by causes with different agendas. Although she mentions Bruce Springsteen’s Born in the USA (a war veteran’s angry rant) being hijacked by Reagan for its air-punching chorus, the phenomenon is not uniquely American. As a BBC news item shows, popular songs have been hijacked – almost invariably without consent – in many countries.

So what, you might ask? Surely once a song – or any other creative endeavour – is in the public domain, interpretation is in the ear of the beholder? Well, as a sometime performer, it’s relatively easy to have some sympathy with the original creators: although some have confined their distaste to public statements or pointed tweets (and the running exchange between The Smiths and David Cameron is acquiring shades of farce), a number have actually taken legal action.

(And if you’re interested in morals, it’s fascinating to notice just how few of the political campaigns in question actually bothered to seek permissions before airing what someone presumably identified as whatever words a spin doctor might use to describe ‘a banging anthem’. Businesses seem a little more ethical: indeed, I remember an amusing afternoon with Coca-Cola’s Head of IPR after she had spent the morning participating in legal action against the group Oasis for stealing the tune of an advert. Some anecdotes, like the most compelling melodic fragments, are best not repeated.)

Actually, I’m probably more concerned for the audience. The unexpected wise man in this whole arena may well turn out to have been Noel Coward, who gave one of the characters in his play Private Lives a telling line:

Amanda: Extraordinary how potent cheap music is.”

Indeed, his first play, Hayfever, contained an exchange that may give a fuller explanation of campaign managers’ behaviour down the years:

Judith: “Are you susceptible to music?”

Richard: “I’m afraid I don’t know very much about it.”

Judith: “You probably are, then.”

The implication that audiences – or at least part of them – are swayed more by nebulous emotion than by actual content is depressing for a creative type, of course, but shouldn’t it be more distressing for a larger percentage of us? It’s easy enough to understand: popular music has a similar appeal to story-telling – indeed, much of it is story-telling with the added firepower of ‘a banging tune’. Hence, of course, the licensing of music for advertising. It appeals to the part of us that is happy to jump up and down on the sofa shouting along without paying too much attention to what we’re actually shouting.

For communicators and orators – be they politicians or CEOs – this must, however, be something of a cleft stick. The finest communication does not convey merely simple emotions or nebulous sentiment: it’s also actually about something. (Otherwise, why communicate?) Faced with the task of inspiring others, how often do they remind themselves that the phrase ‘inspiring others’ is, in itself, incomplete. I’m not seeking to decry Bon Jovi’s talents – record sales of that magnitude have an irrefutable logic of their own – but their most immediate talent is to rouse others. To fill an empty sports stadium with a joyous racket that ‘inspires’ people to wave lighters and iPhones in the air and to sing nebulous aspirations lustily at no-one in particular.

There’s one difference between Bon Jovi and the roles of politicians or other senior leaders that an album review can’t hope to address: I may financially support entertainers, but their responsibility ends when I file back to the car park or I put the CD back in the rack. They are not charged with shaping the society I live in, the organisation I work for, or the role I perform. If it’s all a little vague, then the fact that they ultimately inspire little beyond a film of perspiration and a briefly lingering sense of uplift of ‘feelgood factor’, means they have fulfilled their requirement.

The orators in our lives who do govern more of its shape, however, need to do more than simply ‘inspire us’. The words ‘to do’ – followed by something specific – belong at the end of their sentence. As Born in the USA’s songwriter, Bruce Springsteen, might wish to remind them, they need to pay as much attention to the lyrics of the verses as they do to the chord changes and accessibility of the refrain. And they need to persuade us to do so too.

It is, as you can see, easy to be cynical. The biggest surprise in the article’s quoted figures for me was that the peak age for lying is 25-39. As Samuel Butler once quipped, “I do not mind lying, but I hate inaccuracy.” I would have thought that the ability of familiarity to breed contempt might have made some of our more experienced workers more tempted to just … you know, bend the truth a little.

Indeed, my biggest reaction to the article was – perhaps sadly, but then I’m not as young as I once was – cynicism. Not least as the self-serving nature of commissioned surveys that lead to paragraphs such as:

[…] HR professionals believed themselves to be the most honest, with 41 per cent claiming they told no lies at all and 49.9 per cent reporting they only told between one and four lies a week.

And, as Butler also quipped:

Lying has a kind of respect and reverence with it. We pay a person the compliment of acknowledging his superiority whenever we lie to him.”

Like any kind of behaviour, inside the office or out, lying is an aspect of culture and values. And like so much of culture and values, we tend to take cues from our environment. It doesn’t take long with Google – certainly not long enough to count as dedicatedly subversive to unearth articles like 39 More Secrets Your HR Person Won’t Tell You, What Your HR Person Won’t Tell You About Being Fired, What HR People Won’t Tell You About the Job Interview, What HR People Won’t Tell You About Salaries and Raises rebellion, the Readers Digest. As one anonymous HR professional in one of these articles said themself, “Seriously, people. There’s an Internet. Look it up.”

We can try to imagine a world in which everyone tells the unvarnished and complete truth the whole time. Actually, we don’t need to make the effort. A 2009 film, The Invention of Lying, posited just such a world. It wasn’t perhaps the world’s greatest film (honestly, I’m summarising the general critical reception, as Rotten Tomatoes will confirm), but it did make a few important points along the way. As one reviewer, Roger Ebert, commented:

Mark lives in a typical little city with bland people and no anger. Everyone always believes everyone else. I wonder if politics are even possible. We see this isn’t an ideal situation. There are no consolations. Nothing eases the way.”

If the film partly argues that deceit is a fundamental component of hope, it isn’t the first explanation of a recurrent human tendency. Many decades earlier, the Chinese writer Lin Yutang made a similar comment on the role that being less than scrupulously honest plays in our interactions:

Society can exist only on the basis that there is some amount of polished lying and that no one says exactly what he thinks.”

Other minds that have received more than the typical share of public praise have commented too. Susan Sontag, for example, once offered a definition: “Lying is the most simple form of self-defence.”

While People Management sees HR Professionals being happy to point the finger, wouldn’t a more enquiring mind want to understand more about cause and effect? Consider the following quote from a Susan Heathfield article, where she quotes from a reader’s comment on an earlier blog posting:

HR staff feel the need to put a ‘friendly face’ on all interactions, empathizing and finding common ground with employee concerns. However, they do not work with other employees on a regular basis, so they’re empathetic strangers. It rings false, and no bond can be established on this basis.”

The most interesting element of the People Management article to me is the contribution of Cass Business School’s Professor Roger Steare, who divides ‘lies’ into two categories. Not black and white, as you might expect, but lies for personal gain and the lies we tell “to maintain co-operative relationships”. (In a comment we hope was fed back to the survey’s respondents he also points out that “Anyone who says they never lie is deluded.” Presumably we can argue about the exact definition …)

In a corporate culture in which lying is apparently becoming more prevalent, the lies for personal gain remain as irredeemably black as ever. But the second category – the lies we tell to rub along – might respond to what we might think of as a little ethical bleaching. If the culture and peaceful internal existence of an organisation depends on a moderately high level of mistruths to ‘maintain co-operative relationships’ then the culture needs to be reviewed. If people are lying in self-defence, or because a less polished version of ‘the truth’ would be socially unacceptable, the culture – and the organisation – are in trouble.

The question to ask faced with that kind of lying is not ‘What are they lying about?’. It’s ‘Why do they feel the need to do it?’. The truth – as, of all people, Ricky Gervais warned us about on a movie screen a few years ago – might not be entirely comfortable.