Interviewed on the NZI Business morning TV programme on Monday, I was asked for my views about how business people can cope with the downturn in the New Zealand economy.  Putting recessions into context, the economy is by nature cyclic: after periods of growth, there is a necessary correction.  Knowing this in theory doesn’t lessen the impact of suddenly having fewer orders, having to make people redundant, perhaps even having to wind up the business, and what makes the current global change especially demanding is that it is happening very rapidly indeed.  In the space of a week during a recent visit to the UK, we saw several thousand jobs go in the construction industry alone. 

A page in the Business section of recent edition of the Press made interesting reading.  The lead article was a report on the implications of the new Flexible Work Arrangements Act, which will allow those employees who care for others the legal right to flexible working arrangements.  The business community – or part of it at any rate – is predictably upset by the new Act, arguing that it will make unacceptable demands on small- to medium-sized enterprises (SMEs).  The feedback to Claire Massey of the NZCentre for SME Research is that these employers resent being dictated to, and that their view is ‘Come on, give us a break, we have more common sense than that’ – in other words, you don’t need to legislate, we look after our staff already.

The Challenge of Change offers a unique perspective on resilience training: that resilience is not about keeping your head above water for longer, which would still mean paddling furiously to keep afloat.  Instead, it says that there is no water to keep your head above, other than imagined ‘what-ifs’ and ‘if-onlys’, which the programme describes as ruminating about the worst things in your life that never happened.

What is a team? The usual response runs along the lines of a group of people who work together for a common goal, but teams are often far more nebulous and subtle than this simple definition would suggest.

In a quote variously attributed to Mark Twain or Benjamin Disraeli, lies are described as lies, damn lies and statistics.  In fact, statistics are just numerical ways of expressing things and have no particular valence, but they can certainly be used to mislead people, and when they’re presented without clarification they can easily be misunderstood.