Welcome to this year’s rant at the worst of email marketing.  It will probably be my last on this subject.  At 7000 words, it is by far the longest blog I have written.  Why?  Because I want to illustrate the wide range and number of issues, all of which need to be addressed well... Read More

Hunt’s medical qualifications Our sparkling current health secretary, Jeremy Hunt, appears to have no education in health or medicine:  he studied politics, philosophy and economics at Oxford. After university Hunt worked for two years as a management consultant at OC&C... Read More

In a move which can only be described as either hilarious or jaw-droppingly insincere, talented health secretary, Jeremy Hunt has launched an urgent inquiry into the level of junior doctors’ morale and welfare as large numbers threaten to quit the profession over being forced to... Read More

In my line of business, I often have to help people understand why they do things in preparation for working out what they could do better. Invaluable in this process is the purpose and outcomes model.  This essentially says there is a difference between your purpose in doing... Read More

As has been widely reported [*1], Tesco was done last week for contravening the UK “groceries code”.  Widespread evidence of “payments delayed to disguise missed targets, and suppliers left waiting for million-pound payments for up to two years. Sometimes there were arbitrary or... Read More

These gems are based on a lifetime’s experience of call centres.  In recent experience, Waitrose, Sainsbury’s, Vodafone, Carphone Warehouse, Samsung and the RAC have all inspired me to put fingers to keyboard. 1        Always remember that the purpose of your call centre is... Read More

In his excellent book, The corporation, Joel Bakan writes, As a psychopathic creature, the corporation can neither recognize nor act upon moral reasons to refrain from harming others. This is a case study.  Unlike my blog on Talk talk, I have had to rely on media reports as I... Read More

The UK parliamentary and health service ombudsman, Dame Julie Mellor, has published her ‘review into the quality of NHS complaints investigations where serious or avoidable harm has been alleged’ [Guardian articles on this:  here, december 2015, and here, february 2015]. The... Read More

I had the pleasure of attending one of the government’s speed awareness courses recently in Gloucestershire. I think the course was based on a false premise.  That premise is that speed kills. But speed is a mathematical concept, the ratio of distance moved by an object and the... Read More

At my request, I was called the other day by someone (“Laura”) from the Talktalk chief executive’s office.  I had complained that, through apparent negligence, Talktalk had allowed my personal financial information to be hacked by criminals not once, but three times in the past... Read More