I met a prince yesterday. Not a royal one as it happens - more self-made. Geoff Prince is his name although it is his will to work rather than his surname that marks him out. 'Will to Work' is the charitable trust that Geoff has built which offers anybody in his town the opportunity to do an afternoon of carpentry, painting, sewing, fiddling with electrics or even just pottering about making tea in his community workshop - on one condition - you need to be 'feeling a bit poorly' as Geoff puts it.
His business model (not a term that Geoff bothers with much) is based on the fact that every day somebody clears out an old draw, cupboard or garage full of useful tools and materials that somebody else no longer needs. Will to Work accepts these items as donations and puts them back to work in Geoff's workshop housed in an old school building right alongside the town's health centre - with its handy rows of disabled parking spaces. Sensible doctors have begun to prescribe an afternoon's occupational therapy for many of their patients with a range of conditions which might be making them 'feel a bit poorly'. And from there good-hearted volunteers, donations, referrals, grants, goodwill and word of mouth does the rest. Oh, and endless shifts of time and love and tea put in by Geoff, his wife and their small core team.
Now I have designed and led and run hundreds of workshops myself. Most of them end up looking like an explosion in a Post-It factory with scribbled flip charts scattered everywhere and a tired facilitator gathering up evaluation forms - or 'happy sheets' as they are known in my trade. The Will to Work workshop doesn't do happy sheets - it just does happiness instead. And proves that every man can be a prince.
Friday, 4 July 2014
Tuesday, 14 May 2013
Dilbert
Dilbert announces to his boss that he has looked at every available book on leadership.
'What´s the secret?`
`Apparently leadership is the product of extreme sociopathy plus luck - all the other personality traits are inactive ingredients.` His boss looks both thoughtful and wary.
`Did you actually read all those books?` asks a colleague later.
`No,`says Dilbert, `I just needed to check that they were all different...`
Something in this exchange resonates. Have a good day.
'What´s the secret?`
`Apparently leadership is the product of extreme sociopathy plus luck - all the other personality traits are inactive ingredients.` His boss looks both thoughtful and wary.
`Did you actually read all those books?` asks a colleague later.
`No,`says Dilbert, `I just needed to check that they were all different...`
Something in this exchange resonates. Have a good day.
Wednesday, 26 December 2012
The tough questions...?
I had a call from a client the other day - a senior executive in a global business. She wanted help in preparing a series of year end feedback interviews that she had scheduled with the team of six people reporting in to her. After some discussion about the purpose of the team and its work, we came up with this list:
- What's the one thing I do that adds real value for you?
- What's the one thing I do that really annoys you?
- Does anything I do waste your time?
- What else could I do differently to help you become more effective?
- What's the toughest question I could ask you?
Saturday, 1 December 2012
Taking a bath
If there was one thing I had to do while in Turkey, it was to take a bath. I was raised under a 'cleanliness is next to godliness' regime and in the ablutionary world there is no higher state of absolution than the full Turkish experience.
Just alongside an entrance to the Grand Bazaar on my way towards the Blue Mosque, I spied a sign engraved in marble, 'Enter Istanbul's Oldest Hamam, 1584'. It sounded like an imperial proclamation that was impossible to ignore, let alone refuse.
The receptionist was dressed in a tightly fitting, shiny olive coloured suit complete with waistcoat and fob chain. His front of house manner was such that he could just as easily have been running a pre-war provincial cinema or a betting shop close to a major racecourse. He explained the tariff structure to me in careful, practised English. I opted for the DIY wash out of a slight cautiousness. With a snap of his fingers he summoned one of his underlings to escort me to a first floor locker room up a twisted flight of wooden steps. 'Undress,' was the curt, unambiguous command from the disappearing minion.
I looked around guardedly. On the bench in my private, caged locker room was small gingham tea towel presumably designed to afford me some modesty in my journey towards the steam, heat and thudding sounds that emanated from the floor above me. I stripped off, slipped on a pair of blue plastic bath thongs and tried with limited success to use the tea towel for its fit and proper purpose.
I stepped out of my locker cage and turned to head upstairs. A large hand clamped itself on my shoulder and propelled me slightly faster in the direction I was already going. My borrowed thongs slid unsteadily across the uneven dark grey marble slabs underfoot. I was ushered into the magnificent central arched vault of the hamam still driven firmly from behind by my attendant. 'DIY,' he spat out the term like a curse. Then all of a sudden I was alone in an echoing chamber of smoke.
Looking up I could see the sunlight streaming in through half the tiny windows circling the inner rim of the dome. The central section of the dome itself had been punctured like a pepper pot with more vents creating brilliant shafts angling through the steam. Rising a foot above the floor of the bath vault was the huge circular 'belly stone' platform in a lighter shade of grey marble. I went to sit on its nearest edge and immediately leapt up scalded. From one of the private alcove wash stations set around the outer circumference of the room, I heard a throaty chuckle. As I became accustomed to the steamy haze, I realised that I was in fact not alone at all and that several fellow bathers were attending to their rituals sluicing themselves down using the fawcets set above marble basins in each of the surrounding alcoves.
One of these fellows emerged carrying a shallow metal tin plate full of water and splashed it hissing over the belly stone before flipping his tin over and settling it as a pillow under his head as he stretched out on the gleaming slab like a cat rolling on its back in the sun. I made my way to an alcove to begin some private and tentative ablutionary experiments of my own. My small roughly chopped cake of soap smelt of freshly cut lemons.
Step by step I began to get the hang of the DIY version of the splash, soap, lather and scrub routine that I saw being carried out by attendants on the more adventurous or accustomed bathers. My tea towel soon became a sodden scrap but still useful for insulating my buttocks from the sharp marble sting of the furniture. Slowly everything softened, relaxed, sweated and plumped up like a prune in hot water. It was easy to imagine the grittiness and stress of days of travelling washing away down the elaborate system of drains and gunnels criss-crossing the floor.
Super-saturated I dragged myself away from the quiet hiss and splash of the bath house and back in the direction from which I remembered entering. Not so fast. I was immediately apprehended by an attendant who looked as if he might well have done much of his earliest and best work in a high security penal establishment. Certainly his service philosophy seemed more shaped by Midnight Express than the Orient Express. This heavily moustachioed officer unceremoniously re-directed me towards the shower area, slapped open a tap and shoved me under the cold jet that emerged directly from a gouge in the tiles at head height. Gasping and clutching for my towel, I spluttered my thanks and stumbled towards the stair well.
As I approached the sanctuary of my locker, an unseen hand thrust a fresh white towel in front of me. It was soft, sweetly scented with lavender and with a deep, thickly luxurious pile that scoured my back and shoulders with the gentlest of rough caresses. I got dressed in a dream and headed out, cleansed, to face the purity of the Blue Mosque.
Just alongside an entrance to the Grand Bazaar on my way towards the Blue Mosque, I spied a sign engraved in marble, 'Enter Istanbul's Oldest Hamam, 1584'. It sounded like an imperial proclamation that was impossible to ignore, let alone refuse.
The receptionist was dressed in a tightly fitting, shiny olive coloured suit complete with waistcoat and fob chain. His front of house manner was such that he could just as easily have been running a pre-war provincial cinema or a betting shop close to a major racecourse. He explained the tariff structure to me in careful, practised English. I opted for the DIY wash out of a slight cautiousness. With a snap of his fingers he summoned one of his underlings to escort me to a first floor locker room up a twisted flight of wooden steps. 'Undress,' was the curt, unambiguous command from the disappearing minion.
I looked around guardedly. On the bench in my private, caged locker room was small gingham tea towel presumably designed to afford me some modesty in my journey towards the steam, heat and thudding sounds that emanated from the floor above me. I stripped off, slipped on a pair of blue plastic bath thongs and tried with limited success to use the tea towel for its fit and proper purpose.
I stepped out of my locker cage and turned to head upstairs. A large hand clamped itself on my shoulder and propelled me slightly faster in the direction I was already going. My borrowed thongs slid unsteadily across the uneven dark grey marble slabs underfoot. I was ushered into the magnificent central arched vault of the hamam still driven firmly from behind by my attendant. 'DIY,' he spat out the term like a curse. Then all of a sudden I was alone in an echoing chamber of smoke.
Looking up I could see the sunlight streaming in through half the tiny windows circling the inner rim of the dome. The central section of the dome itself had been punctured like a pepper pot with more vents creating brilliant shafts angling through the steam. Rising a foot above the floor of the bath vault was the huge circular 'belly stone' platform in a lighter shade of grey marble. I went to sit on its nearest edge and immediately leapt up scalded. From one of the private alcove wash stations set around the outer circumference of the room, I heard a throaty chuckle. As I became accustomed to the steamy haze, I realised that I was in fact not alone at all and that several fellow bathers were attending to their rituals sluicing themselves down using the fawcets set above marble basins in each of the surrounding alcoves.
One of these fellows emerged carrying a shallow metal tin plate full of water and splashed it hissing over the belly stone before flipping his tin over and settling it as a pillow under his head as he stretched out on the gleaming slab like a cat rolling on its back in the sun. I made my way to an alcove to begin some private and tentative ablutionary experiments of my own. My small roughly chopped cake of soap smelt of freshly cut lemons.
Step by step I began to get the hang of the DIY version of the splash, soap, lather and scrub routine that I saw being carried out by attendants on the more adventurous or accustomed bathers. My tea towel soon became a sodden scrap but still useful for insulating my buttocks from the sharp marble sting of the furniture. Slowly everything softened, relaxed, sweated and plumped up like a prune in hot water. It was easy to imagine the grittiness and stress of days of travelling washing away down the elaborate system of drains and gunnels criss-crossing the floor.
Super-saturated I dragged myself away from the quiet hiss and splash of the bath house and back in the direction from which I remembered entering. Not so fast. I was immediately apprehended by an attendant who looked as if he might well have done much of his earliest and best work in a high security penal establishment. Certainly his service philosophy seemed more shaped by Midnight Express than the Orient Express. This heavily moustachioed officer unceremoniously re-directed me towards the shower area, slapped open a tap and shoved me under the cold jet that emerged directly from a gouge in the tiles at head height. Gasping and clutching for my towel, I spluttered my thanks and stumbled towards the stair well.
As I approached the sanctuary of my locker, an unseen hand thrust a fresh white towel in front of me. It was soft, sweetly scented with lavender and with a deep, thickly luxurious pile that scoured my back and shoulders with the gentlest of rough caresses. I got dressed in a dream and headed out, cleansed, to face the purity of the Blue Mosque.
Thursday, 29 November 2012
Let the kids look out the window
As a young trainee teacher I was fortunate enough to do parts of my apprenticeship with a number of quietly inspirational classroom teachers. I was reminded of one of these figures while on a ferry ride down the Bosphorus Straits recently.
Istanbul is that most singular of cities, impossible to imagine other than exactly where it stands in wedlock between Europe and Asia. Thrice capital of Middle Earth and like all great imperial cities, it sets off echoes of others in its world heritage league. Tunis, Tripoli, Cairo, Beirut, Athens all carry an Ottoman stamp first posted out through the Sea of Marmara. Gaze down old Stamboul's steep streets and across its waters to Maiden's Island and there is a glimpse of Alcatraz in San Francisco Bay. Cross the Golden Horn by the Galata Bridge and the Rialto comes to mind. Let the eye wander along the prosperous wooded waterfront beneath the Bosphorus Bridge and Sydney Harbour becomes the comparison. Perched on the wharfside boulevard in the village of Istinye, the fishermen on Havana's Malecon would feel at home.
Taking in all these heady and fanciful comparisons from the ferry deck, we slipped past a string of Ottoman villas each with its wrought iron lace-fronted landing stage lapped by the swirling waters of the Straits. In the last of these grand reminders of a gilded age, the top storey shutters were thrown back and we were passing close enough to see the reflection of light off water dancing on the pressed ceiling of a large schoolroom. Framed in the picture window looking out over the water, was the back of a single figure I took to be the teacher. Just visible above their desk tops were rows of bobbing children's heads, craning to see beyond and behind their teacher's bulk.
I was transported back to my teacher trainee days in that loveliest of cities, Cape Town. I remembered arriving for a week's stint in a secondary school situated high on a hillside above one of the city's Atlantic-facing suburbs. The classroom to which I had been assigned commanded a particularly fine view out over Table Bay, beyond the Docks where the Dutch had landed in 1652 and away towards Robben Island, at that stage still Nelson Mandela's place of long incarceration.
The first thing I noticed as I began to prepare for my history lesson was that the teacher's desk was placed to one side away from the window with all the students' desks facing out over the Bay. Alarm bells began to ring in my eager young instructional mind. Under no circumstances did I want my students to be distracted from the vital content of my lesson. I began to swing the desks around to ensure that they all faced the blank wall on the mountain side of the classroom.
"What on earth are you doing?" The softly challenging voice belonged to the teacher who had been asked to oversee my fledgling efforts that morning. I muttered something about not wanting the kids to be looking out the window when they should be concentrating on their studies.
"But their history is all there - and their future - straight out of that window - your job is to help them make sense of what they can see right in front of them without standing in their way."
I learned more from that short exchange than most of the rest of my year's training put together and it all came flooding back as I waved at the inquisitive, cheerful faces in the school beside the Straits where Jason once sailed in search of the Golden Fleece.
Istanbul is that most singular of cities, impossible to imagine other than exactly where it stands in wedlock between Europe and Asia. Thrice capital of Middle Earth and like all great imperial cities, it sets off echoes of others in its world heritage league. Tunis, Tripoli, Cairo, Beirut, Athens all carry an Ottoman stamp first posted out through the Sea of Marmara. Gaze down old Stamboul's steep streets and across its waters to Maiden's Island and there is a glimpse of Alcatraz in San Francisco Bay. Cross the Golden Horn by the Galata Bridge and the Rialto comes to mind. Let the eye wander along the prosperous wooded waterfront beneath the Bosphorus Bridge and Sydney Harbour becomes the comparison. Perched on the wharfside boulevard in the village of Istinye, the fishermen on Havana's Malecon would feel at home.
Taking in all these heady and fanciful comparisons from the ferry deck, we slipped past a string of Ottoman villas each with its wrought iron lace-fronted landing stage lapped by the swirling waters of the Straits. In the last of these grand reminders of a gilded age, the top storey shutters were thrown back and we were passing close enough to see the reflection of light off water dancing on the pressed ceiling of a large schoolroom. Framed in the picture window looking out over the water, was the back of a single figure I took to be the teacher. Just visible above their desk tops were rows of bobbing children's heads, craning to see beyond and behind their teacher's bulk.
I was transported back to my teacher trainee days in that loveliest of cities, Cape Town. I remembered arriving for a week's stint in a secondary school situated high on a hillside above one of the city's Atlantic-facing suburbs. The classroom to which I had been assigned commanded a particularly fine view out over Table Bay, beyond the Docks where the Dutch had landed in 1652 and away towards Robben Island, at that stage still Nelson Mandela's place of long incarceration.
The first thing I noticed as I began to prepare for my history lesson was that the teacher's desk was placed to one side away from the window with all the students' desks facing out over the Bay. Alarm bells began to ring in my eager young instructional mind. Under no circumstances did I want my students to be distracted from the vital content of my lesson. I began to swing the desks around to ensure that they all faced the blank wall on the mountain side of the classroom.
"What on earth are you doing?" The softly challenging voice belonged to the teacher who had been asked to oversee my fledgling efforts that morning. I muttered something about not wanting the kids to be looking out the window when they should be concentrating on their studies.
"But their history is all there - and their future - straight out of that window - your job is to help them make sense of what they can see right in front of them without standing in their way."
I learned more from that short exchange than most of the rest of my year's training put together and it all came flooding back as I waved at the inquisitive, cheerful faces in the school beside the Straits where Jason once sailed in search of the Golden Fleece.
Dolphins on the Bosphorus
"Do you want to sit on the Asian or the European side?"
That was the question my host asked me as we boarded her daily commuter ferry heading towards the centre of old Istanbul. There can't be too many urban transport routes where this is a relevant question. Continent-spanning cities are at a premium. Atyaru, Kazakhstan, located at the point where the Ural River meets the Caspian Sea, has a fair claim with the traffic signposts on its major motorway offering 'Europe/Asia' as alternative off-ramps. Panama City could make an argument based on a notional cut-off point between the North and South American continental masses. Reykjavik has a tentative geological claim in that it all but straddles the Atlantic tectonic plates that bind and divide Europe and North America. Port Said and Suez act as twin stitches holding Africa together with Asia across the man-made incision of the Suez Canal. The Straits of Hercules are too wide and turbulent to have allowed a joint Afro-European settlement to have developed on either side - Atlantis maybe but no Heraclinople or Gibstanbul?
No, the question applies uniquely to Istanbul. The ferry pilot tacks across the swirling currents of the Bosphorus navigating the ancient waterway with deceptive ease. Under our bows at each station, the waters churn and drag fiercely - the tides of history tugging us deeper into the heart of the city. From the Anatolian shores come the sweet, balmy waters of Asia, above the skyline of Thrace rise the competing spires of Europe. Istanbul is both mother and father to a nation.
We pass the narrowest point in the straits where Sultan Mehmet II ordered a chain link blockade to be strung from his hastily constructed M-shaped fortress in order to strangle Constantinople before entering it in 1453. Today the Fatih Sultan Mehmet suspension bridge connects the continents high above us. Migratory seabirds meeuw and swoop down from its steel cradle.
"If we are very lucky, we may see dolphins," my host peers over the European starboard side of the boat where we have chosen to sit this morning, promising ourselves an Asian side ride on the way home. I stare intently at the roiling waters willing these graceful, intelligent creatures into sight. They are easy shapes to conjure with in the mind's eye. But none appear as we approach the Ataturk Bridge.
I suppose that if you are a dolphin in the Bosphorus, you don't have to choose between continents, between good bank or bad bank, left wing or right wing, between rival religions or even between the secular and the divine. There's just fish for tea and the freedom of the sea that made the world.
Monday, 26 November 2012
With this juice...
I stand long and watch a juice seller in the cobbled, market streets of Istanbul leading up to the Ayasofia. His waist-height, three wheeled, rectangular wooden cart serves as the perfectly constructed and balanced platform for his art and his trade. As a robust business model it cannot be faulted.
On either side of his central fruit crusher equipment are equal piles of washed oranges and pomegranates. Taking two fruits from each pile, he juggles them briefly in an effortless display of cocktail barman's circus brilliance. The fresh fruit globes fall with a satisfying plop into a hand and are lined up one-two, one-two on his scarred wooden chopping board. A lethal blade flashes four times and the eight halves tremble gently on their backs.
Then each half section is placed juice side down on a circular metal pyramid resembling a small, ringed bee-hive - and summarily executed. I notice that the executing lever is in the form of a metal cross whose inverted cup presses down firmly on its mosque dome shaped counterpart. Into a small tin cup beneath, a fragrant juice trickles.
'One lira Turkish,' he proffers a single cup of his freshly-squeezed, transformed essence of life's goodness. What price a few precious drops of life-taken, lifeblood juice?
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