Common Courtesy

Day 42 ( Wednesday 11th January 2017)

42 times higher than the national air quality standards - was the finding of
scientists in India when assessing pollution in Delhi during Diwali (the
celebratory fireworks plunged the city into smog and air pollution levels
rose significantly on the night of the Diwali holiday.) Air pollution causes as many
as 10,000-30,000 deaths annually in India.

Today's post is by a delightful man, whom I met for the first time on 8th December 2016 - Bede Northcote, the Managing Director and founder of Northcote Internet Ltd, a business that provides videos for online annual reports and live events production. Bede has had a fascinating route to where he is now - with a degree in Nuclear Engineering and a period in the British Royal Navy as a submariner, before  working in software development and as a consultant for a range of organisations including IMR Global, Thomson Financial and Morgan Stanley International. I met Bede because he and I share a love of rugby - having both played in the front row when younger. We enjoyed watching The Varsity Match together - I am pleased to report that, being supporters of Cambridge, we had much to celebrate (Cambridge broke a six year run of losing to take the title). 

Bede can be found on Twitter (his handle is @northcote_b), although he is seldom active in a personal capacity. His post is on the theme of heart and the impact people have on others through the way they interact.

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Common Courtesy

For some years now, I have been trying to be more polite.  

It has the most wonderful benefits.  I started by thanking bus drivers and now try to look back at the driver and wave my thanks as well.  This invariably results in a smile and a wave back.  I now hear more bus passengers also thanking the driver.  We rely on so many people doing hard jobs in difficult situations at odd hours of the day and night that politeness is the least that we can do.

London Transport's first female bus driver, Mrs Rosamund Viner, at the driver training centre in Chiswick 1974

Britain has always thought of itself as a polite country.  We need to work at being more polite and remembering that manners, etiquette and civility all help us get along.  This is particularly true in the coming years as we face a new future.

This thought has lead me to another level.  I have a wonderful multi-national and multi-cultural team working for me.  A lot of them are from Europe and the morning after the Brexit result, they felt that they weren’t as welcome here as they had felt before.  Meanwhile all of the rhetoric from our politicians assumes that we can just get what we want.

We need to be more polite, we offer help to the world and we should be polite in asking for it back.  We should be generous in our offers and un-assuming in our expectations.  We have no right to expect a better world for ourselves.

Banksy drawing in Clacton

If we approached the future negotiations with utter politeness, maybe it would be much easier.  People achieve so much more happiness and success when they are polite to each other rather than assuming that everything is in conflict.  Countries are only huge collections of people and politicians are only representatives of people.  If the people demand politeness, then contentment will follow.

The first thing we could do is offer the wonderful people who are British by choice, the protection of our country. 

Global etiquette

Of Nice and Men

Day 34 (Sunday 3rd January 2015)

34 is the age at which men are "at their most attractive"
(according to research conducted by Allure Magazine,
using a sample of 2000 respondents);
for women perceived peak appeal is at the age of 30.
Personally I don't think that age is important.

How are you enjoying the first weekend of the New Year? I am off to West Sussex to visit friends. I will be taking traditional New Year gifts of food, drink, light and heat to wish them well for the months ahead. I am looking forward to spending some time with them relaxing and catching up on news.

After the rush of the past few weeks, it is good to sit quiet and contemplate. This reflective post by Tim Scott hits the spot. Tim is Head of People and OD at the charity Brook, based in Liverpool and winner of the HR Management category of the 2015 Charity Times Awards. Tim is a social media adept - active on Twitter (his handle is@TimScottHR), he blogs (his site is  , but he also writes guest posts for the CIPD and for HRD (HR Director) magazine, and he has even co-authored a book on "Putting Social Media to Work" and future-casting the world of work in a decade's time. Tim has an active life IRL - he is a devoted father, husband and a music-nut. He often brightens people's timelines through his quick wit, repartee, sound advice and music recommendations.

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It feels to me like 2015 was a year of austerity and blame, celebrity and social antisocial-ness. All too often, what marked us apart was given more attention than the things we have in common. We saw it demonstrated time and time again that people are complex, messy and unpredictable. 

As we go about doing our daily stuff, we all leave trails in our wake through our actions, interactions and lack of action - like a comet's sparkly tail streams after it and coal leaves behind a dirty, powdery dust. The theme of this year's Advent blogs made me wonder whether, in this time of supposed mindfulness, we are really mindful of the trail we are leaving - and particularly the impact it has on others?

What I see on a daily basis suggests that not all of us are. For example, just a few minute ago I was walking to the station to catch the train I'm currently travelling on. Two men passed each other on the pavement in front of me, walking in opposite directions. Neither moved completely out of the others' way and they ended up catching each other's shoulders awkwardly. What surprised me most was that neither even broke their stride: without a backward glance, they carried on walking. 

Days of Judgement Cats in the City, sculpture by Laura Ford, 2015

This was hardly a life-changing incident - I imagine similar things happen thousands of times a day - but it was quite a forceful impact and for neither party to apologise or even acknowledge what happened didn't feel right somehow. Maybe I'm old-fashioned on this kind of thing but it all felt a bit, well, "not nice" as my kids would say. 

"Nice", is a seriously underrated attribute in my view. We see "nice" as being almost an insult sometimes, suggesting something insipid or just OK - particularly in business and management where we still regard Sir Alan Sugar's pantomime baddie act as something to aspire to. 

Personally, I regard being called nice as a compliment. I remember being involved with a disciplinary dismissal years ago and as I was escorting the unfortunate ex-employee from the premises, she thanked me. I said, somewhat incredulously, "why are you thanking me? We've just dismissed you!" She said "Yeah, but you did it nicely". 

Not every dismissal I have been involved with has gone quite so smoothly but that's an occupational hazard for a whole other blog...

My ultimate point I guess is that sometimes HOW we do stuff is as important as WHAT we do in terms of the impact on other people. In our day-to-day interactions, we can choose the how, even if we can't choose the what. Would it have hurt those two guys to have apologised to each other? Certainly not as much as the initial impact must have - and it might have eased the glowering look on the face of the chap coming towards me. So my challenge is, as we enter the start of the New Year and look back on the old: what is the impact you are having on the people around you? What trail do you leave in your wake? As someone said at a conference I was at recently, "Do you light up a room when you enter it - or when you leave it?" Are you sprinkling magical comet trails or depositing sooty coal dust?

P.S. Apologies for the appalling title. Sometimes once I think of these things I can't get them out of my head. Just like you are probably now singing Kylie to yourself. Sorry again.