John Linton .....of the hopes, aspirations and even 'life and death' scenarios of the human species.
There are not many things left to do in the remaining days of December to complete what is required to start the new year on January 1st. The major things are to finalise the pricing for new business services and residential services and write the communications to the various out of contract organisations/people that/who are affected. We also need to do some revisions to the web sites and advise our personnel of the various, relatively minor, changes to the company's operating structures. It sounds quite simple and easy to accomplish but it represents a reasonable amount of work to be accomplished over the remaining 11 days of 2010 and doubtless it will take until COB on the 31st before it is completed - for some reason it always seems to do that.
I wonder whether anyone who takes time to look at the coming year in any sort of detail has any real idea what 2011 will produce in terms of their company's development and/or progress? The pleasing symmetry of figures in spread sheets depicts the second by second events and the actions of real people in simple numbers. It is a total de-personalisation of human activities - representing all the work of a group of human beings by rows and columns of numbers on a screen and/or, for those that can be bothered, on sheets of paper. The X's and Y's that represent people we, as yet, don't know depict people 'polishing their resumes' and hoping they find a suitable first job as they post or email them to recruitment agencies and companies whom they don't know nor have any idea of how their abilities and qualifications as depicted in words, they don't really know how to use as yet, will be received.
Yet, for better or worse, it is figures on a spread sheet these days that determines the 'fate' of practically everyone who works for a living either in their current work place or in a work place that they aspire to work. Stating the obvious? Almost certainly; but I wonder how many people actually think about it in that way when some unknown planner or decision maker deletes some X or Y from some spread sheet grouping or changes some projection either up or down based on the best information they have available to them at the time but with no real knowledge of what will really happen beyond the columns of actual figures preceding the forecasts they or someone advising them have made in the columns representing the future?
Perhaps I am over stating the case but you see the results of these tyrannous rows and columns everywhere. I derided the iinet public statement that "iinet were no longer going to grow because they wanted to concentrate on developing new and better services for their current customers" (or words to that effect). What really happened was that those tyrannous columns were trending downwards in terms of numbers of customers and the revenues and profits being predicted and they had no option but to make future plans based on those unarguable numbers. So who is in charge of such organisations?.... the people making their spin spiv derived statements of what they hope the gullible will believe or the spread sheets depicting the reality of the actual situation of the past and giving one, often quite different view, of the future?
The actual reality is that whatever any 'planner' does in terms of his/her own sets of forecasts are almost entirely dependent on what other 'planners' working for their competitors are putting in to their own forecasts and that information is not available at the time decisions have to be made - other than as extrapolations of what has been seen in the recent past. I am starkly reminded of this when I look back over 2010 and recall how many times we modified our plans and forecasts over the past twelve months. So in this time in this industry the huge efforts that go in to constructing future plans is largely if not completely wasted.
Who really knows what 2011 will bring? Look at the result of the third test compared to the 'expert' press predictions and the bookie's odds after Australia's first innings was completed to see just how wrong you can get predictions of events just a couple of days in the future.
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