When I’m in charge of world football…

…This how it will be.

Teams like Luxembourg and the Faroe Islands really shouldn’t be playing in world cup qualifying groups with teams like Spain and Germany (although they could probably give England a run for their money).  It’s not good for the sport that certain teams are habitually thumped, yet on the rare occasions they do manage to get a result it will be meaningless because it is one of many group games they have to play.

To solve this I would make the world cup more like the FA cup – basically a straight knock-out.

Here is how it would work:

The first and second rounds would take place some time prior to the finals, as the qualification stages do now.  The top 100 teams in the FIFA world rankings would be joined in a draw by 20 teams that had qualified from the remainder (of which there are currently 107).  These teams would be drawn against each other with no seeding or other preference – If Brazil have to play Kazakhstan away, too bad, thats where they play.  The 60 winners of this round would be drawn for the second round, of which 30 would emerge.

These teams would go to play in the finals along with the current champions and the host nation.  The finals would be much like they are at the moment – with one nation hosting a month or so of games – except that it would be a straight knock-out with no group stages.

This would make all games vitally important – an upset would be amazing/fatal, depending on whether you were the underdog or not.  No more pointless drubbings, and “good” teams are punished for being below par if they don’t manage to win.

I’m not sure how the qualification for the lower ranked teams would work.  I think group stages would be fine here, as it means that teams would get plenty of experience actually playing competitive matches rather than being thrashed most of the time.  It would give them something worth playing for, rather than attempting merely to minimise the scale of defeat, and teams around about the 100th rank would be scrapping like cats in a bag to get an automatic qualification spot.

Of course it won’t happen because (a) it would mean fewer games and hence less revenue; and (b) actually the current system isn’t broke enough to warrant such a massive overhaul.  I still think it would be fun though.

Just don’t get me started on international cricket…

Seasonal work

When I’m making a living without a job I want to have enough projects on the go that I can work seasonally.  My non-salary-days should see me abuzz with ideas about two projects which I have begun working on, but right now in the glorious summer heat we have in the UK at the moment, I just… can’t… be… bothered.  Next year I need to have some outdoorsy projects up my sleeve, or at least ones that don’t mainly involve being at a computer.  I could try and change tack now but I would be clutching at straws with nothing worthwhile to start work on.

Business writing can be good writing too

I came across this dire paragraph at work recently:

The policy requires that we deliver sustainable solutions across our activities by evolving our multidisciplinary approach, developing our technical expertise and building on our track record of delivery.

What… the… Hell… does that mean?  It’s supposed to explain how “sustainability” is to be addressed by the designers (we are an engineering consultancy), but it tells you nothing about the concept of sustainability or any concrete information about what it would entail in practice.

In contrast to that, last week I noticed a memo on a colleague’s desk entitled “Sustainability as sartorial style”.  This compared the whole building design process to choosing an outfit.  The underwear is the ground engineering, the fabric is the structure, the architecture is the flamboyant shirt.  The sustainability of the design, however, is NOT the accessories, the cufflinks and watch; it is the style, the overall look.  This is a way of saying that you can’t do the whole design (put all the clothes on) and then add sustainability at the end – it has to be a conscious part of the decision making from the start, and will affect all the choices you make.  It was simple, understandable, and memorable.  I can’t think of a better description of good writing than that.

ESA charts flight to… where?

I must confess I don’t pay much attention to ESA, beyond a general feeling of good-will to that organisation which carries the flag into space on my behalf as a UK citizen and taxpayer.

This article though demonstrates why I’m not holding my breath for ESA to do anything truly exciting any time soon.  My bar for exciting is quite high, it being a human mission to Mars, or the Moon at a pinch.

There were three omissions, he told his audience:

(1) Europe was now in need of a political dimension to space policy, he argued. He contrasted the slow move to consensus required among a club of 18 equal partners (the Esa member states) with the sort of impetus a US President could give to policy. It was only the likes of a US president or a Chinese premier who could say “we go the Moon”, and then direct the effort and the money to achieve that goal.

A US President has once, ever, given a meaningful space policy impetus.  Some chap called Kennedy.  After him, despite standing on the vast edifice of the physical and intellectual infrastructure that he summoned into being, no president has set a course to anywhere.  Low Earth Orbit is not a destination.  If the Chinese choose to go to the Moon, good luck to them.  If it starts another space race I just pray it is not as part of a new Cold War.

(3) And the final big omission was crew transportation. As you know, at the moment, Europe has no independent means of getting its astronauts into space. They must hitch a ride on a US or a Russian vehicle. Europe certainly has the technical means to build its own transportation system, but so far Esa member states have baulked at the cost.

And here in a paragraph is the fundamental problem.  What was not said was “We will be sending astronauts to Moon/Mars/Somewhere by [specified date] and we need to develop the hardware to do that”.  No, the focus is on the technology – we need this equipment, even though we have no plans to put it to meaningful use.  No doubt there are paper aspirations to go places, but if they were meaningful the mindset would not be the one demonstrated here.

You don’t have the right to not be offended

That doesn’t mean that it is OK for people to be rude, hectoring, obnoxious.  It’s not OK, but you don’t have a “right” to be free from it unless it constitutes sustained abuse and harassment, which it usually doesn’t.  Instead of protecting your rights, exercise your freedoms instead and ignore your combatant or put them back in their box with a withering retort.  The flip side is that just because you have the freedom to be rude, hectoring, obnoxious, you have no “right” to be so, and anyway it still makes you a ******.

How to capture those ideas

You know those ideas you get, usually in the pub, which start with the words “Wouldn’t it be great if…” and go on to describe a neat business concept?  Of course, you never do anything about it, and then you vaguely wonder why some people are really successful and you  are not.

Perhaps the successful people write those ideas down.  This forces you to think a bit harder about it than if you are just shooting the breeze over drinks; it also means you can put the idea to one side for a while and come back to it.  I’m going to start writing my ideas down.

I’m trying to come up with a format that can describe such an idea in 1-2 pages, and that just captures the initial excited thinking – research and the like can come later.  These are my heading ideas for this format:

Initial concept – What form did the idea take when you first thought of it?

Sketch – How would it work, what would the process/product look like to the customer/user?

Target Audience - Who is it for?

Precedents – What existing business ideas that you know about make you think that your idea could work?

Assumptions – What (probably unspoken) assumptions have you made about customers, competitors, logistics?  This will give you a list of things to follow up if you take the idea forward.

Anything else?

Psychometric testing – they’re in my head!

I uncovered a character profile from some psychometric testing I did a couple of years ago.  I’m generally sceptical about such things but this excerpt, from the section on how to interview me, is pretty close to the mark:

Expect logical answers as opposed to socially acceptable ones.

In the event of rational stonewalling, do not hesitate to throw in some socially provocative questions.

There are a few subjects that I try my best to avoid debating, either because long experience tells me that you can’t sway people and the topic is just too emotive (fox-hunting, abortion); or I don’t know enough and really can see both sides (Irish Republicanism, for example).

Apart from that I’ll debate the hind-legs off a donkey.  Ideas are important, and we make too many lazy assumptions (myself included).  If I disagree with someone I swing between excessive combativeness and asking mild questions to draw out someone’s train of thought before putting their contradiction to them.  Both are probably a bit mean.  My favourite conversation using the latter technique though led to the girl I was talking to tell me that she thought global starvation was on the way because as people got richer there would be fewer and fewer farmers.  I gently suggested she hadn’t considered the concept of supply and demand.

Horse cloning – the future of sport?

I’m one of those people that really annoys motor sports fans because I think that it would be interesting if all the drivers had exactly the same model of car so we could see who was actually the best driver.

Following this logic, all jockeys should have the same horse.  Obviously then we need to speed up the development of mammalian cloning so that come the Grand National 40 jockeys can all be riding genetically identical horses, which will have been carefully raised in identical conditions.

Sports Report

Yesterday evening a match of Association Football was undertaken between eleven gentlemen representing the United States of America and eleven gentlemen representing England.  Both sets of gentlemen each scored one goal.

Scurrilous rumours that the company formerly known as British Petroleum had, on behalf of the English gentlemen, attempted to sap American morale by deliberately spilling considerable quantities of oil on large stretches of American coastline were unfounded.

You don’t see with just your eyes

My undergraduate degree is in ecology, but I am a terrible field ecologist.  To me birds comprise robins, crows, pigeons, and all the other ones; and trees are all oaks or not-oaks.

In the summer between our first and second year we had to make a taxonomic collection – collect, preserve and identify examples of 15-20 species from a taxonomic group or closely related groups.  At my mum’s suggestion I chose grasses, and quickly expanded this to include sedges.  Prior to this I had always strolled along country paths and through woods and, whilst I always liked the setting, I only ever saw an indistinct green background.  But once I had to look and understand, that is when I really began to see what that green background was – and it was intricate and beautiful.  By the end of the summer I could spot a species of grass I hadn’t yet collected from several metres away amongst a riot of green, when all I used to see was a green background.  You see more when you know what you are looking at.

If you want to pick up field identification skills, it can be a bit daunting when you speak to someone who knows what every bird call and flash of feather belongs to, or what kind of geologic material that stone and those cliffs are.  But the best way to start is from the beginning.  First, learn to identify the really obvious stuff, the ones you see all the time.  Want to know about birds but don’t know the difference between a coot and a moorhen?  Go to the pond with a bird handbook, wait till you see one or the other, and look it up.  Don’t go out straight out looking for kingfishers, start with the ones you will see most often.  Quickly, you will be confident in identifying 75% of what you see if you know the most common ones.  Your eye is then attuned to looking for one you haven’t yet seen.  See with your mind, not just your eyes.