Everything I need to know I learned from eavesdropping on my boss

I learned a tremendous amount from overhearing my boss’s phone conversations at my first “real” (post-college) job. Tone, style, vocabulary, phrasing. How to cold-call a researcher, how to finesse a funding relationship, how to dance backwards from committing yourself to an undesired collaboration.

All of which is to say, I’m in general agreement with Megan Hustad:

The office phone call, properly overheard, is really the cheapest, easiest way to transmit institutional knowledge.

Which is why, these days, I try to make sure my younger collegues can overhear my most important conversations. They’ll learn more from that than almost anything I can teach them directly.

posted by Sra. Bibliotecaria ⋅ Comments Off ⋅ tagged culture, productivity, random thinking

Wow. Just, wow.

It’s hard to list all the things that are terrible about this idea:

A ban on the sale of cigarettes to anyone who does not pay for a government smoking permit has been proposed by Health England, a ministerial advisory board.

The idea is the brainchild of the board’s chairman, Julian Le Grand, who is a professor at the London School of Economics and was Tony Blair’s senior health adviser. In a paper being studied by Lord Darzi, the health minister appointed to oversee NHS reform, he says many smokers would be helped to break the habit if they had to make a decision whether to “opt in”.

The permit might cost as little as £10, but acquiring it could be made difficult if the forms were sufficiently complex, Le Grand said last night.

The people behind this idea are surprisingly aware of (some of) its potential problems. Unfortunately, they don’t really see them as problems:

“Breaking the new year’s resolution not to smoke would be costly in terms of both money and time … [This] would probably have a greater impact on poor smokers than on rich ones, hence contributing to a reduction in health inequalities.”

Sounds like a great plan to me: Reduce inequality by introducing legislation that is systematically unequal in its effects. How could this go wrong?

The paper, written by Le Grand and Divya Srivastava, an LSE researcher, acknowledges: “Administratively it would require addressing the problem of the existing black markets and smuggling in tobacco; but this should probably be done anyway.”

Translation: “Implementing this would make the black markets worse and drive more economic activity underground, causing more danger for all involved, and this will in turn require still greater militarism from our law enforcement and spending even more of the taxpayers’ money, but hey, we were going to do that anyway!”

Mark my words: They’re coming for our Krispy Kremes next.

(Full article at The Guardian)

posted by Nicholas ⋅ 1 comment » ⋅ tagged bad ideas, civil liberties, culture, freedom, law, politics

Amen

It takes five minutes to show someone how to put on a condom, but it takes a lot more to teach kids how to get into the respectful situations necessary to make sure the condom is in fact used.

The article notes a study that suggests that American and Dutch parents’ attitudes towards teen sex seem to be linked with the teens’ likelihood of making responsible (not celibate, responsible) choices. Read it.

posted by Sra. Bibliotecaria ⋅ Comments Off ⋅ tagged culture, sex, youth