The State Of English and World Cricket

http://www.philipdelisle.co.uk/cricket/18/so-thats-alright-then/

It's Goodbye from Him

I'm closing this blog here on Blogger and transferring it to a Wordpress blog on one of my personal domains.

I'm renaming it too to You Have Control! too but keeping the aeronautical theme going, particularly as this phrase is not indexed - yet - by Google).

This site was an experiment to see how Google and Blogger interact (being one and the same company as it were). I've found, to my surprise, that there is little difference in indexing times between Blogger and my Wordpress blogs (and yes I do have sitemaps registered for both sites ).

So it's off to it's new home with a new name ...

Worst Fears of a Parent

Our 4 year old son decided to upset his 6 year old brother yesterday and ended up flat on his back on the floor. Unfortunately on concrete. And split his head open.

A parent's worst nightmare!

But A&E at Hemel Hempstead were brilliant. He was seen inside 10 minutes for a quick appraisal and we were back home within 3 hours which wasn't bad considering that we had to wait for a doctor and then a nurse to close up the wound with medical superglue which was astonishing.

A few hours later he was full of life and today you would not know anything had happened. His mum and I though wince every time his head comes anywhere near the chairs, table, kitchen worktops ...

He's not known as Danger Mouse for nothing!

Job Interview - The Final Frontier!

I got a phone call from the outgoing chair yesterday at 5:15pm some 2 days after the interview panel had said I'd be informed.

They clearly had a major headache in making the decision.

Having been praised for my presentation ("a really enjoyable tour de force") I got the dreaded news that I wasn't being offered the position which was, and still is, disappointing. I was told that I would have been a "breathe of fresh air" but that I was considered to be too likely to make waves. In short I was too scary and therefore too risky. If I'm honest, this was not a surprise as I'm not a political animal and the 2nd interview showed me that you had to be pretty good at it to deal with the regulatory stuff/people.

But then I was dumbfounded to be told that they had decided not to appoint any of the candidates! So the deputy Chair has been told he didn't get the job but, by the way, can you chair the board for the next few months on an interim basis while headhunters are appointed and do their stuff? I'm glad I'm not in his shoes.

Heaven knows what this is costing them. The ad in the Sunday Times won't have been cheap, plus the expense of the outside assessor and now headhunters who are, I suspect, going to demand a flat fee as the post doesn't pay well.

This has been an extraordinary process from my point of view and I've learnt a lot. Not least of which is that interviewing is a dance and that the appointed candidate may well not be able to live up to their performance of that dance.

No wonder so many senior executives fail so early in a new job.

The sad thing is that this is a great little company which has huge potential. It would have been great fun, and hard work, to take it forward. But if they have this much difficult hiring a Chair, I worry if they have the where with all to take the necessary tough decisions needed to grow the business. Time will tell.

Job Interview Part 2

Well I made it to the 2nd interview. A 15 minute presentation on a topic that I'd specifically said at the 1st interview I believed was not part of the role! So I argued against it and got better feedback than I was expecting.

Then they dropped the bombshell - that the current vice Chair had applied for the role and was being interviewed as well. So they asked awkward questions about how I might cope with a member of the board who was uncooperative, difficult, not up to the job etc etc. Surprisingly I found I enjoyed it.

But then I had to be appraised by an external third party and it was then that I realised just how different the private and public sectors are. And it really does appear that one is trying to operate with both hands tied behind one's back. For example, although the company that is offering the job is in the private sector, it's sole shareholder is public sector and therefore regulated. Which means that the private company is expected by the regulator to adhere to public guidelines and policy. Which calls into question how it can remain competitive and this expectation is onerous to say the least.

Anyway they told me that they would try and let me know by the end of yesterday and it is now midday GMT the following day as I type this and I've not heard anything so I'm assuming that it is a split decision and I'm still involved if only on the basis that if I wasn't in the frame they'd have told me straight away.

And curiously, I find that I'm increasingly keen to land the job as I'm now very intrigued by how it all works. So fingers crossed!

Wow, a Job Interview!

I attended my first ever job interview today. Not bad for someone of nearly 50 years of age! I guess being a serial entrepreneur means that I just don't like working for others.

This one is interesting. It's for the position of non-executive chair of a public services company. Now I've never worked in this sector so I've been really intrigued by the way that they go about hiring. I must confess that it's not the way that I would do it - to send in an application form with a supporting paragraph or two to back up why you are applying and no CV is strange to me, so I did it my way which was a bit cheeky and sent them a supporting letter with a photograph.

The interview itself seemed to go well. A three man panel who asked intelligent questions and created a nice atmosphere to allow me to feel comfortable. I enjoyed the experience much to my surprise.

I'll have to wait and see if I did enough to move forward to the next stage. Watch this space!

Does it pay to buy links?

The perceived wisdom is that to get a good natural position in the search engines, you need to have one way incoming links from sites with a good page rank (normally 5 or more).

There are lots of 2 page word cloud sites with a decent page ranks. And the links are cheap - $10 a link isn't a lot to pay for a decent placement.

But do they work?

And how come these sites get page ranked so well when they don't seem to offer much in terms of content?

And am I brave enough to use some of my marketing budget to find out???

What's Google playing at?

I was doing some research recently into how Google works so that I can improve the ranking of my other websites. We all know that content is king, and I've always been very sceptical about using SEO to improve rankings, preferring, perhaps naively, to create a pleasant site with interesting information in the areas that I work in; these are not mainstream so I'm unlikely to get business directly from the web. So my playing with my sites is safe from a financial point of view.

However ...

I've now got Google to index this blog. And I'm pretty disappointed to discover that my entries are in the supplementary index which is clearly not a good thing.

I'm confused as to why this should have happened as blogs, particularly Blogger ones, are supposed to be loved by Google.

So experiment time ...

I've changed the name of the blog for reasons I won't bore you with and rewritten the description to make it more relevant to me and what this blog is about.

It will be interesting to see if this makes a difference when Google makes another pass in a few weeks time.

I'll keep you posted!

Video Diaries

I had a great meeting today with an old friend, Stephen Harvard Davis. I showed him how easy it was to create a video for uploading onto YouTube/Google Video/MySpace etc using the default tools in WinXP and a cheap DV video camera.

The results were surprisingly good with titles, credits, voice overs etc. After about 15 minutes of thought, it looks like we might have come up with a new business so stay tuned!

Time to think about a video diary too ...

Me and My Big Mouth!

Well I said last month that all we needed was for our eldest son to get Chicken Pox over Half Term for our lives to be complete (A Pox On You!).

Boy do I wish I'd kept my mouth shut.

Poor lad had a terrible dose of the pox! Right throughout Half Term. And I went down with the flu.

So all our plans went out of the window.

A terrible week ...

I Don't Believe It!

England's cricketers have one of the most embarassing Ashes tours in living memory and then proceed to limp through the early qualifying games agains Australia and New Zealand.

And then win the whole shotting match without needing to go to the 3rd final. Amazing.

So now it's off to the WIndies for the World Cup which might be quite good for us, but I have a sneaking feeling it won't be. But the Baggy Greens have got some real problems to resolve in the next 2 weeks. Shouild they take Glenn McGrath? He's looked very tired in these last few games. And he's already announced his retirement from international cricket so one must question his motivation. And the loss of Andrew Symonds is a huge blow.

I know who's captaincy shoes I'd rather be in ...

Why not come clean?

The UK newspapers and TV channels have been full of stories about a coroner trying to determine the cause of death of a British soldier in Afganistan and demanding a copy of the onboard tape from the US tankbuster aircraft that was alleged to have killed him. The so-called "friendly fire".

The tape, to my untrained eye, looks pretty conclusive.

What is so sad was reading today that the US authorities tried so hard to prevent this tape from ever seeing the light of day. And then reading that they are as equally uptight about sharing this type of information with their own press when US service men and women are killed or injured by friendly fire.

Our press has been making a meal of how the US treat the British troops (and Britain the country) as second class citizens. This is arrrogant nonsense given my comment above about how they treat their own people.

War is a dirty business. People get hurt. Accidents happen. They always have and they always will. The fact is that modern warfare can be fought from literally miles, if not thousands of miles away from the battlefield. We are not living in the days of horses and pitched battles. Consequently these accidents are going to become increasingly common. So the authorities, regardless of which country is involved, might as well come clean. That doesn't make any accident acceptable, but I think it makes them more understandable.

Not that that will be much comfort to the families of the unfortunate victims. But the truth might go some way to helping them come to terms with their loss.

Great Scott - We Won!

England finally manage to beat the Aussies in a one day game. The first time we've beaten them since the glorious Summer of 2005.

Wonders will never cease!

There's Nowt So Queer as Folk!

I spent a long day with a mentoring client yesterday, not finishing until 8:15pm.

They have a difficult exit journey to travel in the next 12 months - the countdown clock literally started yesterday.

What I found interesting is that although they know they need keep people on an interim basis, and that this new interim team will add millions of pounds to the value of the company, they are still finding it difficult to focus on the value of the team rather than the day rates of the team members.

May be it's because of my training as an economist, but if someone adds a penny more onto value than they cost to hire, it's a good hire. If they add millions, they're a steal!

A Pox On You!

My youngest son aged 4 came down with Chicken Pox today.

Nasty rash all over his body with a large cluster in his groin, poor little man. My poor wife Dawn has had a couple of sleepless nights already and I'm afraid she's likely to be in for several more. I'm in the spare room which is bliss for me as little one has this urge to kick with both feet to check that you are still there even when he's asleep. So Dawn is a bit sore today :)

Now all we want is for our eldest to get it for our lives to be complete! And it will be just our luck if he gets it over Half Term!

Still it's better to get this over and done with now while the weather is warm so that they can wear loose and light fitted clothing. I'm beginning to sound like our doctor ...

You've got to be kidding me!

It was my wife Dawn's 40th birthday earlier this week so we went to The Grove in Watford to celebrate.

We had a fantastic meal in The Glasshouse at less than £100 including a glass of excellent red wine each (it was a freezing night so no chances taken).

Her best friend Mary gave a her a fabulous present of taking her to Chicago (the stage show not the city!) in a week's time. It is Mary's 40th in the summer and Dawn has always wanted to have tea at the Ritz Hotel in London so she has decided to take her.

The cost? £80 for two people. For tea??!!

What's that all about?

It's behind you!

One of the things that I love about panto (a particularly British phenomenon) is the way that one of the good characters can never see the baddie while the audience, i.e. the children, scream "It's behind you" at the top of their voice. With 2 small boys of 6 and 4 at the time of writing, the joy in their eyes while participating in this event will remain with me forever.

So what does this have to do with a business mentor and a blog? Actually, quite a lot. It's about change.

In my life.

My personal change of direction will be channelled into Mapping Beauty, my core process.

My corporate change of direction will be focussed on Enhancing Clarity.

And my work direction can be followed on my personal website www.philipdelisle.com.

And this blog? It's just a bit of fun ...

It's behind you!