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Office Politics: Your Emails…
This morning’s post was meant to be about the framing bias and statistics and the lecture that I listened to yesterday by David Spiegelhalter (no jokes). But I got as far as the opening paragraph before I got distracted: first by buzzfeed, and then by a team of workmen coming to fix some carpeting. Then […]
read moreOffice Politics: The Awkwardness of Expectations.
Pygmalion, from Greek myth, was a Cypriot who found himself “not interested in women” after he saw the ladies in his home town prostituting themselves (it seems they irritated the goddess Aphrodite, and her idea for their punishment involved a loss of shame and whoring to exhaustion). Somehow, Pygmalion managed to overcome his puritanical disgust […]
read moreOffice Politics: Leave Me My Clutter
There’s an old adage about tidy desks making for tidy minds. And, I guess, for an auditor – having a tidy mind is relatively important. But if your mind was tidy all the time, that does sound like it might be a bit… small. Minds, after all, are infinite for all intents and purposes. And […]
read moreOffice Politics: Prisoners, Prison Guards, and Power Perversion
In 1971, Stanford psychologist Philip Zimbardo conducted his now-infamous prison experiment. It lasted 6 days before he eventually had to shut it down. And you should watch this clip (seriously), because there is video footage from the experiment, and it’s incredible how rapidly human nature can transform. The Background Zimbardo wanted to conduct an experiment that […]
read moreOffice Politics: Honest In Moderation
Unless something annoying/interesting has happened at work during the week, my usual starting point for an Office Politics post is a cruise through reddit.com: generally not fruitful, but always entertaining. For example, this morning I discovered that there are products specifically designed to hide puffy nipples on men, and that certain bodily fluids can activate the […]
read moreOffice Politics: And Pens
Yesterday, I had to go and collect a brewing unit for an espresso machine. I arrived in a hurry, for three reasons: I left the office late; The coffee-servicing place was more distant than expected; and Traffic lights. Also, while I trust Google Maps to be entirely accurate for drive-times (freakishly accurate, in fact), it […]
read moreOffice Politics: The Fresh Start
It’s a new year (I can say that – we’re still in January). The gyms are full; carbohydrate consumption is down; I see a lot of runners on the roads. More irritatingly, I see a lot of cyclists. In particular, the one that went through a red light and cut across me in traffic yesterday, […]
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Office Politics: The Not So Innocent Bystander
In October 2011, China was swept up in outrage after 10 minutes of horrifying footage from a security camera went viral on Sina Weibo. It showed a two year old toddler walking into the middle of a street in the Guangdong province, getting run over by a van, lying there bleeding as several pedestrians and […]
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Office Politics: Pay A Little Not A Lot
I kind of love the phrase “cognitive dissonance”. Although I don’t really use it correctly (I’m not sure that it translates as a snooty version of “you’re both boring and irritating and it’s happening to me at the same time”). It’s meant to mean that you hold two conflicting beliefs simultaneously and it causes you […]
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Office Politics: Marshmallow? Why Thank You.
It seems that most people are familiar with the Stanford Marshmallow experiment from 1970: “one of the best known studies in the history of psychology” is the line I see used. Well good for everyone else. Because I only encountered it in a book by Richard Wiseman that I read in my mid-twenties. And by […]
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