Opinion: We cannot for our comfort ignore the homeless

No woof without a roof

Having suffered the threat of homelessness a number of times, there are deep experiences that recovering from illness and adversity have brought into my life.

Blog - Homeless! My exciting life takes a new chapter

Blog - England: How Lewisham Single Homeless Intervention Prevention humiliated me

I have hoped that the lessons I learnt and continue to learn will make me a better person, a more considerate person, a caring person, a compassionate person and a more understanding person.

Critically, being a more understanding person hopefully helps you appreciate long before you are tempted to judge or be prejudiced.

More than who you see

I have seen homelessness in many cities and it is clear that most homeless people have stories and narratives that are far from the stereotypes of homelessness that we are sometimes fed by the media.

One such example of a homeless person with a story was that of Anne Naysmith whose obituary appeared in literally all the main English newspapers, locally known as the Car Lady of Chiswick, she was once concert pianist and even taught at Trinity College, London.

She lost her home and lived rough in a car for 26 years before she was moved on by the authorities, quite a tale of a life that was. It goes without saying that many others might well have tales of wonder in their past that the present attempts to place into insignificance. We must never be fooled, our humanity is much richer than what meets the eye.

Longing for a caring society

For myself, where I have had the opportunity, I have been blessed to both give and encourage, if I could do more, I would love to. For what many of the homeless need is first the understanding of others and then the opportunity to begin to have options; once those options are there, they can begin to make choices; choice indicates a sense of independence and from the budding of the very basic encouragement in word and in deed, you can watch people rise.

What I long for is, a more caring society, a more considerate humanity and a more engaging community in helping those who lack shelter, resource or opportunity.

Atrocious spikes

It is in this vein that I was utterly, utterly repulsed by the studs Selfridges in Manchester installed on the ledges of their shop window with the excuse that they were to prevent staff from smoking about and around the entrance of the store. [Mancunian Matters]

Whilst the ledge itself was probably not wide enough for people to sleep on, it represented a growing trend first seen in London when Tesco’s installed anti-homeless studs at their Regent Street store and then a luxury apartment complex in London did the same.

For all the excuses and many might be valid for installing the studs just as anti-pigeon pins are installed around public buildings, the broader society could not countenance the deliberate attempt to cleanse our inner cities of the homeless so that we can comfortably assume their being out of sight means we do not have a homelessness problem amongst us.

Our true society

I believe we need to observe the comforts and the discomforts of our communities in plain sight and if at any time the discomforts of homelessness should disappear, it should be as a result of society working to help rather than society actively ostracising and stigmatising those more unfortunate than ourselves.

It is the reason why I signed Change.Org petition started by Professor Cathy Urquhart asking Selfridges in Manchester to remove the anti-homeless spikes from outside their store and I am glad to report that after a well-publicised campaign against this odious and reprehensible conduct, the spikes have been removed.

Still unforgivable

I, however, doubt this episode will be forgiven just as I have not forgiven Tesco’s for thinking up the stinking idea. I would rather see these corporate behemoths of retail excess positively contributing to helping the homeless and the many disadvantaged, get their lives together and find opportunities to thrive in society.

That to me would be real corporate social responsibility, one where those who have been helped with have heart-warming stories of corporate showing a human face, having a human heart passionately and compassionately working for profit for the community and themselves.

Whilst I will thank Selfridges in Manchester for listening, the real truth is it should never have happened in the first place.

The indulgence of incumbency

What is not a right

First of all, references are alluded to without prejudice.

Leadership confers on leaders to the opportunity guide, direct, instruct, advice and represent the people represented or being lead.

Leadership can come by heredity as in monarchies, by conquest or usurpation usually exemplified in coups, by conferment through democratic channels or even inexplicable circumstance - to broad an issue to discuss in detail.

However, understanding the function of leadership an how to exercise it justly is an aspect of knowledge, wisdom and prudence that escapes many leaders who in turn create self-serving and self-propagating structures to maintain their status without due regard for the people they lead.

Leadership is not a right, even if you are the incumbent.

One illustrates a number of instances of abuse of process and equity in maintaining a status of leadership.

African and Ex-Soviet Republic Leaders - Dictators to you and me

One particular trait one has observed is the tendency for elected leaders elected on a constitutional term of a number of years for a fixed length of time, manipulating the legislative process to modify the term duration and creating a "till death do us part" leadership pact very similar to a monarchy.

Examples of where this kind of leadership has benefited the people at large are exceptions rather than the rule - Azerbaijan.

Rather, these docile democratic fig-leaves metamorphosed into despotic tyrants, dictators, plundering their countries natural resources, polarising ethnic and religious differences for their own ends and suppressing every kind of dissent and illegally siphoning stolen moneys to foreign accounts.

Electing dictators

A Member of the Dictators' Club Speaks Up

List of African Dictators

Saddam Hussein is not the Scariest Dictator

The Dictatorship Game

Compendium of dictators and tyrants

American Gerrymandering - An electoral fraud long before elections

One horrible aspect of American democracy is the ability of legislature to redraw constituency boundaries to favour either party in power.

If the constituency boundaries were reconstructed to reasonable shapes and demographic factors, the process would have been above board.

Unlike the scrutiny foreign elections get subjected to during the polling and counting process. Gerrymandering or redistricting happens between elections, sanctioned by incumbent politicians stealing the vote long before it is cast.

Gerrymander

Another Gerrymander definition

A treatise on gerrymandering

Texan Democrats flee state

Corporate Governance

The last two decades has seen the rise and fall of the cult of the CEO - IBM's Watson, GE's Welch, Chrysler's Iacocca, Enron's Lay, the list is almost endless. However, another interesting drift to this is exemplified in Disney.

A Michael Eisner has been the head of Disney since 1984 and is credited with turning Disney into a major Fortune 500 company.

When he first started losing lieutenants, we almost always concurred that they were impatient in waiting for the prize. These lieutenants have moved on to greater things.

However, Mr Eisner seems to have the knack for losing these helpers, it is no more careless but catastrophic. In one week, two senior executives including a nephew of Walt Disney resigned and called for Eisner's resignation.

The danger is Mr Eisner might just have run out of Disney magic dust.

Disney's Eisner

The Not-So-Wonderful World of Disney

A Mickey Mouse Organisation

Unchallenged Incumbency would end eventually

Incumbency when ingratiated takes away the challenge of competing forces that compel the incumbents to perform and owe proper and due allegiance to the framework that placed them in that position of leadership.

The many examples of incumbency stifling innovation, resistant to change and reform exist in all aspects of human endeavour. It offers a negative but effective resistance to irrelevance by cutting off any objective assessment of its existence.

However, history shows that all sorts of incumbency have a shelf life due to expire at the behest of circumstance or a natural course of events.

Corporate inversion to produce excellence

Losing that Corporate umbrella

Having worked in a number of organisations, conglomerates and enterprises, one has seen the tyranny of pointless political battles, internal markets, Russian-doll-empires and departmental rivalries that beset all good intentions of the board of directors.

The Organisational Chart

The Organisational Chart, possibly created in that dreaded PowerPoint or this time Microsoft Visio (See earlier blog on PowerPoint), creates the fertile ground for the at times credible generalisations that:

• Working for the same organisation does not mean you gel as an organisation.
• Each departmental function is an unchallenged monopoly in that organisation.
• Collective responsibility of corporate goals is dispersed amongst departmental heads who work a double agenda of both trying to be efficient and the desire to succeed the incumbent corporate officers.
• Responsibility is aggressively acquired from other units for successes and promptly evaded and blamed on other units for failures.
• Employee value and talent is lost in the bean counting of cost-centre accountancy.

One is saying that the comfort of working under the umbrella of ABC Corporation is failing the corporation and stopping the corporation from evolving fast enough to respond to the change necessary for its profitability and survival.

The logic of proper outsourcing

Imagine your organisation being changed into something completely from what it is now. It now just consists of a board of directors with the ideas and capital for a particular venture.

• The facilities department becomes a facilities management firm competing in tenders to provide a block of offices and run all the facilities necessary for a corporate headquarters and the satellite offices.
• The legal department becomes a law firm providing legal advice to the company and any other companies needing that expertise for a fee.
• The personnel management department becomes combined talent resourcing and payroll management firm managing all Human Resourcing needs for a market that includes your organisation and the departments that have become firms.
• The finance department becomes a corporate finance advisory firm and facilitator for managing the board's capital interests in this venture.
• The IT department becomes a service provider of end-to-end IT services to the organisation and all the firms employed by the board for the organisation. The IT firm also competes on the open market.
• The marketing, sales and publicity departments become a PR firm with professional research and marketing facilities, holding a respectable PR budget.

This is the same organisation with a centralised core of the board with a clear set of goals, requirements and principles. Now, each firm competing on the open market to fulfil the requirements is faced with tougher choices to either perform or face extinction from competition.

The Organisational Chart is no more a hierarchy but a star with one reporting line between the office of the board of directors (the customer) and the firms that provide customer service. The complete inversion of corporate government.

The Board Expects

 For the fee the office of the board pays for each service they have acquired they should expect the following:

• Clearly set contract service levels and penalties for default.
• Professional customer service with performance metrics, which include bonuses for exceeding expectations.
• Well planned and organised project deliveries that cut the muster of competitive market scrutiny.
• Firm managements that can negotiate realistic timelines, costs, requirements and deliverables.
• Considerable improvements if the service contracted is provided or the option to renegotiate or fire the service company if they under perform.

The Firm

The firms face the continual test of if their service is worth paying for; they have to cost and value every negotiated settlement balancing the provision of service with staying competitive.

 This would do wonders for the erstwhile department in these ways:

• All resources that have survived for so long under the corporate setting but brought no value to the company would be exposed and offered severance terms.
• Projects properly researched before any negotiations begin and only within the resources available to service that project.
• Poor management within the firm would be under pressure to perform or depart.
• The level of service required or the firm would require skilled personnel on better remuneration to fulfil contracts signed.
• Market forces would compel the firms to adapt to trends more quickly.
• The organisational issues which plagued the larger organisation and were buried the weight of internal rivalries would have a smaller field of play, but its impact would be immediately felt and dealt with.

The individual

How this affects all the individuals involved depends if you are on the board to demand or in the firm to provide a service.

If on the board your question would be - If I had to pay for this kind of service from an external firm, what should I demand and expect?

If in the service firm, your question would be - Would one get away with giving this level of service if someone had to pay for it?

The Utopian Organisation

The mindset of the organisational entity is completely changed and that is outsourcing in Utopia, if only the world were a perfect place.