Giving blood

I am a huge fan of the NHS, and as learnt from my dad, giving blood is really important to me.  Few things made me as proud (and restores your faith in our country) as during the bombing of 7/7 queues of ordinary London folk outside hospital's waiting to give blood.

Anyway enough of me rambling on, having given blood 2 weeks ago, I got this text from the National Blood and Transplant service :

Pretty cool I reckon, its obvious that they would have an amazing inventory and tracking system, but to the feedback that mine has been used, is not only cool, but really incentivises me to make sure I'm booked in again - nice work whoever thought that up !

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GE boss on culture, coding and staff evaluations

Interesting from GE, a couple of statements just out :

" Which brings me to how we will get there - our culture. We may be a century-old company, but we need to move quickly, take risks, fail fast and behave like a startup to keep winning. I joined GE 34 years ago, and until recently our management could make every decision in the headquarters. Those days are over.  We have to embrace decentralization and use technology to help our people to stay connected and allow more automated decision-making so you can look at an app and see what’s going on inside the company.

But culture is not just apps. It's a combination of people and technology. If you are joining the company in your 20s, unlike when I joined, you’re going to learn to code. It doesn’t matter whether you are in sales, finance or operations. You may not end up being a programmer, but you will know how to code. We are also changing the plumbing inside the company to connect everyone and make the culture change possible. This is existential and we’re committed to this."

"We are also changing the way we evaluate our people. We’re trying to end anything that was annual or quarterly and make everything more real-time. We wanted to make the feedback process more like how we give each other advice in the real world. Instead of an annual review, we have an app PD @ GE where our people are getting continuous insights from their colleagues that they can use to get better every day."

GE is an interesting company, the few people that I know who have worked there, all rave about the culture, and what a great company to work for they, and that always amazes me for big companies to get that right.  They are also making a big push on digital, setting up a digital business unit, and it's interesting to see them continue to talk about culture, and I like the fact they are moving away from annual reviews (fast feedback is key), and that everyone will be trained to code.


full article here : https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/why-ge-giving-up-employee-ratings-abandoning-annual-reviews-immelt

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Dan TDM - who knew

my kids are 12 and soon to be 10, so as we head into the teenage years, my wife and I are expecting less and less conversation and more and more grunts and general huffing (Kevin the teenager behaviour).

However for a couple of hours last night, they were the most animated I've seen them in a long time.  The reason - Dan TDM was in town.  Dan is a Vlogger, who mostly creates videos about Minecraft.  Over the last 5 years Dan has amassed over 11 million subscribers to his Youtube channel.  This is a staggering number in anyone's book.

What really caught me off guard (apart from how excited about seeing him live the kids were) was just the general level of celebrity endowed upon Dan and his wife Gemma.  He seems like a nice enough bloke, and the kids loved the show as you can see from the photo...!

In the cold light of day this morning I looked at who the biggest Vloggers are in the UK.  What's very interesting is that the top 5 is :

1. One direction
2. KSI
3. Adele 
4. Dan TDM
5. Zoella

this makes Dan the biggest Youtuber that's not a musician, which is pretty phenomenal when you think about it.

Certain amount of dad kudos (in short supply these days) was Dan liking our tweet...!

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