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Learning to Paint – Untitled

I was just goofing around with blue and violet and thinking about China and about cameras and about movement. An odd combination of thoughts for sure – and it produced this. Watercolour and pencil on an A5 sheet of 300 gsm water colour paper.

I was just goofing around with blue and violet and thinking about China and about cameras and about movement. An odd combination of thoughts for sure – and it produced this. Watercolour and pencil on an A5 sheet of 300 gsm water colour paper.

Untitled

Positively Psyched

Happy Monday y’all. Seeing as how today is not many folks fave day of the week I thought I’d kick things off on some positive notes to help get you in your stride.

MeetMeMe

I recently had a great customer experience courtesy of MeetMeMe. I found out about these unusual business cards after seeing a post on Facebook by Dawn Hrdlica Burke about them. I went to order a pack and they are US shipment only. I dropped them a nice note to say how cool I thought their product was and they kindly agreed to ship me some. Sweeeeeeet!

We’re going one step further and offering five sets of cards as give aways over at our Facebook page. All you have to do is head over there, give us a like and then get ready to be quick off the mark around 2pm on Thursday 19th July to nab yourself a pack of your own MeetMeMe trading cards.

Sukh Pabial

Sukh is on an adventure. A step on that adventurous journey is his Positive Psychology in Application event in London on Friday August 17th. You can find out more about the event here and I’m pleased to let you know that we have two tickets to give away. All you have to do is add a comment to this post asking for a ticket and if you are the first or second person to do so – bingo! I’ll then put you in touch with Sukh and you can take it from there.

John Junson

John is the network cartoonist and designer over at David Zinger’s Employee Engagement Network. He created the design and colours for the network. He created our unique symbol/brand. He designed all the free e-books. He has been involved in this work before it went online over four years ago. His birthday is July 21 and we want to see if we can have the community at 5000 members for his birthday.

Please help. If you have not joined, join today. I’ve been a member for a few years and enjoyed lots of useful learning and sharing, and membership is free.

To join the network, click here.

So there you have it – three positives to kick off your week. Happy Monday!

Turning a Blind Eye

Blind Eye

When is it OK to ignore the elephant in the room? At what point should we acknowledge ‘I can’t cope’, or ‘dammit I’ve screwed up here’, and take action or make that call for help?

The security firm G4S are splashed all across the news here in the UK after seemingly goofing up the security recruitment and training plans for the Olympics. It’s not a minor slip, they are thousands of people short of their targets. In March 2011 G4S won a £284m contract to provide 13,700 guards, but only has 4,000 in place. It says a further 9,000 are in the pipeline. G4s revealed this two days ago, with just two weeks to go before the start of the biggest world sporting event, and yet as recently as May 2012 G4S was riding high as winner of Best Global Recruitment Strategy award at the Recruiter’s Awards for Excellence.

I expect this goof up will cost G4S dearly (although bizarrely there is no penalty clause for failure within the contract itself), but at least it serves as a powerful reminder to the rest of us. Too often in the workplace we wait for someone else to take a lead, or assume it’s someone else’s responsibility.

When you think something’s going badly wrong, whether it be malpractice, bullying, or just good old fashioned human error, take courage and say something.

painting credit

Update:

The plot thickens. Since I wrote this post it has emerged that the UK Government were warned about difficulties with the recruiting process ten months ago. The warnings came from Her Majesty’s Inspectorate of Constabulary, not the security company itself. So now the UK Government is under pressure to explain why it didn’t take the matter further. Much pointing of fingers is currently going on.