Libre Draw: A Good Alternative to Microsoft Visio for Most People Many years ago I read that for any product or service, you can have any two of Cheap, Fast and Good. This sits nicely alongside another saying “buy cheap, buy twice”, something I learned the hard way when racing powerful superbikes round my local […]
Steady Eddy and Edwina: The Hidden power behind your business
This post is based on an article I wrote for the 2022 Q4 edition of the Institute of Water magazine Who makes your business really perform, day in and day out, just simply making the right things happen at the right time in the right way? Your Rising Stars? Or perhaps your graduate trainees? Or […]
From Dropout to Director and Beyond
This post is based on an article I wrote for the 2022 Q3 edition of the Institute of Water magazine My story I was inspired to write this article by the quote, attributed by some to Jane Austen: “It’s never too late to be what you could have been”. This might seem strange given that […]
Water: How Should we value it?
A clue: It’s more than just counting the money This post is based on an article I wrote for the Q3 edition of the Institute of Water magazine The ideal There is increasing awareness that clean drinking water and good sanitation has a far greater value than the simple economic returns it offers to water […]
Title: Are your people technical enough?
This post is based on an article I wrote for the 2021 Q1 edition of the Institute of Water magazine When I was doing my A levels, Chemistry, Physics and Pure Maths, I had to know and be able to answer questions about electronic orbitals configurations and the order they were filled in, the equations […]
Building the great future that you want
It’s the gift that keeps giving Organisations need high-performing employees and high performing employees want satisfying jobs. In this piece I will discuss how what I learned from racing superbikes can help both get what they want. My early career with Anglian Water was not great, my youthful self-confidence running into organisational inertia and coming […]
Disinfection: Improving the odds
Abstract As operational scientists the authors know well from experience that apparently well-run treatment works can have the occasional coliform failure but all the resamples are compliant. This paper explores why, in the authors’ opinion, this is a consequence of the underpinning disinfection kinetics and two major operational factors, pH and actual retention times. In […]
TEE-Shaped Learning – The gift that keeps giving
This post is based on an article I wrote for the Q3 edition of the Institute of Water magazine Background Over the last ten years I’ve done a fair bit of interim management, doing nominally full-time roles on a three-day a week contract. And, yes, I had days off, worked on other projects and had […]
Money Laundering, without getting arrested
I’m sorry if you have arrived here expecting to find ways of recycling some ill-gotten gains. You will have to look elsewhere This post is about something a little more useful to most of the population: how to keep your coins clean and COVID-free with the minimum of fuss. Yes, i know about contactless payments […]
Gifts that keep giving
Repositioning a curtain rail the other day, it struck me that most of the tools I was using were many years old. Everything was at least five years old, and the drill was, at over 40, the granddaddy. The tools are an example of Gifts That Keep Giving. Originally used as an advertising slogan in […]