Emotional Turmoil

One of the products that I offer on my 360 degree feedback site is for assessing Emotional Intelligence at Work. Anyone who has read Daniel Goleman's book will know that the main behavioural competencies involved in Emotional Intelligence are Self Awareness, Managing Emotions, Self Motivation, Managing Relationships and Emotion Coaching.

I often get queries about profiling Emotinal Intelligence - but the most important aspect seems to be lost on most people. you cannot assess Emotional Intelligence in isolation. It is largely to do with the way that people interract with each other and so to make any meaningful assessment you have to include the observations of other people.

That's where 360 appraisal, also known as multi-rater feedback comes in. The subject of the assessment fills in their own profile and then the same set of questions is given to a number of observers who know the subject well. Then you compare the subject's self assessment with what the observers had to say.

That really is the only way...

Using 360 degree feedback to help appraisal and professional development

If you are looking for a tool to help your professional development and appraisal process you could do worse than look at my Appraisal360 system at www.appraisal360.co.uk. 360 degree feedback is a system that works well for encouraging teamwork, helping people to take ownership of their own development. It is also known as multi rater feedback and can be used to help assess emotional intelligence because it is based on observations of people's real life behaviour.

Here's a copy of the sitemap.
Home: 360 degree feedback as part of the appraisal process (1)
How the Appraisal360 system works (24)
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Tell a friend about Appraisal360 (28)
Appraisal360 packages and pricing (36)
The 360 appraisal process (37)
Contact Appraisal360 (42)
Management competency frameworks for 360 appraisal (47)
360 feedback as an equality and diversity tool (49)
Emotional Intelligence (50)
360 degree appraisal partner solutions (52)
Appraisal360 download area (53)
Register as an Appraisal360 affiliate (59)
Emotional Intelligence Homepage (66)
360 feedback enterprise solutions (67)
360 degree appraisal systems for employers and managers (68)
360 degree feedback system for individuals (70)
Gail Machin: 360 feedback case study (71)
Running a 360 appraisal project (72)
Links: directories (79)
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Appraisal360 QuickStart guide (81)
Win a free prize with your 360 degree appraisal (83)
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Nuclear standoff

When Patrick and I decided to measure the power that household appliances drew on standby, an hour's investigation turned out to be very instructive .

The standby power of the TV was a staggering 74 watts - enough to light the whole house using energy saving bulbs. And the common myth that leaving flourescent lights on rather than turning them off and on saves electricity proved to be a complete fallacy. The startup surge of a flourescent lamp amounts to only a few seconds worth of run-time consumption.

Anyone who thinks that building a new generation of nuclear power plants to supply a nation of incandescent bulbs and equipment left on standby has clearly lost the plot.

Dr Strangelove rides his nuke

The news that Tony Blair has been in secret talks with Bush about siting nukes on British soil again rather reminds me of the closing scene in Dr Strangelove where a crazed Dr Strangelove wearing a cowboy hat, having evaded all attempts to rein him in, is seen riding his nuke out of the bomb bay towards a waiting Russian capital wired for automatic retaliation.

The chilling prospect of Bush starting a new Cold War indicates stupidity evolving into insanity. The fact that our political system does not immediately annilate such an extreme fuckwit shows the mindnumbing extent of CBA (Can't Be Arsed) amongst the populus and the deeply flawed nature of the democratic system - which assumes that the population actually take an interest in what is going on.

So: what's the difference between a Labour MP and a supermarket trolley? Answer: The supermarket trolley has a mind of its own. I'm not suggesting that other MPs are any different of course, but the way that they still support Blair after the events of the last few years - even before Iraq and the dodgy dossier - obliterates the boundary between loyalty and stupidity beyond intelligent comment.

The prospect of having billions of my tax payers money spent on hi-tech toys of mass destruction at the whim of unarguably the most stupid man ever to occupy the Whitehouse makes my blood boil. Save the money. Build a European Supergrid instead so we can start to use all the sunshine that falls free of charge on the deserts of North Africa.

Ever heard of a zero cost solution? Ban the sale of incandescent bulbs and scrap the next generation of nuclear powerstations: because you won't need them any more.

Of course - invest in nukes and there's a small chance that we might wipe out life on earth. Do nothing and there's a virtual certainty that life on Earth won't survive the next century.

My Blair can safely be ignored - he's on the way out. Great British Public - take your pick.

Carbon is the new Gold

Some of you may be old enough to remember the Gold Standard. I'm not, but yesterday a comment from a reader got me thinking.

It's becoming increasingly apparent to me that future energy policy - and indeed the total solution to regulating carbon emissions - will require a global emissions trading scheme.

I'm sure I'm not the first person to have noticed that trading carbon emissions is much like trading any other commodity. You need a market, a mechanism for establishing futures, a means of setting interests rates and prices. Carbon savings now are worth more than carbon savings in the future - and so on. Hmmmm... now where have we seen all that before?

But two things make carbon emissions different: they are a truly global commodity and the total emissions worldwide have to be tightly regulated - in fact, much like the way a Central Bank regulates a currency. Carbon emissions will have a monetary value - the same the world over, so how long before the value of our currencies is defined against the Carbon Standard?

If there are any money men reading this, give me a call....

Google - are you listening

There are a lot of people out there who want to know all about my 360 degree feedback service at appraisal360.co.uk. But your spider is taking rather a long time to look at the sitemap which can be found at www.appraisal360.co.uk/-54 so can you send your robot round please?

Strewth!!!

This morning's announcement by the Australian government that they will be banning the sale of incandescent lightbulbs by 2010 is an interesting development.

Commentators have been suggesting for a while now that the incandescent bulb will be extinct within ten years. And regular readers will recall that when I changed every lightbulb in the house to a low enegy type the household electricity consumption dropped by a staggering 30% and an article in today's Independent suggests that this is typical.

But the Australian conversion is interesting because Australia is on of the few developed countries other than the United States to have refused to sign up to Kyoto on the grounds that it would damage their coal based electricity industry too much. Strange that, when you consider that Australia is one of the sunniest countries in the world and that the scope for solar power generation using CSP (Concentrated Solar Power) technology must be huge.

So is it too much to hope that the recently awakened Australian government will follow their lead in becoming the first major economy to outlaw incandescent bulbs by phasing out their coal fired power stations in favour of cheap, clean, plentiful, everlasting power from the sun?

Now the light is really starting to go on.... Strewth Bruce!!

Nukes again

I felt somewhat reassured when Greenpeace managed to force a rethink of the government's decision to push ahead with a new nuclear power programme. The reality is that there is enough renewable energy around to power the world many times over and at a fraction of the price of a nuclear programme that will only ever supply a fraction of the electricity that the world needs.

But to my surprise - this Sunday's Grauniad carried an article by James Lovelock (creator of the Gaia theory) in favour of nuclear power. His premise is that nuclear is the only way of generating sufficient power quickly enough to avert a total disaster. He may have a point - but strange because nuclear is in itself not a renewable energy source, and ramping up the nuclear programme will take some considerable time. Not least because the number of trained and experienced nuclear engineeers has been run down considerably in recent years.

Renewable energy protagonists take the view that a nuclear programme will reduce the resources put into the real long term solution.

However, here Lovelock and the renewable energy guys see eye to eye. Long term nuclear is not the answer - renewables are the only way, and for that we should be optimistic. Clean renewable energy to power the world hundreds of times over. Why didn't we think of it before?

Chavs in suits

This morning I was at another dreary business breakfast. Full of grey men in grey suits - supposedly the good and the great of Stoke on Trent. God help us.

It wasn't long before the sprinkling of snow that had brought the nation to a halt turned the conversation to global warming. "They won't do anything about it ho-ho-ho" went the grey coffin dodger on the other side of the table. Resisting the templation to lunge across the table and grab him warmly by the throat I pointed out that we were now committed to a level of climate change that would wipe out around a third of the world's population within about a hundred years. "But we don't know if it's caused by human activity." I thought that there was only one idiot left on the face of the planet who still believed that rubbish. And he's imprisoned in the Whitehouse. "Oh, but we've still got to have growth."

Presumably the enlightened long term outlook of this particular grey gentleman says something about the current predicament of Stoke on Trent. Perhaps he doesn't have any children or grandchildren - either that or he's too dense to see that the things we are talking about are impending during their lifetime. That he is condemning them to live in a world torn by conflict and strife - or that they will pay many times over every time he turns the key in his Jag or whatever it is.

To be blunt I struggle to tell the difference between people who carry on like this in the full knowledge of the impact of their actions and those who open the taps on the gas chamber. The result is the same, just maybe it's a bit easier to pretend that the link doesn't exist.

It would be nice to think that those fortunate enough to live in parts of the world that are likely to get through this are those wise and forward looking. That those destined to have their lands turn into deserts or floods will be the ones we can do without. Maybe we should have passports issued on merit - but somehow I don't think it's going to happen that way.

Many of our biodiesel customers are simple folk. Taxi drivers, van drivers, but concerned enough to see that they can play their part. They recognise that they owe it to their children and they deserve their place in the future of the planet. But many of the great and the good of Stoke on Trent, it seems, are just chavs in suits.

As reliable as a VolksWagen

Some of you may remember a particular VW advert on the telly. A young woman comes out of her mews townhouse in an obvious fit of high maintenance stroppery. She takes off her engagement ring and throws it down the gutter. Ditto with the house keys. Then comes the car keys. She stops and looks at them. She smiles and gets into her conveniently parked VW Golf. "If only everything was as reliable as a Volkswagen" cries the ad smuggly.

Indeed - if only everything was as reliable as a Volkswagen. It was a bad omen from the start when I bought my Golf 2.0 TDI. Even before I hit the road I emailed the salesman with some information he needed. When I heard nothing I rang him up: "Our email isn't working." He seemed a bit shocked when I asked him if his cars were any better - but thus history has proven.

I've lost count of thie number of times the car has had to spend a day off the road to be fixed under warranty. The most expensive was to replace the turbo which died on the M6Toll. Rear wash/wipe, the throttle position sensor, the fuel pump (which died on the way into town leaving me stranded at the side of the road), the turbo seals (apparently they were leaking oil) and today the foglight switch gave up the ghost. It's got to the stage that every time the car seems to falter or sound a little different I'm worried that it's going to die yet again. When the AA man towed me in I said to him "The most unreliable car I've ever, ever had - does that sound right?" He nodded. But then maybe "Worst cars on the road" was his sympathetic response to every driver he rescued from the roadside.

That said it's still a lovely car, just unreliable - maybe it's a woman!