Yes, it may be frantic now as we try to finish up all those things we promised we would have done ‘by the end of the year’, but soon it will be Christmas and, hopefully, we can relax and catch up on reading more, as we also promised ourselves, but didn’t get done.
If this sounds like you, may I recommend a book that will have you laughing as well as learning? In “Corporate Punishment”, James Adonis, takes apart 38 of the most common – and most annoying – business clichés, such as ’employees are our greatest asset’, ‘think outside the box’, ‘pick the low hanging fruit’, and the ever-present but abysmally misleading ‘what gets measured, gets done’. At the very least, you will avoid the embarrassment of using them yourself.
The cleverness of the cover illustration encouraged me to pick this up and start reading and after that, the author kept me going until the very last page. I don’t know about you, but it is the rare book I read right through to the end nowadays, so this is a rare recommendation.
AM Clichés?
Reading these general business clichés reminded me that we have our own in asset management – perhaps the leading one being ‘there are no votes in maintenance’. If there were a book of AM Clichés, what clichés would you suggest should be included?
‘The data is bad’……… the most common excuse for inaction.
Thanks John, yes, indeed. Our data is never as good as we would like but it is not an excuse for inaction. I once thought of my own work as ‘making the best use of poor data’ At the time I would say that I doubted that I would ever go out of business – I reckon this is still true today – despite our addiction to data gathering.
There is also another cliché that you suggested in an earlier comment, namely that AM is just maintenance under a new name. I am sure we have lots of these assumptions, tossed off without consideration.
Thanks Penny I’ll look out for it.