© The Walt Disney Company
Appealing though it might be to be a secret hero*, like Fedora Perry – cool hat! – even this misunderstands platypuses. The internet has plenty of cute images of things that are labelled platypuses but aren’t.
In particular, many cartoons (like Perry) show them with a beaver tail*. They are sort of like an Australian beaver, so we assume they look like them. Even the robot platypus has a beaver tail. But platypuses have furry tails.
Once someone put a beaver tail on a platypus, it was easier for people to copy than check a photo of a real platypus*.
And I guess they were the inspiration for Fantastic Beast the niffler – and now nifflers show up in seaches for platypus images.
And since almost no-one has ever seen a baby platypus*, fake pictures circulate (and there’s a furious debate about what they are even called).
Yes, platypuses are widely misunderstood, when people have even heard of them.
What does a good infrastructure Asset Manager really do*?
*Hint: not a lone hero, not a construction engineer, not necessarily what people think, and they don’t spring fully formed from college…
In writing Building an Asset Management Team, Lou Cripps and I looked at the skills an effective Asset Management team requires – both technical and business understanding, good grasp of front-line experience, both system and structured thinking, a longer term perspective, emotional intelligence and communication skills, embracing uncertainty and the tools to think about risk, integrity, and enough leadership ability to get others to buy into a new way of working.
Good infrastructure Asset Management requires a tricky combination of attributes.
Lou came up with the image of the platypus, that is very rare and not to be found on most continents.
Instead of searching for an amphibious, duck-billed, otter-footed, egg-laying, venomous mammal that locates prey through electroreception, it’s easier to provide all the qualities we need through a complementary team.
But we still love platypuses. Watch out for more of them in the next ten days!
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