The dark (or milk) side

Chocolate - a consuming passion
chocolate: a consuming passion?
So it isn't programmed it was genetically, but it is the next best thing – we can't help our addiction to chocolate!
I don't know why this has come to the surface just now (work was published in 2007, but it appeared in my Google News feed this morning) but here's a piece of research that shows we develop cravings for chocolate because of bacteria in our gut.
http://dsc.discovery.com/news/2007/10/12/chocolate-craving-hea.html?category=health&guid=20071012140000&dcitc=w19-506-ak-0004
it opens up the possibility that bacteria may be responsible for other cravings as well –I heard somewhere that an aversion therapy for alcoholics is to place microbes in their gut that cause them to be violently sick in the presence of alcohol, and perhaps something that is the "full"responseat an earlier stage will work for people with eating disorders?
Incidentally, that first quote above: 

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PwC Report on the Current State of Project Management

PwC Project Management ReportPwC found that successful companies are getting more mature in their project management ability.  This raises the game – successful companies have lower costs from fewer failed projects, and less successful companies have to work harder to catch up.  There are some important lessons to take this report for everyone – Read more…

Joy instead of tedium

The Office

Every office has them - the tasks that have to be done that nobody likes doing.  Whether it's the audit, the wages, standard letters, whatever it is - someone has to do it and it feels like a waste of time and money.

Why should you care?

So you employ somebody, so why do you care about how tedious the task is? Well they are costing money, to do something that could be done far more effectively.

Learning from the Past

Evidence for service improvement

Many public service changes have little basis in evidence. Their success (or otherwise) does not appear to depend on how 'good' the policy itself is, but rather on how it has been implemented. This relies on staff attitudes and relationships. My research falls into a number of broad categories: finding out what is currently happening; what people think about it; and what people think it will mean.

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Consumer Price Index (CPI) Calculator for SROI

CPI components

When calculating a Social Return on Investment (SROI) evaluation or SROI forecast , sometimes you have to rely on published figures from reports.  But if these are from a few years ago, then they probably need adjusting for inflation.

There are calculators on the web to do this for you, but I found them cumbersome and it was difficult to keep a record of what calculator I'd used, and how, for which value - auditability and transparency is vital for SROI.  So here's a spreadsheet to do this properly!

Leadership and Margaret Thatcher

Margaret Thatcher - a greta leader?

Leadership is one of those characteristics that most people recognise, some people claim, and nobody manages to explain.

We can identify the great leaders from the past and present, and talk about their characteristics, but it is too easy to overlook the hundreds of thousands of people who claimed to be leaders or tried to be leaders, and who shared these characteristics.  We need to identify what the great leaders have that the failures or mediocre leaders don’t have, or we will be no nearer to identifying the characteristics of leadership.