Targeting failure

Not getting off the ground

Sitting in an airport, waiting for a delayed flight is annoying. When that delay reaches six hours, you'll probably be finding it harder to pass the time.

But our airline pulled a masterstroke on this occasion. All five subsequent, hourly flights to the same destination departed on time.

Rather than shifting the passengers and relabelling the planes - giving each a one hour delay - they had decided to hand out the full delay to one group. Their maths had shown that one plane-load delayed by six hours was better than six plane-loads delayed by one.

Thank you, American Airlines.

Presumably they have targets, under which 16% delayed (for a long time, but who cares about that detail?) is better than 100% delayed (a little).

Targets in business can be useful, helpful and appropriate. But, in the hands of idiots, can lead to unwanted outcomes. If the targets are daft but the incentives high, managers will act against what should be their better judgement in order to score a higher mark - and secure their bonus.

(Personally, I'll avoid flying with American Airlines again. Sure, they gave me some loyalty-card points by way of an apology. The points expired unused.)

No longer an emergency

Not so long ago, accident and emergency departments at British hospitals were given a target of 'dealing with' (my words) people within four hours of their arrival.

This sounds eminently sensible, until you consider what happens once the target has been missed. When the punter reaches four hours and one minute, the target has been missed. The statistics won't look as healthy.

But now there's no hurry. That person's deadline (as it were) has been missed. It's either hit or missed and it's been missed. On the charts, graphs, executive summaries and board member's appraisals it makes no difference whatsoever if that guy is seen in the next five minutes or not for the next five years.

It may be better to forget about them for a while and clear the room of the other guys who haven't hit the magic four hours yet. With any luck, his problem will clear up of its own accord and he'll just leave. (Or maybe call for an ambulance so he can try his luck somewhere else.)

Fortunately, medical staff are not that stupid, callous and/or evil. Maybe better hope no airline executives move over to the healthcare sector.

Being smart

There is a management trope that targets should be 'SMART' which, as I'm sure you're delighted to hear, is an acronym for specific, measurable, attainable, realistic and timely.

It all sounds good until you notice that it's assumed that the target will be sensible and will lead to the whole enterprise improving, advancing, making more money, etc, etc.

This is so obvious that the management gurus haven't even felt the need to mention it. No, not even in passing.

That might need a rethink. Set yourself a target to have it done urgently.

your work read like it was second draft, not polish

It's both very easy and spectacularly pointless to mock, ridicule or otherwise reject well-intentioned feedback.

Take the title of this blog post. I could attempt a weak joke by saying that I wasn't writing in Polish and they'd forgotten the capital letter. Or I could accept it's a linguistic shorthand and move on.

However, the detail this person provided showed that their bugbear was entirely to do with my style of punctuation. And specifically the fact that I punctuate like I'm English while they prefer it American-style. And that's not an error, any more than if I criticised them for spelling 'colour' wrongly.

And I pointed that out and we agreed to disagree and moved on. It was friendly and well-intentioned and I appreciate that this person clearly had enough interest in what I was writing to try to help.

But...

I admit it. I have a chip on my shoulder. The chip is something along the lines of... "people think self-published books will be full of spelling mistakes, grammatical mistakes, punctuation mistakes, hideous sentences, woeful paragraphs, lumpy stories, implausible characters and predictable plots - all lurking behind garish amateurish covers". Not that anyone would judge a book by its cover, of course.

That's not why I look for errors in 'conventionally' published books. But it's good to have some ammunition to show that everyone makes mistakes. And, unless you're an obsessive, the mistakes don't matter. Great books can transcend a printer's mistake but fabulous typography can't rescue a clanger.

Dave Gorman

I like Dave Gorman. (Not personally, you understand - but I like to think that's only because I haven't met him so I have no opinion about whether or not I'd like him in person.)

I like his performance-persona and I like his writing style. I like the subjects that he covers (except America Unchained, but that still gives a very high hit rate).

I'm reading 'Too Much Information' and I've found two errors. One glaring, one slightly less glaring. Page 47 - "greatest gits album". Page 51 - "three that didn't chart at all" (it's actually two).

I wonder how that happened. I can think of three scenarios.

1. Dave typed the manuscript, made a slight slip and no one spotted or corrected it (despite the best efforts of professional publishing industry blah blah blah)
2. Dave typed the manuscript correctly but, during the editing process or the pre-publish formatting process, someone else introduced the howlers which were then not spotted as above
3. Dave bangs out some stream of consciousness stuff which then has to be thrashed into book-shape by a team of minions who introduced the errors (as above)

I don't think it's number 3.

(There is the fourth possibility that they are both intended as jokes. I don't think "greatest gits album" is a joke of Dave's normal high standard. And using the number three instead of two isn't normally going to be funny and certainly isn't in this case.)

Either way, nobody's perfect and it is excruciatingly difficult to get every error out of a book once it has more than a few hundred words in it.

And that's whether you write, edit, format and publish it yourself (like what I do) or use the mighty forces of the Ebury Press, an imprint of Ebury Publishing - A Random House Group company.

Danny Wallace

Danny Wallace used to write with Dave Gorman. (And I like him too - as above.)

His book "Hamish and the Worldstoppers" has just been published. I haven't read it but, judging from the blurb, it includes the premise that the world can freeze, time can stop and then things can happen which most people won't be aware of, except the special character, who I'm guessing is called Hamish.

Sounds great. No, really. I wish him well - because I like him (see above). But I wrote Timestand five years ago which features a character who can freeze the world by stopping time so he can do things that most people won't be aware of.

Clearly I didn't copy him. And, equally obviously, he didn't copy me. But it's an interesting coincidence. Maybe if Danny shows that there's a market for these sorts of stories, I might get a few sales off the back of it. I'm not proud. I'll ride on coat-tails...


P.S. In keeping with the general theme of this post, there might be a prize awarded to the first person to spot a typo anywhere in this article.