Tag: Life

Spring Reflections: Communication

The season is one of mild rain and occasional storms. Seeds that have been lying dormant now get their chance to germinate. To enter the struggle for life as they compete with their surroundings. Leaves emerge, they twist and turn to channel the energy of the Sun. It’s Spring. A time for new beginnings. Longer days. Shorter nights.

UK Government Ministers are often their own worse enemies. These are smart people. Yes, I say that with no sense of irony. If they have fought their way up the greasy pole of a political career, they are not the numskulls that it’s soothing to think that they are. Well, there are naturally exceptions. God only knows why Liz Truss became Prime Minister of this great country.

Amongst the skills that are mandatory in the role of Minister, communications is surely one of them, if not the most important. Because if a Minister can’t communicate what they are doing the chances are that they will not be in a job for long. The cacophony of noise that pervades the everyday media will distort all but the clearest messages.

Let’s say there’s a 5-minute slot available on the national media to address a matter of public concern. There’s a massive pile of matters of public concern. It’s wise to stick to the ones that the individual has a modicum of knowledge about or at least has recently been briefed.

My instinct would be to us a tried and tested formula for public communications. It goes like this – tell them what you are going to say, tell them, and then tell them what you have told them. Doing this focused on one key point. Not wandering off onto tangential subjects and getting sidetracked. I know this is easier said than done. An interviewer, worth their salt, will want to extract as much new information as possible. They will be driven by the common journalist’s creed. The instinct that the greatest accolade is to get a “scoop.”

What happens, if this morning is anything to go by, is a jumble of slogans come out in an almost involuntary way. The speed of speaking increases as the clock ticks away the precious minutes. Then phases, probably implanted by civil servants, pops out of the conversation. Jargon terms like, implied wholesale element, third party intermediaries, or qualifying financially disadvantaged customers. These will mystify the listener unless they have already read chapter and verse of the subject the Minister is talking about.

As the interview progresses then Ministers become parodies of themselves. I’m sure they walk away from their media interviews with the voices inside their heads saying, I should have stuck to the script. Why didn’t I – keep it simple.

There’s a resort to catch phrases that seems irresistible too. It’s one thing to say that a government is working at pace but what on earth does that mean? The alternative would be to be sitting on one’s backside waiting for something to happen.

There’s also the pretence that an action is taking place immediately. Fixes are happening now. I think most listeners are mature enough to know that doing things takes time and resources. So, being evasive about an action that will take place in April next year, as opposed to now, sounds shabbily. Switching to a defensive mode is never a clever way to win over supporters.

It’s Spring. A time for new beginnings. It should be a time to elevate people’s spirits. The prospect of summer and the shaking off a dull dark winter is reason enough to be optimistic. Someone needs to tell government.

Email Overload

So called snail-mail is in an inevitable decline. One day it will be necessary to explain the concept of an envelope, and what it’s for, to younger people. To write, with a handheld pen, place a piece of paper inside an adequately formed folded paper enclosure and sealing it. This may involve moistening a surface or removing a strip of paper. To take account of the costs associated with this procedure a small, preprinted paper stamp is attached to one corner of the enclosure. The enclosure must meet regulations to then be accepted by a carrier who will take it from a bright red box. This artifact, called a “letter” is then piled up with lots of others to eventually be sorted and directed towards a specified destination. If the process is successful, a recipient may then destroy the envelope and read the letter.

When spelt out like so, it’s no wonder that e-mail has taken over the world. After centuries of operation the popular paper-based means of communication is now a novelty. Classical mail hangs on mostly as a means of getting birthday cards, and other celebratory cards, from A to B.

Even ardent official users, like the taxman, a trying to entice us all to become paperless. Major banks are also exhibiting this aversion to paper. Often more for their convenience rather than ours as their administrative systems become exclusively digital.

There’s a universal aspect that’s shared by the old world and the new world. It’s one that’s almost impossible to shake off. Filter it as we may, the piling up of junk mail is as bad on the doorstep as it is in the in-box. Junk splits into a whole series of categories. Putting aside the malicious and criminal variety, there’s a mass of mail that’s devoted to sales and marketing. I’ve ranted about this bombardment before, even if it makes no difference. The likes of:

“We are always looking to improve your experience with us, and we invite you to give your feedback in this short survey.”

Breaking this e-mail request down, it proports to be to my advantage to spend time answering the sender’s questions. Obviously, it’s to the questioner’s advantage and not mine. To sweeten the pill there’s a chance to win a small prize. Probably with odds set at a billion to one.

If this experience was occasional and advantageous to me, complaining might not be the right way to go. Sadly, the reality is the stream of e-mails, from multiple services, gets so annoying that I wish these tedious e-mails were paper. Then at least my recycling bin would benefit.

My approach is to instantly delete these e-mails. I’m sure that I’m not alone in this one. Customer feedback can go and take a hike. Naturally, I want the coffee shop I regularly use and my main bank to improve their services. But if these organisations think this is the way to do it, I think they have a big hole in their thinking.

Yes, if quick enough, it’s possible to opt in or out of marketing communications but endless feedback surveys seem to be exempt. They are the confetti of the marketing world.

“How did we do?” Is ticking a box really going to provide an answer to that question? “Thanks for your time” Nice, but as insincere as an algorithm can be.

Some forward-thinking organisations may eventually eliminate junk mail. In time there must be a better way of interacting. It’s about time they hurried up.

Generational Differences

I believe the Scottish word for it is – Dreich. With that spelling it almost sounds German. I’d pronounce it as dreek. What this means is the weather is dull, damp, gloomy, and miserable. Overcast, wintery, with intermittent drizzle and rain never seeming to give up. Couldn’t be a better word to describe it – Dreich.

That was yesterday. There’s a good chance that today will be the same. Not unusual for February. That said, the cumulative impact is that the ground water is rising and the rivers are topped right up to the brim. That rock hard, dusty, tinder dry summer of last year is as if it was a million years ago. What water shortage?

Outside the bird life is flourishing in these damp conditions. I saw a large white Egret was doing a morning stroll oblivious to the drizzle. Up top a tall dead tree a Cormorant was surveying its territory. Ducks are playfully buzzing around the river’s edge. The Canadian Geese are doing what they do every day. Foraging for anything of interest.

It does not good to complain about this uninspiring weather. Although it’s a cultural phenomenon, the weather is the biggest sources of small talk in this country. “You’re not made of sugar, get out there and do something”. I maybe miss remembering these parental words. It’s clear that mulling around indoors and constantly whining isn’t a good formula for mental health.

Add to the gloom and despondency the daily dose of British politics. So many of us had hoped that replacing one group of deafening incompetent politicians with a duller set would mean that stuff gets done. The boring, but necessary, tasks of governing would be accomplished without endless calamities. Faint hope.

For lunch, to escape the incessant rain, I sat down in a coffee shop. The place was busy. Everyone coming in to get out of the rain. Shaking off umbrellas and drying out raincoats. I had to look around to find a comfortable place to sit. Near the entrance. Next to me were an older couple and their granddaughter. It’s impossible not to earwig in such situations. We exchanged a couple of polite smiles.

Here I recount what fascinated me about the generational gap. The young girl didn’t put her mobile phone down once, in so far as I could see. It was clear from the conversation that she was not allowed to use her mobile at school. Phones were confiscated. If my observation indicates anything, it’s that banning phones just mean more mobile phone use when the opportunity presents itself.

Politics reared its head in their conversation. The granddaughter was monosyllabic about the subject. Maybe it was one she studies at school. She carried on scrolling. Unsolicited grandfatherly advice came across the table. To paraphrase – You should watch that man Jacob Rees-Mogg on GB News. He speaks very good English. He makes a lot of sense. The young girl carried on scrolling.

Oh brother! There’s a generational gap summary in a couple of rainy-day minutes.

I had one grandfather on my mum’s side. On my dad’s side my grandfather died relatively young. Both were West Country farmers. The grandfatherly advice I got was more to do with hard work. Not so much to do with politics. That is except for amusement about the hippies that turned up at the village of Pilton every year. That became the Glastonbury festival. Given that my grandfather had experience of the First World War, that must have been quite a contrast.

Influences on Well-Being

How life has changed. In the time of black and white TV I remember watching Jack Hargreaves[1] wibbling on about a lost countryside. A romantic world of idyllic landscapes. Rolling English hills and green hedges. His series “Out of Town” played for a generation. To his credit he did focus on people and the way they lived their lives as much as the scenic backdrops.

He’s cheerily derogatory about the urban environment. Although he does take on the sentimentality that people have towards the countryside. In ways he’s a latter-day green campaigner. With a past century traditional style. 

This memory is sparked by me thinking about colds and flu. Winters accompaniments. Changeable January weather torments us in one way and in another gives us a tempting glimmer of the spring to come. It really is wet wet wet.

Ground water has risen to form shallow pools in the swamy field out back. This is much to the liking of the geese and a lone heron. The river Lambourn hasn’t yet bust its banks but that can’t be far off. Cloudy today with more rain on the way.

I’m fortunate in being in relatively good health. I’ve had my bout of winter blues. Now, I’m noticing the slightly shorter shadows when the sun shines. Everything is sodden. Hints of the season changing are out there. It’s the blubs that are trusting upwards from the soggy soil.

What do I attribute my good health to? I wouldn’t put it down to heathy living although the maximum of all things in moderation does appeal. In part, maybe it’s because I grew up in the world that Jack Hargraves documented. On a west country farm were muck and mud were plentiful at this time of year. Deep soggy and unavoidable.

I don’t know if youthful the exposure to muck and mud has a lifetime benefit. It certainly seems to be one theory that is put around. The idea that a person’s immune system learns about all the nasties that are encountered. It then adapts and knows how to fight off the worst of them.

My, and my brothers, inoculation consisted of a wheelbarrow, a pitchfork and a mountain of manure. Shifting this delightful stuff from farm sheds was mostly a manual task in the 1960s. Now, it’s a case of jumping on a Bobcat[2] or JCB and driving up and down until the job is done.

Solid stone-built farm buildings, like our cart shed were never intended for the use that my parents put them to. Keeping cattle indoors during the winter months. Layers of straw and muck accumulated their bedding grew in hight. By the time it was dry enough to let the cattle out into the surrounding fields their bedding was almost as deep as I was tall.

That’s how we earned our pocket money. A wheelbarrow, pitchforks and hundreds of trips backwards and forwards shifting muck. Creating a big pile in the farmyard. Then that got loaded into a muck spreader. The most organic fertiliser that can be spread on the land.

This memory is sparked. Looking at a cliff like face of compressed muck that went back for what seemed like miles. Digging away at it endlessly. Wheelbarrow load after load. A Sisyphean task, where only dogged persistence would pay off. No wonder I was a healthy young man.

[1] https://youtu.be/4e_jfU9eTSI

[2] https://www.bobcat.com/na/en

Dreams

Dreams are weird. For a start I often wake-up knowing that I’ve had a dream only to ponder on what it was about. It’s as if an erase function was pressed the moment the sunlight starts to beam through the curtains. As if my mobile’s alarm triggers a mental dustbin to empty.

Now, if I do wake-up from a dream in the night, I try to remember to scribble a note. Naturally, that’s merely a case of putting down a couple of words, not a full-page story. Interestingly that note can be surprisingly useful in restoring a glimpse of what I was dreaming.

I’m not going to get into the interpretation of dreams[1]. I don’t think they are a kind of prophecy. Literature is full of that notion. To me it must be that complex jumble of stimulus that has accumulated slowly being sorted, either filed or discarded. That’s not an analogy with a conventional computer. I think we have a powerful desire to take masses of information and make sense of it. That means wrapping a story around a lot of disparate stuff.

Dreams are weird. That’s because they have parts that make everyday sense and parts that live purely in the imagination. Boundaries and simple cause and effect don’t have to conform to waking reality. Imaginary worlds can be way of the charts.

Here’s goes. Fragments of what I remember go like so. It’s a clean room, like in a large semiconductor manufacture. White coats and white walls. Workbenches and sophisticated equipment laboratory style. Serious looking people.

Groups in different rooms. Could be in entirely different places. All working on making some kind of super chip [Have I been reading too many articles on quantum computing and alike?]. Could be a scene from a classic 007 movie where the villain invited their competitors to their secret hidden laboratory.

The last image was curious. A group of scientific people standing around staring intensely at a device (chip) sitting on a bench knowing that its performance has beaten all the opposition. Left the competition in the dust. Lots of questions being asked. This was not a hostile or nightmarish dream. This solid grey device looked like the base of a ceramic butter dish.

Even stranger the heatsink that rose up from the structure was shaped as a miniature model of the Roman forum[2] in Rome. It was as if the designers were so cocky they wanted to play a joke on their competitors. Me being one of them.

I don’t think there’s much mileage in sensemaking of this morning recollection. A dream about an imaginary future happening isn’t a kind of prediction. Perhaps it’s a chunking together fiction, facts and fantasy. However, it’s possible that some kind of breakthrough technology is sitting on a cleanroom bench somewhere. Where are the modern-day oracles when we need them.

[1] https://www.freud.org.uk/schools/resources/the-interpretation-of-dreams/

[2] https://www.rome.net/roman-forum

Legacy of Dilbert’s Humour

Cartoonists capture reality. Or at least, a snapshot of an ephemeral or enduring moment. It’s not photography. A cartoon’s realism isn’t about fidelity in the capture of a scene. It’s more focused on our perception of reality. No need for representative images full of depth and detail.

Absurdities and peculiarities captured by ink and pen can be sharp and masteries of observation. The flash of “who said what to whom” is a moment that displays the strange assortment and madness of everyday life.

To me the creator of Dilbert nailed a decade. That’s the 1990s. A time when management styles favoured open plan offices littered with cubicles. A time when of the evolution of computer networks connected office workers in a new and unfamiliar way. “You’ve got mail” was a positive thing.

Scott Adams[1] has passed at a relatively young age. His reputation not entirely intact. Now, I must decide what to do with the books I have of his. Charity shop or not? Element of his humour don’t fit the world of the 2020s. In some ways an even more absurd world than past decades.

Where he hit the mark, in my mind, centres around 1995, or so, a time when I was travelling to America. Visting giant aerospace manufacturing companies. I can close my eyes and see a hangar like building of enormous proportions where every square inch was covered by naturally coloured cubicles. Neutral coloured partitions coming up to shoulder hight. Water coolers. Glass windowed offices. Notice boards with the latest dictate.

Of course, Dilbert was an engineer. An engineer shoehorned into a modern management world that challenged his sensibilities. A hierarchical place where systematic pseudo-science clashes with logic and rationality. Where human frailties and social pressures are turned into office management speak to justify unjustifiable actions. Pushing a rock uphill to meet unrealistic project plans.

It’s a tiny thing. Dilbert’s upturned tie smacks my experience of standing at a drawing board in the late 1970s. He’s a cartoon character that is inevitably dragging his heals as he’s being forced to come to terms with a maddening corporate culture. That’s an encounter that a lot of people can relate too. It compelled office workers to play games that seemed to work in the opposite direction to any that was intended. Later, TV comedy picked up on this with series like: The Office[2].

This work day phenomenon hasn’t passed. Modern managements’ more barmy methods and theories are so ingrained that it seems wrong to highlight. Somehow our reaction to this has changed.

For a while Dilbert’s humour put up a mirror to those of us in senior management roles. Here’s a model that, if you start behaving like the “classic” boss, it’s time to do a double take. When encountering that slippery slope, look far and wide for a cynical talking dog.

[1] https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c5y320k72vyo

[2] https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b00jd68z

Swearing in English Culture

I do suppose that it’s my country upbringing, but that’s not entirely so. There was a set of opposing tensions that spread through society in the 1960s as much as they did in the 1660s.

On the one side there’s the authenticity of the country born and bread son or daughter of the soil in honest toil. That image of the rural artisan, painted by a famous artist, struggling with the elements to put bread on the table wasn’t as clean and tidy as the artist depicted.

On the other hand, was a spirit of bettering oneself. Elevation from the base worker day reality, up to one’s knees in muck, and practicalities of country life. Middle class, educated entrepreneurial, energies directed at improvement and modernisation.

An indicator of the side of the line that was most natural for a person was the use of langauage. Another might be the seriousness with which a Sunday church sermon was listened to. Another could be the frequency of evenings spent propping up the bar in the village pub.

Here my focus is on language. I’m of a generation who was told off for swearing. Whether at home, school or most social situations. This idea of self-improvement and good manners was handed down. It didn’t just spring from our parents’ ambitions. There was pressure to behave.

To suggest that colourful swearing didn’t happen was far from the truth. Even the highest minded tended to shift their disposition depended on the situation. Afterall, if I have had a calf stood on my toe or lost a wellington boot in deep cold mud it’s unlikely that my exclamation would have been – oh dear! that was jolly inconvenient.

Swear words are a constant. What continues to change is the meaning and level of offense that each one has attached. Casual obscenities that were thrown about like confetti may now be totally out of bounds. Calling someone a “bastard” in past times might almost have been considered a term of endearment.

Campaigners rail against suppressing free speech. Regulating what can be said. Rightly so, in most cases. That said, it’s rare that common place langauage is what such campaigners wish to protect. Even the traditional mundane ones are converted into softer tones to avoid offence.

If I think back to my childhood and market days in towns like Sturminster Newton in Dorset, then a great deal of English culture has been lost. Some may say thank God for progress. For me, the rural landscape isn’t as colourful or characterful as it once was, but what do I know?

Don’t read me wrong. I’m not calling for expletives and offensive words to spill out of every page or be heard up and down the high street. Social media is full of grossly offensive nastiness.

That’s part of my point. Authentic swearing doesn’t have to be used as a weapon. Yes, swearing in the 17th century was often used that way. Today, it’s better used as emphasis, exaggeration or an expression of despair. Like a valve on the lid of a pressure cooker, the occasional use of a rude word is a manner of relief. I’m sure Shakespeare would approve. Even he was censored.

As an expression of despair, we do need everyday tools to hand. If that’s the lively use of traditional langauage then so be it. For those who are offended please look at the bigger picture.

Lessons from Nature

I once said to Kwasi Kwarteng[1] that peak Boris Johnson passed during the early part of his terms as London mayor. Naturally, predicably he didn’t agree with me. This was in the Parliamentary constituency of Runnymede and Weybridge in 2017. I was the Liberal Democrat candidate standing against former Conservative Minister Philip Hammond. The public event we were attending was in Egham in Surrey.

Wow. A hell lot of water has passed under the bridge since that time. It’s like looking back at medieval history and trying to find a thread that links with the here and now. Governments have been and gone, careers have flourished and collapsed, Trump has been and gone and then returned and as was predicted Brexit has turned out to be a disaster.

Here’s a thought. It has always astonished me that we have a common fallacy. If a shelf regarding person who makes a lot of noise was once, even for a fleeting time, good at one job, they will be good at a loosely similar job. What a load of nonsense. So, it has turned out to be.

I’ve been watching the BBC’s series Kingdom[2]. About the animal kingdom. I know that the filming of such a spectacular series takes an enormous amount of dedication and effort. We get the pleasure of watching a well edited set of stories about leopards, hyena, wild dogs, and lions.

It’s tough out there to survive the seasons in the imposing Zambian landscape. We get to see the shifting of power between animal families and from generation to generation. It’s raw nature doing what it does and what it has been doing since the dawn of time. In what appears a paradise, nature is cruel. Rivals quickly exploit weakness. It’s going a bit far to draw a direct link between the rivals in the wild and the rivals in our parliamentary democracy. That said, there are lessons nature can teach us.

One is that top dogs don’t stay top dogs forever. They get their moment in the sun and then it passes. The fight to make a claim on a territory is perpetual. Yes, the cycles of the season have their impact and luck, good or bad, plays its part.

Two, is that a bad move remains a bad move. Ignoring crocodiles is never a good move. Wandering about without the protection of the pack is a high-risk strategy. Backing off, and fighting another day, is the best way to deal with a bigger, meaner, and hungrier opponent.

Where am I going with talk of these two different worlds? Human nature and animal nature.

It’s my reaction to seeing the scribblings of a former Prime Minister wibbling on about how dangerous it would be to reverse Brexit. Boris Johnson, that man whose star faded a long time ago, is writing for tabloid newspapers. He’s writing exactly what anyone would expect to see from those who will not learn from experience.

A bad move remains a bad move. Now, nearly ten years on, a bad decision remains a bad decision. Write what you like, it’s impossible to transform a failed project into a kind of utopia. What’s worse is to try and scare people by writing that we must tolerate failure because we once adopted a failed project is ludicrous. It’s irresponsible. It’s mad.

[1] UK Chancellor of the Exchequer from September to October 2022 under PM Liz Truss.

[2] https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m002hdgh

Events, my dear boy

It’s strange that with all the bumps, bruises and grazes that I’ve had so far, that I’ve never broken a bone. I’ve fallen off motorcycles, had bales of hay dropped on my head, almost drowned in rivers, damaged cars and had a couple of workshop accidents. I guess I am extremely fortunate, let’s say lucky, when I think on a couple of past accidents.

Of all the events that I can recount only a couple have left their mark. That indelible mark that’s a sign of life’s travels and travails. One finger wouldn’t be graded ten out of ten in a finger competition. My forehead has a small mark, could call it a dent, hardly noticeable by anyone other than me. That’s the list. Thankfully a tiny list.

I’m not counting a botch job of a hospital scare that a boyhood appendicitis left me. Images of that time don’t stack up to a big pile but one of rolling in agony on a living room sofa, I’ll never forget. A colourful children’s ward and unendingly cheerful nurses stick too. And a clown.

There are those near misses that leave no physical signs. Rich selection of memories. An acute compression in time. The electrical shocks I’ve had have no legacy other than my great respect of high voltages. Vivid recollections too.

Yes, if it wasn’t for a wide-awake race marshal at a grass track meeting[1], I’d probably have been run over you a Laverda sidecar outfit. Thankfully someone grabbed me from behind and pulled me to safety behind the straw bales that made up the ring. This was the 1970s in a bowl-shaped field outside a small town called Mere. Perfect for that crazy kind of bike racing.

At the time a mate of mine was a keen amateur photographer. He’d get a pass to photograph the action. We’d go to grass track and road race Auto-Cycle Union (ACU) meetings around the West Country. It was always interesting to read the disclaimer on our marshalling race tickets. Anything bad happens – not our fault.

My finger damage is much more recent. It’s the dumb stuff that caught me out. Moving plant pots around doesn’t usually result in any great consequence. Most of them don’t weigh a lot. In this case a large square fiberglass pot needed moving. I had tried pushing it. That didn’t move it far as it scraped slowly along the patio. Next tactic was to pull it. Getting some momentum going it seemed to move more easily as I pulled it. What I didn’t count on was the fragility of the material of the pot. It had aged. I pulled hard and surprise, surprise, it broke. I went flying across the patio at speed. Naturally, I put my hand out to save me tumbling down a flight of stairs. Sadly, my finger took the first impact. That was painful.

Life without one or two bumps, bruises and grazes is unimaginable. Maybe, I’ve got a little bit more risk averse with age. However, like the back garden plant pot incident there’s always an opportunity to be foolish. Having a story to tell about my father falling off a ladder while fixing a gutter, I’m particularly careful around those potential death traps.

I’m happy to admit that I haven’t got nine lives. Or at last I’ve used up a few.

[1] Example: https://youtu.be/ZqC2Hc43a3w

Guilt: Double-Edged

Guilty as charged. At the end of a crime drama that’s what I want to hear. There’s been a resolution. Justice has been done. The baddies have been locked up and the aggrieved are vindicated. Oh, for the simplicity of the simple story. I guess that’s why they are liked so much.

What I want to spin a couple of lines about here is that whole subject of guilt. In reality, that multi-layered feeling is more complex than the two sides of the coin of my crime drama example. A world of purely nothing but good and bad does not exist.

There cannot be a single modern human who has never experienced a form of guilt. Even those who are on the edge of sanity or living as a total hermit will at one moment or another experience remorse, regret, or shame. A lingering uneasiness about what has happened, what’s happening or what might happen.

It’s built into our brains in a fundamental way. Because we can reflect on thoughts and events and learn from them, so we can analysis, even at a superficial level, poor decisions, failures, mistakes or tragedies.

Then comes the internalising thought that – I should do better or have done better. Surely, I should have seen that coming. How did that happen to me? Why me? What did I do? In the answer to those questions a feeling responsible permeates. For past events this can be compounded by knowledge that comes from hindsight.

These emotions can be entirely illogical. For example, feeling guilty about a random event that I have absolutely no responsibility for. An occurrence where, whatever I did, it would still have happened in one shape or form.

On the positive side, a feeling of responsible born of guilt can be a powerful motivator. Moments that tip people from a bad course of action to a good one. A true moment of learning.

On the negative side, guilty feelings can be destructive. They create resentment and even suffering. Especially when associated with any kind of injustice, intolerance or manipulation.

That gets to the point that I had in mind. It’s when people use of guilt as part of the general management toolbox. I’ve experienced that one often enough at work and elsewhere. Putting in those extra unpaid hours because if I didn’t the outcome will reflect badly on me. Doing that job, that I didn’t want to do, because someone was insistent that my saying “no” would result in failure. Not competing would let the side down.

My point. Don’t do it. For anyone who has authority over another, moral or actual, this is a foolish way to get things done. It can work in the short term. The problem is that such emotional blackmail has a lingering tail. That tail can kick-back and so it should.