Heard the one about women at the office? – FT.com

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On humour, power and gender relations, a different take by Lucy Kellaway of the FT:

This all rings a distant bell, but I fear there is something more sinister at work. If laughter varies with gender, it varies even more with power. The single fastest way of understanding the balance of power and alliances in any group is by looking at who is laughing – and not laughing – at whose jokes. You only need to watch the Queen or Prince Charles meeting ordinary people to note that even the lamest pleasantry is greeted by gales of laughter. So, if other board members don’t laugh when their women colleagues crack a joke, it may not be because the joke isn’t funny but because boards can be hierarchical places and women are too low in the pecking order to command much in the way of fawning laughter.

Heard the one about women at the office? – FT.com.

Healthcare: Cyber wards – FT.com

Some good examples of small-scale innovation in healthcare, focussing on the concrete and pragmatic, rather than large-scale systemic change. My favourite example is replacing the clipboard with an iPad for medical history; the challenge of course is getting this integrated into whatever electronic health record system is in place.

Healthcare: Cyber wards – FT.com.

Good enough is better than perfection – FT.com

A fun piece by Lucy Kellaway, not tongue-in-cheek, about the obsession and distortion in perfection and being a perfectionist. Concluding quote:

In most things, being good enough requires quite a lot of effort. More recently, CEOs of Barclays haven’t been nearly good enough. Nor have most other bankers, or most other workers, or most products, or, come to that, most newspaper columnists. And most universities are nowhere near good enough either – they are increasingly places where students emerge with a lot of debt, having suffered more wear and tear on their livers than on their brains.

Good enough is better than perfection – FT.com.