If you mention gender quotas to me you will probably sense my temperature rise and start to notice the steam emerging from different parts of my body!
I want the best person to get the job but I do absolutely believe that we need to do everything to make sure this can be a woman or a man with no disadvantage to either.
However (this is huge coming from me!) watching the political standoff between Fianna Fail, Fine Gael, the independent candidates and the other parties as Ireland struggles to form a government reminds me of some of the key messages I heard recently at the Network Ireland, International Women’s Day event.
At the conference Gabrielle Motolla (a very impressive American photographer who lives in Iceland) spoke about the worldwide economic crash and a profound comment that was made at the time that “the banking systems lack of femininity caused many of the problems”
It wasn’t that there were too many men involved but the point was there was too much “masculinity” in the mix – too much testosterone, too much macho stuff, too much bravado, too much risk taking, too much ultra competitiveness and too many egos recklessly driving the banking system off the cliff.
All of these characteristics can be demonstrated by men or women but they are typically masculine traits so a gender balance could provide some protection against the potentially dangerous excesses of these traits.
This point really impacted on me – I understood exactly what she was saying and I can see the danger myself of too much of any particular trait in an organisation.
I met a Canadian woman at the same conference who operates a large energy company in Canada and we spoke about this issue. She’s not in favour of quotas but she explained that in her business it would be virtually impossible to manage a team of all men and it would be just as difficult with a team of all women.
In her experience the guys are just too macho and the women are too passive and cautious – she reckons a balance works best and in her industry she reckoned 60/40 works best and this is what she strives for when assembling teams.
With our political impasse at the moment I notice that nearly all of the posturing, which is getting us nowhere is very masculine.
We desperately need to sort this out and get our country back on track – maybe we should introduce some femininity and get this process moving?
My two buddies were all excited about Snapchat and insisted on enthusiastically showing me how it works.
You take a picture of your face you press this button and then you choose an effect … Open your mouth and a tongue flies out, raise your eyebrows and water gushes out of your eyes, click here and you are wearing shades and a cop uniform. This is very strange ..
Ok …..What then?
Well you can put that out as a story for “all your fans” to see or you can send it directly to a chosen few.
How do I find people to follow, how do they find me…?
They show me posts by people they are following and it all seems a bit odd.. Most people seem to be messing around with nothing at all decent going on. Some of the people that I followed seem to be convinced that they are celebrities and keep talking to the camera about their day. You are not a celebrity!!
I must admit I quite admire the guy who records himself jogging…try taking a selfie mini movie while running! I’d like to see that on the claim form – how exactly did you fall into that pothole?
One woman I know quite well keeps posting from her bed, telling us how tired and sick she is (this is done with full make up by the way!) and moaning about all the married men who are coming on to her. Really (I feel like calling her and having a quiet word)??
I find one US politician, Cory Booker who seems to be using it in a semi intelligent way and of course Kim Kardashian is offering us another version of her reality TV life. Social media guru and entrepreneur Gary Vaynerchuk has effectively become an actor and this is another platform for him to do his thing – he likes eating bananas, I’ve discovered!
When you open up Snapchat the camera on your phone is automatically looking at you….Ok, you can take a picture or film yourself. What do you say?
Is it like Facebook…not really, Twitter….Definitely not, Instagram…The most like it but the posts just stay for 24 hours.
I don’t like it, it seems incredibly egotistical and I’m really uncomfortable because I don’t really know what I’m doing and I haven’t quite figured out how to use it..but I will!
This is good … I train and advise people on using social media all of the time so this is a really great learning for me.
I now know how they feel – I had forgotten what it was like to feel like a dinosaur!
I’m sitting in a really lovely, modern, state of the art shopping centre on a Sunday afternoon, my day off and wondering what the f### am I doing here?
Families are walking by looking miserable, a dad walks out with a crying child in his arms, couples walk by in a trance, a woman walks by all dressed up pushing her twins in a trendy double buggy looking depressed.
An older couple walk by linking arms and the train rolls by with mothers on their mobiles sitting in the carriages with their kids who gaze out at the rest of us.
A parent chases a kid running with a balloon and a teenager walks by drinking her trendy health juice.
Cappuccino in hand, shopping bag in the other, more buggies, more couples, more parents, more mothers and daughters, more teenagers… Bargains, new stock, special offers.
A disturbing image appeared in my twitter feed – How is it that I am likely to live nearly five years less than my female equivalent …outrage!!
This blatant inequality is a total disgrace and why aren’t us boys kicking up a storm about this injustice?
Why is it happening, what do I have to do different to sort it out? – I’m guessing if the shoe was on the other foot there would be riots in the streets but us boys have been way too passive and just putting up with it!
I asked my buddy Mr. Google for some answers. He’s normally quite helpful with these things.
According to this article and related studies: Women live longer than men primarily because of modern lifestyle factors, rather than any biological difference. Statistically, women are less prone to heart disease and smoking related illnesses, which are the leading causes of death due to making healthier lifestyles choices.
Ok..In the world we live 4.5 years on average less than women but if I make healthier life choices I could beat these numbers and besides I don’t smoke. That doesn’t sound too bad!
I found another article on a BBC site with exactly the same title written by David Robson.
In this article he talks about: One early idea was that men work themselves into an early grave. Whether working in a mine or ploughing the land, they put extra stress on their bodies and amassed injuries that caught up with them later in life. Yet if that were the case, you might expect the gap to be closing, as both men and women converge on the same, sedentary jobs.
So gender equality might level the life scores as we will live longer and women will live shorter..hmm.
However changing lifestyles hasn’t changed the ‘life’ gap so this isn’t the answer.
In his article he does explore lifestyle choices, which he feels is a factor but he feels there is more than that: The fact is that female chimpanzees, gorillas, orangutans, and gibbons also consistently outlive the males of the group, and you do not see apes – male or female – with cigarettes hanging out of their mouths and beer glasses in their hands.
So it’s more than healthy lifestyle choices and work patterns?
In this article some other quite painful research might point towards an answer – imagine the following headline on the front page of your daily newspaper!
Eunuchs are 130 times more likely to reach 100, compared to other men
The very thought of it makes me wince in pain and brings many tears to my eyes but apparently the answer to this ‘life’ gap question could be testosterone:
Evidence comes from an unexpected place: the Imperial Court of the Chosun Dynasty in Korea. Korean scientist Han-Nam Park recently analysed the detailed records of court life from the 19th Century, including information about 81 eunuchs whose testicles had been removed before puberty.
His analyses revealed that the eunuchs lived for around 70 years – compared to an average of just 50 years among the other men in the court. Overall, they were 130 times more likely to celebrate their hundredth birthday than the average man living in Korea at the time. Even the kings – who were the most pampered people in the palace – did not come close.
The article explores other evidence about the presence of our ‘cobblers’: In sad cases of mental health patients, institutionalised in the USA in the early 20th Century. A few were forcibly castrated as part of their “treatment”. Like the Korean eunuchs, they too lived for longer than the average inmate – but only if they had been sterilised before the age of 15.
More pain and even more tears..
It goes on to say that the female body could have advantages due to the sex hormone oestrogen, which can protect the woman’s health leading to longer life.
His article is inconclusive about why exactly us boys are expected to be around for shorter: Scientists admit that we need to keep on looking for a definitive answer.
I’m busy clearing down a mountain of emails after a long weekend.
Each of these emails was sent with some purpose .. a work request, keeping me in the loop of something, providing me with valuable information or hoping that I will be prompted to do something.
Each of these emails was sent with a plan..someone decided on the content and the format and hit that ‘send’ button.
In the middle of all of this I get a “to whom it may concern” email from someone who is looking for Fuzion or one of our clients to sponsor their event in some way.
Technically they have done their job.. they compiled a list of people/companies to target, they gathered their email list, they worked on the ‘copy’ for their email and pressed ‘send‘.
When I get a ‘to whom it may concern‘ it makes it really easy to hit the ‘delete’ button.
‘Hi Greg‘ will work much better..go on… I’ve said it before, personalise – it” easy!
I am working on a really interesting project at the moment and because it is quite complex there is a diverse team made up of very talented individuals from different organisations working on it.
We had a full day session, which included a meeting with the client group and instead of being the enjoyable experience I was expecting it was a horrible, draining one.
There is one characters (who happens to be really talented and super valuable) on the team who is just plain rude, arrogant, dismissive and being honest a little nasty. This has led to a testy atmosphere with team members trying to give their opinion but being dismissed in a rude manner.
Everyone witnesses the ‘put down’ and are waiting to see how the person who has just been insulted reacts …. he feels bad, he feels small and he feels weak if he keeps his mouth shut or does he decide to react and let the whole thing bubble over? To be fair to him he decided to bite his lip and eventually other people jumped in and supported him. I’m not sure if my lip would be that resilient.
At the end of the day I was totally wiped out and demotivated and a potentially great project had now disintegrated into something that was hardship. I can’t wait for it to be over is now my main thought but there is still a lot of work to be done with this crew.
I have made an effort at addressing this with this group of people who I don’t know that well .. I did it by email the following day (lets’ see if it makes any difference?)
Team spirit – At times yesterday a horrible, testy atmosphere crept into our team meeting – this makes the work very draining and we have to mind ourselves. The team leader has assembled a talented bunch together for this task – lets get the best from this collective talent and synergise. This is a team folks …lets support each other and make this job a enjoyable one.
Our state broadcaster, RTE has just banned the Budweiser commercial featuring UFC fighter and Irish hero Conor McGregor.
The banning has already led to newspaper articles, much discussion and a huge curiosity and will inevitably have everyone googling just to see what this “offensive” advert was all about. I suspect they will be left scratching their heads wondering what the fuss was all about.
In many ways this could be deemed as a huge success for the brand because it will now achieve a level of visibility and notoriety that it previously didn’t have, without having to pay the advertising costs.
While it sends out a big message from RTE you would like to think that this is a good, sensible one because we do want there to be watchdogs to protect us from danger. It is important that ‘banning’ makes sense, that it is rational and that it is fair.
The advertising guidelines around alcohol are very strict in Ireland and all of these were followed carefully.
In the advert there isn’t a picture of a bottle of beer, there isn’t a pub in sight. There is just Conor tastefully captured in a scene walking around his home town, Crumlin in Dublin, which then transforms into a street in LA.
This 27 year old apprentice plumber has achieved huge success by dedication to his sport and the advert demonstrates this with the help of these scenes and the voice over by Conor:
Never give up on your dream
Be your own inspiration, a beacon of self belief
Keep proving others wrong
If your dream doesn’t scare you, then its not big enough
So dream, as big as you dare
Only at the very end of the advert do we see the Budweiser logo and the usual drink responsibly message at the bottom of the screen.
For me the message from the advert is a very inspirational one, delivering a powerful positive message. Yes, it does come from a beer brand, which I think is more than ok. It shows you how the guidelines are keeping alcohol brands in a very responsible place and forcing a communication about positive values.
The message coming from RTE in banning this advert?
According to the newspapers they issued a statement to the Sunday Business Post that the advert breached advertising guidelines because Conor McGregor is considered a “hero to the young“, which will in turn encourage them to drink alcohol.
I don’t get it..
In my view banning the advert will achieve the wrong thing (besides totally confusing an industry that is trying to be very responsible) – viewers will definitely seek out the inspirational advert and could instead conclude that we are living in a censorship state that in some way has an issue with people from working class backgrounds having and achieving their dreams.
Banning the advert is also bad for the RTE brand as in my view it shows them as being ultra conservative and this is not good when they are up against such stiff competition. Leaving the censorship to the advertising authorities might be a much better policy.
It’s a great thing that we are seeing extra vigilance about alcohol advertising but we need to make sure that the brands that are working really hard to get it right aren’t punished.
From the other side of Harbour View beach in West Cork we could hear the laughing and chuckling as a man and woman and a little girl played at the waters edge as the sea rolled in.
Taking it in turns mum (lets assume) chased dad with some seaweed, dad chased mum, mum chased the little girl and the little girl chased dad.
Dad picked his little girl up in his arms and twirled her around.. He grabbed the seaweed and both of them chased after mum.
From where we were walking we could hear the infectious roars of laughter and the beautiful young chuckles from the little girl. This gorgeous, fun day will be remembered forever by all of them hopefully along with many more just like this one.
On this nice day one of them decided ..”Let’s go to the beach“..good call!
I had to take a photo to capture this precious moment but in truth no photo can quite do that job..
“If your dream doesn’t scare you then it isn’t big enough. Dream as big as you dare”
These are the words that were challenging me and the strange thing is that I heard them uttered by Conor McGregor in an advert that my son, Brendan Canty directed for Budweiser.
I then hear both Conor (the apprentice plumber from Crumlin) and Brendan (the boy from Ballincollig!), two 27 year old’s from different parts of our fine country and from different backgrounds talking about “following your dream” in a behind the scenes video about the advert.
Brendan talks about throwing everything at your dream and Conor talks about following your passion.
From the outside it probably looks easy and then I think about Malcolm Gladwell and his theory about 10,000 hours in his book Outliers and I think about what I know about these two young men.
Brendan didn’t get the grade he hoped for in CIT because his lecturer had some issue with his short film “The Kid“. Take one look at thetrailer or even the full feature and make up your own mind (Brendan will kill me for drawing attention to this – this work by a student is incredible!).
He regularly pitches for videos and adverts that he doesn’t win – some of these treatments have some of his best work in them but they will never grace our screens.
He takes the kicks in the backside and drives on. Following your dream means driving on even when things happen that might leave you feeling on the floor.
Conor with all of his talent and brashness has followed his dream. I haven’t followed his story well enough to talk about his knocks but I am sure there have been many and I have no doubt that 10,000 hours of sweat, toil and disappointments are all in his ‘experience bank‘ that has him where he is today.
Okay, he took a kick in the backside in his last fight against Nate Diaz but he spoke about “celebrating defeat” ..we have to if we want to succeed!
With all this talk of dreaming I was inclined to look at my own life and what I was doing at 27 years of age and what I have done since.
The dream of a thirteen year old was to work in the music business. I flirted with managing bands for about two years, which was fun for a while and then the bands I was working with broke up!
I always wanted to start my own business and I got that chance when I started a fast food restaurant with another guy. It wasn’t my industry of choice but this ‘golden opportunity‘ to start something and make some money seemed like a good idea.
It wasn’t my dream so I talked him into opening music stores. We didn’t know the first thing about this industry but it didn’t stop us opening one in Cork, one in Limerick and one in Galway in the space of 12 months. During that time we also opened a second fast food restaurant in Cork.
We were business trailblazers but we were crazy – this rate of growth was reckless and if anything went wrong we were in huge financial trouble. Some of these ventures worked out and some of them were miserable failures.
All of this was when I was incredibly still holding down a full time job – I was working around clocks that I didn’t even have!
I was then asked if I would become the General Manager of Deasy’s, the Guinness owned subsidiary that I was the Financial Controller of. I was staggered to be asked to take on such a role and this was another dream fulfilled! After doing this for two years I was asked to join Guinness in Dublin ..wow..working in a relatively senior role for a huge international company – another dream. I was 29!
I took a job as General Manager of a subsidiary of Heineken a few years later – I quickly realised that repeating myself wasn’t part of the dream and I needed to change.
In 2001 I had a dream about creating a high end fashion and beauty event and taking it on tour around Ireland with the top Irish models. Myself and Dee created ‘Catwalks’ which was the talk of the female luxury sector in Ireland for a number of years.
Dee emigrated from Kerry to Cork and we opened a Fuzion office on the South Mall in Cork (before thatwe worked from home for a few years – thank you to Alison, Doreen and Barry who were happy to have enough faith in us to do that).
Soon after that we became the only agency in Ireland to have an office in both Cork and Dublin as we opened one in our capital city.
This year I was elected to the Dublin Chamber of Commerce council by the members – this sounds like a very trivial thing but it is a big deal as members from smaller firms find it impossible to get elected. This makes me very proud as it is a small tangible sign that we are succeeding in Dublin and achieving some recognition for the work we are doing there.
When I heard the words “If your dream doesn’t scare you then it’s not big enough” I had to admit to myself that I feared I had stopped dreaming big and maybe that I had stopped dreaming at all. After writing this piece I know this isn’t quite true.
This 51 year old hasn’t stopped dreaming but yes …I admit, my dreams don’t scare me.
Maybe it’s time to be scared again and not leave that to the 27 year olds!
I was having a chat with a buddy of mine who we do some work with from time to time.
A project with an immovable deadline had hit an impasse because someone on the client side had let one of his guys down – the task they were to do was a relatively straightforward one but they didn’t get to it due to their own work pressure.
The person on his team informed him that she could do no more because of this ‘thing‘ that wasn’t done so the project deadline would be missed.
It would probably have been a legitimate reason for missing the deadline and he could quite happily declare that “there is nothing we could do“.
He had a choice to make ..
Being in business is like being on a dance floor except you have no idea what music they are about to play or who you will have to dance with!
You turn up expecting an eighties disco and suddenly they play a waltz. You are waltzing and an Irish gig comes on. Sometimes the dance floor is packed and you are struggling to manoeuvre around the floor and suddenly you find yourself dancing by yourself and feeling very awkward as everyone is watching.
There are times when no one is dancing and its up to you to get things moving by dragging an unsuspecting dance partner out on the floor in the hope that others join in.
Sometimes you can dance all night and have the best of fun but there are times when you are just not in the mood – your feet are sore but you still have to dance.
Sometimes it’s dancing with the most perfect, incredible, stunningly beautiful woman and sometimes … Well. you can only dance with the women who are in the room!
My buddy instructed his team member to just do the task that the client was supposed to do as it wasn’t a big deal and he wanted to deliver the project on time. Nice move..
Greg Canty Fuzion Blog 