A couple of days ago Theo Paphitis, of Dragon’s Den quasi-fame, wrote a piece at the Mail encouraging bosses to ban Facebook from the workplace.
The fact that this moderately successful boss would get access to a medium such as the Mail just by virtue of being in the habit of sitting down next to Peter Jones on a TV studio should raise eyebrows at the UK media’s standards for selecting figureheads to represent groups.
Fortunately its readers are smarter than the paper: I am sure most business people won’t identify with Theo nor his message. That is a good thing. He did get it so very wrong!
To be fair, his start is not bad. Praise falls on the wonder of the Internet as a phenomenon and an enabler for business. Then, fairly as well, he points out all revolutions as he chooses to call the Net, have downsides. And points out the motor car as an example of liberation married with pollution.
Then he goes on to advocate the equivalent of banning his employees to drive cars to/from/during work! They’d only be allowed to drive through pre-approved roads to pre-selected destinations that the smarter people in the company would deem appropriate for business.
As he makes the case to ban most of the Internet from his staff, Theo slowly reveals the real Paphitis: a dark, confused personality who thinks is above the rest of us, free of fault, unable to stray from the straight and narrow and empowered to pass judgment on the people he thinks have been blessed with his guiding light.
After confessing to be a Facebook user in his private life, Theo goes on to state: “it is hopelessly addictive. Regular users of the social networking sites are like smokers in that they just have to get their latest fix. They cannot leave a message unanswered, or a photo unseen. So great is their addiction that the desire to connect with their online friends over-rides even the requirements of their job descriptions.” Not for him, clearly. He’s alright, he doesn’t get Facebook cold Turkey. But the others are helpless and must be protected for their own sake.
Now, I don’t know about you but when someone writes statements like these in a national newspaper I like to see proof. Surely some research must have been made to determine that Facebook is addictive and that people are “overriding the requirements of their job descriptions” at work in any significant numbers. Unfortunately it looks we’re out of luck: this must have been revealed to Paphitis in his sleep by a savant spirit of sorts. He says it, we believe it, end of story, right?
There is plenty more babble in the piece – from inaccurate statements about what’s required to monitor employees’ Internet usage to a final pearl of wisdom at the end advocating a stop to mobile phone use because it brings “linguistic recession”. Nice one Theo. you must be proud.
Now let me take a stab at this: from the first day a company set out a corner of the office to store stationery, some employees have failed to realise the boundaries between their employee and individual personas. Some companies have locked the stationery cupboard, some others have invested in employee engagement and trust, making sure to lay clear rules for the avoidance of doubt. That the chairman of Raymans the Stationer were to miss this point and how it translates for appropriate management of a company’s electronic assets is a great irony.
There is a silver lining to all this: while Theo isolates his organisations from the world and wastes time lowering the linguistic interest rate and injecting new words into his day as a form of linguistic quantitative easing, the world moves on.
In the real world, Dragons are not the stuff of awe. They’re relics from another time that will be set aside by the evolutionary pressures they choose to ignore. And for all of this, Theo, I won’t be investing in you anytime soon. I’m out.
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