Can We Be Arsed To Catch Up?

See that previous post? It all happened.

4 weeks in, 'so Jim, how are you finding being back in London?'

Well I've had a clear illustration why the East Asian economies continue to leave the Westerners for dead. One might be the different attitude the two cultures have to a simple thing called a deadline.

A deadline is essentially a promise. "I promise I will deliver you something by this time on that day," so an employee may say to his boss, or a supplier may say to a customer. My experiences in Hong Kong were clear - deadlines meant deadlines. People that missed deadlines did so with embarassment, shame, and no end of apologies.

In the UK it's different. A supplier - let's call them Sky Broadband by way of example - write to you and say, we'll have you connected by then. And then they don't. And they're not that bothered really anyway. So my first Sky bill arrives for the month, and it's for 36 quid a month, rather than the 41 quid I'd agreed  when I signed a contract for TV and broadband. They've lost 5 quid. That's called lower productivity.

As it says at the top of the page, it's no rocket science.