Monthly Archives: November 2014

Opinion – Spend your old age caring for the even older generation – Telegraph – John Gelmini

November 30, 2014 By in Healthcare, NHS, UK Tags: , , , , Leave a comment
Elderly lady practicing Taiqi in Jing An Park.

Elderly lady practicing Taiqi in Jing An Park. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

An elderly man performing tai chi in front of ...

An elderly man performing tai chi in front of Haystack Rock in Cannon Beach, Oregon. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Dr Alf asks a telling question.  and having looked after an elderly father for three years with my sister whilst working I speak from experience.

Adult Social Care is fixable but the British public have to face up and be made to confront several difficult realities:

1) They are responsible for their own health and well-being, not doctors, the council, the Government or anyone else.
That means diet, nutrition, vitamin supplementation, cooking properly, avoiding junk foods, continually learning , avoiding whenever possible harmful things in the air, water, countryside and the built environment.

It means reducing or eliminating alcohol, smoking cessation, avoiding bizarre and unusual sexual practices and maintaining stable relationships ideally within the boundaries of traditional marriage assuming you are one of the 89 people out of 90 who is a heterosexual.

It also means following an enabling personal philosophy having thought it through carefully and developing resilience and mental toughness.

Obviously, accidents happen and our military men and woman plus people in high risk occupations are a special category but much of the need for Adult Social Care is driven by a lack of commonsense and disregard to the above points.
This falls under the process of prevention through education.

2) Early identification of people about to fall into the need for Adult Social Care can be effected by CRM and the ESD Toolkit and we need to put the people we find back onto the straight and narrow by involving GP’s,physiotherapists,coaches and nutritionists and by tough love—Insisting on weight reduction and smoking cessation before expensive operations or modifications to stairs and houses are made.

3) Variable taxes on foods and limits on sugar, salt and e-number content

4) Using the zoning laws to reduce junk food outlets and expand healthy eating establishments,farm shops etc

5) Banning aluminium saucepans,foil, Bisphenol A and E numbers

6) Replacing the NHS with a new French style system minus unnecessary NHS managers and unnecessary civil servants at the Department of Health and then merging Adult Social Care into it.

7 )Aggressive re-enablement of Adult Social Care recipients involving where necessary the fitting of Gastric Bands,sending them to fat camps, compelling them to practice Tai Chi and curtailing the benefits of refuseniks.

8) Using robots in care homes and outsourcing Dementia care in extreme cases to lower cost countries if there are no close relatives

9) Providing generous tax relief to Long Term Care Premiums

10) Redesigning our cities to be pedestrianized as is the case in Salzberg, Austria,p utting in extra police to create safe havens for walking

John Gelmini

Opinion – So you want to be an Independant Interim Executive? – John Gelmini

November 30, 2014 By in Coaching, Consulting, Executive Interim Management, Executive interim management career, Independent Professional Services, Interim Management, Interim Manager, People, Personal Marketing, Search engine optimization Leave a comment

Dr Alf is right to counsel for a 12 to 24 month financial buffer for a would be interim. But given that 80% of bank account holders in the UK have less than £500 gbp in them at any one time, most people would fall at the first hurdle.

If I was counselling one of these prospective interims, I would want to be assured that

  • they had a fat address book
  • contacts willing to give them assignments and that
  • they knew how to sell.

Many prospective interims imagine that because they were wizards in corporate life, that the world will recognize their brilliance and beat a path to their door.

They imagine that interim providers (intermediaries), who have up to 250,000 people on their books down to as few as 5000 will provide them with work. This when just 30% of assignments come from interim providers and then only to a charmed minority of favored people.

For those without an alumnus, a fat address book, connections through golf, fraternal organisations, the pub or former regiments, schools and interest groups, the future is neither bright nor orange.

They have to learn how to sell, earn how to network, write letters to interim providers, promote themselves, write “pain letters” and “hunt kill and eat their own prey” either alone or with others.

That process can be exhausting, so elderly interims need to keep in shape, develop stoicism, take vitamins, exercise, eat well and keep up to date.

Gaps between assignments have to be explained and the would be interim has to be constantly learning and developing additional income streams so that when an assignment emerges they look and sound the part.

Too many interims imagine that they have the luxury of turning up in the same suit as if they had the sort of money that Branson, Bill Gates, Bezos and Sir Martin Sorrell has. They can get away with it, whereas an aspiriing interim has to drive the right car and exude an air of success and quiet competence that says the job will get done efficiently and on time, without any doubt about delivery/benefits realization.

John Gelmini