Monday, March 20, 2006

so much red tape....


It's lunch time here at work and I've just sat through training on Money Laundering, how to spot it that is, not how to do it.

The rules are utterly ridiculous and mind boggling. I won't bore you with it all, but some of our laws are very well intentioned but laborious, circular and downright daft. The only folks these laws benefit seem to be the regulators. This smcks of a classic example of 'jobs for the boys'.

I remember once belonging to an office, where the firm's principal client insisted on having ISO 9001. What a great idea - get everyone routinely working in the same way with checks and balances. Great theoretical idea - useless practically.

I found that you could pass an ISO audit by having a beautifully ticked check box without ever having given advice to the client, or, even worse, entirely negligently advising the client,losing the action, but having the right coloured bits of card against the right documents. Conversely, you could ignore the bits of card, have a great rapport with the client, do things legally incredibly well - and fail the audit.

It strikes me that this happens a lot in legislation, or regulation, and here the music industry is a major culprit. Everyone wants a slice of the action, the creative intentions of the artist and their intentions are very much an afterthought.

I wish things would start to turn and there would be far less red tape...

5 comments:

Brad P. from NJ said...

I love hearing about ISO 9001 audits. The single purpose of these things seems to be to get people to buy things with ISO 9001 audit logos on them. Somewhere, somebody is making a lot of money... and eagerly anticipating the client list for ISO 9002 audit logos.

There are so many of these audit processes that simply don't seem to be revisited. Here in the US, there's a new program on factory inspections. If you get all your documents in a row, have your application approved, and presumably pay your fee... you don't have to be subjected to an audit. You've gotten all your paperwork in, you see. What I've not heard is if there will even be an audit review process.

Regulator - "Sure, you got all your paperwork done, but have you done all the work you were supposed to do?"

Factory Owner - "Does it matter? I've gotten all my boxes ticked."

Regulator - "Good on ya, then. I'll just go and have a cuppa."

Or whatever the American regional dialect approach may be.

I can only imagine the rampant abuses that will be spawned from there.

Anonymous said...

Is that your in-tray mate? It kinda looks like a shopping trolley! :D

podcastpaul said...

Geoff - my in tray is one heck of a lot bigger than that!!

Brad - hope you're on the mend mate - glad to hear from yoU!

Anonymous said...

If I remember right I think you did post a picture of your office a while back .. would be cool to see the picture again fella if you still have it :)

Plus Posh Bird needs to come back on to the show and tell us what she's been up too. It would be nice to hear from her again.

All the best

Geoff

Anonymous said...

I often think that regulations, standards and legislation have extaclty the opposite effect to the one they intended. I've worked for a couple of organisations who spent fortunes on obtaining ISO9000 compliance only to go bankrupt shortly thereafter. In both cases it was the fact that they spent all their effort on getting their boxes ticked and no time on making sure their clients were happy. It's easy to have high quality processes when there's no pesky customers to muck things up :)

Then again maybe it IS the intention of the music industry moguls to suck all the diversity and creativity from the music we listen to???

Thanks for the new music for new music Friday tomorrow Paul - between all the music podcasts everyone has started listening to we've got a whole day's worth planned for tomorrow :)