About

Welcome to Flip Chart Fairy Tales!

What is Flip Chart Fairy Tales? 

As it says at the top. My reflections on business, the world of work and the general organisational crap that we all have to put up with in the course of our employment.

And you are…?

Rick. At the moment, I’m running this blog on my own but I intend to invite some other well-informed commentators to join me if I can find anyone else stupid interested enough.

How come you know so much about it then?

I have worked as a line executive, a Human Resources manager, a project manager and, more recently, a business consultant, in most industry sectors. Having been inside more than thirty organisations across Europe and the Middle East, I reckon I know a thing or two about how companies work – or don’t work.

I also studied organisations for my master’s degree, so I can spout on about some of the theoretical stuff with a reasonable level of confidence.

So, are you going to tell us a bit more about yourself, Rick?

Of course not! Do you think I’m completely bloody stupid? Some of the stuff I’m going to write here may well upset one or two people. If they know who I am, even the thick ones might be able to put two and two together and identify themselves in the stories.

This could result in me ending up in court or in a pool of blood outside a London pub, depending on the preferred modus operandi of the offended party.

Well, why Flip Chart Fairy Tales then?

Because most corporate drivel starts off either on flip charts or Powerpoint. I thought about calling this blog Death By Powerpoint but that was just too depressing.

Update – July 2010

Hasn’t this blog got a bit serious?

Well, yes it has. When I started this blog in 2007 I wasn’t sure what I was going to write and I intended most of it to be light-hearted. But much of what has happened in the business world since then is beyond parody. The banking crash and the subsequent financial crisis are such fine examples of collective corporate idiocy that it is difficult to joke about them. As the crisis and the recession played out, I also noticed that a lot of commentators were talking rubbish. I got so annoyed that I had to start putting them right which is why this blog suddenly got very serious.

So isn’t the title a little frivolous for the content now?

I suppose it is but something else very strange has happened over the past three years. Flip Chart Fairy Tales has acquired a steadily increasing number of dedicated readers. I think that is because the subject matter of this blog – how people behave in organisations, how they are managed, how they are rewarded etc. – has gone mainstream. The financial crash and the public spending cuts have provoked a lot of interest in how organisations work and how management decisions are made. Presumably, that is what has pushed up this blog’s readership. I never thought, when I started this blog, that I would end up writing stuff for proper newspapers but that indicates the level of interest there now is in the way that people and organisations are managed. A lot of people know Flip Chart Fairy Tales and come here looking for comment, so there’s no point in changing the title now.

Hasn’t giving interviews and writing articles blown your cover?

Yes it has but a few people had already sussed me out anyway. That said, I still keep this blog separate from my company stuff as I don’t want my long-suffering colleagues to be tarred with any of my jaundiced views.

And anyway, people have told me that Flip Chart Rick is now a bit of a ‘thing’.

So has anyone sued you or beaten you up outside a pub yet?

No, but there is still time.