Archive
Customer Service…pizza style
I’ve blogged about The Pizza Cafe in Newton Abbot before – you can read it here. At the time I was talking about social media and how it is used – and was delighted that @pizzacafenewton had started chatting on twitter. I love the pizzas that these guys produce and I’ve never yet met someone who didn’t agree that it was amongst the best pizza they’ve ever had. So there’s the disclaimer – I am biased – I love Pizza Cafe Newton and I’m not ashamed to admit it!
So imagine my complete horror when we rang up last night to order pizza, only to be told that there were no large pizzas available! This is not on. It’s a Saturday night – how can you run out of pizza? X-factor is on, surely they must have known that they’d be flooded with orders. I’d already had a couple drinks so couldn’t drive to go and get a different take out – and to be honest, I had been looking for an occasion to have their pizza for weeks now (I’m trying to limit my consumption), I’d known all day we were having pizza for tea – this couldn’t be happening.
I am a big fan – I advertise them nonstop – I’d probably added to the problem, but this wasn’t on. Pizza Cafe Newton had let me down 
…except they didn’t. They have their priorities so bloody right they imagine themselves into being a customer. So when they couldn’t provide anything but small pizzas they managed to make it alright….for each of the two large pizzas we’d wanted they provided three small ones! Then to make up for it, they threw in two garlic breads and a pot of coleslaw. Now *that* is customer service.
I was then faced with a dilemma – should I advertise my ongoing love affair with Pizza Cafe Newton and their fantastic customer service and potentially risk getting someone into trouble for 1) running out of bases or 2) being too generous in their compensation. Anyway in the end I decided that my returning custom would alone make up for it…and I’m sure anyone reading this would happily share the love, and the experience, and support Pizza Cafe Newton.
The best pizza ever….and customer service as it should be. Go show them some love @pizzacafenewton.
Gluten Free Chocolate Brownies
The lovely @hadleybeeman was asking today if I had a gluten free chocolate brownie recipe. The truth is I don’t, but, I have adapted the Hummingbird Bakery recipe that features in their awesome Hummingbird Bakery Cookbook on three occasions – none of them came out perfectly, but they were all completely edible; let’ be honest with this much chocolate you can’t go wrong 
Ingredients
200gm dark chocolate
175gm unsalted butter
325gm caster sugar
**130gm plain flour**
3 eggs
icing sugar, to decorate
a 33 x 23 x 5cm baking tray, lined with greaseproof paper
Magic
Preheat the oven to Gas Mark 3 (170C/325F)
Smash the chocolate against the worktop to break it up (very therapeutic) – put chocolate and butter in a bowl over a saucepan of simmering water (usual caution about not letting bowl touch the water but I have to confess that I’m way too impatient for that so I always make sure it is in the water, just not touching the bottom of the pan)! Leave until melted and smooth.
Take off the heat. Add the sugar and stir it all together. Then add flour** and stir until well mixed. Lightly beat the eggs and stir them into the mix until thick and smooth.
Pour/spoon into baking tray and bake in preheated oven for about half an hour – the idea is to get brownies that are soft in middle and flaky on top. I have cooked these loads of times and nearly always leave them in for too long! I check after 30mins, get concerned that the mix is still a little wobbly looking, bottle it and put them back in for five mins….only to end up with overdone brownies with crispy edges – which are still beautifully edible but not as nice as they should be.
Leave to cool before decorating with icing sugar. Serve with clotted cream, ice cream, yoghurt if you insist on pretending to be healthy, on their own. I’ve never had anyone complain about these!
**Gluten free alternatives**
As I said I’ve made these three times for those pesky people who don’t do gluten One of the times I did a straight swop for almonds, so instead of the flour just 130gm ground almonds; one of the times I replaced with a mix of half almonds and half rice flour; and one time I just used gluten free flour from Doves Farm.
IMO none of these substitutes work as well….but they were all still very edible and very yummy.
Brownie tin?
This week the ever resourceful @dalekdoctor spotted this and sent me a link to the Edge Brownie Pan – I have yet to indulge in a purchase but if I do I’ll let you know how I get on – it makes perfect sense to me as a solution for the is it raw…damn it’s crusty challenge I regularly seem to face.
Need an excuse?
Just in case you are one of those strange, restrained types who needs an excuse to get baking – don’t forget it’s @macmillancoffee today and let’s face it, we shouldn’t need a special day to eat cake or raise cash for them – they’re worth it anyday, so get baking 
CommonWEALTH perspective
This year the Commonwealth Games are being held in India, in fact they are due to start in just under 10 days. You can visit the XIX Commonwealth Games 2010 Delhi website here. There has been lots of media coverage this week, which you would think was a good thing….except it has nearly all been ridiculously negative. It has been questioning the preparations, the buildings, alleged corruption, and most recently ‘shocking’ photos of the Athletes Village have been winging their way around the web. You can see the BBC report here.
The motto of the Commonwealth Games is Humanity – Equality – Destiny.
So the irony isn’t lost on me that the Western media is moaning about the conditions that athletes will live in for eleven days, when the reality for many people living in India is that this is far and above their everyday living conditions. So how about a little perspective people? I’m not suggesting that the conditions are below what is optimum, but how about a little humanity and equality?
Cancer and Cake
The other week I sat down to watch The Bucket List, I didn’t really know much about it, except that it was a comedy and that Morgan Freeman and Jack Nicholson starred in it. In a nutshell, for anyone who hasn’t seen it, it’s about two terminally ill cancer patients and their quest to achieve a number of things on their to-do list before they die. It’s a little cheesy, it’s easy watching, there’s a moral (kinda), you can probably take as much or as little out of it as you like. The tag lines of the film probably tell you all you need to know:
When he closed his eyes, his heart was opened
You only live once, so why not die with style?
If you’ve not seen it I’d recommend it.
Except it left me thinking. A lot. Regular readers (all two of you ), will be aware that my dad has terminal cancer, cholangiocarcinoma (you’d think after three years I wouldn’t need to double check how to spell that bloody word but no such luck). At his last appointment he decided not to have chemo for now (it was only likely to give him extra months not years) and to just carry on as normal – whatever normal is. The irony of the situation is that my dad is, or at least looks, fit and well; you wouldn’t know he was ill, indeed if it wasn’t for the routine scan earlier this summer I’m not sure we’d have been giving it a second thought. Dad was given three months to live, three years ago this week; he has surpassed all the odds already.
Last week was his birthday. What do you get a man who is dying for his birthday? Getting my dad a birthday present is an epic task at the best of times. He’s almost Buddhist in his approach to life and possessions – nothing is permanent so why want for anything? The only answer my dad has ever been consistent with when asked what he wants for his birthday – or for Christmas – or any other occasion is three well behaved children. We’re not too bad, us three, and we’re all adults now – so hopefully that need is met. So, true to form, what did I get him – I got him nothing, I baked instead. Double chocolate brownies for my pa on his 63rd birthday.
Which loops full circle to the point of this post – having just watched the Great British Bake Off on BBC2 I’ve decided that I’ll be baking tomorrow night for the World’s Biggest Coffee Morning on Friday. It’s not too late – you can still register to raise incredibly valuable funds for Macmillan Cancer Support. Trust me, Macmillan do really make the difference between a good and a bad day and just £25 could pay for a Macmillan Nurse for an hour; to be blunt that hour could change someone’s life.
You can help Macmillan continue their fantastic work – and you get to eat cake; what more could you ask for?
Change is a coming
“The rate of change in the business world is not going to slow down anytime soon. If anything, competition in most industries will probably speed up over the next few decades. Enterprises everywhere will be presented with even more terrible hazards and wonderful opportunities, driven by the globalization of the economy along with related technological and social trends”
Quote taken from Kotter (1996) Leading Change
Last week saw the culmination of a project that I have been involved with for almost two years now. The project, SDS360, focused on the process of change required to support the move to self-directed support in adult social care.
Self-directed support, or SDS, is central to personalisation, the government’s vision for adult social care. Personalisation, as you may have guessed from it’s name, focuses on the provision of a more personal support service than traditional social services have provided. There are four key elements to personalisation: universal services, early intervention and prevention, social capital and a focus on choice and control. So ultimately, SDS is about people having control over the support they need so they can live their life as they choose.
When we started the project two years ago, the vision for personalisation had recently been outlined in Putting People First (DH 2007) and Transforming Adult Social Care (DH 2008). The targets set seemed a long way off with local authorities expected to have made significant changes by April 2011.
Several things were clear to us at the start of the project:
- the policy landscape was changing
- the evidence base was new, with research projects and evaluations being few and far between, with the exception of IBSEN which was underway in several areas
- local authorities were all approaching personalisation in their own idiosyncratic way
- staff were experiencing a range of emotions, mostly confusion, some abject fear, and nearly all with a sprinkling of hope and enthusiasm along the way.
What was, and is, clear to anyone involved in adult social care is that the move to this new way of working requires a significant shift change. Indeed the TASC document cited above, clearly stated the challenge as follows:
It is essentially about a significant cultural shift and management of change
So rather than wait for the policy makers to settle down and decide what was happening, or sit back and wait for the evidence base to emerge, we decided to conduct a Change Project, SDS360. This project combined what we knew from change theory, with the emerging evidence around personalisation, and the experiences of service users and staff involved with adult social care. We produced a resource, that was piloted, refined and last week published alongside an accompanying website.
Changecards are built on the ten emotions that people told us they most commonly felt about the change. These emotions can be arranged on a spectrum ranging from excited, positive, enthusiastic, hopeful, challenged, uncertain, confused, anxious, overwhelmed through to frustrated. Each emotion has four types of cards linked to it:
- change theory – validates feelings by linking them to models of change
- evidence – uses evidence to show how others have experienced change
- reflection – gives examples to encourage reflection and discussion
- action – gives ideas for what helps and what you might do.
The cards are designed so that they can be used alone or in a group, we wanted a resource that anyone could relate to, wherever they personally were in the process of change. We know from talking to people that irrespective of how well your service, department or authority are doing with the move to self-directed support, change poses challenges to us all. The cards were designed to relate to self-directed support but we feel that they could be adapted for use with any change process.
The cards are now available for purchase (they’re a bargain at £20 + postage and packing) from the changecards website. I really hope that this is just the beginning for this resource, I’m optimistic that we can build a community of users who can feed in their experiences of change, their reflections on self-directed support, and their actions of what helped. We are planning to devise a trainer pack of resources and are collating ideas of how people would use the cards. I hope that the ‘wonderful opportunities’ that Kotter talked of will emerge from this resource, I hope that by combining a tangible resource, with a web platform and the power of social networks, we can support this resource to keep growing and in turn supporting people to make progress through their journey of change.
I have been delighted with the responses and support we’ve had so far, most heartening was sitting with some members of the original development group last week and seeing their responses and enthusiasm for the website and the cards. I always find it nerve racking when I’ve been working on something for so long and I don’t know how anyone else will find it, whether they’ll see it’s potential, whether they’ll use it, whether we’ve have done their thoughts and ideas justice.
I am proud of this resource, I love the accompanying website, and ultimately if they help just one person with the changes they are facing, or support one person to achieve their outcomes or access a better service, then it’s good enough for me. As ever, I’d love your feedback and ideas so please do get in touch either with me here or over on twitter, either at @georgejulian or @changecards.
ps Thank you to @fergusbisset for the website, @redjotter for helping with facilitating the piloting, @rich_w for the support and encouragement, and @antlerboy for being the first person to buy a pack!
Two year twitterversary
Wednesday was the two year anniversary of when I joined twitter.
Photo by Ansik
I intended to blog about it yesterday but got distracted by real life instead, enjoying an evening of chat, banter and Mary Poppins with @fergusbisset and @Mac1610 . So two years on I thought it was time for some self-reflection and a focus on what I’ve learnt about twitter and its impact on my life. These are my thoughts, they’re not rules and I’m not saying anyone else should take any notice of them, so please don’t take offence if you disagree – and better still let’s chat about it – you know the drill, please leave a comment.
1. I didn’t *get* twitter until I threw myself in and just got on with it. I watched and lurked for a while, I’d only met four people in real life @CliveAndrews @jonmoss @zerosandones and @tferriss, all at the Do Lectures earlier that month, I couldn’t keep on at them but I didn’t know anyone else. It took me a little while but I realised soon enough that you didn’t need to know someone to follow them – this wasn’t facebook, I wasn’t claiming to be their friend – it was just a case of hitting follow and saying hello if I was feeling brave or lurking if not.
2. Twitter is really just a microcosm of real life. There are as many people who are awesome, irritating, generous, vacuous, caring, bigoted, friendly, aloof, considerate, forward thinking, shallow and amusing on twitter as there are anywhere else in life. The real benefit of twitter is that you can pick and choose how much you interact with people who you disagree with or dislike….which is both a big benefit and a big risk if you ask me. You can sanitise your experience but for me that doesn’t resemble real life and is a dangerous strategy – as much as I hate the BNP I’d still rather read about them and know what they’re up to than just ignore them and pretend they don’t exist….the same goes for the tossers on twitter, we all need a little balance in our lives
3. Broadcast is DULL – talk to people, engage with people and respond to people who try to engage with you. There is nothing more disheartening than people who don’t respond, I just don’t understand what the point is. People are interesting, some of my most surprisingly positive twitter conversations have been with corporate accounts – Dave on the @thetrainline account and the guys and gals (not sure which) at Manchester airport @manairport. I’ll not bother listing the people who I’ve stopped following because they seem to just like the sound of their own voices/tweets but there are quite a lot.
4. Please please please RT selectively. I understand that some people tweet more than others, so they are likely to retweet more than others, that’s grand. However, some people appear to have a ratio of retweet to tweet of about 10:1. At some level I have no problem with that, after all it’s up to you, but then I fundamentally question what value you have to add and again the list of people I’ve unfollowed due to them flooding my stream with RTs is quite long. Please guys, as in life, you’re way more interesting when you add an original contribution or thought or discussion – each and every person out there has something to offer and something new to bring to the conversation, so please take time to share your perspective not just to recycle someone else’s opinion.
5. Personally I prefer to know you…yes you. I have been told several times that people can’t believe how honest and open I am on twitter and in my blog. I love that compliment but I also find it odd….I can’t be arsed to be anything but me, there are some things I wont talk about because I don’t think it’s professional or fair, there are some things I don’t think are ‘mine’ to discuss, but on the whole I’ll be as honest and open on line as I will off line….which for those of you who have met me is fairly bluntly honest I also much prefer people who are true to themselves, so come on people be yourselves, it makes twitter (and life) way more interesting.
So that’s about it, I could go on but I’m not sure it’s really that interesting…but then see point 5 and point 2…this is me.
So what has changed as a result of twitter? Well everything and nothing. I guess the single greatest impact is that I have met people who I probably would not have met without twitter – or perhaps I would have met them but I would have been unlikely to have a way to keep in touch with them. On a personal and a professional level I have developed my networks, I have made new friends and acquaintances, I consider that I have a greater pool of people to ask for advice or support, I guess (at risk of sounding cheesy) I feel more connected. So I guess that’s a big fat success as far as I’m concerned.
Thanks to each and every one of you who has made the last two years such a blast. You’re all awesome. Tweet you soon.
Really bad advertising! #no1
I get a lot of what can only be described as crap advertising dropping through my letterbox. Sometimes I wonder whether there are regional variations and my rubbish post is worse than other people’s due to my exotic Westcountry location Most of the time I grumble about the trees being killed in a really awful attempt to get me to buy a product or service I don’t need or don’t want. I don’t think I have ever ordered or purchased something as a result of some shoddy mass mail drop.
Today I got home to an advert from TalkTalk – two things amazed me and actually drove me to action in terms of sharing this with you! 1) That it was soooo bad (I mean who do they pay to design this stuff)? 2) That some poor person had actually marked on it number 16 – either the postman or someone else who had thrown it back in the post indicating it was for a no16 somewhere and mine was the lucky chosen street. I don’t know but I thought it was truly crap and warranted sharing with the masses! Depending on what response this little gem gets I might do regular posts – because I really do get some crackingly bad post!
