I am currently using Posterous as a random place to publish images and whatnot. Aside from that, Twitter is my other outlet, follow me @toppage.

The Obama victory is such a wonderful event. I think Maya Angelou sums up best why it is so special. (Dare you to watch Maya speak so eloquently and passionately, and not be in tears by the time she reads her poem “I Rise”.)

It isn’t just that he is a democrat and doesn’t come from the white wealthy establishment. It isn’t just what he symbolises. Nor that he is smart (please tell me that the word intellectual is going to stop being a term of abuse).

But because he has in bucket loads that under-rated and sadly rare value of common sense. It is inevitable he’ll disappoint, make decisions people don’t agree with, or are just plain wrong. But by using common sense to come to conclusions, there is a greater chance that his decisions will be well thought out. And he has the leadership skills and charisma to get people to follow him, even if they don’t always agree with him. Now that’s a special talent.

Obama inspires so much debate about race and identity. Is he black? White? Bi-racial? Post-racial? Not “proper” African American because he is the son of an African and an American, but doesn’t have a slave history? A new type of American as he is the son of an immigrant?

While Obama’s existence and and experience is causing this particular debate around race and ethnicity to move on and progress, I don’t really share the need that some people feel to put labels onto others. Surely it is up to the person to decide what, if any, label or identity they wish to choose? When done by others, there seems to be an expectation that this identity explains everything about someone. By doing so, leads people to ignore the parts of someone which don’t conform to that identity, or inflate the parts of someone’s behaviour which re-inforce the stereotype.

I wrote a very rushed colour piece on Englishness and identity years ago when I worked at the BBC (the page has now been deleted, but I found a version on a forum). It wasn’t a  particularly good or amusing article. It was intended to be satirical, but I think in parts it reinforced rather than confounded national stereotypes and certainly was a little immature in places! However, despite this, elements of the piece still sum up my views on my own identity.

A Gaelic-speaking mother, Welsh-speaking father, born in England, raised in Australia, lived in the UK for over a decade. I don’t know what that makes me, but I know it doesn’t make me any one singular thing: a Scot, or Welsh, or English, or British, or Australian (despite my accent). 

I’m really quite comfortable with not having a clear sense of what identity box I go into, no matter how many times people try to say that I am one of these things. I’m quite happy being just Jen.

Not to get all Carrie Bradshaw, but it got me thinking how different it is to promote a brand new, game-changing product, compared with something that is making incremental innovations. 

It made me come back to one of the theories from my MBA which is pretty well known but very useful – Herzberg’s theory on motivation-hygiene factors. The logic is that there are things that can de-motivate you at work: a broken chair, your computer not working, feeling that you aren’t paid what you should be. However, when these things are fixed (your chair is comfortable, you computer works like a dream, you feel you are being paid roughly what is fair for the job you are doing) then you aren’t motivated to work harder (“wow, this chair is so comfy I’m going to try especially hard today!”). Instead, the things that motivate you are often more intangible, and are factors such as recognition, growth, responsibility – being appreciated, I guess.

Although Herzberg was talking specifically about motivation at work, you could twist it to be about the marketing of existing products which are incrementally improving. Promoting something as new that people assume you are doing already is a bit like the broken chair. Yes, it is right to launch a new version of your product that consolidates all your activities (fixing the chair), but people aren’t going to necessarily see it as new and shiny. Rather, they’ll see it as more (and hopefully better) of what you’ve been doing for years. 

As an aside, if you want to become hugely well-off, one way is to come up with a management theory and get it included in MBA material. You are then quids in each time it is published by the hundreds of business schools round the world. Charles Handy, Porter’s five forces, Mintzberg’s organisational configurations. The list is endless.

My management model would be the goat fucker theory, based on the old joke: A man discovers the cure for cancer, do they call him cancer curer? No. He saves children from a burning building. Do they call him child saver? No. But he fucks one goat… 

Really, it is a (cruder) version of Herzberg. You can (and should) spend a lot of time making sure that your products are what people expect them to be, people’s desks are fixed, computers work, etc., however you shouldn’t expect extra recognition or a big medal for doing so. Rather, if you mess these up (and worse, don’t also offer the factors that encourage and inspire), then people rightly get de-motivated. And you run the risk of being considered the Goat Worrier.