management blog

England are playing Australia at Lords. The Open golf championship is on at Turnberry. After two disappointing years a warm English summer is expected. And meanwhile, back in the office, people are pretending to care about work.

Summertime, and earning a living isn’t easy. Oh I know, there’s a recession on, the risk of a double-triple-quadruple dip, life is terribly serious and we all need to work harder. I’m not arguing about that. It’s just that, come this time of the year, it is not always easy to take the suited, frowning, grown-up life so seriously.

A straw poll of otherwise mature and serious colleagues confirms that thoughts are beginning to drift, shall we say, to a world beyond the desk and the PC. This lack of professionalism and loss of focus can affect anyone, regardless of seniority.

Blame the school calendar. For most of us those early years, with their long summer holidays, establish a rhythm in our lives that no amount of grown-up work can ever break. From mid-July onwards, until September, the serious stuff just doesn’t quite seem to count. We become characters in our own private sequel to The Truman Show. The scenery looks the same, the dialogue sounds plausible, but our hearts are not in it.

Hence the great British tradition of the so-called “silly season”, a time when in theory there is not much news about, and airtime/column inches have to be filled with frivolous items. In many workplaces senior colleagues may disappear for extended breaks, happy in the knowledge that nothing important is going to happen until the autumn. How could anything important happen when they are not there?

The problem with that approach, when you think about it, is that in recent years August has been one of the busiest months of all for major world developments. Soviet tanks rolled into Prague in August 1968. Richard Nixon resigned in August 1974. Iraq invaded Kuwait in August 1990. Diana, princess of Wales and Elvis Presley both died in August (1997 and 1977 respectively).

More recently August also gave us Lord Hutton’s inquiry into the death of Dr David Kelly (2003), Hurricane Katrina (2005), and, in 2007, the emergence of the credit crunch, the consequences of which we are still struggling with today.

So now is really not the time to slacken. We should be sitting up straight, alert, and on the look-out for new opportunities that can be grabbed while other less hard-working people are either on the beach or dreaming of it.

But no sooner are those words typed up than thoughts turn to a full house at Lords, the beautiful south Ayrshire coast, and long summer holidays with adult responsibilities left far behind.

Is there any way of overcoming this July-August slump, and the seasonal slide into falling productivity? Willpower alone may not do it. Even fear of getting the sack may not be terrifying enough. No, short of emigrating to Argentina or Australia, where it is now winter, I’m not sure what else to suggest.