FASTER

“You’ve got to be faster, cheaper and better” - but the greatest of these is faster

In the world in which we live this mantra has the joint distinction of being both true and fantastically annoying. It’s on the lips of all Management Consultants and MBAs. Because in 2017 tortoises don’t win; they get run over.

But speed contains its own perils like prosecution, fatal collisions and blinding headaches. In Britain, as we are demonstrating in our preparation for Brexit, speed is not our priority because when we attempt to rev up we become like Lord Ronald in Stephen Leacock’s “Gertrude the Governess” - one of his Nonsense Novels:

“Lord Ronald said nothing; he flung himself from the room, flung himself upon his horse and rode madly off in all directions.”

Our great trophy - HS2 - will cost £56 billion give or take and save 30 minutes on the journey time to Birmingham. If the money were spend instead on increasing broadband speeds and improving mobile reception this would improve our lives and the speed at which we operated in a much more relevant way. What sort of country Lord Ronald, we ask, do you want Britain to be? Currently we are 31st for broadband speed in the Global League Table. 17 of the EU countries come ahead of us. But (zut alors) we come ahead of France on whose slow broadband we contemptuously spit.

Presuming that we wish in our post Brexit lives to remain a green and pleasant land but also be supremely fit for international business for the next generation, speed in the right area rather than on a slightly quicker trip up north would seem the smart thing to do. But presumably we’ll push on with HS2 because we said we would.

Our second mission in speeding up our lives is to stop wasting our time. I have had a run-in with BT (yes them again) for several months over our defective landline. It hasn’t worked except for odd moments. Dealing with them is made harder by most of the conversations irritatingly being online or with a computer. Worst of all I’m wasting your time by telling you all this. (Breaking news…..Trevor from BT just fixed it and was mystified it had taken so long…)

By trying to make things simpler we’ve complicated processes so trying to fix anything takes a very long time. Today it took a very accomplished workman 3 ½ hours to fix one kitchen tap and conclude that another one was defective. The way they were assembled made this process incredibly longwinded.

We have too much bad design, too much choice, too many applications. We are wasting our energy being busy. In the recent Great British Menu one of the contestants produced a brilliantly complicated confection. The judges started at it and concluded “There’s a lot going on here…far too much”

So the greatest word is not faster.

It’s simpler.

Being less elaborate and more effective should be our mantra.

THE POISON OF XENOPHOBIA

No, this is not an attack on UKIP, who will carry on muttering their stuff regardless of me and be very happy, on their own, in a pub with locked doors.

No, it’s a reflection on the dangers I see in isolationism and resistance to change.  It seems entirely possible that we could soon have a resignation and a divorce pretty well all at once with Britain saying goodbye to Europe and Scotland saying goodbye to Britain.

All done and dusted, we’d be proudly on our own.

But why stop there? Let’s ditch everything apart from London and the South East. We’re roughly 40 % of the UK and twice as rich as the rest. A £1.5 trillion gated community of an economy and no need to worry about Labour or Liberals anymore or those strange Northern accents or greyhounds or pies or the Co-op. Burn the cloth cap and build another runway or two at Heathrow and who needs HS2? We’ll spend it on skyscrapers instead.

Increasingly we’ll retreat indoors behind our PCs and read about the Bulgarian invasion of Scotland and laugh drily.  But weren’t we born to huddle together, laugh, drink and tell stories?  Weren’t we born to exchange views and change minds?  Aren’t we hard wired to work together?

I was asked today if I thought travelling broadened the mind. Not exactly, I reflected, it’s bigger than that. It explodes boundaries. Go to China or India and you see unimaginable scale, poverty, wealth, growth and a sheer sense of wonder and discovery in their eyes and through your own. These are places that are devouring a diet of change. They have infinite  horizons just as extraordinary and wide as Columbus saw.
Caitlin Moran lamented her London being stolen by a new rich foreign cadre who’ve taken it over. Yet I rejoice to hear people describe Mile End as trendy and smart. I’m amazed (happily) that Park Royal is cool – a sort of South Ealing without the ponce and that Clapham is the Chelsea of today.

Because there is only one poison more toxic than that of hating abroad and that’s the small ‘c’,  conservative resistance to change and hostility to ambition.

You know, the view that we can’t afford to do whatever it takes to get to the next level when all the evidence of history has consistently shown ambition, investment, drive and change has, nearly always, led to a better life. Isn’t that the lesson of the Olympics?

I realise how much I like being part of Scotland and how refreshing, foibles and all (and we’re good ones to talk) Europe is (from Greece to Sweden) and how good it is being a European citizen…..because here’s where I live.

Maybe we’ve got bored or gone mad but as Tom Peters once put it “you can’t shrink into greatness”.

Here’s hoping lots of people hear that.

WHY I LOVE LOOPHOLES

One of the smartest men ever to work in advertising was Bill Bernbach. He said that the admission of a small fault would gain you trust that you were a truthful sort of person. Bill was praising the loophole, or rather the need to admit it and the benefit from doing so.

Truth of course is much in the news right now – the Police, Orchid View Care Home and the KPMG HS2 report on the zero sum effect of the project…apparently its loophole is it’ll damage the economy of places to which it isn’t going.

Today when everyone is counselled to whistleblow it’s disappointing that Lisa Martin who called in the police to Orchid View exposing a horror story has been unable to get a job since.

And if you want to succeed as a policeman watch other colleagues’ backs, smooth over the loopholes and play for the team. I’m not defending the Plebgate guilty, merely observing that they acted, all of them, true to their collegiate and Freemasonish culture.  Imagine a premier league striker stopping a game to confide in the referee that a team member had “dived deliberately” in the penalty area.

The likely consequence, I imagine, would be the whistleblowing footballer would be sent off by the irate referee, fired by his club and beaten up by his agent.

Truth, as Pontius Pilate discovered, is tricky stuff.

And again as we saw in the hostile interrogation of the HS2 CEO, Alison Munro by Gavin Esler regarding the failure to broadcast all the data in this recent report.

What the appalling Esler did is switch me (and I suspect others) from sceptic about HS2 to fervent supporter on the basis that if he can be so horrid he must be against it for bad reasons.

The perception of truth is about its presentation as well as facts.

In my imagination I see Esler interviewing Asa Briggs Candler, the marketing genius at the birth of today’s number two brand, Coca-Cola:

“So does it contain traces of the banned substance cocaine?…do you refuse to answer?....Well what are the ingredients?...What do mean it’s secret?. …why are you hiding the truth?...and does it dissolve human teeth if they are left to soak in it for 24 hours?...come on answer…you will be judged by your silence.”

Coke is a winner and you Mr Esler will be judged by your manners.

Life is not neat and tidy. It is not a thing of perfection. There are loopholes.  And the desire to have a cut and dried, cast iron, irrefutable story is going to lead to being economical with the truth.

Remember what Bill Bernbach said and disarm your opponent with a small admission and keep smiling. On balance you’ll win more victories that way.