MONET. MONET. MONET.

This week I went to the incredibly popular Royal Academy show “Painting the Modern Garden: Monet to Matisse”. It had been described by the Guardian as

“a ravishing joy from start to finish”.

Yet - oh dear. Am I a philistine? I was a bit bored. Monet is in the money as an artist - one of his many lilies “The Water Lily Pond” sold for $54 million at New York in May last year but there was a dreary sameness of colourful blobs throughout the exhibition. I found myself growling that flowers are precise and mathematical in design not random slobs. My mind was annoyed and my heart unmoved.

Until I came to the less well known Alfred Parsons (no me neither). Born in 1847 he died in 1920. He lived in Broadway where artists of the late 19th century congregated.   He was an artist, illustrator and a garden designer. As it happens I know one of the gardens he designed. It’s wonderful.

Here is the picture that really caught my wife’s eye and mine. It has movement and invites you in. It is one of the pictures in the RA that actually smelt of flowers. These rude orange lilies reek of summer and there’s a back story behind that gate…a couple embracing or a cat sunning itself. The painting is alive. It’s also valuable but more like $20,000 than $20 million.

I’ve decided to listen to my heart more and less to what I’m told to think. And let that terrible expression of the second rate businessman “the devil lies in the detail” be forever sent into exile. That’ll be good news for Boris Johnson whom, as far as I know is not keen on gardening, painting or detail.  If he had a song here’s how it would go:-

“You put your right arm in
your right arm out
In, out, in, out,
You shake it all about.
You do the Hokey Cokey and you turn around
That's what it's all about...”

But I digress….

After recent weeks of working on presentations and reading business books I’d had enough. They maybe full of quotable stuff from chaps like Peter Drucker positioning culture as the key to success:

“Culture eats strategy for breakfast” he said; right on Peter.

Because yes, it’s good (but like Monet is it worth the money?) So I decided to refresh my mind with some John Le Carré.

My wife had bought me “The Night Manager” which is also currently on TV - it’s BBC drama at its swaggering best. The book’s astonishing, dense and beautifully written; it speaks to my mind and to my heart.

He’s such a fine craftsman and his definition of what a story is, is  unsurpassable:
“‘The cat sat on the mat’ is not a story.
‘The cat sat on another cat’s mat’ is a story.”

He also wrote a book called “The Constant Gardener” which brings me back to Monet……
Painting the Mo Garden: Monet to Matisse

I WANT IT HOT

If I were to get home from a work, from one of those exhausting meetings with colleagues in a wine bar at 10pm to find the chef (my wife) had shut down the kitchen and said “no hot food” I’d be quite cross. I’d express myself colourfully. I might even swing my arms around. Mind I’d never hit her - wouldn’t dare - not that brave - crikey….the very thought…..

That’s the trouble with self-opinionated egocentics like Jeremy Clarkson, Kevin Pietersen, Piers Morgan and me. We need our hot food.

But relax.

This isn’t yet another article about “Top Gear” and St Jeremy of Ferrari.

I wanted instead to reflect on difference between people who do their homework and those who don’t and on the amateurism that some aspire to. I’ve actually heard people say things like “I want to be fresh - I don’t want to over prepare”. That’s about as absurd as saying you don’t want to cook the food so it’s piping hot (as anyone getting in after a hard day’s work should expect it to be) but want to serve it fresh…and semi raw.

The best people I work with all allow a lot of preparation and rehearsal time for presentations or even the simplest of speeches.

Even those blessed with nerveless competence need to have their presentation nailed down.
There’s no room for hoping it’ll be all right in the night.  Besides it’s ill-mannered not to prepare your presentational banquet fastidiously. This is the opportunity to be a Master Chef or be sent home early in gastronomic disgrace.

Three things determine the star from a wally:-

• A great story - one that hangs together which has a point and a memorable theme
• One that is served hot - which has bits of contemporary garnish and relevance
• One that is delivered with charm and confidence

 All of this deserves a lot of time - Leon Kreitzman, one of the finest speakers and storytellers I’ve ever seen, reckoned on a half hour presentation needing 5 hours hard work and practice - assuming it’s on a subject you really know about.

Recently I had to do a complex reading in church - I reckon I practised it at least twelve times before I had it cracked.

So the message is prepare, rehearse, assume nothing and don’t be so unprofessional as to hope you can stroll up on stage and busk it. To be sure, the more that you do it the better you get so never risk that ghastly feeling that you aren’t quite ready yet.

You haven’t got the time?

Set your alarm an hour or so early for a week….rehearse then.

I regard sleep as sacred but it’s a sin to be snoozing if instead you could be honing your performance.
Which is why JC was so cross. Because whilst ever the pro himself his production team were not and let the chef go home.

Bottom Gear guys.

A PLEA FOR RECOGNISING REAL TREASURE

I am not one for nostalgia. The allure of steam trains, pipe smoking and warm beer seems to me massively overrated. UKIP may look fondly backwards but hankering for the past doesn’t create a useful platform for developing the future. Indeed almost everything about the present seems to me a massive improvement - from restaurants to transport to houses everything has simply got cleaner, cheaper and more efficient.

But three times this week I felt a little twitch of affection for long lasting treasures which were they not here we’d be really sorry.

The BBC is obvious enough but the way this organisation is currently reinventing itself is astounding. Dr Who was always good but now it’s reaching Shakespearian levels, similarly Sherlock which has an intellectual power and narrative drive we see seldom except in Stoppard.

And it stretches to C-Beebies - in my days the poncy-voiced lady said accusingly “are you sitting comfortably? Then I’ll begin”. She terrified me. Even John Humphrys has become human on the Today Programme as Cherry Owen in Under Milk Wood asking Mrs Cherry Owen (played by Cerys Matthews) to “give us a kiss”. This, after being called a “silly sausage “by Johnny Rotten in an interview. What fun. What a brilliant apostle for change “Auntie” has become.

And then the Co-op dubbed a joke company following the escapades of the Reverend Flowers and the departure of top management. But you know something? Following the Tesco story and the way the city is walking all over our grocers something stands out. The Co-op may be flawed and foolish but at least it’s authentic in its foolishness. It’s like the Archers full of humanity not behaving like a crooked MBA. Its latest advertising for its bank (proof its feet are made of damp clay) - “ethics, values and a tattoo parlour” is dreadful.

Beware a person who says “...trust me. I’m honest”. But beware a London ad agency for leading the good old Co-op down the smooth ad campaign route. The Co-op is authentic, real, has values and some great products. Focus on the facts and the stories but not in glossy ads. The Co-op is not nor should ever be glossy. But I still it love it warts and all.

And finally people: the diversity I recently saw in Shoreditch which more resembled New York than the London of cosy Soho. Or the laconic conversation I had in a Brighton Lidl about the weather with a quite large lady whose basket seemed alarmingly full of pies.

The Treasury has confirmed what we lovers of immigration have always known (immigration, by the way, creates what has always made the country we live in what it is- a brilliant mish-mash of talent, diversity and resourcefulness.) The Treasury news is this: immigrants bring a net £20 billion to the economy.

£20,000,000, 000 - thank you.

The BBC, the Co-op and our people - human, imperfect and brilliant. We are so lucky.

BOREDOM R.I.P.

The age of boredom is dead. Boredom’s not actually that old an idea, the word having been coined in 1852 in Dickens’s Bleak House.

This was when Britain was the world’s largest economy, when the pre Raphaelites were doing their thing and Tennyson was poet Laureate. Yet in my own childhood just over a century later, we were still told we must be capable of dealing with boredom. Like grief, boredom was something that happened to everyone and you just had to sit quietly and wait.

There wasn’t much else to do of course. Shops were shut on Sunday. Actually there weren’t many shops and hardly any restaurants. Loneliness was commonplace (unless you smoked of course. Remember the advertising campaign “You’re never alone with a Strand”?) When the circus came to town it was a very big event rather like the Olympics but with animals. In the early ‘60s the world was a quiet place. When we went to Greece it was like being an intrepid explorer.  Local Greeks would walk up and stare at you in astonishment whilst you needed a police permit to travel to northern Corfu.

There was the polite absence of things going on. Cabinet Ministers were addressed as “Sir” by BBC interviewers and were given an easy time and we were still hanging people - not so polite that. There was always football of course and draught bitter and Mackeson Stout. But just this week I noticed that the number of people going to the theatre now exceeds the number of people who go to watch football.

I have this funny feeling that the heyday of football is over and will decline - a dull, overpriced game that is no longer beautiful - and the era of DIY eventing in on us. The number of people practising “circus arts” has shot up and the incidence of activity holidays - learning to cook, dance, yodel or write creatively has shot up. (Sorry I lied about “yodelling” - that was an example of creative writing.)

The modern world is about “doing things on the move”. Visiting, trying and watching. Bite sized everything.
Today it’s Sunday I can read several 100 page Sunday Papers, I can go shopping to hundreds of boutiques and specialist shops, eat from a choice of every cuisine in the world, listen to street musicians who in the 1960s would have been at the Palladium, go to see one of 30 different films, drink wine, fruit cider, cocktails, infinite varieties of tea and coffee - even Vietnamese coffee. You haven’t heard of it …me neither till today.

I am, literally, spoilt for choice.

Check out what’s on for families and there are museums, activity centres, discovery centres, open farms where you can cuddle animals of your choice. The menu of possibilities is too long for anyone to conceive of getting bored.

My grandsons and great nieces have far busier diaries than mine…poor things.

Boredom is dead. Exhaustion is the new boredom.

POVERTY OF FOOD AND THOUGHT

This week I got really angry a few times. So, you might say, you’re at the sort of age when anger goes with those grey hairs; chill out; it isn’t fatal.

Only starvation is fatal.

I watched a BBC programme incredulously – “The Great British Budget Menu”. I was incredulous because it ran through midnight which is not exactly prime time.  And incredulous because it painted a picture of Britain I thankfully don’t recognise but have suspected is there lurking just below politics and whiffle of middle class crossness.

Essentially we have a nutrition crisis.

Forget obesity. Forget Five-a-Day. Through massive food price inflation we are facing a crisis in which a lot of people just don’t have enough to eat, in which well over ½ million people are forced to use Food Banks , the use of which has increased by 200% over the past three months alone.

The only apparently affordable way of eating is the worst way – cans and instant if you’re on a draconian budget.

The programme showed three top chefs Hartnett, Corrigan and Martin struggling to create a decent nutritious meal for £1. The best bits were James Martin asking a butcher to cut a chicken leg in half, Richard Corrigan’s face when a mum told him she had just 20p to last till payday (she was what George our chancellor would call an “honest, hardworking mum”) and Angela Hartnett whooping with joy when she found a chicken for £2.70. No animal husbandry here, no organic squeamishness. Cheap protein….yes!
With all the caveats of knowing a TV producer is squeezing out maximum anguish and empty plates are being filmed by well-fed cameramen this programme humbled and shocked me. I hope David, Nick, Ed and company all felt the same.

And then there was the Sunday Times article about advertising. It said “mad men are being replaced by maths men as ad agencies bid for eyeballs in fractions of a second.” Apart from being glad for anything nasty that happens to the odious and talentless Don Draper and his colleagues I was again enraged. What used to be called the “persuasion industry” has allegedly become the computerised subliminal impact industry. Any industry that becomes a process next becomes a commodity and then dies.

So goodbye to the ads that lay behind some of the greatest film talents as they matured…Ridley Scott, Alan Parker, Adrian Lyne and others. Goodbye to storytelling. Goodbye to creativity. Really?

Clearly insane.

We’re too rich as a nation to allow a large community to be hungry and we’re too smart as a country to believe Chinese water torture is superior to the magic of creativity and brilliant advertising ideas.

Or am I being an optimist?

www.colourfulthinkers.com

WHY THE BBC MUST NOT XXXXXXXXXXXXX

Has the BBC taken leave of its senses in their redactions of the Pollard Report?

I was at Balliol with Lord Patten. Chris (as we knew him) was seen many times ccc vvvv xxxx nnnn cccccc nn bb yet we never thought this ,,,,mmmmmmmm despite his obvious propensity for  bbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbb discreetly.

It was David Cameron in his relationship with ccccccc nnnnnnn who raised more xxxxxxxxxx. He was discovered one vvvv,,, with his finger bbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbb laughing in mmmmmmmmmmmmmmm and in discomfort.

Ed Balls or Balls up as his friends described him was well known for vvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvv            vvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvv with evident relish.

And he thought this picture said it all:

SssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssSssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssSssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssss disgusting.d d disgusting.

As all the above shows the practice of redaction makes innocents subject to unjustified speculation because redaction feeds the wit of Merton and Hislop on “Have I Got News For You?” and the fertile imaginations of the rest of us. No wonder Jeremy Paxman’s so frustrated.

It’s hard enough running anything.  People just make it worse. The tensions between indulging creative talent, human ambitions and the tendency that human beings have to cut off their noses to spite their faces makes being a leader one of the most complex tasks that exists.

How does one reconcile the frailties of leaders like Steve Jobs, Ron Dennis, Frank Lowe with the fact that each in their respective fields have been leaders of utterly brilliant business enterprises?

I watched “Moneyball” on Friday – Brad Pitt playing Billy Beane General Manager of the Oakland “A”s a financially strapped Baseball Team who uniquely used data to help recruit a hugely cost effective team in 2002. He broke all the rules of intuition old timers relied on in judging potential. It’s a riveting story of new business models.

As John Henry owner of the Boston Red Socks says to Billy:

“You won the exact same number of games that the Yankees won, but the Yankees spent one point four million per win and you paid two hundred and sixty thousand. I know you've taken it in the teeth out there, but for the first guy through the wall it always gets bloody, always. It's the threat of not just the way of doing business, but in their minds it's threatening the game. But really what it's threatening is their livelihoods, it's threatening their jobs, it's threatening the way that they do things.”

Redaction feels old fashioned too. Some believe it’s saving their jobs but it isn’t.  They should start opening up, telling the truth and changing the way they do things.

www.colourfulthinkers.com

INSTITUTIONS ARE LIKE ASH TREES

 
We are in strange and uncharted times when virtually every institution on which we’d counted is under attack or rotting to death.

Is it so surprising in our increasingly open society in which the speed of communication is instant, transparency is the norm and there’s an absence of certain things being sacred anymore that one after another the old order is disappearing?

We’re seeing the equivalent of Chalara fraxinea cutting a swathe though, banking, the police, the church, parliament, the BBC, old fashioned media, big tax dodging companies and the offshore rich whose hidden wealth disaffected bankers keep revealing.

If we don’t all of us believe in the power of the people to put the boot in without any fear of reprisal, think again.

An old favourite of mine who in his heyday usually seemed a step ahead, Chris Patten, now seems unable to hold a catch.

The church is bankrupt financially and morally and it’s with concern we even wonder if Justin Welby mightn’t end up like George Entwhistle some 55 days into his archbishopric. (Just don’t let him go on the Today programme – ever).

As the ill attended vote for police commissioners was held we find a lot of old Chief Constables under arrest or being investigated and a bunch of officers in Kent charged with rigging crime figures.

When you can’t trust the police or priests it’s a bit sad. Actually the “trust what they say” figure in the Ipsos Mori Veracity Index 1983 – 2011 shows the clergy have plummeted from 85% believing in their truthfulness to 68% - below doctors (who come top with 88%), teachers, professors, judges and scientists. The police at 63% come next. Vicars used to be way out in front.

And according to You Gov the decline in belief of the BBC journalists to tell the truth fell 13% points in the past fortnight.

Unsurprisingly but depressingly 80% of the public actually expect politicians to lie.

The time has come a bit, like a mugger sidling out of the shadows, when we are all being asked what our values really are.

The God we worship can’t just be profit, votes or share of audience. Over the next few months Google, Amazon, Apple, Starbucks and the rest are going to be hammered. And whistleblowers will make a symphony of sound to rival Eric Whitacre.

See it bigger

Watch that Ipsos Mori Veracity Index – it’s the one that really matters.

www.colourfulthinkers.com