YA BOO SUCKS

I came back from what turned out to be a slightly longer summer break than I’d intended feeling genial. Genial is an old fashioned sort of pork pie, pint and pickles word – genial is not about being pleased with oneself but it’s having that feeling  of viewing  life in a calm, tolerant and good-natured way.

Even the news about the economy was better and the long term forecasters, genially in praise of population growth, suggest that going as things are we’ll be the no. 2 economy in Europe soon and even possibly overtake Germany by the middle of the century.

So what’s not to smile about?

Quite a lot apparently if you are a member of the far right anti-Europe Tory brigade, the Tea Party in America or the Golden Dawn in Greece (notice how I’ve willy-nilly thrown together these unhappy bed fellows into the grumpy sleeping bag.)

This right wing crowd are characterised by extreme bad manners, a refusal to play by the rules and a strong sense of self-righteousness. Most of all they won’t take no or even yes for an answer – they all have to have the last word. So you might say they are behaving in quite a childish way.

This makes me speculate that Mr Cool - Barack Obama – who is calmly saying “no” at present, probably wishes he lived in Greece because what he’d do then is lock the Tea Party up, ban them and pretend they didn’t exist.

Is he lacking in leadership? Well he isn’t a Thatcher or a Churchill or a George Bush for sure. But all of them were actually pretty unpopular from time to time in their day.

It’s been argued that the absence of leadership – so widely lamented – is partly due to a failure of “followship”. We, the electorate, have become unherdable cats or horses (if you prefer) who, when it comes the crunch, won’t drink.

And modern media adds to the trouble because wrong and right both demand and get equal billing, so it’s really difficult to keep focused on principle and stay calmly on the track you promised.

Especially as Armageddon beckons.

And finally Luke Johnson – who created Pizza Express and writes insightfully on management has lambasted the far from genial Lord Sugar and the crowd on Dragon’s Den. Their behaviour is inhibiting a new generation of entrepreneurs because witnessing the witless and greedy being torn to shreds by the cruel and rude is not what they want from their lives.

It seems to me a bit of geniality all round might not go amiss. I’m not going to align with the band War’s song “why can’t we be friends?” but it really seems endless playground confrontation is becoming  tiresome and unproductive.

So there.

www.colourfulthinkers.com

THE REALITY OF POLITICS

The enclosed intrigued me. The sheer economic pressures of what Martin Luther King called “the fierce intensity of now” takes smiles off faces and puts steel into behaviour. Today I got a request (well nearly, very nearly a demand) for £215 from Barnado’s to identify and rescue a child vulnerable to sexual exploitation.

The latter days of Obama campaign plus Sandy plus a lot of money concluded the affair.

Moral: get the money in….then get them out….get them voting (however reluctantly)…

Before the election – “we need your money ….now!”

"Friend --

In a few hours, I'm walking into a budget meeting with the rest of the campaign management team.

By the time we walk out of that room, we'll have decided exactly what kinds of resources we can get to organizers on the ground and which attacks we can beat back in the last three days of this election.

This is seriously your last chance to help decide what that looks like. Your donation will determine which attacks get a response -- and which don't.
According to our records associated with this email address, you haven't chipped in to this campaign yet. So this is it, the very last call. If you care about the outcome of this election, now is the time to show it.

Please give $5 or more, and help while you still can:
https://donate.barackobama.com/Budget-Decisions

Please hear me when I say this is serious, and the decisions we're making are very concrete -- and final.

Give what you can, and let's make sure we win.

Thank you.

Ann Marie

Ann Marie Habershaw
Chief Operating Officer
Obama for America

After the election – phew!!!

Friend –

I'm about to go speak to the crowd here in Chicago, but I wanted to thank you first.

I want you to know that this wasn't fate, and it wasn't an accident. You made this happen.

You organized yourselves block by block. You took ownership of this campaign five and ten dollars at a time. And when it wasn't easy, you pressed forward.

I will spend the rest of my presidency honoring your support, and doing what I can to finish what we started.

But I want you to take real pride, as I do, in how we got the chance in the first place.

Today is the clearest proof yet that, against the odds, ordinary Americans can overcome powerful interests.

There's a lot more work to do.

But for right now: Thank you.

Barack

www.colourfulthinkers.com

CONFIDENCE AND CREATIVITY ARE THE CRITICAL CURRENCIES

It’s easy to talk oneself into a state of despondency. Read any economist today on sovereign debt and you’ll reduce your forecasts and plan to dine on gruel two nights a week.  Lose your confidence and your expectation of success reduces too. Barack Obama said “always act confident”. If we acted on what we are reading currently we’d all be doomed.

But there is a side effect of the prognoses these economic gurus are having. They are dispiriting most of our competitors and giving the rest of us huge opportunities. Strategically we should be embarked upon a share-gain plan, ruthlessly selling the benefits of our products and services at the expense of our more pessimistic competitors.

This is the age of the salesman…they crop up every decade or so …where confidence, can-do and enthusiasm will win friends and sales.

The world has changed. Countries like Greece and Portugal, we’re told, are structurally doomed and being targeted by those who make their money by selling things short. But none of this makes a scrap of difference to someone selling industrial flooring, pesto sauce or who’s running a restaurant. We may live in a global economy but on a day to day basis we live in our own worlds, world’s a lot simpler and more driven by practical needs than those of macro-economists.

In planning for 2012 you’ll be told to expect downturn to which your answer must be “not necessarily”.
The answer to most things will be to retain good, cheerful, smart people in the front line, to focus on existing customers encouraging and incentivising them to do more with you, to invest in programmes of positive coaching for all your sales people and to be much more creative in your presentations and your solutions to problems.

This is the age of creative confidence when ingenuity and the ability to talk things up rather than be down in the mouth will pay dividends.

And in the end with low interest rates and an increasing pressure on people to work harder 2012 could be quite spectacular in terms of share growth and productivity for some of us.

To put it in perspective here’s what one-time US President Calvin Coolidge said about the prospects of doom:

“If you see ten troubles coming down the road, you can be sure that nine will run into the ditch before they reach you.”