HAVE WE FORGOTTEN EXCELLENCE?

Forty years ago Tom Peters, a renowned management consultant, writer and speaker, co-authored a book called “In Search of Excellence.” It caused something of a stir as Peters assumed the pioneer role of excellence-discoverer.

The book suggested that excellent businesses had specific attributes: 

…”flat anti-hierarchical structures; innovation and entrepreneurship; small numbers of corporate and middle management; staff reward systems based on contribution rather than position or length of service; brain power rather than muscle”. 

It sold 4 million copies and was described as the best management book of all time. Sadly 40 years on we seem to have learnt nothing. We haven’t forgotten excellence we just never seem to have known precisely what it is or how to get it.

John Neil, the CEO of Unipart, the multinational logistics, supply chain, manufacturing and consultancy company, once said to me

“the trouble with British Industry is it doesn’t know what good is.”

Forget excellence, he seemed to suggest, being good would be a marked improvement.

Instead of excellence we learnt about being the “lowest cost producer”, of moving production to wherever to get goods made cheaply and cut labour costs. MBAs talked about “exits”(not physical ways out but monetary ways out) or, to be blunt, selling businesses for as much money as possible to regardless of whom they are. That’s why the most excellent of restaurants – the Wolseley Group – majority owned in Thailand by Minor Hotels having put it into administration have ousted that King of Customer Service. Jeremy King, its founder. 

No, I’m not xenophobic but it’s wasteful to build an excellent business and then sell it to corporations (mainly overseas) whose interests are purely about money, burnishing their image or whose cultural values are so strongly at variance with their acquisition. That’s why in-shoring has become a new vogue  (it means bringing production back home), that’s why Waterstones (currently Russian owned but left well alone by him) run by the excellent James Daunt of Daunt Books, does so well. Under the previous management, I was told they talked about skus (stock keeping units) not books, and it drove staff in the stores crazy.

When so many companies in the UK are parcelled off to foreign business or private equity, firms whose raison d’être is lots of money, it’s unsurprising that the focus has shifted from rock solid, immutable values about product excellence and customer service.

One place where this hasn’t happened in Richer Sounds. Founded in 1978 the business was 100% owned by Julian Richer, the founder and managing director of the company, who in 2019 sold 60% of its shares to an employee ownership trust. It’s feted for its customer service and standards of management.

Seeking to become just another big ‘cheese’ is also relatively absent in the food business where founders are obsessed with quality. The TV chef James Martin is particularly appealing in his appetite for excellence and singles out the French:

“What I love about Lyon is they don’t care what people think about what they do or if they even like it, they know, they just know themselves that it’s brilliant”

On a TV programme he wandered around “Les Halles de Lyon Paul Bocuse - Lyon Indoor Food  Market” talking to camera, ecstatic about the supreme excellence of the food there.

The French care jealously about Comté cheese and the right Cassoulet recipe. The Italians are similarly fussy about Spaghetti Carbonara.

Their ROI is in heaven. Their being excellent matters more than being rich.

How ironic that Julian Richer in denial of his name, like so many chefs, could be much richer but instead leads an excellent UK business. 

GOAL!!!

I feel out of touch. We’re in the middle of the Euros and I don’t feel engaged. Worse…whenever I hear the word I think of “Uros” or Urology, the branch of medicine that focuses on surgical and medical diseases of the male and female urinary-tract.

What’s wrong with me? What’s not to like about this tribal, passionate game that evokes such spirit, creativity and wealth with 50 world players estimated to be worth more than £50 million? Why don’t I warm to their chants:

Two of these to the tune of “Lord of the Dance” 

“Park , Park wherever you may be, you eat dogs in your home country. It could be worse, you could be scouse and eat rats in your council house”

(About Ji-Sung Park, the Korean player at Manchester United)

The fans followed this up with 

“He shoots, he scores, he’ll eat all your Labradors”

The second, some time ago, was Chelsea fans singing about John Terry after his affair with his fellow player Wayne Bridges’ girlfriend:

“Chelsea, wherever you may be, keep your wife from John Terry”

And because I live in Brighton – whose team (my team, I suppose) managed to remain in the Premier League this year:

“You’re practically French, You’re practically French, you’re so far southern you’re practically French” (Hull fans at Brighton)

And from Arsenal fans trading on the reputation Brighton has for having a large proportion of gays in its city: 

“We can see you, we can see you, we can see you holding hands”.

But there’s one I like. It’s been sung by various teams when they’re being trounced (like when Tottenham were 4-0 down to Liverpool)

“Let’s pretend. Let’s pretend. Let’s pretend we scored a goal” 

This is followed by rapturous applause. I like this because these fans appreciate the irony of their devastating defeat and are saying self-deprecatingly “it doesn’t matter….it’s only a game.”

The biggest news for me about the Euros/Uros (whatever) is the stand-off between the government and some 2,500 UEFA officials who are coming to the Semi-Finals and Finals at Wembley, who unless the latter are given a quarantine waiver are threatening to move these games to Hungary.

We’re not very popular anywhere right now are we? 

The USA gave us a detention (a seldom given “demarché") before the G7 – it’s a formal bollocking in diplomatic circles indicating displeasure about our behaviour – namely our failure to sort out the Irish protocol.

The French hate us, our sausages, our fishermen and just about everything else about us. 

The Germans don’t trust Boris. So what? Who does?

Even those nice people in Chesham and Amersham don’t like our government, booting out a prospective Tory MP in a by-election who was nearly 10 feet tall and installing a Liberal instead in this rock-hard-safe Tory seat.

We have in footballing terms become the Millwall of politics:

“Nobody likes us we don’t care”

Actually I do care. I care about our values and how others see us. I feel patriotic but most of all that we need to be seen by all our colleagues across the world as reliable, trustworthy and civilised.

Politics and diplomacy are not like football not yet even after Donald Trump who set a certain adversarial tone that jarred. But we’ve acquired a “Chopper Harris” attitude to life - Ron Harris played for Chelsea and had what was euphemistically described as “a tough approach to tackling”. 

We need to get smarter not tougher but I can’t see that happening soon. And as far as the Euros go, frankly my dears I don’t give a damn.

I'M NOT OLD - JUST A BIT OFF COLOUR

I had lunch with Richard French the other day.

He’s just had a hip replacement. We were both on an alcohol free and Spartan calorie diet.
He reflected wistfully, although briefly, on advancing age but we concluded how lucky we were. The period between 1950 and 2012 has been rich in earth shaking events, in human drama, in amazing discoveries and huge improvements. Exmouth Market where we had our cheerfully meagre lunch has become the next Marylebone High Street. You need to know how awful it was until recently. (Here it is in summer.)

London is full of change with great architecture, improvements, diversity of race, talent and offerings.
If the 70s were the golden age of advertising the 2010s is the golden age of life…austerity and all.
In the 70s we had advertising we adored for instant mashed potatoes, cigarillos and piss poor lager.
Today we have dozens of potato varieties and recipes that make Smash seem like prison food, smoking is banned and we have all the real ale any man or woman could want.

And age? Harriet Walter, the actress, has self-published this brilliant book in which she quotes Cora Harvey Armstrong saying “inside every older person is a younger one wondering what the hell happened.”

 
The other line I recall was at 80 you felt like a 40 year old who really wasn’t very well at all.
Age is like a wide angled lens. It allows you to see things against a broader sweep of history.

Think of age as like a rather long book which leaves a literary canapé like “A Sense of an Ending” struggling somewhat although interestingly it is all about our ability to recall events in the past as they were.  And it may indeed be that we who lived through the Miners’ Strike and the Falklands Conflict see it less clearly than those who had no skin in those particular games.

But our long and rich book has reached its most optimistic passage.

Quality brands are burying inferior offerings. Medicine continues to win (no more polio in India – in my lifetime – amazing). We get cleaner streets and better designed homes. We are beginning to use technological developments intelligently.  And we are questioning everything.

Hurray.

Are windmills the answer to cheap energy – almost certainly not.
Are the Mormons going to rule the USA – excuse me?
Can money buy you anything – try telling that to Chelsea FC.
Will Facebook change our lives – is it still going that strong…well is it?

And when it comes to age Engelbert Humperdinck has the answer…Euro Vision Champion for Britain? We shall see but at least he could actually sing when I last checked his pulse.


I had lunch with Richard French the other day and like good claret he’s improving too.
Let’s hope Engebert is too come the end of May. This was taken a few days ago – he’s 76 and I want to know what he’s on because I want some too.