WHAT A LOAD OF RUBBISH

All over Brighton the bins are full and the streets are overflowing with rotting rubbish. It’s been like this for two weeks. The latest news about the strike is it could last until mid-November given talks between the GMB union and council have broken down. The GMB called action over changes of duties, drivers being removed from long-standing rounds and pay. Pessimists are predicting a six month stand-off.

 

The irony is the Council is led by the Green Party. A similar strike happened before -  nationwide in 1978-79 leading to Margaret Thatcher’s rise to power over the bones of the Labour administration in the “winter of discontent”.

 

 

I’ve been surprised just how relaxed everyone seems to be about this hygiene catastrophe, exhibiting mild grumbles rather than outrage. A group of valiant lads proposed commandeering a lorry and clearing their area but were told by the council it would be illegal to intervene and dispose of this illegal rubbish in the tip.

 

What a load of rubbish. 

 

We might start burning it – not very green but we wouldn’t have a plague of rats. My frustration is that no one is seeking a solution to this urgent problem. Politicians, Waste Management Experts, Journalists, Union Officials are talking about it but not creating a solution…unlike the Pied Piper of Hamelin’s musical solution.

 

Sir Patrick Vallance, the Government Chief Scientific Advisor, who has had something of a rubbish week himself given the findings of the Health and Social Care Committee’s report on the handling of the Covid pandemic, said he believed we needed more engineers and engineering systems. 

 

Engineering, unlike Patrick, had a great week. The front page of the Times carried a story about the need to rename engineers. Professor Elena Rodriguez-Flacon thinks engineers should be called 'ingeniators' – ingenious innovators. 

 

Well, I think that’s rubbish. We need to celebrate engineers not rebrand them. I like the dictionary definition of the verb “to engineer” – “to skilfully arrange for (something) to occur”. Engineers are not just TV repairmen or radiator installers. Think Brunel, think Stephenson, think Archimedes, think Tesla (the engineer not the car!), think Leonardo. All engineers.

 

 

Given the current global fragility of critical systems a few smart engineers would seem to be exactly what we need. Engineers not MBAs, engineers not politicians. If politicians had engineered the Channel Tunnel it would have ended up in Antwerp and then flooded.

 

Three stories that have cheered me up in the midst of the garbage mountain outside our house.  

 

1. I had an x-ray recently at the Hove Polyclinic. Spotlessly clean. Plenty of parking. Charming people – It’s a no-appointment place;  I was in and out in 15 minutes. The radiology manager was Sid. Remember the Gas Privatisation advertising in 1986. The NHS can be amazing  when there are “Sids” to make it happen. 
2. A friend of mine is running an incubator seeking new ways to convert waste (yes, rubbish) into useful and valuable material by employing the inventive skills of Chemical Engineers. It’s flying.
3. Restaurants are open. Wild Flor in Brighton is back, delivering a splendid experience. They ‘engineer’ a perfect conjunction of relaxation, taste and pleasure.

 

What I’ve realised this past week is that good intentions, optimism and unbridled hope are not enough. We can eliminate grumpiness but never the need to question and work out how to engineer solutions and systems that work, are robust and adaptable. 

 

What’s happening in our rubbish strike is an absence on all sides of common sense, compassion, compromise and community. Brighton’s not a nice place to live in right now.

EVERYTHING IS GOING TO BE ALL RIGHT

There’s an obsessive fatalism that currently fills the airwaves and pages of the newspapers. We are doomed, as Private Frazer used to say grimly in “Dad’s Army”. But we are clearly not doomed; we are just being forced to change. And change isn’t comfortable. We, who lived through the early days of the Thatcher administration bear the scars. It is then when she and her team dismantled uncompetitive British Industry and let markets decide the fate of lame dogs, many of them not so lame. We know what radical change feels like.  A sharp, unpleasant and unwelcome shock.

Thatcher embarked on her “let markets and individuals decide” revolution with relish. Some sectors like Banking and Advertising did well. They were emboldened by her mantra of emancipation from state control. So, we (I was in advertising then) swept into America taking over businesses and being rather cocky. As Colin Welland proclaimed, when in 1982 the British film, Chariots of Fire won seven Oscars, “The British are coming.”  

Well, like all such revolutionary initiatives it worked well for a while especially for the young, callous and enterprising in service-businesses but not so well if you were a miner or stevedore or manufacturer. Short, sharp shocks work but not forever. 

I remember most of my life back then as being like surfing dangerously but with great exhilaration. It was creative and rule breaking…these were the most un-woke of times. Long lunches, great music, from Bartok to Blur. And yes, that was what it was like through the end of the 20th century and through to the end of the coalition – a bit of a blur. But a blur of excitement and happiness.

But times have changed. Especially recently. We have become increasingly grumpy and dislocated as a nation. Left and right, in and out, young and old, PC and not PC, each group unwilling to hear the other and debate, converse or think.  The idea of ‘cancelling’ someone who says something that distresses you seems alien to my view of free speech.

But we’ve had another sharp shock with Covid but not so short, sadly, I expect. 

Still my grumpiness began to ebb away last week. Was it just me or did motorists behave better? Did I see more smiles? Was there resolution rather than resentment emerging? Perhaps it was because the script writer has been hard at work…unbelievable things have been happening…Trump catching Covid.  Priti Patel thinking (is thinking the right word?) of sending immigrants to Ascension Island 4,400 miles from the UK. To see how batty she can be watch this:

Yes, Michael Spicer and Spitting Image show how satire still works like nothing else. 

But most of all it was these words that gripped me, sadly, because Derek Mahon, the Irish poet, died of cancer this week. He was described as a “Belfast Keats with a Popean sting” He wrote this poem which has become famous as the pandemic has gripped the world. Fatalistic? Grumpy? Doomed? Try a dose of this:

How should I not be glad to contemplate
the clouds clearing beyond the dormer window
and a high tide reflected on the ceiling?
There will be dying, there will be dying,
but there is no need to go into that.
The poems flow from the hand unbidden
and the hidden source is the watchful heart.
The sun rises in spite of everything
and the far cities are beautiful and bright.
I lie here in a riot of sunlight
watching the day break and the clouds flying.
Everything is going to be all right.

Thank you, Derek. I really think it is going to be all right too. In a riot of sunlight. Thank you.

I AM NOT A LUDDITE

My life is enriched with delight by innovation and curious developments. Every visit to a supermarket or department store has my despairing wife saying “no!” as I pick up new pickles, digital radios, fitness watches and, a “NEW” Peruvian Ready Meal…she’s rather like Mrs Thatcher:-
 “No! No! No!”

Let me be clear. I think our world today is in so many ways better than it was in the so-called “good old days”.  Overall we are wealthier, healthier, cleverer and less protective of knowledge. Whilst we used to believe that knowledge was power,  we now think data is the new oil. The more data the richer we’ll be.

I watch my grandsons smart, lovely, affectionate people becoming transfixed by their phones and games. I find myself justifying the educational benefits of Fortnite and FIFA 20. But I know there’s something not quite right here. As I myself find the urge to check my own phone on the train when I see someone else check theirs, I realise the helpless need of the addict as I stare at my screen. How has it come to this?

It’s when senior executives from Diageo (as if they would) start saying “for goodness sake don’t drink alcohol” that you know there’s big problem. Which is why so many of the senior executives in Silicon Valley are denying their children the joys (sic) of their technology.

Enter Tristan Harris, ex-disillusioned, senior Google executive aged 35.

We are experiencing what he calls, a ‘systemic catastrophe’. He talks of the perils of the giant techno-companies realising our attention is worth money; that gaining it is their goal. He calls this “Attention Capitalism” – and claims it’s “making us nastier, stupider and less likely to find common ground”

What’s happening? He says our brains are being rewired and this is pulling us apart as a society. The nastier we are in our tweets, the more violent words we include, the more we’ll get re-tweeted….so bloody well bang you snot-gobbling-tossers! (Watch that one go viral.)

He claims that fake news spreads six times faster than accurate news. Actually satire discovered this ages ago but now our phones seem to be destroying our sense of humour. What was fake and regarded as such, is now taken (too often) literally. That’s why I love ‘Onion’ – the American satirical site.

Tristan tells us to keep our phones away from our bedrooms, remove social media from them, talk rather than text, type apps thus un-branding icons, go greyscale – it’s less seductive – turn off all notifications apart from those from people and regain control of our calendar by looking at our phone only occasionally.  His services are in high demand by corporate America.

This story is about – and I’m sorry to borrow this Brexit theme – taking back control. The emergence of “attention capitalism” makes this hard. But we can do it if we stand up to the silicon bullies.

I’m not a Luddite but let’s question how we use technology.

EXIT.

 

ISSUES OF LEADERSHIP

I’ve just finished Robert Harris’ “Dictator,” the last in his quadrilogy of books on Cicero. It’s about leadership as much as about Cicero. We have a smorgasbord of leadership types. Cicero himself, Pompey, Mark Anthony, Octavius and the so called, self-styled God called Julius Caesar, clearly insane but brilliant at building a fighting force of employees through non-stop action making all of them feel that they are irreplaceable and unstoppable.

Ernest Saunders at Guinness was a bit like that…he had the best foot soldier/marketers any general/CEO in business ever had. Talk to them now and they are still in awe of each other, of what they achieved with “the black stuff” as they called Guinness and having been part of the highest performing team they could remember.

The conversation about leadership is thrown into relevance by Davos where the movers and shakers are gathering like sleek vultures. The recently published Ipsos Mori Veracity Index which has been charting levels of public trust in various professions for 32 years is even more relevant.
Business leaders are now amongst the least trusted groups. As Matthew Parris spluttered in Saturday’s Times:- “the typical FTSE CEO makes 183 times more than their average employee…” Leadership is being measured, he implies, by how much they earn not by how effective they are.

What do we really expect from leaders?

In the Roman Republic they spent most of their time trying to construct checks and balances to avoid the Julius Caesar “I am God” problem. We spend our time today trying to create images of leadership perfection. Tim Cook, Charlie Mayfield, Howard Schultz and so on but whichever way it’s not going to be a long list.

When Tony Hayward ex BP CEO and running that business during the Deepwater Horizon crisis took a "day off" to see Bob, his co-owned boat, participate in the Round the Island yacht race off the Isle of Wight with his son saying he wanted to get “his life back”. In truth he was paid all those millions not to have a life of his own.

Leaders are needed to be different things in different situations. We choose the leaders we think we need. Churchill in 1940; Reagan in 1981; Thatcher in 1979; Blair in 1997. Sometimes we need inspirers, sometimes martinets, sometimes healers, sometimes role models and sometimes visionaries.

Reflect on the deluges that came after Lord Browne, Tim Leahy, Justin King, Alex Ferguson, Marjorie Scardino … and increasingly we realise leadership is as much to do with luck as skill.

To understand the role of leader, watch this Ted Talk:-



This a stunning story about conductors and styles of leadership from Itay Talgam, the Israeli Conductor and Business Consultant. It’s both insightful and very funny.

But don’t people need the smack of strong leadership…people like Trump and Putin?

No. I think people need leaders who manage to draw the best out of them…who make them surprise themselves.

Surely the age of the bully-leader is over.

DO WE REALLY UNDERSTAND HOW TO DEVELOP?

I’ve had a recent stint of travelling through Europe and I’ve been reflecting on our frustrating country that I’ve lived in and loved for so long.

Do you remember the 1960s and a wave of “new music”, Herman’s Hermits for instance with “No Milk Today” or “Bus Stop” by the Hollies - prosaic, local love stories….no Empire building here.

Then we had the strike-ridden, high-inflation ‘70s.

The Thatcher axe wielding ‘80s followed when we relearnt the art of combat …. invading  New York and pillaging ad agencies, banks and businesses.

And then the ‘90s, noughties and the current decade when we became middle class, more meritocratic and technophiles. A world in which London started winning the race to become arts, sports and financial centre of the world.

What could go wrong?

Last week I was told what by the guy running Russia for a multinational:
“I love your country but from my perspective it’s fumbling along without any clear strategy….if it were a company it’d be ripe for takeover”.  (Probably Vladimir Putin feels the same.)

Listen to the British news in which pratfalls are celebrated more than success and cynicism rules and you’ll take the point my friend from Russia made. Unlike most of the EU, compared with whom we are doing brilliantly, we seem unable to promote our strengths. Creativity, innovation, arts, media and yes finance (over-cooked as that sector has been).

Psychologists have proved that human beings are more responsive to bad news. Good news seems so cheesy in comparison. That’s why for some Peter Mead’s book “When in Doubt be Nice” was an awkward read. Where was the tabasco wit, the flagrant irony?

Recently a very nice guy said “We must play the ball not the man” to which a very smart and funny German retorted “No. Play the man first - always. Then everyone knows where they stand”.

We need to sharpen up. We are living in a global economy and over the past six weeks at various conferences I’ve reflected on how lacking in confidence we seem despite having a growing economy; English is the language all business speaks and speaks well; we are becoming an increasingly desirable country to visit; our capital city bestrides the world - top of the cultural pops.

To thrive and grow we need to look forward, enjoy our economic status, we need to be confident, fast-footed and relaxed. We need to become traders  again not tubby diplomats.

I’ve loved travelling Europe and its neighbours hearing optimists regardless of their current “temporary little local blips”. My growth conversations with Russians, Egyptians, Turks, Poles and people from the Gulf, ….opportunity-hunters explaining in flawless English why their future looks so great, have felt unusually inspiring and refreshing.

Maybe we don’t want to succeed. Maybe being miserable fatalists is our natural role in life.

But I don’t think so.

We should travel much more, talk up our successes and feel good.

That’s all it takes, Tiger.

WELL I CAN'T COMPLAIN

I recently have gone on about customer service, the lack of it and the need to improve it. I hear no dissent. Tiers of corporate executives are all out there benchmarking and establishing robust measurement processes of their own customer satisfaction.

But what about the complainers - are they always justified and when did that world weary “can’t complain love” disappear from our language? For years I associated this with our putting up with overcooked food and weak tea, an era of laughable cuisine and public sector attitudes to service.

Inflation record 1956 - 2013

It changed in the 1970s. In 1975 inflation was nearly 25% and getting worse. Businesses would merrily inflate their prices twice a year. Britain was a basket case. And customer service hit an all-time low. Thatcher’s wagging finger symbolised the change. And her intolerance towards shabby standards was given daily articulation by the Sun and the Daily Mail.

We created a new generation of people. In Network (1976) Peter Finch playing Howard Beale said:   “I want all of you to get up out of your chairs. I want you to get up right now and go to the window. Open it, and stick your head out, and yell, 'I'M AS MAD AS HELL, AND I'M NOT GOING TO TAKE THIS ANYMORE!'”

This was a time when we were sold the Austin Allegro, Morris Marina and Triumph Dolomite (renamed the Triumph Sodomite by Robert Robinson BBC broadcaster). These were the worst cars ever built (if such a sturdy word as “built” is appropriate.)

A friend of mine claims around this time he had a made-to-measure suit created for him by a Soho tailor. When he first wore it a sleeve came off. The tailor looked at him suspiciously when he went back to ask for an explanation. “You’ve been wearing it haven’t you?”

In those days we didn’t really complain….we prefaced our “observations” with phrase like “I’m sorry to bother you but”…

Last week I saw that Southern Rail had been taken to task for standards of punctuality and heartstrings had been tugged by a “handwritten” letter).

I personally think the service from Southern is remarkably good.  You could argue that they should just put their foot down and overtake or ram the wretched First Capital Connect laggard trains dawdling ahead of them. Or being pessimistic about the timetables they could say “expected arrival time …whenever” and offer free G&Ts to every customer to quieten them.

Things always swing from one extreme to another and I think we’re becoming a nation of complainers quite often without real justification. From the NHS to education to all the institutions there’s an increasing sense of discontent.

Yet the optimist in me wants to shout - things are so much better than they were. All that currently happens is the exception always proves the rule. One botched operation typifies a NHS breakdown, A few late(ish) trains demonstrate the wicked ineptitude of the provider.

Not so. Stop grumbling.

YOU DECIDE

We all know that concession to democratic management of our households when we grandly proclaim “you decide”. It could be about anything….where to go for lunch, what to do at the weekend or what garment to buy.

This conversation we’ve started is about more than it seems. It’s as much about a slippery avoidance of making the decision ourselves as an act of generous delegation.

Because actually making decisions is hard.

And it’s getting harder because so many interests now need to be included.   It’s no longer a case of making the logically correct choice. The difficulty of being a leader is in creating the illusion of decisiveness without irritating those around you who’ll immediately tweet their irritation if they are irritated and then sullenly go slow.

What do you decide to do about the following if the buck stopped with you?

• Syria
  
• Fracking
  
• HS2
  

And “I don’t know” is not an acceptable answer.

Sometimes decision making is so hard because what we really believe ourselves is not what most of the group who are described as stakeholders quite believe…life is full of shade of grey.  So the skill that is being adopted now in making decisions is not decision making but enrolling votes of support or, worse, avoiding a row.

And if the proposition changes from a simple binary choice to a complex “maybe” so be it, so long as everyone is happy or rather not unhappy or more probably that the majority view is not one of strong dissent.

I recently heard the Prime Minister was asking advisors to “examine all options” on Syria. Isn’t that what we do in considering decisions? But I smell the whiff of “let’s parade the sheer complexity of the issues to obfuscate our difficulty in making an acceptable decision”.

In this world the clamour for strong leadership is based on the myth that Thatcherism is the answer…a little like suggesting bleach is such a great germ killer and cleaner we should all wash our hands in it.

It isn’t always that simple…as she discovered when deciding on the poll tax

In the end decision making is very hard.

We need to think – that hardest of activities – using the most sensitive of weighing machines - the human mind. Just watch a judge at work, analysing, pondering, reflecting and deciding.
So next time you say “you decide” remember it’s like saying “you do the calculus”.

IS IT WORKING?

In the late 1970s a poster appeared with the headline “Labour Isn’t Working”. This idea of the Labour administration failing and especially failing in the area of employment resonated so powerfully that Margaret Thatcher won the election.

The other day I was sitting in the train from Brighton thinking of the rose tinted past, a kind of UKIP moment. But it wasn’t as special as some like to pretend.  And life today puts me in so much better a mood than life in the past. Except for the unemployed… especially if they’re gifted…. and stuck….and playing to the rules of the past.

In the seats just ahead of me I heard this conversation. Two young guys just into their twenties speaking that “whatever, you know, excellent, awesome “  language as unfamiliar as French to older generations, meaning I got some but not all of it.

They were talking about getting employment…”I like the sound of that …. they’ve  got no deadlines and you get lots of time off… it’s a three month fixed contract… I can do it blindfolded.” Of course they were from Brighton and as they say down here well Brighton is different.

Whilst they seemed happy enough they’re living in a world where employee rights have diminished, work for many is a necessary means of getting by for now not about creating a future, where you only have fixed term contracts not jobs and terms of employment are unknown.

Maybe that doesn’t matter.

Because change shakes people up;  because the entitlement society (a mostly bad thing) is dying; because energy and application are in fashion and because I smell the whiff of an emergent, enterprise culture.

But the trouble with change is that some people get hurt. And we aren’t educating young people in the scale of this real change…probably because we don’t get it ourselves. But overall is it working? For parts of the service economy, yes.

Aldi, for instance, is now the Oxbridge of employers paying graduates £40,000 a year, plus a new Audi A4– nearly twice the £25,500 offered by lawyers, banks and Marks & Spencer. But you are expected to work all hours, do everything (“clean those lavatories”, “learn all the prices”, “do everything.”)

I used to joke that to get a job in the Pizza Express at Brighton you needed an Upper Second.  I don’t think that’s a joke any longer. So why am I so optimistic? Because in the middle of the mess I can smell the whiff of enterprise and adventure. The young people I heard were more savvy than they seemed.
They were behaving like consumers not employees. And in the end consumers drive up quality.

WE HAVE A STRATEGY. IT'S CALLED DOING THINGS

That’s what Herb Kelleher, who founded the successful Southwest Airlines, said.

In a week dominated by Margaret Thatcher the media have been rolling out their reaction wagon and lazily seeing what stories they can create. She would have been ironically amused by how well “The Witch is dead” is doing in the charts.  If they say of me “Let’s bury the old Bastard” I’ll know I’ll have made an impression on some,  been unpopular with many and actively disliked by a few.

I think she’d have said that the witch is dead but not maybe her spell.

Back at the end of the 1970s when this poster appeared, there was massive inflation, powerful and irresponsible unions and some rusting industry suffering from underinvestment and a feeling from some the country was on its last legs.

But it wasn’t. Where I worked in advertising there was a sense of great creativity and self-belief. We thought anything was possible.

Sure there was a need for change. Britain was still very hard up after the war and there was a need for demolition (of fabric and institutions) and a need for action.

But we’ve never been good at demolition preferring to keep things that are ineffective either to save money or, if they’re broken, in case they turn out to be useful. In a factory I visited in the 1970s I admired brass plaques on machines ponderously clunking and recalled the Japanese kit I’d seen the week before in Germany whirring along busily…. no history, just very efficient and fast.

As for action in the 1970s - most of us didn’t do action. We talked. We wrote. We didn’t do.
Under her, things like the privatisation of British Gas happened and happened breathtakingly fast. So a failing concern became a modern industry.

She made us feel global and different. In this zero sum game she created a climate of doing things.

Like good old Herb Kelleher.

Herb said of Southwest’s new CEO who took over from him:
“I think now probably everybody says, "Wow! He's one heck of a CEO! And who's that old guy with the wrinkles sitting in the balcony?"

It’s interesting that our famous witch and her spell have lingered on, wrinkles and all. That’s partly because we have a need for a similarly spirited assault on flabbiness and indecision today.

Someone whose strategy is to get things done, regardless.

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