WHY ARE OUR SUPPLY CHAINS QUITE SO COMPLEX?

For years guided by MBAs and McKinsey we’ve been persuaded to “think global,” construct complex supply chains, offshore production and cut cost. Our world we believed was driven by price and the need to be lowest cost producer. Which was fine when globalisation was the thing and Asia was to the place to get things made.

Covid has changed a lot of things not least the increasing belief driven by the vaccine contretemps with the EU and post Brexit complications that domestic production is the safest strategy for many industries.

Currently my underpants come from Bangladesh, my jacket and my socks from China, my sweater from Cambodia and my T-shirt from America. Over 50% of what I eat and drink comes from outside the UK – from Holland, France, Peru and Spain.

This is not the ranting of a xenophobe. If we’ve learnt nothing else over the past 14 months its been that the old rules don’t apply. The rebellion started with “America First” and then the bizarre decision to exit the EU. No more frictionless travel. No more working across the EU using the business lingua franca – English – to do business. Two years ago I visited seven different EU countries in as many weeks in co-ordinating a project. That won’t happen again. 

Now perhaps for the first time I’ve begun to wonder about whether I’d want to remain in the EU after the shabby performance of Ursula Van Der Leyen over the EU’s failed procurement of vaccine. I’ve been shocked that the EU, rule maker and follower of rules is now a rulebreaker, with member countries off doing their own thing. The irony of their demanding more Astra Zeneca vaccine even as they withdrew permission for its use was eye-wateringly comic.

In a crisis we retreat to localism. The Covid crisis will change many things but the most significant thing will be the pressure to grow and make our own. Small businesses will be created doing what previously bankrupted businesses did until globalisation became the hot, new thing. 

Except there‘ll be a difference. These new businesses will be better run, with electric speed delivery, concern for climate change and with brilliant customer service. We bought a new car recently . The whole process took less than a week. It used to take forever. Thanks to Amazon and the growth of online our expectations have been transformed. Old fashioned standards are dead. Our world is a better place in which (blame it on the ‘elf and safety woke-culture’ in fact) workplace deaths and injuries have plummeted in the past few years.

Our ability to transform our economy  will be driven by the astonishingly interventionalist strategies of the least conservative government we’ve ever had. Once they realised that people must be paid when, through no fault of their own, they can’t work, then the realisation that inspiring and incentivising new businesses that usefully employ people makes economic sense, can’t be far behind.

But the small is beautiful argument always seemed weird to me especially when small as in pubs, shops and roads often meant rotten and inefficient. Equally the argument for scale falls on stony ground. The NHS we’ve been proudly told is globally the biggest employer after the Indian Rail Service and the Chinese Army. Why is that good?

If we want to stop just being a “nation of shopkeepers” as Napoleon scornfully described us we need to start being producers as well. We’re actually rather good at it. Films, gaming, pharmaceuticals, software, cars and shoes – yes, my shoes are all made in Britain.

  

MONET, MONEY AND MARKS

I know…from art to retailing requires a leap of faith.

I’ve just been to the Monet exhibition at the National Gallery. The 70 paintings there would sell for over $1 billion yet he found it hard even selling his work until his mid-40s when sales took off with vivid Mediterranean coastline paintings which Americans loved.

Claude’s story matches that of most artists that we now rate as great with only a few becoming truly rich from their endeavours whilst young enough to enjoy it. Most relied on finding a sugar daddy or patron but the market itself was harsh. Yet they carried on tirelessly and in the case of Monet painting the same scene at different times of the day when the lighting was different.  In painting Rouen Cathedral he sat in a ladies changing room of a department store opposite the cathedral, ladies curtained off of course, and painted dawn to dusk.

Artists in general are not especially commercial, entrepreneurial or productive…they just carry on doing what they do regardless always trying to get better. For them quality beats cash any time. Money merely seems to be inconvenient (mostly by its absence.) And a century after they die their work (like ‘Nymphéas en fleur’) can sell for $85 million.

But it isn’t money you think about when you think of Monet, it’s the light, the colours the sheer joie de vivre.

And that’s what’s missing from M&S - retail bellwether, housewives’ favourite, the Monet of underwear. Unlike Monet its value is declining.  Unlike Monet it is no longer notable for its light, colour or joie de vivre. It’s about to depart the FTSE 100, close a dozen or more stores and ‘unify brand and culture’ (I really wish that I knew what that meant). The iron hand of Archie Norman, the man who saved Asda 27 years ago is Chairman. He is a McKinsey trained heavy who seemed short on small talk when I met him.

For years M&S has been a bit like the Brexiteers chasing new business in young markets unknown to them but “representing huge, yes huge and incalculable opportunities”, rather  than focusing on their core old market of loyalists– around 20 million of them. Instead it keeps on going hopefully after the deaf, dumb and blind kids like millennials who would rather be seen dead than in M&S. Because M&S is like grandad doing the twist.

M&S matters because when it does things well, like much of its food, like cashmere, socks, underwear or cords it does them rather well. When it flirts with the unknown it’s sorrowfully irrelevant. I shall watch its strategy of downsizing and trying to find an authentic voice intriguing but without much hope. M&S has stopped learning it seems.

Monet kept on learning. He has colour and energy. His pictures are timeless. M&S is not. Tom Peters said “you can’t shrink your way to greatness”. On that Monet and I (but not M&S) agree.

THE ROYAL SOCIETY OF PUBLIC AFFAIRS

Look, I have a confession to make. I love the RSA (Royal Society of Arts). 

I love the building, the people there, the library and the events. But hardly any of the events are about culture or the arts – we’ve got Sir Peter Bazalgette shortly – but for something with Arts in its title that’s a bit sparse. And the library is more McKinsey meets Harvard Business School than “hand me the prussian blue and the burnt sienna, sweetheart”.

The RSA's mission expressed in the founding charter was to:
 "embolden enterprise, enlarge science, refine art, improve our manufacturers and extend our commerce".
But in its website, the RSA describes itself as
"an enlightenment organisation committed to finding innovative practical solutions to today’s social challenges".

Whichever way you look at it art has been demoted whilst we’ve been looking at the front of the building and feeling happy in the warm embrace of the name.

What Matthew Taylor has done brilliantly is indeed to make the RSA an enlightenment and  mind-opening organisation. What the RSA says today carries the weight of considered opinion but it’s missing a trick.
A trick I heard on Saturday Live on the Radio 4 when following a piece on GF Watts Richard Cole and Alain de Botton reflected that “art can really change the world”.

Who would deny the explosion of pop culture in the early 1960s changed the way we felt and saw things or that the beauty and power of Titian and Tintoretto helped build the character of 16th century Venice or that Dickens helped explain and change Victorian Society?  William Morris, Ruskin and we might have add the Bloomsbury Group and latterly Conran were people who believed art was part of and helped define a good life. Graffiti and rap, alien to many, helps shape today’s world. When we hear the Mozart Requiem it isn’t just a succession of tunes, it lets us see the “world in technicolour” as Eric Whitacre put it.

Art, quite simply, changes the way we feel, think and see things.

The current epidemic of book clubs and choirs is about something more profound than self-improvement. And as Gareth Malone discovered, and has harnessed, society is inspired by the art that lies unexplored within people.

The GF Watts Gallery in Compton near Guildford, the topic on Saturday Live, is a tribute to the Victorian artist whose painting “Hope” has inspired Barack Obama – it’s his favourite painting.

Through the period when Watts lived, Britain was characterised by urbanisation, mechanisation, poverty, a rapidly growing economy, Imperialism and an explosive arts scene – the Pre Raphaelites, the Romantics and the great Victorian Novelists.

And the RSA thrived.

Now as part of its mission to enlighten we’d like to see a little more focus by the RSA on the economic, social and global impact that the arts in the UK can have. If nothing else the influence this organisation might bring to bear on successive governments, who are deaf to the importance of the arts, might improve the current funding famine.

As Sir John Tusa (CEO of the Barbican Centre) mildly observed:
“I have no doubt whatever that we behave in a much better way because of the time we spend with the arts.”

He might have added that the RSA isn’t spending enough time with them.

Written for and first published on 'Business of Culture'

www.colourfulthinkers.com

WHAT A WASTE OF TIME

Strange isn’t it that two of the biggest and most self-regarding corporations in the world are “Mc” named. McDonalds of Olympic shame and McKinsey the people who according to Malcolm Gladwell helped build Enron, creators of the big whopper – or was it the other way round. Whatever….

Allister Heath, from the paper City AM, reveals  Mckinsey’s study which tells us something we know but we’ve doing nothing about. It shows that  61% of average office workers time’s spent as follows:-
28% staring at their computer screen at e-mails and stuff
19% gathering information
14% collaborating and communicating internally
Then there’s Twitter, Facebook, GooglePlus, Linkedin and other sites.

We have gone insane with paying attention to opinion and giving our opinions to a vast  chortling audience.

“Isn’t Jess Ennis great”. Yes. We know. Why share it?

Allister says:
“Anyone who’s able to tackle the mad communication overload will be on to a winner”.

It isn’t that hard Allister. It just involves facing up to the truth.

Most of digital is bunk.

And I’m making a pledge.
Today.  Right here.  Right now.

I’m reducing my e-mail traffic to 12% of my working time. I’m ceasing activity on all my Linkedin Groups, stopping Facebook and stopping Twitter. I’m even wondering if this should be my last blog.
I’m changing my office layout, relegating my PC to a corner and going back to thinking on paper on a big lots-of-room-to-work table.

The key word is “thinking”.

I’m going to start trying to do that properly.

And I’m going to walk more, talk more, listen more, read more, look at the world more.
I’m going to work less hard and work much better.
I’m going to value people’s voices and faces much more and spend less time crafting e-mails.

Mostly I’m going to spend less time on networking (or as I call it not-working) because the world is full of people meeting who can do nothing to help each other

I’m tired of hearing how critical IT is. In my recent experience it’s a time waster and something we use to do stuff we could often do quicker and cheaper more simply manually.

Most of all I’m going to simplify. Clear out stuff. Stop wasting time on the internet.
And start using my creativity and my common sense.

Being me. Not a robot.

LET'S RE-APPRAISE WHAT TALENT REALLY IS

I recently found a book by Malcolm Gladwell called “What The Dog Saw”- a collection of his essays from the New Yorker and there’s one in it called “The Talent Myth. Are Smart People Over-rated?” It’s about that blinding revelation that McKinsey and others had about “talent” which goes like this:

“a deep seated belief that having better talent at all levels is how you outperform your competitors”

This led to a seminal book – “The War For Talent” which has alone created the new orthodoxy of American Management. Quotes inspired by this mind-set abound:-

“we hire very smart people and pay them more than they think they are worth”

That’s from Richard Foster’s presciently titled book “Creative Destruction”. This comes from a guy at General Electric:-

“don’t be afraid to promote stars without specifically relevant experience, seemingly over their heads”

Gladwell tells us about one particular company that bought “The War For Talent” mythology hook line and sinker from McKinsey and became the ultimate talent company, stocking it with the best college and MBA graduates they could find.

That company was Enron.

Gladwell’s question relates to the absence of correlation between IQ and performance in the workplace and he quotes Richard Wagner, a psychologist at Florida State University who said this:-

“in terms of how you evaluate schooling, everything is about working by yourself. If you work with someone else it’s called cheating.


Once you get out in the real world everything you do involves working with other people.”

The next time you hear someone talk about “talent” think about this. Are they good with people? And if they aren’t, don’t hire them.