WHEN A BREAK MENDS YOUR SPIRIT

I hadn’t realised how shredded I was until my second day’s break in Canterbury. Canterbury? Hardly the Cote d’Azur or Paxos. But it did the trick. Most surprising of all wasn’t just the Cathedral – the choirs there are astounding, the architecture stunning and, as we discovered just after returning home, the stained glass is the oldest in Britain and maybe in the world dating back to the 12th century. Years older than previously thought.

No it was the Great Stour which together with its many tributaries flows through the city. This is a city of water, locks, sluices and punts not just “the” Roman Road – Watling Street -  or the stage  on which the extraordinarily gruesome and historically significant and symbolic murder of Thomas Becket took place. Canterbury feels old, Elizabethan architecture, pedestrianised and very quiet – like Oxford’s Turl street but on a smaller scale. 

I bought T.S. Eliot’s Murder in the Cathedral in the Cathedral bookshop. Reading it I discovered how stunningly theatrical it is. Read the self- justifications of the four knights – the murderers -  who walking to front of the stage in blokey language explain they were alternatively, tipsy; that there was no benefit to them for doing it; that Becket could have escaped but effectively, because he stood up to them, was (or so a jury would surely conclude) committing suicide whilst of unsound mind. Black humour.

The final thing about this small,  43,000 population city (city status because of the Cathedral) is it’s crammed with glorious gardens. Real gardens created and tended by real gardeners not Council workers. Gardens that merge into water meadows. At Abbott’s Mill in the city they’re creating a city woodland with the Stour rushing through it only being interrupted by an electricity generating wooden water wheel. 

Canterbury opened my eyes, my mind and mended my grumpiness. The word I’m looking for about it is civilised. 

Shortly after we got home Storm Evert struck. 

“Blow winds crack your cheeks” said King Lear – and so they did last Friday in Brighton. But then again I love weather – WEATHER (it needs capitals) when people say “it just doesn’t know what to do”. Because WEATHER combines exciting cloud formations, gales, sunshine, torrential rain. I remember Greece where it was identically beautiful every day. No excitement. No unpredictability.

And that of course is what we’ve been missing over the past year or so because  Covid’s been so oppressively a one-paced presence.  Life has been a bit dull with one day following the next. Until Canterbury. And until the Olympics of which I’m not generally a fan. 

But that was before Beth Schriever and BMX. Beth couldn’t get financial support from Team GB who meanwhile, like a mad gambler were ploughing nearly £25 million into rowing. Instead she managed to crowd-fund £50k getting her through the trials to Tokyo where she won a gold medal. She’s 22 and amazing. I watched her race with joy. Her spirit wonderfully was not broken. She got a break on her own terms. Golden girl.

Routine is the killer for most people. If all our lives comprise the “the same as” we get bored then depressed then diminished. We stop learning. That’s why I love Canterbury – I learnt some new stuff. That’s why Beth is so interesting. I didn’t know BMX was an Olympic sport. And I’d never heard of her.

Everyone needs to multiply the number of new things they do. To many the pandemic has been characterised by watching repeats on TV. We can do better. We need to find our Canterbury because……

AAARRRGH!!

Ralph Waldo Emerson, one of our most quoted writers, said: “Fear defeats more people than any other thing in the world.”

There’s something disagreeable about seeing people panic. Something futile. Something demeaning. But fear can also be also something enormously powerful. Fear fills Shakespeare’s tragedies, fear of the unknown, fear of betrayal, fear of failure.

We are currently on the verge of an era of fear. The past few months in particular, has been full of fear and fearful with bush fires, floods and other disasters. Real gut-wrenching fear. The Covid 19 story is different. FOMO (the acronym meaning ‘fear of missing out’) currently fills our pampered lives; fear of missing out on holidays, business travel, the Olympics, parties, shopping and so on.

When I told a mother with several children that Professor Whitty, the Chief Medical Officer, had said if the virus intensified schools might have to shut for two months, she went white and groaned “having the children at home for that long that would kill me quicker than any virus”. She displayed genuine fear as she might at the prospect of an invasion by an implacable and ruthless alien force with insistent cries of “mummy!!!”

But fear of your savings and earnings being reduced, enforced time with your close family and of your life undergoing upheaval is not quite a fight or flight situation.

Fear was in the news more prosaically when a plan was announced to level up the red squirrel population at the expense of the larger, more aggressive grey squirrels originally introduced from America. How? By introducing pine martens to their environment who’d kill either species at random but whose prospects against red squirrels were less good than against grey. Why? Because grey squirrels are fearless and stepping out cockily to greet the pine martens would be promptly slaughtered. Red squirrels are terrified of nasty, bitey pine martens and flee uttering the squirrel equivalent of “mummy!”

As with red squirrels, fear is a perfectly healthy emotion – part of our defence system. It’s how we cross roads safely and avoid the perils of life.

But more mysterious is our wanting to feel fear through horror films or attractions like The London Dungeon where the success of the experience can be judged by the quantity and volume of screams. It is indeed horrible especially the experience, too real for laughter, of the ‘long drop’ when being hanged, the proximity to Sweeney Todd and the macabre descriptions of the Black Death. You are herded through nastiness where actors perform their roles with melodramatic relish. Fear can only usually be dispelled by laughter which is why those screams are usually punctuated by giggling.

But the threat of Covid 19 isn’t funny. It’s unknown. Welcome to globalisation which means there’s nowhere to hide. We’ll end up poorer and may have been briefly housebound but think of the reading, tidying and DIY opportunities. And think of the time we’ll have to reflect on the sort of interconnected world we’re creating.

WHAT A STRANGE WORD 'GOOD' IS

Ask a young person how they are and chances are they’ll say ‘good’ which means ‘fine’ or ‘OK’. It doesn’t mean terrific. Generally good means something more rounded than ‘winning’ or the overused ‘brilliant’.  Years ago I was talking to the CEO of Unipart, John Egan, about the success of his company and the generally poor state of British Industry. ’Why was this?’ I asked. John’s reply was instructive.

“Too few people know what good is” he said and that has got me thinking ever since. To be good at anything the performance has to be seen in the context of other good things; you have to be measured against global competitors. That’s why the Olympics and World Cup are so important. It’s no longer sufficient to be good enough just for Bolton or Brighton.

At this point I’d like to introduce you to Simon Anholt who’s worked, he says, with numerous Heads of State and Heads of Government, helping their countries to engage more productively and imaginatively with the international community. It’s what he says about good that I like. Using a huge database he researches globally what becomes a kind of ethical-performance league table called “The Good Country Index.” His thesis is the more you’re respected the better you’ll do. The more you give the more you get. Good may be measured by the extent to which people say “the world would be a worse place without X”…. or “X makes our world a better place” or “X is a role model to the rest of us.”

In 2014 Ireland came first on the back of economic revival when mere survival had seemed unlikely and en route, unlike Iceland who unilaterally wrote off their debt, paid theirs off.

Last year the top countries were:

• Netherlands
• Switzerland
• Denmark
• Finland
• Germany
• Sweden
• Ireland
• UK

USA came 25th and is daily getting worse I imagine given its current attitude to collaboration and selflessness.  Here’s Simon’s analysis of what’s wrong with the world.

“Things seem to be getting worse all the time: climate change, terrorism, pandemics, migration, economic chaos… the list goes on. All these problems have grown too big and too complex for any individual nation to solve. But instead of collaborating, nations spend all their energy and resources competing against each other. This has to change if we want to make the world work. This is why the Good Country Index exists.”

It’s curious that everything he sensibly prescribes like union, sharing and looking outwards for inspiration are what all good companies are doing nowadays and what nearly all nation states eschew.

America in particular is a strange case right now. What was once the leader of the world and role model to anyone with ambition is now behaving like a rogue state. American films featuring Gregory Peck and John Wayne – both good guys – have changed to Tarantino horrors instead. Pity. We need a good America.

THINKING ABOUT BIG

I’m not against big businesses.  Not at all. They are full of smart and civilised people. They are important to our economy and our social stability.

I like Google and Apple (who doesn’t?)

I used to love the spirit Nike had in the period of their pre-21st-century glory. I love the confidence with which companies such as John Lewis, Heinz (now 3G) and BMW go about what they do. I enjoy seeing challengers like Deliveroo, Uber, Airbnb and especially Aldi, disrupt their markets and behave small (even when - like Aldi - they’re the 90th biggest company in the world, a lot bigger than Tesco with twice as many stores in 18 countries.)

But there’s something about big companies that’s beginning to worry me.

Mark Ritson in Marketing Week gets it spot-on when he castigates Apple for circumventing paying their tax:
“Apple is by no means alone in its attempts to legally minimise its tax responsibilities. Despite what all the naïve morons that espouse CSR and brand purpose keep telling you, there are very few brands that don’t actively and massively avoid tax liabilities to a disgraceful degree. What makes Apple notable in this uniformly disgusting context is the manner in which Cook has continued to portray himself as a different kind of CEO, who takes his societal responsibilities very seriously.”

What worries me is being big can make you a bully and prematurely deaf. Being big makes you think ‘There’s my way and then there’s my way.’ Most of all, being big makes you an enemy of marketing. The big decisions you make will be about money, cost and margins, about downsizing, consolidating and acquisitions. They should be about people and what they want and need. They should be about marketing but they won’t be. And if you get too big to focus on marketing, well…you’re going to die.

Small businesses are about the future. They are about risk and about change. They are where innovation thrives.  They are about learning. They are about being busy doing important things. They are more in love with their top-line (their sales) than their bottom-line (profit). And they keep on trying to get better not richer.
Small businesses are lucky. They don’t usually have shareholders or if they do they don’t have analysts poring over their numbers. They don’t have a lot of out-of-date plant and investment in property they just don’t need. They don’t have a huge workforce.

But what don’t they have?

They don’t have enough money to have much wriggle room. So they need to be very smart if they’re going to survive.   Lord Rutherford the scientist said:

“We have no money so we shall have to think.” (Those who know me well will have heard that many times before.)

We’ve got to stop bending the knee to big business. The real future lies with companies creating the future and not protecting the past. And if they won’t pay their tax, however big they are, they can get lost.

IS IT REAL?

Authenticity is something of a buzzword right now along with transparency, honesty and sharing. The need for plain English and the “truth” are constantly on people’s lips.

I have felt uneasy about the Olympics and about cricket because of the doping scandals of the former and the betting corruption of the latter to the extent of not watching them.

What’s the point when so many competitors have cheated blatantly?  These sports are simply inauthentic being literally played on an uneven playing field.  Yet I found myself being drawn towards the Olympics despite my reservations. Applause like laughter is infectious. There’s something about sport when it’s played well that gets you. So when Adam Peaty  smashed the world record time in the 100 metres breaststroke I, who loathe swimming, was fascinated. Adam seems to have disrupted breast stroke technique by swimming in an exhaustingly aggressive way. A dull stroke made thrilling.

In the midst of Polish Weightlifters, Bulgarian Steeplechasers and Chinese swimmers being sent home this week for doping offences there’s a kind of naïve brilliance we see in the way some athletes excel.

Here’s a different story about authenticity.  There’s an old report of a conspiracy to cheat on insurance through bogus whiplash and other injuries which were allegedly suffered by 26 passengers on a bus that normally carried about eight people. When the bus ran into a car causing a slight bump legitimate, law abiding passengers watched in bemusement as the conspirators flung themselves to the floor of the bus clutching their necks and screaming in apparent agony.

CCTV footage showed some of them giggling as they performed these antics. It was not authentic nor intelligent but quite funny at every level. It’s the idea of mass incompetent corruption that has a Monty Python feel to it. There was one other piece of idiocy - they all made claims against just one insurance company.

Judge Patricia Lynch was the most authentic voice last week when she swore back at John Hennigan whom she was jailing for breaching an Asbo order:

Henningan: You’re a bit of a c..t
Judge: You’re a bit of a c..t yourself.
Hennigan: Go f..k yourself
Judge: You too.

Hennigan did not cut a particularly attractive figure in his behaviour or in his physical appearance - no Olympic athlete he - but I doubt if Patricia’s authenticity which won her widespread support on social media will go down quite so well with the judiciary.

Whilst writers try to find their authentic voice - the true them - this is not generally true of politicians who spend most of their lives trying to be what they think voters want. Boris Johnson, for example, plays whatever he judges will work best: buffoon, man of the people, intellectual, small boy or repentant. Our Foreign Secretary seems to have gone to earth doubtless working on his next performance. To misquote Bacon in his famous quote about Pilate:

“What is real?” said jesting Johnson but would not stay for an answer.

MOMENTUM IS KING

Do you recall that story about Sisyphus, a thoroughly nasty piece of work by all accounts , who was forever condemned to push the same  heavy boulder up a hill only for it to roll back down again every time?
Imagine the encouraging call “Push, push Sisyphus” followed by “oops”.

It struck me that the 71% of people (unearthed by the Royal Society of Arts in research) who show up as dissatisfied and unhappy with their jobs probably feel like this Corinthian king. Bored and fed up.
What they are lacking is momentum. They’re living a Groundhog Day existence making simply no progress at all with every day feeling the same as the last.

In a recent Test Match at Lords both sides had players who took the match by the scruff of the neck and made something unexpected happen. We see it in markets where traders still bellow seductively about their wares - “lovely juice-oozing strawberries, strong gob-burning Cheddar”….

Yet in a world of self service and social media we just let things sit there in a rather docile way until big-data spreadsheets tell us what’s happened to sales.

Momentum? Remember the Olympics and the delicious demolition of cynics as momentum built to that dizzy climax of Day 8, August 4th when Britain won six gold medals and the good humour of the whole event spilt over into helpless disbelief - could life ever get better?

Momentum? The Ivy and The Chiltern Firehouse - restaurants that you can’t get into because the momentum of their reputation exceeds the reality of their offering.

Momentum? Game of Thrones or Oliver Twist - yes, Dickens was the original momentum builder and master of the cliff hanger.

I love the moment when, with a cunning mixture of promotion, packaging and chutzpah, momentum begins to unfold before you, because a nerve is struck and imagination is fired up. It’s that lighting the blue touch paper moment when the fizzing sound of ignition briefly precedes a bang.

Momentum is the most important aspect of marketing. You can have a great plan but if nothing happens you’re a loser. Marketing is littered by brilliant people who cautiously advanced but achieved no oomph. The skill is in in making something happen out there not looking good in here, the boardroom. To achieve momentum you need to inspire a following, get people trying your product or service and then telling others they like it.

Forget the bottom line. If you don’t have a top line you don’t have a business. Buy sales, give your product away or hire beautiful people to sample it. Flaunt it don’t intellectualise.

There’s a new book by Yuval Noah Harari called “Sapiens” and it’s about us, human beings, and why we’ve made it so big. He attributes it to our ability to tell stories, create visions and so on.

Great stories create momentum. Stories that involve people, engage and inspire them -  momentous stories.
And, remember, momentum is king.

IN PRAISE OF GOLD MEDALS

I want you to imagine it’s the Olympics (again) in which there are two streams of competitor, A and B.
A are the real high flyers and B are what we’ll call average. It’s been noted that stream A are getting disproportionately more medals, faster times, greater attention from coaches and greater funding attention.
It has been decided this imbalance must be adjusted. So less attention is going to be spent on nourishing the potentially best talent and the less promising are going to be helped more. We’ll put our money on the guy in orange.

The result?  Whilst the number of medals won has gone down dramatically we have a great deal more 5th and 6th placed athletes. Which just goes to show that being fairer improves things for more people.
Rarely has a piece of work irritated me more than the recent report “Rebalancing our Cultural Capital”…. on three counts:

1. Until I’d read it I would have broadly agreed with the proposition that the rest of the UK got a poor deal when it came to sharing out funds. London it could be argued was getting not just the cake but all the cherries too. But on reading it my mind was changed mainly because the argument was based on a basis of equity not quality, on spreading the butter over bread both fresh and stale and that won’t do.
2. The argument that London is a population of 8.2 million is a little misleading. Add in tourists and it’s some 24 million. And they need adding in because tourism counts and that’s where the return on investment in the arts is irrefutable. It’s the quality of London that generates the tourist revenue (interestingly the most cited reason for tourists coming to London is going to the theatre).
3. The rather careless use of data should concern us. Anyone indicating a calamitous trend in share of funds for the rest of England from ACE – from 19.6% in 1980 to 17.8% in 2012/13 – using a vertical axis going from 16.5% to 20% deserves to be rebuked. 

Simon Jenkins in the Standard praises London theatre saying “it rules the world” but adds a caveat a bit limply “The reality is that London is where ministers live and minsters look after their own”. Others have said “there may be a point of sorts here but it’s the same old hammer and the same old nail isn’t it”.

Quite.

The more gold medals in artistic terms that London wins the better and the more inspiring a role model it is, or should become, and the more rewards are reaped by everyone.

But there’s a fourth reason I fell out with the report which is this. The story is not about how you cut the cake but how big the cake is in the first place. For successive governments to be embarrassed about the elitist nature of culture and the arts and accordingly give it small crumbs to spend – less than Financial Services used to get and about a quarter of what we spend on intelligence and spooks.

No you won’t find it below. Not important enough.  Under other.
 .

To be fair it gets a bit more than the Statistics Authority which may seem unjust given how inspiring government statistics can be.

Ultimately, I think for little Britain to have the greatest city in the world thanks to a large extent to its brilliance in the arts and culture, vindicates the imbalance that exist and because of the celebration that creates it should make the less favoured rest of Britain lift their game too.

Written by Richard Hall and first published on the Business of Culture website

LET THE SUNSHINE IN

Odd how a bit of sunshine completely changes the way you feel or think. Or in my case not think. My brain has gone into “idle” ever since a fortnight in sunny Venice and a return to, heaven be praised, sunny  Brighton. (Now I understand the problem in Greece, Italy and Spain – too much sun). Now I’m in a kind of “what’s it all about Alfie?” frame of mind. Given the state of the world today,  Alfie rather than the IMF or the rest of that wretched Troika might have a more useful viewpoint.

So Alfie what do you think?

“Well the Olympics are great. Have you noticed how much nicer people are being at stations and throughout London – smiling and being helpful? I guess we might be learning to lift our standards of customer service…and be like they are in New York. And yes the sunshine helps. And there’s something odd in the press: a series of views that the bad news about recession may have been too gloomy and possibly wrong. Even James Naughtie was cheery on the Today programme. Post Leveson could we have a good-news media? Are we being infected by what Boris called a “benign virus”? What else do I really think? Economics is boring and always wrong - always. Bankers are barmy. The uber-rich are wretched and doomed. People at the top of companies are all “out of touch”. Oh yes one other thing.  The Olympics is wonderful because it’ll be about everyone trying their best but I don’t much like McDonalds, Coca-Cola or Visa. Oops – shouldn’t have said that…. What else do you want to know?”
Just your address Alfie, so the Brand Police can come and arrest you for “reputation-terrorist-attacks” on those great brands.

How do we recreate that sunshine we’ve missed for so long? Speeches don’t do it. Images can start to. Music helps. But it’s an event that does it. We need an anniversary, a national party, a big unifying event to make everyone grin.

The lesson of the Olympics is a lesson in the power of “Event Marketing”.

And Alfie is right.
I was in London today, the Olympic spirit is wonderful and London buzzed.
We are so lucky because I suddenly realised how great London is – here’s how Nancy Durrant of the Times described it - “a heaving, breathing, shifting beast with a mind of its own.”
And that’s just Boris Johnson.

Boris – a mind of his own - sunshine or shower?

WHAT A YEAR TO THROW A PARTY

Imagine you’d won the local house of the year award, imagine that you’re planning a celebratory event for your best friends (and even some people you don’t even like but want to impress.) You’ve had the gardeners in to redesign the garden, tart up the house, repaint the front (the door a matt Farrow and Ball “Shocked Grey Face”), turned the garden room into a cinema room which at £10k including the 60 inch Sony screen and their sound system is a steal and that rose garden in blush pink is a wow. To round things off there’s a Boxster for you and Smart Car for her – “what do mean 'her'?” (sorry darling) - in the drive.

Made it. Got there.  Smugly, snugly winners.

And as you sit down the front door bell rings.

It’s the event organisers – Locog it says on their T shirts – who sweep in. “Relax“ they say “it’s great. Now leave it to us now.”

An army of identically clad young men and women stride in mouths smiling, eyes staring and repaint the door Cadbury purple, remove that screen in the cinema (what a crashing sound) and put in a Panasonic, The cars have been towed away and replaced by a BMW 7 series plus a Mini Cooper, the roses have been ripped out and replaced by Coca-Cola Reds, a Visa ATM has been set up beside the garage, your Longines watch has been snatched from your wrist and before your cry of outrage has subsided replaced by an Omega and as you retreat to your office you discover a team of smiling songsters smashing your Apple Mac and replacing it with an Acer.

Do you know, for the first time ever, I now know what living in a totalitarian state might feel like?

I’m a lifelong enthusiast for adventure but I’ve got uneasy.

I love the Olympics, their athletes and the buzz but the marketing stuff around it is beginning to feel a bit absurd.

Let’s just applaud the bravery of the brilliant competitors and ignore the rest.

Now, there’s a battle cry to make the moneymen think.

(Here are the Olympic Global sponsors:  Coca-Cola, Acer, Atos, Dow, GE, McDonalds, Omega, Panasonic, P&G, Visa, Samsung …well you knew that obviously. Here’s the London sponsorship list: BMW, BP, BA, BT, Lloyds, EDF).

And unless you got all those right someone’s wasted a lot of money.

DREAM-TAKERS, SHERPAS AND TWO FIRST HALVES

I was at a conference about “sporting excellence” last week run by Noggin the people-performance people. You never know about these events do you? Lots of sports people comparing discus throwing with strategic planning - Olympic medals being shown around and stories of daring-do.

Yet there was some really great stuff here.
I became convinced “thriving” was the greatest state of economic grace we individually, corporately and nationally should aspire to….doing well, “doing just what we should do”. Gardens thrive; they don’t win; they don’t go for super-growth (and when they do they fall over.)
I listened in amazement to the juggernaut flattened Gold medallist James Cracknell  (cycling across America for fun he was very nearly killed by a truck) who described the winning strategy of the rowing four – “make sure your worst is better than their best”. He also talked about the recovery from his near death experience and the negativism of some doctors. “Don’t let the dream-takers get in the way” he said. Dream-takers are the enemy of our ambition and excitement.
Many of those talking were very good mentors and coaches with some telling insights. I loved the idea that we spend too much time on autopsies…it’s true that in business much too much time is spent on the past. But it was listening to Billie Bragg on the radio that I heard a blinding definition of mentors as “sherpas”-   helping the people they mentor get to the top of their particular mountain.
And talking of climbing – the extraordinary rock climber Mike Weekes gave advice for life that we should all take. In climbing he said (and most people get this wrong) do the easy stuff fast, only take time over the really hard stuff. And don’t hang on for grim death – this is a fingertip, light touch business. Like life.
Finally the hugely impressive Jeff Grout,  formerly Sir Clive Woodward’s business manager, who described the Lion’s discovery when winning the World Cup,  that they always started the first half better than the second half in matches. So they changed into completely clean kit for the second half thereby playing two first halves. Here’s an obsession with detail and changing the weather in their minds.
Grout said, have ambitions, set performance goals and then step by step set up processes to deliver the goal. If the process is right the outcome will follow.
But I’m still thinking about the weather in my mind…what a great concept.

IF ONLY I'D HAD A MENTOR WHO'D GUIDED ME

Not  in fact the departing words of Sir Fred Goodwin or Chuck Prince, perhaps, but if we are honest most of could do with a grandfatherly figure who can fearlessly, and with our best interests unconditionally at heart, advise us and, most important of all, get the best out of us.

Leon Taylor is an Olympian. He won a silver medal at Athens doing with Peter Waterfield, the most difficult dive invented in history. He fought injury, disappointment and still threw himself off the top of a three storey building, hitting the water at 40mph again and again and again. In short he’s crazy.

But he’s written a great book on mentoring and he’s Tom Daley’s mentor (so. if Tom doesn’t win a gold in 2012, Leon’s entirely and brazenly to blame.) A great book because it has an innocent clarity about it. No cynical management book this, it prescribes laughter, hard work, excitement, and good planning as keys in the success recipe. But having the calm, inspiration and support of your mentor can make the difference between hero and nobody.

There are two things Leon says that stick with me:
“You can’t always choose what you do but you can always choose how you do it”.
I’d rather be a great check-out operator than an unenthusiastic brand manager and so on and so on. Do what you do brilliantly and with enthusiasm and the rest will follow.

The second is a quote from Dr Steve Peters and his three rules of life:
1. Life is not fair.
2. The goalposts always move.
3. Your job is to do your best under the circumstances.
Steve has pretty well captured the dilemma mankind faces. And by making us face it does us all a great service. Stop whingeing – get up and get on.  But as a mentor I think I want to add a fourth point.

4.  Your mentor’s job is to help you understand how great you can be if only you press the right buttons.

When people say “but what does a mentor do?” I feel like saying “what does a gardener do?” Answer “makes the soil sing with colour.”  Mentors are those button locators. We are the messengers of hope and inspiration. We help people see what good is and how to get there. We fuel laughter and adventure. We make good people become great and sometimes good people do something different in order to become great.

Life is like high diving. It’s frightening. It hurts. You haven’t got enough time to think but if you have a mentor like Leon Taylor, or a select group like him,  you can learn to press the right buttons and do your best under any circumstances.

BRINGING ATHLETIC VALUES TO WORK

For a long time now I have been a sceptic about the value of using sport as a guide to success in business. Talks on how javelin throwing can help you gain market share have always seemed to me to miss the mark.

But I’m changing my mind after last week.

I went to a conference called “Ahead of the Games” at the Royal College of Physicians in Regents Park to hear a cluster of past Olympic medal winners tell their stories.

And something happened to me; it wasn’t, you see, just what they said but what lay behind their talks and the uniformly clean, enthusiastic positivism of their delivery and attitude to life that suddenly got to me. I became not just a believer in the Olympics but in this simple professional approach to life. There were no spurious words about market forces or external factors. This was simply you against them.

Three things particularly stuck in my brain (although if you want my list of all 20 top tips just e-mail me at richard@hallogram.freeserve.co.uk )

1. On marketing – here’s what I jotted down as they were talking “The Olympic buzz is a virus – think of how to create a marketing buzz in your business – create a build up: a sense that something’s going to happen; use real people to talk about it; make the event itself extraordinary; worry about how to exceed expectation and then how to leave a legacy of new talent.” Stop using military metaphors in marketing and start using medical ones. How to create a pandemic for your brand – that’s the marketing man’s real job….spreading the bug.
    
2. On the big performance – be that the race or, say, a business presentation….one chance…one contest…one winner….or as someone said “it’s sometimes not so much winning a bronze as losing a gold”. They all talk about proper preparation, about smiling at the start and reflecting “I’ve done all I can”. If Olympic athletes were as prepared to busk as most business people seem to be we’d never win anything. Robustly thorough preparation is everything.
3. On success – top athletes all surround themselves with good advisors on diet, on positive thinking, on aches and pains, on technique because the difference between success and failure is the small % point improvement such help can give. And all, literally all, talk about WE not I – “we met every week over four years”: “we talked about it”; “we discovered a better way”; “we ran…” Compared with the value of achieving success, good mentoring and coaching is really cheap. Not to be mentored is one sign of career damaging egotism.

This event taught me more about business than I’d expected as well as inspiring me hugely. The Olympics is coming. It’s going to be great. And if business in Britain is half as professional as the builders of the event itself and athletes competing in it then the next good times are just around the corner.

JIM ROGERS THE POUND

Jim Rogers went to Balliol so he can’t be all bad.

But last week he told the world that sterling was finished, to sell the pound and that Britain was bankrupt.

It was all rather depressing.

Especially as Jim’s an exceeding rich and successful person and a one time colleague of George Soros.

So he should know.

Yet apparently this is the man who told us a couple of years ago to invest in Zimbabwe.

This piece of news about him cheered me enormously.

Britain is not finished but some of its aspirations are and thank heavens for that.

1. We are not a Premier League country any more.
2. Britain sounds great without the Great
3. Can we stop giving our money away to Overseas Development – we don’t have much left
4. Can we have a sensible conversation about the Olympics?
5. Can we invest in a 21st century manufacturing/innovation economy?
6. Can we stop trying to keep the terminally ill companies alive that have no future?
7. Can we get an SAS economic squad together to resuscitate the ones in peril that we need to keep by taking smart people out of retirement if necessary to help them?
8. And can we stop paying stupid fees to advisers? I heard about a consulting firm who claimed they had to charge large fees as their overheads were so high. Ironically their first name is “Price”.

Britain will be fine.

All it needs is for us to be resourceful, innovative and energetic and – this is the real key – stop listening to the doom mongers….Jim Rogers is wrong (again).