THE AGE OF ENTERPRISE

Recently I was passed in the street by someone uttering some rather depressing words.

“It’s so hard. I have to spend my time keeping tabs on my people making sure they do things properly.”

It must be fun working for him. But he, the joyless administrator,  is one reason the Start-Up revolution is gaining so much momentum.

The other is we live in a world of increasing uncertainty where economists and leading opinion makers  say with equally great conviction “we’re on the edge of a cliff” or “things will settle down quite quickly in reality”.

Few of us comprehend the macro-economy but we understand our own small world quite well. We know that big companies are not to be entirely trusted when it comes to “downsizing”. We are tired of being a number not a face. Better to strike out on our own in a rowing boat than stick with Titanic Limited.

Today I’m focusing on the middle aged entrepreneur.

George Clooney is 58. He recently sold his Tequila brand Cosamigos for $1billion. 

In a paper in the National Bureau of Economic Research middle aged start-ups are shown to grow faster and survive longer. The FT says over-50s now account for 43% of those who start their own business.

So what’s going on?

What I call the Start -Up Revolution is being fuelled from three sources – Millennials, who don’t want to work for the people like that lugubrious joker on whom I eavesdropped, women – many post maternity-leave to whom the thought of returning to office politics is too awful and the disenchanted, redundant over 50s loaded with experience, skill and enough surplus cash to fund a start-up.

David Rowan has written a book “Non-Bullshit Innovation” in which he explores the mindsets of global tech start-ups and their disruptive, white-sheet-of-paper thinking. He rightly criticises the British government’s constant postponement of decisions about strategic priorities.

It’s ironic we have so many assets to play with. Here are just a few:
- English is the world’s lingua franca
- We are huge in gaming technology
- We are big in film production
- Our creative industries are booming

- We are still dominant in financial services
- Climate change is giving us the agro-friendly climate of France in the 1980s
- We have become accomplished at customer service (about time)
- Our recent record in innovation from luxury goods to food to technology is impressive.

We don’t blow our own trumpets but as the middle aged increasingly flex their innovative muscles a fanfare is becoming more noticeable. Take gin where a generation of middle aged entrepreneurs have introduced the most exotic, interesting variety of new gins imaginable. Sales of gin have doubled in the past five years.

We hear a lot about Silicon Valley. It’s time we started to think regardless of Brexit of ourselves as “Innovation Island”. Driven by the ambitions, skill and independence of spirit of the experienced, as well as the young and hungry, we are in good shape.

Government won’t help us (they seldom do)  but they can at least get out of the way.

“Start-ups Pivots and Pop Ups” by Richard Hall and Rachel Bell is published in October by Kogan Page. The antidote to doubt and gloom.

NOSTALGIA ISN'T QUITE WHAT IT WAS

On Friday we went to Guildford for lunch with a friend with whom I shared my three years at Balliol College, Oxford. We sat looking over the Surrey countryside. It was all very pastoral. And it would have been perfectly in order for me to have been humming Parry’s “Jesusalem” especially as my friend’s a vicar.

But we spoke only briefly of the past. He asked if I regretted anything about my University days. I declared like Piaf “Je ne regretted rien…” But I did regret one thing.

I regretted not having worked harder. Not to have got a better degree but because today I have so much more energy than I did when I was 20 - ½ century ago - and I regret not having read more, thought more and squeezed more juice from the fruit I’d been given. I had a great time, made some great friends, learnt a lot but the Nutribullet that I called my brain was in idle.

Those were pleasant times…we had the Beatles, That Was the Week That Was, films like Zulu, the first Habitat … but they were sleepier times . Donald Campbell reached 276mph to break the land speed record.

Today it’s 763mph.

Instead of pleasant reminiscing my friend and I talked about now, the future and about what’s going to happen next. He’s unwell and being made worse by tooth-sucking doctors - I call them “pessimedics”. If only they’d say “Well done, you’re making great progress” the effect would be more beneficial. Advice to doctors: don’t give people pills. Inspire them to feel a bit better. Look forwards. As we both did.

The world we talked about is certainly more dynamic than the past. And more fun. How extraordinary to hear my grandsons talk about their favourite football teams (we can take Brighton & Hove Albion who are second in the Championship as a given):

“Arsenal, Manchester City, Real Madrid, Bayern Munich and Barcelona”

At 7 and 9 years old they are people who think beyond these shores. Wonderful.

I am currently writing a book on Marketing and whilst my grumpy nostalgic side threatens to surface when I encounter the debate on social media and “the need for an authentic interactive platform” it’s suppressed. Because give or take a bit of linguistic embroidery what’s new? Just an abundance of bright, shiny toys for lucky marketers to play with.

I wish, I really wish I were back in marketing; it seems to be so tricky now, yet so full of change and such fun.  A cornucopia is what we have. Great shops. Great food. Great wine. Great entertainment. Great memories - yes of course but keep these in perspective.

I feel the urge to use that quotation from 1957 from Prime Minister Harold MacMillan who predicted:
“a state of prosperity such as we have never had in my lifetime - nor indeed in the history of this country”

Yes. We’ve never had it so good.

TALK ABOUT PARIS

I suppose I should be flattered that someone thought I should write a blog about how to do business in what they called a growing climate of fear. Flattered that they thought I might have anything useful to contribute to the vast amount of analysis, handwringing and horror.

               
I have just two things to say before migrating to less well trodden ground.

1. I wish we’d regard this less like a football match in which every “kill” on our side is described joyously in “back of the net” terms. Wouldn’t it be better just to take out the “bad guys” quietly and say nothing?
2. We mustn’t be frightened. Those of us who lived through the IRA outrages without changing our shopping habits know that a certain sang froid is the answer.

 A salesman who worked for me back then and  who covered Northern Ireland described how the front was blown out of Debenhams as he was about to call there. When I asked him what he did, apart from brushing off the glass, he said “Oh I called on S.D. Kells instead.”

We need to avoid the knee jerk reaction of “kill them all” which some ill-advisedly describe as being Churchillian.  Guerrilla fighters are so hard to defeat because they don’t play by any of the rules that we know. They behave like the triumphant David to our Goliath.  We’ll only beat them by understanding them better and then by out-thinking them and not just by bombing where we think they are.
Have we learnt nothing from Vietnam and Afghanistan?

But then I listened to our Secretary of State for Defence on the Today programme and I rather gloomily realised we hadn’t.

GLORIOUS SPORT RIP

Ninety five years ago “Shoeless” Joe Jackson of the Chicago White Sox was allegedly approached by a young fan with the words “say it aint so Joe.”  The reference was to the fact the White Sox had thrown the 1919 World Series, losing to underdogs the Cincinatti Reds. Eight White Sox players including Joe Jackson were banned for life and the baseball establishment was rocked.

Today sport is very big business - global sponsorship is worth $58 billion - up 27% in the past five years. Yet sport is troubled and I suspect I’m not alone in feeling a weary cynicism towards it. Nearly all sports are run by a hegemony of people like Ecclestone, Blatter, Diack, Srinivasan (respectively, Formula One, Football, Athletics and Cricket) and  resemble recent dictatorships in the Middle East. But unravel their rule and does worse follow?

Whenever there’s a strange result in sport nowadays I wonder, I just wonder if something fishy is going on. Why is everyone getting so upset about Russia’s doping programme? They and East Germany have, we all assumed, been at it for years and blind eyes had been turned. What is sad is to see Seb “Mr Clean” Coe being turned over in the midst of allegations which he surely must have known about and simply ignored or worse… “say it aint so Coe”.

Without anyone seeming to worry too much Cricket has been taken over by India where the match fixing scandals are endemic. Just this summer two of the top sides in the Indian Premier League, the Chennai Super Kings and Rajasthan Royals, were suspended for two years having been found guilty in an illegal betting and match-fixing probe. The owners of both sides were suspended from all cricket-related activities for life. The respective captains of these sides are MS Dhoni (the Indian captain) and Steve Smith (the Australian captain). Worried? You should be. Meanwhile Chris Cairns, ex New Zealand cricket star, still on trial at Southwark Crown Court for match fixing, was compared to Lance Armstrong for the damage he’s done to his sport.

But does it really matter? Sport seems to me to have become increasingly boring and trivial. I found the recent Rugby World Cup mostly dull, Football is nearly always wretched, Athletics is a catwalk sport owned by Nike, Adidas and the others and cricket has become a wham bam of a spectacle, the equivalent of willow wielding penalty shoot-outs rife with corruption.

A friend suggested to me life would be simpler if only we allowed athletes to take whatever drugs they wanted because that’s going to be the only level playing field you’ll get. Most of my life I’ve believed in my heroes, the Seb Coes, Rod Lavers, Bobby Moores and Chris Cairns yet when the veil of romanticism is lifted there’s nothing there but a lot of money, some sweat and a lot of pretence.

Sorry but  it really is so.

Money in Sport A Conference this year in Australia

WE ARE IN CRISIS (AGAIN)

A friend of mine is over from China where he works in the business I once tormented (advertising - yeah, you probably noticed the resemblance between me and Don Draper.)  He said something I’ve heard a lot recently.

“The industry’s in crisis”
“Yes” I said, “it always was.”

It was in crisis when the young Turks with ideas took over, it was in crisis when the Brits took over the US agencies, it was in crisis when the media men like Kraken awoke and plundered the business and it is in crisis now digital is the story. Someone asked recently what a client’s social media strategy was. That’s rather like asking for a conversing-with-friends strategy.

As the lovely lady exclaimed in Smiths today - “bollocks” as for the second time her purchase of some magazine was double-counted by the DIY self-service till. She said “sorry” but I explained consolingly this was the word I’d been seeking to describe “a social media strategy”.

(By the way what a dreary, ill lit and drab place WHS is. And Kate Swann, their ex CEO, left with £13million for the job she did for them?  Astonishing.)

Recently I met someone with whom I was at Oxford. I haven’t seen much of him over the many intervening years but discovered he was so positive, so different from the many Meldrew “just-typical” figures of our generation, so inspiringly hopeful that we were not in crisis but that in fact we’ve, to quote a Prime Minister of my youth - Harold MacMillan, “never had it so good.”

The fact is markets change because technology changes but human beings don’t. I’m struck by how similar marketing ideas and advertising strategies are to those used a century or half a century ago. Our passions for strange football teams remain solid. (And what a great observation that those stunning crowds that Jezza Corbyn drew in his campaign were smaller than 2nd Division Accrington Stanley gets.) We love, we live, we row, we laugh, jokes we laugh at live forever - and we want the same things - safety, comfort and companionship.I hold it, that a little rebellion, now and then, is a good thing, and as necessary in the political world as storms in the physical.  - Thomas Jefferson

And one other thing - a bit of rebellion - Thomas Jefferson one-time US President and a genius said a “little rebellion now and then is no bad thing”. The Corbanista and Trumpeters have brought a sparkle back into politics, some real arguments and besides anything else, how lovely to see the looks of confusion on the faces of the establishment.

So the industry is in crisis. Martin Sorrell is, I hear, intent on “horizontalising” (means “integrate”) the marketing services business. If I’d offered to “horizontalise” that young lady in WH Smith they’d have arrested me.

Sorrell wants to re-invent the one stop shop. It was always a lovely idea but it doesn’t work that well. Stick to your knitting and be the best at what your great at.

Because there is no crisis except in our heads and that’ll never go away.

WHERE DO WE LIVE?

What interests me is how we feel; where our true north is. Where we live, live in our head as opposed to where we physically sleep or where we work are different things. I know people who think nothing of commuting a thousand miles a week, or who camp near their place of work before driving home.

After the wall came down in East Germany someone hailed a cab to go home. He said to the Taxi Diver:-
“Can you take me to …”
“No need to ask,” replied the Cabbie “I know where you live.”

Apparently most of the Stasi became taxi drivers when their security role ended. But where they lived had changed in their heads.

I was talking about football to my grandson when he said there was a boy at his school who was exceptionally gifted at it.  In talking about this success he said that this boy came from a different country.

“Oh where does he come from?” I asked. To which he replied without missing a beat.
“Manchester”.

Yes, Manchester a different country,  all on its own, full of great footballers - nothing to do with the rest of us.

It was Christopher Marlowe in the Jew of Malta who said “The past is another country”.  And you realise the truth of this in listening to UKIP. This other country is one of nostalgia, when summers were always sunny, when steam engines drove our trains, when cricketers wore white flannel, when business lunches were fuelled with claret and cigar smoke.

I simply don’t do nostalgia. I think the future is a different country and, if we choose to make it so, a better one.

I am currently doing work across Europe. Sweden, Poland Germany, Greece, Italy, France, Britain, Ireland are all terrific, bright, different but united (in the English language and in in an attitude to doing business). These people are not defined by where they come from but by where they live in their heads.

Unashamedly I’m pro EU albeit anti-Euro bureaucracy. My philosophy of life is the same as one-time US President Lyndon Johnson’s (cynical as it may sound). He was talking about an obstreperous colleague who was thinking of resigning:

“It's probably better to have him inside the tent pissing out, than outside the tent pissing in.”

That’s how I feel about Europe - the biggest economy and most civilised in the world. The more I work in Europe the more I think of it as one country.

The most changed country is America whose view of the world swung eight years ago. They gave up on old Europe and swung their attention west to the Asian powerhouse. I don’t blame America - that’s probably right for them.

But it leaves an opportunity for us. We can and should be the key portal for the rest of the world into Europe…it’s something we do really well - because it’s where most of us working really live and do business intellectually.

Colourful Thinkers

A TRICK OF MEMORY

As you get older your memory seems to worsen but it’s more complicated than the just the onset of senior moments. Quite simply you have much more to remember than someone younger who’s been to fewer places, met fewer people and done less. The attic of your mind or, if you prefer, your “Mind Palace” is crammed to the rafters and finding that name or that reference is hard as it’s lying behind all those memories, thoughts and experiences.

The mind is also good at being a therapist. Forgetting things can often be very helpful. If we could vividly recall as though it were yesterday each  root canal procedure we’d had, every embarrassing faux pas and every crisis and tragedy we’d soon become a gibbering wreck. Our mind filters this stuff and sometimes deletes the names of people we actually didn’t like but had felt we ought to have because they were important. Our mental search engine is on our side and it even rewrites history casting us in a better light than we deserved.

Remember that horrible confrontation with a mugger who was about to hit you when you cried:  “don’t - please don’t”, and at that moment a passer-by intervened and drove him off.  In the recut version of the play you smite the beastly ruffian with one blow of your fist and it is he who cries in a quavering voice “don’t please don’t, please don’t hit me again” and you laugh and send him on his way. Yes!

Daniel Kahneman in his epic “Thinking fast and slow” describes the distorting power of memory and how we can decide, if we choose, that a favourable reconstruction of history makes us happier people. If we can only remember things as they were as vividly as if they’d happened today we should never forgive. The Irish Peace Agreement, the cordial relationships we have with Germany and Japan and so on would be impossible. Forgetfulness and shading of memory enables forgiveness.

It’s in a court of law where two people of good character, with no incentive to tell anything other than the truth, very often claim honestly to see things from a completely contrary point of view. It’s why our legal system is so robust and effective. It understands that people unblinkingly and unwittingly lie and it seeks to unravel this.

Less importance is attached to memory than ever…why try to remember when Google can do it for you? But memory matters. Nearly all speakers at conferences feel they speak without notes (that’s memory); making creative connections is done by … memory; avoiding plagiarism is done by good memory (plagiarism is done by simple memory);  good human relationships depend on memory (remembering birthdays and anniversaries).

The mind is kind. It responds to our needs and our desires. You can train your memory, you can focus on what you need to remember but you can also filter out bad stuff. Remember, your mind is on your side.

BACK TO SCHOOL

For many of us, sixteen of the first twenty years of our life are defined by Michaelmas, Easter and Summer terms. And so it is that around this time of year the smell of autumn - Keats’ “season of mists and mellow fruitfulness” and back to school paraphernalia fill all our minds.

The three phases for me in a work schedule work are :-

• Back to school - renewal, new classes, new teachers, a new syllabus and above all change. In that remorseless run up to Christmas the agenda for change is omnipresent.
• New Year  resolutions - and even if we aren’t exactly wedded to these the need to self- appraise and set goals burns in our souls as the skirl of New Year bagpipes fades away
• Spring clean - this happens as the first sounds of woodpeckers and doves fill our ears in May; time to clear out, renew and simplify

But it wasn’t until I went to America in their fall and realised what a big and colourful story it was as trees turned golden, red, orange and sienna.

As the process of new school discovery started over the last week that familiar feeling of looking at a clean sheet of paper struck me.

One of my grandsons, the elder one aged 8 described the pressure of being in year 4. He made it sound like Finals Year at University as he reflected in tones far older than his years how it was going with his new form teacher.

“She said she’s going to make sure we learn in every available second. We used to play more now it’s maths, maths and more maths. I’m feeling tired and a bit depressed.” 

Shades of Mrs Trunchbull.

I felt tired listening to it. When I was 8 we played a lot. I wrote stories about journeys to Canada where I fought off Grizzly Bears and ate tomato sandwiches. We sang songs, went on nature walks and I wondered if I’d get to see Isobel Black’s knickers at playtime. I remember a complete lack of stress although there was an underlying  terror that one would get caned for some inadvertent misdemeanour.

Matthew Arnold in his poem the Scholar Gypsy captured then, in 1853, what I think is truer today, 160 years later:

“O born in days when wits were fresh and clear
And life ran gaily as the sparkling Thames
Before this strange disease of modern life,
With its sick hurry, its divided aims”

In the long ride to Christmas which I see has already been well trailed - my wife is buying Christmas cards already -  I worry that I am having more fun than my grandsons and great nieces who seem tyrannised by SATS and homework.

I love the call to action but doesn’t  laughter,  frivolity and dance have a place too?

I recall my mother once grimly saying “life is real and life is earnest”. She was way ahead of her time.

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.

OUT OF AFRICA

At the TEDx Conference run by the London Business School at the Royal Geographical Society on April 24th there was one stand out presentation.

Gareth Cliff at 37 is regarded as a stalwart broadcaster in South Africa. He is the founder of the Cliff Central radio station which has the slogan - “Uncensored. Unscripted. Unradio”.

Cliff is a contrarian who has created a show which he describes as follows:-

“real conversation about everything in the news, guests, edgy material and a healthy dose of inspiration and intelligence. Without limits... there will be entertainment, provocative content and unhinged reality.”

His talk was inspiringly positive. No doubt he ridicules the absurd and has rows with politicians but in modern Africa he can. His thesis was about the new found freedom of speech and the explosive effect on the continent’s growth this would bring.

Digital is the new voice of Africa with over 900,000 mobile subscriptions. Now everyone is a broadcaster. By 2018 Africa will have overtaken the USA for smart phone ownership.

The story of democratisation was novel in the context of an African narrative of Ebola, Boko Haram, Somalian piracy and 91 year old Robert Gabriel Mugabe. Cliff talked about this old man to whom something happened recently which went viral.

Mugabe fell awkwardly on some stairs after addressing supporters in Harare. The blameless bodyguards have all been fired albeit not executed. Now in the past this minor incident would have been censored but this is 2015 and not only did it get full coverage but the satirists have got to work. The web was full of Mugabe in action from breakdancing to football and more. Cliff mildly observed that personally he had no reason to make fun of a very old man but wasn’t it great that everyone out there thought it was safe now to take a pop at this long serving dictator.

Cliff’s vision of Africa was impressive. It may be far from perfect in pockets, for instance he and the South African President Jacob Zuma are unlikely to be bosom buddies after Cliff posted a piece to him explaining what a crap job Zuma was doing.

Recently Cliff questioned the cost and need for a very expensive public funeral for a footballer called Senzo. Imagine a state funeral for a Wayne Rooney. There was an explosion of outrage from people calling him racist to which he responded in his blog:

“I was called every kind of vulgar thing by a horde of the least eloquent, most furious, marauding lunatics I didn’t know, and who couldn’t have all known Senzo either.”

Hurray! They are out there in the open talking, shouting and even laughing.  Democracy and free speech works.

Postscript to the BT Soap Opera.

To conclude it’s not working at BT.  The engineer due to fix up the TV (three weeks after we’d moved house) was about to go to our old address and said he was unable to come to the right address for “health and safety reasons”. Aaagghh!!!!!

WHEN BIG BEHAVES BIG IT ALWAYS GETS IT WRONG

When you move house or office or anything like that a fair amount of disruption follows. For me the most intriguing thing has been the array of tradesmen who’ve been to call checking a variety of utilities, mending the broken and quoting eye watering sums for the potential beautification of the house.

All of them real craftsmen, impressively knowledgeable and attentive to our needs - including BT when they got here.  My concern about beastly BT is they’ve constructed an unwieldy and commercially crass structure until a real human being, the BT engineer comes to call. He was smart, assiduous and all is well - I’m back on line. But here’s the odd thing, the maddening thing - before he arrives I’m called by BT saying I can set myself up without an engineer (no I can’t and yes I know having an attack of rage so early in the morning can’t be good for me) and then even whilst he’s here I’m being texted to say he won’t be coming now for another two days. I show him this and he says “take no notice” and carries on working.

My dispassionate and utterly serious point to you BT is you cannot afford to carry on wasting time, money and talent doing the little stuff so badly. Please can I tell you how to solve the problem?

Be as big as you wish but behave as though you were small. When your customer interface parades your scale you are doomed. Thus with the banks. I bank with NatWest - I always have. At a branch level (yes I go to branches ever since being told by a banking friend that bankers never bank online - “are you insane?”) the service is brilliant, charming and helpful. Out there however beyond the phone, in the call centres life gets trickier. Thus with the retailers. Tesco suffered in part by seeming so huge. Wherever you went that 1970s logo reminded you that “every little helps”. Pretending to be little when they are really big and beastly. Thus with big government, it doesn’t work. Only small, can-do fix-it-it people can solve things.

It’s time to put human faces back into customer service like B&Q have done employing retirees who are D&Y fanatics and who really know what they are talking about.

And it’s time to break down the myth that big is better when it’s usually confused. In the case of BT left and right hands belong to completely different bodies. Imagine a left hand whom you don’t know and isn’t yours trying to blow your nose. My BT experience has been that bad.

Oh and it isn’t over. They called to say could they fix the TV by sending an engineer? Suspiciously I agreed. Then the paperwork was emailed. They are planning to go where we used to live. The trouble is I can’t get through to them to say don’t go there we’ve moved.

IT'S GOOD TO TALK

The late David Abbott created this wonderful advertising campaign for BT starring Bob Hoskins with his gritty, man of the people voice. At the time I thought it was perfect, capturing as it did the raison d’etre of this big cuddly company.

This month I’ve changed my mind.

Over the several hours that I’ve talked to BT employees over the past month I’ve concluded this lumbering beast needs dismembering and fast. Everyone I’ve talked to from Jordan, Louise, Kate, Mia, Dali to Helen and many others have been articulate, intelligent and well mannered. But the cock-up over which they’ve calmly presided is baffling.

On the 18th of March they accepted my reporting of an imminent change of address and my order for fibre optic broadband with all the bells and whistles at the new address.

A week later having received no confirmation of the order I called and was unable to reach anyone apart from the BT sales team trying to sell me BT Mobile. It was like enquiring  what the next train for London was and being asked if I wanted to buy a banana. Eventually I got someone who said they could help and they told me the first order had not been processed for technical reasons and a new one would be raised.
Hurray. It was and I was e-mailed confirmation and told an engineer would call to sort everything at the new address on April 2nd and that the kit would be sent.

The kit arrived. BT were really bringing it all together. So ‘twas on a Wednesday morning when the BT man came to call….only he didn’t.

And when I complained was told the earliest anyone could call was April 16th.

And then called again to say that was now April 20th. Because the sun was shining, Brighton is laid back and England had just won a cricket match I didn’t shout and was calm and reasonable and the Indian said wistfully “thank you Sir for being so nice in these circumstances”.

And then I got an invoice for the old address for my office which is where the broadband is based which didn’t mention termination so I rang and they denied all knowledge and said the line would remain live till April 20th this being the earliest they could react.

So I have broadband working where I used to live and nothing where I do live.

And about four hours of my life have been spent talking to people who are doing their best but do not grasp that the customer’s always right and needs to be satisfied.

But it’s all clearly my fault and I should be so lucky as to have BT supplying me.

BT is a beast.

I’m going to have to fire them but they’ve been family all my life so it’ll be a real wrench.
I’m going to check out alternatives and move on from bureaucracy….or not.

As Bob Hoskins might have said “it’s good to walk”.

LET'S HAVE A LONG MEETING

I was talking to a friend recently about the role of Communications in a big corporation. This discipline like HR is one which has grown and entwined itself through organisations. It’s yet another function to blame when things go wrong. But does it fulfil a useful role?

I personally don’t have an internal communications strategy in my own house. My wife tells me what to do and I do it. It really is that simple but in a 10,000 or bigger business ensuring the misunderstandings that can ruin a business are avoided, is vital.

Improving the quality and quantity of communication in a large business covering different countries and cultures could probably improve productivity and save money faster than anything else. It’s also certain than in a knowledge economy where there is an explosion of data and information, filtering and controlling the information dissemination needs new disciplines.

Just for a moment imagine this 10,000 strong business where the following happens.  Simple jargon-free English is the norm so the irate manager who said the following never has to get irate again.
“If I hear the word ‘upcoming’ again I shall be down-coming and someone will find themselves outgoing.”

E-mails will be short in short easy to understand sentences. Always. Every e-mail will have an ACTION REQUIRED section at the end. People who write complex e-mails will be required to do a “Communications Course.”

All documents, all of them, will have a short executive summary which has as point one - why this report has been prepared and point two - what readers are being asked to consider and decide.

Presentations should only last 20 minutes. In exceptional circumstances presentations may be longer but no presentation will ever last more than one hour. No presentation will have more than one slide per minute. No slide will have more than 12 words on it. No meeting should last more than the length of an average examination (namely 3 hours). The consequence of this is that agenda creation and the rigorous use of pre-meetings and meeting preparation will intensify. In fact meetings will become an art-form in celebration of clarity and minimalism.

All executives will receive regular coaching in clarity of, impact creation and brevity of communication in the business context.

In all appraisals “Quality of Communication” will be a KPI or Important measurement of performance and potential - acronyms are being weeded out as abominations.

Face to face communication is being encouraged but all new recruits are being coached in something new to them called “telephone manners”.

What’s wrong with all this is it smacks of the “Thought-Police” and a regimen of communication dictatorship. But this is not an attempt to create a 21st century Tower of Babel.  Quite simply a more focused and disciplined communication strategy is needed in most companies if we are to produce a generation of effective, rigorous and clear thinking managers.

It’s that simple.