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.

www.colourfulthinkers.com

JUST DO IT

My favourite recent story was from Nigeria. The economy there is in a mess with frequent breakdowns in electricity. This means factories have to rely on expensive generators and this makes life hard.

The scene is a Lagos Stock Cube Factory in Lagos as electricity fails again.
BBC Interviewer: “How do you cope with this? It must make you very uncompetitive in cost terms.”
Stock Cube Company MD; “We just make as much as we can and hope for the best.”

The day a sophisticated CEO in the western world says “we hope for the best” which in a completely erratic world where you can’t control events is the right thing to think and do, is the day I’ll break into applause.

Herb Kelleher who used to be Chairman and CEO of Southwest Airlines in America, one of America’s most admired and successful companies, said once when asked about strategy at his airline: “We have a strategy here. We call it doing things.”

It’s that same action-packed attitude to life. Hurray for people who park their sceptical brains and get their hands dirty.

We are now off to Venice to what Mike Geoghegan ex CEO of HSBC described in a soulless way as
“Once the greatest financial powerhouse in the world and now a mere water attraction”

In that sentence we get to see what’s wrong with bankers.

As regards the weather, food, and aching feet we are going to follow our Nigerian’s advice and hope for the
best.