WHY I DECIDED TO READ THE DAILY MAIL

It had been a strange week what with Clacton and the prospect of the Stroud and Rochester by-election at which the Tories promise (threaten?) to send the Cabinet several times to drum up opposition to Reckless. It’ll be ghastly for the voters.

Ghastly is how I felt as I saw a lethal Panorama report by softly-spoken Darragh MacIntyre on Nigel Farage. As I watched Nigel’s brazen contempt for the EU and his embarrassing behaviour I remembered that great advertisement which the Democrats ran in 1960 against Richard Nixon.

Like Nixon, Farage has a slightly sleazy and flaky look about him - definitely a “nice little runner only one careful owner and because I like your face I’ll knock off fifty quid. OK?” sort of person.

And then, I thought, I must read the Daily Mail and see what’s going on. It was 88 pages long with some 42 stories in the first 40 pages (before we hit travel, property, lots of ads, TV, Sudoku and sport) of which 7 dealt with sex - mostly rape and paedophilia - 7 with politics, mostly anti Tory establishment, and an astounding 14 on health, many lambasting the NHS.

A sample of these

• “Air Passenger in protective suit as ebola fears start to grip the west”
• “Filing your nails daily does more harm than good”
• “Run off four miles to burn off just one bottle of Coke”
• “Piling on the pounds? Blame it on Jet Lag”
• “Don’t call 999 until you’re unconscious, dying man is told”
• “France to curb binge drinking”

But on page 35 - immigration rears

• “Adult asylum seekers pose as teens to get school places”
• “Our right to be here by Park Lane migrants”

What was the overall effect of the paper?

There were some rather grumpy arguments between my wife and me about how the paper seemed to use consistently just one ‘typical’ story to stir up general anger about immigration, the NHS or government.

I was very conscious of the Taxi Driver grumble - “and another thing” - and I noticed this, for instance, in the leading article when Cameron’s team were accused of being in danger of making “a mistake they’d made all too often in the past”. Expressions like “All too often, not for the first time and how typical” are key words of negative thinking.

How did I feel? I felt shocking to be honest. This is not company I want to keep or a country I recognise or would want to live in. It’s sterile, cantankerous and permanently discontented. The sun doesn’t shine in Northcliffe House the Mail’s HQ.

And another thing - they really do think “Voting for UKIP will hand keys on No10 to Miliband” (p.19) - source: Lord Ashcroft. And you know, I think they actually want this.

Because then they’ll really have something to complain about.

“That Miliband made a right balls of it - typical!”

BE NIMBLE, IMPROVISE AND WIN

We can all make the mistake of getting stuck in the same old groove. But business can’t be treated like Su Doku, a game with straightforward rules.  Yet words best designed to make anyone scream like corporate template and company strategy (usually because there isn’t one) are same old groove words for most people.

If we are going to make well informed, even inspired decisions we have to get outside the groove and consider our situation from a different perspective - what Professor John Kay of the LSE calls “obliquity”. He says obliquity (pursuing our goals indirectly) is necessary because living in a world of uncertainty means the problems we encounter aren’t always clear and we often can’t pinpoint what our real goals are. Things change and people (the behaviour of whom is often hard to predict) change too. Direct approaches are often unimaginative whilst ‘muddling through’ for a bit can sometimes be a much more productive answer.

Stories of improvisation beating the corporate plan abound but I enjoy one Malcolm Gladwell tells. Big corporate Goliath being outwitted and outgunned by the guerrilla tactics of David armed with the 1000BC equivalent of Remington XP-100 (rated the most accurate hand gun in the world). David knew he’d win so long as he improvised out of the reach of lumbering Goliath’s but what’s baffling is that Saul and the other spectators  only foresaw this as a toe to toe duel because that’s how you did things in those days in Israel. They were thinking in “like-we’ve-always-done-it” terms rather than let’s improvise and win terms.

In business, stories of small, loose thinking winners include Nike winning as a Vietcong style upstart founded in 1964 against Adidas founded 1948 – Nike is now twice the size of Adidas, Facebook against My Space (in June 2006 My Space captured 80% of social networking traffic (up from 76% in April). Facebook was second with 7.6%. The ball has been dropped in most markets we are looking at and no one really knows where it is. Better to improvise rather than pretend the ball’s still in sight.

We all tend to overestimate power whether it’s physical like Goliath’s or exploited by people who feel they’re expected to flaunt it. That’s a high risk strategy on their part but some seem to think it worth taking. Chuck Prince ex CEO and Chairman of Citigroup certainly seemed to think so as he made the defining quote of the 2008 crash on the very eve of the credit crunch:-

“When the music stops, in terms of liquidity, things will be complicated. But as long as the music is playing, you’ve got to get up and dance. We’re still dancing.”

 You make decisions that solve problems by taking each on its merits and not being hamstrung by a rigid plan. Strategic plans can make one option blind. Remember Mike Tyson:

“Everyone has a plan till they get punched in the mouth”