HOLD UP THAT GLASS AND THINK...

The new optimists

Yes they do exist (fortunately). They represent over half the population. They are people who have to cope and increasingly are running our economy and those who believe the world is theirs and believe they’re invincible.

- Women – I’m blown away by the confidence and resilience of the women I’ve been talking to who are starting new businesses. They are in general better prepared, more thoughtful and more realistic than their male counterparts. Men still control the money and are often averse to releasing funds to women. Perhaps the rise in NatWest of both Alison Rose and Katie Murray to top jobs in a company recognised as one of 52 firms in the 2017 Bloomberg Financial Services Gender-Equality Index (BFGEI) will make a breakthrough difference.

Alison Rose. Tipped to be the next RBS CEO

- Millennials – Simon Sinek gave one of the most popular and entertaining talks on “Millennials”. He stereotyped the snowflake generation as being over-entitled and needy. “They want a job with purpose, they want to make a difference, they want free food and beanbags”…LAUGHTER. But that isn’t the generation I’ve been talking to. My millennials are smarter, kinder, more collaborative and more enterprising than we were. Up to 70% of graduates want to start their own business not to make loads of money but because it seems so much more relevant than working for a big corporation and building a career. When the new 18 – 35 year olds are in charge of our world I’ll feel a lot more confident and optimistic about our future.
     
“Thriving on chaos”

This extraordinary book by Tom Peters was written in 1991 and has in parts the freshness of insight that is relevant today. He gives good advice:

“Leaders trust their guts. "Intuition" is one of those good words that has gotten a bad rap. For some reason, intuition has become a "soft" notion. Garbage! Intuition is the new physics. It's an Einsteinian, seven-sense, practical way to make tough decisions. Bottom line, …. the crazier the times are, the more important it is for leaders to develop and to trust their intuition.” 

He also said “If you aren’t confused you aren’t paying attention.” 

Well I’m pretty confused but after a quarrelsome year I think virtually everything is looking up. Just hold your nerve and focus on what you can do to improve your world and the world around you.

Happy New Year. Have fun. Thrive on chaos and enjoy surfing the uncertainty of 2019.

Richard will continue to publish his observations usually on a Monday morning

ZEE BEE BEE

The American executive was talking fast and earnestly “zee-bee-bee is the only way” she intoned “only way to go”. As she went on about the rational positives of this initiative I recalled the child’s response to an unfair telling-off, acknowledging whilst there may have been a tinge of blame but at the same time pleading “can’t you catch a bit of slack?” That one word response is “yebbut.” And my own response to “zee-bee-bee” is “yebbut”.

The problem with zero-based-budgeting (geddit?) is it comes from a dreary, barren place called “failure”. Tom Peters the management pundit whom I’d assumed had disappeared in a gust of his own oratory said once: “You can’t shrink into greatness”. He also said something very spot-on about the world in which we live “if you aren’t confused you aren’t paying attention”.

I once tried zee-bee-bee at home. Christmas was approaching and I went through the items that could be zee-bee-beed. The Christmas tree; Christmas cards; flowers on the table - who needs them? Bowls of sweets; Christmas dinner…just a modest roast chicken would do; and presents….At this point my wife turned quite nasty and reflected that I was a Scrooge and a zero and could be finding myself redundant to requirements if I carried on like this.

The issue is zee-bee-bee has a corrosively negative effect on everyone and whilst it might work on a spreadsheet it imposes a drying up of whatever innovative and entrepreneurial spirit exists within an organisation. Businesses exist to do things, invent things and grow. When, as happens, they lose their way and falter the answer is seldom a let’s-reduce-to nothing approach. The cry that there are no sacred cars (no that isn’t a misprint) is seldom true. The guys at the top are protected from most of the mean spiritedness of the zee-bee-bee approach.

I’m not advocating a blind blunder into bankruptcy but if you reach the need to zee-bee-bee you probably need to do some more radical and exciting things like exiting marginal businesses and investing heavily in those with some promise. In some businesses I know cost has been cut, jobs have been slashed but the survivors have been given carte blanche to grow and thrive. In my own experience survival strategies that only comprise cost cutting hardly ever or probably never work.

I hear that one of the major grocers is investigating a major overhaul of their supply chain by turning their much smaller outlets into high street sites where there is only one of every item on the shelf and you walk briskly round clicking your easy-order-gismo and your groceries are delivered to your home just three hours later.

“Genius” I thought “I wonder if the turnip head who thought of that ever visited Dean and Delucca in New York.”

The trouble with cost reducers is that they are, to a person, destroyers of joy. Little by little they poison and they lay waste.

Better the savage prune than the snip-snip of mean-minded scissors.

THE POISON OF XENOPHOBIA

No, this is not an attack on UKIP, who will carry on muttering their stuff regardless of me and be very happy, on their own, in a pub with locked doors.

No, it’s a reflection on the dangers I see in isolationism and resistance to change.  It seems entirely possible that we could soon have a resignation and a divorce pretty well all at once with Britain saying goodbye to Europe and Scotland saying goodbye to Britain.

All done and dusted, we’d be proudly on our own.

But why stop there? Let’s ditch everything apart from London and the South East. We’re roughly 40 % of the UK and twice as rich as the rest. A £1.5 trillion gated community of an economy and no need to worry about Labour or Liberals anymore or those strange Northern accents or greyhounds or pies or the Co-op. Burn the cloth cap and build another runway or two at Heathrow and who needs HS2? We’ll spend it on skyscrapers instead.

Increasingly we’ll retreat indoors behind our PCs and read about the Bulgarian invasion of Scotland and laugh drily.  But weren’t we born to huddle together, laugh, drink and tell stories?  Weren’t we born to exchange views and change minds?  Aren’t we hard wired to work together?

I was asked today if I thought travelling broadened the mind. Not exactly, I reflected, it’s bigger than that. It explodes boundaries. Go to China or India and you see unimaginable scale, poverty, wealth, growth and a sheer sense of wonder and discovery in their eyes and through your own. These are places that are devouring a diet of change. They have infinite  horizons just as extraordinary and wide as Columbus saw.
Caitlin Moran lamented her London being stolen by a new rich foreign cadre who’ve taken it over. Yet I rejoice to hear people describe Mile End as trendy and smart. I’m amazed (happily) that Park Royal is cool – a sort of South Ealing without the ponce and that Clapham is the Chelsea of today.

Because there is only one poison more toxic than that of hating abroad and that’s the small ‘c’,  conservative resistance to change and hostility to ambition.

You know, the view that we can’t afford to do whatever it takes to get to the next level when all the evidence of history has consistently shown ambition, investment, drive and change has, nearly always, led to a better life. Isn’t that the lesson of the Olympics?

I realise how much I like being part of Scotland and how refreshing, foibles and all (and we’re good ones to talk) Europe is (from Greece to Sweden) and how good it is being a European citizen…..because here’s where I live.

Maybe we’ve got bored or gone mad but as Tom Peters once put it “you can’t shrink into greatness”.

Here’s hoping lots of people hear that.

ARE WE TRYING TO CREATE TOO MUCH CHANGE?

Blaise Pascal, the French mathematical genius, said:-
“All of humanity's problems stem from man's inability to sit quietly in a room alone.”
And ever since reading that I’ve been sitting in a room quietly, by myself, thinking about the turmoil of change.

Anyone who’s a student of management or a modern day business leader will, almost certainly, be an espouser of making things happen. They’ll be a connoisseur of the global social tsunami. They’ll sniff and love the smell of marketing cordite. These are the “Carpe Diemists.” And as protagonists in this world of change the words of Meat Loaf will ring in their ears:-
“If it ain't real - fake it!
  If it ain't yours - take it!
  If it don't exist - you make it!
  If it ain't broke - break it!”


Robert Kriegel, New York author, has actually written a book called “If it aint broke , break it”. But I’m not sure that either he or Tom Peters the “creative destruction” guru  are right. We have had too much “slash and burn” management, too many generations of MBAs centralising command, too many fakers, thieves and spurious innovators – all those featuring in Meat Loaf’s  song.

But there are some other words in that song too:-
“Give me some words to live by”

Many of the most creative things we’re looking at today are the product of recognising how people work and working with that. Inspiration from humanity not control of humanity.

Example: The traffic experiments of Belgian, Hans Monderman,  in the Dutch town Drachten which involved the removal of street furniture, traffic lights, warning signs and even road markings….accidents down, drivers more focused.

Example: The experiment in Hogewey in Holland in which a gated village was created for dementia  patients which is a microcosm of the real world – a bit like Truman – wherein carers act roles and everyone living (often) in their own harmless fantasy, seems very happy.

Example: In a children’s home vandalism was reduced by repairing the vandalised home not punishing the child. In New York graffiti was reduced by painting over it leaving graffiti artists frustrated by having nothing to show for their efforts. So they stopped doing it.

We don’t want certain things to change.

Chocolate, our favourite piece of music, Sunday lunch, a joke that we always find funny or the arrival of Spring (again). Over half a century of the arrival of Spring and it’s always a surprise.

Sometimes that apparent same-as can be a revelation.

So the words to live by are to find the time to sit quietly and think….because rushing around isn’t always the answer and reality is nearly always better than faking it.

WHAT WE NEED NOW IS HOPE NOT PUNISHMENT

I was reading Tom Peters the other day. Tom, the management guru and author, wrote a book called “Thriving on Chaos” in 1989. He thinks chaos is good. Most people think it’s pretty punishing.

In 1989 we thought the world was pretty hairy with events like these:

The fall of the Berlin Wall.

The Exxon Valdez oil disaster in Alaska.

The student protest on Tiananmen Square, Beijing with up to 7000 killed.

Earthquakes in America and Australia.

Pan Am filing for chapter 11.

The Soviet Union withdrawing from Afghanistan after 10 years of fighting.

Yet compared to what the world has seen since 2007 these were extremely nasty storms not the destructive hurricanes we’ve been recently experienced.

The uncertainty of recent times is epic. We have twice looked over the brink of global economic meltdown.

And this one is really nasty. Euro Flu is worse than Banker Flu.  And, as I write this, we have no one in charge in the UK.

So whoever is PM later this week pay heed to these two lessons from America.
One, what Reagan said on becoming President, inheriting an economic mess and being given a briefing on it.
“They gave it me. I read it. I don’t like it. You aren’t going to like it either.”

And, two, John Gardner a US Government official (sounds like a good one) at the end of the 1990s:

“The first task of a leader is to keep hope alive.”

Lessons: speak English, tell it how it is and tell us how we are going to get out of it.