LOOK TO THE FUTURE NOW, IT'S ONLY JUST BEGUN

When Slade first sang this iconic Christmas song in 1980 it was against the background of the worst recession for over 30 years, inflation of 18% and mass unemployment. Slade’s lead singer, Noddy Holder, said it was their attempt to cheer up people and get them to visualise a better future. It’s how we need to begin 2021 when all many see is Casper David Friedrich’s extraordinary painting ‘The Sea of Ice’ (1824) depicting a shipwreck in the Arctic where the ship has been overwhelmed by a compressed mountain of ice.

Where are we? 

Intriguingly we moved up to 5th in Global Economic League of 2020 (source: IMF data from 2019) mainly because India’s economy did so badly. The top ten are shown below and in bold on the right the ranking of each of the top 10 in the 2020 Global Happiness League (source: United Nations/Gallup).

Economic rank	Country	GDP (US$ trillion)	Happiness rank
1	United States	20.49	18
2	China	13.4	94
3	Japan	4.79	62
4	Germany	4.00	17
5	United Kingdom	2.83	13
6	France	2.78	23
7	India	2.72	144
8	Italy	2.07	30
9	Brazil	1.87	32
10	Canada	1.71	11

Despite our problems we seem to be doing well. People like being British more than say the Germans like being German or the French are content with being French. So much for those lamenting how wrecked we are. But let’s not get complacent – there’s a lot of work to do.

What do we want to become?

Increasingly it became clear that the Brexit argument was not about negotiating a trade deal but about who we want to be. Like it not Brexit is done.

‘Sovereignty’ (which, allegedly, whenever he heard it used - which was often - reduced the European Commission's Head of Task Force for Relations with the United Kingdom, Michel Barnier, to uncomprehending rage) was the core issue for the Brexiteers. They believed we needed to feel free, to be on our own, to control our ‘identity’. 

Which is what? 

That’s the problem. No one seems to have nailed this down. Over Christmas I read an engaging book by Cees Nooteboom called ‘Venice. The Lion, the City and the Water.’ In it he quotes academic and author, C.P. Snow, from over 50 years ago, comparing the history of Venice and Britain:

“The Venetians  knew, just as clearly as we know, that the current of history had begun to flow against them. Many gave their minds to working out how to keep going. It would have meant breaking the pattern into which they had crystallised. They were fond of the pattern, just as we’re fond of ours. They never found the will to break it.” 

Which is why “getting back to normal” has always seemed to me such an anathema. We’ve has a far bigger shock to our economy in 2020 than any for around 300 years. GDP fell by 11% (only Argentina did worse). The Government has categorised swathes of what many thought made life worth living as “inessential”: bookshops, theatres, concerts, restaurants, hotels, travel, museums, sport and hugging.

That pattern of normal that’s crystalised in Britain needs breaking because as things stand we shan’t be Good Britain (let alone Great Britain after the Covid crisis ) unless we make some hard choices about where to focus next.

More good news

We have a certain inbuilt resourcefulness and resilience that we saw in action in the 1980s.  That’s when creative industries thrived most and our entrepreneurial boom began. We need more of the same. Much more. 

We need to become Silicone Island (we’ve already made a promising start in boom sectors like gaming) and the big techno-giants are investing in huge look-at-me HQs in London employing talented young people whose ambitions for independence will outstrip their employers soon enough. 

In film, music, fashion, theatre, literature, events, environmental technology and restaurants we have the talent and capacity to continue leading the world.  Treat these half as seriously as we treat fishing and the rebirth of  tourism and the hospitality sector will follow. By looking to the future and reinventing rather than restoring what we once had we will have a great opportunity to create important global businesses.

Pricking the Covid Bubble and learning some lessons

Lessons we must learn as the vacillating vaccination programme trundles through 2021 are:-

i) How to manage risk well. We’ve flip-flopped from reckless to paranoid in 2020.  We cannot and should not completely avoid risk. We just need to manage it and mitigate it. Risk management is a key theme for the next decade.                                   

ii) There are going to more Covids – this one was just a dress rehearsal. We need to invest in planning protective measures for round two and three now.

We need to think the unthinkable. We need to re-think education and examinations, hospitality, cities and towns. As Shopping Centres become increasingly defunct with old shopping venues like Westfield emptying of tenants the opportunity for creating world-class entertainment centres and tourist magnets exists. Time to blow away the dust of uncreative, profit-focused and old-formula thinking of developers and landlords.

Economists are always wrong

That’s one thing to be sure of. The fallibility of economists. So far I’ve heard two rock-solid predictions from them. First that we are on the brink of a boom the like of such we’ve never seen before, thanks to all that cash poured into the ailing economy to keep us afloat. Secondly, we’re doomed. Double dip recession, raging unemployment and company failures on an epic scale.

Long experience suggests it’ll be neither but a mixture of both - the first half of 2021 a storm to make 1980 look like a breeze but with boom sectors emerging in the second half with possible strong resurgence in some sectors. But the scale of sustainable growth will not depend on economics alone. It will depend on people.

So how do we feel? How will we react?

We learnt some strangely alien habits in 2020: working from home, missing those ‘off the record’ lunch conversations, Zoom, no informal meetings, social distancing, not being able to affirm our feelings by hugging, shaking hands or just brushing someone’s upper arm. We’ve become less human.

People are for the most part rule-abiding, well behaved and resilient. Overall we’ve done brilliantly in 2020 even if some of us feel a bit robotic sometimes. There’s a problem though. The excess of information, astoundingly clumsy communication from Government and the conflicting views of experts have made us, most of us, cynics about our leaders and about Professors, Doctors and other “important people”. Cynicism and a profound distrust of government is the biggest negative legacy of Covid.

I think the quest for transparency and full disclosure has damaged us all. Life is too busy and our individual tasks too demanding and important for us to spend our energy on subjects we don’t and never will understand. Social media has become a disruptive and corrosive influence in this respect so it’s interesting that a lot of young people I know have abandoned it completely as a time-waster.

Ultimately how we feel is mostly up to us but we can feel better just by looking at the future and determining that we, not a grey shroud of characters we call “they”, will shape our future.

A cautiously optimistic expectation

I believe in humankind, in our ability to help each other, to do creative things, to invent new ways of improving the world in which we live. We’ve just undergone what we can describe as global chaotic incompetence or, from a more optimistic perspective, a phase of “creative destruction.” No longer are we in an era of business as usual. The game has changed and all the pieces – education, housing, government departments, shopping, working, taxation, the environment and yes even the NHS – are in different places, in different shape and all need to change and be changed.

But this will take time. Consistently we’ve been promised quick fixes. It’s time to think longer term and forget tomorrow’s headline. Time to start under-promising and over-delivering. Time for calm and patience. Time for ambition, sure, but not for being reckless.

This could be the most exhilarating time any of us have seen for 40 years or longer.

Welcome to a truly Brave New World. 

THE THIEVES OF TIME

When Dickens wrote in David Copperfield “Procrastination is the thief of time” he was wrong. It isn’t procrastination it’s technology and bureaucracy. I recently came across a Bain & Company Consultancy study on where time goes in the average organisation. Here’s the tawdry truth:

• 40% in meetings
• 23% doing e-mails
• 18% doing unproductive work
• Which leaves 14% on “getting real work done” - like selling stuff (actually it’s 19% but Management Consultants never could add up.)

Bain are being kind because other research shows goofing around, looking at stuff online, playing video games etc. accounts for 25% of the workday (in banking at any rate) so that 14% is probably overstated and is more like 10%.

It’s a joke.

   
In an organisation of 10,000 only 1,000 are working full time whilst the rest are doing nothing, zero, zip. So when Len McCluskey warns Peugeot, who’re about to buy Vauxhall that there must be no loss of jobs, in the 4,500 UK Vauxhall work force (go figure the math) nearly 4,000 are doing nothing anyway - in theory.

Yes I know applying statistics like this doesn’t really work.

No, the real issue is not that people are lazy, because in general they’re not, it’s that we manage to build organisations and working practices that steal their time. Meetings are too long (cancel half the meetings and then halve the time of every meeting that’s left - it’s easy if you try), only allow morning e-mails or WhatsApp messaging, afternoons are for creating opportunities, talking to customers, getting out into shops talking to consumers.

   
What, I was asked, are the processes that would allow this to happen. Try these for starters: turning off the WiFi every afternoon, appointing a squad of ‘Time-Police’ whose only role would be to break up unproductive meetings and to punish people for talking too much and especially for writing long and useless documents.

We have to stop a few myths - being in constant contact electronically isn’t good, it’s unproductive and stressful. Creating forms to complete, making people clock on, having an HR department, trying to achieve corporate identities (for whom? Not the brand, not the consumer. It’s only done so there can be internal debate). So much of the “work” is mythical, politically correct and impenetrable that you need more meetings to translate it.

A smart management consultant - yes there are some - said “trust” is the most precious corporate commodity. It’s time to work from the bottom up. We need to destroy systems not create them. We need to trust people to lead the fight against time-wasting at work. And although it may sound counter-intuitive chatting with people, having lunch with new people and actually getting to know your colleagues can actually lead to saving time because when you know someone, asking them for something, information or a favour, is easier and quicker.

So find out who these rascally thieves of time really are. And banish them.

PREPARE FOR LIFT-OFF AND A DODGY FLIGHT

Increasingly what defines our lives lies in the execution of stuff. A great recipe badly cooked and carelessly served is a disaster. An ordinary recipe beautiful cooked and lovingly served is a triumph.

We are living in a world of change, innovation and contradiction, a world where nothing is quite as it seems, where long held assumptions about civil rights, equality and being nice to each other were just taken for granted.

Let’s consider gastroenterology and the state of chronic constipation. That’s how the EU bureaucratic has felt for some time as has the US dominated by its MBAs, Silicon Valley and its Financiers. Enter the two best laxatives known to humanity - Donald Trump and an elixir called Brexit.

Here’s how Dave Barry a Pulitzer prize-winning columnist for the Miami Herald described his own laxative moment:
“On the day before my colonoscopy, I began my preparation. In accordance with my instructions, I didn't eat any solid food that day; all I had was chicken broth, which is basically water, only with less flavour. Then, in the evening, I took the MoviPrep. You mix two packets of powder together in a one-litre plastic jug, then you fill it with lukewarm water. (For those unfamiliar with the metric system, a litre is about 32 gallons.) Then you have to drink the whole jug. This takes about an hour, because MoviPrep tastes - and here I am being kind - like a mixture of goat spit and urinal cleanser, with just a hint of lemon.

The instructions for MoviPrep, clearly written by somebody with a great sense of humour, state that after you drink it, 'a loose, watery bowel movement may result.' This is kind of like saying that after you jump off your roof you may experience contact with the ground.

MoviPrep is a nuclear laxative. I don't want to be too graphic, here, but: have you ever seen a space-shuttle launch? This is pretty much the MoviPrep experience, with you as the shuttle. There are times when you wish the commode had a seat belt. You spend several hours pretty much confined to the bathroom, spurting violently. You eliminate everything. And then, when you figure you must be totally empty, you have to drink another litre of MoviPrep, at which point, as far as I can tell, your bowels travel into the future and start eliminating food that you have not even eaten yet.”

In political terms that is what we’ve just started to go through.

In years to come we’ll describe not draining the swamp but emptying the body of its waste so we can start to behave sensibly again. Neither Trump nor Theresa are permanent fixtures - they are watery movements and they’ll pass on quite soon.

Am I unduly optimistic? We are - I suggest- going through a curious phase as this cartoon suggests. Time to use these laxative tools and then get back to down to earth again

WHY I STILL BELIEVE IN SANTA CLAUS

“Bah! Humbug! Don’t be daft…you can’t.” But I do… I completely believe in the idea of Santa Claus…of sleigh bells…of “Ho! Ho! Ho’s!” and of Rudolf. Like all great, timeless stories it has evolved and gathered a patina of stuff like the elves, North Pole, chimneys and that red Santa costume. I really believe in the spirit of Christmas that this projects.

And that’s why I abhor the idea of telling children at a certain age that it isn’t true, that the whole idea is a piece of childish garbage. A friend told me that when his mother told him aged 10 “the truth” he told her insouciantly “yeah I knew that.” But he didn’t and just went away sobbing because an idea had been broken and a trust destroyed.

Imagine the guffaws of laughter provoked by the Rubens painting of St. Francis at Christ’s crucifixion. …spoiler alert …Francis wasn’t born for another 1200 years so the whole thing is a lie. Ho. Ho. Ho.

In a year which heralded the arrival of post-truth my support for the idea not the literal truth being what matters may seem dangerously avant-garde.  But Christmas like love is not something we can just reduce to facts.

Fact or fiction? Whenever we read a totally engaging story we lose ourselves in the truth of that story. A Christmas Carol, Pickwick Papers are both in the bubble in which we read them, totally credible. The skilful storyteller can induce what Samuel Taylor Coleridge 200 years ago called a “suspension of disbelief”.
In the car recently the Archers came on the radio and our grandsons listened…there was a long silence. When it finished I heard that carefully phrased question: “Grandpa are those real people and why do they talk like that?”  The Archers and those funny “old people” - step up Joe Grundy - have become a new truth which they and other soap opera stars are for many people. Just  as the Shire has its own reality in Lord of the Rings.

Do you believe in miracles? Do you believe the incredible can happen? You’d better after 2016. But miracles need a little help. Like great magic the more we’re predisposed to accept the implausible the more wonderful the trick becomes.

Sadly as we grow up and become more rational and hardened against play we lose a little of our humanity. We become cynical about the stories that can make the world so beautiful a place.

I believe in goodness, in human beings, in generosity of spirit and in Christmas not as a factual thing but as a completely brilliant idea and story. A story that is timeless and which bonds us together. And what better way to start a story could there be than this?

“In the bleak midwinter, frosty wind made moan, earth stood hard as iron, water like a stone; snow had fallen, snow on snow, snow on snow, in the bleak midwinter, long ago.” 

OUR PRODUCTIVITY PROBLEM

Philip Hammond in his autumn statement last week lamented Britain’s poor productivity:

“The productivity gap is well known, but shocking nonetheless. It takes a German worker four days to produce what we make in five, which means, in turn, that too many British workers work longer hours for lower pay than their counterparts.” 

Is that really true? Are our Nissan and Jaguar plants really 25% less efficient than German car plants? I doubt it. The problem is that productivity’s a tenuous means of measuring performance. Apparently we lag all G7 countries apart from Japan for productivity and our performance rather than improving has stayed flat over the past decade. GDP per hour worked seems a loopy way of assessing things because when I was working fulltime I reckoned my contemporaries worked much harder than their French, American and German counterparts. It was only in heavily unionised businesses like the film industry that productivity was really held back.

On a personal level I’m very concerned about my wife’s productivity. She seems to be working harder and harder despite my reducing the housekeeping budget in view of the current economic uncertainty and a reduction of “narrow money”. In other words less GDP per hour worked. Her productivity gap is shocking and she refuses to accept my solution that by doing less we’ll improve our productivity. Indeed when I mention productivity now she gets quite shirty and hands me a tea towel.

So the solution to this “national problem” is for us to reduce the number of hours we work. In the UK the number of hours worked per head per annum has gone down by just 1.5% in the past 15 years (it’s down 6% in Germany). The Germans work 18% less than we do - yes a whopping 18% fewer hours.

The original definition of Parkinson’s Law was this:-
"Work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion."

So if follows if we worked less we’d produce about the same and our productivity would shoot up; as an economist might say - “sorted.”

Sathnam Sanhera wrote about the “gig economy” last week. This is where people do things other than just for money or proper money for the job done. Like speakers at conferences and virtually all writers. If an author were to apply a minimum hourly rate for their work no one would ever publish their work. Yet our world is full of wannabe writers. According to a report from the International Publishers Association UK publishers released 184,000 new and revised titles in 2013. That’s 2,875 titles per million inhabitants, and places the UK 1,000-plus titles ahead of second-placed Taiwan and Slovenia with the US publishing only 959 titles per million inhabitants.

So we work too much, we charge too little for our work and we spend too much time writing books.
We don’t actually have a real productivity problem at all. As my wife so aptly said it’s just another piece of claptrap.

CH-CH-CH-CHANGES, TURN AND FACE THE STRANGE

Throughout my career I met people who said they loved change, simply thrived on it. They were, they claimed, a manic gleam in their eyes, change-agents. They were only interested in the future. “History is bunk” they said quoting Henry Ford. And I humoured them because a change, here and there, is the essence of progress. As it says in my recently published book on marketing - “Brilliant Marketing - 3rd Edition” - it’s “new and improved” - in other words changed.

But this year change seems too small a word. I’ve been arguing for some time that we’re living through a quiet revolution. After the US election and Brexit it’s not so quiet. And just wait as suppliers and retailers in the UK grapple with forthcoming inflation and a sales slowdown. More revolution’s imminent.

I say “forthcoming” but who can tell?  Our radar systems have all gone down. Research has become discredited. A senior fmcg executive recently said “we’ve more than halved our research budget. It wasn’t telling us anything we had any faith in”.

(Until November 9th  - David!)

This is the age of the contrarian, the thinker of the impossible. When the Saatchi brothers said in a Lewis Carroll moment “anything is possible” they were, at the time, guilty of hyperbole but, considered today, they were merely ahead of their time. In this uncertain world those apostles of change I described should be feeling delighted. But I bet they aren’t. We know that the most stressful moments of our lives - moving house, changing jobs and divorce - all involve real change, reappraisal and the need for difficult decisions.

Increasingly it feels as though we’re living with Alice in Wonderland where “If you don't know where you are going any road can take you there.”  Certainly that seems to describe our Prime Minister whose pose of confidence doesn’t conceal that she must be missing the Home Office where she was mistress of all she surveyed with no ghastly surprises coming at her from every direction.

Post-Truth has been named word (sic) of the year by the Oxford English Dictionary. It will, I think, be overtaken by “Post-Strategic” because arguably strategy has been replaced by tactical nimbleness, by the ability to change direction and avoid the unexpected. Diplomacy has been replaced by deal-making and poker (at least that’s how some Minsters describe the negotiations with the EU (“keeping our cards face down and close to our chest.”)

Perhaps the biggest surprises will be for two people discovering that running a turbulent country is neither the same as running a business empire nor heading a government department.

So it’s time to turn and face the strange…and the totally unexpected.

You’d better be ready. So here’s some advice….

Medical research (if you believe it) shows that snoozing before an exam is more efficacious than last minute cramming. So I recommend a lot more snoozing for all of us. We need to be prepared… for anything.

DEATH TO MISANTHROPY

We live in grumpy times. The referendum didn’t help much. I’m still coming across people who haven’t been on speaking terms with their Brexit-voting parents since June.

It’s reminiscent of Jonathan Swift’s descriptions in “Gulliver’s Travels” of seemingly trivial but vitriolic disagreements between the Lilliputians and Blenfuscuans as to which end of an egg to break open, the small or big end. This ding-dong led to thousands of deaths. There’s yet another dispute in the Lilliputian court between the Tramsecksan and Slamekstan factions, the one favouring low heels and the other high heels. Neither party will acknowledge or speak to the other. Splendidly the Emperor seeking a rapprochement wears one low heel and one high heel “which gives him a hobble in his gait.”

Ah, the hobbling gait of modern life foreseen back in 1726. Plus ça change….

What I love about Swift is his ability to put the spotlight on the triviality of human obsessions and that urge to take extreme positions even when Lustrog (Swift’s fictional god in this instance) has proclaimed:
“All true believers shall break their eggs at the convenient end”

Depends on what you mean by “convenient” they all cry and the Smallenders and Bigenders in rage and hatred set about each other…kersplat!

Surely we are better? Well not if you read about the alleged tantrums displayed by the third and not-so-lucky appointment to head the Independent Inquiry into Child Sexual Abuse by Theresa May, when Home Secretary, a few months ago. Dame Lowell Goddard, according to the Times, “treated staff with contempt and flew into rages”.

She refutes this but even if a tiny bit true it might explain why so many people at work there and generally today are so unhappy. Workplaces are increasingly driven by targets, by egos and by fear.  And this made me sad when the so-called NHS Whistleblowing Tsar Dr Henrietta Hughes said the NHS needed more of the “trust and joy and love as in Love Actually” hormone oxytocin and was derided by Santham Sanghera in the Times. More mirth and better manners and, yes, a bit more love wouldn’t be so bad but Santham hates the film for its sugariness, inappropriate sexual liaisons - just about everything.

Come on. Richard Curtis must have done something right because Love Actually grossed $259 million worldwide and nearly $30 million in the UK and was the apotheosis of “feel-good”. And feel-good is what we’re missing. Santham reduces life to mere functionality when he suggests all an employee needs to be happy is to be reasonably paid and do interesting work for a successful company. Most people achieve none of those.

What the workplace currently misses (blame computer screens and savings on coffee and biscuits) is the sound of buzz, gossip and laughter. Make it a place people want to go to for work and a pay packet, sure, but much more a place where interesting stuff happens and where grey people and misanthropes get mercilessly teased.

Bah humbug!

WHO THE HELL ARE THESE PEOPLE?

The new-enlightenment fizzled out in June when old Britain won. Just what this really means became clearer at the Conservative Party Conference. This is not just about throwing up two fingers to Europe; it’s about dismantling new, liberal, cosmopolitan Britain and creating a new Brand. The Millwall FC of Nations - remember Millwall’s chant “nobody likes us and we don’t care”.

Old Britain hankers after BOAC, the Austin Allegro, coal mines, bri-nylon and Rule Britannia. And because we love the idea of democracy more than we love rationality we are all reluctantly and silently getting on with it, playing the ball where it lies and tacitly accepting a long period of decline and disgruntlement.

Because we are homo sapiens (well, most of us are  but there are an awful lot of neanderthals around too) we are adaptable, crafty and resourceful. Yes of course we’ll find opportunities but if the landscape against which this smart thinking occurs is as disagreeable to many of us, as seems increasingly possible, the will to win for Britain seems less likely to burgeon.

In the midst of this a public row between Rudd and Rudd - Sister Amber Rudd Home Secretary and her smarter, older brother Roland Rudd founder of Finsbury PR is thrilling. Here’s what Roland said:
“In a democracy there’s always a spectrum of views. Those of us who want a sensible Brexit, who want Britain to remain a beacon of tolerance and who find the denigration of non-British workers appalling have a duty to speak out”… and he added …”Leaving the EU is probably the biggest event since the Second World War.”

When I look at Amber I remember Roy Jenkins as Home Secretary - when our leading politicians (even some Conservatives) were progressive champions of liberalism and creating a New Britain.  I have a mischievous desire to extrapolate the nonsense that she speaks to a declaration that foreign names like Prêt a Manger, La Gavroche, Credit Suisse must be translated in future.

 “The Best of British” - overdone beef and warm beer - lovely - is also on many lips together with dark warnings about failing to be patriotic enough. Remember Dr Johnson saying “patriotism is the last refuge of the scoundrel”. He was right.

And talking of scoundrels.

Here are three of my least favourite men. The chaps to get a deal, win business and build Brand Britain.  “Haaanngg on!!!” as Mr Tumble my grand daughter’s favourite TV character splutters in despair.  Davis, Fox and Boris (another Johnson) - the slipperiest trio in living political memory. Philip Collins quoting Chamberlain’s comment on Disraeli says of Boris: “a man who never tells the truth except by accident.”

So am I depressed? No. This will not last. Old Labour and Old Tory will be replaced by a new generation of liberal, enlightened and resourceful voters. Just keep on talking about all this and laughing at their idiotic lumbering backwards.

It makes Monty Python look quite serious.

I'VE DECIDED IT'S ALL TO DO WITH MARKETING

Peter Drucker, the famous management guru lived to ninety six saying stuff like:
“The most important thing in communication is to hear what isn't being said”

He was seen as wise and relevant because he presented himself that way.

So like Drucker I’ve decided to keep on going but by being a nuisance. In his book “More Human: Designing a World Where People Come First” Steve Hilton who used to be David Cameron’s policy advisor and a man who despises corporate obesity noted that nature had determined that the elephant and the whale were as big as it was going to get. So BT and the NHS would be anomalies then?

My run-ins with BT have bored many who read me so I won’t go on but the irony is it’s hard to telephone BT and the company that produced an advertising campaign -“It’s good to talk” - doesn’t actually want to…talk that is. We got back from Venice three weeks ago and our land line was down. Getting through to a human was hard and when I did they lived in Chenai and they weren’t briefed about the angry me - the human ‘me’ - not just my phone number. It’s taken three weeks, three engineers, with only the last one to visit qualified to do the work. It worked fine but then stopped working although right now it’s OK again. My fingers are crossed.

This is a marketing problem. I want a Bob Hoskins sound-alike on my case not an Indian with an MBA being very nice but without being trained in how I feel and me feeling worse through being carefully nice to prove I’m not racist. BT is a dinosaur trying to be hi tech and this rusty old beast isn’t human so even when they get it right I get cross.

Next; my wife’s eye examination at the Brighton Eye Hospital. Result: nurses brilliant; doctors superb; front of house marketing a disgrace. The waiting room is dirty. How dare they have posters emblazoned “This is an infection free zone…are you are in the zone?” when it’s clearly a breeding ground for all kinds of vile viruses, especially the filthy windows which make those on a Southern Railway train look spotless. And talking of railways why in this supposedly state-of-the-art palace of medical technology would you have a large but faded print of a Great Western steam train tootling through idyllic pre-war Britain? And finally under another poster which asked cheerily “Having trouble with your sight?” they had a little library of sarcastically small print paperbacks bar one vast  1000 pager called ”Into the Darkness”. Also amid the plethora of posters was one that intrigued me. It said “Finding Your Feet with the ECLO* - and in small print *Eye Clinic Liaison Officer

Decent marketing communication - I conclude somewhat irritably - would put us all in a better state of mind and make our world a better place.

VENICE AND A BOOK

Richard is currently researching a book about Venice and will be back to his regular blog in a couple of weeks' time.

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.

IT'S TIME TO BE DIFFERENT

I heard Linda Jackson Citroen’s CEO on Radio 4 last week. She was asked to reflect on this car maker’s resurgence in sales - up 16% year on year. She said she thought the brand had lost its soul, that it had tried to be like the others rather than trying to be different. But that had changed. She was (she said) leading Citroen back to the glorious eccentricities of the 2CV and the DS - Maigret’s car and the limousine used by French Presidents.

Citroen was style. Citroen was sexy. Citroen was - as David Cameron put it - the future once. It had the potential to be relevant, feminine and head turning and now it’s all of those - at last.

Over 20 years ago I held a senior position in London in a French advertising agency called Euro RSCG who had the Citroen account. From a distance I watched the business constantly on the verge of being lost and then in an unbelievable kiss-and make-up over a spectacular meal between the agency’s French CEO and the CEO of Citroen a new strategy would be hatched over Chateau Latour and more mediocre advertising for mediocre cars resulted.

Citroen had not only lost it soul it had lost its senses. But it seems Linda has helped change this. And well done here because we live in a same-old world when it comes to most design.

We’ll  decline complacently as we become more alike. To succeed we need to renovate, reinvent and be distinctive.

What’s a French Carmaker that’s a bit awkward, independently spirited and characterful got to do with Brand Britain?

Caitlin Moran who usually makes me laugh more than she makes me think made me start thinking quite hard on Saturday when she wrote in the Times:

“Ostensibly we’re leaving Europe but what we’re really leaving is the High Table. We’ve made all our history. We’ve done all our innovating. We want to be smaller. Let someone else do the heavy lifting ….. I think we’re done.”

That’s why the old and the young voted so differently. The older voters are knackered by the constant demands on trying to be GREAT Britain when just being Britain would be great enough.  We may, like it or not, have voted to be a bit smaller.  But more importantly although we don’t have a plan yet we have voted to be different, less institutional, less global corporate, more awkward and less co-operative.

Finding our soul, agreeing on our reinvention and doing a Citroen on ourselves is going to take longer than the negotiation of the Brexit terms with the EU and it’s a lot more important. If we get this right (or more properly if we come to a broad consensus on what we are trying to become) things could work out well.

David Cameron used to talk about the Big Society. This is the smaller society. More John Lewis than Tesco but actually different to either.

Are we up for it?